That is what we need to do with ourselves occasionally. We need to take a journey from our self-absorbed centre, and see ourselves with a fresh eye and an unprejudiced judgment.



ON THE ENGLISH SPIRIT

I have seen no story of the war which, within its limits, has pleased me more than that which Mr. Alfred Noyes told in the newspapers in his fascinating description of his visit to the Fleet. It was a story of the battle of Jutland. "In the very hottest moment of this most stupendous battle in all history," he says, "two grimy stokers' heads arose for a breath of fresh air. What domestic drama they were discussing the world may never know. But the words that were actually heard passing between them, while the shells whined overhead, were these: 'What I says is, 'e ought to have married 'er.'"

If you don't enjoy that story you will never understand the English spirit. There are some among us who never will understand the English spirit. In the early days of the war an excellent friend of mine used to find a great source of despair in "Tipperary." What hope was there for a country whose soldiers went to battle singing "Tipperary" against a foe who came on singing "Ein' feste Burg"? Put that way, I was bound to confess that the case looked black against us. It seemed "all Lombard Street to a China orange," as the tag of other days would put it. It is true that, for a music-hall song, "Tipperary" was unusually fresh and original. Contrast it with the maudlin "Keep the home fires burning," which holds the field to-day, and it touches great art. I never hear it even now on the street organ without a certain pleasure—a pleasure mingled with pain, for its happy lilt comes weighted with the tremendous emotions of those unforgettable days. It is like a butterfly caught in a tornado, a catch of song in the throat of death.

But it was only a music-hall song after all, and to put it in competition with Luther's mighty hymn would be like putting a pop-gun against a 12-inch howitzer. The thunder of Luther's hymn has come down through four centuries, and it will go on echoing through the centuries till the end of time. It is like the march of the elements to battle, like the heaving of mountains and the surge of oceans. In nothing else is the sense of Power so embodied in the pulse of song. And the words are as formidable as the tune. Carlyle caught their massive, rugged strength in his great translation:

A safe stronghold our God is still, A trusty shield and weapon; He'll help us clear from all the ill That hath us now o'ertaken....

Yes, on the face of it, it seemed a poor lookout for "Tipperary" against such a foe. But it wasn't, and any one who knew the English temperament knew it wasn't. I put aside the fact that for practical everyday uses a cheerful tune is much better than a solemn tune. "Tipperary" quickens the step and shortens the march. Luther's hymn, so far from lightening the journey, would become an intolerable burden. The mind would sink under it. You would either go mad or plunge into some violent excess to recover your sanity. It is the craziest of philosophy to think that because you are engaged in a serious business you have to live in a state of exaltation, that the bow is never to be unstrung, that the top note is never to be relaxed. You will not do your business better because you wear a long face all the time; you will do it worse. If you are talking about your high ideals all day you are not only a nuisance: you are either dishonest or unbalanced. We are not creatures with wings. We are creatures who walk. We have to "foot it" even to Mount Pisgah, and the more cheerful and jolly and ordinary we are on the way the sooner we shall get over the journey. The noblest Englishman that ever lived, and the most deeply serious, was as full of innocent mirth as a child and laid his head down on the block with a jest. Let us keep our course by the stars, by all means, but the immediate tasks are much nearer than the stars—

The charities that soothe and heal and bless Are scattered all about our feet—like flowers.

It is just this frightful gravity of the German mind that has made them mad. They haven't learned to play; they haven't learned to laugh at themselves. Their sombre religion has passed into a sombre irreligion. They have grown gross without growing light-hearted. The spiritual battle song of Luther has become a material battle song, and "the safe stronghold" is no longer the City of God but the City of Krupp. They have neither the splendid intellectual sanity of the French, nor the homely humour of the English. It is this homely humour that has puzzled Europe. It has puzzled the French as much as the Germans, for the French genius is declamatory and needs the inspiration of ideas and great passions greatly stated. It was assumed that, because the British soldier sang "Tipperary," moved in an atmosphere of homely fun, indulged in no heroics, never talked of "glory," rarely of patriotism or the Fatherland, and only joked about "the flag," there was no great passion in him. Some of our frenzied people at home have the same idea. They still believe we are a nation of "slackers" because we don't shriek with them.

The truth, of course, is that the English spirit is distrustful of emotion and display. It is ashamed of making "a fuss" and hates heroics. The typical Englishman hides his feelings even from his family, clothes his affections under a mask of indifference, and cracks a joke to avoid "making a fool of himself." It is not that he is without great passions, but that he does not like talking about them. He is too self-conscious to trust his tongue on such big themes. He might "make an exhibition of himself," and he dreads that above all things. This habit of reticence has its unlovely side; but it has great virtues too. It keeps the mind cool and practical and the atmosphere commonplace and good-humoured. It gives reserves of strength that people who live on their "top notes" have not got. It goes on singing "Tipperary" as though it had no care in life and no interest in ideas or causes. And then the big moment comes and the great passion that has been kept in such shamefaced secrecy blazes out in deeds as glorious as any that were done on the plains of windy Troy. Turn to those stories of the winning of the V.C., and then ask yourself whether the nation whose sons are capable of this noble heroism deserves to have the whip of Zabern laid across its shoulders by any jack-in-office who chooses to insult us.

Those two stokers, putting their heads out for a breath of fresh air in the midst of the battle, are true to the English type. Death was all about them, and any moment might be their last. But they were so completely masters of themselves that in the brief-breathing space allowed them they could turn their minds to a simple question of everyday conduct. "What I says is, 'e ought to have married 'er." That is not the stuff of which heroics are made; but it is the stuff of which heroism is made.



ON FALLING IN LOVE

Do not, if you please, imagine that this title foreshadows some piquant personal revelation. "Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, sir." I have not fallen in love for quite a long time, and, looking in the glass and observing what Holmes calls "Time's visiting cards" on my face and hair, I come to the conclusion that I shall never enjoy the experience again. I may say with Mr. Kipling's soldier that

That's all shuv be'ind me Long ago and fur away.

But just as poetry, according to Wordsworth, is emotion recalled in tranquillity, so it is only when you have left the experience of falling in love behind that you are really competent to describe it or talk about it with the necessary philosophic detachment.

Now of course there is no difficulty about falling in love. Any one can do that. The difficulty is to know when the symptoms are true or false. So many people mistake the symptoms, and only discover when it is too late that they have never really had the true experience. Hence the overtime in the Divorce Court. Hence, too, the importance of "calf love," which serves as a sort of apprenticeship to the mystery, and enables you to discriminate between the substance and the shadow.

And in "calf love" I do not include the adumbrations of extreme childhood like those immortalised in Annabel Lee:—

I was a child and she was a child In that kingdom by the sea.

* * * * *

But we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee.

I know that love. I had it when I was eight. "She" was also eight, and she had just come from India. She was frightfully plain, but then—well, she had come from India. She had all the romance of India's coral strand about her, and it was India's coral strand that I was in love with. Moreover, she was a soldier's daughter, and to be a soldier's daughter was, next to being a soldier, the noblest thing in the world. For that was about the time when, under the inspiration of The Story of the Hundred Days, I had set out with a bag containing a nightshirt and a toothbrush to enlist in the Black Watch. (It was a forlorn adventure that went no further than the railway station.) Finally she had given me, as a token of her love, Poor Little Gaspard's Drum, wherein I read of Napoleon and the Egyptian desert, and, above all, of the Mamelukes. How that word thrilled me! "The Mamelukes!" What could one do but fall in love with a girl who used such incantations?

But this is not the true calf love. That comes with the down upon the lip. People laugh at "calf love," but one might as well laugh at the wonder of dawn or the coming of spring. When David Copperfield fell in love with the eldest Miss Larkins, he was really in love with the opening universe, and the eldest Miss Larkins happened to be the only available lightning conductor for his emotion.

The important thing is that you should contract "calf love" while you are young. It is like the measles, which is harmless enough in childhood, but apt to be dangerous when you are grown up. The "calf love" of an elderly man is always a disaster. Hence the saying, "There's no fool like an old fool." An elderly man should not fall in love. He should walk into it. He should survey the ground carefully as Mr. Barkis did. That admirable man took the business of falling in love seriously:

"'So she makes,' said Mr. Barkis, after a long interval of reflection, 'all the apple parsties, and does all the cooking, do she?'

"I replied that such was the fact.

"'Well, I'll tell you what,' said Mr. Barkis. 'P'raps you might be writin' to her?'

"'I shall certainly write to her,' I rejoined.

"'Ah!' he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me. 'Well! If you was writin' to her, p'raps you'd recollect to say that Barkis was willin', would you?'"

This is a model of caution in the art of middle-aged love-making. The mistake of the "Northern Farmer" was that he applied the same middle-aged caution to youth. "Doaent thou marry for munny; but goae wheer munny is," he said to his son Sammy, who wanted to marry the poor parson's daughter. And he held up his own love-making as an inspiration for Sammy:

And I went wheer munny wor, and thy moother coom to and Wi' lots o' munny laaeid by, and a nicetish bit o' land. Maybe she worn'd a beauty: I nivver giv' it a thowt; But worn'd she as good to cuddle and kiss as a lass as an't nowt?

I have always hoped that Sammy rejected his father's counsel and stuck to the poor parson's daughter.

There is no harm of course in marrying money. George Borrow said that there were worse ways of making a fortune than marrying one. And perhaps it is true, though I don't think Borrow's experience was very convincing. I have known people who "have gone where money was" and have fallen honestly and rapturously into love, but you have got to be very sure that money in such a case is not the motive. If it is the penalty never fails to follow. Mr. Bumble married Mrs. Corney for "six teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a milk-pot, with a small quantity of secondhand furniture and twenty pounds in money." And in two months he regretted his bargain and admitted that he had gone "dirt cheap." "Only two months to-morrow," he said. "It seems a age."

Those who believe in "love at first sight" take the view that marriages are made in heaven and that we only come to earth to fulfil our destiny. Johnson, who was an excellent husband to the elderly Mrs. Porter, scoffed at that view and held that love is only the accident of circumstance. But though that is the sensible view, there are cases like those of Dante and Beatrice and Abelard and Heloise, in which the passion does seem to touch the skies. In those cases, however, it rarely ends happily. A more hum-drum way of falling in love seems better fitted to earthly conditions. The method of Sir Thomas More was perhaps the most original on record. He preferred the second of three sisters and was about to marry her when it occurred to him—But let me quote the words in which Roper, his son-in-law, records the incident:

"And all beit his mynde most served him to the seconde daughter, for that he thoughte her the fayrest and best favoured, yet when he considered that it woulde be bothe great griefe and some shame alsoe to the eldest to see her yonger sister in mariage preferred before her, he then of a certeyn pittye framed his fancye towardes her, and soon after maryed her."

It was love to order, yet there was never a more beautiful home life than that of which this most perfect flower of the English race was the centre.

In short, there is no formula for falling in love. Each one does it as the spirit moves.



ON A BIT OF SEAWEED

The postman came just now, and among the letters he brought was one from North Wales. It was fat and soft and bulgy, and when it was opened we found it contained a bit of seaweed. The thought that prompted the sender was friendly, but the momentary effect was to arouse wild longings for the sea, and to add one more count to the indictment of the Kaiser, who had sent us for the holidays into the country, where we could obey the duty to economise, rather than to the seaside, where the temptations to extravagance could not be dodged. "Oh, how it smells of Sheringham," said one whose vote is always for the East Coast. "No, there is the smack of Sidmouth, and Dawlish, and Torquay in its perfume," said another, whose passion is for the red cliffs of South Devon. And so on, each finding, as he or she sniffed at the seaweed, the windows of memory opening out on to the foam of summer seas. And soon the table was enveloped in a rushing tide of recollection—memories of bathing and boating, of barefooted races on the sands, of jolly fishermen who always seemed to be looking out seaward for something that never came, of hunting for shells, and of all the careless raptures of dawn and noon and sunset by the seashore. All awakened by the smell of a bit of seaweed.

It is this magic of reminiscence that makes the world such a storehouse of intimacies and confidences. There is hardly a bird that sings, or a flower that blows, or a cloud that sails in the blue that does not bring us some hint from the past, and set us tingling with remembrance. We open a drawer by chance, and the smell of lavender issues forth, and with that lingering perfume the past is unrolled like a scroll, and places long unseen leap to the inward eye and voices long unheard are speaking to us:—

We tread the path their feet have worn. We sit beneath their orchard trees, We hear, like them, the hum of bees, And rustle of the bladed corn.

Who can see the first daffodils of spring without feeling a sort of spiritual festival that the beauty of the flower alone cannot explain? The memory of all the springs of the past is in their dancing plumes, and the assurance of all the springs to come. They link us up with the pageant of nature, and with the immortals of our kind—with Wordsworth watching them in "sprightly dance" by Ullswater, with Herrick finding in them the sweet image of the beauty and transience of life, with Shakespeare greeting them "in the sweet o' the year" by Avon's banks long centuries ago.

And in this sensitiveness of memory to external suggestion there is infinite variety. It is not a collective memory that is awakened, but a personal memory. That bit of seaweed opened many windows in us, but they all looked out on different scenes and reminded us of something individual and inexplicable, of something which is a part of that ultimate loneliness that belongs to all of us. Everything speaks a private language to each of us that we can never translate to others. I do not know what the lilac says to you; but to me it talks of a garden-gate over which it grew long ago. I am a child again, standing within the gate, and I see the red-coated soldiers marching along with jolly jests and snatching the lilac sprays from the tree as they pass. The emotion of pride that these heroes should honour our lilac tree by ravishing its blossoms all comes back to me, together with a flood of memories of the old garden and the old home and the vanished faces. Why that momentary picture should have fixed itself in the mind I cannot say; but there it is, as fresh and clear at the end of nearly fifty years as if it were painted yesterday, and the lilac tree bursting into blossom always unveils it again.

It is these multitudinous associations that give life its colour and its poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. "The true harvest of my life," said Thoreau, "is something as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was the summary, the essence, of all his experience. We are like bees foraging in the garden of the world, and hoarding the honey in the hive of memory. And no hoard is like any other hoard that ever was or ever will be. The cuckoo calling over the valley, the blackbird fluting in the low boughs in the evening, the solemn majesty of the Abbey, the life of the streets, the ebb and flow of Father Thames—everything whispers to us some secret that it has for no other ear, and touches a chord of memory that echoes in no other brain. Those deeps within us find only a crude expression in the vehicle of words and actions, and our intercourse with men touches but the surface of ourselves. The rest is "as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was one of the most companionable of men, William Morris, who said:

That God has made each one of us as lone As He Himself sits.

That is why, in moments of exaltation, our only refuge is silence, and the world of memory within answers the world of suggestion without.

"And what does the seaweed remind you of?" said one, as I looked up after smelling it. "It reminds me," I said, "of all the seas that wash our shores, and of all the brave sailors who are guarding these seas day and night, while we sit here secure. It reminds me also that I have an article to write, and that its title is 'A Bit of Seaweed.'"



ON LIVING AGAIN

A little group of men, all of whom had achieved conspicuous success in life, were recently talking after dinner round the fire in the smoking-room of a London club. They included an eminent lawyer, a politician whose name is a household word, a well-known divine, and a journalist. The talk traversed many themes, and arrived at that very familiar proposition: If it were in your power to choose, would you live this life again? With one exception the answer was a unanimous "No." The exception, I may remark, was not the divine. He, like the majority, had found one visit to the play enough. He did not want to see it again.

The question, I suppose, is as old as humanity. And the answer is old too, and has always, I fancy, resembled that of our little group round the smoking-room fire. It is a question that does not present itself until we are middle-aged, for the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, and life then stretches out in such an interminable vista as to raise no question of its recurrence. It is when you have reached the top of the pass and are on the downward slope, with the evening shadows falling over the valley and the church tower and with the end of the journey in view, that the question rises unbidden to the lips. The answer does not mean that the journey has not been worth while. It only means that the way has been long and rough, that we are footsore and tired, and that the thought of rest is sweet. It is nature's way of reconciling us to our common lot. She has shown her child all the pageant of life, and now prepares him for his "patrimony of a little mould"—

Thou hast made his mouth Avid of all dominion and all mightiness, All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs, All beauty, and all starry majesties, And dim transtellar things;—even that it may, Filled in the ending with a puff of dust, Confess—"It is enough."

Yes, it is enough. We accept the verdict of mortality uncomplainingly—nay, we would not wish it to be reversed, even if that were possible.

Now this question must not be confounded with that other, rather foolish, question, "Is Life worth living?" The group round the smoking-room fire would have answered that question—if they had troubled to answer it at all—with an instant and scornful "Yes." They had all found life a great and splendid adventure; they had made good and wholesome use of it; they would not surrender a moment of its term or a fragment of its many-coloured experience. And that is the case with all healthy-minded people. We may, like Job, in moments of depression curse the day when we were born; but the curse dies on our lips. Swift, it is true, kept his birthday as a day of mourning; but no man who hates humanity can hope to find life endurable, for the measure of our sympathies is the measure of our joy in living.

Even those who take the most hopeless view of life are careful to keep out of mischief. A friend of mine told me recently of a day he had spent with a writer famous for the sombre philosophy of his books. In the morning the writer declared that no day ever passed in which he did not wish that he had never been born; in the afternoon he had a most excellent opportunity of being drowned through some trouble with a sailing boat, and he rejected the chance with almost pathetic eagerness. Yet I daresay he went on believing that he wished he had never been born. It is not only the children who live in the world of "Let us make pretend."

No, we are all glad to have come this way once. It is the thought of a second journey over the same ground that chills us and gives us pause. Sometimes you will hear men answer, "Yes, if I could have the experience I have had in this life." By which they mean, "Yes, if I could come back with the certainty of making all the short cuts to happiness that I now see I have missed." But that is to vulgarise the question. It is to ask that life shall not be a splendid mystery, every day of which is

an arch wherethrough Gleams the untravelled world;

but that it shall be a thoroughly safe three per cent. investment into which I can put my money with the certainty of having a good time—all sunshine and no shadows. But life on those terms would be the dreariest funeral march of the marionettes. Take away the uncertainty of life, and you take away all its magic. It would be like going to the wicket with the certainty of making as many runs as you liked. No one would trouble to go to the wicket on those preposterous terms. It is because I may be out first ball or stay in and make a hundred runs (not that I ever did any such heroic thing) that I put on the pads with the feverish sense of adventure. And it is because every dawn breaks as full of wonder as the first day of creation that life preserves the enchantment of a tale that is never told.

Moreover, how would experience help us? It is character which is destiny. If you came back with that weak chin and flickering eye, not all the experience of all the ages would save you from futility.

No, if life is to be lived here again it must be lived on the same unknown terms in order to be worth living. We must come, as we came before, like wanderers out of eternity for the brief adventure of time. And, in spite of all the fascinations of that adventure, the balance of our feeling is against repeating it. For we know that every thing that makes life dear to us would have vanished with all the old familiar faces and happy associations of our former pilgrimage, and there is something disloyal in the mere thought of coming again to form new attachments and traverse new ways. Holmes once wrote a poem about being "Homesick in heaven"; but it would be still harder to be homesick on earth—to be wandering about among the ghosts of old memories, and trying to recapture the familiar atmosphere of things. We should make new friends; but they would not be the same. They might be better; but we should not ask for better friends: we should yearn for the old ones.

There is a fine passage in Guido Rey's noble book on the "Matterhorn" which comes to my mind as a fitting expression of what I think we feel. He was on his way to climb the mountain, when, on one of its lower slopes, he saw standing lonely in the evening light the figure of a grey-headed man. It was Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn—Whymper grown old, standing there in the evening light and gazing on the mighty rock that he had vanquished in his prime. His climbing days were done, and he sought no more victories on the mountains. He had had his day and was content to stand afar off, alone with his memories, leaving the joy of battle to the young and the ardent. There was not one of those memories that he would be without—save, of course, that terrible experience in the hour of his victory over the Matterhorn. But had you asked him if he was still avid for those topless grandeurs and starry majesties he would have said, "It is enough."



TU-WHIT, TU-WHOO!

There are two voices that are most familiar to me on this hillside. One is the voice of the day, the other of the night. Throughout the day the robin sings his song with unflagging spirit. It is not a very brilliant song, but it is indomitably cheerful. Wet or fine, warm or cold, it goes on through the November day from sunrise to sunset. The little fellow hops about, in his bright red waistcoat, from tree to tree. He flutters to the fence, and from the fence to the garden path, and so to the door and into the kitchen. If you will give him decent encouragement he will come on to your hand and take his meal with absolute confidence in your good faith. Then he will trip away and resume his song on the fence.

There are some people who say hard things about the robin—that he is selfish and "gey ill to live wi'" and so on—but to me he seems the most cheerful and constant companion in nature. He is a bringer of good tidings—a philosopher who insists that we are masters of our fate and that winter is just the time when there is some sense in being an optimist. Anybody, he seems to say, can be an optimist when the days are long and the air is warm and worms are plentiful; but it is just when things are looking a little black and the other fellows begin to grouse that I put on my brightest waistcoat, tune up my best whistle, and come and tell you that the unconquerable soul is greater than circumstance.

The other voice comes when night has descended and the valley below is blotted out by the darkness. Then from the copse beyond the orchard there sounds the mournful threnody of the owl. The day is over, he says, and all is lost. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." I only am left to tell the end of all things. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." I've told it all before a thousand times, but you wouldn't believe me. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Now, you can't deny it, for the night is dark and the wind is cold and all the earth is a graveyard. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Where are the songs of spring and the leaves of summer? "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Where the red-cheeked apple that hung on the bough and the butterfly that fluttered in the sunshine? All, all are gone. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo ... Tu-whit, tu-whoo ... Tu-whit, tu-whoo...."

A cheerless fellow. Some people find him an intolerable companion. I was talking at dinner in London a few nights ago to a woman who has a house in Sussex, and I found that she had not been there for some time.

"I used to find the owl endurable," said she, "but since the war I have found him unbearable. He hoots all night and makes me so depressed that I feel that I shall go mad."

"And so you come and listen to the owl in London?" I said.

"The owl in London?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "the owl that hoots in Carmelite Street and Printing House Square."

"Ah," she said, "but he is such an absurd owl. Now the owl down in the country is such a solemn creature."

"He says a very foolish thing In such a solemn way,"

I murmured.

"Yes, but in the silence and the darkness there doesn't seem any answer to him."

"Madame," I said, "if you will look up at the stars you will find a very complete answer."

I confess that I find the owl not only tolerable but stimulating. I like to hear the pessimist really let himself go. It is the nameless and unformed fears of the mind that paralyse, but when my owl comes along and states the position at its blackest I begin to cheer up and feel defiant and combative. Is this the worst that can be said? Then let us see what the best is, and set about accomplishing it. "The thing is impossible," said the pessimist to Cobden. "Indeed," said that great man. "Then the sooner we set about doing it the better." Oh, oh, say I to my owl, all is lost, is it? You wait till the dawn comes, and hear what that little chap in the red waistcoat has to say about it. He's got quite another tale to tell, and it's a much more likely tale than yours. I shall go to bed and leave you to Gummidge in the trees until the sun comes up and tells you what a dismal fraud you are.

"Tu-whit, tu-whoo," hoots the owl back at me.

Yes, my dear sir, but you said that last night, and you have been saying it every night I have known you, and always the sun comes up and the spring comes round again and the flowers bloom, and the fields are golden with harvest.

"Tu-whit, tu-whoo."

Oh, bother you. You ought to be a Daily Mail placard.

No doubt the owl is quite happy in his way. Louis XV. expressed the owlish philosophy when he said, "Let us amuse ourselves by making ourselves miserable." I have no doubt the wretched creature did amuse himself after his fashion. I have always thought that, secretly, Mrs. Gummidge had a roaring time. She really enjoyed being miserable and making everybody about her miserable. I have known such people, and I daresay you have known them, too—people who nurse unhappiness with the passion of a miser. They are having the time of their lives now. They go about saying, "Tu-whit, tu-whoo! The Russians are beaten again, or if they are not beaten they will be. Tu-whit, tu-whoo! We're slackers and slouchers and the Germans are too many for us. Tu-whit, tu-whoo. They're on the way to India and Egypt, and nothing will stop them. All, all is lost." But I notice that they enjoy a beef-steak as much as anybody, and do not refuse their soup though they salt it with their tears.

I like that story of Stonewall Jackson and the owl. The owl was a general, and he rushed up to Jackson in the crisis of the first battle of Bull's Run, crying "All is lost! We're beaten!" "Oh," said Jackson, "if that's so I'd advise you to keep it to yourself." Half-an-hour later the charge of Jackson's brigade had won the battle. I do not know what happened to the owl, but I daresay he went on "Tu-whit-ing" and "Tu-whoo-ing" to the end. The owl can't help being an owl.

Ah, there is little red waistcoat singing on the fence. Let us find a worm for the philosopher....



ON POINTS OF VIEW

As I sat in the garden just now, with a writing-pad on my knee and my mind ranging the heavens above and the earth beneath in search of a subject, my eye fell on a tragedy in progress at my elbow. A small greenfly had got entangled in a spider's web, and was fluttering its tiny wings violently to effect an escape. The filaments of the web were so delicate as to be hardly visible, but they were not too delicate to bear the spider whom I saw advancing upon his prey with dreadful menace. I forgot my dislike of greenflies, and was overcome with a fierce antagonism for the fat fellow who had the game so entirely in his hands. Here, said I, is the Hun encompassing the ruin of poor little Belgium. What chance has the weak and the innocent little creature against the cunning of this rascal, who hangs out his gossamer traps in the breeze and then lies in hiding until his victim is enmeshed and helpless? What justice is there in nature that allows this unequal combat?

By this time the spider had reached the fly and thrown a new filament round him. Then at frightful speed he raced to the top of his web and disappeared in the woodwork of the arbour, drawing the new filament tight round the victim, which continued its flutterings for a little time and then gave up the ghost. At this moment I was called in to lunch, and at the table I told the story of the spider and the fly with undisguised hostility to the spider. "That," said Robert, home from the front—"that is simply a sentimental point of view. My sympathies as a practical person are all with the spider. He is the friend of man, the devourer of insects, the scavenger of the gardens. He helps in the great task of keeping the equilibrium of nature. Moreover," said he, "I have seen you kill greenflies yourself. You killed them because you knew they were a nuisance. Why should you object to the spider doing the same useful work for a living?"

"Ah," said I weakly, "I suppose it is because he does it for a living. Now I ..." "Now, you," interrupted the other, "do it for a living, too, because you want your fruit trees to bear fruit, and your roses to thrive, and your cabbages to prosper. Who more merciless than you on slugs and other pests that fly or crawl? No, no, we are all out for a living, you as much as the spider, the spider as much as the fly." "We are all Huns," said I. "What a detestable world it is." "Not at all," said he. "It's a very jolly world. I drink to the health of the spider."

"And you have no pity for the fly?" I said. "Not a little bit." he replied. "I am on the side of right." "Whose side is that?" I asked. "Mine," said he. "We must all act according to our point of view. That's what the greenfly does. That's what the spider does. We shall never in this world get all the points of view in accord. We shall go on scrambling for a living to the end. Sometimes the greenfly will be on top, sometimes the spider. Look at that cherry-tree in the orchard. A month ago its branches were laden with fruit. Now there is not a cherry to be seen. The blackbirds and the starlings have stripped the tree as clean as a bone. Their point of view is that the cherries are provided for them, and they are right. They know nothing of the laws of property which man makes for his own protection. It's no use going out to them and asking them to look at your title-deeds, and reminding them of the policeman and the laws against larceny. Our moral code is for us, not for them.

"We are all creatures of our own point of view," he went on. "Before Jones next door bought a motor-car he had very bitter feelings about motorists—used to call them road-hogs, said he would tax these 'land-torpedoes' out of existence, and was full of sympathy and pity for the poor children coming from school. Now he drives a car as hard as anybody; blows the hoggiest of horns; and says it's disgraceful the way parents allow their children to play about in the streets. Nothing has changed except his point of view. He has shifted round to another position, and sees things from a new angle of vision. Samuel Butler hit the comedy of the thing off long ago:—

What makes all doctrine plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before Prove false again? Two hundred more."

"Are our points of view then all dictated by our selfish motives as those of your friend the spider, who has probably by this time gobbled my friend the greenfly?" "No, I do not say that. I think that, comprehending all our private points of view, there is an absolute motive running through human society, call it the world spirit, the mind of the race, or what you will, that is something greater and better than we. The collective motion of humanity is, except in very rare cases, nobler than its individual manifestations. I respond and you respond to an abstract justice, an abstract righteousness, which is purer and better than anything we are capable of. We are all at the bottom, I think, better than our actions paint us, better than our limited points of view permit us to be, and in our illuminated moments we catch a glimpse of that Jacob's ladder that Francis Thompson saw, with ascending angels, at Charing Cross. Some one called Shelley 'an ineffectual angel.' I think most of us are ineffectual angels. Take this tragedy that is filling the world with horror to-day. We are fighting like tigers for our own points of view, but in our hearts we are ashamed of the spectacle, and know that humanity is better than its deeds. One day, perhaps, the ineffectual angel will find his wings and outsoar the spider point of view.... And, by the way, suppose we go and see how the spider is getting on."

We went out into the garden and found the web. But the little green corpse had gone, and the spider was digesting his meal somewhere out of sight.

(Note.—This article should be read in connection with that entitled "On the Downs.")



ON BEER AND PORCELAIN

I was reading an American journal just now when I came across the remark that "one would as soon think of drinking beer out of porcelain as of slapping Nietzsche on the back." Drinking beer out of porcelain! The phrase amused me, and set me idly wondering why you don't drink beer out of porcelain. You drink it (assuming that you drink it at all) with great enjoyment out of a thick earthenware mug or a pewter pot or a vessel of glass, but out of china, never. If you were offered a drink of beer out of a china basin or cup you would feel that the liquor had somehow lost its attraction, just as, if you were offered tea out of a pewter pot, you would feel that the drink was degraded and unpleasant. The explanation that the one drink is coarse and the other fine does not meet the case. People drink beer out of glass, and the finer the glass the better they like it. But there is something fundamentally discordant between beer and porcelain.

It is not, I imagine, that porcelain actually affects the taste or quality of the liquor. It is that some subtle sense of fitness is outraged by the association. The harmony of things is jangled. Touch and taste are no longer in sympathy, and we are conscious of a jar to some remote and inexplicable fibre of our being. It is in the realm of the palate that we get the miracle of these affinities and antipathies in their most elementary shape. Who was it who discovered that two such curiously diverse things as mutton and red-currant jelly make a perfect gastronomic chord? By what stroke of inspiration or luck did some unknown cook first see that apple sauce was just the thing to make roast pork sublime? Who was the Prometheus who brought to earth the tidings that a clove was the lover for whom the apple pudding had pined through all the ages?

Seen in the large, this world is just an inexhaustible mine of materials out of which that singular adventurer, man, is eternally bringing to light new revelations of harmony. The musician gathers together the vibrations of the air and discovers the laws of musical agreement, and out of that discovery emerges the stupendous mystery of song. The poet takes words, and out of their rhythms finds the harmonious vehicle for ideas. The scientist sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a symphony before which the mind stands mute and awestruck. The cook takes the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small, spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation—Bach fashioning that immortal Concerto for Two Violins that takes us out like unsullied children into fields of asphodel; Wordsworth looking out over Tintern Abbey and capturing for us that

Sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and in the mind of man;

Botticelli weaving the magic lines of the Madonna of the Magnificat into a harmony that, once deeply felt, seems to dwell in the heart for ever. And you and I, though we are not captains in the adventure, all have our glimpses—glorious moments when the mind sings in tune with circumstance, when the beauty of the world, or the sense of fellowship with men or the anthem of incommunicable things seems to open out the vision of something that we would fain possess and are meant to possess.

"A mirage," you say, being a cynical person—"a mirage just to keep us going through the desert—a sort of carrot held before the nose of that donkey, man." Well, looking at the world to-day, it does rather seem that, if harmony is the main concern of the adventure, humanity had better give up the enterprise. In the light of the events in which we live, man is not merely the most discordant creature on earth: he is also the most ferocious animal that exists. Dryden's famous lines read like a satire:—

From harmony, from heavenly harmony. This universal frame began; From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man.

If Dryden could see Europe to-day he might at least find one flaw in that ode of which he had so exalted an opinion.

But the story of man is a long story, and we cannot see its drift from any episode, however vast and catastrophic. We are still only in the turbulent childhood of our career, and frightful as our excesses are, there is a motive behind them that makes them profoundly different from the wars of old. That motive is the idea of human liberty, the sanctity of public law, the right of every nation, small or great, to live its life free from the terrorism of force. When, in the ancient or mediaeval world, was there fought a war for a world idea like this? Despotism then had it all its own way. Even the Peace of Rome was only the peace of universal subjugation, not the peace of universal liberty based on law which the world is fighting to establish to-day. Never before has embattled democracy challenged the principle of tyranny for the possession of the world....

Ah, I know what you are thinking as you run your mind over the Allies. Liberty! Does Russia stand for liberty? Yes, in the circumstances of to-day, even Russia stands for liberty, for do not forget that this is not a war of the Russian bureaucracy, but a war sustained by the passion of the Russian people. And, Russia apart or Russia included, who can doubt that the cause of human freedom is in our hands, and the cause of ancient tyranny is in the hands of our enemy? May we not see in these baleful fires the Twilight of the Gods—of those old gods of blood and iron that have held the world in subjection through the long centuries of its travail? May we not see even in the midst of this discord and carnage, this hell of death and destruction, the new birth of humanity—the promise of a world set free?

Perhaps in that distant time when the tragedy of to-day is only an old chapter in the story of the human race it will be seen that Dryden, after all, was not guilty of a grim jest, but that this mighty discord was the announcement of that final harmony for which all that is best in us yearns. It may seem a hard vision to cherish to-day. But we must cherish it, or accept the hideous alternative that this is, after all, in very truth the madhouse of the universe. Can you live with that idea? Would it be worth while living with that idea? If not, then the other holds the field, and it is for all of us in our several ways, small or great, to work so that it may possess the field.

I have wandered somewhat far from the question of the beer and the porcelain, and yet I think you will find that the sequence is not lacking, and that the little window commands a large landscape.



ON A CASE OF CONSCIENCE

It was raining when Victor Crummles stepped out into the street. But he did not notice the fact. True, he put his umbrella up, but that was mere force of habit. He was not aware that he had put it up. His mind was far too engaged with the ordeal before him to permit any consciousness of external things to creep into it. He was "up against it and no mistake," he observed to himself. There was the paper in his pocket telling him the time and place at which he was to present himself for medical examination. He put his hand in his pocket. It was there all right. Kilburn. Twelve o'clock.

Yes, he was fairly up against it. Not, as he hastened to assure himself, that he objected.... Not at all.... He had always been a patriot, and always would be. He'd love to have a smack at the Huns. He'd give them what for.... He wished he'd been a bit younger—that's what he wished. If he'd been a bit younger he'd have gone like a shot. That's what he'd have done—he'd have gone like a shot. No fetching him—if he'd been a bit younger. But a chap at thirty-eight ... well....

Here was the "Golden Crown." Yes, he thought he'd better have "just one." It would pull him together and give the doctors a chance. He ought to give them a chance whatever the consequence to himself. A whisky-and-soda would just put him "in the pink."

There, that was better. Now he could face anything. Now for Kilburn. How should he go? It was two miles at least ... a good two miles. There was No. 16—he could take that. And there was the Tube—he could take that.

Or he could walk. There was plenty of time.... Yes, on the whole he thought he ought to walk. There was that varicose vein. The doctors ought to know about that. It wouldn't be fair to them or to the country that they shouldn't know about it. Varicose veins were very serious affairs indeed. He knew because he'd looked the subject up in the dictionary. It had made such a deep impression on him-that he could repeat what it said:—

"The dilation and thickening of the veins with lengthening and tortuosity, and projection of certain points in the form of knots or knobs, in which the blood coagulates, fibrin is deposited, and in the centre sometimes even osseous matter; in addition the coats of the veins are diseased."

There was more about it than that. It looked a very black case indeed. Many a man had been turned down for varicose veins, and—and—well, the doctors ought to know about it. That was all.... They ought to know about it.... He oughtn't to go there and pass himself off under false pretences.... Mind you, he wanted to fight the Germans all right. He wanted to do his bit—nobody more so. But was it fair not to let the doctors see what was the matter with him? He certainly had those knots and knobs when he walked very hard. Who knew? Perhaps there was "fibrin" and "osseous matter" there. At any rate, the doctors ought to see his leg under fair conditions....

He didn't hold with allowing your patriotism to make you deceive your country. It wasn't fair to the country to let it spend a heap of money on a fellow who might "crock up" in the first week or two. It wasn't fair to the fellow either. Not that he was thinking about himself.... Not at all. It was the country he was thinking of. A fellow must think about the country sometimes. It was his duty to put his own feelings, as it were, under the tap. He wanted to go to the war as much as any man, but he didn't want the country to lose by him....

Yes, it was his duty to walk. It was his duty not to conceal those knots and knobs. He hoped they wouldn't be a fatal objection. But he was going to play a straight bat with the country whatever happened.... He was not the man to palm himself for what he wasn't. He would show the doctor quite plainly what his varicose vein was like.

When Victor Crummles entered the room he was feeling a bit tired, but courageous. He had taken another "stiffener" at the "Spread Eagle" and felt equal to any fate. There were two doctors in the room—one sitting at a table, the other standing by the window.

"Anything the matter with you?" said he at the table.

"Not that I know," said Victor with the air of a man who meant business. Then, as if unwillingly dragging the truth out of himself he added, "I have got a bit of a varicose vein, but it's hardly worth mentioning."

"Oh, don't worry about that," said the doctor. "We've got past that stage. Now strip."

Don't worry about that! Got past that stage! What did it mean?... Well, he had done his duty.... If there was fibrin and osseous matter in his veins he had given them fair warning. It was the country that would suffer. These doctors,... well, there....

"Stripped? Now, let's have a look at you."

The doctor examined him carefully. Perhaps that varicose vein would surprise him after all. He'd walked two miles and it ought to be ... not that he wanted it to be; but if it was—well, it was only fair they should know.

"What did you say your age was?"

"Thirty-eight, sir."

"Thirty-eight! Thirty-eight ... um ... Come here, Jeffkins."

Jeffkins came from the window and joined his colleague, and together the two doctors took stock of Victor. They were taking no notice of his leg. Well, it was their look out. He wouldn't be to blame if he broke down.

"You can dress." And the two doctors went to the window and consulted in low tones.

Then the first came back.

"Well, my man, it won't do," he said. "We like your spirit.... Very creditable, very creditable indeed. But (laughing) thirty-eight! Come, come."

Light was breaking in on Victor. Was he really being rejected?... And because he was too old?... Oh, the scandal, the shame.... And he dying to get at those Huns....

"But upon my oath...." He was really in earnest now.

"There, there, we understand," said the doctor. "You've done your best. And it's very creditable to you—very. But thirty-eight! Come, come.... Now, good morning."

Outside, Victor's anguish and indignation were too bitter to be borne unaided. He turned into the "Spread Eagle."



ON THE GUINEA STAMP

My eye was caught as I passed along the street just now by an advertisement on a hoarding which announced that Mr. Martin Harvey was appearing in a new cinema play entitled The Hard Way, which was described as

A FINE STORY BY A PEER.

I confess that I took an objection to that play on the spot. It may be a good play. I don't know. I never shall know, for I shall never see it. But why should it be assumed that you and I will run off to the pay box to see a new play "by a peer"? Suppose the anonymous playwright had been a lawyer, or a journalist, or a pork-butcher, or a grocer. Would the producer have thought it helpful to announce a new play by a pork-butcher, or a lawyer, or a grocer, or a journalist? He certainly would not. He would have left the play to stand or fall on its merits.

Why, then, does he think that the fact that it is by a peer will bring us all crowding to his doors? You may, of course, take it as a reflection on the peerage. You may be supposed to think it such a miraculous thing that a peer should be able to write a play that you may be expected to go and see it as you would go to Barnum's to see a two-headed man or a bearded woman? We may be invited to see it merely as a marvel, much as we used to be invited to go and see the horse that could count or the monkeys that could ride bicycles.

If it were so I should feel it was unjust to the peerage which is certainly not below the average in intellectual capacity. But it is not so. It is something much more serious than that. It is not intended to be a reflection on the peerage. It is an unconscious reflection on the British public. The idea behind the announcement is not that we shall go to see the play in a spirit of curiosity, as if it had been written by an ourang-outang, but that we shall go to see it in a spirit of flunkeyism, as if it had been written by a demi-god. We are conceived sitting in hushed wonder that a visitor from realms far above our experience should stoop down to amuse us.

I wish I could feel that this was a false estimate of the British public. It would certainly be a false estimate of the French public. The most splendid thing, I think, in connection with the French people is their freedom from flunkeyism. The great wind of the Revolution blew that rubbish out of their souls for ever. It gave them the sublime conception of citizenship as the basis of human relationship. It destroyed all the social fences that feudalism had erected to keep the people out of the common inheritance of the possibilities of human life. It liberated them from shams, and made them the one realistic people in Europe. They looked truth in the face, because they had cleaned its face of the dirty accretions of the past. They saw, and they are the only people in Europe who as a nation have seen, that

The rank is but the guinea stamp: The man's the gowd, for a' that.

It is this fact which has made France the standard-bearer of human ideals. It is this fact which puts her spiritually at the head of all the nations.

I am afraid it must be admitted that we are still in the flunkey stage. We are still hypnotised by rank and social caste. I saw a crowd running excitedly after a carriage near the Gaiety Theatre the other day, and found it was because Princess So-and-So was passing. Our Press reeks with the disease, and loves to record this sort of thing:—

THE DUKE OF CONNAUGHT IN NEW YORK.

While strolling down Fifth Avenue the Duke of Connaught accidentally collided with a messenger boy carrying a parcel, whereupon he turned round and begged the boy's pardon.

You see the idea behind such banalities. It is that we are stricken with respectful admiration that people with titles should act like ordinary decent human beings. It is an insult to them, and it ought to be an insult to the intelligence of the reader. But the newspaper man knows his public as well as the cinema producer. He knows we have the souls of flunkeys. I am no better than the rest. When I knew Mr. Kearley, the grocer, I looked on him as a man and an equal. When he blossomed into Lord Devonport I felt that he had taken wings and flown beyond my humble circle. I feel the flunkey strong in me. I hate him, but I cannot kill him.

It is not the fact that inferior people get titles which should give us concern. It is not even that they get them so often by secret gifts, by impudent touting, by base service. These things are known, and they are no worse to-day than they have always been. Every honours list makes us gape and smile. If we see a really distinguished name in it we feel surprise and a certain sorrow. What is he doing in that galley? I confess I have never felt the same towards J.M. Barrie since he allowed a tag to be stuck on to a great name. What did he want with a tag that any tuft hunter in public life can get? It is only littleness that can gain from titles. Greatness is always dishonoured by them. Fancy Sir Charles Dickens, or Lord Dickens, or Lord Darwin, or Lord Carlyle, or Lord Shakespeare, or John Milton masquerading as the Marquis of Oxfordshire. Yes, Tennyson became a lord and was the smaller man for the fact. Who does not recall Swinburne's scornful comment:

Stoop, Chaucer, stoop; Keats, Shelley, Burns bow down.

And who did not share the feeling of Mark Pattison at the pitiful anti-climax? "There certainly is something about Tennyson," he said, "that you find in very few poets; in saying what he says in the best words in which it can be said, he is quite Sophoclean. But this business of the peerage! It is really so sad that I hardly like to speak of it. Compare that with Milton's ending and mark the difference."

But it is the corrupting effect of titles on the national currency that is their real offence. They falsify our ideals. They set up shams in place of realities. They turn our minds from the gold to the guinea stamp and make us worship the false idols of social ambition. Our thinking as a people can't be right when our symbols are wrong. We can't have the root of democracy in our souls if the tree flowers into coronets and gee-gaws. France has the real jewel of democracy and we have only got the paste. Do not think that this is only a small matter touching the surface of our national character. It is a poison in the blood that infects us with the deadly sins of servility and snobbery. And already it is permeating even the free life of the Colonies. If I were an Australian or a Canadian I would fight this hateful taint of the old world with all my might. I would make it a criminal offence for a Colonial to accept a title. As for us, I know only one remedy. It is to make a title a money transaction. Let us have a tariff for titles. If American millionaires, like Lord Astor, want them let them pay for them at the market rate. It would be at least a more wholesome method than the present system. And it would bring the whole imposture into contempt. Nobody would have a title when everybody knew what he had paid for it. It is a poor way of getting rid of the abomination compared with the French way, but then we are some centuries behind the French people in these things.



ON THE DISLIKE OF LAWYERS

"I have spent a large part of my life in advising business men how to get out of their difficulties," said Mr. Asquith the other day. It was a statement wrung from him by a deputation which was inflicting on him the familiar talk about lawyers and the need of "business men" to run our affairs. I suppose there has been no more banal cackle in this war than the cackle about a "business Government" and the pestilence of lawyers.

I am not a lawyer, and have no particular affection for lawyers. I keep out of their professional reach as much as possible. But it is as foolish to ban them as a class as it would be to assume that a grocer or a tailor is a great statesman because he is a successful grocer or tailor. Running an empire is quite a different job from running a grocery establishment, and it is folly to suppose that because a man has been successful in buying and selling bacon and butter for his own profit he can ipso facto govern a nation with wisdom and prudence. Who are the most distinguished grocers of to-day? They are Lord Devonport and Sir Thomas Lipton. Both excellent men, I've no doubt. But would you like to hand over the Premiership to either of them? Now, would you?

The great statesman has to prove himself a great statesman just as the great grocer has to prove himself a great grocer. He has to prove it by the qualities of statesmanship exercised in the full glare of publicity. If the grocer makes a howler in his trade the world knows nothing about it. If the statesman makes a howler all the world knows about it. He has to emerge to the front in the most public of all battles, and you may be sure that no one comes to eminence without great powers which have passed the test of the fiercest trials. He does not evade that test because he is a lawyer. Mr. Asquith had to survive it just as Mr. Chamberlain, who was a maker of nails, had to survive it, just as Mr. Balfour, who is a landowner, had to survive it. No one said to Mr. Chamberlain, "Yah! nailmaker," or to Mr. Balfour, "Yah! landlord," thinking he had disposed of them. Why should you suppose that when you have said "Yah! lawyer" to Mr. Asquith or Mr. Lloyd George you have disposed of them?

Is the idea that lawyers are more selfish than other people—brewers, or soap boilers, or bankers? I doubt it. They are just the average, and include good and bad like any other class. Judge Jeffreys was a monster; but, on the other hand, it was the lawyers of the seventeenth century who largely saved the liberties of this country. I doubt whether the world has ever produced a wiser, more unselfish, more heroic figure than Lincoln. And he was a lawyer. I doubt whether any man in politics to-day has made such financial sacrifices as Mr. Asquith has made. He had a practice at the Bar which, I believe, brought him in L10,000 a year, and had he devoted himself to it instead of to politics, would have brought him in far more, and he gave it up for a job immeasurably more burdensome that has never brought him more than L5000. He might have been Lord Chancellor, with a comfortable seat on the Woolsack and L10,000 a year, and he chose instead to sit in the House of Commons every day to be the target of every disappointed placeman. Ah, you say, but look at the glory. Well, look at it. I would, as Danton said, rather keep sheep on the hillside than meddle with the government of men. It is the most ungrateful calling on earth. And, whatever other defects may be attributed to Mr. Asquith, a passion for such an empty thing as glory is not one of them. You will discover more passion for glory in Mr. Churchill in five minutes than you will discover in Mr. Asquith in five years. And Mr. Churchill is not a lawyer.

But this dislike of lawyers in the abstract has a certain basis. It is an old dislike. You remember that remark of Johnson's when he was asked on a certain occasion who was the man who had left the room: "I don't like saying unpleasant things about a man behind his back; but I believe he is an attorney." And Carlyle was not much more civil when he described a barrister as "a loaded blunderbuss "—if you bought him he blew your opponent's brains out; if your opponent bought him he blew yours out. His weapon is the law, but his object is not justice. As often as not he aims at defeating justice, and the more skilful a lawyer he is the more injustice he succeeds in doing. It is this detachment from the merits of a case, this deliberate repudiation of conscience in his business relations that makes him so suspect. Of course he has a very sound reply. "It is my business to put my client's case, and my opponent's business to put his client's case. And it is the business of the judge and jury to see that justice is done as between us." That is true, but it does not get rid of the suspicion that attaches to a man who fights for the guilty or the innocent with equal fervour.

And then he deals in such a tricky article. When Sancho Panza was Governor of the Island of Barataria he administered justice. If he had been the Governor of the Island of Britain he would have administered the law, and his decisions would have been very different. Law has about the same relation to justice that grammar has to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare were put in the dock and tried by the grammarians he would be condemned as a rogue and vagabond, and, similarly, justice is not infrequently hanged by the lawyers. We must have law just as we must have grammar, but we have no love for either of them. They are dry, bloodless sciences, and we look askance at those who practice them. You may be the greatest rascal of your time, but if you study the law and keep within its letter the strong lance of justice cannot reach you. No, law which is the servant of justice often betrays his master.

But do not let us be unjust. If law to-day is more nearly the instrument of justice than it has ever been, it is the great lawyers to whom we chiefly owe the fact. There are Dodsons and Foggs in the law, but there are also Pyms and Pratts who have upheld the liberties of this country in the teeth of tyrant kings and servile Parliaments.



ON THE CHEERFULNESS OF THE BLIND

I was coming off a Tube train last evening when some one said to me: "Will you please give this gentleman an arm to the lift? He is blind." I did so, and found, as I usually find in the case of the blind, that my companion was uncommonly talkative and cheerful. This gaiety of the blind is a perpetual wonder to me. It is as though the outer light being quenched an inner light of the spirit illuminates the darkness. Outside the night is black and dread, but inside there is warmth and brightness. The world is narrowed to the circle of one's own mind, but the very limitation feeds the flame of the spirit, and makes it leap higher. It was the most famous of blind Englishmen who in the days of his darkness made the blind Samson say:—

He that hath light within his own clear breast May sit i' th' centre and enjoy bright day.

And it has been remarked in many cases in which men have gone blind that their cheerfulness so far from being diminished has by some miracle gained a new strength. In no case of which I have had any knowledge has it apparently had the contrary effect. The zest of living seems heightened. Not long ago Mr. Galsworthy wrote to the Times a letter in which he spoke with pity of the unhappiness of the blind, and there promptly descended on him an avalanche of protest from the blind themselves. I suppose there was never a man who seemed to have a more intense pleasure in life than the late Dr. Campbell, the founder of the Normal School for the Blind, who worked wonders in extending the range of the activities of the blind, and himself did such apparently impossible things as riding a bicycle and climbing mountains.

Nor was the case of Mr. Pulitzer, the famous proprietor of the New York World, less remarkable. Night came down on him with terrible suddenness. He was watching the sunset from his villa in the Mediterranean one evening when he said: "How quickly the sun has set." "But it has not set," said his companion. "Oh, yes, it has; it is quite dark," he answered. In that moment he had gone stone blind. But I am told by those who knew him that his vivacity of mind was never greater than in the years of his blindness.

My friend Mr. G.W.E. Russell has a theory that the advantage of the blind over the deaf and dumb in this matter of cheerfulness is perhaps more apparent than real. He points out that it is in company that the blind is least conscious of his misfortune, and that the deaf and dumb is most conscious of it. That is certainly the case. In conversation the sightless are on an equality with the seeing, while the deaf and dumb are shut up in a terrible isolation. The fact that they see is not their gain but their loss. They watch the movement of the lips and the signs of laughter, but this only adds to the bitterness of the prison of soundlessness in which they dwell. Hence the appearance of gloom. On the other hand, in solitude the deaf and dumb has the advantage. All the colour and movement of life is before him, while the blind is not only denied that vision of the outside world, but has a restriction of movement that the other does not share. Mr. Russell's conclusion, therefore, is that while the happiest moments of the blind are those when he is observed, the happiest of the deaf and dumb are when he is not observed.

There is some measure of truth in this, but I believe, nevertheless, that the common impression is right, and that, judged by the test of the cheerful acceptance of affliction, the loss of sight is less depressing than the loss of hearing and speech. And this for a very obvious reason. After all, the main interest in life is in easy, familiar intercourse with our fellows. I love to watch a golden sunset, to walk in the high beech woods in spring—or, for that matter, in summer or autumn or winter—to see the apples reddening on the trees, and the hedgerows thick with blackberries. But this is the setting of my drama—the scenery of the play, not the play itself. It is its human contacts that give life its vivacity and intensity. And it is the ear and tongue that are the channels of the cheerful interplay of mind with mind. In that interplay the blind man has full measure and brimming over. His very affliction intensifies his part in the human comedy and gives him a peculiar delight in homely intercourse. He is not merely at his ease in the human family: he is the centre of it. He fulfils Johnson's test of a good fellow: he is "a clubbable man."

And even in the enjoyment of the external world it may be doubted whether he does not find as much mental stimulus as the deaf-and-dumb. He cannot see the sunset, but he hears the shout of the cuckoo, the song of the lark, "the hum of bees, and rustle of the bladed corn." And if, as usually happens, he has music in his soul, he has a realm of gold for his inheritance that makes life a perpetual holiday. Have you heard Mr. William Wolstenholme, the composer, improvising on the piano? If not, you have no idea what a jolly world the world of sounds can be to the blind. Of course, the case of the musician is hardly a fair test. With him, hearing is life and deafness death. There is no more pathetic story than that of Beethoven breaking the strings of the piano in his vain efforts to make his immortal harmonies penetrate his soundless ears. Can we doubt that had he been afflicted with blindness instead of deafness the tragedy of his life would have been immeasurably relieved? What peace, could he have heard his Ninth Symphony, would have slid into his soul. Blind Milton, sitting at his organ, was a less tragic figure and probably a happier man than Milton with a useless ear-trumpet would have been. Perhaps without the stimulus of the organ he could not have fashioned that song which, as Macaulay says in his grandiloquent way, "would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal beings whom he saw with that inner eye, which no calamity could darken, flinging down on the jasper pavements their crowns of amaranth and gold."

It is probable that in a material sense blindness is the most terrible affliction that can befall us; but I am here speaking only of its spiritual effects, and in this respect the deprivation of hearing and speech seems to involve a more forlorn state than the deprivation of sight. The one affliction means spiritual loneliness: the other deepens the spiritual intimacies of life. It was a man who had gone blind late in life who said: "I am thankful it is my sight which has gone rather than my hearing. The one has shut me off from the sun: the other would have shut me off from life."



ON TAXING VANITY

That quaint idea of Sir Edward Clarke's that, as a revenue expedient in time of war, we should impose a tax on those who have names as well as numbers on their garden gates has a principle in it which is capable of wide extension. It is the principle of taxing us on our vanities. I am not suggesting that there is not also a practical point in Sir Edward's idea. There is no doubt that this custom of giving our houses names is the source of much unnecessary labour and irritation to other people—postmen, tradesmen, debt collectors, and errand boys. Mr. Smythe—formerly Smith—of 236, Belinda Avenue, is easily discoverable, but what are you to do about Mr. Smythe, of Chatsworth House, Belinda Avenue, on a dark night? How are you to find him? There are 350 houses in Belinda Avenue, all as like as two peas, and though Mr. Smythe has a number, he never admits it. Chatsworth House is where he lives, and if you want him it's Chatsworth House that you have to find.

The other night a friend of mine was called to the door at a late hour. It was dark and raining and dismal. At the door stood a coal-heaver. "Please, sir," he said, "can you tell me where Balmoral is? I've got a load of coal to take there, and I've been up and down this road in the dark twice, and can't make out where it is." "It's the fourth house from here to the right," said my friend, and the coal-heaver thanked him and went away. That illustrates the practical case for a tax on house names.

But it was not that case which was in Sir Edward's mind. His view is that we ought to pay for the innocent vanity of living at Chatsworth House instead of 236, Belinda Avenue. Now if that principle is carried into effect, I see no end to its operation. I am not sure that Sir Edward himself would escape. I have often admired his magnificent side-whiskers. I doubt whether there is a pair of side-whiskers to match them in London. That he is proud of them goes without saying. Nobody could possibly have whiskers like them without feeling proud of them. I feel that if I had such whiskers I should never be away from the looking-glass. And consider the pleasurable employment they give in idle moments. Satan, it is said, has mischief still for idle hands to do. But no one with such streamers as Sir Edward's can ever have idle hands. When you have nothing else to do with them you stroke your whiskers and purr. Certainly they are worth paying for. I think they would be dirt cheap at a tax of L1 a side.

And then there are white spats. I don't know how you regard white spats, but I never see them without feeling that something ought to be done about it. I daresay the people who wear them are quite nice people, but I think they ought to suffer in some way for the jolt they give to the sensibilities of humbler mortals who could no more wear white spats than they could stand on their head in the middle of Fleet Street. I am aware that white spats are often only a sort of business advertisement. I have known careers founded on a pair of white spats. There is Simpkins, for example. I remember quite well when he first came to the club in white spats. We all smiled and said it was like Simpkins. He was pushful, meant to get on, and had set up white spats as a part of his stock-in-trade. We knew Simpkins, of course, and discounted the white spats; but they made a great impression on his clients, and he forged ahead from that day. Now he wears a fur-lined coat, drives his own motor-car, and has a man in livery to receive you at the door. But the foundation of his fortunes were the white spats. He understood that maxim of Rochefoucauld that "to succeed in the world you must appear to have succeeded already," and the white spats did the trick. I think he ought to pay for them—L2 a spat is my figure.

Most of us, too, I think, will agree that, if vanity is to be taxed, the wearing of an eyeglass cannot be overlooked. It is impossible to dissociate vanity from the use of the monocle. There are some people, it is true, who wear an eyeglass naturally and unaffectedly, as though they were really born with it and had forgotten that it was there. I saw a lady in a bus the other day who used an eyeglass and yet carried it so well, with such simple propriety and naturalness, that you could not feel that there was any vanity in the matter. But that is an exception. Ordinarily the wearing of a monocle seems like an announcement to the world that you are a person of consequence. Disraeli knew that. His remark, when Chamberlain made his first appearance in the House, that "at least he wore his eyeglass like a gentleman," showed that he knew that, in general, it was an affectation. It was so in his own case, of course. I hope Sir Edward Clarke will agree that L5 is a reasonable tariff for an eyeglass.

There are a thousand other vanities more or less innocent, that will occur to you in looking round. I should put a very stiff tax on painted cheeks and hair-dyes. Any lady dyeing her hair once would be taxed L5 for the privilege. If, growing tired of auburn, she decided to change again to a raven hue, she would pay L10. The tax, in fact, might be doubled for every change of colour. If rather than pay the tax Mrs. Fitzgibbons Jones resolves to wear her hair as nature arranged that she should, life will be simplified for me. The first time I met Mrs. Fitzgibbons Jones she had black hair. A year later I met her husband with a lady with chestnut hair. He introduced me to her as his wife, and she said we had met before. I said I thought she was mistaken, and it was not until we had parted that I realised that it was the same lady with another head of hair and another system of coloration altogether.

The weak point about Sir Edward's idea as a financial expedient is that so few of our vanities would survive the attention of the tax-collector. Personally, I should have the name-plate off my gate at once. Indeed, I'm not sure I'll not have it off as it is. It was there when I came, and I have always been a little ashamed of its foppery, and have long used only the number. Now the name seems rather more absurd than ever. Its pretentiousness is out of tune with these times. I think many of us are getting ashamed of our little vanities without the help of the tax-collector.



ON THOUGHTS AT FIFTY

Stevenson, it will be remembered, once assigned his birthday to a little girl—or was it a boy?—of his acquaintance. The child was fond of birthdays, while he had reached a time of life when they had ceased to have any interest for him. Most of us, if we live long enough, experience that indifference. The birthday emotion vanishes with the toys that awaken it. I remember when life was a journey from one birthday to another, the tedium of which was only relieved by such agreeable incidents as Christmas, Easter, and the school holidays. But for many years I have stumbled up against my birthday, as it were, with a shock of surprise, have given it a nod of recognition as one might greet an ancient acquaintance with whom one has lost sympathy, and have passed on without a further thought about the occasion.

But to-day it is different. One cannot pass over one's fiftieth birthday without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth thinking about. To be fifty was to be among the old fellows, to be on the shelf, to have become an antiquity.

And now here am I at fifty, and so far from feeling like an antiquity, I feel as much of a young fellow as at any time of my life. I had feared that when middle age overtook me I should feel middle-aged and full of sad longings for the old toys and the old pleasures. How would life be tolerable when cricket, for example, had ceased to play an important part in it? Never again to have the ecstasy of a drive along "the carpet" to the boundary or, with a flash of the arm, snapping an opponent in the slips. What a dreary desolation life must be, stripped of those joys! And on the contrary I find that the spirit of youth is no more dependent on cricket than it is on the taste for lollipops. It consists in the contented acceptance of the things that are possible to us. Do not suppose, young fellow, that you are any younger than I am because you can jump five feet eight and I have ceased to want to jump at all. The feeling of youth is something much deeper and more enduring than the ability to jump five feet eight. It may be as vigorous at eighty as it is at eighteen. It is only its manner of expression which is changed. Holmes never admitted that he had grown old. "I am eighty-three young to-day," he would say. And Johnson, with his old age and his infirmities, still insisted that he was "a young fellow"—as, indeed, he was, for where shall we find such freshness of spirit, such a defiance of the tooth of Time as in that grand old boy?

Youth, in fact, is not a physical affair at all, but an affair of the soul. You may be spiritually bald-headed at twenty-five or a romping young blade at eighty. Byron was only thirty-four when he wrote:—

I am ashes where once I was fire. And the soul in my bosom is dead; What I loved I now merely admire, And my heart is as grey as my head.

Perhaps there was some affectation in this, for Byron was always dramatising himself. But that he died an old man at thirty-six is as indisputable as that Browning died a young man at seventy-seven, with that triumphant envoi of Asolando as his last expression of the eternal youth of the soul.

In thinking of old age, the mistake is to assume that the spirit must decay with the body. Of course, if the body is maltreated it will react on the spirit. But the natural decline of the physical powers leaves the healthy spirit untouched with age, should indeed leave it strengthened—glowing not with passion but with a steadier fire. When we are young in years our eager spirit cries for the moon.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not.

But as we get older we learn to be satisfied with something nearer than the moon. The horizon of our hopes and ambitions narrows, but the sky above is not less deep, and we make the wonderful discovery that the things that matter are very near to us. It is the homing of the spirit. We have been avid of the "topless grandeurs" of life, and we return to find that the spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach. And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another discovery. We find that this is the true way to the "topless grandeurs" themselves, for those topless grandeurs are not without us but within.

But I am afraid I am sermonising, and I do not want to sermonise, though if ever a man may be allowed to sermonise it is when he is completing his half-century. Let me as an antidote recall a little story which the present Bishop of Chester once told me over the dinner table, for it contains a practical recipe for keeping the heart young. He was in his earlier days associated with Archdeacon Jones of Liverpool. The Archdeacon, then over eighty, had been tutor to Gladstone, and one day the future Bishop turned the conversation into a reminiscent channel, and sought to evoke the Archdeacon's memories of the long past. Presently the Archdeacon abruptly changed the subject by asking, "What was the concert of the Philharmonic like last night?" And then, in answer to the obvious surprise which the question had aroused, he added, "Although I am an old man, I want to keep my heart young, and the best way of doing that is not to let one's thoughts live in the past, but to keep them in tune with the life around one."

The truth is that every stage of the journey has its own interests. Probably none is better than another, but my own preference has always been for that stage which I happen to be doing at the time. When I was twenty I thought there was no age like twenty, and now I am fifty I have transferred my enthusiasm to fifty. There is no age like it, I feel, for all-round enjoyment. And I have a strong conviction that if I have the good fortune to reach sixty I shall be found declaring that there is no age like sixty. And why not? It is pleasant to see the sun on the morning hills, but it is not less pleasant to walk home when the shadows are lengthening and the cool of the evening has come.



THE ONE-EYED CAT

"There's Peggy with that horrid cat again—the one-eyed cat from over the fence." I looked out as I heard the ejaculation, and there in truth coming down the garden path was Peggy bearing affectionately in her arms the one-eyed cat from over the fence. Peggy likes the animal in spite of its one eye. I am not sure that she does not like it all the more because of its one eye. I think she has an idea that if she nurses the cat it forgets that it has only one eye and recovers its happiness. She has a passion for all four-legged creatures. I have seen her spend a whole day picking handfuls of grass in the orchard and running with them to the donkey or the horse standing patiently in the neighbour's paddock, and when she hasn't animals to play with she will put a horseshoe on each hand and each foot, and then you will hear from above the plod-plod-plod of a horse going its daily round. But while she has a comprehensive affection for all four-legged things, her most fervent love is reserved for the halt and the blind.

It is only among children that we find the quality of charity sufficiently strong to forgive deformity. The natural instinct is to turn away from any physical imperfection. It is the instinct of the race for the preservation of its forms. We call these forms beauty and the departure from them ugliness, and it is from "beauty's rose," as Shakespeare says, that "we desire increase." If you shudder at the touch of a withered hand or at the sight of a one-eyed cat, it is because you feel that they are a menace to the established forms of life. You are unconsciously playing the part of policeman for nature. You are the guardian of its traditions when you blush at the glance of two eyes and shudder at the glance of one.

And yet it is not impossible to fall in love with the physically defective and sincerely to believe that they are beautiful. Take that incident mentioned by Descartes. He said that when he was a child he used to play with a little girl who had a squint, and that to the end of his days he liked people who squinted. In this case it was the associations of memory that gave a glamour to deformity and made it beautiful. The squint brought back to him the memory of the Golden Age, and through the mist of that memory it was transmuted into loveliness.

Nor is it memory alone that will work the miracle. Intellectual sympathy will do it, too. Wilkes was renowned for his ugliness, but he claimed that, given half an hour's start, he would win the smiles of any woman against any competitor. And when one of his lady admirers, engaged in defending him, was reminded that he squinted badly, she replied: "Of course he does; but he doesn't squint more than a man of his genius ought to squint." Nor was it women alone whom the fellow fascinated. Who can forget the scene when Tom Davies brought him into the company of Dr. Johnson, who hated Wilkes' Radicalism, and would never willingly have consented to meet him? For a time Johnson refused to unbend, but at last he could hold out no longer, and fell a victim to the charm of Wilkes' talk.