promiscuous! Never was a war with trophies so much of an anti-climax!
The nearest thing to a real trophy which they have had since this
war ended was the great pyramid of guns in the middle of the Champs
Elysées, all heaped together pell-mell with the cock crowing on the
top of them. But I never see a Bavarian or a Prussian gun stuck up
mournfully in a little English town without thinking of the English
and French guns which are knocking about somewhere among the German
states. And what is more, I never see one without thinking how poor a
trophy the modern gun makes; especially the German gun, the carriage
of which always reminds me of rather heavy and bad agricultural
machinery. I think of the trophies of old, of the fine bronze guns
taken in the wars against the French, and of the flags in the churches,
and especially that amazing ragged dusty double line of them in the
Invalides in Paris, which looks down slantwise through a yellow window
and sees, in its solemn gulf below, the huge marble sarcophagus of
Napoleon.
However, there was the gun. And as the time of waiting for a train is
the most empty time in the world (because you cannot limit it and you
do not know whether it is long enough to start a geometrical problem or
some other entertaining pastime), I filled it up by walking round that
gun.
I guessed it to be a 150, say six inch, but I judge these things badly.
At any rate it was a heavy piece, not a howitzer.
I know not what it is, it may be youth and its permanent memories, but
when I see a gun firing at the moon cocked up at its utmost elevation,
I feel that the weapon has suffered an indignity. It is as though it
were an animal going through a performance. For the natural position
of a gun is some slight elevation for a normal range, and not this
isolated, head-in-the-air, barking attitude which the guns of captivity
too often wear. They are noblest, these poor prisoners, when they stand
level with the earth as though they were firing at close range in the
hopeless effort to stop an advancing wave.
Well, anyhow, there it was, all lifted up, absurdly, like a dog baying.
Then, when I got nearer to the gun, and looked closely at it, I saw
something which I have seen so often in a million German things that
it has become a commonplace for them in my mind, but I know it is
perilous to whisper it on this side of the Channel. The thing that has
become a commonplace in my mind is the fact that Germans cannot _make_,
but can only _copy_. They have many negative virtues, very unsuited
to their vast aberrations. They are fairly industrious, very simple,
normally kind and domestic, and in their dreamy way, they half catch
now and then what the older civilisation of Europe expresses in strong
and positive beauty. But they copy. They are impressed. They are a
soft metal and ancient Europe is the die. What made me think of this
commonplace was the seeing on that gun--actually engraved upon a modern
gun!--a poor little copy of Louis XIV. Think of it! After now much more
than two hundred years! There it was before my astonished eyes, and
I could hardly believe it; the motto of the great king copied upon a
Hohenzollern gun! It was like reading the "_Honi soit qui mal y pense_"
of the Plantagenets on the Menu of a Cosmopolitan Hotel....
For Louis XIV in his proudest moment had engraved upon his cannon, just
above the middle point where cannons turn upon their trunnions, a
great "L" written in a flourishing script, with a crown above it, and
then along the breach, just above the touch-hole, he had had engraved
upon a sort of scroll the phrase "_Ultima ratio regum_." It was a
famous phrase in Europe then. The greatest of English writers made good
fun of it when he said: "It seems that his arguments have been turned
against himself."
That was Louis XIV's manner; and, I say, I thought everybody had
forgotten it. I thought that no one remembered that motto except a few
miserable people like myself who potter about doing useless things. But
I was wrong. The last King of Prussia, the last of the Hohenzollerns,
the man upon whom the famous oracle of the thirteenth century has
fallen, _he_ remembered it--William II, last and most grotesque German
Emperor, was responsible for this silly thing.
For there on that gun in the wretched little, absurd little, squalid
little station square of a little port, with no one to pay it the
honour even of curiosity, I remarked graven things slavishly copied
from Louis XIV. First, just above the trunnion, there was a crown and
under it, in exactly the same flourishing script of the seventeenth
century, the two letters "W. R." interlaced, and between them an eagle
looking fiercely to its right.... So I take it that this gun was worked
for the King of Prussia.
Then at the breach there was a scroll, and in the scroll was a similar
script just like that of Louis XIV. And the motto ran: "_Ultima ratio
regis_"--"_regis_" mind you, not "_regum_."
We all have the defects of our qualities, and there does go with the
German, even with the Prussian, simplicity, an astonishing lack of
critical power. "_Ultima ratio regum_" is one thing: "_Ultima ratio
regis_" is quite another. It reminded me of the famous quotation:
"Frailty, thy name is lady."
Now why was that script ever engraven? (The date was 1909.) Against
whom was this ephemeral Prussian king going to use his argument--his
last argument? I carry back my mind to 1909, and I can remember no
one against whom at that moment he was preparing to argue in such a
fashion. It was a quiet time. There was no worry within the Prussian
state; Agadir had not been heard of. Yet that was the date and that
was the motto. And there was the eagle and there was the inscribed
flourishing initial, and there was the crown.
I know very well that some, perhaps most, of my readers--of those who
do me the honour to read this rambling--will think me a fool for what I
am next to say. But I confess a sentimentality towards that gun. When
I was a boy and they were teaching me to drive in the artillery school
at Toul they used to give us a sort of vile body on which to experiment
our horses and ourselves: old guns of '48--old bronze guns. And these
the French had made with great art. They were beautiful things.
What touched me most about them was that each of them had a name.
One was called "Liberty," another "The Voice of the People," another
"Equality," and so on. It is a human instinct and a just one to give
names to things. It is part of the truth that we ourselves are made in
the image of God. Why, even my boat, which is but a material, inanimate
body (may She forgive me), has a name. I must tell you, though you
ridicule me, that when I saw that German gun I wished it also had a
name.
And what sort of name should it have had? It could not have had a
name for an abstract virtue or idea, like a French gun. It might have
had the name of a great German man, but the names of such men are
soon exhausted. It might have had the name of a jest, for jests are
innumerable; but then the reader would have had to understand the jest
which would probably have been local--like "Grandmamma" or "Archie"
or the huge French gun I knew in my youth, which the men of my youth
called "Silence in the Ranks"--an enormous piece on the top of a fort.
Indeed, I cannot conceive what name could have been given to this one
gun out of so many guns. Still I wish it had had a name.
If it had had a name I could look back on it, now that I have left it,
and say to myself: "What fun I had in those few minutes before the
train came in, examining the outward expression of ----, his character,
his toilet, his elevation, and all the rest of it!"
But the gun had no name, and so I must still carry it in my mind
anonymously as "the German gun."
Of all the hundreds of guns that I have seen lying about or being
carried on trucks or drawn by horses, or standing in the great
factories during these years, only one gun has touched me more, and
this also was a German gun. I saw it in February, 1915. It lay derelict
in a ditch close to the road near the river Ourcq, within an hour of
Meaux, and Paris not forty miles away. It was perhaps the extreme gun
of all the invasion; the mark of the high tide. It lay pitifully on one
side, like the corpse in Beaudelaire's poem. One wheel it had not at
all, but only the axle sticking up into the air, and the other wheel
was rotted into the ground. And there lay the poor dead German gun like
a fool.
I said to my companion: "Why does not some one of the peasants take it
away and keep it for a relic?" To which my companion answered in the
hard French fashion (which differs so much from the more human English
way): "Why should he?"
ON A TAG PROVIDER
There are a great number of trades in the world of which one does not
hear, because men do not make a full living by them. Most of them are
interesting trades.
There is the famous example of the man who gave his trade on the
Inquisition Form as "Maker of smoked glasses through which to watch
such total eclipses of the sun as may be visible from Greenwich." There
is the less known but equally remarkable case of the worm-eater; and to
this I can swear to, because I read it in print with my own eyes. It
happened years ago in a police court in London. The magistrate said to
the poor man who was (as is the fashion of the poor) in trouble, "What
is your trade?" to which he answered, "I am a worm-eater." It turned
out that he was not a person who ate little worms, nor, metaphorically,
a man who made his living out of dejection and humility, but a person
who simulated the action of worms upon old wood. He was employed by the
furniture fakers to discharge a load of very fine shot from a great
distance at wood which had already been scraped and treated with acid
and chipped about so that it looked old. This very fine shot made very
fine holes which made the wood look as if it had been worm-eaten. Thus
was he a worm-eater.
Then there are the men who do the hind legs of an animal in a
pantomime, and there is the trade of the man who is not exactly a
detective but, as it were, a detective's servant, and is not let
into the secret but simply told to watch. There are great numbers of
these honest folk. You may see them all up and down London, and you
may mark them by two things. First of all, they always have something
new about them, usually a new hat, because they are miserable men and
their employers think that if they looked too poor they would be too
conspicuous. It is a muddle-headed idea, but there it is. Therefore,
they are always given something new in the way of clothing, and usually
a hat. This done, they are apt to stay all day within a very narrow
area, looking at a particular door and at the same time trying to look
as though they were not looking at it. In this they fail. I had a long
conversation with one of these innumerable London police-spies two
years ago, and gave him great agony by going up to the house after he
had spoken to me and warning the people inside.
But of all these hidden trades, the one I like most is that of
Tag-Provider (as it used to be called in the old days of party
politics). I believe the last of them is dead; at any rate, when I saw
him ten years ago he was in a very anxious state, coughing, badly
broken by age, and telling me he knew not which way to turn for a meal;
yet he had had his prosperous days.
He lived in a little room, a lodging, at the top of an old house
overlooking the river. I came across him quite by accident through my
habit of writing rhymes--a pastime to which I have been given all my
life. These rhymes I often print and sometimes sign; that is how he got
hold of my name. He wrote to me and asked me whether I would go and
look over some of his rhymes and see whether I thought they suited.
When I got his letter I thought he was a poet who wanted advice, so
I wrote my regular answer that I knew nothing about poetry and could
not give advice. He wrote again imploringly, saying that he was not a
poet in the ordinary sense but that in his profession it was necessary
to introduce rhymes from time to time, and that my judgment really
would be of great service to him, for he was good enough to say that
I had quite a knack of rhyming, especially at rhyming words of three
syllables, which is difficult. So I went round to see him, and being
younger than I am now I was able to enjoy his conversation well enough
for half an hour or more. He was very proud of his work, and had round
his room autograph letters of congratulation which had been sent to
him by the most famous politicians of his time. It was he who invented
(it was one of the last of his actions) the tag "We want eight and we
won't wait." When he asked me if this could be improved, I suggested
"No fleet, no meat." He said this would not go down. I asked him
why not. He said, "Because the public could not remember very short
rhymes." They had to be rather long to have any effect, but not too
long. He told me (and he was very proud of it) that he was also the
inventor of "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right." "Here," said
he proudly to me, "you have a very fine example of irregular rhyme
with two balanced statements in opposition and contrast." "The first,"
he added, "is concrete, the second abstract: the first is purely
historical without moral sequence, the second contains the deepest
political and moral lesson."
I wish he had lived to the present day. He might have given us
something really good and new, which we badly lack.
He also wrote "One tongue, one flag, one throne." He was not so proud
of that, because, he said, that some fool had imported it into the
United States, where it did not go down. The enthusiasts kept the
"one tongue" part, but they did not know what to add, which spoiled
the whole show. He did not make up the phrase "blood is thicker than
water," but I suggested to him a very good way in which it could be
turned into a poem during any one of those recurrent moments (they turn
up every ten years or so) when our politicians are morally certain of
wangling the American alliance. The rhyme I suggested was this:
Blood is thicker than water--
And so it oughter.
We had a great debate over this, and I fear it was his obstinacy which
prevented this really fine rhyme from getting floated. It would have
made a great difference, and we might, by this time, have acquired fame
between us, had it not been for this silly old man's objections. So
true is it that great events spring from small causes!
His objection, oddly enough, was not one of metre but one of grammar;
and he added to this what I think another very silly objection, but
one you constantly find in critics of good verse. He said "and so it
oughter" made bad syntax with the first line. I said it did not: it
must be read elliptically. The full sentence would be "And so it ought
to be"; and I then pointed out to him that the very greatest poets
had used the elliptical form and that it had appeared in a thousand
interesting phrases. I cited to him from that splendid twenty-first
sonnet:
... I have found a face
More beautiful than gardens: More desired
Than boys in exile love their native place.
He read this several times and said that it did not parse either. I
told him that the form had been used by the poet Homer. This had no
effect on him. He said it might be all very well in Asia Minor but it
would not go down in England, and so, after quite a long dispute, he
refused my version. But there it stands, and I am still proud of it:
Blood is thicker than water--
And so it oughter.
If ever the Anglo-American Alliance _is_ wangled, remember that poem.
I asked him whether he had also produced political tags that did not
rhyme, for I had heard a great number in my time, such as "Rome on the
Rates." He said he had produced many such pieces of English prose, but
that this was not one of them. He wished it had been, for he thought it
a very telling phrase, and he could quote me one which had won no fewer
than 117 votes. That was not bad in the old days when votes were less
common than they are now, and when 117 was worth getting.
He was also very proud of his internal rhymes, particularly of those
concerning the land:
Less of a pleasure place for the rich
And more of a treasure place for the people.
It was the "pleasure and treasure" rhyme that made the success of
that particular tag, he said, and I was quite willing to believe him.
But even as he spoke tears came into his eyes, and he added, "You
will hardly believe me, sir, when I tell you the agony I have gone
through in trying to find a rhyme for 'people.' It is one of the most
difficult words in the English language to get a rhyme for. There are
many rhymes for the abhorred rich, but none suitable for 'people.'
There is 'steeple,' but I think that is about all; and it is dreadfully
difficult to work in 'steeple.' I worked at it for three nights and
then gave it up in despair. However, the thing in its final form did
well enough, as I have told you."
I suggested to him that he might have turned the difficulty by using
some other word for "people," as, for instance, hoipolloi, mob,
populace, gutter-snipes, boors, dregs, dross, scum and other accurate
and suitable words, but he at once stopped me. "None of these will do,"
he said, "because the People do not like being called those names."
"Then," said I, "there is 'citizens,' 'the Britons,' 'Britishers,' and
so forth"; but he still wagged his beard from side to side, saying that
none of them would fit, "besides which," he added, "they are just as
difficult to rhyme to as the other. It can't be done."
I asked him whether he had made Harmsworth's phrase "Rolling the French
in mud and blood." He said yes, but he had originally written it with
a blank--"Rolling the (blank) in mud and blood," and had hawked it
all round London for years according as our foreign policy changed.
The mud and the blood made a very good rhyme, and any old nation
would do to fit into the blank. He had used the words "Russians" and
"Spaniards," and even--I say it with horror--"Yankees," for he was at
work as long ago as the Alabama claim, which I wasn't. He only wished
he had lived long enough to put "Germans," but it happened just to fit
in with the French at the moment he wrote it. He sold it to Harmsworth
(he told me), and it came out in his papers, "We will roll the French
in mud and blood." It did great service, for it frightened the French
to death and kept them out of Morocco in 1899.
I next asked him if he had written the famous rhyme--
We don't want to fight,
But by jingo if we do,
--which is one of the happiest memories of my childhood. He was
immensely flattered--but had to deny the authorship.
"I only wish I had written it, sir," he said (he called me "sir"
the whole time, and it pleases me to remember the honour he paid
me). "I only wish I _had_ written it! That was a real corker! None
of the others led to anything so big: this one very nearly made a
war and moved a whole fleet at immense expense from one part of the
Mediterranean to the other. No small feat! But what I did write,
sir, if you will believe me--and I never got the credit for it--was
a most excellent tag called 'Ninepence for fourpence.' It occurred
to me in this way. I was sitting in one of Lockhart's cafés, which
I patronised in those days, drinking a stir of brown with a slab of
thick." I nodded, for the terms were familiar to me; and he continued:
"As I did so a man came in with a shilling and said he would have a
scone and a cup of tea and a pat of butter (in those days, sir, we
had not the advantage of margarine. You young folks have a better
time than ever we had!) The man came in, I say, with a shilling and
put it down and said he would have a scone and a cup of tea and a
pat of butter, and that was threepence. Then they gave him ninepence
change. Then he put it back again and said he had changed his mind
(the shilling was still lying on the counter), and asked what he could
get for one-and-ninepence. The woman who was serving was very flurried
with the crush of people, and she said, 'What do you mean?' He said,
'One and ninepence. I have paid threepence--that is one and three
and nine, makes ... no, I'll tell you what!'--putting down another
shilling--'That makes two and ninepence together. Look here, that's too
much.' Then he shifted the coins about a bit while she served other
people in her hurry, and then she looked at him again all fussed and
said, 'Now then! Make up your mind!' and he said, 'Well, I will tell
you what, I think I can afford fourpence. Will you give me a sausage
with some bread and a cup of tea?'; and she said, 'Oh, how you do
pester!' Then he put down fourpence, picked up the ninepence change
and the shillings, and in this way, after he had had his sausage and
tea and bread and butter, he won ninepence by risking fourpence. He
was a wizened-looking man with a cunning look and a fixed smile. I
have always remembered him; and that is how I got my idea of ninepence
for fourpence; but if you will believe me, sir, I sent that into the
Central Office and they used it and never paid me!"
"What a shame!" said I. "What are you usually paid?" "Why, sir," he
answered, "I used to work on a royalty basis, but it was so difficult
to keep the accounts when millions and millions of people used the
phrase and when it was printed in all sorts of pamphlets, that I
changed my contracts and sold out and out. But now," he added sadly, "I
cannot sell a thing. It is a terrible thing the way in which a change
of custom takes the bread out of an old man's mouth." I said it was,
indeed. "And yet," he continued eagerly, "it is an older trade than you
think for. Believe me, sir, it has been in our family for generations."
I was astonished to hear this, for I believed tags to be quite modern,
but he assured me it was not so. "My own great-grandfather," he said,
"was the author of 'No taxation without representation,' and that
was a stunner. It rhymed and it took root, two things that often go
together, and the old man on his death bed told my father, who has told
me, how it was done, but you will excuse me if I do not tell you that
because it is a secret of the trade; it used to be my livelihood and
that livelihood may creep up again." He said these last words rather
doubtfully, and was interrupted by a dreadful cough.
I asked him whether he used a rhyming dictionary, like Wordsworth, the
great poet. He said, between the intervals of his coughing, "No, sir,
no! I find it cramps the style! I ascribe a great deal of Wordsworth's
failures to this deleterious habit. I walk the streets, keeping my mind
as vacant as possible and then the things occur to me--or rather they
did once occur to me," he added sadly. Then he sighed and said, "There
is no market any more."
This was years ago. I have hoped against hope that the trick would
return, but time has gone by and apparently the market for such things
is dead and, as I said before, I think the old man is dead, too. But
what a lot of good he did in his time, and how true it is of him, as of
many other lesser men, that they achieved far more than they knew, and
that their reward was not proportionate to their achievement.
ON "AND"
Dark eyes adventure bring: the blue, serene,
Do promise Paradise--and yours are green.
This little jewel--called "The Lover's Complaint"--is ascribed by some
to Herrick. They are wrong. It proceeds from a younger but already
faltering pen.
I introduce it only at the head of this to illustrate the singular
depth, the weight, the value of the word "and." Even in the English
tongue, the noblest vehicle of expression (but in this point weak), the
word "and" plays its subtle parts.
We lack the double "and" of antiquity--that subtle repetitive effect in
which the classics abound. We have no "_que_" to our "_et_"; we have no
[Greek: te] to our [Greek: kai] we have only our plain "and." But even
so, our plain "and" has much diversity about it: a versatile, mercurial
word: a knight in the chess play of prose.
"How is this?" you say. "'And' would seem to be but a redundant word to
express some addition already apparent."
"'He was drunk, disorderly!' 'And' would seem to be stuck in between
the two affirmations from a sort of laziness of the mind."
You are wrong. It is a great pleasure to me to tell you that you are
wrong.
Even if "and" only pursued this function of letting the mind repose
it might be welcomed as a bed; but it does much more. It introduces
emphasis, as in the poignant sentence: "Their choice was turbot--and
boiled." It also has an elevating effect, hooking up something to the
level of the rest; as where it is written:
Nibbity, bibbity, bobbity bo!--
_And_ the little brown bowl--
We'll drink to the Barley Mow!
The little brown bowl would have come in absurdly: it would have jolted
the mind like a bump in the road, were it not for that precious little
"and," which catches it neatly up, putting upon one level that which
goes before with that which comes after.