← catalogue

Tremendous Trifles

by G. K. Chesterton · English · Gutenberg #8092 · 325,172 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tremendous Trifles
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Tremendous Trifles

Author: G. K. Chesterton


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8092]
                Most recently updated: April 27, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8092

Credits: An Anonymous Volunteer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TREMENDOUS TRIFLES ***




TREMENDOUS TRIFLES

By G. K. Chesterton




PREFACE


These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission of the
Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared. They amount
to no more than a sort of sporadic diary--a diary recording one day in
twenty which happened to stick in the fancy--the only kind of diary the
author has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keep
by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the
topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive.
As the reader’s eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it
probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window
blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at
something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not
write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post
or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as “The
Bed-Post; Its Significance--Security Essential to Idea of Sleep--Night
Felt as Infinite--Need of Monumental Architecture,” and so on. He could
not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even
in the form of a summary. “The Window-Blind--Its Analogy to the Curtain
and Veil--Is Modesty Natural?--Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun,
etc., etc.” None of us think enough of these things on which the eye
rests. But don’t let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy?
Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that
run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular
athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured
cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else
may do it better, if anyone else will only try.


     CONTENTS:

           I  Tremendous Trifles
          II  A Piece of Chalk
         III  The Secret of a Train
          IV  The Perfect Game
           V  The Extraordinary Cabman
          VI  An Accident
         VII  The Advantages of Having One Leg
        VIII  The End of the World
          IX  In the Place de la Bastille
           X  On Lying in Bed
          XI  The Twelve Men
         XII  The Wind and the Trees
        XIII  The Dickensian
         XIV  In Topsy-Turvy Land
          XV  What I Found in My Pocket
         XVI  The Dragon’s Grandmother
        XVII  The Red Angel
       XVIII  The Tower
         XIX  How I Met the President
          XX  The Giant
         XXI  The Great Man
        XXII  The Orthodox Barber
       XXIII  The Toy Theatre
        XXIV  A Tragedy of Twopence
         XXV  A Cab Ride Across Country
        XXVI  The Two Noises
       XXVII  Some Policemen and a Moral
      XXVIII  The Lion
        XXIX  Humanity: An Interlude
         XXX  The Little Birds Who Won’t Sing
        XXXI  The Riddle of the Ivy
       XXXII  The Travellers in State
      XXXIII  The Prehistoric Railway Station
       XXXIV  The Diabolist
        XXXV  A Glimpse of My Country
       XXXVI  A Somewhat Improbable Story
      XXXVII  The Shop of Ghosts
     XXXVIII  The Ballade of a Strange Town
       XXXIX  The Mystery of a Pageant





I. Tremendous Trifles

Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly in the
front garden, because their villa was a model one. The front garden was
about the same size as the dinner table; it consisted of four strips of
gravel, a square of turf with some mysterious pieces of cork standing up
in the middle and one flower bed with a row of red daisies. One morning
while they were at play in these romantic grounds, a passing individual,
probably the milkman, leaned over the railing and engaged them in
philosophical conversation. The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter,
were at least sharply interested in his remarks. For the milkman (who
was, I need say, a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offering
them in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for. And
Paul closed with the offer with a business-like abruptness, explaining
that he had long wished to be a giant that he might stride across
continents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas in an afternoon
dinner stroll. The milkman producing a wand from his breast pocket,
waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner; and in an instant the
model villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll’s house at Paul’s
colossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds to
visit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas,
he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little cork
rockery in the garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than
the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for
several minutes trying to find something really large and finding
everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five
prairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside the
hut of an intellectual backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment
with an axe in one hand and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the
other. The man looked at the book and then at the giant, and then at the
book again. And in the book it said, “It can be maintained that the evil
of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe.” So the
backwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and, working eight hours a
day for about a week, cut the giant’s head off; and there was an end of
him.

Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly
enough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long wished to
be a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he immediately became
one. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst of
an immense plain, covered with a tall green jungle and above which, at
intervals, rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolic
pictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward
the middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic and
impossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance, that it looked
like some incident of the end of the world. And far away on the faint
horizon he could see the line of another forest, taller and yet more
mystical, of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever.
He set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has not
come to the end of it yet.

Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest
qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit
for children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it is
not childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in fact
the almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating the pages that
follow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences upon European
literature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own preference in
its most favourable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girls
call telling a story.

I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scraps
that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace
existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other great
literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr.
Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by
sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical
variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere. Let it
be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight; and the
two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling’s school advises us
to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The
school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the
man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long
enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a
far greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words,
we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually
before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up
their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the
Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may
see if he is active and strides from continent to continent like the
giant in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how many
extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur
himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have taken
the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made an idle
diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walking
in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that
these are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I can
only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says that
I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is
so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture
than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add this not
unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one has only to become a
pigmy like Peter to discover that.

I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting
to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the
most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an
exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth.
But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness,
but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like
insects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it is
from the level that things look high; I am a child of the level and have
no need of that celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the
hills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass
to the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is in an
attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I
will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like
flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never
starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.




II. A Piece of Chalk

I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer
holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing
nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a
walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket.
I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house,
belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village),
and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown
paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook
the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She
seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be
wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to
do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental
capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of
toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only
wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in
the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a
question, not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing
comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I
wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparently
supposing that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paper
wrappers from motives of economy.

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not
only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper,
just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer,
or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal
twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured
chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and
blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of
divine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman;
and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and
possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how
primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one’s
pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the
infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely
about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and
the age of the great epics is past.

.....

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out
on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal contours that
express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time
soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the
smoothness of great cart-horses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree;
it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty
are merciful. As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly
as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake. The
villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see, for centuries;
yet the lifting of the whole land was like the lifting of one enormous
wave to wash them all away.

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place
to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven’s sake, imagine I was going to
sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind
old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in
robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred
or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.
They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much
easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a
mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs
of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly
walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and
silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the
beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the
landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the
best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about
the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care
very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but
they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about
Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white
robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had
stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the
purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand
green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The
blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the
Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

.....

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began
to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that
a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art
of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I
cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise
and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white
is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and
affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so
to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows
white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities
of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is
exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality
is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the
avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like
pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or
sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive
thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something
flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but
He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when
He paints in white. In a sense our age has realised this fact, and
expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that
white was a blank and colourless thing, negative and non-committal, then
white would be used instead of black and grey for the funeral dress of
this pessimistic period. We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of
spotless silver linen, with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies.
Which is not the case.

Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk.

.....

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer than
Chichester at which it was even remotely probable that there would be
such a thing as an artist’s colourman. And yet, without white, my absurd
little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there
were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for
expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and
again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine
a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass.
Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt
water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense
warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of white
chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped
and broke a piece off the rock I sat on; it did not mark so well as the
shop chalks do; but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance
of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand
peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more
admirable. It is a piece of chalk.




III. The Secret of a Train

All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to a loose
memory. I will not merely say that this story is true: because, as you
will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and
no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in
life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if
it were not too large to be seen. For the perplexity of life arises from
there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested
properly in any of them; what we call its triviality is really the
tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like
ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. My
experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate, not
fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents (what there were
of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere of the landscape, which
were the whole horror of the thing. I remember them vividly, and they
were as I shall now describe.

.....

About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing outside
the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London. And
for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind or the
emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice fell upon
me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step out on the
road and walk at least some part of the way to London. I do not know
if other people are made like me in this matter; but to me it is always
dreary weather, what may be called useless weather, that slings into
life a sense of action and romance. On bright blue days I do not want
anything to happen; the world is complete and beautiful, a thing for
contemplation. I no more ask for adventures under that turquoise dome
than I ask for adventures in church. But when the background of man’s
life is a grey background, then, in the name of man’s sacred supremacy,
I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail man
refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in letters
of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall happen, then the
immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees that
something shall happen, if it be only the slaughter of a policeman. But
this is a digressive way of stating what I have said already--that
the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger for some change of plans, that the
monotonous weather seemed to render unbearable the use of the monotonous
train, and that I set out into the country lanes, out of the town of
Oxford. It was, perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came
upon me out of the city and the sky, whereby it was decreed that years
afterwards I should, in an article in the DAILY NEWS, talk about Sir
George Trevelyan in connection with Oxford, when I knew perfectly well
that he went to Cambridge.

As I crossed the country everything was ghostly and colourless. The
fields that should have been green were as grey as the skies; the
tree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds and as
cloudy. And when I had walked for some hours the evening was closing in.
A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon, as if pale with reluctance
to leave the world in the dark. And as it faded more and more the skies
seemed to come closer and to threaten. The clouds which had been merely
sullen became swollen; and then they loosened and let down the dark
curtains of the rain. The rain was blinding and seemed to beat like
blows from an enemy at close quarters; the skies seemed bending over and
bawling in my ears. I walked on many more miles before I met a man, and
in that distance my mind had been made up; and when I met him I asked
him if anywhere in the neighbourhood I could pick up the train for
Paddington. He directed me to a small silent station (I cannot even
remember the name of it) which stood well away from the road and looked
as lonely as a hut on the Andes. I do not think I have ever seen such a
type of time and sadness and scepticism and everything devilish as that
station was: it looked as if it had always been raining there ever since
the creation of the world. The water streamed from the soaking wood of
it as if it were not water at all, but some loathsome liquid corruption
of the wood itself; as if the solid station were eternally falling to
pieces and pouring away in filth. It took me nearly ten minutes to find
a man in the station. When I did he was a dull one, and when I asked him
if there was a train to Paddington his answer was sleepy and vague. As
far as I understood him, he said there would be a train in half an hour.
I sat down and lit a cigar and waited, watching the last tail of the
tattered sunset and listening to the everlasting rain. It may have
been in half an hour or less, but a train came rather slowly into the
station. It was an unnaturally dark train; I could not see a light
anywhere in the long black body of it; and I could not see any guard
running beside it. I was reduced to walking up to the engine and calling
out to the stoker to ask if the train was going to London. “Well--yes,
sir,” he said, with an unaccountable kind of reluctance. “It is going
to London; but----” It was just starting, and I jumped into the first
carriage; it was pitch dark. I sat there smoking and wondering, as we
steamed through the continually darkening landscape, lined with desolate
poplars, until we slowed down and stopped, irrationally, in the middle
of a field. I heard a heavy noise as of some one clambering off the
train, and a dark, ragged head suddenly put itself into my window.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the stoker, “but I think, perhaps--well, perhaps
you ought to know--there’s a dead man in this train.”

.....

Had I been a true artist, a person of exquisite susceptibilities
and nothing else, I should have been bound, no doubt, to be finally
overwhelmed with this sensational touch, and to have insisted on
getting out and walking. As it was, I regret to say, I expressed myself
politely, but firmly, to the effect that I didn’t care particularly if
the train took me to Paddington. But when the train had started with
its unknown burden I did do one thing, and do it quite instinctively,
without stopping to think, or to think more than a flash. I threw
away my cigar. Something that is as old as man and has to do with
all mourning and ceremonial told me to do it. There was something
unnecessarily horrible, it seemed to me, in the idea of there being
only two men in that train, and one of them dead and the other smoking
a cigar. And as the red and gold of the butt end of it faded like a
funeral torch trampled out at some symbolic moment of a procession,
I realised how immortal ritual is. I realised (what is the origin and
essence of all ritual) that in the presence of those sacred riddles
about which we can say nothing it is more decent merely to do something.
And I realised that ritual will always mean throwing away something;
DESTROYING our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

When the train panted at last into Paddington Station I sprang out of
it with a suddenly released curiosity. There was a barrier and officials
guarding the rear part of the train; no one was allowed to press towards
it. They were guarding and hiding something; perhaps death in some too
shocking form, perhaps something like the Merstham matter, so mixed up
with human mystery and wickedness that the land has to give it a sort of
sanctity; perhaps something worse than either. I went out gladly enough
into the streets and saw the lamps shining on the laughing faces.
Nor have I ever known from that day to this into what strange story I
wandered or what frightful thing was my companion in the dark.




IV. The Perfect Game

We have all met the man who says that some odd things have happened to
him, but that he does not really believe that they were supernatural. My
own position is the opposite of this. I believe in the supernatural as a
matter of intellect and reason, not as a matter of personal experience.
I do not see ghosts; I only see their inherent probability. But it is
entirely a matter of the mere intelligence, not even of the motions;
my nerves and body are altogether of this earth, very earthy. But
upon people of this temperament one weird incident will often leave a
peculiar impression. And the weirdest circumstance that ever occurred
to me occurred a little while ago. It consisted in nothing less than my
playing a game, and playing it quite well for some seventeen consecutive
minutes. The ghost of my grandfather would have astonished me less.

On one of these blue and burning afternoons I found myself, to my
inexpressible astonishment, playing a game called croquet. I had
imagined that it belonged to the epoch of Leach and Anthony Trollope,
and I had neglected to provide myself with those very long and luxuriant
side whiskers which are really essential to such a scene. I played
it with a man whom we will call Parkinson, and with whom I had a
semi-philosophical argument which lasted through the entire contest. It
is deeply implanted in my mind that I had the best of the argument; but
it is certain and beyond dispute that I had the worst of the game.

“Oh, Parkinson, Parkinson!” I cried, patting him affectionately on the
head with a mallet, “how far you really are from the pure love of the
sport--you who can play. It is only we who play badly who love the Game
itself. You love glory; you love applause; you love the earthquake voice
of victory; you do not love croquet. You do not love croquet until
you love being beaten at croquet. It is we the bunglers who adore the
occupation in the abstract. It is we to whom it is art for art’s sake.
If we may see the face of Croquet herself (if I may so express myself)
we are content to see her face turned upon us in anger. Our play is
called amateurish; and we wear proudly the name of amateur, for amateurs
is but the French for Lovers. We accept all adventures from our Lady,
the most disastrous or the most dreary. We wait outside her iron gates
(I allude to the hoops), vainly essaying to enter. Our devoted balls,
impetuous and full of chivalry, will not be confined within the pedantic
boundaries of the mere croquet ground. Our balls seek honour in the ends
of the earth; they turn up in the flower-beds and the conservatory; they
are to be found in the front garden and the next street. No, Parkinson!
The good painter has skill. It is the bad painter who loves his art. The
good musician loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music. With
such a pure and hopeless passion do I worship croquet. I love the game
itself. I love the parallelogram of grass marked out with chalk or tape,
as if its limits were the frontiers of my sacred Fatherland, the four
seas of Britain. I love the mere swing of the mallets, and the click of
the balls is music. The four colours are to me sacramental and symbolic,
like the red of martyrdom, or the white of Easter Day. You lose all
this, my poor Parkinson. You have to solace yourself for the absence of
this vision by the paltry consolation of being able to go through hoops
and to hit the stick.”

And I waved my mallet in the air with a graceful gaiety.

“Don’t be too sorry for me,” said Parkinson, with his simple sarcasm. “I
shall get over it in time. But it seems to me that the more a man likes
a game the better he would want to play it. Granted that the pleasure
in the thing itself comes first, does not the pleasure of success come
naturally and inevitably afterwards? Or, take your own simile of the
Knight and his Lady-love. I admit the gentleman does first and foremost
want to be in the lady’s presence. But I never yet heard of a gentleman
who wanted to look an utter ass when he was there.”

“Perhaps not; though he generally looks it,” I replied. “But the truth
is that there is a fallacy in the simile, although it was my own. The
happiness at which the lover is aiming is an infinite happiness, which
can be extended without limit. The more he is loved, normally speaking,
the jollier he will be. It is definitely true that the stronger the love
of both lovers, the stronger will be the happiness. But it is not true
that the stronger the play of both croquet players the stronger will
be the game. It is logically possible--(follow me closely here,
Parkinson!)--it is logically possible, to play croquet too well to enjoy
it at all. If you could put this blue ball through that distant hoop as
easily as you could pick it up with your hand, then you would not put it
through that hoop any more than you pick it up with your hand; it would
not be worth doing. If you could play unerringly you would not play at
all. The moment the game is perfect the game disappears.”

“I do not think, however,” said Parkinson, “that you are in any
immediate danger of effecting that sort of destruction. I do not think
your croquet will vanish through its own faultless excellence. You are
safe for the present.”

I again caressed him with the mallet, knocked a ball about, wired
myself, and resumed the thread of my discourse.

The long, warm evening had been gradually closing in, and by this
time it was almost twilight. By the time I had delivered four more
fundamental principles, and my companion had gone through five more
hoops, the dusk was verging upon dark.

“We shall have to give this up,” said Parkinson, as he missed a ball
almost for the first time, “I can’t see a thing.”

“Nor can I,” I answered, “and it is a comfort to reflect that I could
not hit anything if I saw it.”

With that I struck a ball smartly, and sent it away into the darkness
towards where the shadowy figure of Parkinson moved in the hot haze.
Parkinson immediately uttered a loud and dramatic cry. The situation,
indeed, called for it. I had hit the right ball.

Stunned with astonishment, I crossed the gloomy ground, and hit my ball
again. It went through a hoop. I could not see the hoop; but it was the
right hoop. I shuddered from head to foot.

Words were wholly inadequate, so I slouched heavily after that
impossible ball. Again I hit it away into the night, in what I supposed
was the vague direction of the quite invisible stick. And in the dead
silence I heard the stick rattle as the ball struck it heavily.

I threw down my mallet. “I can’t stand this,” I said. “My ball has gone
right three times. These things are not of this world.”

“Pick your mallet up,” said Parkinson, “have another go.”

“I tell you I daren’t. If I made another hoop like that I should see all
the devils dancing there on the blessed grass.”

“Why devils?” asked Parkinson; “they may be only fairies making fun of
you. They are sending you the ‘Perfect Game,’ which is no game.”

I looked about me. The garden was full of a burning darkness, in which
the faint glimmers had the look of fire. I stepped across the grass
as if it burnt me, picked up the mallet, and hit the ball
somewhere--somewhere where another ball might be. I heard the dull click
of the balls touching, and ran into the house like one pursued.




V. The Extraordinary Cabman

From time to time I have introduced into this newspaper column the
narration of incidents that have really occurred. I do not mean to
insinuate that in this respect it stands alone among newspaper columns.
I mean only that I have found that my meaning was better expressed
by some practical parable out of daily life than by any other method;
therefore I propose to narrate the incident of the extraordinary cabman,
which occurred to me only three days ago, and which, slight as it
apparently is, aroused in me a moment of genuine emotion bordering upon
despair.

On the day that I met the strange cabman I had been lunching in a little
restaurant in Soho in company with three or four of my best friends. My
best friends are all either bottomless sceptics or quite uncontrollable
believers, so our discussion at luncheon turned upon the most ultimate
and terrible ideas. And the whole argument worked out ultimately to
this: that the question is whether a man can be certain of anything
at all. I think he can be certain, for if (as I said to my friend,
furiously brandishing an empty bottle) it is impossible intellectually
to entertain certainty, what is this certainty which it is impossible
to entertain? If I have never experienced such a thing as certainty I
cannot even say that a thing is not certain. Similarly, if I have never
experienced such a thing as green I cannot even say that my nose is not
green. It may be as green as possible for all I know, if I have really
no experience of greenness. So we shouted at each other and shook the
room; because metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing. And
the difference between us was very deep, because it was a difference as
to the object of the whole thing called broad-mindedness or the opening
of the intellect. For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the
sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening’s sake, opening
infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened
my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing
it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly
silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.

.....

Now when this argument was over, or at least when it was cut short (for
it will never be over), I went away with one of my companions, who in
the confusion and comparative insanity of a General Election had somehow
become a member of Parliament, and I drove with him in a cab from the
corner of Leicester-square to the members’ entrance of the House of
Commons, where the police received me with a quite unusual tolerance.
Whether they thought that he was my keeper or that I was his keeper is a
discussion between us which still continues.

It is necessary in this narrative to preserve the utmost exactitude of
detail. After leaving my friend at the House I took the cab on a few
hundred yards to an office in Victoria-street which I had to visit. I
then got out and offered him more than his fare. He looked at it, but
not with the surly doubt and general disposition to try it on which is
not unknown among normal cabmen. But this was no normal, perhaps, no
human, cabman. He looked at it with a dull and infantile astonishment,
clearly quite genuine. “Do you know, sir,” he said, “you’ve only given
me 1s.8d?” I remarked, with some surprise, that I did know it. “Now you
know, sir,” said he in a kindly, appealing, reasonable way, “you know
that ain’t the fare from Euston.” “Euston,” I repeated vaguely, for the
phrase at that moment sounded to me like China or Arabia. “What on
earth has Euston got to do with it?” “You hailed me just outside Euston
Station,” began the man with astonishing precision, “and then you
said----” “What in the name of Tartarus are you talking about?” I said
with Christian forbearance; “I took you at the south-west corner of
Leicester-square.” “Leicester-square,” he exclaimed, loosening a kind of
cataract of scorn, “why we ain’t been near Leicester-square to-day. You
hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said----” “Are you mad, or am
I?” I asked with scientific calm.

I looked at the man. No ordinary dishonest cabman would think of
creating so solid and colossal and creative a lie. And this man was
not a dishonest cabman. If ever a human face was heavy and simple and
humble, and with great big blue eyes protruding like a frog’s, if ever
(in short) a human face was all that a human face should be, it was the
face of that resentful and respectful cabman. I looked up and down the
street; an unusually dark twilight seemed to be coming on. And for one
second the old nightmare of the sceptic put its finger on my nerve. What
was certainty? Was anybody certain of anything? Heavens! to think of the
dull rut of the sceptics who go on asking whether we possess a future
life. The exciting question for real scepticism is whether we possess a
past life. What is a minute ago, rationalistically considered, except
a tradition and a picture? The darkness grew deeper from the road. The
cabman calmly gave me the most elaborate details of the gesture, the
words, the complex but consistent course of action which I had adopted
since that remarkable occasion when I had hailed him outside Euston
Station. How did I know (my sceptical friends would say) that I had not
hailed him outside Euston. I was firm about my assertion; he was quite
equally firm about his. He was obviously quite as honest a man as I,
and a member of a much more respectable profession. In that moment the
universe and the stars swung just a hair’s breadth from their balance,
and the foundations of the earth were moved. But for the same reason
that I believe in Democracy, for the same reason that I believe in free
will, for the same reason that I believe in fixed character of virtue,
the reason that could only be expressed by saying that I do not choose
to be a lunatic, I continued to believe that this honest cabman was
wrong, and I repeated to him that I had really taken him at the corner
of Leicester-square. He began with the same evident and ponderous
sincerity, “You hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said----”

And at this moment there came over his features a kind of frightful
transfiguration of living astonishment, as if he had been lit up like
a lamp from the inside. “Why, I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “I beg
your pardon. I beg your pardon. You took me from Leicester-square. I
remember now. I beg your pardon.” And with that this astonishing man let
out his whip with a sharp crack at his horse and went trundling away.
The whole of which interview, before the banner of St. George I swear,
is strictly true.

.....

I looked at the strange cabman as he lessened in the distance and the
mists. I do not know whether I was right in fancying that although his
face had seemed so honest there was something unearthly and demoniac
about him when seen from behind. Perhaps he had been sent to tempt me
from my adherence to those sanities and certainties which I had defended
earlier in the day. In any case it gave me pleasure to remember that
my sense of reality, though it had rocked for an instant, had remained
erect.




VI. An Accident

Some time ago I wrote in these columns an article called “The
Extraordinary Cabman.” I am now in a position to contribute my
experience of a still more extraordinary cab. The extraordinary thing
about the cab was that it did not like me; it threw me out violently in
the middle of the Strand. If my friends who read the DAILY NEWS are
as romantic (and as rich) as I take them to be, I presume that this
experience is not uncommon. I suppose that they are all being thrown out
of cabs, all over London. Still, as there are some people, virginal and
remote from the world, who have not yet had this luxurious experience, I
will give a short account of the psychology of myself when my hansom cab
ran into the side of a motor omnibus, and I hope hurt it.

I do not need to dwell on the essential romance of the hansom cab--that
one really noble modern thing which our age, when it is judged, will
gravely put beside the Parthenon. It is really modern in that it is
both secret and swift. My particular hansom cab was modern in these two
respects; it was also very modern in the fact that it came to grief.
But it is also English; it is not to be found abroad; it belongs to a
beautiful, romantic country where nearly everybody is pretending to be
richer than they are, and acting as if they were. It is comfortable, and
yet it is reckless; and that combination is the very soul of England.
But although I had always realised all these good qualities in a hansom
cab, I had not experienced all the possibilities, or, as the moderns put
it, all the aspects of that vehicle. My enunciation of the merits of a
hansom cab had been always made when it was the right way up. Let me,
therefore, explain how I felt when I fell out of a hansom cab for the
first and, I am happy to believe, the last time. Polycrates threw one
ring into the sea to propitiate the Fates. I have thrown one hansom
cab into the sea (if you will excuse a rather violent metaphor) and the
Fates are, I am quite sure, propitiated. Though I am told they do not
like to be told so.

I was driving yesterday afternoon in a hansom cab down one of the
sloping streets into the Strand, reading one of my own admirable
articles with continual pleasure, and still more continual surprise,
when the horse fell forward, scrambled a moment on the scraping stones,
staggered to his feet again, and went forward. The horses in my cabs
often do this, and I have learnt to enjoy my own articles at any angle
of the vehicle. So I did not see anything at all odd about the way
the horse went on again. But I saw it suddenly in the faces of all the
people on the pavement. They were all turned towards me, and they were
all struck with fear suddenly, as with a white flame out of the sky. And
one man half ran out into the road with a movement of the elbow as if
warding off a blow, and tried to stop the horse. Then I knew that
the reins were lost, and the next moment the horse was like a living
thunder-bolt. I try to describe things exactly as they seemed to me;
many details I may have missed or mis-stated; many details may have,
so to speak, gone mad in the race down the road. I remember that I
once called one of my experiences narrated in this paper “A Fragment of
Fact.” This is, at any rate, a fragment of fact. No fact could possibly
be more fragmentary than the sort of fact that I expected to be at the
bottom of that street.

.....

I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that
the converted do not understand their own religion. Thus I have always
urged in this paper that democracy has a deeper meaning than democrats
understand; that is, that common and popular things, proverbs, and
ordinary sayings always have something in them unrealised by most who
repeat them. Here is one. We have all heard about the man who is in
momentary danger, and who sees the whole of his life pass before him
in a moment. In the cold, literal, and common sense of words, this is
obviously a thundering lie. Nobody can pretend that in an accident or
a mortal crisis he elaborately remembered all the tickets he had ever
taken to Wimbledon, or all the times that he had ever passed the brown
bread and butter.

But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing towards the traffic
of the Strand, I discovered that there is a truth behind this phrase,
as there is behind all popular phrases. I did really have, in that short
and shrieking period, a rapid succession of a number of fundamental
points of view. I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as
many seconds. My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sincere
men is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded a
state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper name has ever
been found. The ancients called it Stoicism, and I think it must be what
some German lunatics mean (if they mean anything) when they talk
about Pessimism. It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing that
happens--as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiously
enough, came a very strong contrary feeling--that things mattered very
much indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic. It was
a feeling, not that life was unimportant, but that life was much
too important ever to be anything but life. I hope that this was
Christianity. At any rate, it occurred at the moment when we went crash
into the omnibus.

It seemed to me that the hansom cab simply turned over on top of me,
like an enormous hood or hat. I then found myself crawling out from
underneath it in attitudes so undignified that they must have added
enormously to that great cause to which the Anti-Puritan League and I
have recently dedicated ourselves. I mean the cause of the pleasures of
the people. As to my demeanour when I emerged, I have two confessions to
make, and they are both made merely in the interests of mental science.
The first is that whereas I had been in a quite pious frame of mind the
moment before the collision, when I got to my feet and found I had got
off with a cut or two I began (like St. Peter) to curse and to swear.
A man offered me a newspaper or something that I had dropped. I can
distinctly remember consigning the paper to a state of irremediable
spiritual ruin. I am very sorry for this now, and I apologise both to
the man and to the paper. I have not the least idea what was the meaning
of this unnatural anger; I mention it as a psychological confession. It
was immediately followed by extreme hilarity, and I made so many silly
jokes to the policeman that he disgraced himself by continual laughter
before all the little boys in the street, who had hitherto taken him
seriously.

.....

There is one other odd thing about the matter which I also mention as
a curiosity of the human brain or deficiency of brain. At intervals of
about every three minutes I kept on reminding the policeman that I had
not paid the cabman, and that I hoped he would not lose his money. He
said it would be all right, and the man would appear. But it was not
until about half an hour afterwards that it suddenly struck me with a
shock intolerable that the man might conceivably have lost more
than half a crown; that he had been in danger as well as I. I had
instinctively regarded the cabman as something uplifted above accidents,
a god. I immediately made inquiries, and I am happy to say that they
seemed to have been unnecessary.

But henceforward I shall always understand with a darker and more
delicate charity those who take tythe of mint, and anise, and cumin,
and neglect the weightier matters of the law; I shall remember how I
was once really tortured with owing half a crown to a man who might
have been dead. Some admirable men in white coats at the Charing Cross
Hospital tied up my small injury, and I went out again into the Strand.
I felt upon me even a kind of unnatural youth; I hungered for something
untried. So to open a new chapter in my life I got into a hansom cab.




VII. The Advantages of Having One Leg

A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement and
casting about for some phrase of consolation that should not be either
insolent or weak, said at last, “I think one can live through these
great sorrows and even be the better. What wears one is the little
worries.” “That’s quite right, mum,” answered the old woman with
emphasis, “and I ought to know, seeing I’ve had ten of ’em.” It is,
perhaps, in this sense that it is most true that little worries are most
wearing. In its vaguer significance the phrase, though it contains a
truth, contains also some possibilities of self-deception and error.
People who have both small troubles and big ones have the right to say
that they find the small ones the most bitter; and it is undoubtedly
true that the back which is bowed under loads incredible can feel a
faint addition to those loads; a giant holding up the earth and all
its animal creation might still find the grasshopper a burden. But I
am afraid that the maxim that the smallest worries are the worst is
sometimes used or abused by people, because they have nothing but the
very smallest worries. The lady may excuse herself for reviling the
crumpled rose leaf by reflecting with what extraordinary dignity she
would wear the crown of thorns--if she had to. The gentleman may permit
himself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he would behave much
better if it were a mere matter of starvation. We need not deny that
the grasshopper on man’s shoulder is a burden; but we need not pay much
respect to the gentleman who is always calling out that he would rather
have an elephant when he knows there are no elephants in the country. We
may concede that a straw may break the camel’s back, but we like to know
that it really is the last straw and not the first.

I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right to grumble,
so long as they grumble about something else. It is a singular fact that
if they are sane they almost always do grumble about something else. To
talk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickest
way to go off your head. But people with great troubles talk about
little ones, and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very
often has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly a very
clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking
that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that
molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this
evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more
invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere. No
one ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over a
hassock. William III. died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose
that with all his varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a
mountain. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask
a happy man (not William III.) to put up with pure inconveniences,
and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive
poverty I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental
limitations that are always falling across our path--bad weather,
confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments
or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts, finding
unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse, finding
punctuality when we don’t. It is of the poetic pleasures to be drawn
from all these that I sing--I sing with confidence because I have
recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures which arise
from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot, with the only
alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork--a stork is a
poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.

To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if the thing
itself symbolise something other than isolation. If we wish to see what
a house is it must be a house in some uninhabited landscape. If we wish
to depict what a man really is we must depict a man alone in a desert or
on a dark sea sand. So long as he is a single figure he means all that
humanity means; so long as he is solitary he means human society; so
long as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship. Add another
figure and the picture is less human--not more so. One is company, two
is none. If you wish to symbolise human building draw one dark tower on
the horizon; if you wish to symbolise light let there be no star in the
sky. Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we call our day
there is but one star in the sky--a large, fierce star which we call the
sun. One sun is splendid; six suns would be only vulgar. One Tower Of
Giotto is sublime; a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row
of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower;
the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in
following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the
single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find the poetry of
all human anatomy in standing on a single leg. To express complete and
perfect leggishness the leg must stand in sublime isolation, like the
tower in the wilderness. As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is
that which stands most alone.

This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity of some Doric
column. The students of architecture tell us that the only legitimate
use of a column is to support weight. This column of mine fulfils its
legitimate function. It supports weight. Being of an animal and organic
consistency, it may even improve by the process, and during these few
days that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness or dislocation
of the one leg may find compensation in the astonishing strength and
classic beauty of the other leg. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr.
George Meredith’s novel might pass by at any moment, and seeing me in
the stork-like attitude would exclaim, with equal admiration and a more
literal exactitude, “He has a leg.” Notice how this famous literary
phrase supports my contention touching this isolation of any admirable
thing. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, wishing to make a clear and perfect
picture of human grace, said that Sir Willoughby Patterne had a leg. She
delicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive fact
that he had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous and irrelevant,
a reflection, and a confusion. Two legs would have confused Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London. That having had one
good leg he should have another--this would be to use vain repetitions
as the Gentiles do. She would have been as much bewildered by him as if
he had been a centipede.

All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object. All surrender
of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity, all
desolation has for its real aim this separation of something so that it
may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed. I feel grateful for the slight
sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division
between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to
realise that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strong
and splendid a foot is; in the other I can realise how very much
otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly
exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and
beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you
wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a
moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God’s image
is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision of
all visible things--wink the other eye.




VIII. The End of the World

For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious town
of Besançon, which stands like a sort of peninsula in a horse-shoe of
river. You may learn from the guide books that it was the birthplace of
Victor Hugo, and that it is a military station with many forts, near the
French frontier. But you will not learn from guide books that the very
tiles on the roofs seem to be of some quainter and more delicate colour
than the tiles of all the other towns of the world; that the tiles look
like the little clouds of some strange sunset, or like the lustrous
scales of some strange fish. They will not tell you that in this
town the eye cannot rest on anything without finding it in some way
attractive and even elvish, a carved face at a street corner, a gleam of
green fields through a stunted arch, or some unexpected colour for the
enamel of a spire or dome.

.....

Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colours so simple
and yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together and make a fairy
tale. I sat down for a little outside a café with a row of little toy
trees in front of it, and presently the driver of a fly (as we should
call it) came to the same place. He was one of those very large and dark
Frenchmen, a type not common but yet typical of France; the Rabelaisian
Frenchman, huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was
a sort of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but
English. And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two
nations. For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like
a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets, this
Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise--as if pleasure
were a kind of pagan religion. After some talk which was full of the
admirable civility and equality of French civilisation, he suggested
without either eagerness or embarrassment that he should take me in his
fly for an hour’s ride in the hills beyond the town. And though it was
growing late I consented; for there was one long white road under an
archway and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord. We
drove through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans, and I
remember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we passed out of
the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds which are the trinity
of France. They make what some poet calls “a tangled trinity,” and I am
not going to disentangle it. Whatever those three things mean, how
or why they co-exist; whether they can be reconciled or perhaps are
reconciled already; the three sounds I heard then by an accident all
at once make up the French mystery. For the brass band in the Casino
gardens behind me was playing with a sort of passionate levity some
ramping tune from a Parisian comic opera, and while this was going on
I heard also the bugles on the hills above, that told of terrible
loyalties and men always arming in the gate of France; and I heard also,
fainter than these sounds and through them all, the Angelus.

.....

After this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having left
France behind me, or, perhaps, even the civilised world. And, indeed,
there was something in the landscape wild enough to encourage such
a fancy. I have seen perhaps higher mountains, but I have never
seen higher rocks; I have never seen height so near, so abrupt and
sensational, splinters of rock that stood up like the spires of
churches, cliffs that fell sudden and straight as Satan fell from
heaven. There was also a quality in the ride which was not only
astonishing, but rather bewildering; a quality which many must have
noticed if they have driven or ridden rapidly up mountain roads. I mean
a sense of gigantic gyration, as of the whole earth turning about one’s
head. It is quite inadequate to say that the hills rose and fell like
enormous waves. Rather the hills seemed to turn about me like the
enormous sails of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic
wings. As we drove on and up into the gathering purple of the sunset
this dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below.
Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof. I stared
at them until I fancied that I was staring down at a wooded plain. Below
me steeps of green swept down to the river. I stared at them until I
fancied that they swept up to the sky. The purple darkened, night drew
nearer; it seemed only to cut clearer the chasms and draw higher the
spires of that nightmare landscape. Above me in the twilight was
the huge black hulk of the driver, and his broad, blank back was as
mysterious as the back of Death in Watts’ picture. I felt that I was
growing too fantastic, and I sought to speak of ordinary things. I
called out to the driver in French, “Where are you taking me?” and it
is a literal and solemn fact that he answered me in the same language
without turning around, “To the end of the world.”

I did not answer. I let him drag the vehicle up dark, steep ways, until
I saw lights under a low roof of little trees and two children, one
oddly beautiful, playing at ball. Then we found ourselves filling up the
strict main street of a tiny hamlet, and across the wall of its inn was
written in large letters, LE BOUT DU MONDE--the end of the world.

The driver and I sat down outside that inn without a word, as if all
ceremonies were natural and understood in that ultimate place. I ordered
bread for both of us, and red wine, that was good but had no name. On
the other side of the road was a little plain church with a cross on top
of it and a cock on top of the cross. This seemed to me a very good end
of the world; if the story of the world ended here it ended well. Then
I wondered whether I myself should really be content to end here, where
most certainly there were the best things of Christendom--a church and
children’s games and decent soil and a tavern for men to talk with men.
But as I thought a singular doubt and desire grew slowly in me, and at
last I started up.

“Are you not satisfied?” asked my companion. “No,” I said, “I am not
satisfied even at the end of the world.”

Then, after a silence, I said, “Because you see there are two ends of
the world. And this is the wrong end of the world; at least the wrong
one for me. This is the French end of the world. I want the other end of
the world. Drive me to the other end of the world.”

“The other end of the world?” he asked. “Where is that?”

“It is in Walham Green,” I whispered hoarsely. “You see it on the London
omnibuses. ‘World’s End and Walham Green.’ Oh, I know how good this is;
I love your vineyards and your free peasantry, but I want the English
end of the world. I love you like a brother, but I want an English
cabman, who will be funny and ask me what his fare ‘is.’ Your bugles
stir my blood, but I want to see a London policeman. Take, oh, take me
to see a London policeman.”

He stood quite dark and still against the end of the sunset, and I could
not tell whether he understood or not. I got back into his carriage.

“You will understand,” I said, “if ever you are an exile even for
pleasure. The child to his mother, the man to his country, as a
countryman of yours once said. But since, perhaps, it is rather too long
a drive to the English end of the world, we may as well drive back to
Besançon.”

Only as the stars came out among those immortal hills I wept for Walham
Green.




IX. In the Place de La Bastille

On the first of May I was sitting outside a café in the Place de
la Bastille in Paris staring at the exultant column, crowned with a
capering figure, which stands in the place where the people destroyed a
prison and ended an age. The thing is a curious example of how symbolic
is the great part of human history. As a matter of mere material fact,
the Bastille when it was taken was not a horrible prison; it was hardly
a prison at all. But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a
sure instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance, at the last
General Election, or for President Kruger’s hat in the election before;
their poetic sense is perfect. The Chinaman with his pigtail is not
an idle flippancy. He does typify with a compact precision exactly
the thing the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque
nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots, that it
is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy and evil magic
calling monsters from the ends of the earth. The people hate the mine
owner who can bring a Chinaman flying across the sea, exactly as the
people hated the wizard who could fetch a flying dragon through the air.
It was the same with Mr. Kruger’s hat. His hat (that admirable hat) was
not merely a joke. It did symbolise, and symbolise extremely well, the
exact thing which our people at that moment regarded with impatience and
venom; the old-fashioned, dingy, Republican simplicity, the unbeautiful
dignity of the bourgeois, and the heavier truisms of political morality.
No; the people are sometimes wrong on the practical side of politics;
they are never wrong on the artistic side.

.....

So it was, certainly, with the Bastille. The destruction of the Bastille
was not a reform; it was something more important than a reform. It was
an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. The people saw the
building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they
struck at it as at a carved fact. For of all the shapes in which that
immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the
most oppressive are big buildings. Man feels like a fly, an accident,
in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the
spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could
unmake it. Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street
taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, a ritual
meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious
service. If, for instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous
enough to capture and smash up the Bank of England, you might argue for
ever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the
root of the economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would
never forget it. It would change the world.

Architecture is a very good test of the true strength of a society,
for the most valuable things in a human state are the irrevocable
things--marriage, for instance. And architecture approaches nearer than
any other art to being irrevocable, because it is so difficult to get
rid of. You can turn a picture with its face to the wall; it would be a
nuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with its face to the wall. You
can tear a poem to pieces; it is only in moments of very sincere emotion
that you tear a town-hall to pieces. A building is akin to dogma; it
is insolent, like a dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims
permanence like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture
of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is
obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see
anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that
does not change like the clouds of the sky. But along with this decision
which is involved in creating a building, there goes a quite similar
decision in the more delightful task of smashing one. The two of
necessity go together. In few places have so many fine public buildings
been set up as here in Paris, and in few places have so many been
destroyed. When people have finally got into the horrible habit of
preserving buildings, they have got out of the habit of building them.
And in London one mingles, as it were, one’s tears because so few are
pulled down.

.....

As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty and
Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like so many
such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and silent line of
horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and prosaic enough,
but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their helmets; and their
helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans. I had seen them
by twos and threes often enough before. I had seen plenty of them in
pictures toiling through the snows of Friedland or roaring round
the squares at Waterloo. But now they came file after file, like an
invasion, and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that
lit up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie into
which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet and cry out,
“The French soldiers!” There were the little men with the brown faces
that had so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as coolly as
they now rode through their own. And when I looked across the square I
saw that the two other corners were choked with blue and red; held
by little groups of infantry. The city was garrisoned as against a
revolution.

Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker. He
said he was not going to “Chomer.” I said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que le
chome?” He said, “Ils ne veulent pas travailler.” I said, “Ni moi non
plus,” and he thought I was a class-conscious collectivist proletarian.
The whole thing was curious, and the true moral of it one not easy for
us, as a nation, to grasp, because our own faults are so deeply and
dangerously in the other direction. To me, as an Englishman (personally
steeped in the English optimism and the English dislike of severity),
the whole thing seemed a fuss about nothing. It looked like turning out
one of the best armies in Europe against ordinary people walking
about the street. The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less
harmlessly. But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms
one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not) as docile as
the English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled, so to speak,
through the whole noisy night. This people has a natural faculty for
feeling itself on the eve of something--of the Bartholomew or the
Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment. It is this sense of
crisis that makes France eternally young. It is perpetually pulling down
and building up, as it pulled down the prison and put up the column
in the Place de La Bastille. France has always been at the point of
dissolution. She has found the only method of immortality. She dies
daily.




X. On Lying in Bed

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if
only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the
premises. I think myself that the thing might be managed with several
pails of Aspinall and a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping
and masterly way, and laid on the colour in great washes, it might drip
down again on one’s face in floods of rich and mingled colour like some
strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages. I am afraid
it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of
artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling would
be of the greatest possible use; in fact, it is the only use I think of
a white ceiling being put to.

But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have
discovered it. For years I have been looking for some blank spaces in
a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really
allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, “Il me faut des géants.”
 But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms
such as we all live in I was continually disappointed. I found an
endless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain of
fine links between me and my desire. I examined the walls; I found them
to my surprise to be already covered with wallpaper, and I found the
wallpaper to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearing
a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I could not understand why one
arbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely devoid of any religious
or philosophical significance) should thus be sprinkled all over my
nice walls like a sort of small-pox. The Bible must be referring to
wallpapers, I think, when it says, “Use not vain repetitions, as the
Gentiles do.” I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colours,
rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called Turkish
Delight. I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight really is; but I
suppose it is Macedonian Massacres. Everywhere that I went forlornly,
with my pencil or my paint brush, I found that others had unaccountably
been before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture with
their childish and barbaric designs.

.....

Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this
occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying
on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my
vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition
of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas!
like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable;
it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the
window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom
has been discouraged--never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all
political rights--and even my minor proposal to put the other end of
the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been
conceded. Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that
all the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces
and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods. I am
sure that it was only because Michael Angelo was engaged in the ancient
and honourable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realized how the
roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a
divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.

The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is
hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to
mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous than
the exultation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the
expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties
and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse than the modern
weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor
morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad
taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays,
for cleanliness is made essential and godliness is regarded as an
offence. A playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long as
he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met Ibsenite
pessimists who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prussic
acid. Especially this is so in matters of hygiene; notably such matters
as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as
a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be
regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up
early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but
there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

.....

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get
up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its
mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle.
A man’s minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible,
creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his
ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly;
but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and
rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes
in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the
top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let
them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of
good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which
mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues
which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of
inspired pity or of inspired candour. If ever that abrupt appeal is made
to us we may fail. A man can get use to getting up at five o’clock in
the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his
opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little
more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected.
I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an
almost terrible virtue.

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic
caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (like
journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed (as,
for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that
the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution
I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it
without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course,
of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it
without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he
does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific
explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.




XI. The Twelve Men

The other day, while I was meditating on morality and Mr. H. Pitt, I
was, so to speak, snatched up and put into a jury box to try people.
The snatching took some weeks, but to me it seemed something sudden and
arbitrary. I was put into this box because I lived in Battersea, and
my name began with a C. Looking round me, I saw that there were also
summoned and in attendance in the court whole crowds and processions of
men, all of whom lived in Battersea, and all of whose names began with a
C.

It seems that they always summon jurymen in this sweeping alphabetical
way. At one official blow, so to speak, Battersea is denuded of all its
C’s, and left to get on as best it can with the rest of the alphabet. A
Cumberpatch is missing from one street--a Chizzolpop from another--three
Chucksterfields from Chucksterfield House; the children are crying out
for an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street corner is weeping
for her Coffintop, and will not be comforted. We settle down with a
rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race,
the C’s of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totally
inaudible manner by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his
second childhood. We understand, however, that we are to well and truly
try the case between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the
bar, neither of whom has put in an appearance as yet.

.....

Just when I was wondering whether the King and the prisoner were,
perhaps, coming to an amicable understanding in some adjoining public
house, the prisoner’s head appears above the barrier of the dock; he
is accused of stealing bicycles, and he is the living image of a great
friend of mine. We go into the matter of the stealing of the bicycles.
We do well and truly try the case between the King and the prisoner in
the affair of the bicycles. And we come to the conclusion, after a brief
but reasonable discussion, that the King is not in any way implicated.
Then we pass on to a woman who neglected her children, and who looks as
if somebody or something had neglected her. And I am one of those who
fancy that something had.

All the time that the eye took in these light appearances and the brain
passed these light criticisms, there was in the heart a barbaric pity
and fear which men have never been able to utter from the beginning, but
which is the power behind half the poems of the world. The mood cannot
even adequately be suggested, except faintly by this statement that
tragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of human
life. Never had I stood so close to pain; and never so far away from
pessimism. Ordinarily, I should not have spoken of these dark emotions
at all, for speech about them is too difficult; but I mention them now
for a specific and particular reason to the statement of which I will
proceed at once. I speak these feelings because out of the furnace of
them there came a curious realisation of a political or social truth. I
saw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what a jury really
is, and why we must never let it go.

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards
specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because
they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained
dancers because they dance better, specially instructed laughers because
they laugh better, and so on and so on. The principle has been applied
to law and politics by innumerable modern writers. Many Fabians have
insisted that a greater part of our political work should be performed
by experts. Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should
be altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.

.....

Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable, I do
not know that there would be any fault to find with this. But the true
result of all experience and the true foundation of all religion is
this. That the four or five things that it is most practically essential
that a man should know, are all of them what people call paradoxes. That
is to say, that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths,
yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming
verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance, is the unimpeachable
platitude that the man who finds most pleasure for himself is often the
man who least hunts for it. Another is the paradox of courage; the fact
that the way to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it.
Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeful cliff
above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness. Whoever will
lose his life, the same shall save it; an entirely practical and prosaic
statement.

Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught to every
infant prattling at his mother’s knee is the following: That the more a
man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns
a thing the less he knows it. The Fabian argument of the expert,
that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted would be
absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied
a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its
significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its
significance. In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we
are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing
less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.

.....

Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of
men. But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can to
other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun. And
the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all
judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not
that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid
(several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got
used to it.

Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is
the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of
judgment; they only see their own workshop. Therefore, the instinct
of Christian civilisation has most wisely declared that into their
judgments there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and
fresh thoughts from the streets. Men shall come in who can see the court
and the crowd, and coarse faces of the policeman and the professional
criminals, the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the
gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture or a
play hitherto unvisited.

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining
the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to
trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who
know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt
in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system
discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when
it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of
the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember
right, by the Founder of Christianity.




XII. The Wind and the Trees

I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling like surf about
the tops of them, so that their living load of leaves rocks and roars in
something that is at once exultation and agony. I feel, in fact, as if
I were actually sitting at the bottom of the sea among mere anchors and
ropes, while over my head and over the green twilight of water sounded
the everlasting rush of waves and the toil and crash and shipwreck of
tremendous ships. The wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck
them root and all out of the earth like tufts of grass. Or, to try yet
another desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy, the
trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they were a tribe of
dragons each tied by the tail.

As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible and violent
witchcraft, a phrase comes back into my mind. I remember a little boy of
my acquaintance who was once walking in Battersea Park under just such
torn skies and tossing trees. He did not like the wind at all; it blew
in his face too much; it made him shut his eyes; and it blew off his
hat, of which he was very proud. He was, as far as I remember, about
four. After complaining repeatedly of the atmospheric unrest, he said at
last to his mother, “Well, why don’t you take away the trees, and then
it wouldn’t wind.”

Nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake. Any
one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy that they were
indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere waving agitated the
air around them for miles. Nothing, I say, could be more human and
excusable than the belief that it is the trees which make the wind.
Indeed, the belief is so human and excusable that it is, as a matter
of fact, the belief of about ninety-nine out of a hundred of the
philosophers, reformers, sociologists, and politicians of the great age
in which we live. My small friend was, in fact, very like the principal
modern thinkers; only much nicer.

.....

In the little apologue or parable which he has thus the honour of
inventing, the trees stand for all visible things and the wind for the
invisible. The wind is the spirit which bloweth where it listeth; the
trees are the material things of the world which are blown where the
spirit lists. The wind is philosophy, religion, revolution; the trees
are cities and civilisations. We only know that there is a wind because
the trees on some distant hill suddenly go mad. We only know that there
is a real revolution because all the chimney-pots go mad on the whole
skyline of the city.

Just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more ragged and
rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails, so the human city rises
under the wind of the spirit into toppling temples or sudden spires. No
man has ever seen a revolution. Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood
pouring down the gutters, the guillotine lifted higher than the throne,
a prison in ruins, a people in arms--these things are not revolution,
but the results of revolution.

You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind. So,
also, you cannot see a revolution; you can only see that there is a
revolution. And there never has been in the history of the world a real
revolution, brutally active and decisive, which was not preceded by
unrest and new dogma in the reign of invisible things. All revolutions
began by being abstract. Most revolutions began by being quite
pedantically abstract.

The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved. So
there must always be a battle in the sky before there is a battle on the
earth. Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom, it is
lawful also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore
the kingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the
trees. It is lawful to pray “Thine anger come on earth as it is in
Heaven.”

.....

The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees. The great
human heresy is that the trees move the wind. When people begin to
say that the material circumstances have alone created the moral
circumstances, then they have prevented all possibility of serious
change. For if my circumstances have made me wholly stupid, how can I be
certain even that I am right in altering those circumstances?

The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment is
simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts--including
that one. To treat the human mind as having an ultimate authority is
necessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking. And nothing will
ever be reformed in this age or country unless we realise that the moral
fact comes first.

For example, most of us, I suppose, have seen in print and heard in
debating clubs an endless discussion that goes on between Socialists and
total abstainers. The latter say that drink leads to poverty; the former
say that poverty leads to drink. I can only wonder at their either of
them being content with such simple physical explanations. Surely it
is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat leads to
poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink; the absence
of strong civic dignity, the absence of an instinct that resists
degradation.

When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long
ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you will have
discovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman.
The Englishman, among his million delightful virtues, really has this
quality, which may strictly be called “hand to mouth,” because under
its influence a man’s hand automatically seeks his own mouth, instead of
seeking (as it sometimes should do) his oppressor’s nose. And a man who
says that the English inequality in land is due only to economic causes,
or that the drunkenness of England is due only to economic causes, is
saying something so absurd that he cannot really have thought what he
was saying.

Yet things quite as preposterous as this are said and written under the
influence of that great spectacle of babyish helplessness, the economic
theory of history. We have people who represent that all great historic
motives were economic, and then have to howl at the top of their voices
in order to induce the modern democracy to act on economic motives. The
extreme Marxian politicians in England exhibit themselves as a small,
heroic minority, trying vainly to induce the world to do what, according
to their theory, the world always does. The truth is, of course, that
there will be a social revolution the moment the thing has ceased to be
purely economic. You can never have a revolution in order to establish a
democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

.....

I get up from under the trees, for the wind and the slight rain have
ceased. The trees stand up like golden pillars in a clear sunlight.
The tossing of the trees and the blowing of the wind have ceased
simultaneously. So I suppose there are still modern philosophers who
will maintain that the trees make the wind.




XIII. The Dickensian

He was a quiet man, dressed in dark clothes, with a large limp straw
hat; with something almost military in his moustache and whiskers, but
with a quite unmilitary stoop and very dreamy eyes. He was gazing with a
rather gloomy interest at the cluster, one might almost say the tangle,
of small shipping which grew thicker as our little pleasure boat crawled
up into Yarmouth Harbour. A boat entering this harbour, as every one
knows, does not enter in front of the town like a foreigner, but creeps
round at the back like a traitor taking the town in the rear. The
passage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic, and in
consequence the bigger ships look colossal. As we passed under a timber
ship from Norway, which seemed to block up the heavens like a cathedral,
the man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden figurehead carved like a
woman, and said, like one continuing a conversation, “Now, why have they
left off having them. They didn’t do any one any harm?”

I replied with some flippancy about the captain’s wife being jealous;
but I knew in my heart that the man had struck a deep note. There has
been something in our most recent civilisation which is mysteriously
hostile to such healthy and humane symbols.

“They hate anything like that, which is human and pretty,” he continued,
exactly echoing my thoughts. “I believe they broke up all the jolly old
figureheads with hatchets and enjoyed doing it.”

“Like Mr. Quilp,” I answered, “when he battered the wooden Admiral with
the poker.”

His whole face suddenly became alive, and for the first time he stood
erect and stared at me.

“Do you come to Yarmouth for that?” he asked.

“For what?”

“For Dickens,” he answered, and drummed with his foot on the deck.

“No,” I answered; “I come for fun, though that is much the same thing.”

“I always come,” he answered quietly, “to find Peggotty’s boat. It isn’t
here.”

And when he said that I understood him perfectly.

There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred to the people
who live there. I myself have never come to the end of the list of
Batterseas. But there are two to the stranger and tourist; the poor
part, which is dignified, and the prosperous part, which is savagely
vulgar. My new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost; to the
latter he would only distantly allude.

“The place is very much spoilt now... trippers, you know,” he would say,
not at all scornfully, but simply sadly. That was the nearest he would
go to an admission of the monstrous watering place that lay along
the front, outblazing the sun, and more deafening than the sea. But
behind--out of earshot of this uproar--there are lanes so narrow that
they seem like secret entrances to some hidden place of repose. There
are squares so brimful of silence that to plunge into one of them is
like plunging into a pool. In these places the man and I paced up and
down talking about Dickens, or, rather, doing what all true Dickensians
do, telling each other verbatim long passages which both of us knew
quite well already. We were really in the atmosphere of the older
England. Fishermen passed us who might well have been characters like
Peggotty; we went into a musty curiosity shop and bought pipe-stoppers
carved into figures from Pickwick. The evening was settling down between
all the buildings with that slow gold that seems to soak everything when
we went into the church.

In the growing darkness of the church, my eye caught the coloured
windows which on that clear golden evening were flaming with all the
passionate heraldry of the most fierce and ecstatic of Christian arts.
At length I said to my companion:

“Do you see that angel over there? I think it must be meant for the
angel at the sepulchre.”

He saw that I was somewhat singularly moved, and he raised his eyebrows.

“I daresay,” he said. “What is there odd about that?”

After a pause I said, “Do you remember what the angel at the sepulchre
said?”

“Not particularly,” he answered; “but where are you off to in such a
hurry?”

I walked him rapidly out of the still square, past the fishermen’s
almshouses, towards the coast, he still inquiring indignantly where I
was going.

“I am going,” I said, “to put pennies in automatic machines on the
beach. I am going to listen to the niggers. I am going to have my
photograph taken. I am going to drink ginger-beer out of its original
bottle. I will buy some picture postcards. I do want a boat. I am ready
to listen to a concertina, and but for the defects of my education
should be ready to play it. I am willing to ride on a donkey; that is,
if the donkey is willing. I am willing to be a donkey; for all this was
commanded me by the angel in the stained-glass window.”

“I really think,” said the Dickensian, “that I had better put you in
charge of your relations.”

“Sir,” I answered, “there are certain writers to whom humanity owes
much, whose talent is yet of so shy or delicate or retrospective a
type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places or certain
perishing associations. It would not be unnatural to look for the spirit
of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, or even for the shade of Thackeray
in Old Kensington. But let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens, for
Dickens is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward, but forward;
he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury, but he
would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy, but it would
be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it. We will not have all
his books bound up under the title of ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’ Rather
we will have them all bound up under the title of ‘Great Expectations.’
Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make something of it,
swallow it with a holy cannibalism, and assimilate it with the digestion
of a giant. We must take these trippers as he would have taken them, and
tear out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do you remember now what
the angel said at the sepulchre? ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?
He is not here; he is risen.’”

With that we came out suddenly on the wide stretch of the sands, which
were black with the knobs and masses of our laughing and quite desperate
democracy. And the sunset, which was now in its final glory, flung far
over all of them a red flush and glitter like the gigantic firelight
of Dickens. In that strange evening light every figure looked at once
grotesque and attractive, as if he had a story to tell. I heard a little
girl (who was being throttled by another little girl) say by way of
self-vindication, “My sister-in-law ’as got four rings aside her weddin’
ring!”

I stood and listened for more, but my friend went away.




XIV. In Topsy-Turvy Land

Last week, in an idle metaphor, I took the tumbling of trees and the
secret energy of the wind as typical of the visible world moving under
the violence of the invisible. I took this metaphor merely because I
happened to be writing the article in a wood. Nevertheless, now that I
return to Fleet Street (which seems to me, I confess, much better and
more poetical than all the wild woods in the world), I am strangely
haunted by this accidental comparison. The people’s figures seem a
forest and their soul a wind. All the human personalities which speak or
signal to me seem to have this fantastic character of the fringe of the
forest against the sky. That man that talks to me, what is he but an
articulate tree? That driver of a van who waves his hands wildly at me
to tell me to get out of the way, what is he but a bunch of branches
stirred and swayed by a spiritual wind, a sylvan object that I can
continue to contemplate with calm? That policeman who lifts his hand
to warn three omnibuses of the peril that they run in encountering my
person, what is he but a shrub shaken for a moment with that blast
of human law which is a thing stronger than anarchy? Gradually this
impression of the woods wears off. But this black-and-white contrast
between the visible and invisible, this deep sense that the one
essential belief is belief in the invisible as against the visible,
is suddenly and sensationally brought back to my mind. Exactly at
the moment when Fleet Street has grown most familiar (that is, most
bewildering and bright), my eye catches a poster of vivid violet, on
which I see written in large black letters these remarkable words:
“Should Shop Assistants Marry?”

.....

When I saw those words everything might just as well have turned upside
down. The men in Fleet Street might have been walking about on their
hands. The cross of St. Paul’s might have been hanging in the air upside
down. For I realise that I have really come into a topsy-turvy country;
I have come into the country where men do definitely believe that the
waving of the trees makes the wind. That is to say, they believe
that the material circumstances, however black and twisted, are more
important than the spiritual realities, however powerful and pure.
“Should Shop Assistants Marry?” I am puzzled to think what some periods
and schools of human history would have made of such a question. The
ascetics of the East or of some periods of the early Church would have
thought that the question meant, “Are not shop assistants too saintly,
too much of another world, even to feel the emotions of the sexes?” But
I suppose that is not what the purple poster means. In some pagan cities
it might have meant, “Shall slaves so vile as shop assistants even be
allowed to propagate their abject race?” But I suppose that is not what
the purple poster meant. We must face, I fear, the full insanity of what
it does mean. It does really mean that a section of the human race
is asking whether the primary relations of the two human sexes are
particularly good for modern shops. The human race is asking whether
Adam and Eve are entirely suitable for Marshall and Snelgrove. If this
is not topsy-turvy I cannot imagine what would be. We ask whether
the universal institution will improve our (please God) temporary
institution. Yet I have known many such questions. For instance, I have
known a man ask seriously, “Does Democracy help the Empire?” Which is
like saying, “Is art favourable to frescoes?”

I say that there are many such questions asked. But if the world
ever runs short of them, I can suggest a large number of questions of
precisely the same kind, based on precisely the same principle.

“Do Feet Improve Boots?”--“Is Bread Better when Eaten?”--“Should
Hats have Heads in them?”--“Do People Spoil a Town?”--“Do Walls
Ruin Wall-papers?”--“Should Neckties enclose Necks?”--“Do Hands Hurt
Walking-sticks?”--“Does Burning Destroy Firewood?”--“Is Cleanliness Good
for Soap?”--“Can Cricket Really Improve Cricket-bats?”--“Shall We Take
Brides with our Wedding Rings?” and a hundred others.

Not one of these questions differs at all in intellectual purport or in
intellectual value from the question which I have quoted from the
purple poster, or from any of the typical questions asked by half of the
earnest economists of our times. All the questions they ask are of this
character; they are all tinged with this same initial absurdity. They do
not ask if the means is suited to the end; they all ask (with profound
and penetrating scepticism) if the end is suited to the means. They do
not ask whether the tail suits the dog. They all ask whether a dog is
(by the highest artistic canons) the most ornamental appendage that can
be put at the end of a tail. In short, instead of asking whether our
modern arrangements, our streets, trades, bargains, laws, and concrete
institutions are suited to the primal and permanent idea of a healthy
human life, they never admit that healthy human life into the discussion
at all, except suddenly and accidentally at odd moments; and then they
only ask whether that healthy human life is suited to our streets and
trades. Perfection may be attainable or unattainable as an end. It may
or may not be possible to talk of imperfection as a means to perfection.
But surely it passes toleration to talk of perfection as a means to
imperfection. The New Jerusalem may be a reality. It may be a dream. But
surely it is too outrageous to say that the New Jerusalem is a reality
on the road to Birmingham.

.....

This is the most enormous and at the same time the most secret of the
modern tyrannies of materialism. In theory the thing ought to be simple
enough. A really human human being would always put the spiritual
things first. A walking and speaking statue of God finds himself at
one particular moment employed as a shop assistant. He has in himself
a power of terrible love, a promise of paternity, a thirst for some
loyalty that shall unify life, and in the ordinary course of things he
asks himself, “How far do the existing conditions of those assisting in
shops fit in with my evident and epic destiny in the matter of love and
marriage?” But here, as I have said, comes in the quiet and crushing
power of modern materialism. It prevents him rising in rebellion, as he
would otherwise do. By perpetually talking about environment and visible
things, by perpetually talking about economics and physical necessity,
painting and keeping repainted a perpetual picture of iron machinery
and merciless engines, of rails of steel, and of towers of stone, modern
materialism at last produces this tremendous impression in which the
truth is stated upside down. At last the result is achieved. The man
does not say as he ought to have said, “Should married men endure being
modern shop assistants?” The man says, “Should shop assistants marry?”
 Triumph has completed the immense illusion of materialism. The
slave does not say, “Are these chains worthy of me?” The slave says
scientifically and contentedly, “Am I even worthy of these chains?”




XV. What I Found in My Pocket

Once when I was very young I met one of those men who have made
the Empire what it is--a man in an astracan coat, with an astracan
moustache--a tight, black, curly moustache. Whether he put on the
moustache with the coat or whether his Napoleonic will enabled him not
only to grow a moustache in the usual place, but also to grow little
moustaches all over his clothes, I do not know. I only remember that he
said to me the following words: “A man can’t get on nowadays by hanging
about with his hands in his pockets.” I made reply with the quite
obvious flippancy that perhaps a man got on by having his hands in other
people’s pockets; whereupon he began to argue about Moral Evolution, so
I suppose what I said had some truth in it. But the incident now comes
back to me, and connects itself with another incident--if you can call
it an incident--which happened to me only the other day.

I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps through
some absent-mindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with some
reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I had
at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief; I
had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should
find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a
tidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my
possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with
them, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets. If once anything
slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell.
I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets are still
there; the same presumption applies to the things that I have dropped
into the sea. But I regard the riches stored in both these bottomless
chasms with the same reverent ignorance. They tell us that on the
last day the sea will give up its dead; and I suppose that on the same
occasion long strings of extraordinary things will come running out of
my pockets. But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there
is really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all surprised
at finding among them.

.....

Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence. I here only wish
briefly to recall the special, extraordinary, and hitherto unprecedented
circumstances which led me in cold blood, and being of sound mind, to
turn out my pockets. I was locked up in a third-class carriage for a
rather long journey. The time was towards evening, but it might have
been anything, for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shade
was painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting sheet of
quite colourless rain. I had no books or newspapers. I had not even a
pencil and a scrap of paper with which to write a religious epic. There
were no advertisements on the walls of the carriage, otherwise I could
have plunged into the study, for any collection of printed words is
quite enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity. When
I find myself opposite the words “Sunlight Soap” I can exhaust all the
aspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, and Summer poetry before I go on to the
less congenial subject of soap. But there was no printed word or picture
anywhere; there was nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blank
wet without. Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be,
uninteresting. So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats, and
began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood. Just as I had
begun to realise why, perhaps, it was that Christ was a carpenter,
rather than a bricklayer, or a baker, or anything else, I suddenly
started upright, and remembered my pockets. I was carrying about with
me an unknown treasury. I had a British Museum and a South Kensington
collection of unknown curios hung all over me in different places. I
began to take the things out.

.....

The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of Battersea
tram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase. They shook
down in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course, they touched my
patriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes; also they provided me
with the printed matter I required, for I found on the back of them some
short but striking little scientific essays about some kind of pill.
Comparatively speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might
be regarded as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should my
railway journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for a
few months longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the
controversial aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders pro
and con upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolic
quality of the tickets that moved me most. For as certainly as the cross
of St. George means English patriotism, those scraps of paper meant all
that municipal patriotism which is now, perhaps, the greatest hope of
England.

The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket-knife, I
need hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral meditations
all to itself. A knife typifies one of the most primary of those
practical origins upon which as upon low, thick pillows all our human
civilisation reposes. Metals, the mystery of the thing called iron and
of the thing called steel, led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream.
I saw into the intrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among
all the common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent
battle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered
against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man.
I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth. I saw all the
swords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial war. For the knife is
only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword. I opened it
and looked at that brilliant and terrible tongue which we call a blade;
and I thought that perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs
of man. The next moment I knew that I was wrong; for the thing that came
next out of my pocket was a box of matches. Then I saw fire, which is
stronger even than steel, the old, fierce female thing, the thing we all
love, but dare not touch.

The next thing I found was a piece of chalk; and I saw in it all the art
and all the frescoes of the world. The next was a coin of a very modest
value; and I saw in it not only the image and superscription of our own
Caesar, but all government and order since the world began. But I have
not space to say what were the items in the long and splendid procession
of poetical symbols that came pouring out. I cannot tell you all the
things that were in my pocket. I can tell you one thing, however, that I
could not find in my pocket. I allude to my railway ticket.




XVI. The Dragon’s Grandmother

I met a man the other day who did not believe in fairy tales. I do not
mean that he did not believe in the incidents narrated in them--that he
did not believe that a pumpkin could turn into a coach. He did, indeed,
entertain this curious disbelief. And, like all the other people I
have ever met who entertained it, he was wholly unable to give me an
intelligent reason for it. He tried the laws of nature, but he soon
dropped that. Then he said that pumpkins were unalterable in ordinary
experience, and that we all reckoned on their infinitely protracted
pumpkinity. But I pointed out to him that this was not an attitude we
adopt specially towards impossible marvels, but simply the attitude we
adopt towards all unusual occurrences. If we were certain of miracles
we should not count on them. Things that happen very seldom we all leave
out of our calculations, whether they are miraculous or not. I do not
expect a glass of water to be turned into wine; but neither do I expect
a glass of water to be poisoned with prussic acid. I do not in ordinary
business relations act on the assumption that the editor is a fairy; but
neither do I act on the assumption that he is a Russian spy, or the lost
heir of the Holy Roman Empire. What we assume in action is not that the
natural order is unalterable, but simply that it is much safer to bet
on uncommon incidents than on common ones. This does not touch the
credibility of any attested tale about a Russian spy or a pumpkin turned
into a coach. If I had seen a pumpkin turned into a Panhard motor-car
with my own eyes that would not make me any more inclined to assume
that the same thing would happen again. I should not invest largely in
pumpkins with an eye to the motor trade. Cinderella got a ball dress
from the fairy; but I do not suppose that she looked after her own
clothes any the less after it.

But the view that fairy tales cannot really have happened, though crazy,
is common. The man I speak of disbelieved in fairy tales in an even more
amazing and perverted sense. He actually thought that fairy tales
ought not to be told to children. That is (like a belief in slavery
or annexation) one of those intellectual errors which lie very near to
ordinary mortal sins. There are some refusals which, though they may be
done what is called conscientiously, yet carry so much of their whole
horror in the very act of them, that a man must in doing them not only
harden but slightly corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of
milk to young mothers when their husbands were in the field against us.
Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.

.....

The man had come to see me in connection with some silly society
of which I am an enthusiastic member; he was a fresh-coloured,
short-sighted young man, like a stray curate who was too helpless even
to find his way to the Church of England. He had a curious green necktie
and a very long neck; I am always meeting idealists with very long
necks. Perhaps it is that their eternal aspiration slowly lifts their
heads nearer and nearer to the stars. Or perhaps it has something to
do with the fact that so many of them are vegetarians: perhaps they are
slowly evolving the neck of the giraffe so that they can eat all the
tops of the trees in Kensington Gardens. These things are in every sense
above me. Such, anyhow, was the young man who did not believe in fairy
tales; and by a curious coincidence he entered the room when I had just
finished looking through a pile of contemporary fiction, and had begun
to read “Grimm’s Fairy tales” as a natural consequence.

The modern novels stood before me, however, in a stack; and you can
imagine their titles for yourself. There was “Suburban Sue: A Tale of
Psychology,” and also “Psychological Sue: A Tale of Suburbia”; there was
“Trixy: A Temperament,” and “Man-Hate: A Monochrome,” and all those nice
things. I read them with real interest, but, curiously enough, I grew
tired of them at last, and when I saw “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” lying
accidentally on the table, I gave a cry of indecent joy. Here at least,
here at last, one could find a little common sense. I opened the book,
and my eyes fell on these splendid and satisfying words, “The Dragon’s
Grandmother.” That at least was reasonable; that at least was true. “The
Dragon’s Grandmother!” While I was rolling this first touch of ordinary
human reality upon my tongue, I looked up suddenly and saw this monster
with a green tie standing in the doorway.

.....

I listened to what he said about the society politely enough, I hope;
but when he incidentally mentioned that he did not believe in fairy
tales, I broke out beyond control. “Man,” I said, “who are you that you
should not believe in fairy tales? It is much easier to believe in Blue
Beard than to believe in you. A blue beard is a misfortune; but there
are green ties which are sins. It is far easier to believe in a million
fairy tales than to believe in one man who does not like fairy tales. I
would rather kiss Grimm instead of a Bible and swear to all his stories
as if they were thirty-nine articles than say seriously and out of
my heart that there can be such a man as you; that you are not some
temptation of the devil or some delusion from the void. Look at these
plain, homely, practical words. ‘The Dragon’s Grandmother,’ that is all
right; that is rational almost to the verge of rationalism. If there was
a dragon, he had a grandmother. But you--you had no grandmother! If you
had known one, she would have taught you to love fairy tales. You had no
father, you had no mother; no natural causes can explain you. You cannot
be. I believe many things which I have not seen; but of such things
as you it may be said, ‘Blessed is he that has seen and yet has
disbelieved.’”

.....

It seemed to me that he did not follow me with sufficient delicacy, so I
moderated my tone. “Can you not see,” I said, “that fairy tales in their
essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting
fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible?
Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild
and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of
routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the
fairy tale is--what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The
problem of the modern novel is--what will a madman do with a dull world?
In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad.
In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and
suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos. In the
excellent tale of ‘The Dragon’s Grandmother,’ in all the other tales of
Grimm, it is assumed that the young man setting out on his travels
will have all substantial truths in him; that he will be brave, full
of faith, reasonable, that he will respect his parents, keep his word,
rescue one kind of people, defy another kind, ‘parcere subjectis et
debellare,’ etc. Then, having assumed this centre of sanity, the writer
entertains himself by fancying what would happen if the whole world went
mad all round it, if the sun turned green and the moon blue, if horses
had six legs and giants had two heads. But your modern literature
takes insanity as its centre. Therefore, it loses the interest even of
insanity. A lunatic is not startling to himself, because he is quite
serious; that is what makes him a lunatic. A man who thinks he is a
piece of glass is to himself as dull as a piece of glass. A man who
thinks he is a chicken is to himself as common as a chicken. It is only
sanity that can see even a wild poetry in insanity. Therefore, these
wise old tales made the hero ordinary and the tale extraordinary.
But you have made the hero extraordinary and the tale ordinary--so
ordinary--oh, so very ordinary.”

I saw him still gazing at me fixedly. Some nerve snapped in me under the
hypnotic stare. I leapt to my feet and cried, “In the name of God
and Democracy and the Dragon’s grandmother--in the name of all good
things--I charge you to avaunt and haunt this house no more.” Whether
or no it was the result of the exorcism, there is no doubt that he
definitely went away.




XVII. The Red Angel

I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad
for children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him I can
never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest letter
saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even if
they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy tales,
because it frightens them. You might just as well say that it is cruel
to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry. All this
kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting of what a child is
like which has been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes.
If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them
up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells
than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and
black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and
cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to
begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them
even when he does not like them. There is just as much difficulty in
saying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as there is in ours
when we walk of our own free will into the torture-chamber of a great
tragedy. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from
the universe of the soul.

.....

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are
alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They
dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be
alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics
worship it--because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible
for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy
tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is
in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales
do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the
child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby
has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What
the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series
of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit,
that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that
there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and
stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the
darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant
taller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a
Cyclops. But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I read
an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal
dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar
inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some
bad riddles, and a brave heart. Sometimes the sea at night seemed as
dreadful as any dragon. But then I was acquainted with many youngest
sons and little sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as the
sea.

Take the most horrible of Grimm’s tales in incident and imagery, the
excellent tale of the “Boy who Could not Shudder,” and you will see what
I mean. There are some living shocks in that tale. I remember specially
a man’s legs which fell down the chimney by themselves and walked about
the room, until they were rejoined by the severed head and body which
fell down the chimney after them. That is very good. But the point
of the story and the point of the reader’s feelings is not that these
things are frightening, but the far more striking fact that the hero was
not frightened at them. The most fearful of all these fearful wonders
was his own absence of fear. He slapped the bogies on the back and asked
the devils to drink wine with him; many a time in my youth, when stifled
with some modern morbidity, I have prayed for a double portion of his
spirit. If you have not read the end of his story, go and read it; it is
the wisest thing in the world. The hero was at last taught to shudder
by taking a wife, who threw a pail of cold water over him. In that one
sentence there is more of the real meaning of marriage than in all the
books about sex that cover Europe and America.

.....

At the four corners of a child’s bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd
and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making
him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone. For
the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in the
universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted; but
the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied. As I told “H.
N. B.” (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its most superstitious
sense), the one thing modern people really do believe in is damnation.
The greatest of purely modern poets summed up the really modern attitude
in that fine Agnostic line--

“There may be Heaven; there must be Hell.”

The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition; and the
new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin by being
gloomy. A little while ago men believed in no spirits. Now they are
beginning rather slowly to believe in rather slow spirits.

.....

Some people objected to spiritualism, table rappings, and such things,
because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or
waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least.
I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are. That they should
make more jokes and better ones, would be my suggestion. For almost all
the spiritualism of our time, in so far as it is new, is solemn and sad.
Some Pagan gods were lawless, and some Christian saints were a little
too serious; but the spirits of modern spiritualism are both lawless and
serious--a disgusting combination. The specially contemporary spirits
are not only devils, they are blue devils. This is, first and last, the
real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it
is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa
Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others
for not doing so. But if there is anyone who does not comprehend the
defect in our world which I am civilising, I should recommend him, for
instance, to read a story by Mr. Henry James, called “The Turn of the
Screw.” It is one of the most powerful things ever written, and it is
one of the things about which I doubt most whether it ought ever to
have been written at all. It describes two innocent children gradually
growing at once omniscient and half-witted under the influence of the
foul ghosts of a groom and a governess. As I say, I doubt whether Mr.
Henry James ought to have published it (no, it is not indecent, do not
buy it; it is a spiritual matter), but I think the question so doubtful
that I will give that truly great man a chance. I will approve the thing
as well as admire it if he will write another tale just as powerful
about two children and Santa Claus. If he will not, or cannot, then the
conclusion is clear; we can deal strongly with gloomy mystery, but not
with happy mystery; we are not rationalists, but diabolists.

.....

I have thought vaguely of all this staring at a great red fire that
stands up in the room like a great red angel. But, perhaps, you have
never heard of a red angel. But you have heard of a blue devil. That is
exactly what I mean.




XVIII. The Tower

I have been standing where everybody has stood, opposite the great
Belfry Tower of Bruges, and thinking, as every one has thought (though
not, perhaps, said), that it is built in defiance of all decencies of
architecture. It is made in deliberate disproportion to achieve the one
startling effect of height. It is a church on stilts. But this sort of
sublime deformity is characteristic of the whole fancy and energy
of these Flemish cities. Flanders has the flattest and most prosaic
landscapes, but the most violent and extravagant of buildings. Here
Nature is tame; it is civilisation that is untamable. Here the fields
are as flat as a paved square; but, on the other hand, the streets and
roofs are as uproarious as a forest in a great wind. The waters of wood
and meadow slide as smoothly and meekly as if they were in the London
water-pipes. But the parish pump is carved with all the creatures out of
the wilderness. Part of this is true, of course, of all art. We talk of
wild animals, but the wildest animal is man. There are sounds in music
that are more ancient and awful than the cry of the strangest beast
at night. And so also there are buildings that are shapeless in their
strength, seeming to lift themselves slowly like monsters from the
primal mire, and there are spires that seem to fly up suddenly like a
startled bird.

.....

This savagery even in stone is the expression of the special spirit in
humanity. All the beasts of the field are respectable; it is only man
who has broken loose. All animals are domestic animals; only man is ever
undomestic. All animals are tame animals; it is only we who are wild.
And doubtless, also, while this queer energy is common to all human art,
it is also generally characteristic of Christian art among the arts
of the world. This is what people really mean when they say that
Christianity is barbaric, and arose in ignorance. As a matter of
historic fact, it didn’t; it arose in the most equably civilised period
the world has ever seen.

But it is true that there is something in it that breaks the outline
of perfect and conventional beauty, something that dots with anger the
blind eyes of the Apollo and lashes to a cavalry charge the horses
of the Elgin Marbles. Christianity is savage, in the sense that it is
primeval; there is in it a touch of the nigger hymn. I remember a debate
in which I had praised militant music in ritual, and some one asked me
if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band.
I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ definitely
approved a natural noisiness at a great moment. When the street children
shouted too loud, certain priggish disciples did begin to rebuke them in
the name of good taste. He said: “If these were silent the very stones
would cry out.” With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic
creation that has been founded on this creed. With those words He
founded Gothic architecture. For in a town like this, which seems to
have grown Gothic as a wood grows leaves, anywhere and anyhow, any odd
brick or moulding may be carved off into a shouting face. The front of
vast buildings is thronged with open mouths, angels praising God, or
devils defying Him. Rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems to
scream. The miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out.

But though this furious fancy is certainly a specialty of men among
creatures, and of Christian art among arts, it is still most notable in
the art of Flanders. All Gothic buildings are full of extravagant things
in detail; but this is an extravagant thing in design. All Christian
temples worth talking about have gargoyles; but Bruges Belfry is a
gargoyle. It is an unnaturally long-necked animal, like a giraffe. The
same impression of exaggeration is forced on the mind at every corner of
a Flemish town. And if any one asks, “Why did the people of these flat
countries instinctively raise these riotous and towering monuments?” the
only answer one can give is, “Because they were the people of these
flat countries.” If any one asks, “Why the men of Bruges sacrificed
architecture and everything to the sense of dizzy and divine heights?”
 we can only answer, “Because Nature gave them no encouragement to do
so.”

.....

As I stare at the Belfry, I think with a sort of smile of some of my
friends in London who are quite sure of how children will turn out
if you give them what they call “the right environment.” It is a
troublesome thing, environment, for it sometimes works positively
and sometimes negatively, and more often between the two. A beautiful
environment may make a child love beauty; it may make him bored with
beauty; most likely the two effects will mix and neutralise each other.
Most likely, that is, the environment will make hardly any difference at
all. In the scientific style of history (which was recently fashionable,
and is still conventional) we always had a list of countries that had
owed their characteristics to their physical conditions.

The Spaniards (it was said) are passionate because their country is
hot; Scandinavians adventurous because their country is cold; Englishmen
naval because they are islanders; Switzers free because they are
mountaineers. It is all very nice in its way. Only unfortunately I am
quite certain that I could make up quite as long a list exactly contrary
in its argument point-blank against the influence of their geographical
environment. Thus Spaniards have discovered more continents than
Scandinavians because their hot climate discouraged them from exertion.
Thus Dutchmen have fought for their freedom quite as bravely as Switzers
because the Dutch have no mountains. Thus Pagan Greece and Rome and many
Mediterranean peoples have specially hated the sea because they had the
nicest sea to deal with, the easiest sea to manage. I could extend the
list for ever. But however long it was, two examples would certainly
stand up in it as pre-eminent and unquestionable. The first is that the
Swiss, who live under staggering precipices and spires of eternal snow,
have produced no art or literature at all, and are by far the most
mundane, sensible, and business-like people in Europe. The other is that
the people of Belgium, who live in a country like a carpet, have, by an
inner energy, desired to exalt their towers till they struck the stars.

As it is therefore quite doubtful whether a person will go specially
with his environment or specially against his environment, I cannot
comfort myself with the thought that the modern discussions about
environment are of much practical value. But I think I will not write
any more about these modern theories, but go on looking at the Belfry
of Bruges. I would give them the greater attention if I were not pretty
well convinced that the theories will have disappeared a long time
before the Belfry.




XIX. How I Met the President

Several years ago, when there was a small war going on in South Africa
and a great fuss going on in England, when it was by no means so popular
and convenient to be a Pro-Boer as it is now, I remember making a bright
suggestion to my Pro-Boer friends and allies, which was not, I regret to
say, received with the seriousness it deserved. I suggested that a band
of devoted and noble youths, including ourselves, should express our
sense of the pathos of the President’s and the Republic’s fate by
growing Kruger beards under our chins. I imagined how abruptly this
decoration would alter the appearance of Mr. John Morley; how startling
it would be as it emerged from under the chin of Mr. Lloyd-George. But
the younger men, my own friends, on whom I more particularly urged
it, men whose names are in many cases familiar to the readers of this
paper--Mr. Masterman’s for instance, and Mr. Conrad Noel--they, I felt,
being young and beautiful, would do even more justice to the Kruger
beard, and when walking down the street with it could not fail to
attract attention. The beard would have been a kind of counterblast to
the Rhodes hat. An appropriate counterblast; for the Rhodesian power in
Africa is only an external thing, placed upon the top like a hat; the
Dutch power and tradition is a thing rooted and growing like a beard;
we have shaved it, and it is growing again. The Kruger beard would
represent time and the natural processes. You cannot grow a beard in a
moment of passion.

.....

After making this proposal to my friends I hurriedly left town. I went
down to a West Country place where there was shortly afterwards an
election, at which I enjoyed myself very much canvassing for the Liberal
candidate. The extraordinary thing was that he got in. I sometimes lie
awake at night and meditate upon that mystery; but it must not detain us
now. The rather singular incident which happened to me then, and which
some recent events have recalled to me, happened while the canvassing
was still going on. It was a burning blue day, and the warm sunshine,
settling everywhere on the high hedges and the low hills, brought out
into a kind of heavy bloom that HUMANE quality of the landscape which,
as far as I know, only exists in England; that sense as if the bushes
and the roads were human, and had kindness like men; as if the tree were
a good giant with one wooden leg; as if the very line of palings were a
row of good-tempered gnomes. On one side of the white, sprawling road a
low hill or down showed but a little higher than the hedge, on the
other the land tumbled down into a valley that opened towards the Mendip
hills. The road was very erratic, for every true English road exists
in order to lead one a dance; and what could be more beautiful and
beneficent than a dance? At an abrupt turn of it I came upon a low white
building, with dark doors and dark shuttered windows, evidently not
inhabited and scarcely in the ordinary sense inhabitable--a thing more
like a toolhouse than a house of any other kind. Made idle by the heat,
I paused, and, taking a piece of red chalk out of my pocket, began
drawing aimlessly on the back door--drawing goblins and Mr. Chamberlain,
and finally the ideal Nationalist with the Kruger beard. The materials
did not permit of any delicate rendering of his noble and national
expansion of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for
man, and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled.
Just as I was adding the finishing touches to the Kruger fantasy, I was
frozen to the spot with terror. The black door, which I thought no more
of than the lid of an empty box, began slowly to open, impelled from
within by a human hand. And President Kruger himself came out into the
sunlight!

He was a shade milder of eye than he was in his portraits, and he did
not wear that ceremonial scarf which was usually, in such pictures,
slung across his ponderous form. But there was the hat which filled the
Empire with so much alarm; there were the clumsy dark clothes, there was
the heavy, powerful face; there, above all, was the Kruger beard which
I had sought to evoke (if I may use the verb) from under the features
of Mr. Masterman. Whether he had the umbrella or not I was too much
emotionally shaken to observe; he had not the stone lions with him, or
Mrs. Kruger; and what he was doing in that dark shed I cannot imagine,
but I suppose he was oppressing an Outlander.

I was surprised, I must confess, to meet President Kruger in
Somersetshire during the war. I had no idea that he was in the
neighbourhood. But a yet more arresting surprise awaited me. Mr. Kruger
regarded me for some moments with a dubious grey eye, and then addressed
me with a strong Somersetshire accent. A curious cold shock went through
me to hear that inappropriate voice coming out of that familiar form.
It was as if you met a Chinaman, with pigtail and yellow jacket, and he
began to talk broad Scotch. But the next moment, of course, I understood
the situation. We had much underrated the Boers in supposing that the
Boer education was incomplete. In pursuit of his ruthless plot against
our island home, the terrible President had learnt not only English, but
all the dialects at a moment’s notice to win over a Lancashire merchant
or seduce a Northumberland Fusilier. No doubt, if I asked him, this
stout old gentleman could grind out Sussex, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk,
and so on, like the tunes in a barrel organ. I could not wonder if
our plain, true-hearted German millionaires fell before a cunning so
penetrated with culture as this.

.....

And now I come to the third and greatest surprise of all that this
strange old man gave me. When he asked me, dryly enough, but not without
a certain steady civility that belongs to old-fashioned country people,
what I wanted and what I was doing, I told him the facts of the case,
explaining my political mission and the almost angelic qualities of the
Liberal candidate. Whereupon, this old man became suddenly transfigured
in the sunlight into a devil of wrath. It was some time before I could
understand a word he said, but the one word that kept on recurring was
the word “Kruger,” and it was invariably accompanied with a volley of
violent terms. Was I for old Kruger, was I? Did I come to him and want
him to help old Kruger? I ought to be ashamed, I was... and here he
became once more obscure. The one thing that he made quite clear was
that he wouldn’t do anything for Kruger.

“But you ARE Kruger,” burst from my lips, in a natural explosion of
reasonableness. “You ARE Kruger, aren’t you?”

After this innocent CRI DE COEUR of mine, I thought at first there would
be a fight, and I remembered with regret that the President in early
life had had a hobby of killing lions. But really I began to think that
I had been mistaken, and that it was not the President after all. There
was a confounding sincerity in the anger with which he declared that he
was Farmer Bowles, and everybody knowed it. I appeased him eventually
and parted from him at the door of his farmhouse, where he left me
with a few tags of religion, which again raised my suspicions of
his identity. In the coffee-room to which I returned there was an
illustrated paper with a picture of President Kruger, and he and Farmer
Bowles were as like as two peas. There was a picture also of a group of
Outlander leaders, and the faces of them, leering and triumphant, were
perhaps unduly darkened by the photograph, but they seemed to me like
the faces of a distant and hostile people.

I saw the old man once again on the fierce night of the poll, when he
drove down our Liberal lines in a little cart ablaze with the blue Tory
ribbons, for he was a man who would carry his colours everywhere. It
was evening, and the warm western light was on the grey hair and heavy
massive features of that good old man. I knew as one knows a fact of
sense that if Spanish and German stockbrokers had flooded his farm
or country he would have fought them for ever, not fiercely like an
Irishman, but with the ponderous courage and ponderous cunning of the
Boer. I knew that without seeing it, as certainly as I knew without
seeing it that when he went into the polling room he put his cross
against the Conservative name. Then he came out again, having given his
vote and looking more like Kruger than ever. And at the same hour on
the same night thousands upon thousands of English Krugers gave the
same vote. And thus Kruger was pulled down and the dark-faced men in the
photograph reigned in his stead.




XX. The Giant

I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night.
At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is
great. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps
architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. At
least, I think many people of those nobler trades that work by night
(journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers, and such
mistaken enthusiasts as refuse to go home till morning) must often have
stood admiring some black bulk of building with a crown of battlements
or a crest of spires and then burst into tears at daybreak to discover
that it was only a haberdasher’s shop with huge gold letters across the
face of it.

.....

I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to be
wandering in the Temple Gardens towards the end of twilight. I sat down
on a bench with my back to the river, happening to choose such a place
that a huge angle and façade of building jutting out from the Strand
sat above me like an incubus. I dare say that if I took the same seat
to-morrow by daylight I should find the impression entirely false. In
sunlight the thing might seem almost distant; but in that half-darkness
it seemed as if the walls were almost falling upon me. Never before have
I had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics,
the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth. That
pile of wealth and power, whatever was its name, went up above and
beyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb. I had an
irrational sense that this thing had to be fought, that I had to fight
it; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion but an indolent
journalist with a walking-stick.

Almost as I had the thought, two windows were lit in that black, blind
face. It was as if two eyes had opened in the huge face of a sleeping
giant; the eyes were too close together, and gave it the suggestion of a
bestial sneer. And either by accident of this light or of some other, I
could now read the big letters which spaced themselves across the front;
it was the Babylon Hotel. It was the perfect symbol of everything that I
should like to pull down with my hands if I could. Reared by a detected
robber, it is framed to be the fashionable and luxurious home of
undetected robbers. In the house of man are many mansions; but there is
a class of men who feel normal nowhere except in the Babylon Hotel or
in Dartmoor Gaol. That big black face, which was staring at me with its
flaming eyes too close together, that was indeed the giant of all epic
and fairy tales. But, alas! I was not the giant-killer; the hour had
come, but not the man. I sat down on the seat again (I had had one wild
impulse to climb up the front of the hotel and fall in at one of the
windows), and I tried to think, as all decent people are thinking, what
one can really do. And all the time that oppressive wall went up in
front of me, and took hold upon the heavens like a house of the gods.

.....

It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been the defeated
who have won. The people who were left worst at the end of the war
were generally the people who were left best at the end of the whole
business. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the
Christians. But they did not end in the decline of the Christians; they
ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave of Moslem
power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns of Christendom,
that wave was broken, and never came on again. The Crusaders had saved
Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The same applies to that epic of
Republican war in the eighteenth century to which we Liberals owe our
political creed. The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came
back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had lost its
last battle; but it had gained its first object. It had cut a chasm.
The world has never been the same since. No one after that has ever been
able to treat the poor merely as a pavement.

These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere stones of the
street; but as stones that may sometimes fly. If it please God, you and
I may see some of the stones flying again before we see death. But here
I only remark the interesting fact that the conquered almost always
conquer. Sparta killed Athens with a final blow, and she was born again.
Sparta went away victorious, and died slowly of her own wounds. The
Boers lost the South African War and gained South Africa.

And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really
stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment; it
deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock and jar the
unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil; just as a pebble on
a railway can stagger the Scotch express. It is enough for the great
martyrs and criminals of the French revolution, that they have surprised
for all time the secret weakness of the strong. They have awakened and
set leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever the coward in the hearts
of kings.

.....

When Jack the Giant-Killer really first saw the giant his experience was
not such as has been generally supposed. If you care to hear it I will
tell you the real story of Jack the Giant-Killer. To begin with, the
most awful thing which Jack first felt about the giant was that he was
not a giant. He came striding across an interminable wooded plain, and
against its remote horizon the giant was quite a small figure, like a
figure in a picture--he seemed merely a man walking across the grass.
Then Jack was shocked by remembering that the grass which the man was
treading down was one of the tallest forests upon that plain. The man
came nearer and nearer, growing bigger and bigger, and at the instant
when he passed the possible stature of humanity Jack almost screamed.
The rest was an intolerable apocalypse.

The giant had the one frightful quality of a miracle; the more he became
incredible the more he became solid. The less one could believe in him
the more plainly one could see him. It was unbearable that so much of
the sky should be occupied by one human face. His eyes, which had stood
out like bow windows, became bigger yet, and there was no metaphor that
could contain their bigness; yet still they were human eyes. Jack’s
intellect was utterly gone under that huge hypnotism of the face that
filled the sky; his last hope was submerged, his five wits all still
with terror.

But there stood up in him still a kind of cold chivalry, a dignity of
dead honour that would not forget the small and futile sword in his
hand. He rushed at one of the colossal feet of this human tower, and
when he came quite close to it the ankle-bone arched over him like a
cave. Then he planted the point of his sword against the foot and leant
on it with all his weight, till it went up to the hilt and broke the
hilt, and then snapped just under it. And it was plain that the giant
felt a sort of prick, for he snatched up his great foot into his great
hand for an instant; and then, putting it down again, he bent over and
stared at the ground until he had seen his enemy.

Then he picked up Jack between a big finger and thumb and threw him
away; and as Jack went through the air he felt as if he were flying from
system to system through the universe of stars. But, as the giant had
thrown him away carelessly, he did not strike a stone, but struck soft
mire by the side of a distant river. There he lay insensible for several
hours; but when he awoke again his horrible conqueror was still in
sight. He was striding away across the void and wooded plain towards
where it ended in the sea; and by this time he was only much higher than
any of the hills. He grew less and less indeed; but only as a really
high mountain grows at last less and less when we leave it in a railway
train. Half an hour afterwards he was a bright blue colour, as are the
distant hills; but his outline was still human and still gigantic. Then
the big blue figure seemed to come to the brink of the big blue sea, and
even as it did so it altered its attitude. Jack, stunned and bleeding,
lifted himself laboriously upon one elbow to stare. The giant once more
caught hold of his ankle, wavered twice as in a wind, and then went over
into the great sea which washes the whole world, and which, alone of all
things God has made, was big enough to drown him.




XXI. A Great Man

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always
seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils
from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous
but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for
exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything
so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never
gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million
times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to
meet him in real life. The Yellow Pressman seems to have no power of
catching the first fresh fact about a man that dominates all after
impressions. For instance, before I met Bernard Shaw I heard that
he spoke with a reckless desire for paradox or a sneering hatred of
sentiment; but I never knew till he opened his mouth that he spoke with
an Irish accent, which is more important than all the other criticisms
put together.

Journalism is not personal enough. So far from digging out private
personalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities on the
surface. Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression of this kind
which we have all felt when we met great poets or politicians, but which
never finds its way into the newspapers. I mean the impression that
they are much older than we thought they were. We connect great men with
their great triumphs, which generally happened some years ago, and many
recruits enthusiastic for the thin Napoleon of Marengo must have found
themselves in the presence of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.

I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising
politician confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of
boyhood. It described how his “brave young voice” rang in the rafters.
I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably
older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose: all
this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once met
a great man who was younger than I expected.

.....

I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down
a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.
A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight
which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening. It
was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set an instant
after noon. It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened and the road
sank.

I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents; I felt that the
treetops that closed above me were the fixed and real things, certain as
the level of the sea; but that the solid earth was every instant failing
under my feet. In a little while that splendid sunlight showed only in
splashes, like flaming stars and suns in the dome of green sky. Around
me in that emerald twilight were trunks of trees of every plain or
twisted type; it was like a chapel supported on columns of every earthly
and unearthly style of architecture.

Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature of the
forest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force. For the meaning of
woods is the combination of energy with complexity. A forest is not
in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense with delicacy. Unique
shapes that an artist would copy or a philosopher watch for years if he
found them in an open plain are here mingled and confounded; but it is
not a darkness of deformity. It is a darkness of life; a darkness of
perfection. And I began to think how much of the highest human obscurity
is like this, and how much men have misunderstood it. People will tell
you, for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead.
Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate; it
is only the live tree that grows too many branches.

.....

These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out into
deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening was
so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all to
itself. I went along that road according to directions that had been
given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling beyond which the
wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious courtesy
and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from him upon the
valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of that quality which
the old English called “faërie”; it is the quality which those can never
understand who think of the past as merely brutal; it is an ancient
elegance such as there is in trees. I went through the garden and saw
an old man sitting by a table, looking smallish in his big chair. He
was already an invalid, and his hair and beard were both white; not like
snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even
fierce; rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up
quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand, and
I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young. He was the one
great man of the old world whom I have met who was not a mere statue
over his own grave.

He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about the
books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked
about the books he had not written. He unrolled a purple bundle of
romances which he had never had time to sell. He asked me to write one
of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he had
been talking to the milkman. It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort
of astronomical farce. It was all about a man who was rushing up to the
Royal Society with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying
comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped
up at every other minute by his own weakness and vanities; how he lost
a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling. That is only one
of them; there were ten or twenty more. Another, I dimly remember, was
a version of the fall of Parnell; the idea that a quite honest man might
be secret from a pure love of secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went
out of that garden with a blurred sensation of the million possibilities
of creative literature. The feeling increased as my way fell back into
the wood; for a wood is a palace with a million corridors that cross
each other everywhere. I really had the feeling that I had seen the
creative quality; which is supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls
the Old Man of the Forest: I had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind
my path; I have never seen him again; and now I shall not see him,
because he died last Tuesday.




XXII. The Orthodox Barber

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love
of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it
would, if they had it. There is a very real thing which may be called
the love of humanity; in our time it exists almost entirely among what
are called uneducated people; and it does not exist at all among the
people who talk about it.

A positive pleasure in being in the presence of any other human being is
chiefly remarkable, for instance, in the masses on Bank Holiday; that is
why they are so much nearer Heaven (despite appearances) than any other
part of our population.

I remember seeing a crowd of factory girls getting into an empty train
at a wayside country station. There were about twenty of them; they all
got into one carriage; and they left all the rest of the train entirely
empty. That is the real love of humanity. That is the definite pleasure
in the immediate proximity of one’s own kind. Only this coarse, rank,
real love of men seems to be entirely lacking in those who propose
the love of humanity as a substitute for all other love; honourable,
rationalistic idealists.

I can well remember the explosion of human joy which marked the sudden
starting of that train; all the factory girls who could not find seats
(and they must have been the majority) relieving their feelings by
jumping up and down. Now I have never seen any rationalistic idealists
do this. I have never seen twenty modern philosophers crowd into one
third-class carriage for the mere pleasure of being together. I have
never seen twenty Mr. McCabes all in one carriage and all jumping up and
down.

Some people express a fear that vulgar trippers will overrun all
beautiful places, such as Hampstead or Burnham Beeches. But their fear
is unreasonable; because trippers always prefer to trip together;
they pack as close as they can; they have a suffocating passion of
philanthropy.

.....

But among the minor and milder aspects of the same principle, I have no
hesitation in placing the problem of the colloquial barber. Before any
modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist (I insist
with violence) that he shall always be very much pleased when his barber
tries to talk to him. His barber is humanity: let him love that. If he
is not pleased at this, I will not accept any substitute in the way of
interest in the Congo or the future of Japan. If a man cannot love his
barber whom he has seen, how shall he love the Japanese whom he has not
seen?

It is urged against the barber that he begins by talking about the
weather; so do all dukes and diplomatists, only that they talk about
it with ostentatious fatigue and indifference, whereas the barber talks
about it with an astonishing, nay incredible, freshness of interest. It
is objected to him that he tells people that they are going bald.
That is to say, his very virtues are cast up against him; he is blamed
because, being a specialist, he is a sincere specialist, and because,
being a tradesman, he is not entirely a slave. But the only proof of
such things is by example; therefore I will prove the excellence of the
conversation of barbers by a specific case. Lest any one should accuse
me of attempting to prove it by fictitious means, I beg to say quite
seriously that though I forget the exact language employed, the
following conversation between me and a human (I trust), living barber
really took place a few days ago.

.....

I had been invited to some At Home to meet the Colonial Premiers, and
lest I should be mistaken for some partly reformed bush-ranger out
of the interior of Australia I went into a shop in the Strand to get
shaved. While I was undergoing the torture the man said to me:

“There seems to be a lot in the papers about this new shaving, sir. It
seems you can shave yourself with anything--with a stick or a stone or a
pole or a poker” (here I began for the first time to detect a sarcastic
intonation) “or a shovel or a----”

Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing about the
matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein.

“Or a button-hook,” I said, “or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram or a
piston-rod----”

He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, “Or a curtain rod or a
candle-stick, or a----”

“Cow-catcher,” I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic
duet for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told
me. He explained the thing eloquently and at length.

“The funny part of it is,” he said, “that the thing isn’t new at all.
It’s been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before. There is
always a notion that the razor might be done without somehow. But none
of those schemes ever came to anything; and I don’t believe myself that
this will.”

“Why, as to that,” I said, rising slowly from the chair and trying to
put on my coat inside out, “I don’t know how it may be in the case of
you and your new shaving. Shaving, with all respect to you, is a trivial
and materialistic thing, and in such things startling inventions are
sometimes made. But what you say reminds me in some dark and dreamy
fashion of something else. I recall it especially when you tell me,
with such evident experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not
really new. My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of
making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts
off one thing it shifts on to another. If one man has not the toil of
preparing a man’s chin, I suppose that some other man has the toil of
preparing something very curious to put on a man’s chin. It would be
nice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody. It would be nicer
still if we could go unshaved without annoying anybody--

   “‘But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
     Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.’

“Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it
under strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure.

“In the first and darkest of its books it is fiercely written that a man
shall not eat his cake and have it; and though all men talked until the
stars were old it would still be true that a man who has lost his razor
could not shave with it. But every now and then men jump up with the new
something or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice,
that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there is no real
difference between being shaved and not being shaved. The difference,
they say, is only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionary
and relative. Shavedness is immanent in man. Every ten-penny nail is
a Potential Razor. The superstitious people of the past (they say)
believed that a lot of black bristles standing out at right angles to
one’s face was a positive affair. But the higher criticism teaches us
better. Bristles are merely negative. They are a Shadow where Shaving
should be.

“Well, it all goes on, and I suppose it all means something. But a
baby is the Kingdom of God, and if you try to kiss a baby he will know
whether you are shaved or not. Perhaps I am mixing up being shaved and
being saved; my democratic sympathies have always led me to drop my
‘h’s.’ In another moment I may suggest that goats represent the
lost because goats have long beards. This is growing altogether too
allegorical.

“Nevertheless,” I added, as I paid the bill, “I have really been
profoundly interested in what you told me about the New Shaving. Have
you ever heard of a thing called the New theology?”

He smiled and said that he had not.




XXIII. The Toy Theatre

There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys;
and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys takes so
very much more time and trouble than anything else. Playing as children
mean playing is the most serious thing in the world; and as soon as we
have small duties or small sorrows we have to abandon to some extent
so enormous and ambitious a plan of life. We have enough strength
for politics and commerce and art and philosophy; we have not enough
strength for play. This is a truth which every one will recognize who,
as a child, has ever played with anything at all; any one who has played
with bricks, any one who has played with dolls, any one who has played
with tin soldiers. My journalistic work, which earns money, is not
pursued with such awful persistency as that work which earned nothing.

.....

Take the case of bricks. If you publish a book to-morrow in twelve
volumes (it would be just like you) on “The Theory and Practice
of European Architecture,” your work may be laborious, but it is
fundamentally frivolous. It is not serious as the work of a child piling
one brick on the other is serious; for the simple reason that if your
book is a bad book no one will ever be able ultimately and entirely to
prove to you that it is a bad book. Whereas if his balance of bricks
is a bad balance of bricks, it will simply tumble down. And if I know
anything of children, he will set to work solemnly and sadly to build it
up again. Whereas, if I know anything of authors, nothing would induce
you to write your book again, or even to think of it again if you could
help it.

Take the case of dolls. It is much easier to care for an educational
cause than to care for a doll. It is as easy to write an article on
education as to write an article on toffee or tramcars or anything else.
But it is almost as difficult to look after a doll as to look after a
child. The little girls that I meet in the little streets of Battersea
worship their dolls in a way that reminds one not so much of play as
idolatry. In some cases the love and care of the artistic symbol has
actually become more important than the human reality which it was, I
suppose, originally meant to symbolize.

I remember a Battersea little girl who wheeled her large baby sister
stuffed into a doll’s perambulator. When questioned on this course of
conduct, she replied: “I haven’t got a dolly, and Baby is pretending to
be my dolly.” Nature was indeed imitating art. First a doll had been a
substitute for a child; afterwards a child was a mere substitute for a
doll. But that opens other matters; the point is here that such devotion
takes up most of the brain and most of the life; much as if it were
really the thing which it is supposed to symbolize. The point is that
the man writing on motherhood is merely an educationalist; the child
playing with a doll is a mother.

Take the case of soldiers. A man writing an article on military strategy
is simply a man writing an article; a horrid sight. But a boy making a
campaign with tin soldiers is like a General making a campaign with live
soldiers. He must to the limit of his juvenile powers think about the
thing; whereas the war correspondent need not think at all. I remember
a war correspondent who remarked after the capture of Methuen: “This
renewed activity on the part of Delarey is probably due to his
being short of stores.” The same military critic had mentioned a few
paragraphs before that Delarey was being hard pressed by a column which
was pursuing him under the command of Methuen. Methuen chased Delarey;
and Delarey’s activity was due to his being short of stores. Otherwise
he would have stood quite still while he was chased. I run after Jones
with a hatchet, and if he turns round and tries to get rid of me the
only possible explanation is that he has a very small balance at his
bankers. I cannot believe that any boy playing at soldiers would be as
idiotic as this. But then any one playing at anything has to be serious.
Whereas, as I have only too good reason to know, if you are writing an
article you can say anything that comes into your head.

.....

Broadly, then, what keeps adults from joining in children’s games is,
generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure in them; it is simply
that they have no leisure for them. It is that they cannot afford the
expenditure of toil and time and consideration for so grand and grave a
scheme. I have been myself attempting for some time past to complete
a play in a small toy theatre, the sort of toy theatre that used to be
called Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured; only that I drew and coloured
the figures and scenes myself. Hence I was free from the degrading
obligation of having to pay either a penny or twopence; I only had to
pay a shilling a sheet for good cardboard and a shilling a box for bad
water colours. The kind of miniature stage I mean is probably familiar
to every one; it is never more than a development of the stage which
Skelt made and Stevenson celebrated.

But though I have worked much harder at the toy theatre than I ever
worked at any tale or article, I cannot finish it; the work seems
too heavy for me. I have to break off and betake myself to lighter
employments; such as the biographies of great men. The play of “St.
George and the Dragon,” over which I have burnt the midnight oil (you
must colour the thing by lamplight because that is how it will be seen),
still lacks most conspicuously, alas! two wings of the Sultan’s Palace,
and also some comprehensible and workable way of getting up the curtain.

All this gives me a feeling touching the real meaning of immortality.
In this world we cannot have pure pleasure. This is partly because
pure pleasure would be dangerous to us and to our neighbours. But it is
partly because pure pleasure is a great deal too much trouble. If I am
ever in any other and better world, I hope that I shall have enough
time to play with nothing but toy theatres; and I hope that I shall have
enough divine and superhuman energy to act at least one play in them
without a hitch.

.....

Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one’s
consideration. All the essential morals which modern men need to learn
could be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered, it reminds us
of the main principle of art, the principle which is in most danger
of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists of
limitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist in
expanding things. Art consists of cutting things down, as I cut down
with a pair of scissors my very ugly figures of St. George and the
Dragon. Plato, who liked definite ideas, would like my cardboard dragon;
for though the creature has few other artistic merits he is at least
dragonish. The modern philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcome
to a sheet of the plain cardboard. The most artistic thing about the
theatrical art is the fact that the spectator looks at the whole thing
through a window. This is true even of theatres inferior to my own; even
at the Court Theatre or His Majesty’s you are looking through a window;
an unusually large window. But the advantage of the small theatre
exactly is that you are looking through a small window. Has not every
one noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen
through an arch? This strong, square shape, this shutting off of
everything else is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential
of beauty. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

This especially is true of the toy theatre; that, by reducing the scale
of events it can introduce much larger events. Because it is small it
could easily represent the earthquake in Jamaica. Because it is small it
could easily represent the Day of Judgment. Exactly in so far as it is
limited, so far it could play easily with falling cities or with falling
stars. Meanwhile the big theatres are obliged to be economical because
they are big. When we have understood this fact we shall have understood
something of the reason why the world has always been first inspired by
small nationalities. The vast Greek philosophy could fit easier into
the small city of Athens than into the immense Empire of Persia. In the
narrow streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room for Purgatory
and Heaven and Hell. He would have been stifled by the British Empire.
Great empires are necessarily prosaic; for it is beyond human power to
act a great poem upon so great a scale. You can only represent very big
ideas in very small spaces. My toy theatre is as philosophical as the
drama of Athens.




XXIV. A Tragedy of Twopence

My relations with the readers of this page have been long and pleasant,
but--perhaps for that very reason--I feel that the time has come when I
ought to confess the one great crime of my life. It happened a long time
ago; but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse to reveal
such dark episodes long after they have occurred. It has nothing to do
with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League. That body is so offensively
respectable that a newspaper, in describing it the other day, referred
to my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar Jepson; and it is believed
that similar titles are intended for all of us. No; it is not by the
conduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton, of the Rev. James
Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even of that fine and virile old
ecclesiastic, Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish (or rather, am driven by
my conscience) to make this declaration. The crime was committed in
solitude and without accomplices. Alone I did it. Let me, with the
characteristic thirst of penitents to get the worst of the confession
over, state it first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible form.
There is at the present moment in a town in Germany (unless he has died
of rage on discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper to whom I still
owe twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant knowing that I owed
him twopence. I carried it away under his nose, despite the fact that
the nose was a decidedly Jewish one. I have never paid him, and it is
highly improbable that I ever shall. How did this villainy come to occur
in a life which has been, generally speaking, deficient in the dexterity
necessary for fraud? The story is as follows--and it has a moral, though
there may not be room for that.

.....

It is a fair general rule for those travelling on the Continent that the
easiest way of talking in a foreign language is to talk philosophy. The
most difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities. The
reason is obvious. The names of common necessities vary completely
with each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint. How, for
instance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would be called a
“scuttle”? If he has ever seen the word scuttle it has been in the
Jingo Press, where the “policy of scuttle” is used whenever we give
up something to a small Power like Liberals, instead of giving up
everything to a great Power, like Imperialists. What Englishman in
Germany would be poet enough to guess that the Germans call a glove a
“hand-shoe.” Nations name their necessities by nicknames, so to
speak. They call their tubs and stools by quaint, elvish, and almost
affectionate names, as if they were their own children! But any one can
argue about abstract things in a foreign language who has ever got as
far as Exercise IV. in a primer. For as soon as he can put a
sentence together at all he finds that the words used in abstract or
philosophical discussions are almost the same in all nations. They are
the same, for the simple reason that they all come from the things that
were the roots of our common civilisation. From Christianity, from
the Roman Empire, from the mediaeval Church, or the French Revolution.
“Nation,” “citizen,” “religion,” “philosophy,” “authority,” “the
Republic,” words like these are nearly the same in all the countries in
which we travel. Restrain, therefore, your exuberant admiration for the
young man who can argue with six French atheists when he first lands at
Dieppe. Even I can do that. But very likely the same young man does not
know the French for a shoe-horn. But to this generalisation there
are three great exceptions. (1) In the case of countries that are not
European at all, and have never had our civic conceptions, or the old
Latin scholarship. I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for
“citizenship” at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak’s word for “the
Republic” has been familiar to me from the nursery. (2) In the case of
Germany, where, although the principle does apply to many words such
as “nation” and “philosophy,” it does not apply so generally, because
Germany has had a special and deliberate policy of encouraging the
purely German part of its language. (3) In the case where one does not
know any of the language at all, as is generally the case with me.

.....

Such at least was my situation on the dark day on which I committed my
crime. Two of the exceptional conditions which I have mentioned were
combined. I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German. I
knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which hold
our European civilisation together--one of which is “cigar.” As it was a
hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort of beer-garden, and
ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the lager, and paid for
it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gazing
rapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus mountains. After about
ten minutes, I suddenly remembered that I had not paid for the cigar. I
went back to the place of refreshment, and put down the money. But the
proprietor also had forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural
things in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said
“cigar,” and he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down the
money to wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought that
my rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular
cigar, and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill,
seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture that my
rejection was a rejection of cigars in general, not of that particular
article. He mistook this for the ordinary impatience of common men, and
rushed forward, his hands filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing
them upon me. In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the
more cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars were
brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment. I tried in
vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact that I had already
had the cigar. I imitated the action of a citizen smoking, knocking off
and throwing away a cigar. The watchful proprietor only thought I was
rehearsing (as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar he
was going to give me. At last I retired baffled: he would not take the
money and leave the cigars alone. So that this restaurant-keeper (in
whose face a love of money shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and
firmly refused to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and
I took that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months. I
hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth very gently to
that unhappy man.

.....

This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the
moral of it is this--that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The
idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions at
all, because it is an abstract idea. And civilisation obviously would be
nothing without debt. So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific
sociology (which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation is
material or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves how many of
the things that make up our Society, the Law, or the Stocks and Shares,
or the National Debt, you would be able to convey with your face and
your ten fingers by grinning and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.




XXV. A Cab Ride Across Country

Sown somewhere far off in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire there lies
a village of great beauty, and I doubt not of admirable virtue, but of
eccentric and unbalanced literary taste, which asked the present writer
to come down to it on Sunday afternoon and give an address.

Now it was very difficult to get down to it at all on Sunday afternoon,
owing to the indescribable state into which our national laws and
customs have fallen in connection with the seventh day. It is not
Puritanism; it is simply anarchy. I should have some sympathy with the
Jewish Sabbath, if it were a Jewish Sabbath, and that for three reasons;
first, that religion is an intrinsically sympathetic thing; second, that
I cannot conceive any religion worth calling a religion without a fixed
and material observance; and third, that the particular observance of
sitting still and doing no work is one that suits my temperament down to
the ground.

But the absurdity of the modern English convention is that it does not
let a man sit still; it only perpetually trips him up when it has forced
him to walk about. Our Sabbatarianism does not forbid us to ask a man
in Battersea to come and talk in Hertfordshire; it only prevents his
getting there. I can understand that a deity might be worshipped with
joys, with flowers, and fireworks in the old European style. I can
understand that a deity might be worshipped with sorrows. But I cannot
imagine any deity being worshipped with inconveniences. Let the good
Moslem go to Mecca, or let him abide in his tent, according to his
feelings for religious symbols. But surely Allah cannot see anything
particularly dignified in his servant being misled by the time-table,
finding that the old Mecca express is not running, missing his
connection at Bagdad, or having to wait three hours in a small side
station outside Damascus.

So it was with me on this occasion. I found there was no telegraph
service at all to this place; I found there was only one weak thread
of train-service. Now if this had been the authority of real English
religion, I should have submitted to it at once. If I believed that
the telegraph clerk could not send the telegram because he was at that
moment rigid in an ecstasy of prayer, I should think all telegrams
unimportant in comparison. If I could believe that railway porters when
relieved from their duties rushed with passion to the nearest place of
worship, I should say that all lectures and everything else ought to
give way to such a consideration. I should not complain if the national
faith forbade me to make any appointments of labour or self-expression
on the Sabbath. But, as it is, it only tells me that I may very probably
keep the Sabbath by not keeping the appointment.

.....

But I must resume the real details of my tale. I found that there was
only one train in the whole of that Sunday by which I could even get
within several hours or several miles of the time or place. I therefore
went to the telephone, which is one of my favourite toys, and down which
I have shouted many valuable, but prematurely arrested, monologues upon
art and morals. I remember a mild shock of surprise when I discovered
that one could use the telephone on Sunday; I did not expect it to be
cut off, but I expected it to buzz more than on ordinary days, to the
advancement of our national religion. Through this instrument, in fewer
words than usual, and with a comparative economy of epigram, I ordered a
taxi-cab to take me to the railway station. I have not a word to say in
general either against telephones or taxi-cabs; they seem to me two
of the purest and most poetic of the creations of modern scientific
civilisation. Unfortunately, when the taxi-cab started, it did exactly
what modern scientific civilisation has done--it broke down. The result
of this was that when I arrived at King’s Cross my only train was gone;
there was a Sabbath calm in the station, a calm in the eyes of the
porters, and in my breast, if calm at all, if any calm, a calm despair.

There was not, however, very much calm of any sort in my breast on first
making the discovery; and it was turned to blinding horror when I learnt
that I could not even send a telegram to the organisers of the meeting.
To leave my entertainers in the lurch was sufficiently exasperating; to
leave them without any intimation was simply low. I reasoned with the
official. I said: “Do you really mean to say that if my brother were
dying and my mother in this place, I could not communicate with her?” He
was a man of literal and laborious mind; he asked me if my brother was
dying. I answered that he was in excellent and even offensive health,
but that I was inquiring upon a question of principle. What would happen
if England were invaded, or if I alone knew how to turn aside a comet or
an earthquake. He waved away these hypotheses in the most irresponsible
spirit, but he was quite certain that telegrams could not reach this
particular village. Then something exploded in me; that element of the
outrageous which is the mother of all adventures sprang up ungovernable,
and I decided that I would not be a cad merely because some of my remote
ancestors had been Calvinists. I would keep my appointment if I lost all
my money and all my wits. I went out into the quiet London street, where
my quiet London cab was still waiting for its fare in the cold misty
morning. I placed myself comfortably in the London cab and told the
London driver to drive me to the other end of Hertfordshire. And he did.

.....

I shall not forget that drive. It was doubtful whether, even in a
motor-cab, the thing was possible with any consideration for the driver,
not to speak of some slight consideration for the people in the road.
I urged the driver to eat and drink something before he started, but
he said (with I know not what pride of profession or delicate sense of
adventure) that he would rather do it when we arrived--if we ever did. I
was by no means so delicate; I bought a varied selection of pork-pies
at a little shop that was open (why was that shop open?--it is all a
mystery), and ate them as we went along. The beginning was sombre and
irritating. I was annoyed, not with people, but with things, like a
baby; with the motor for breaking down and with Sunday for being Sunday.
And the sight of the northern slums expanded and ennobled, but did
not decrease, my gloom: Whitechapel has an Oriental gaudiness in its
squalor; Battersea and Camberwell have an indescribable bustle of
democracy; but the poor parts of North London... well, perhaps I saw
them wrongly under that ashen morning and on that foolish errand.

It was one of those days which more than once this year broke the
retreat of winter; a winter day that began too late to be spring. We
were already clear of the obstructing crowds and quickening our pace
through a borderland of market gardens and isolated public-houses, when
the grey showed golden patches and a good light began to glitter on
everything. The cab went quicker and quicker. The open land whirled
wider and wider; but I did not lose my sense of being battled with
and thwarted that I had felt in the thronged slums. Rather the feeling
increased, because of the great difficulty of space and time. The faster
went the car, the fiercer and thicker I felt the fight.

The whole landscape seemed charging at me--and just missing me. The
tall, shining grass went by like showers of arrows; the very trees
seemed like lances hurled at my heart, and shaving it by a hair’s
breadth. Across some vast, smooth valley I saw a beech-tree by the
white road stand up little and defiant. It grew bigger and bigger with
blinding rapidity. It charged me like a tilting knight, seemed to hack
at my head, and pass by. Sometimes when we went round a curve of road,
the effect was yet more awful. It seemed as if some tree or windmill
swung round to smite like a boomerang. The sun by this time was a
blazing fact; and I saw that all Nature is chivalrous and militant. We
do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek the nobler sort
of war; and see all the trees as green banners.

.....

I gave my address, arriving just when everybody was deciding to leave.
When my cab came reeling into the market-place they decided, with
evident disappointment, to remain. Over the lecture I draw a veil.
When I came back home I was called to the telephone, and a meek voice
expressed regret for the failure of the motor-cab, and even said
something about any reasonable payment. “Whom can I pay for my own
superb experience? What is the usual charge for seeing the clouds
shattered by the sun? What is the market price of a tree blue on the
sky-line and then blinding white in the sun? Mention your price for that
windmill that stood behind the hollyhocks in the garden. Let me pay you
for...” Here it was, I think, that we were cut off.




XXVI. The Two Noises

For three days and three nights the sea had charged England as Napoleon
charged her at Waterloo. The phrase is instinctive, because away to
the last grey line of the sea there was only the look of galloping
squadrons, impetuous, but with a common purpose. The sea came on like
cavalry, and when it touched the shore it opened the blazing eyes and
deafening tongues of the artillery. I saw the worst assault at night on
a seaside parade where the sea smote on the doors of England with the
hammers of earthquake, and a white smoke went up into the black heavens.
There one could thoroughly realise what an awful thing a wave really is.
I talk like other people about the rushing swiftness of a wave. But the
horrible thing about a wave is its hideous slowness. It lifts its load
of water laboriously: in that style at once slow and slippery in which
a Titan might lift a load of rock and then let it slip at last to be
shattered into shock of dust. In front of me that night the waves were
not like water: they were like falling city walls. The breaker rose
first as if it did not wish to attack the earth; it wished only to
attack the stars. For a time it stood up in the air as naturally as a
tower; then it went a little wrong in its outline, like a tower that
might some day fall. When it fell it was as if a powder magazine blew
up.

.....

I have never seen such a sea. All the time there blew across the land
one of those stiff and throttling winds that one can lean up against
like a wall. One expected anything to be blown out of shape at any
instant; the lamp-post to be snapped like a green stalk, the tree to be
whirled away like a straw. I myself should certainly have been blown out
of shape if I had possessed any shape to be blown out of; for I walked
along the edge of the stone embankment above the black and battering sea
and could not rid myself of the idea that it was an invasion of England.
But as I walked along this edge I was somewhat surprised to find that
as I neared a certain spot another noise mingled with the ceaseless
cannonade of the sea.

Somewhere at the back, in some pleasure ground or casino or place of
entertainment, an undaunted brass band was playing against the cosmic
uproar. I do not know what band it was. Judging from the boisterous
British Imperialism of most of the airs it played, I should think it was
a German band. But there was no doubt about its energy, and when I came
quite close under it it really drowned the storm. It was playing such
things as “Tommy Atkins” and “You Can Depend on Young Australia,” and
many others of which I do not know the words, but I should think they
would be “John, Pat, and Mac, With the Union Jack,” or that fine though
unwritten poem, “Wait till the Bull Dog gets a bite of you.” Now, I
for one detest Imperialism, but I have a great deal of sympathy with
Jingoism. And there seemed something so touching about this unbroken and
innocent bragging under the brutal menace of Nature that it made, if I
may so put it, two tunes in my mind. It is so obvious and so jolly to
be optimistic about England, especially when you are an optimist--and
an Englishman. But through all that glorious brass came the voice of the
invasion, the undertone of that awful sea. I did a foolish thing. As I
could not express my meaning in an article, I tried to express it in
a poem--a bad one. You can call it what you like. It might be called
“Doubt,” or “Brighton.” It might be called “The Patriot,” or yet again
“The German Band.” I would call it “The Two Voices,” but that title has
been taken for a grossly inferior poem. This is how it began--

  “They say the sun is on your knees
   A lamp to light your lands from harm,
   They say you turn the seven seas
   To little brooks about your farm.
   I hear the sea and the new song
   that calls you empress all day long.

  “(O fallen and fouled! O you that lie
   Dying in swamps--you shall not die,
   Your rich have secrets, and stronge lust,
   Your poor are chased about like dust,
   Emptied of anger and surprise--
   And God has gone out of their eyes,
   Your cohorts break--your captains lie,
   I say to you, you shall not die.)”

Then I revived a little, remembering that after all there is an English
country that the Imperialists have never found. The British Empire
may annex what it likes, it will never annex England. It has not even
discovered the island, let alone conquered it. I took up the two tunes
again with a greater sympathy for the first--

   “I know the bright baptismal rains,
      I love your tender troubled skies,
    I know your little climbing lanes,
      Are peering into Paradise,
    From open hearth to orchard cool,
    How bountiful and beautiful.

  “(O throttled and without a cry,
   O strangled and stabbed, you shall not die,
   The frightful word is on your walls,
   The east sea to the west sea calls,
   The stars are dying in the sky,
   You shall not die; you shall not die.)”

Then the two great noises grew deafening together, the noise of the
peril of England and the louder noise of the placidity of England. It
is their fault if the last verse was written a little rudely and at
random--

   “I see you how you smile in state
      Straight from the Peak to Plymouth Bar,
    You need not tell me you are great,
      I know how more than great you are.
    I know what William Shakespeare was,
    I have seen Gainsborough and the grass.

  “(O given to believe a lie,
   O my mad mother, do do not die,
   Whose eyes turn all ways but within,
   Whose sin is innocence of sin,
   Whose eyes, blinded with beams at noon,
   Can see the motes upon the moon,
   You shall your lover still pursue.
   To what last madhouse shelters you
   I will uphold you, even I.
   You that are dead.  You shall not die.)”

But the sea would not stop for me any more than for Canute; and as for
the German band, that would not stop for anybody.




XXVII. Some Policemen and a Moral

The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood
in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and
intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the
keeping off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing.
At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree,
practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing
by which men murder each other in Stevenson’s romances.

Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something about
their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me,
I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the
knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade,
religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/8092