ABOUT this time last year I was fortunate enough to go to a very nice
children’s party, or, rather, a very nice party for children. I add the
appreciative epithet because there was only one grown-up person there,
and that person was not I; and when all is said it may be stated
confidently that the fewer the grown-ups the better the children’s party.
Nevertheless, although there was only one grown-up for about thirty
children, and she the most charming and tactful of girls, I had not been
long in the place of fairy-lamps before I discovered that with one
exception I was the youngest person there. I had come out that night in
the proper party frame of mind. My shoes were tight and my mind was full
of riddles of which I had forgotten the answers, and as I drove along in
a four-wheeler—who ever went to a party in anything else?—I noticed that
the stars smelt of tangerine oranges. When I reached the house
everything looked all right. The place was very busy, and there were
lots of white frocks and collars, and pink faces.
Yes, it ought to have been a jolly party, but it came about twenty years
too late, and the children, I had almost added, were about twenty years
too old. Instead of forgetting everything else in the whirl and clamour
of play and dancing, they were, it seemed to me, too busy registering the
impressions to enjoy themselves. One of them, a child of eleven, was
already smitten with a passion for the _mot juste_. “My tongue,” she
told me gravely, “is like a cloud”; and, later, “a marigold is like a
circus.” She had a crushing word for a comrade who was looking at
herself in a mirror. “But you don’t _really_ look as nice as you do in
the looking-glass!” The other children did not seem much better, and I
stood forlornly in their midst, as a child stands among the creased
trouser-legs of its elders, until I saw a scared little face in a corner
apart from the rest. “Why aren’t you playing?” I asked. The child
looked me straight in the face, and burst into a thousand tears. At
least here was something young, something not wholly wise. We sat
together, exchanging grave confidences all the evening.
Possibly this is a queer way in which to start an article on common
sense, but there is more than madness in my method, for I feel assured
that the children have derived their new wisdom—a senseless wisdom, a
wisdom of facts—from their absurd parents. The latest creed, the belief
that comfort for the masses prevents remorse in the individual, may be
well enough in its way, but it creates a very bad atmosphere in which to
bring up children. They are taught that life is an agglomeration of
facts, and no sort of miracle, and by learning these facts like little
parrots they lose the whole thrill and adventure of life. They do not go
out to kill dragons, because they know that there are no dragons there.
Chivalry survived with children long after common sense had killed it as
dead as mutton in the adult mind. But now they, too, have found it out,
and there are only a few silly poets and mad lovers to keep the memory of
Quixote green.
What are these facts by which we are to guide our lives, of which,
indeed, our lives are to consist? One of the simplest, one that has come
to have the force of a proverbial expression, is the fact that two and
two make four, and this is one of the first things we teach our children.
I have a friend who suspects that in moments of intense consciousness two
and two, weary of making four, would make five for a change. I have
heard it argued against him by mathematicians that the fourness of
four—four’s very existence, as it were—depends on its being related to
two in the subtle fashion suggested by the well-known dogma, but I can
discern no grounds for this assertion. Consider the fate that would
befall a man who went for a ride on an omnibus for the purpose of making
use of this one fact. He might be aware that the fare to Putney was
fourpence, and, proud of his mathematical knowledge, might pay his fare
in two instalments of twopence. What would be his consternation to find
that, as he reached his journey’s end, he would have to pay another penny
because he had not paid his fourpence in one lump sum? In terms of ’bus
fares, two and two do not make four, and I would multiply examples of
such exceptions to the accepted rule.
But even if two and two really did make four, the fact would remain
supremely useless. However cunningly it was conveyed, the statement
would not abate one tear from the sorrows of a child, nor would it
brighten, even for an instant, the eyes of a dying man. You could not
win a girl with it, because the man who counts his kisses is damned from
the start. A poet could not turn it into song; it would draw no briefest
flame from the ashes of a storyteller’s fire. The thing is cold,
inhuman; it is made for lawyers and politicians, and the persons who
argue their lives away on matters of no importance. We who are simpler
never put two and two together for the purpose of making four, for four
is of no more use to us than a nice brace of twos. The infinite is the
answer of all our mathematical problems, and if we cannot find it we are
quick to sponge the sum off our slates. The belief that two and two make
four leads most people to think four a better fellow than two; to hold,
for instance, that a man with four millions must be richer than a man
with two, though the groans of our pauper millionaires never cease to
admonish our national cupidity. Two and two make just what your heart
can compass, neither more nor less, and, if your unit is worthless, they
make nothing at all.
Facts are worse than useless, for they limit the journeys of the human
mind; but there is a common sense not founded on facts that represents
the extreme limits of our intellectual pilgrimages. It is common only in
this: it is true for all humanity when humanity is wise enough to accept
it. Shakespeare had it deliciously, and even now we are only beginning
to learn the things he knew. For instance—
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
This seems more wisely true to us to-day than it did to the men and women
of his age, but it was as true when he wrote it as it is now. Or again—
“Men must abide
Their going hence even as their coming hither,
Ripeness is all.”
This is the true common sense—all that we know, all that we shall know;
but this is not the thing that we teach the children in our schools, nor
is it the light by which most of us guide our lives. We invent trivial
rules and conventions to belittle the life we have to lead, and make
marks in the dust with our fingers to cheat an uncheatable fate. We add
illusion to illusion in coward hopes of outliving the greatest illusion
of all. We add folly to folly, and lie to lie, and are content that the
results of our labours should be unwisdom and untruth. We add two to two
and worship the mournful constancy of four.
I began my article on common sense with a children’s party; I must end
it, I suppose, somewhere within the limits of our unhoping lives. When
the night of a hundred kisses draws to a close, and Dawn, with her
painted smile, creeps like a spy into the room, men and women believe
that they can see things as they really are. The earth is grey to their
eyes, though not more grey than their own tired flesh, and their little
hearts are quick to believe that grey is the normal colour of life. The
sun comes up and tints the world with rose, and they forget their sorrow,
as they have so often forgotten it before, and go their boasting way
through the world they believe their own. Around them, in the light that
is not the sun’s, the shadows tremble—shadows of the dead, shadows of the
yet unborn. The wise cannot tell them apart.
* * * * *