THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE

BY ROBERT LYND

LONDON

GRANT RICHARDS LTD. 

ST MARTIN'S STREET

1921

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED

EDINBURGH

TO JAMES WINDER GOOD

CHAPTER PAGE

 I. THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE 11

 II. THE HERRING FLEET 19

 III. THE BETTING MAN 29

 IV. THE HUM OF INSECTS 40

 V. CATS 51

 VI. MAY 61

 VII. NEW YEAR PROPHECIES 70

 VIII. ON KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE 82

 IX. THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING 91

 X. WHY WE HATE INSECTS 102

 XI. VIRTUE 114

 XII. JUNE 123

 XIII. ON FEELING GAY 132

 XIV. IN THE TRAIN 141

 XV. THE MOST CURIOUS ANIMAL 149

 XVI. THE OLD INDIFFERENCE 158

 XVII. EGGS: AN EASTER HOMILY 167

XVIII. ENTER THE SPRING 176

 XIX. THE DAREDEVIL BARBER 186

 XX. WEEDS: AN APPRECIATION 195

 XXI. A JUROR IN WAITING 205

 XXII. THE THREE-HALFPENNY BIT 215

XXIII. THE MORALS OF BEANS 224

 XXIV. ON SEEING A JOKE 233

 XXV. GOING TO THE DERBY 243

 XXVI. THIS BLASTED WORLD 253

_Acknowledgments are due to "The New Statesman, " in which all but oneof these essays appeared. "Going to the Derby" appeared in "The DailyNews. "--R. L. _

I

THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE

It is impossible to take a walk in the country with an averagetownsman--especially, perhaps, in April or May--without being amazedat the vast continent of his ignorance. It is impossible to take awalk in the country oneself without being amazed at the vast continentof one's own ignorance. Thousands of men and women live and diewithout knowing the difference between a beech and an elm, between thesong of a thrush and the song of a blackbird. Probably in a moderncity the man who can distinguish between a thrush's and a blackbird'ssong is the exception. It is not that we have not seen the birds. Itis simply that we have not noticed them. We have been surrounded bybirds all our lives, yet so feeble is our observation that many of uscould not tell whether or not the chaffinch sings, or the colour ofthe cuckoo. We argue like small boys as to whether the cuckoo alwayssings as he flies or sometimes in the branches of a tree--whetherChapman drew on his fancy or his knowledge of nature in the lines:

 When in the oak's green arms the cuckoo sings, And first delights men in the lovely springs. 

This ignorance, however, is not altogether miserable. Out of it we getthe constant pleasure of discovery. Every fact of nature comes to useach spring, if only we are sufficiently ignorant, with the dew stillon it. If we have lived half a lifetime without having ever even seena cuckoo, and know it only as a wandering voice, we are all the moredelighted at the spectacle of its runaway flight as it hurries fromwood to wood conscious of its crimes, and at the way in which it haltshawk-like in the wind, its long tail quivering, before it daresdescend on a hill-side of fir-trees where avenging presences may lurk. It would be absurd to pretend that the naturalist does not also findpleasure in observing the life of the birds, but his is a steadypleasure, almost a sober and plodding occupation, compared to themorning enthusiasm of the man who sees a cuckoo for the first time, and, behold, the world is made new. 

And, as to that, the happiness even of the naturalist depends in somemeasure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of thiskind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in thebooks, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed eachbright particular with his eyes. He wishes with his own eyes to seethe female cuckoo--rare spectacle!--as she lays her egg on the groundand takes it in her bill to the nest in which it is destined to breedinfanticide. He would sit day after day with a field-glass against hiseyes in order personally to endorse or refute the evidence suggestingthat the cuckoo _does_ lay on the ground and not in a nest. And, if heis so far fortunate as to discover this most secretive of birds in thevery act of laying, there still remain for him other fields to conquerin a multitude of such disputed questions as whether the cuckoo's eggis always of the same colour as the other eggs in the nest in whichshe abandons it. Assuredly the men of science have no reason as yet toweep over their lost ignorance. If they seem to know everything, it isonly because you and I know almost nothing. There will always be afortune of ignorance waiting for them under every fact they turn up. They will never know what song the Sirens sang to Ulysses any morethan Sir Thomas Browne did. 

If I have called in the cuckoo to illustrate the ordinary man'signorance, it is not because I can speak with authority on that bird. It is simply because, passing the spring in a parish that seemed tohave been invaded by all the cuckoos of Africa, I realised howexceedingly little I, or anybody else I met, knew about them. But yourand my ignorance is not confined to cuckoos. It dabbles in all createdthings, from the sun and moon down to the names of the flowers. I onceheard a clever lady asking whether the new moon always appears on thesame day of the week. She added that perhaps it is better not to know, because, if one does not know when or in what part of the sky toexpect it, its appearance is always a pleasant surprise. I fancy, however, the new moon always comes as a surprise even to those who arefamiliar with her time-tables. And it is the same with the coming inof spring and the waves of the flowers. We are not the less delightedto find an early primrose because we are sufficiently learned in theservices of the year to look for it in March or April rather than inOctober. We know, again, that the blossom precedes and not succeedsthe fruit of the apple-tree, but this does not lessen our amazement atthe beautiful holiday of a May orchard. 

At the same time there is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learningthe names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading abook that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had sobad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he hadnever read it before. I have myself a capricious and leaking memory. Ican read _Hamlet_ itself and _The Pickwick Papers_ as though they werethe work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much ofthem fades between one reading and another. There are occasions onwhich a memory of this kind is an affliction, especially if one has apassion for accuracy. But this is only when life has an object beyondentertainment. In respect of mere luxury, it may be doubted whetherthere is not as much to be said for a bad memory as for a good one. With a bad memory one can go on reading Plutarch and _The ArabianNights_ all one's life. Little shreds and tags, it is probable, willstick even in the worst memory, just as a succession of sheep cannotleap through a gap in a hedge without leaving a few wisps of wool onthe thorns. But the sheep themselves escape, and the great authorsleap in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little enoughbehind. 

And, if we can forget books, it is as easy to forget the months andwhat they showed us, when once they are gone. Just for the moment Itell myself that I know May like the multiplication table and couldpass an examination on its flowers, their appearance and their order. To-day I can affirm confidently that the buttercup has five petals. (Or is it six? I knew for certain last week. ) But next year I shallprobably have forgotten my arithmetic, and may have to learn once morenot to confuse the buttercup with the celandine. Once more I shall seethe world as a garden through the eyes of a stranger, my breath takenaway with surprise by the painted fields. I shall find myselfwondering whether it is science or ignorance which affirms that theswift (that black exaggeration of the swallow and yet a kinsman of thehumming-bird) never settles even on a nest, but disappears at nightinto the heights of the air. I shall learn with fresh astonishmentthat it is the male, and not the female, cuckoo that sings. I may haveto learn again not to call the campion a wild geranium, and torediscover whether the ash comes early or late in the etiquette of thetrees. A contemporary English novelist was once asked by a foreignerwhat was the most important crop in England. He answered without amoment's hesitation: "Rye. " Ignorance so complete as this seems to meto be touched with magnificence; but the ignorance even of illiteratepersons is enormous. The average man who uses a telephone could notexplain how a telephone works. He takes for granted the telephone, therailway train, the linotype, the aeroplane, as our grandfathers tookfor granted the miracles of the gospels. He neither questions norunderstands them. It is as though each of us investigated and made hisown only a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work isregarded by most men as a gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reactionagainst our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate. We revel in speculations about anything at all--about life after deathor about such questions as that which is said to have puzzledAristotle, "why sneezing from noon to midnight was good, but fromnight to noon unlucky. " One of the greatest joys known to man is totake such a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge. The greatpleasure of ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions. The man who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure ofdogma, which is the pleasure of answering, is already beginning tostiffen. One envies so inquisitive a man as Jowett, who sat down tothe study of physiology in his sixties. Most of us have lost the senseof our ignorance long before that age. We even become vain of oursquirrel's hoard of knowledge and regard increasing age itself as aschool of omniscience. We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdomnot because he was omniscient but because he realised at the age ofseventy that he still knew nothing. 

II

THE HERRING FLEET

The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired isa harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for thestars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regarda ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if notwith the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth. This, morethan the entrance to a wood or the source of a river or the top of abald hill, is the beginning of infinity. Even the dirtiest coal-boatthat lies beached in the harbour, a mere hulk of utilities that aretaken away by dirty men in dirty carts, will in a day or two liftitself from the mud on a full tide and float away like a spirit intothe sunset or curtsy to the image of the North Star. Mystery lies overthe sea. Every ship is bound for Thule. That, perhaps, is why men arecontent day after day to stand on the pier-head and to gaze at thewater and the ships and sailors running up and down the decks andpulling the ropes of sails. 

We may have no reason for pretending to ourselves that thefishing-boats are ships of dreams setting out on infinite voyages. But, none the less, even in a fishing village there is always acongregation of watching men and women on the pier. Every day thecrowd collects to see the harbour awake into life with the bustle ofmen about to set out among the nations of the fishes. By day the boatslie side by side in the harbour--stand side by side, rather, likehorses in a stable. There are two rows of them, making a camp of mastson the shallow water. In other parts of the harbour white gigs arebottomed on the sand in companies of two and three. As the tide slowlyrises, the masts which have been lying over on one side in a sleepystillness begin to stir, then to sway, until with each new impulse ofthe sea all the boats are dancing, and soon the whole harbour is awakeand merry as if every mast were a steeple with a peal of bells. It isnot long till the fishermen arrive. One meets them in every cobbledlane. How magnificent the noise made by a man in sea-boots on thestones! Surely, he strikes sparks from the road. He thumps the groundas with a hammer. The earth rings. One has seen those boots in themorning hanging outside the door of his house while he slept. Theyhave been oiled, and left there to dry. They have kept the shape ofhis limb and the crook of his knee in an uncanny way. They look asthough he had taken off his legs before going into the house and hungthem on the wall. But the fisherman is a hero not only in his boots. His sea-coat is no less magnificent. This may be of oil-skin yellow orof maroon or of stained white or of blue, with a blue jersey showingunder it, and, perhaps, a red woollen muffler or a scarf with greenspots on a red ground round his throat. He has not learned to be timidof colour. Even out of the mouths of his boots you may see the ends ofred knitted leggings protruding. His yellow or black sou'-westerroofing the back of his neck, he comes down to harbour, as splendid asa figure at a fair. And always, when he arrives, he is smoking a pipe. As one watches him, one wonders if anybody except a fisherman, as helooks out over the harbour, knows how to smoke. He has made tobaccopart of himself, like breathing. 

If the tide is already full the fishermen are taken off in smallrowing-boats, most of them standing, and the place is busy with acriss-cross of travelling crews till the fishing-boats are all manned. If the water is not yet deep, however, most of the men walk to theirboats, lumbering through the waves, and occasionally jumping like awading girl as a larger wave threatens the tops of their boots. Manyof them carry their supper in a basket or a handkerchief. The first ofthe boats begins to move out of its stall. It is tugged into the clearwater, and the fishermen put out long oars and row it laboriously tothe mouth of the harbour and the wind. It is followed by a motor-boat, and another, and another. There are forty putting up their sails likeone. The harbour moves. One has a sense as of things liberated. It isas though a flock of birds were being loosed into the air--as thoughpigeon after pigeon were being set free out of a basket for home. Lug-sail after lugsail, brown as the underside of a mushroom, hurriesout among the waves. A green little tub of a steamboat follows withinsolent smoke. The motor-boats hasten out like scenting dogs. Everysort of craft--motor-boat, gig, lugger and steamboat--makes for sea, higgledy-piggledy in a long line, an irregular procession of black andblue and green and white and brown. Here, as in the men's clothes, thepaint-pots have been spilled. 

There is nothing more sociable than a fishing-fleet. The boatsovertake each other, like horses in a race. They gallop in rivalry. But for the most part they keep together, and move like a travellingtown over the sea. As likely as not they will have to come back out ofthe storm into the shelter of the bay, and they will ride there tillnightfall, when every boat becomes a lamp and every sail a shadow. Inthe darkness they hang like a constellation on the oily water. Theybecome a company of dancing stars. Every now and then a boat moves offon a quest of its own. It is as though the firmament were shaken. Onehears the kick-kick-kick of the motor, and a star has become awill-o'-the-wisp. These lights can no more keep still than aplayground of children. They always make a pattern on the water, butthey never make the same pattern. Sometimes they lengthen themselvesagainst the sandy shore on the far side of the bay into a goldenriver. Sometimes they huddle together into a little procession ofmonks carrying tapers. .. . 

One goes down to the harbour after breakfast the next morning to seewhat has been the result of the night's fishing. One does not reallyneed to go down. One can see it afar off. There is movement as at thebuilding of a city. On every boat men are busy emptying the nets, disentangling the fish that have been caught by the gills, tumblingthem in a liquid mass into the bottom of the boat. One can hardly seethe fish separately. They flow into one another. They are a pool ofquick-silver. One is amazed, as the disciples must have been amazed atthe miraculous draught. Everything is covered with their scales. Thefishermen are spotted as if with confetti. Their hands, their browncoats, their boots are a mass of white-and-blue spots. The labourerswith the gurries--great blue boxes that are carried like Sedan-chairsbetween two pairs of handles--come up alongside, and the fish areladled into the gurries from tin pans. As each gurry is filled the menhasten off with it to where the auctioneer is standing. With the helpof a small notebook and a lead pencil he auctions it before anoutsider can wink, and the gurry is taken a few yards further, wherewomen are pouring herrings into barrels. They, too, are covered withfish-scales from head to foot. They are dabbled like a painter'spalette. So great is the haul that every cart in the country-side hascome down to lend a hand. The fish are poured into the carts over thesides of the boats like water. Old fishermen stand aside and look onwith a sense of having wasted their youth. They recall the time whenthey went fishing in the North Sea and had to be content to sell theircatch at a shilling and sixpence a cran--a cran being equal to fourgurries, or about a thousand herrings. Who is there now who would selleven a hundred herrings for one and sixpence? Who is there who wouldsell a hundred herrings for ten and sixpence? Yet one gig alone thismorning has brought in fourteen thousand herrings. No wonder thatthere is an atmosphere of excitement in the harbour. No wonder thatthe carts almost run over you as they make journey after journeybetween boat and barrel. No wonder that three different sorts ofsea-gulls--the herring gull, the lesser black-headed gull, and theblack-backed gull--have gathered about us in screaming multitudes andfill the air like a snowstorm. Every child in the town seems to bemaking for home with its finger in a fish's mouth, or in two fishes'mouths, or in three fishes' mouths. Artists have hurried down to theharbour, and have set up their easels on every spot that is notalready occupied by a fish barrel or an auctioneer or a man with aknife in his teeth preparing to gut a dogfish. The town has lost itshead. It has become Midas for the day. Every time it opens its mouth aherring comes out. A doom of herrings has come upon us. The smellrises to heaven. It is as though we were breathing fish-scales. Eventhe pretty blue overalls of the children have become spotted. Everywhere barrels and boxes have been piled high. We are hoistingthem on to carts--farm carts, grocers' carts, coal carts, any sort ofcarts. We must get rid of the stuff at all costs. Anything to get itup the hill to the railway station. The very horses are frenzied. Theystick their toes into the hill and groan. The drivers, excited withcupidity as they think of all the journeys they will be able to makebefore evening, bully them and beat them with the end of the reins. Their eyes are excited, their gestures impatient. They fill the townwith clamour and smell. It is an occasion on which, as the vulgar say, they wouldn't call the Queen their aunt. .. . 

This, I fancy, is where all the romance of the sea began--in the storyof a greedy man and a fresh herring. The ship was a symbol of man'squesting stomach long before it was a symbol of his questing soul. Hewas a hungry man, not a poet, when he built the first harbour. Luckily, the harbour made a poet of him. Sails gave him wings. Helearned to traffic for wonders. He became a traveller. He told tales. He discovered the illusion of horizons. Perhaps, however, it is lessthe sailor than the ship that attracts our imagination. The ship seemsto convey to us more than anything else a sense at once of perfectfreedom and perfect adventure. 

That is why we are content to stand on the harbour stones all day andwatch anything with sails. We ourselves want to live in some suchfreedom and adventure as this. We are feeding our appetite for libertyas we gaze hungrily after the ships making their way out of harbourinto the sea. 

III

THE BETTING MAN

If The Panther wins the Derby, [He didn't] as most people apparentlyexpect him to do, his victory will carry more weight among frequentersof race-courses as an argument for Socialism than any that has yetbeen invented. For The Panther is a Government-bred horse, born andbrought up in defiance of the _laissez-faire_ principles of Mr HaroldCox. He will therefore carry the colours of a great principle at Epsomas well as those of his present lessee. Who would have thought fiveyears ago that the Derby favourite of 1919 would start under so gravea responsibility?

Not that racing men have much time to spare for thoughts about socialproblems, even when these are related to a horse. Theirs is a busylife. They enjoy little of the leisure that falls to the lot ofstatesmen and haberdashers. 

Their anxieties are a serial story continued from one edition of theday's papers to another Nor does the last edition of the evening papermake an end of their anxieties. It is not an epilogue to one day somuch as a prologue to the next. The programme of races for thefollowing day suggests more problems than the Peace Conference itselfcould settle in a month. The racing man, having studied the names ofthe horses entered, goes out to buy some tobacco. As he takes hischange from the tobacconist, he asks: "Have you heard anything forto-morrow?" The tobacconist says: "I heard Green Cloak for the firstrace, " The racing man nods. "You didn't hear anything for the bigrace?" he asks. "No. Somebody was saying Holy Saint. " "I heard OilyHair, " says the racing man gravely. "Good-night. " And he goes out. Hisbrow becomes knitted with thought as he moves off along the pavement. He tells himself that Holy Saint certainly does offer difficulties. Holy Saint is a notoriously bad starter. If he could be trusted to getaway, he would be one of the finest horses of his year inlong-distance races. But he is continually being left at the post. Toback him would be pure gambling. He could win if he liked, but wouldhe like? On the whole, Oily Hair is a safer horse to back. He hasalready beaten Holy Saint in the Chiswick Cup, and only lost theScotch Plate to Disaster by a neck. As the racing man allows hismemory to dwell on the achievements of Oily Hair his confidence rises. "I see nothing to beat him, " he says to himself. He has just decidedto put "a fiver" on him when he meets an acquaintance, who suggests adrink. As they drink, the talk turns on horses. "What are you backingin the big race to-morrow?" "Have you heard anything?" "I heard OilyHair. " "I think not. I'll tell you why. Tommy Fitzgibbon's youngestsister is at school with two sisters of Willie Soames, who's going toride Peace on Earth to-morrow, and one of them told her that Williehad written to her to put every halfpenny she has on Peace on Earth. ""I'm sick, sore and tired of backing Peace on Earth. He's acantankerous beast that seems to take a positive pleasure in losingraces. " "Well, remember what I told you. .. . "

On arriving home our sportsman goes to his shelves and takes down thelast annual volume of _M'Call's Racing Chronicle and Pocket TurfCalendar_, and looks up Peace on Earth in the index. He turns up therecord of one race after another, and finds that the horse has abetter past than he had remembered. He cannot make up his mind what todo. He looks over several weekly papers to see if any of them canthrow light on his difficulties. Each of them names a different winnerfor the big race. When he puts on his pyjamas that night, all he knowsis that he has decided to decide nothing till the next day. 

Next day he once more reads the names of the horses entered for thevarious races, and glances down the list of winners selected by theracing prophet in the morning paper. Having breakfasted late, he findshe has only about an hour to waste before catching a train for theraces, and he resolves to pay a call at the "Bird of Paradise, " wherea friend of his who has an unusual gift for picking up information isusually to be found about noon. He learns from the landlord that hisfriend has been in and gone away, but the landlord tells him that hehears Pudding is a certainty. 

"Have you any reason for thinking so?"

"Well, there was a man in here who has a son a policeman close byJobson's stables, and he tells me that everybody in the neighbourhoodhas been backing Pudding down to their last spoon. That looks as ifword had been passed round that it was going to win. " The racing manpasses out and looks in at the "Pink Elephant" to see if his friend isthere. He is seated at a little table in an upstairs parlour with fourothers, all drinking whisky and exchanging tips. They belong to themost credulous race of men alive. They are all believers in what iscalled information, and information is simply the betting man's namefor gossip. The friend is speaking in a low but excited voice to hiscompanions, who crouch over towards him in order to catch informationnot meant for the rest of the room. He tells how he had just been into buy a paper at his newsagent's, and how his newsagent had beencalling on his solicitor that morning, and the solicitor told him thatthe caller who had just left as he came in was Gordon, the owner ofCutandrun, and Gordon said that Cutandrun was the biggest thing thathad ever come into his hands. The buzz-buzz of talk in thesmoke-filled room and the clatter of passing carts makes it difficultto hear him, but the others lean over the table with red, intentfaces, like men among whom an apostle has come. They do not stay longover their drinks, as they have not much time for social pleasures. They swallow their whisky with a quick gesture look at their watches, stand up hurriedly and part with handshakes. 

Then comes a drive to the railway station where race-cards are beingsold. The racing-man buys a "card" and several papers. He looks downthe lists of the horses again in the train, and tries to make up hismind whether to take the tobacconist's tip and back Green Cloak forthe first race. He believes greatly in breeding, and by far thebest-bred horse in the race is Liberal, who has three Derby winners inhis pedigree. Then there is Red Rose, who created a sensation a monthago by winning two races in a day. He decides to do nothing till hesees the horses themselves. He pays thirty shillings at the turnstileof the race-course and is admitted to the grand stand. Already one ortwo bookmakers are shouting from their stands, and some of them havechalked up on blackboards the odds they are willing to give in the bigrace. He looks at the board and sees that he can get twenties againstCutandrun. A five-pound note might bring him a hundred pounds. On theother hand, if Oily Hair was going to win, he wouldn't like to missit. The bookmakers are offering fives against it. Holy Saint is hotfavourite at two to one. That alone makes him impatient of it, for hedislikes backing favourites. He prefers the big risks, with greatscoops if he wins. However, he will make up his mind later. Meanwhile, he will go to the paddock and have a look at the horses for the firstrace. Half-a-dozen horses are already out, and men with numbers ontheir arms are walking them round and round in a ring. He consults hiscard and sees that No. 7 is Brighton Beauty, and No. 2 (a slender, glossy, black beast with a white star in his forehead) Green Cloak. Liberal has not appeared. The numbers of the starters, with the namesof the jockeys, are now being hoisted. He makes a pencil-mark oppositethe name of each starter on his racing-card, and jots down the name ofthe jockey. Raff, he sees, is riding Green Cloak. That is in itsfavour. 

When he gets back to the betting-ring, the bookmakers are shoutinghoarsely against each other. Liberal is a very hot favourite. They areshouting: "I'll take two to one. I'll take two to one. Five to one barone. A hundred to eight Green Cloak. " He feels almost sure Liberalwill win, but Green Cloak--he wishes he had asked the tobacconistwhere he got his information from. Anyhow, half-a-sovereign doesn'tmatter much. He goes up to a bookmaker, and says: "Ten shillings GreenCloak. " The bookmaker turns to his clerk and says: "Six pound five toten shillings Green Cloak, " gives a red-white-and-blue card with hisname and a number on it; the other takes the card, writes on the backof it the name of the horse and the amount of the bet, and makes forthe stand to see the race. The horses have now come out, and are offone after another to the starting-post. Green Cloak would be hard tomiss because of his jockey's colours--old gold, scarlet sleeves, andgreen and black quartered cap. The bell has hardly rung to announcethat the race has begun when men in the crowd begin to dogmatise aboutthe result. One man keeps saying: "Green Cloak wins this race. GreenCloak wins this race. " Another says: "Liberal leads. " Another says:"No; that's Jumping Frog. " To the unaccustomed eye the horses seem asclose to each other as a swarm of bees. Suddenly, however, a bay horsesprings forward and seems to put a length between itself and theothers at every stride. The people in the stand shout: "Liberal!Liberal!" It wins by about ten lengths. Green Cloak is second, but abad second. The crowd begins to pour down from the stand again. Thosewho have won wait near the bookmakers till the winner has been to theunsaddling enclosure and the announcement "All right" is made. Thenthe bookmakers begin to pay out, and the crowd moves off to thepaddock again to see the horses for the next race. 

Friends stop each other and exchange information in low voices. Othersdo their best to listen in the hope of overhearing information: "Ihear Tomsk, " "Johnnie says lay your last penny on Glasgow Pet, " "I'mgoing to back Submarine. " And the parade of the horses, the hoistingof the names of the starters and jockeys, the laying of the bets, andthe climbing of the grand stand are all gone through over and overagain. The betting man has no time even for a drink. To the casualonlooker a day's horse-racing has the appearance of a day's holiday. But the racing man knows better. He is collecting information, comingto decisions, wandering among the bookies in the hope of getting agood price, climbing into the grand stand and descending from it, studying the points of the horses all the time with as little chanceof leisure as though he were a stockbroker during a financial crisisor a sailor on a sinking ship. 

Perhaps, in the train on the way home from the races, he may relax alittle. Certainly, if he has backed Cutandrun, he will. For Cutandrunwon at ten to one, and his pocket is full of five-pound notes. Hefeels quite jocular now that the strain is over. He makes puns on thenames of the defeated horses. "Lie Low lay low all right, " heannounces to the compartment, indifferent to the scowls of the man inthe corner who had backed it. "Hopscotch didn't hop quite fastenough. " Were he tipsy, he could not jest more fluently. His jokes aresmall, but be not too severe on him. The man has had a hard day. Waitbut an hour, and care will descend on him again. He will not have satdown to dinner in his hotel for three minutes till someone will besaying to him: "Have you heard anything for the Cup to-morrow?" Thereis no six-hours day for the betting man. He is the drudge of chancefor every waking hour. He is enviable only for one thing. He knowswhat to talk about to barbers. 

IV

THE HUM OF INSECTS

It makes all the difference whether you hear an insect in the bedroomor in the garden. In the garden the voice of the insect soothes; inthe bedroom it irritates. In the garden it is the hum of spring; inthe bedroom it seems to belong to the same school of music as the bizzof the dentist's drill or the saw-mill. It may be that it is not theright sort of insect that invades the bedroom. Even in the garden wewave away a mosquito. Either its note is in itself offensive or wedislike it as the voice of an unscrupulous enemy. By an unscrupulousenemy I mean an enemy that attacks without waiting to be attacked. Themosquito is a beast of prey; it is out for blood, whether one is asgentle as Tom Pinch or uses violence. The bee and the wasp are incomparison noble creatures. They will, so it is said, never injure ahuman being unless a human being has injured them. The worst of it isthey do not discriminate between one human being and another, and thebee that floats over the wall into our garden may turn out to havebeen exasperated by the behaviour of a retired policeman five milesaway who struck at it with a spade and roused in it a blind passionfor reprisals. That or something like it is, probably, the explanationof the stings perfectly innocent persons receive from an insect thatis said never to touch you if you leave it alone. As a matter of fact, when a bee loses its head, it does not even wait for a human being inorder to relieve its feelings, I have seen a dog racing round a fieldin terror as a result of a sting from an angry bee. I have seen aturkey racing round a farmyard in terror as a result of the samething. All the trouble arose from a human being's having very properlyremoved a large quantity of honey from a row of hives. I do not admitthat the bee would have been justified in stinging even the humanbeing--who, after all, is master on this partially civilised planet. It had certainly no right to sting the dog or the turkey, which had aslittle to do with stealing the honey as the Vice-Chancellor of OxfordUniversity. Yet in spite of such things, and of the fact that somebreeds of bees are notorious for their crossness, especially whenthere is thunder in the air, the bee is morally far higher in thescale than the mosquito. Not only does it give you honey instead ofmalaria, and help your apples and strawberries to multiply, but itaims at living a quiet, inoffensive life, at peace with everybody, except when it is annoyed. The mosquito does what it does in coldblood. That is why it is so unwelcome a bedroom visitor. 

But even a bee or a wasp, I fancy, would seem tedious company at twoin the morning, especially if it came and buzzed near the pillow. Itis not so much that you would be frightened: if the wasp alighted onyour cheek, you could always lie still and hold your breath till ithad finished trying to sting--that is an infallible preventive. Butthere is a limit to the amount of your night's rest that you arewilling to sacrifice in this way. You cannot hold your breath whileyou are asleep, and yet you dare not cease holding your breath while awasp is walking over your face. Besides, it might crawl into your ear, and what would you do then? Luckily, the question does not often arisein practice owing to the fact that the wasp and the bee are more likehuman beings than mosquitoes and have more or less the same habits ofnocturnal rest. As we sit in the garden, however, the mind is bound tospeculate, and to revolve such questions as whether this hum ofinsects that delights us is in itself delightful, whether itsdelightfulness depends on its surroundings, or whether it depends onits associations with past springs. 

Certainly in a garden the noise of insects seems as essentiallybeautiful a thing as the noise of birds or the noise of the sea. Eventhese have been criticised, especially by persons who suffer fromsleeplessness, but their beauty is affirmed by the general voice ofmankind. These three noises appear to have an infinite capacity forgiving us pleasure--a capacity, probably, beyond that of any music ofinstruments. It may be that on hearing them we become a part of someuniversal music, and that the rhythm of wave, bird and insect echoesin some way the rhythm of our own breath and blood. Man is in lovewith life and these are the millionfold chorus of life--the magnifiedecho of his own pleasure in being alive. At the same time, ourpleasure in the hum of insects is also, I think, a pleasure ofreminiscence. It reminds us of other springs and summers in othergardens. It reminds us of the infinite peace of childhood when on afine day the world hardly existed beyond the garden-gate. We can smellmoss-roses--how we loved them as children!--as a bee swings by. Insectafter insect dances through the air, each dying away like a note ofmusic, and we see again the border of pinks and the strawberries, andthe garden paths edged with box, and the old dilapidated wooden seatunder the tree, and an apple-tree in the long grass, and a streambeyond the apple-tree, and all those things that made us infinitelyhappy as children when we were in the country--happier than we wereever made by toys, for we do not remember any toys so intensely as weremember the garden and the farm. We had the illusion in those daysthat it was going to last for ever. There was no past or future. Therewas nothing real except the present in which we lived--a present inwhich all the human beings were kind, in which a dim-sightedgrandfather sang songs (especially a song in which the chorus began"Free and easy"), in which aunts brought us animal biscuits out oftown, in which there was neither man-servant nor maid-servant, neitherox nor ass, that did not seem to go about with a bright face. It was apresent that overflowed with kindness, though everybody except the oxand the ass believed that it was only by the skin of our teeth thatany of us would escape being burnt alive for eternity. Perhaps wethought little enough about it except on Sundays or at prayers. Certainly no one was gloomy about it before children. William JohnMcNabb, the huge labourer who looked after the horses, greeted us allas cheerfully as if we had been saved and ready for paradise. 

It would be unfair to human beings, however, to suggest that they areless lavish with their smiles than they were thirty years or so ago. Everybody--or almost everybody--still smiles. We can hardly stop totalk to a man in the street without a duet of smiles. The Prince ofWales smiles across the world from left to right, and the Crown Princeof Japan smiles across the world from right to left. We cannot open anillustrated paper without seeing smiling statesmen, cricketers, jockeys, oarsmen, bridegrooms, clergymen, actresses andundergraduates. Yet somehow we are no longer made happy by a smile. Weno longer take it, as we used to take it, as evidence that the personsmiling is either happy or kind. It then seemed to come from theheart. It now seems a formula. It is, we may admit, a pleasant anduseful formula. But a man might easily be a burglar or a murderer or aCabinet Minister and smile. Some people are supposed to smile merelyin order to show what good teeth they have. William John McNabb, I amsure, never did that. 

We need not grumble at our contemporaries, however, for not being sofine as William John McNabb. To children, for all we know, the worldmay still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happyand smile because they are kind. The world will always remain to achild the chief of toys, and the hum of insects as enchanting as thehum of a musical top. Even those of us who are grown up can recoverthis enchantment, not only through the pleasures of memory but throughthe endless pleasures of watching the things that inhabit the earth. The world is always waiting to be discovered in full, and yet no lifeis long enough to discover the whole of a single county, or even thewhole of a single parish. Who alive, for instance, knows all the molesof Sussex? I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and, though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had readdescriptions of moles, the living creature was as unexpected as if onehad come on it silent upon a peak in Darien. I had never expected itto look so black and glossy in the midday sun or to have that littlepink snout that made me think of it as a small underground pig. I hadalways been told, too, that the sound of a footstep would frighten amole, but this mole only began to show fright at the sound of voices. Then it began to tear its way into the undergrowth with paws and snoutever trying to overtake each other. Mr Blunden has described how

 The lost mole tries to pierce the mattocked clay In agony and terror of the sun. 

I got much the same impression of agony and terror as this poorcreature dug its way into the grass and ferns and, coming out at thefar end of the clump, bolted under a tree like a frightened pig. Andyet, they say, this poor little coward is a fierce animal enough. Heis, we are told, impelled by so cruel a hunger that he would die of itwere it to go unsatisfied for even twenty-four hours. If he can findnothing else to eat, he will kill and eat a fellow-mole. So theauthorities tell us, but I wonder how many of the authorities haveeven seen a mole in the very act of cannibalism. How many of them havefollowed him on his long journeys through the bowels of the earth? Hecertainly looked no South Sea monster on the Sunday morning on whichfor a few seconds I watched him. Nor would John Clare have writtenaffectionately about him had he been entirely bloody-minded. 

Then there was the hedgehog. The charm of hedgehogs is that we do notsee them every day--that their appearance is a secret and an accident. They are a part of the busy life that goes on all about us asmysteriously as the movements of spirits. Consequently, when I waslooking over a sloping field the other evening and, hearing acrackling as of sticks being trodden on, turned my eyes and saw aliving creature making its way out of a wood into the grass, I wasdelighted to find that it was a hedgehog and not a man or a rat. Icould see it only dimly in the twilight, and it was difficult tobelieve that so small an animal had made so great a noise. Thepleasure of recognition, unfortunately, was not mutual. No sooner didthe hedgehog hear a foot pressing on the road than it gave up allthoughts of its supper of insects and hobbled back into the thicket. Iregretted only that I had not made a greater noise, and scared it intorolling itself into a ball, as everybody says it does when alarmed. But it is perhaps just as well that the hedgehog did not merely repeatitself in this way. We like a certain variety of behaviour inanimals--some element of the unexpected that always keeps ourcuriosity alive and looking forward. 

But we must not exaggerate the pleasure to be got from moles andhedgehogs. They make a part of our being happy, but they do notdelight the whole of our being, as a child is delighted by the worldevery spring. It is probably the child in us that responds mostwholeheartedly to such pleasures. They, like the hum of insects, helpto restore the illusion of a world that is perfectly happy because itis such a Noah's Ark of a spectacle and everybody is kind. But, evenas we submit to the illusion in the garden, we become restive in ourdeck-chairs and remember the telephone or the daily paper or a letterthat has to be written. And reality weighs on us, like a hand laid ona top, making an end of the spinning, making an end of the music. Theworld is no longer a toy dancing round and round. It is a problem, arun-down machine, a stuffy room full of little stabbing creatures thatmake an irritating noise. 

V

CATS

The Champion Cat Show has been held at the Crystal Palace, but thechampion cat was not there. One could not possibly allow him to appearin public. He is for show, but not in a cage. He does not compete, because he is above competition. You know this as well as I. Probablyyou possess him. I certainly do. That is the supreme test of a cat'sexcellence--the test of possession. One does not say: "You should seeBrailsford's cat" or "You should see Adcock's cat" or "You should seeSharp's cat, " but "You should see our cat. " There is nothing we aremore egoistic about--not even children--than about cats. I have hearda man, for lack of anything better to boast about, boasting that hiscat eats cheese. In anyone else's cat it would have seemed an inferiorhabit and only worth mentioning to the servant as a warning. Butbecause the cat happens to be his cat, this man talks about its viceexcitedly among women as though it were an accomplishment. It isseldom that we hear a cat publicly reproached with guilt by anyoneabove a cook. He is not permitted to steal from our own larder. But ifhe visits the next-door house by stealth and returns over the wallwith a Dover sole in his jaws, we really cannot help laughing. We area little nervous at first, and our mirth is tinged with pity at thethought of the probably elderly and dyspeptic gentleman who has hadhis luncheon filched away almost from under his nose. If we were quitesure that it was from No. 14, and not from No. 9 or No. 11, that thefish had been stolen, we might--conceivably--call round and offer topay for it. But with a cat one is never quite sure. And we cannot callround on all the neighbours and make a general announcement that ourcat is a thief. In any case the next move lies with the wrongedneighbour. As day follows day, and there is no sign of his irate andmurder-bent figure advancing up the path, we recover our mentalbalance and begin to see the cat's exploit in a new light. We do notyet extol it on moral grounds, but undoubtedly, the more we think ofit, the deeper becomes our admiration. Of the two great heroes of theGreeks we admire one for his valour and one for his cunning. The epicof the cat is the epic of Odysseus. The old gentleman with the Doversole gradually assumes the aspect of a Polyphemus outwitted--outwittedand humiliated to the point of not even being able to throw thingsafter his tormentor. Clever cat! Nobody else's cat could have donesuch a thing. We should like to celebrate the Rape of the Dover Solein Latin verse. 

As for the Achillean sort of prowess, we do not demand it of a cat, but we are proud of it when it exists. There is a pleasure in seeingstrange cats fly at his approach, either in single file over the wallor in the scattered aimlessness of a bursting bomb. Theoretically, wehate him to fight, but, if he does fight and comes home with a tornear, we have to summon up all the resources of our finer nature inorder not to rejoice on noticing that the cat next door looks asthough it had been through a railway accident. I am sorry for the catnext door. I hate him so, and it must be horrible to be hated. But heshould not sit on my wall and look at me with yellow eyes. If his eyeswere any other colour--even the blue that is now said to be the markof the runaway husband--I feel certain I could just manage to endurehim. But they are the sort of yellow eyes that you expect to seelooking out at you from a hole in the panelling in a novel by Mr SaxRohmer. The only reason why I am not frightened of them is that thecat is so obviously frightened of me. I never did him any injuryunless to hate is to injure. But he lowers his head when I appear asthough he expected to be guillotined. He does not run away: he merelycrouches like a guilty thing. Perhaps he remembers how often he hasstepped delicately over my seed-beds, but not so delicately as toleave no mark of ruin among the infant lettuces and theless-than-infant autumn-sprouting broccoli. These things I couldforgive him, but it is not easy to forgive him the look in his eyeswhen he watches a bird at its song. They are ablaze with evil. Hebecomes a sort of Jack the Ripper at the opera. People tell us that weshould not blame cats for this sort of thing--that it is their natureand so forth. They even suggest that a cat is no more cruel in eatingrobin than we are cruel ourselves in eating chicken. This seems to meto be quibbling. In the first place, there is an immense differencebetween a robin and a chicken. In the second place, we are willing toshare our chicken with the cat--at least, we are willing to share theskin and such of the bones as are not required for soup. Besides, acat has not the same need of delicacies as a human being. It can eat, and even digest, anything. It can eat the black skin of filletedplaice. It can eat the bits of gristle that people leave on the sideof their plates. It can eat boiled cod. It can eat New Zealand mutton. There is no reason why an animal with so undiscriminating a palateshould demand song-birds for its food, when even human beings, who arefairly unscrupulous eaters, have agreed in some measure to abstainfrom them. On reflection, however, I doubt if it is his appetite forbirds that makes the cat with the yellow eyes feel guilty. If you wereable to talk to him in his own language, and formulate youraccusations against him as a bird-eater, he would probably be merelypuzzled and look on you as a crank. If you pursued the argument andcompelled him to moralise his position, he would, I fancy, explainthat the birds were very wicked creatures and that their cruelties tothe worms and the insects were more than flesh and blood could stand. He would work himself up into a generous idealisation of himself asthe guardian of law and order amid the bloody strife of thecabbage-patch--the preserver of the balance of nature. If cats were asclever as we, they would compile an atrocities blue-book about worms. Alas, poor thrush, with how bedraggled a reputation you would comethrough such an exposure! With how Hunnish a tread you would bedepicted treading the lawn, sparing neither age nor sex, seizing theinfant worm as it puts out its head to take its first bewildered peepat the rolling sun! Cats could write sonnets on such a theme. .. . Thenthere is that other beautiful potential poem, _The Cry of theSnail_. .. . How tender-hearted cats are! Their sympathy seems to be allbut universal, always on the look out for an object, ready to extenditself anywhere where it is needed, except, as is but human, to theirvictims. Yellow eyes or not, I begin to be persuaded that the cat nextdoor is a noble fellow. It may well be that his look as I pass is alook not of fear but of repulsion. He has seen me going out among theworms with a sharp--no, not a very sharp--spade, and regards me as nobetter than an ogre. If I could only explain to him! But I shall neverbe able to do so. He could no more appreciate my point of view aboutworms than I can appreciate his about robins. Luckily, we both eatchicken. This may ultimately help us to understand one another. 

On the other hand, part of the fascination of cats may be due to thefact that it is so difficult to come to an understanding with them. Aman talks to a horse or a dog as to an equal. To a cat he has to bedeferential as though it had some Sphinx-like quality that baffledhim. He cannot order a cat about with the certainty of being obeyed. He cannot be sure that, if he speaks to it, it will even raise itseyes. If it is perfectly comfortable, it will not. A cat is obedientonly when it is hungry or when it takes the fancy. It may be aparasite, but it is never a servant. The dog does your bidding, butyou do the cat's. At the same time, the contrast between the cat andthe dog has often been exaggerated by dog-lovers. They tell youstories of dogs that remained with their dead masters, as though therewere no fidelity in cats. It was only the other day, however, that thenewspapers gave an account of a cat that remained with the body of itsmurdered mistress in the most faithful tradition of the dogs. I know, again, of cats that will go out for a walk with a humanfellow-creature, as dogs do. I have frequently seen a lady walkingacross Hampstead Heath with a cat in train. When you go for a walkwith a dog, however, the dog protects you: when you go for a walk witha cat, you feel that you are protecting the cat. It is strange thatthe cat should have imposed the myth of its helplessness on us. It isan animal with an almost boundless capacity for self-help. It can jumpup walls. It can climb trees. It can run, as the proverb says, like"greased lightning. " It is armed like an African chief. Yet it hascontrived to make itself a pampered pet, so that we are alarmed if itattempts to follow us out of the gate into a world of dogs, and onlyfeel happy when it is purring--rolling on its back and purring as werub its Adam's apple--by the fireside. There is nothing that gives agreater sense of comfort than the purring of a cat. It is the mostflattering music in nature. One feels, as one listens, like a humblelover in a bad novel, who says: "You do, then, like me--alittle--after all?" The fact that a cat is not utterly miserable inour presence always comes with the freshness and delight of asurprise. The happiness of a crowing baby, newly introduced to us, maybe still more flattering, but a cat will get round people who cannottolerate babies. 

It is all the more to be wondered at that a cat, which is such amaster of this conversational sort of music, should ever attempt anyother. There never was an animal less fit to be a singer. Someone--wasit Cowper?---has said that there are no really ugly voices in nature, and that he could imagine that there was something to be said even forthe donkey's bray. I should have thought that the beautiful voices innature were few, and that most of them could be defended only on theground of some pleasant association. Humanity, at least, has beenunanimous in its condemnation of the cat as part of nature's chorus. Poems have been written in praise of the corncrake as a singer, butnever of the cat. All the associations we have with cats have notaccustomed us to that discordant howl. It converts love itself into atorment such as can be found only in the pages of a twentieth-centurynovel. In it we hear the jungle decadent--the beast in dissolution, but not yet civilised. When it rises at night outside the window, wealways explain to visitors: "No; that's not Peter. That's the cat nextdoor with the yellow eyes. " The man who will not defend the honour ofhis cat cannot be trusted to defend anything. 

VI

MAY

May is chiefly remarkable for being the only month in which one doesnot like cats. June, too, perhaps; but, after that, one does not mindif the garden is full of cats. One likes to have a wild beast whosemovements, lazy as those of Satan, will terrify the childish birds outof the gooseberry bushes and the raspberries and strawberries. He willnot, we know, have much chance of catching them as late as that. Theywill be as cunning as he, and the robin will wind his alarum-clock, the starling in the plum-tree will cry out like a hysterical drake, and the blackbird will make as much noise as a farmyard. The cat canbut blink at the clamour of such a host of cunning sentinels and, pretending that he had come out only to take the air, returnmajestically to his dinner of leavings in the kitchen. In May andJune, however, one does not wish the birds to be frightened. One wouldlike one's garden to be an Alsatia for all their wings and all theirsongs. There is no hope of this in a garden full of cats. Even aTetrazzini would cease to be able to produce her best trills if everytime she opened her mouth, a tiger padded in her direction down a pathof currant bushes. There are, it may be admitted, heroic exceptions. The chaffinch sits in the plum and blusters out his music, cat or nocat. To be sure, he only sings, a flush of all the colours, in orderto distract our attention. He is not an artist but a watchman. If youlook into the buddleia-tree beside him, you will see his hen movingabout in silence, creeping, dancing, fluttering, as she gorges herselfwith insects. She is a fly-catcher at this season, leaping into theair and pirouetting as she seizes her prey and returns to the bough. She is restless and is not content with the spoil of a single tree. She flings herself gracefully, like a ballet-dancer, into the plum, and takes up a caterpillar in her beak. She does not eat it at once, but stands still, eyeing you as though awaiting your applause. Herhusband, sitting on the topmost spray, goes on singing his version of_The Roast Beef of Old England_. She does not even now eat thecaterpillar, but hurries along the paths of the branches with theobvious purpose of finding a tasty insect to eat long with it. It maybe that there are insects that play the part of mustard orWorcestershire sauce in the chaffinch world. What a meal she is makingin any case before she hurries back to her nest! It seems that amongthe chaffinches the male is the more spiritual of the sexes. But thenhe has so little to do compared with the female. He is still in thatstate of savagery in which the male dresses finely and idles. 

The thrush cannot carry on with the same indifference to cats. He isthe most nervous of parents, and spends half his time calling on hischildren to be careful. The young thrush hopping about on the lawnknows nothing of cats and refuses to believe that they are dangerous. He is not afraid even of human beings. His parent becomesargumentative to the point of tears, but the young one stays where heis and looks at you with a sideways jerk of his head as much as tosay: "Listen to the old 'un. " You, too, begin to be alarmed at suchboldness. You know, like the pitiful parent, that the world is a verydangerous place, and that your neighbour's cat goes about like aroaring lion seeking whom he may devour. It has been contended by somemen of science that all birds are born fearless after the manner ofthe young thrush, and that fear is a lesson that has to be taught toeach new generation by the more experienced parents. Fear, they say, is not an inherited instinct, but a racial tradition that has to becommunicated like the morality of civilised people. The young thrushon the lawn is certainly a witness on behalf of this theory. He hopstowards you instead of away from you. He moves his gaping beak asthough he were trying to say something. If there were no cats in theworld, you would encourage his confidences, but you feel that, much asyou would like to make friends with him, you must, for his own sake, give him his first lesson in fear. You try to give yourself theappearance of a grim giant: it has no effect on him. You make a quickmovement to chase him away: he runs a few yards and then stops andlooks round at you as though you were playing a game. It is too muchto expect of you that you will actually throw stones at a bird for itsgood, and so you give up his education as a bad job. Alas, in twodays, your worst fears are justified. His dead body is found, torn andruffled, among the bushes. Some cat has murdered him--murdered him, evidently, not in hunger, but just for fun. Two indignant children, one gold, one brown, discover the dead body and bring in the tale. They prepare the funeral rites of one whose only sin was hisinnocence. This is not the first burial in the garden. There isalready a cemetery marked with half-a-dozen crosses and heaped withflowers under the pear-tree on the south wall. Here is where the mousewas buried; here where the starling; and here the rabbit's skull. Theyall lie there under the earth in boxes, as you and I will lie, expecting the Last Trump. The robins are not kinder to the "friendlessbodies of unburied men" than are children to the bodies of mice andbirds. Here the ghost of no creature haunts reproaching us with theabsence of a tomb, as the dead sailor washed up on an alien shorereproaches us so often in the pages of _The Greek Anthology_. There isa procession to the grave and all due ceremony. There is even afuneral service. Over the starling, perhaps, it lacked something inappropriateness. The buriers meant well however. Their favourite inverse at the time was _Lars Porsena of Clusium_, and they gave thestarling the best they knew--gave it to him from beginning to end. What he made of it, there is no telling: he is, it is said animpressionable bird, though something of a satirist. Someone, overhearing them, recommended a briefer and more fitting service forthe future. The young thrush had the benefit of the advice. He waslaid to his last rest with the recitation of that noblest ofvaledictories: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun, " over his tomb. Heis now gone where there is no cat or parent to disturb. The priestswho buried him declare that he has been turned into a goldennightingale, and that there must be no noise or romping in the gardenfor three days, as not till then will he have arrived safely at theAppleiades. That is the name they give to the Pleiades--the sevengolden islands whither pass the souls of dead mice and birds and dollsand where Scarlatti lives and where you, too, may expect to go if youplease them. Even the black cat will probably go there--one's ownblack cat. But not the neighbour's cat--the reddish-brown one--thief, murderer and beast. It is the neighbour's cat that makes one believethere is a hell. 

Short is the memory of man, however. Shorter the memory of children. There is no gloom that can withstand May pouring itself out in thedeep blue of anchusa and the paler blue of lupin, gushing out in theyellow of laburnum, tossing like the tides in the wind. One is gloomy, perhaps, when one looks at the lettuces and sees how slow is theirgrowth. Watching a plant grow is like watching a kettle boil. It seemsto take ĉons. The patience of gardeners always astonishes me. Weregardening my profession, I should spend half my time inventing schemesfor making plants grow up in a night like Jonah's gourd. I should notmind about parsnips. A parsnip might mature as slowly as an oak andlive as long for all I care. There is something, it may be, to be saidfor parsnips, as there is something, it may be, to be said for MrBonar Law. But I do not know it. They do not even tempt the slugs andthe leather-jackets away from the lettuces. There is nothing thatpuzzles one more in a friend than if he confesses to a taste forparsnips. Immediately, a gulf yawns deeper than could be caused by anyconfession of religious or moral eccentricity. One's sympathiesinstinctively close up like a sea-anemone touched by a child's finger. Yet people eat them. All that you and I know about them is that kindwords do not butter them; but, if you go to Covent Garden at the righttime of the year, you will undoubtedly find them being sold for food. Why should they make one gloomy, however, seeing that one hassuccessfully excluded them from one's garden? Perhaps one is gloomybecause of the reflection that there must be many other gardens inwhich they are growing. Gloom of this kind, however, is merephilanthropy. Turn your eyes, instead, to the strawberry-flowers andthink of June. Consider the broad beans and the young peas safe amidtheir tall stakes. Consider even the spring onions. Is it any wonderthat the chaffinch sings and the wren is operatic on the thither sideof the garden wall? High in the air the swifts scream, as they rushhere and there after their prey, like polo teams galloping, pullingup, scrimmaging, turning, and off on the gallop again. The swift is anevil-looking bird, but playful. He has none of the grace of theswallow, for he cannot fold his wings, and he is black as adevil-worshipper. Still, he knows more of sport than most of thebirds. I suspect that those rushing companions are not merely bent onfood but have chosen out one individual insect for their pursuit likea ball in a game. Otherwise, why such excitement? There are billionsof insects to be had for the mere asking. The fly-catcher knows this. He can spend an hour at a meal without ever flying more than ten yardsfrom his bough. Still, one rejoices in the energy of the swift. Onewishes the greenfinch had a little of it. The yellow splashes on hiswings are undoubtedly delightful, but why will he perch so long in theacacia wailing like a sick cricket? And why did Wordsworth write apoem in praise of him? Probably he mistook some other bird for him. Poets are like that. Or perhaps he liked a noise like the voice of asick cricket. One can never tell with Wordsworth. He had acuckoo-clock. 

VII

NEW YEAR PROPHECIES

Some people are surprised at the daring with which compilers ofprophetic almanacs forecast the details of the future. The mostastonishing thing of all is that nearly everybody still regards thefuture as a mystery. As a matter of fact, we know a great deal aboutthe future. We know that next year will contain 365 days. We know--andthis is rather a tribute to our cleverness--that the year 1924 willcontain 366 days, and even the exact point at which the extra day willslip in. Ask a savage to point you out the extra day in Leap Year, andhe will be more hopelessly at a loss than a man looking for a needlein a haystack, but even the most ignorant Christian will pick it outat the right end of February as neatly and inevitably as a love-birdon a barrel-organ picking out a fortune. The art of prophecy has grownwith civilisation. Prophets were regarded as almost divine persons inthe old days, but now every man is his own Isaiah. I am the mostmodest of the prophets, but even I venture to foretell that there willbe an annular eclipse of the sun in the coming year on the 8th ofApril, that it will begin at twenty-two minutes to 8 A. M. AtLiverpool, and that it will be visible at Greenwich. What clairvoyantcould go further? Test my mantic gifts at any other point and I doubtnot I can satisfy you. Do you want to know at what time there will behigh water at Aberdeen on the afternoon of the 21th January? Theanswer is: "Thirteen minutes past one. " Do you want to know whenpartridge shooting will begin? I do not even need to reflect beforegiving the answer: "The 1st of September. " And so I could go on, almost _ad infinitum_, filling in the details of the year in advance. On the 1st of March, for instance, being St David's Day, there will bea banquet at which Mr Lloyd George will make a reference to hills, mists, God, and a country called Wales. On the 28th of March, beingEaster Monday, there will be a Bank Holiday. On the 24th of May, beingEmpire Day, the majority of shops in Regent Street will hang out UnionJacks, and school children will salute the flag at Abinger Hammer, Communists in various parts of London gnashing their teeth the while. On the 15th of June the anniversary of Magna Charta will fall and willpass without any disturbance. On the 12th of July Orangemen will dressim in sashes and listen to orators whose speeches will prove thehollowness of the old adage that you cannot serve both God and Mammon. On the same day, Lord Birkenhead will celebrate his forty-ninthbirthday, showing that Gallopers are born not made. Need I continue, however? The year is obviously going to be a crowded one. It will, asI have said, contain 365 days and will come to an end at 12 P. M. On StSilvester's Day at the time of the new moon. 

I have said enough, I think, to prove that one knows a great deal moreabout the future than is generally realised. There may be sceptics whodoubt the virtue of my prophecies. If there be such, all I ask is thatthey should mark them well and verify each of them as its fulfilmentfalls due. The expense will be small. The most serious item will bethe journey to Aberdeen to see the tide coming in on the 24th ofJanuary; but, by taking up a collection in Aberdeen, it should bepossible to reduce one's net outlay by the better part of a shilling. On the whole, there never were prophecies easier to verify. Iconfidently challenge comparison between them and any prophecy made byany Cabinet Minister during the last five years. I even challengecomparison with the much more respectable prophecies contained in_Raphael's Prophetic Messenger_. Raphael at times strains ourcredulity. When he tells us, for instance, that on the 27th of Aprilit is going to be "cold and frosty" and that on the 29th of April weshall see "high winds, storms and thunder, " we feel that he is givinga free rein to his imagination and treating prophecy not as a sciencebut as an art. That the 30th of April will be "showery" I agree, buthow does he know that there will be "high wind and lightning" on the21st of December? I am also somewhat puzzled as to the means by whichhe arrives at the conclusions set forth in his "every-day" guide foreach day in the year. I can myself prophesy what you will do on eachday, but I cannot, as he does, prophesy what you ought to do. Thisintroduces an ethical element which is beyond my scope or horoscope. We need not quarrel with him when he dismisses the 1st of January as"an unimportant day, " but when he bids us on the 2nd of January"court, marry, and deal with females, " we may reasonably ask: "Why?"His advice for the 3rd is more acceptable. "Be careful, " he says, "until 1 P. M. Then seek work and push thy business. " That is about thetime of day one prefers to begin to "seek work"; would there were moredays in the calendar like the 3rd of January. Some saint must have itin his keeping. On the 7th, however, it will be safer to abstain fromwork altogether. Raphael says: "A very unfortunate P. M. And eveningfor most purposes. Court and deal with females. " Sunday, the 9th, isbetter. "Ask favours, " he says, "in the P. M. , and court. " ThoughJanuary is less than half gone, I confess I am getting a littlebreathless with so much courting. Raphael probably recognises this, and a note of caution creeps into his advice on the 13th, on which hebids us "court and marry in the morning, then be careful. " By the18th, however, he is his old self again. "Court, " he says cheerfully, "marry and ask favours and push ahead. " Then come one rather carefulday and two unfortunate ones, till on the 22nd, in a burst ofexuberance, he offers us the day of our lives. "Deal with others, " heexhorts us, "and push thy business, seek work, travel, court, marry, buy and speculate. " I doubt if all this can be crowded intotwenty-four hours outside _The Arabian Nights_. Besides, as a resultof following Raphael's advice, we are already bigamists several timesover, and have become sick of the sight of a Registry Office. By theend of the month even Raphael shows signs of being a little weary ofhis scarcely veiled incitements to Bluebeardism. For the 29th headvises: "Avoid females and be very careful, " and for the 30th, whichis a Sunday: "Avoid females and superiors. " I should just about thinkso. 

We need not follow Raphael through the rest of the year. It is enoughto say that he keeps us busy courting, marrying, seeking work, beingcareful, travelling, speculating, pushing ahead, and avoiding femalesright down till the end of December. He occasionally varies hisformula, as when on the 6th of April he bids us: "Do not quarrel. Bequiet, " and when, on the 23rd of June, he advises: "Ask favours offemales, and travel. " On the whole however, his recommendations leaveus with a sense of the desperate monotony of human existence. It is nowonder the novelists find it so difficult to invent an original plot. Nothing seems to happen--even in the future--except the same oldthing. It is all as monotonous as North, South, East and West. We turnwith relief to the page on which Raphael tells us what are the bestdays on which to hire maidservants and to set turkeys. Our interestredoubles when we come on his advice to those about to kill pigs. "Dothis, " he says, "between eight and ten in the morning, and between thefirst quarter and full of the Moon; the pigs will weigh more, and theflavour of the pork be improved. " Then there are "Legal and CommercialNotes, " one of which--"A bailiff must not break into a house, but hemay enter by the chimney "--suggests a subject for a drawing by MrGeorge Morrow. The medical notes are equally worthy of consideration. On one page we are given a list of herbal remedies, and we are toldhow one disease can be cured by pouring boiling water on hay (uplandhay being better than meadow hay) and applying it to the stomach. ButRaphael is no crank, as we see in his suggestion for the treatment ofinfluenza:

 "If you think you have got an attack of influenza slip off to bed at once and take the whisky or brandy bottle with you, and don't be afraid of it, for alcohol is the best medicine you can take as it kills the germs in the blood. Do not wait until you are half dead--remember that a stitch in time saves nine, even with health. "

Even on the subject of the care of children's teeth he makes it clearthat, whoever may have come under the blight of Pussyfoot, it is nothe:

 "I believe a Committee is to be appointed to inquire into the failing eyesight and decaying teeth in children. I think I have already stated that these troubles were due to the excessive amount of sugar or sweetstuffs consumed. All sweet things cause an excessive exudation of saliva from the gums, which affect and impair both the teeth and the eyesight for, despite of what dentist and doctor may say, there is an intimate relation between the two. Dr Sims Wallace, the eminent lecturer on Dental Surgery, recommends _Beer_ or dry _Champagne_ as an excellent mouth wash. They are also pleasant to the throat and stomach!"

The reader is now in a position to estimate for himself the extent towhich he can rely on Raphael's judgment, and to decide how far he willaccept the horoscope Raphael has cast for Mr Lloyd George. On this hewrites:

 "This gentleman has figured so prominently in our national affairs for the last few years, that it may not be out of place if I give a few remarks on his horoscope. The time of his birth is stated to have been January 17th, 1863, 8h. 55m. A. M. , but neither myself, nor other Astrologers, are satisfied with this hour. I think he was born some minutes sooner. At his birth the Sun was in exact Square to Jupiter, and also in Square to Mars, and Mars was in Opposition to Jupiter. These are very ominous and important aspects. The former denotes great extravagance, and waste of money, and the latter gives impetuosity, and danger to the person. "

He then proceeds to give a "brief analysis" of Mr Lloyd George'shoroscope:

 "The Sun near Ascendant--self-praise, egotism, self-satisfaction, fondness for publicity and notoriety. 

 "Venus and Mercury on Ascendant--fluency in speech, agreeableness, desire to please, fondness for Music, Arts, and Sciences. 

 "Mars in 2nd, in Opposition to Jupiter, unfavourable for financial undertakings, extravagance, carelessness, and losses in speculation. 

 "Uranus in 4th, trouble at end of life. 

 "Jupiter in the 8th, benefit or help from marriage partner. 

 "Moon near cusp of the 11th, many friends, especially females. 

 "The Aspects denote--Sun Square Jupiter and Mars, recklessness in expenditure, public disapprobation, and an unfavourable and sudden ending to life. 

 "Venus in Trine to Saturn, and Moon in Sextile to Jupiter--domestic relations of the happiest description, and the wife a great help. "

I frankly doubt if any man can foretell the future of Mr Lloyd George. No one knows what he will say or do to-morrow. We know what phrases hewill use, but we do not know on what side he will use them, or what hewill mean by them. All we know is that Sir William Sutherland will sayditto. 

Let us, then, return to safer fields of prophecy. What, really, isgoing to happen in 1921? I think I know. Human beings will behave likebewildered sheep. They will be chiefly notable for their lack of moralcourage. Good men will apologise for the deeds of bad men, and bad menwill do very much as they please. Cruel and selfish faces will be seenin every railway carriage and in every omnibus, but readers of therespectable Press will refuse to believe that there are any cruelpeople outside Germany and Russia. Not one but all the TenCommandments will be broken, and turkeys will be eaten on ChristmasDay. Men will die of disease, violence, famine and old age, and otherswill be born to take their place. Intellectuals will bepretentious--mules solemnly trying to look like Derby winners. Therewill be a considerable amount of lying, injustice, andself-righteousness. Dogs will be fairly decent, but some of them willbite. Above all, the human conscience will survive. It will survive. It will continue to be the old still, small voice we know--as stilland as small as it is possible to be without disappearing into silenceand nothingness. And some of us will get a certain amusement out of itall, and will prefer life rather than death. We shall also go onpuzzling ourselves as to what under the sun it all means. Not even amurderer will be without a friend or a pet dog or cat or bird. That iswhat 1921 will be like. That, at least, is as certain as the time ofthe high tide at Aberdeen on the 24th of January. 

VIII

ON KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE

It was only the other day that I came upon a full-grown man readingwith something like rapture a little book--_Ships and Seafaring Shownto Children_. His rapture was modified however, by the bitterreflection that he had already passed so great a part of his lifewithout knowing the difference between a ship and a barque; and, asfor sloops, yawls, cutters, ketches, and brigantines, they were simplythe Russian alphabet to him. I sympathise with his regret. It was anoble day in one's childhood when one had learned the names ofsailing-vessels, and, walking to the point of the harbour beyond thebathing-boxes, could correct the ignorance of a friend: "That's not aship. That's a brig. " To the boy from an inland town every vessel thatsails is a ship. He feels he is being shown a new and bewilderingworld when he is told that the only ship that has the right to becalled a ship is a vessel with three masts (at least), all of themsquare-rigged. When once he has learned his lesson, he finds anunaccustomed delight in wandering along the dirtiest coal-quay, andrecognising the barques by the fact that only two of their three mastsare square-rigged, and the brigs by the fact that they aresquare-rigged throughout--a sort of two-masted ships. Vessels havesuddenly become as real to him in their differences as the differentsorts of common birds. As for his feelings on the day on which he cantell for certain the upper fore topsail from the upper foretop-gallant sail, and either of these from the fore skysail, thecrossjack, or the mizzen-royal, they are those of a man who hasmastered a language and discovers himself, to his surprise, talking itfluently. The world of shipping has become articulate poetry to himinstead of a monotonous abracadabra. 

It is as though we can know nothing of a thing until we know its name. Can we be said to know what a pigeon is unless we know that it is apigeon? We may have seen it again and again, with its bottle-shouldersand shining neck, sitting on the edge of a chimney-pot, and noted itas a bird with a full bosom and swift wings. But if we are not able toname it except vaguely as a "bird, " we seem to be separated from it byan immense distance of ignorance. Learn that it is a pigeon however, and immediately it rushes towards us across the distance, likesomething seen through a telescope. No doubt to the pigeon-fancierthis would seem but the first lisping of knowledge, and he would notthink much of our acquaintance with pigeons if we could not tell acarrier from a pouter. That is the charm of knowledge--it is merely adoor into another sort of ignorance. There are always new differencesto be discovered, new names to be learned, new individualities to beknown, new classifications to be made. The world is so full of anumber of things that no man with a grain of either poetry or thescientific spirit in him has any right to be bored, though he livedfor a thousand years. Terror or tragedy may overwhelm him, but boredomnever. The infinity of things forbids it. I once heard of a tipsyyoung artist who, on his way home on a beautiful night, had hisattention called by a maudlin friend to the stars, where they twinkledlike a million larks. He raised his eyes to the heavens, then shookhis head. "There are too many of them, " he complained wearily. Itshould be remembered, however, that he was drunk, and that he did notknow astronomy. There could be too many stars only if they were allturned out on the same pattern, and made the same pattern on the sky. Fortunately, the universe is the creation not of a manufacturer but ofan artist. 

There is scarcely a subject that does not contain sufficient Asias ofdifferences to keep an explorer happy for a lifetime. It would be easyto do nothing but chase butterflies all one's days. It is said thatthirteen thousand species of butterflies have been already discovered, and it is suggested that there may be nearly twice as many that haveso far escaped the naturalists. After so monstrous a figure, we arenot surprised to learn that there are sixty-eight species ofbutterflies in Great Britain and Ireland. We should be astonished, however, had we not already expended our astonishment on the largernumber. How many of us are there who could name even half-a-dozenvarieties? We all know the tortoiseshell and the white and theblue--the little blue butterflies that flutter over the gold and redof the cornfields. But the average man does not even know by name suchvarieties as the Camberwell Beauty, the Dingy Skipper, thePearl-bordered Fritillary, and the White-letter Hairstreak. As for themoth, are there not as many sorts of moths as there are words in adictionary? Many men give all the pleasant hours of their lives tolearning how to know the difference between one of them and another. One used to see these moth-hunters on windless nights in a Hampsteadlane pursuing their quarry fantastically with nets in the light of thelamps. In pursuing moths, they pursue knowledge. This, they feel, islife at its most exciting, its most intense. They regard a man whodoes not know and is not interested in the difference between one mothand another as a man not yet thoroughly awakened from his pre-natalsleep. And, indeed, one could not conceive a more appalling sort ofblank idiocy than the condition of a man who could not tell one thingfrom another in any department of life whatever. We would ratherchange lives with a jelly-fish than with such a man. This luxury ofvariety was not meant to be ignored. We throw ourselves into it withexhilaration as a swimmer plunges into the sea. There are few forms ofhappiness I know which are more enviable than that of those who haveeyes for birds and flowers. How they rejoice on learning that, according to one theory, there are a hundred and three differentspecies of brambles to be found in these islands! They would not havethem fewer by a single one. It is extraordinarily pleasant even forone who is mainly ignorant of the flowers and their families to comeon two or three varieties of one flower in the course of a countrywalk. As a boy, he is excited by the difference between the pin-headedand the thrum-headed primrose. As he grows older, he scans theroadside for little peeping things that to a lazy eye seem as likeeach other as two peas--the dove's foot geranium, the round-leavedgeranium and the lesser wild geranium. "As like each other as twopeas, " we have said: but _are_ two peas like each other? Who knowswhether the peas have not the same differences of feature amongthemselves that Englishmen have? Half the similarities we notice areonly the results of our ignorance and idleness. The townsman passing afield of sheep finds it difficult to believe that the shepherd candistinguish between one and another of them with as much certainty asif they were his children. And do not most of us think of foreignersas beings who are all turned out as if on a pattern, like sheep? Thefurther removed the foreigners are from us in race the more they seemto us to be like each other. When we speak of negroes, we think ofmillions of people most of whom look exactly alike. We feel much thesame about Chinamen and even Turks. Probably to a Chinaman all Englishchildren look exactly alike, and it may be that all Europeans seem tohim to be as indistinguishable as sticks of barley-sugar. How manypeople think of Jews in this way! I have heard an Englishmanexpressing his wonder that Jewish parents should be able to pick outtheir own children in a crowd of Jewish boys and girls. 

Thus our first generalisations spring from ignorance rather than fromknowledge. They are true, so long as we know that they are notentirely true. As soon as we begin to accept them as absolute truths, they become lies. One of the perils of a great war is that it revivesthe passionate faith of the common man in generalisations. He beginsto think that all Germans are much the same, or that all Americans aremuch the same, or that all Conscientious Objectors are much the same. In each case he imagines a lay figure rather than a human being. Hemay hate his lay figure or he may like it; but, if he is in search oftruth, he had better throw the thing out of the window and try tothink about a human being instead. I do not wish to deny theimportance of generalisations. It is not possible to think or even toact without them. The generalisation that is founded on a knowledge ofand a delight in the variety of things is the end of all science andpoetry. Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in allthings, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations. They subject the unclassified and chaotic facts of life to the orderof beauty. The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also inpursuit of a generalisation--the perfect generalisation of theuniverse. And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a seriesof generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough to call theknown world? To know the resemblances of things is even more importantthan to know the differences of things. Indeed, if we are notinterested in the former, our pleasure in the latter is a merescrap-book pleasure. If we are not interested in the latter, on theother hand, our sense of the former is apt to degenerate intoguesswork and assertion and empty phrases. Shakespeare is greater thanall the other poets because he, more than anybody else, knew how verylike human beings are to each other and because he, more than anybodyelse, knew how very unlike human beings are to each other. He wasmaster of the particular as well as of the universal. How much poorerthe world would have been if he had not been so in regard not only tohuman beings but to the very flowers--if he had not been able to tellthe difference between fennel and fumitory, between the violet and thegillyflower!

IX

THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING

Horse-racing--or, at least, betting--is one of the few crafts that arelooked down on by practically everybody who does not take part in it. "It's a mug's game, " people say. Even betting men talk like this. There is a street called Mug's Row in a north of England town: it isso called because the houses in it were built by a bookmaker. Whetherit was the bookmaker or his victims that gave the street its name I donot know. To call a bookmaker a mug would seem to most people an abuseof language. Yet the only bookmaker I have ever really known used toconfess himself a mug in the most penitent fashion. He was a mug, however, not because he could not make money, but because he could notkeep it. The poor of his suburb, when in difficulties, he declared, used always to come to him instead of going to the clergy, and he wasunable to refuse them. But then he was bitter against the clergy. As ayoung man, he had been a Sunday school teacher, and so far as I couldgather, he might have gone on being a Sunday school teacher till thepresent day if he had not suddenly been assailed with doubts oneSabbath afternoon as he expounded the story of David and Goliath. Whether it was that he looked on David as having taken anunsportsmanlike advantage of the giant or whether he doubted that somuch could be done with such little stones, he did not make quiteclear. Anyhow, from that day on, he never believed in revealedreligion. He quarrelled with his clergyman. He broke the Sabbath. Hebegan to drink beer and to go to race-meetings. He rapidly rose fromthe position of carpenter to that of bookmaker, and, were it not forhis infernal gift of charity, he would probably now be driving his owncar and be hall-marked with a Coalition title. Even as it was, he wasmuch more prosperous than any carpenter. Whenever he produced money, it was in pocketfuls and handfuls. Strange that a bookmaker, who byhis trade must be accustomed to miracles, should find it difficult tobelieve in David and Goliath. He was possibly a man who betted onform, and on form Goliath should undoubtedly have won. David was anoutsider. He had no breeding. He would have been surprised if he couldhave foreseen how his victory would rankle some thousands of yearslater in the soul of an honest English bookmaker. 

It is, however, just these matters of form and breeding that raisehorse-racing and betting above the intellectual level of a game ofnap. Betting men who ignore these things are as unintellectual as theaverage novelist. There are some, for instance, who shut their eyesand bring down a pin or a pencil on a list of names of the horses, inthe hope that in this way they may discover a winner. No doubt theymay. It is perhaps as good a way as any other. But there is somethingtrivial in such methods. This is mere gambling for the sake ofexcitement. There is no more fundamental brainwork in it than in agame I saw being played in a railway carriage the other day, when aman drew a handful of coins from his pocket and bet his friendhalf-a-sovereign that there would be more heads than tails lyinguppermost. This is a game at which it is possible to lose five poundsin two minutes. It is the sort of game to which a betting man willresort when _in extremis_, but only then. The ruling passion isstrong, however. I have a friend who on one occasion went into retreatin a Catholic monastery. Two well-known bookmakers had also gone intotemporary retreat for the good of their souls. My friend told me thateven during the religious services the bookmakers used to bet as towhich of the monks would stand up first at the conclusion of a prayer, and that in the solemn hush of the worship he would suddenly hear ahoarse whisper: "Two to one on Brownie"--a brother with hair of thatcolour--and the answer: "I take you, Joe. " I have even heard of menbetting as to which of two raindrops on a window-pane will reach thebottom first. It is possible to bet on cats, rats or flies. Calvinistsdo not bet, because they believe that everything that happens is acertainty. The extreme betting man is no Calvinist, however. Hebelieves that most things are accidents, and the rest catastrophes. Hence his philosophy is almost always that of Epicurus. To him everyday is a new day, at the end of which it is his aim to be able to say, like Horace, _Vixi_, or, as the text ought perhaps to read, _Vici_. 

The intellectual betting man, on the other hand, has a positionsomewhere between the extremes of Calvinism and Epicureanism. Heworships neither certainty nor chance. He reckons up probabilities. When Mr Asquith picked out Spion Kop as the winner of the Derby, hedid so because he went about the business of selection not with a pinor a pencil, but with one of the best brains in England. In the courseof his long conflicts with the House of Lords he had probablyinterested himself somewhat profoundly in questions of heredity andpedigree, and he was thus well equipped for an investigation into therecords of the parentage and grandparentage of the various Derbyhorses. All that the ordinary casual better knows about Spion Kop isthat he is the son of Spearmint, which won the Derby in 1906. This, however, would not alone make him an obviously better horse thanOrpheus, whose sire, Orby, won the Derby in 1907. The student ofbreeding must be a feminist, who pays as much attention to the femaleas to the male line. It was by the study of the female line that themost cunning of the sporting journalists were able to eliminateTetratema from the list of probable winners. Tetratema, as son of theTetrarch, was excellently fathered for staying the mile-and-a-halfcourse at Epsom. More than this, as a writer in _The Sportsman_pointed out: "The Tetrarch himself is by Roi Herode, a fine stayer, and his maternal grand-dam was by Hagioscope, who rarely failed totransmit stamina. " It is when we turn to Tetratema's mother, ScotchGift--or is it his grandmother something else?--apparently, that wediscover his hereditary vice. This mare our journalist exposed toscathing and searching criticism, and concluded that "there can benothing unreasonable in the inference, based on the records of thisfamily, that the chances are against a Derby winner having descendedfrom the least distinguished of . .. Four sisters. " Even so, however, the writer a few sentences later abjures Calvinism, and denies thatthere is anything certain in what he calls breeding problems. "Itseemed, " he writes, "wildly improbable at one time that Flying Duchesswould produce a Derby winner, for I believe it is correct that two ofGalopin's elder brothers ran in a bus, and there were two others quiteuseless So, on the face of it, the chances were against Galopin, theyoungest brother. " I quote these passages as evidence of the immensedemand the serious pursuit of horse-racing puts on the intellect. Thebetting man must be as well versed in precedents as a lawyer and ingenealogical trees as a historian. At school, I always found thegenealogical trees the most difficult and bewildering part of history. Yet the genealogical tree of a king is a simple matter compared tothat of a horse. All you have to learn about a king is the names ofhis relations: regarding a horse, however, you must know not only thenames but the character, staying power and domestic virtues of everymale and female with whom he is connected during several generations. If a man spent as much labour in disentangling the cousinship of theroyal families of ancient Egypt, he would be venerated as a scholar infive continents. Oxford and Cambridge would shower degrees on him. SirWilliam Sutherland would get him a place on the Civil List. Hence itseems to me that tipping the winners is not, as is too often regarded, "anybody's job": it is work that should be undertaken only by men ofpowerful mind. No man should be allowed to qualify as a tipster unlesshe has taken a degree at one of the Universities. The ideal tipsterwould at once be a great historian a great antiquary, a greatzoologist, a great mathematician, and a man of profound common-sense. It is no accident that an ex-Prime Minister was one of the fewEnglishmen to spot the winner of the Derby of 1920. Mr Asquith musthave gone patiently through all Spion Kop's relations, weighing up thechances whether it was an accident or owing to the weather that suchan one fifteen years ago was beaten by a neck in a six-furlong race, studying incidents in every one of their careers, seeing that none ofthem had ever had a great-uncle a bus-horse, bringing out a table oflogarithms to decide difficult points. .. . We need not be surprisedthat there are fewer great tipsters than great poets. Shakespearealone has given us a portrait of the perfect tipster--"looking beforeand after . .. In apprehension how like a god!"

It is perhaps, however, when we leave questions of breeding and cometo those of form, that we realise most fully the amazingintellectualism of the betting life. In the study of form we are facedby problems that can be solved only by the higher algebra. Thus, ifJehoshaphat, carrying 7 st. , ran third to Jezebel, carrying 8 st. 4lb. , in a mile race, and Jezebel, carrying 8 st. 4 lb. , was beaten bya neck by Woman and Wine, carrying 7 st. 9 lb. , over a mile and aquarter, and Woman and Wine, carrying 8 st. 1 lb. , was beaten by TomThumb, carrying 9 st. In a mile 120 yds. , and Tom Thumb, carrying 9st. 7 lb. , was beaten by Jehoshaphat over seven furlongs, we have tocalculate what chance Tom Thumb has of beating Jezebel in a race of amile and a half on a wet day. There are men to whom such calculationsmay come easy. To Mr Asquith they are probably child's play. Formyself, I shrink from them and, if I were a betting man, would nodoubt in sheer desperation be driven back on the method of pin andpencil. But it is obvious that the sincere betting man has to makesuch calculations daily. Every morning the student of form finds hissporting page full of such lists as the following:--

 0 0 0 CONCLUSIVE (7-5), Kroonstad-Conclusion. 8th of 9 to Poltava (gave 17lb. ) Gatwick May (6f) and 7th of 19 to Orby's Pride (rec 4lb) Kempton May (5f). 

 3 3 3 RAPIERE (7-4), Sunder--Gourouli. Lost 3-4 length and 3 lengths to Bantry (gave 2lb) and Marcia (rec 7lb) Newmarket May (1m), GOLDEN GUINEA (gave 20lb) not in first 9. See BLACK JESS. 

 0 0 4 ROYAL BLUE (7-0), Prince Palatine--China Blue. See NORTHERN LIGHT. 

 0 2 0 BLACK JESS (6-11), Black Jester--Diving Bell. Not in first 4 to St Corentin (gave 121b) Lingfield last week (7f). Here Ap. (7f) lost 3 lengths to Victory Speech (rec 1lb), RAPIERE (gave 13lb, favourite) ½ length off. 

 0 LLAMA (6-11), Isard II. --Laughing Mirror. Nowhere to Silver Jug (gave 15lb) Newbury Ap. (7f). 

Is not a page of Thucydides simpler? Is Persius himself more succinctor obscure? Our teachers used to apologise for teaching us Latingrammar and mathematics by telling us that they were good mentalgymnastics. If education is only a matter of mental gymnastics, however, I should recommend horse-racing as an ideal study for youngboys and girls. The sole objection to it is that it is so engrossing;it might absorb the whole energies of the child. The safety of Latingrammar lies in its dullness. No child is tempted by it intoforgetting that there are other duties in life besides mentalgymnastics. Horse-racing, on the other hand, comes into our lives withthe effect of a religious conversion. It is the greatest monopolistamong the pleasures. It affects men's conversation. It affects theirentire outlook. The betting man's is a dedicated life. Even books havea new meaning for him. _The Ring and the Book_--it is his one and onlyepic. And it is the most intellectual of epics. That is my point. 

X

WHY WE HATE INSECTS

It has been said that the characteristic sound of summer is the hum ofinsects, as the characteristic sound of spring is the singing ofbirds. It is all the more curious that the word "insect" conveys to usan implication of ugliness. We think of spiders, of which many peopleare more afraid than of Germans. We think of bugs and fleas, whichseem so indecent in their lives that they are made a jest by thevulgar and the nice people do their best to avoid mentioning them. Wethink of blackbeetles scurrying into safety as the kitchen light issuddenly turned on--blackbeetles which (so we are told) in the firstplace are not beetles, and in the second place are not black. Thereare some women who will make a face at the mere name of any of thesecreatures. Those of us who have never felt this repulsion--at least, against spiders and blackbeetles--cannot but wonder how far it isnatural. Is it born in certain people, or is it acquired like theold-fashioned habit of swooning and the fear of mice? The nearest Ihave come to it is a feeling of disgust when I have seen a catretrieving a blackbeetle just about to escape under a wall and makinga dish of it. There are also certain crawling creatures which are sonotoriously the children of filth and so threatening in their touchthat we naturally shrink from them. Burns may make merry over a lousecrawling in a lady's hair, but few of us can regard its kind withequanimity even on the backs of swine. Men of science deny that thelouse is actually engendered by dirt, but it undoubtedly thrives onit. Our anger against the flea also arises from the fact that weassociate it with dirt. Donne once wrote a poem to a lady who had beenbitten by the same flea as himself, arguing that this was a goodreason why she should allow him to make love to her. It is, and wasbound to be, a dirty poem. Love, even of the wandering and polygynouskind, does not express itself in such images. Only while under thedominion of the youthful heresy of ugliness could a poet pretend thatit did. The flea, according to the authorities, is "remarkable for itspowers of leaping, and nearly cosmopolitan. " Even so, it has found noplace in the heart or fancy of man. There have been men who wereindifferent to fleas, but there have been none who loved them, thoughif my memory does not betray me there was a famous French prisonersome years ago who beguiled the tedium of his cell by making a pet anda performer of a flea. For the world at large, the flea representsmerely hateful irritation. Mr W. B. Yeats has introduced it into poetryin this sense in an epigram addressed "to a poet who would have mepraise certain bad poets, imitators of his and of mine":

 You say as I have often given tongue In praise of what another's said or sung, 'Twere politic to do the like by these, But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

When we think of the sufferings of human beings and animals at thehands--if that is the right word--of insects, we feel that it ispardonable enough to make faces at creatures so inconsiderate. Butwhat strikes one as remarkable is that the insects that do man mostharm are not those that horrify him most. A lady who will sit bravelywhile a wasp hangs in the air and inspects first her right and thenher left temple will run a mile from a harmless spider. Another willremain collected (though murderous) in presence of a horse-fly, butwill shudder at sight of a moth that is innocent of blood. Our fears, it is evident, do not march in all respects with our sense of physicaldanger. There are insects that make us feel that we are in presence ofthe uncanny. Many of us have this feeling about moths. Moths are theghosts of the insect world. It may be the manner in which they flutterin unheralded out of the night that terrifies us. They seem to tapagainst our lighted windows as though the outer darkness had a messagefor us. And their persistence helps to terrify. They are moretroublesome than a subject nation. They are more importunate than theimportunate widow. But they are most terrifying of all if one suddenlysees their eyes blazing crimson as they catch the light. One thinks ofnocturnal rites in an African forest temple and of terrible jewelsblazing in the head of an evil goddess--jewels to be stolen, werealise, by a foolish white man, thereafter to be the object of avendetta in a sensational novel. One feels that one's hair would bejustified in standing on end, only that hair does not do such things. The sight of a moth's eye is, I fancy, a rare one for most people. Itis a sight one can no more forget than a house on fire. Our feelingstowards moths being what they are, it is all the more surprising thatsuperstition should connect the moth so much less than the butterflywith the world of the dead. Who save a cabbage-grower has any feelingagainst butterflies? And yet in folk-lore it is to the butterflyrather than to the moth that is assigned the ghostly part. In Irelandthey have a legend about a priest who had not believed that men hadsouls, but, on being converted, announced that a living thing would beseen soaring up from his body when he died--in proof that his earlierscepticism had been wrong. Sure enough, when he lay dead, a beautifulcreature "with four snow-white wings" rose from his body and flutteredround his head. "And this, " we are told, "was the first butterfly thatwas ever seen in Ireland; and now all men know that the butterfliesare the souls of the dead waiting for the moment when they may enterPurgatory. " In the Solomon Islands, they say, it used to be thecustom, when a man was about to die, for him to announce that he wasabout to transmigrate into a butterfly or some other creature. Themembers of his family, on meeting a butterfly afterwards, wouldexclaim: "This is papa, " and offer him a coco-nut. The members of anEnglish family in like circumstances would probably say: "Have abanana. " In certain tribes of Assam the dead are believed to return inthe shape of butterflies or house-flies, and for this reason no onewill kill them. On the other hand, in Westphalia the butterfly playsthe part given to the scapegoat in other countries, and on St Peter'sDay, in February, it is publicly expelled with rhyme and ritual. Elsewhere, as in Samoa--I do not know where I found all thesefacts--probably in _The Golden Bough_--the butterfly has been fearedas a god, and to catch a butterfly was to run the risk of being struckdead. The moth, for all I know, may be the centre of as many legendsbut I have not met them. It may be, however, that in many of thelegends the moth and the butterfly are not very clearly distinguished. To most of us it seems easy enough to distinguish between them; theEnglish butterfly can always be known, for instance, by his clubbedhorns. But this distinction does not hold with regard to the entireworld of butterflies--a world so populous and varied that thirteenthousand species have already been discovered, and entomologists hopeone day to classify twice as many more. Even in these islands, indeed, most of us do not judge a moth chiefly by its lack of clubbed horns. It is for us the thing that flies by night and eats holes in ourclothes. We are not even afraid of it in all circumstances. Our terroris an indoors terror. We are on good terms with it in poetry, and playwith the thought of

 The desire of the moth for the star. 

We remember that it is for the moths that the pallid jasmine smells sosweetly by night. There is no shudder in our minds when we read:

 And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream, And caught a little silver trout. 

No man has ever sung of spiders or earwigs or any other of our petantipathies among the insects like that. The moth is the only one ofthe insects that fascinates us with both its beauty and its terror. 

I doubt if there have ever been greater hordes of insects in thiscountry than during the past spring. It is the only complaint one hasto make against the sun. He is a desperate breeder of insects. And hebreeds them not in families like a Christian but in plagues. Thethought of the insects alone keeps us from envying the tropics theirblue skies and hot suns. Better the North Pole than a plague oflocusts. We fear the tarantula and have no love for the tse-tse fly. The insects of our own climate are bad enough in all conscience. Thegrasshopper, they say, is a murderer, and, though the earwig is aperfect mother, other insects, such as the burying-beetle, have thereputation of parricides, But, dangerous or not, the insects are forthe most part teasers and destroyers. The greenfly makes its coloniesin the rose, a purple fellow swarms under the leaves of the apples, and another scoundrel, black as the night, swarms over the beans. There are scarcely more diseases in the human body than there arekinds of insects in a single fruit tree. The apple that is rottenbefore it is ripe is an insect's victim, and, if the plums fall greenand untimely in scores upon the ground, once more it is an insect thathas been at work among them. Talk about German spies! Had German spiesgone to the insect world for a lesson, they might not have been theinefficient bunglers they showed themselves to be. At the same time, most of us hate spies and insects for the same reason. We regard themas noxious creatures intruding where they have no right to be, preyingupon us and giving us nothing but evil in return. Hence ourruthlessness. We say: "Vermin, " and destroy them. To regard a humanbeing as an insect is always the first step in treating him withoutremorse. It is a perilous attitude and in general is more likely tobeget crime than justice. There has never, I believe, been an empirebuilt in which, at some stage or other, a massacre of children among arevolting population has not been excused on the ground that "nitsmake lice. " "Swat that Bolshevik, " no doubt, seems to manyreactionaries as sanitary a counsel as "Swat that fly. " Even in regardto flies, however, most of us can only swat with scruple. Hate fliesas we may, and wish them in perdition as we may, we could not slowlypull them to pieces, wing after wing and leg after leg, as thoughtlesschildren are said to do. Many of us cannot endure to see them slowlydone to death on those long strips of sticky paper on which the fliesdrag their legs and their lives out--as it seems to me, a vilecruelty. A distinguished novelist has said that to watch flies tryingto tug their legs off the paper one after another till they are twicetheir natural length is one of his favourite amusements. I have neverfound any difficulty in believing it of him. It is an odd fact thatconsiderateness, if not actually kindness, to flies has been made oneof the tests of gentleness in popular speech. How often has one heardit said in praise of a dead man: "He wouldn't have hurt a fly!" As forthose who do hurt flies, we pillory them in history. We have neverforgotten the cruelty of Domitian. "At the beginning of his reign, "Suetonius tells us "he used to spend hours in seclusion every day, doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly sharpenedstylus. Consequently, when someone once asked whether anyone was inthere with Cĉsar, Vibius Crispus made the witty reply: 'Not even afly. '" And just as most of us are on the side of the fly againstDomitian, so are most of us on the side of the fly against the spider. We pity the fly as (if the image is permissible) the underdog. One ofthe most agonising of the minor dilemmas in which a too sensitivehumanitarian ever finds himself is whether he should destroy aspider's web, and so, perhaps, starve the spider to death, or whetherhe should leave the web, and so connive at the death of a multitude offlies. I have long been content to leave Nature to her own ways insuch matters. I cannot say that I like her in all her processes, but Iam content to believe that this may be owing to my ignorance of someof the facts of the case. There are, on the other hand, two acts ofdestruction in Nature which leave me unprotesting and pleased. One ofthese occurs when a thrush eats a snail, banging the shell repeatedlyagainst a stone. I have never thought of the incident from the snail'spoint of view. I find myself listening to the tap-tap of the shell onthe stone as though it were music. I felt the same sort of mild thrillof pleasure the other day when I found a beautiful spotted ladybirdsqueezing itself between two apples and settling down to feed on somekind of aphides that were eating into the fruit. The ladybird, thebutterfly, and the bee--who would put chains upon such creatures?These are insects that must have been in Eden before the snake. Beelzebub, the god of the other insects, had not yet any engenderingpower on the earth in those days, when all the flowers were as strangeas insects and all the insects were as beautiful as flowers. 

XI

VIRTUE

There is grave danger of a revival of virtue in this country. Thereare, I know, two kinds of virtue, and only one of them is a viceUnfortunately, it is the latter a revival of which is threatenedto-day. This is the virtue of the virtuously indignant. It is virtuethat is not content merely to be virtuous to the glory of God. It hasno patience with the simple beauty and goodness of the saints. Virtue, in the eyes of the virtuously indignant, is hardly worthy to be calledvirtue unless it goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom it maydevour. Virtue, according to this view, is a detective, inquisitor, and flagellator of the vices--especially of the vices that are sounpopular that the mob may be easily persuaded to attack them. One ofthe chief differences between the two kinds of virtue, I fancy, isthat while true virtue regards the mob-spirit as an enemy, simularvirtue (if we may adopt the Shakespearean phrase) looks to the mob asits cousin and its ally. To be virtuous in the latter sense isobviously as easy as hunting rats or cats. Virtue of this kind issimply the eternal huntsman in man's breast with eyes aglint for avictim. It is Mr Murdstone's virtue--the persecutor's virtue. It isthe virtue that warms the bosom of every man who is more furious withhis neighbour's sins than with his own. If virtue is merely aninflammation against our neighbour's sins, what man on earth is somean as to be incapable of it? To be virtuous in this fashion is aseasy as lying. Those who abstain from it do so not out of lack ofheart, but from choice. We have read of the popularity of theducking-stool in former days for women taken in adultery. Savage mobsmay have thought that by putting their hearts into this amusement theywere making up to virtue for the long years of neglect to which, asindividuals, they had subjected her. They might not have been virtue'slovers, but at least they could be virtue's bullies. After all, virtueitself is no bad sport, when chasing, kicking, thumping, and yellingare made the chief part of the game. Sending dogs coursing after ahare is nothing to it. Man's enjoyment of the chase never rises to thefinest point of ecstasy save when his victim is a human being. Man'sinhumanity to man, says the poet, makes countless thousands mourn. Butthink also of the countless thousands that it makes rejoice! We shouldalways remember that the Crucifixion was an exceedingly popular event, and in no quarter more so than among the virtuously indignant. Itwould probably never have taken place had it not been for the closealliance between the virtuously indignant and the mob. 

To be fair to the virtuously indignant and the mob, they do not insistbeyond reason that their victim shall be a bad man. Good hunting maybe had even among the saints, and who does not enjoy the spectacle ofa citizen distinguished mainly for his unblemished character beingdragged down into the dust? We have no reason to believe that thepeople who were burned during the Inquisition were worse than theirneighbours, yet the mob, we are told, used to gather enthusiasticallyand dance round the flames. The destructive instincts of the mob aresuch that in certain moods it is ready to destroy any kind of man, just as the destructive instincts of a puppy are such that in certainmoods it is ready to destroy any sort of book--whether Smiles's_Self-Help_ or _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ is a matter of perfectindifference. The virtuously indignant maintain their power byconstantly inciting and feeding this appetite for destruction. Hence, when we feel virtuously indignant, we would do well to inquire ofourselves if that is the limit and Z of our virtue. Have we no sins ofour own to amend that we have all this time for barking and biting atthe vices of our neighbours? And if we must attack the sins of ourfellows, would it not be the more heroic course to begin with those weare most tempted by, instead of those to which we have no mind? Do notlet the drunkard feel virtuous because he is able with an undividedheart to denounce simony, and do not let the forger, who happens to bea teetotaller because of the weakness of his stomach, be toovirtuously indignant at the red-nosed patron of the four-ale bar. Anyof us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance ofthe vices that do not attract us. Most of us can boast than we havenever been cruel to a hippopotamus or had dealings with a succubus ortaken a bribe of a million pounds to betray a friend. On these pointswe can look forward with perfect confidence to the scrutiny of the Dayof Judgment. I fear, however, the Recording Angel is likely to devotesuch little space as he can afford to each of us to the vices we haverather than to the vices we have not. Even Charles Peace would havebeen acquitted if he had been accused of brawling in church instead ofmurder. Hence it is to be hoped that passengers in railway trains willnot remain content with gloating down upon the unappetising sins ofwhich the forty-seven thousand are accused by Mr Pemberton Billing. Steep and perilous is the ascent of virtue, and the British public maywell be grateful to Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley if they help it withvoice or outstretched hand to climb to the snowy summits. So far ascan be seen, however, all that Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley do is tointerrupt the British public in its upward climb and orate to it onthe monstrous vices of the Cities of the Plain. This may be anagreeable diversion for weary men, but it obviously involves theneglect of virtue, not the pursuit of it. Most people imagine that topursue vice is to pursue virtue. But the wisdom of the ages tells usthat the only thing to do to vice is to fly from it. Lot's wife was alady who looked round once too often to see what was happening to theforty-seven thousand. Let Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley beware. Theirinterest in the Cities of the Plain will turn them into pillars ofsalt a thousand years before it turns them into pillars of society. 

As for virtue, then, how is it to be achieved? Merely by blackeningthe rest of the world, we cannot hope to make ourselves white. Modernwriters tell us that we cannot make ourselves white even by blackeningourselves. They denounce the sense of sin as a sin, and tell us thatthere is nothing of which we should repent except repentance. We neednot stay to discuss this point. We know well enough that, so long asthe human intellect (to leave the human conscience out of thequestion) survives, men will be burdened with the sense ofimperfection and think enviously of the nobility of Epaminondas orJulius Cĉsar or St Francis of Assisi. For we have to count even JuliusCĉsar among the virtuous, though the scandalmongers would not have itso. His vices may have made him bald and brought about hisassassination. But he had the heroic virtues--courage and generosityand freedom from vindictiveness. When we read how he wept at the deathof his great enemy, and how "from the man who brought him Pompey'shead he turned away with loathing, as from an assassin, " we bow beforethe nobility of his character and realise that he was something morethan a stern man and an adulterer. Pompey, too, had this gift ofvirtue--this capacity for turning away from foul means of besting hisenemies. When he had captured Perpenna in Spain, the latter offeredhim a magnificent story of a plot, the knowledge of which would haveput the lives of many leading Romans in his power. "Perpenna, who hadcome into possession of the papers of Sertorius, offered, " saysPlutarch, "to produce letters from the chief men of Rome, who haddesired to subvert the existing order and change the form ofgovernment, and had therefore invited Sertorius into Italy. Pompey, therefore, fearing that this might stir up greater wars than those nowended, put Perpenna to death and burned the letters without evenreading them. " It was hard on Perpenna, but in burning the letters atleast Pompey gave us an example of virtue. It is Plutarch's feelingfor the beauty of such noble actions that has made his biographies aprimer of virtue for all time. None of his heroes are primarily "good"men. There is scarcely one of them who could have been canonised byany Church. They have enough of the weaknesses of flesh and blood tosatisfy even the most exacting novelist of these days. On the otherhand, they nearly all had that capacity for grandeur of conduct whichdistinguishes the noble man from the base. Plutarch never pretendsthat mean and filthy motives and generous motives do not jostle oneanother strangely in the same breast, but his portraits of great mengive us the feeling that we are in presence of men redeemed by theirvirtues rather than utterly destroyed by their vices. Suetonius, onthe other hand, is the historian of the forty-seven thousand. His bookmay be recommended as scandalmongering--hardly as an aid to virtue. Here we have the servants' evidence of Roman history, the plots andthe secret vices. Suetonius, fortunately, has the grace not to writeas though in narrating his story of vice he were performing a virtuousact. If we are to have stories of fashionable sinners, let us at leasthave them naked and not dressed up in the language of outraged virtue. Scandal is sufficiently entertaining by itself. There is no need tolace it with self-righteousness. 

XII

JUNE

There is always a cuckoo that stays out later than the othercuckoos. .. . 

Two goldfinches came and sang in the catalpa-tree in the garden. .. . 

It is difficult to decide with which sentence to begin. There are somany pleasures. The goldfinches have not come back again, however. They and the faint blue flowers of the catalpa turned a sinistergrowth for an interval into a small Paradise of colour and song. Thenthe flowers fell. They had no more life than snow in May. Coming asthey did at the end of years of barrenness, they astonished one likethe blossoming of the Rose of Sharon. But now the bough is dark andsinister and melancholy again. Sparrows squabble over their loveaffairs in it. The, cuckoo that stays out later than the other cuckoosis the triumphant survivor. 

Not that there is much to be said even for him as a model ofcontinuance. His note will soon change. He will become hoarse and onlyhalf-articulate. He will cease to be the flying echo of the mystery ofskies and wood at dawn and in the still evening. The disreputable bat, whose little wings flutter half visibly like waves of heat risingabove a stove, will outlast him. 

There is no getting beyond the old image of things in general as astream that disappears. The flowers and the birds come in tides thatsweep over the world and in a moment are lost like a broken wave. Thelilacs filled with purple; laburnum followed, and in a few days allthe gold ebbed, and nothing was left but a drift of withered blossomson the ground; then came the acacia-flowers, white as the morningamong the cool green plumage of the tree, and now they, too, have beenturned into dirtiness and deserted foam. And in the hedges change hasbeen as swift, as merciless--change so imperceptible in what it isdoing, so manifest in what it has done. The white blossoms of the sloegave place to the foam of the hawthorn and the flat clusters of thewayfaring-tree; now in its turn has come the flood of theelder-flowers, a flood of commonness, and June on the roads wouldhardly be beautiful were it not for the roses that settle, delicateand fleeting as butterflies, on the long and crooked briers. Perhapsone has not the right to say of any flower or any bird that it is notbeautiful Even elder-flowers, seen at a distance, can givecheerfulness to a roadside. But, if we have to pick and choose amongflowers, there are many who will give the lowest prize to the flowersthat have been compared to umbrellas--elder-flowers, cow's parsley, hemlock, and the rest. These are the plebeians of the hedges andditches. They have the air of something useful. One would imagine theywere intended to be cooked and eaten in cheap restaurants. Weexperience no lifting of the heart at sight of them. We should besurprised to hear the abrupt ecstasy of a wren issuing from amongtheir leaves. And yet it is hardly a week since, walking in a Sussexlane, I saw a long procession of cow's parsley on the top of a highbank silhouetted against the twilight sky. There seemed never to havebeen more exquisite flowers. They had captured the silver of eveningas in a net. 

There are many flowers that seem ugly to an indifferent eye. Even thered valerian, that sprouts so boldly in bushes of coral from the topof the wall, is regarded by some people as a weed and an impudentintruder. For myself, I love the spectacle of stone walls breaking outinto flower with red valerian and ivy-leaved toad-flax. The countrypeople have greeted these flowers with comic and friendly names. Valerian they call "drunken sailor, " and the ivy-leaved toad-flax thatblossoms in a thousand tiny blue butterflies from the stones has (soprolific it is) been given the nickname of "mother of thousands. " Idoubt, however, whether the country people have as many fanciful namesfor the flowers as they are represented as having in the books. WhenMr W. H. Hudson first came on winter heliotrope in Cornwall, and wasattracted by its meadow-sweet smell at a season when there were fewother flowers, he was told by a countryman that it was called simply"weed. " Countrymen, if they are asked the name of a flower, will oftensay that they do not know, but that they call it so-and-so. A smallboy who was gathering green-stuffs for his rabbits came up and walkedbeside me the other day, and, on being shown some goose-grass, andasked what name he knew it by, said: "I don't know its name; we callsit 'cleavers. '" In my childhood, I never heard it called by any othername than "robin-run-the-hedge, " and under that name alone am Iattracted by it. "Cleavers" is too reminiscent of a butcher's yard orof some dull tool. "Goose-grass" at least fills the imagination withthe picture of a bird. But "robin-run-the-hedge" is better, for it isan image of wild adventure. It will be a pity if the tradition ofpicturesque names for flowers is allowed to die. The kidney-vetch, along yellow claw of a flower that looks withered even at birth, maynot deserve a prettier name, but at least it is possible to give it anugly name with more interesting associations. "Staunch" is an oldername that reminds us that the flower was, a few generations ago, usedto staunch wounds. The other name, it is suggested, had its origin inthe supposed excellence of the plant in curing diseases of the kidney. 

But there seem to be no grounds for believing this. There are, unfortunately, some beautiful flowers for which no beautiful or evenexpressive name has ever been invented. Who is there who, coming onthe blue scabious on a hill near the sea, is not conscious of thegross failure of the human race in never having found anything butthis name out of a dustbin for one of the most charming of flowers?Matthew Arnold, appalled by some of the names of human beings thatstill flourished in the days of Victoria, and may for all I know beflourishing to-day, once hoped to turn us into Hellenists by declaringthat there was "no Wragg on the Ilissus. " Was there no "scabious" onthe Ilissus either, I wonder? Were I a flower of the field, I shouldprefer to be called "nose-bleed" or "sow-thistle. " On the whole, however, the plants have little to complain of in the matter of names. The milkwort that has been scattering its fine, delicate colours amongthe short grasses of the bare hills deserves its beautiful name, "grace of God. " We think of it as the sprigging of a divine mantlecast over the June world. The greater plantain, that after the recentrain has come out on the hills, with a ruff of purple feathers roundits brown cone, neither deserves nor possesses a name connotingsacredness. It is interesting mainly as a plant that somehow becameassociated with the voyages and travels of Englishmen, and is known inAmerica as "Englishman's foot, " because, wherever the Englishman goes, the plant follows him. 

The riot of the spring flowers is already passing, however. As we walkalong the path through the corn, we find the wild mustard, that a fewweeks ago made a steep field blaze like a precinct of the sun, alreadywithering into a mass of green pods; and the hay in the valley hasbeen cut down with all its crimson clover. The smell of the tossedhay, as we pass, sends back the memory into an older world. How is itthat sweet smells do not please us so much for what they are as forthe things of which they remind us? At the smell of hay newly stackedwe cease to be our present age; we are in a world as distant as thatof Theocritus. There is no ambition in it, no tears or taxes, no menand women pretending, nothing that is not happy. Every scent is sweet, every sound is a laugh or a bird's song. Every man and woman andanimal we behold is more interesting than if they had come out of aNoah's Ark. Smell has been described as the most sensual of thesenses. It may be so, but it is surely also the sense that is mostclosely related to the memory. Old landscapes, old happinesses oldgardens, old people, come to life again--at times, almost unbearablyso--with the smell of wallflower or hay or the sea. It may be, however, that this is not a universal experience. Some of us, nodoubt, live more in our memories than others: it is our doom. 

Even we, however, are sensualists of the open air, and the spectacleof the wind foaming among the leaves of the oak and elm can easilymake us forget all but the present. The blue hills in the distancewhen rain is about, the grey arras of wet that advances over theplain, the whitethroat that sings or rather scolds above the hedge ashe dances on the wing, the tree-pipit--or is it another bird?--thatsinks down to the juniper-tip through a honey of music, a rough seaseen in the distance, half shine, half scowl--any of these things mayeasily cut us off from history and from hope and immure us in thepresent hour. Or may they? Or do these things too not leave ushome-sick, discontented, gloomy--gloomy if it is only because we arenot nearly so gloomy as we ought to be?

XIII

ON FEELING GAY

Gaiety has come back at least to parts of London. There never weregreater crowds of people eating with bottles at their sides in publicplaces. On the whole, however, there has been little down-heartednessat the restaurants during the past four and a half years Even whilethe housewife in the red-brick street was wasting her mornings in thepatient vigil of the queue, only to find at the end of it that therewas no butter, no lard, no tea, no jam, no golden syrup, no prunes, nopotatoes, no currants, no olive oil, or whatever it might be shewanted most, the restaurants never shut their doors as the grocers'shops and the confectioners' sometimes did. When rationing came, onecould eat the greater part of the week's beef allowance at a singlemeal in the home, but in a restaurant one could get four excellentmeat meals--in some restaurants even eight excellent meals--in returnfor a week's coupons. There were, no doubt, parts of the country inwhich the housewife was hardly more restricted than the diner-out inrestaurants. Travellers came back from places in Dorsetshire, Gloucestershire, and Scotland, as from Ireland, with gorgeousnarratives of areas in which the King's writ did not run so far ascoupons were concerned and beef was free if only you paid for it. Butin London, and especially in the Home Counties, there was no suchreign of liberty. The housewife went shopping, as it were, onticket-of-leave, and even the sleepiest suburbans began to realisethat the arrival of our daily bread is a daily miracle instead of thecommonplace it once seemed to be. Had Dr Faustus come back to life amodern lady would have invoked the aid of his magic for some food lessromantic than grapes out of season: she would have been content with atin of golden syrup. As for butter, it is surprising that no one wrotea sonnet to butter during the war. I have seen eyes positively moistenwith love at the sight of a small dish of it. Even from therestaurants it seemed to vanish for a time, and some of them are stilldoing their best to help one to deceive oneself with a curl of what iscalled butter substitute. The restaurant, however, seem to be bettersupplied than the home with the three great aids to gaiety--wine, jamand currants. I confess I have never been able to understand whycurrants should be generally regarded as one of the necessaryingredients of perfect pleasure. But they unquestionably are The childon a holiday will eat a bun with only three currants in it with threetimes more pleasure than he will eat a frankly plain bun A suetpudding without currants or raisins is prison fare, barren to the eyeand cheerless: let but an infrequent currant or raisin peep from themass and it is a pudding for a birthday. So universal is the passionfor currants as an aid to pleasure that during the past three weeksthe only matter that rivalled in general interest the question whetherthe Kaiser was to be hanged was the question whether we should havecurrants before Christmas. So profound is the disappointment of thepublic at the non-arrival of the currants that explanations have beenput in the papers, calling on us to practise the sublime virtue ofself-sacrifice, happy in the knowledge that all the currants areneeded for invalid soldiers. But if the currants are needed forsoldiers, how comes it that we sometimes find them in the puddings inrestaurants? Those who are concerned for the preservation of home lifein this country cannot but be perturbed by the way in which in thismatter of currants the scales have been weighted in favour of therestaurant and against the home. As for jam, the diner in therestaurant rejoices in jam roll while the child in the home laboursits way through tapioca pudding. Is it any wonder if, as thepessimists believe, the English home decays?

Whether as a result of the jam roll or the rare currants in thepuddings, it has been unusually difficult to get a table at some ofthe restaurants since the signing of the Armistice. No doubt thesigning of the Armistice itself had something to do with it. Christianmen, whenever anything epoch-making happens, must have something toeat. Marriage, the return of a conquering hero, the visit of a greatstatesman, the birth of Christ--we find in all these things a reasonfor calling on the cooks to do their damnedest. Even the dyspepticforgets his doctor's orders in the general excitement and chasesoysters down the narrow stairway of his throat with thick soup, followthick soup with lobster, and lobster with turkey and turkey with asavoury, and the savoury with a _pêche Melba_, and at the end of itwill not reject cheese and a banana, all of this accompanied withstreams of liquid in the form of wine coffee and brandy. I have oftenwondered why a man should feel gay doing violence to his entrails inthis fashion. I have noticed again and again that he loses a little ofhis gaiety if the dinner is served slowly enough to give him time tothink. The gay meal, like the farce, must be enacted quickly. The veryspectacle of waiters hurrying to and fro with an air of peril to thedishes quickens the fancy, and the gastric juices flow to an anapĉsticmeasure. Who does not know what it is to sit through a slow meal anddigest in spondees? One is given time between the courses to turnphilosopher--to meditate becoming a hermit and dining on a bowl ofrice in a cave. Nothing can prevent one from there and then coming toa decision on the matter save a waiter with the eye of a psychoanalystready to rush forward at the first sadness of an eyelid and tempt oneeither with a new dish or with a glass refilled. "Stay me withflagons; comfort me with apples. " It is a universal cry. Our desire isfor the banqueting-house. Perhaps it is not so much that we feel gayas that we are afraid of feeling gloomy. We have no force within usthat will enable us to laugh over a lettuce and become wits on water. There must be an element of riot in our eating and drinking if we areto drive dull care away. That is the defence of cakes and ale. Cakes, no doubt, are not what they used to be, and ale is even less so. Buthuman beings are symbolists, and, if you give them something thatlooks like cakes and something that looks like beer, it is surprisinghow content they will be. Our eating and drinking is but a game, andwe deceive ourselves at table like children among their toys. Even thevegetarian lies his food into grandeur not its own. There is avegetarian restaurant in London in which one of the dishes on the billof fare bears the name "Like chicken. " _Splendide mendax!_

One of the most amazing features in the appearance of London at thepresent time is surely the absence of the signs of widespreadmourning. The windows of the shops are full of all the colours of theparrot. The hats are as bright as a scrap-book. The confectioners'shops are making a desperate effort to look as if nothing hadhappened. The death of a single monarch would have darkened Christmasin Regent Street more effectually than the million mournings of thewar. It is as though we were eager to conceal from ourselves the newsof this terrible disaster. After all, to judge by the crowds in thestreets, most people still remain alive. We have sworn we will neverforget those others, but one has only to read some of the electionspeeches to see that with many of us our own greed and vindictivenessare already ousting the ideals for which hundreds of thousands of mengave up their lives. Can it be that we are feeling gay not onlybecause we have escaped from the disasters of the war but because weare escaping from the ideals of the war? It is as though we hadreturned from the barren snows of the mountain-tops to the cosy plentyof the valleys. We are glad to exchange the stars as companions forthe nearer illuminations of the streets. The familiar world is comingback, and civilian youths have begun once more to sing music-hallchoruses on the way home on the tops of buses:--

 So I dillied, And dallied, And dallied, And dillied; But you can't trust a speshul Like an old-time copper When you can't find your way home. 

Peace had returned without question when nonsense of this venerablekind sped into the air from the roof of a late bus. Well, we havealways wanted the world to be "as usual. " We were angry with theGermans for plunging us into the unusualness of war, and we feelscarcely more friendly to those who would plunge us into theunusualness of Utopia. We feel at home among neither horrors norideals. We are glad at the prospect of having the old world backrather than at having to make a new world. Lord Birkenhead, I observe, declares that it would be an awful thing if the war had left usunchanged, but we look in vain for signs of any deep change even inthe speeches of Lord Birkenhead. One noticeable change the war hasunquestionably made: more women smoke in the restaurants thanformerly. Sanguine people declare that other changes are impending;but other people, equally sanguine, are doing their best to preventthis. The human race is gradually feeling its way back to itstraditional division into those who desire a change and those whodesire to keep things as they are. The Christmas festival appeals toboth equally. It is at once an old custom and the prophecy of a newearth. On such a day one can rejoice even without currants or theLeague of Nations. The world is a good place. Let us eat, drink, andbe merry. 

XIV

IN THE TRAIN

It is said that travelling by train is to be made still moreuncomfortable. I doubt if there is a man of sufficient genius in theGovernment to accomplish this. Are not the trains already merelyelongated buses without the racing instincts of the bus? Have they notalready learned to crawl past mile after mile of backyard and backgarden at such a snail's pace that we have come to know like an oldfriend every disreputable garment hung out on the clothes-lines of ascore of suburbs? Do they not stand still at the most unreasonableplaces with the obstinacy of an ass? Stations, the names of which usedto be an indistinguishable blur as we swept past them as on aswallow's wing, have now become a part of the known world, and have asmuch attention paid to them as though they were Paris or Vienna. Equality has not yet been established among men, but it has beenestablished among stations. There never was such a democracy offrightfulness. 

We seldom see a station which has about it the air of permanence. There are, I believe good historical reasons why there are no Tudorstations or Queen Anne stations to be found in the country. Still, Iknow of no reason why so many stations should look as though they hadbeen built hurriedly to serve the needs of a month, like a travellingshow in a piece of waste ground. Not that the railway station has anyof the gaudy detail of the travelling show. It resembles it only inits dusty and haphazard setting. It is more like a builder's or atombstone-maker's yard. The very letters in which the name of thestation is printed are often of a deliberate ugliness. No newspaperwould tolerate letters of such an ugliness in its headlines. Theystare at one vacuously, joylessly. It is said that the village ofAmberley is known to the natives as "Amberley, God help us!" How manystations look at us from their name-plates with that "God help us!"air! What I should like to see would be a name-plate that would seemto announce to us in passing: "Glasgow, thank God!" or whatever thename of the station may be. I have never yet discovered a merrystation. Here and there a station-master has done his best to make theplace attractive by planting geraniums in the form of letters to spellthe name of the place on a neighbouring embankment. But these thingsremind one of the flowers on a grave. And the people who walk up anddown the platform, their noses cold in the wind, are hardly morecheerful than undertakers' men. Even the porters in their greentrousers, who roll the milk-cans along the platform to the luggage-vanwith an energy and a clatter that would satisfy the ambition of anyhealthy child, do not look merry. There was one cheerful porter whoused to welcome you like a host, and make a jest as he clipped yourrailway ticket--"Just to lighten your load, sir!"--but the Governmenthad him removed and put to mind gates at a crossing where he would notbe able to speak to the passengers. As a rule, however, nobody looksas if he liked being in a railway station or would stop there if hecould go anywhere else. I trust the Ministry of Reconstruction willsee to it that the railway stations of the country are rebuilt andvivified. One does not really wish to stop at any station at allexcept one's own station. But if one has to do so, let the stations bemade more amusing. 

Unfortunately, it is not only the frequent stops that have maderailway travelling almost ideally uncomfortable. The Government seemsalso to have hired a staff of workers to impregnate the seats of thecarriages with dust and to scatter all the dust that can be spared inthese exiguous days on the floors. They have also a gang of old andwheezy gentlemen who travel up and down the line all day shutting thewindows. This work is sometimes deputed to women. They are forbiddento say "May I?" or "Do you mind?" or to make use of any civilexpression that might mollify the traveller sitting by the window. Itis part of their instructions to reach past him with an air ofindependence and to have the window shut and the book that he isreading knocked out of his hand before he has time to see what hashappened. Some day someone will write a book about the alteration ofEnglish manners that took place during the Great War. I believe thealteration is largely due to these Government hirelings whose duty itis to make railway travel a burden and never to say "Please" or "Thankyou. "

Even now, however, there are compensations. In the morning the shadowsare long, and, as one rattles north among the water-meadows, theflying plumes of the engine leave a procession of melting silhouetteson the fields to the west. Rooks oar their way towards their homeswith long twigs in their beaks. Horses go through the last days oftheir kingship dragging ploughs and harrows over the fields with slowand monotonous tread. Here a hill has been ploughed into a sea oflittle brown waves. Further on a meadow is already bright with thegreen of winter-sown corn. The country has never been so labouredbefore. Chalk and sand and brown earth and red are all being turned upand broken and bathed in the sun and wind. Adam has begun to delveagain. There is the urgency of life in fields long idle. It is notthat the fields have become populous. One sees many laboured fields, but little labour. The occasional plough-horse, however, bringsstrength into the stillness. How noble a figure of energy he makes!

As for us who sit in the railway train, we do not look at him much. Weare all either reading papers or talking. Two old men, bearded andgreasy-coated, tramps of a bygone era, sit opposite one another andneither read nor talk. One of them is blear-eyed and coughs, and hasan unclean moustache. All his friend ever says to him is: "Clean yournose, " making an impatient gesture. A young man in a bowler hat andspectacles, who smokes a pipe in inward-drawn lips, discusses theLabour situation with some acquaintances. "They would be all right, "he explains, "if it wasn't for the Labour leaders. You know what aLabour leader is. He's a chap that never did an honest day's work inhis life. He finds it pays better to jaw than to work, and I don'tblame him. After all, it's human nature. Every man's out to do thebest for himself, isn't he?" "Your nose--blow your nose, " mumbled thetramp across the carriage. "Take Australia, " continues the young man;"they've had Labour Governments in Australia. What good did they dofor the working man? Did they satisfy him? Why, there were morestrikes in Australia under the Labour Government than there ever hadbeen before. " "Did you hear that, Johnny?" I heard another voicesaying. "A tame rabbit was sold Sat'day in Guildford market fortwelve-and-sixpence!" "How did they know it was a tame one?" "Ah, nowyou're asking!" A man looked up from _The Morning Post_ with interestin his face. "Why, " he said, "is a tame rabbit considered to be bettereating than a wild one?" It was explained to him that wild rabbitswere often kept for a long time after they were killed, and weretherefore regarded as more dangerous. Otherwise, the tame rabbit hadno point of superiority. "What do _you_ say, Johnny?" Johnny had a fatface and no eyelashes, and wore a muffler instead of a collar. "I say, give me a wild one. " The man with _The Morning Post_ went on to talkabout rabbits and the price at which he had sold them. At intervals, during everything he said, Johnny kept nodding and saying, with asmile of relish: "Give me a wild one!" He said it even when the talkhad drifted altogether away from rabbits. He went on repeating it tohimself in lower tones, as though at last he had found a thought thatsuited him. "Municipalisation means jobbery, " said the young man withthe bowler hat; "look at the County Council tramways. " "Give me a wildone, " said Johnny, in a dreamy whisper; "I say, give me a wild one. ""Why, it stands to reason, if you have a friend, and you see a chanceof shovin' him into a job at the public expense, you'll do it, won'tyou?" said the young man, addressing the reader of _The Morning Post_, who merely cleared his throat nervously in answer. "It's humannature, " said the young man. "Give me a wild one" whispered Johnny. "I'm afraid there's going to be trouble in Ireland, " the man with _TheMorning Post_ turned the subject. The young man was ready for him. "There will always be trouble in Ireland, " he said, with what thenovelists describe as a curl of his lip, "so long as Ireland exists. "The tramp continued to mumble about the condition of his friend'snose, Johnny relapsed into silence, and the young man made the manwith _The Morning Post_ tremble by a horrible picture of what thecountry would be like under a Labour Government. "It would be allU. P. , " he said firmly; "all up. .. . " Who would travel in such days ifhe could possibly avoid it?

XV

THE MOST CURIOUS ANIMAL

Curiosity is the first of the sins. On the day on which Eve gave wayto her curiosity, man broke off his communion with the angels andallied himself with the beasts. To-day we usually applaud curiosity;we think of it as the alternative to stagnation. The tradition ofmankind, however, is against us. The fables never pretend thatcuriosity is anything but an evil. Literature is full of tales offorbidden rooms that cannot be peeped into without disaster. Fatima in_Bluebeard_ escapes punishment, but her escape is narrow enough toleave her a warning to the nursery. A version of the Pandora legendimputes the state of mankind to the curiosity of one disastrous foolwho raised the lid of the sacred box, with the result that theblessings intended for our race escaped and flew away. We have cursedthe inquisitive person through the centuries. We have instinctivelyhated him to the point of persecution. The curious among mankind havegone about their business at peril of their lives. It is probable thatAthens was a city as much given to curiosity as any city has everbeen, and yet the Athenians put Socrates to death on account of hiscuriosity. He was accused of speculating about the heavens above andinquiring into the earth beneath as well as of corrupting the youthand making the worse appear the better reason. History may be read asthe story of the magnificent rearguard action fought during severalthousand years by dogma against curiosity. Dogma is always in themajority and is therefore detestable, but it is also always beaten andis therefore admirable. It rallies its forces afresh on some new fieldin every generation. It fights with its back to the sunrise under abanner of darkness, but even when we abominate it most we cannot butmarvel at its endurance. The odd thing is that man clings to dogmafrom a sense of safety. He can hardly help feeling that he was neverso safe as he is in the present in possession of this little patch hisfathers have bequeathed to him. He felt quite safe without printedbooks, without chloroform, without flying machines. He mocked atIcarus as the last word in human folly. We say nowadays "as safe asthe Bank of England, " but he felt safer without the Bank of England. We are told that when the Bank was founded in 1694 its institution waswarmly opposed by all the dogmatic believers in things as they were. But it is against curiosity about knowledge that men have fought moststubbornly. Galileo was forbidden to be curious about the moon. One ofthe most difficult things to establish is our right to be curiousabout facts. The dogmatists offer to provide us with all the facts areasonable man can desire. If we persist in believing that there is aworld of facts yet undiscovered and that it is our duty to set out inquest of it, in the eyes of the dogmatists we are scorned as hereticsand charlatans. Even at the present day, when the orthodoxies sit onshaky thrones, dogma still opposes itself to curiosity at many points. A great deal of the popular dislike of psychical research is due tohatred of curiosity in a new direction. People who admit the existenceof a world of the dead commonly feel that none the less it ought to betaboo to the too-curious intellect of man. They feel there issomething uncanny about spirits that makes it unsafe to approach themwith an inquisitive mind. I am not concerned either to attack ordefend Spiritualism. I merely suggest that a rational attack onSpiritualism must be based on the insufficiency of the evidence putforward in its behalf, not on the ground that the curiosity which goesin search of such evidence is in itself wicked. 

It is odd to see how men who take sides with dogma give themselves theairs of men who live for duty, while they regard the more curiousamong their fellows as licentious, trifling, irreverent andself-indulgent. The truth is, there is no greater luxury than dogma. It puts an eminence under the most stupid. At the same time I am notgoing to deny the pleasures of curiosity. We have only to see a catlooking up the chimney or examining the nooks of a box-room or lookingover the edge of a trunk to see what is inside in order to realisethat this is a vice, if it is a vice, which we inherit from theanimals. We find a comparable curiosity in children and other simplecreatures. Servants will rummage through drawer after drawer of old, dull letters out of idle curiosity. There are men who declare that nowoman could be trusted not to read a letter. We persuade ourselvesthat man is a higher animal, above curiosity and a slave to his senseof honour. But man, too, likes to spy upon his neighbours when he isnot indifferent to them. No scrupulous person of either sex would readanother person's letter surreptitiously. But that is not to say thatwe do not want to know what is in the letter. We can hardly see aparcel lying unopened in a hall without speculating on what itcontains. We should always feel happier if the owner of the parcelindulged us to the point of opening it in our presence. I know a manwhose curiosity extends so far as to set him uncorking anymedicine-bottles he sees in a friend's house, sniffing at them, andeven sipping them to see what they taste like. "Oh, I have had thatone, " he says, as he lingers over the bitter flavour of strychnine. "Let me see, " he reflects, as he sips another bottle, "there's nuxvomica in that. " Half the interesting books of the world were writtenby men who had just this sipping kind of curiosity. Curiosity was thechief pleasure of Montaigne and of Boswell. We cannot read an earlybook of science without finding signs of the pleasure of curiosity inits pages. Theophrastus, we may be sure, was a happy man when hewrote:

 "However, there is one question which applies to all perfumes, namely, why it is that they appear to be sweetest when they come from the wrist; so that perfumers apply the scent to this part. "

To be curious about such matters would keep many a man entertained foran evening. Some people are so much in love with their curiosity thatthey object even to having it satisfied too quickly with an obviousexplanation. We have an instance of this in a pleasant anecdote aboutDemocritus, which Montaigne borrowed from Plutarch. Montaigne, whosubstitutes figs for cucumbers in the story, relates:

 "Democritus, having eaten figs at his table that tasted of honey, fell presently to consider within himself whence they should derive this unusual sweetness; and to be satisfied in it, was about to rise from the table to see the place whence the figs had been gathered; which his maid observing, and having understood the cause, she smilingly told him that he need not trouble himself about that, for she had put them into a vessel in which there had been honey. He was vexed that she had thus deprived him of the occasion of this inquisition and robbed his curiosity of matter to work upon. 'Go thy way, ' said he, 'thou hast done me wrong; but for all that I will seek out the cause, as if it were natural'; and would willingly have found out some true reason for a false and imaginary effect. "

The novel-reader who becomes furious with someone for letting him intothe secret of the end of the story is of the same mind as Democritus. "Go thy way, " he says in effect, "thou hast done me wrong. " The childprotests in the same way to a too-informative elder: "You weren't totell me!" He would like to wander in the garden paths of curiosity. Hehas no wish to be led off hurriedly into the schoolroom of knowledge. He instinctively loves to guess. He loves at least to guess at onemoment and to be told the next. 

The greater part of human curiosity has as little to be said forit--or against it--as a child's whim. It is an affair of the senses, and an extraordinarily innocent one. It is a vanity of the eye or ear. It is another form of the hatred of being left out. So many humanbeings do not like to miss things. We saw during Saturday's aeroplaneraid how far men and women will go rather than miss things. Thousandsof Londoners stood in the streets and at their windows and gazed atwhat seemed to be the approach of one of the plagues of Egypt. Noplague of locusts ever came out of the sky with a greater air of thewill to destruction. It was as though the eastern sky were hung withthese monstrous insects, leisurely hovering over a people they meantto destroy. They had the cupidity of hawks at one moment. At anotherthey had the innocence of a school of little fishes. Shell-smokeopened out among them like a sponge thrown into the water. It swelledinto larger clouds monstrous in shape as the things doctors preservein bottles. But the plague did not rest. One saw a little blackaeroplane hurry across them, a mere water beetle of a thing, and onewondered if a collision would send one of them to earth with brokenwings. But one did not really know whether this was the manoeuvre ofan enemy or the daring of a friend. There was never a more astonishingspectacle. A desperate battle in the air would have been less of asurprise. But that there should have been nobody to interfere withthem! . .. Yes, it was certainly a curious sight, and London wasjustified in putting its head out of its house, like a tortoise underits shell, till the bombs began to fall. Still, the more often theycome the less curious we shall be about them. A few years ago wegladly paid five shillings for the pleasure of seeing an aeroplanefloat round a big field. There is a limit, however, to our curiosityeven about German aeroplanes. Speaking for myself, I may say mycuriosity is satisfied. I do not care if they never come again. 

XVI

THE OLD INDIFFERENCE

It was an old belief of the poets and the common people that naturewas sympathetic towards human beings at certain great crises. Cometsflared and the sun was darkened at the death of a great man. Even thedeath of a friend was supposed to bow nature with despair; and Miltonin _Lycidas_ mourned the friend he had lost in what nowadays seems tous the pasteboard hyperbole:

 The willows and the hazel copses green Shall now no more be seen Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. 

It may be contended that Milton was here speaking, not of nature, butof his vision of nature; and certainly one cannot help reading one'sown joys and sorrows into the face of the earth. When the lover in_Maud_ affirms:

 A livelier emerald twinkled in the grass, he states a fact. He utters a truth of the eye and heart. The wonderof the world resides in him who sees it. The earth becomes a new placeto a man who has fallen in love or who has just returned to it fromthe edge of the grave. It is as though he saw the flowers as astranger. Larks ascending make the planet a ball of music for him. Hemay well begin to lie about nature, for he has seen it for the firsttime. Experience is not long in warning him, however, that it is heand not the world that has changed. He meets a funeral in themidsummer of his happiness, and larks sing the same songs above thefields whether it is the lover or the mourner that goes by. Thecontinuity of nature is not broken either for our gladness or ourgrief. Mr Hardy frequently introduces the mournful drip of rain intohis picture of men and women unhappily mated. But the rain is not atthe beck and call of the unhappy. The unhappy would still be unhappythough they were in a cherry orchard on the loveliest morning of theyear. The happy would still be happy though St Swithin's Day werestreaming in floods down the window-panes. Who does not know what itis to be happy watching the rain-drops racing down the glass andhearing the gutter chattering like a hedgeful of sparrows or tinklinglike a bell? Who is there, on the other hand, who has not found, andbeen perplexed to find, the world going on its way in full song andbloom on a day that has seemed to him to darken all human experience?Burns's reproach to the indifferent earth has often been quoted as anexpression of this realisation that nature does not mind:

 How can ye sing, ye little birds, And I sae weary, fu' o' care?

Nature, we discover, passes us and our sorrows by. We are of littleaccount to the race of birds. We are of little account, for thatmatter, to the race of men. The end of Hamlet is not the end even of akingdom. Fortinbras comes upon the scene, and life goes on. Ourmournings are only interruptions. The ranks of the procession close upand little is changed. Even the funeral of a king is as a rule less anoccasion for grief than a spectacle for the curious. The crowd mayhave filled the streets all night, but they did not forget to bringtheir sandwiches and whisky-flasks with them. The theatres and thetea-shops and the public-houses will be as full as ever the next day. And for the death of a great author not even the sweet-shops will beclosed. The funeral ceremonies over the dead body of Herbert Spencerdrew a smaller crowd than would gather to see a dog that had been runover in the street. 

We were never before so conscious of the indifference of Nature tohuman tragedy as since the outbreak of the war. Here, one would think, was a tragedy that all but threatened to crack the globe. One wouldimagine that the sides of Nature must be in pain with it and the earthin peril of being hurled out of her accustomed path round the sun. Yetthe sparrows in the Surrey valleys have not heard of it, and thesea-birds know nothing of it, save that occasionally they arebewildered to find a submarine rising from the waters instead of theporpoise for whose presence they had hoped. It is said that thepheasants in a Sussex wood awoke and screamed on Sunday night duringthe barrage fire around London. But this was egotism on the part ofthe pheasants. The pheasants of Wiltshire did not have their sleepbroken, and so were not troubled about the sufferings of Londoners. Wordsworth assured Toussaint L'Ouverture:

 There's not a breathing of the common air That will forget thee. 

He exaggerated. The common air is more perturbed in the year 1918 bythe passing of a single gnat than by the memory of ToussaintL'Ouverture. On Sunday I walked along a quiet hill road within thirtymiles of London, and it seemed for an hour or two as though one wereas remote from the war as a man living a century hence. The catkins inthe hazels by the roadside were beautiful as falling rain: they hungon the branches like notes of music. The country children see them aslambs' tails, dangling in twos and threes in the gentle air. They havebeen growing longer every day since Christmas and the red tips of thefemale flowers have now begun to appear. In the hedge there are stillthe remains of old man's beard that, in one light, looks like dirtywool, but, with the sun shining on it, seems at a distance to behawthorn in the full glory of blossom. Every now and then a crookedcaterpillar of down is detached from it by the wind and sails offvaguely over a field. A few weeks ago sparrows were singing chorusesas they gorged themselves upon it, but lately they have been scrapingtheir beaks busily on the bark of trees as though they had found moresatisfying dishes. At the lower end of the road there is a glow ofcrimson among the sallows, which have begun to festoon their straightrods with silver buds. Chaffinches are beginning to pipe moresolitarily to each other in the tall elms. A few weeks ago theyfluttered everywhere in companies, occupying now a hedge, now a road, and now a tree. The naturalists tell us that these winter companies ofchaffinches are usually composed of birds of one sex only, the malesconsorting together for the time as in a boys' school. The chaffinch, I think, is the commonest bird in this part of the country. It is socommon that its loveliness has hardly been appreciated as it ought tobe. It is a little world of colour, like a small jay, and nothingcould be more beautiful than its flushed breast as it sits on the topof a tall tree in the sunset. As for the jay, it hurries away like athief before one has time to see its coat of many colours. The jay, like the cuckoo, is a bird with a guilty conscience. The wood here isfull of jays, uttering their one monotonous shriek, like the rippingof a skirt. They scuttle among the trees at one's approach, showingthe white feather. Occasionally, however, they too will sit in a treeand allow the sun to flush their cinnamon-coloured breasts. But weshall see hundreds of them before we see a single one in the crestedand passive splendour of the jays in the picture-books. As a matter offact, nearly all the birds in the picture-books are guesses andexaggerations. The birds, we discover before long, are a secretkingdom into which it is given to few to enter. 

The whole of Nature, indeed, is curiously secretive. She does not tellmuch about herself save to the importunate. Not many of us can speakher language or have learned the password to her cave of treasure. Shethrusts upon our notice a few birds, a few insects, a few animals, afew flowers. But for the most part there is no finding her populationwithout seeking for it. Hundreds of her flowers are hidden from thelazy eye, and we may pass a lifetime without seeing so common a birdas a tree-creeper or so common an animal as a shrew-mouse. How seldomit is one sees even a rat! There are human beings who will neverdiscover an early flower, however many miles they cover in theircountry walks. They take no pleasure in finding a wild-strawberryflower in January or a campion blossom in the first week in February. They are as indifferent to Nature as Nature is to them. Thehoneysuckle that breaks out with leaves as with green flames; thethrust of the leaves of the wild hyacinth under the trees, like thereturn of youth; the flowering of the elm; the young moon like a whitebird with spread wings in the afternoon sky; the golden journey ofOrion and his dog across the heavens by night--these things, theyfeel, are not interwoven with man's fate. They were before him, andthey will be after him. Therefore, he cares more for his little brickhouse in the suburbs, which will at least be changed when he goes. Ido not suggest that anyone consciously adopts a philosophy of thiskind. But most of us are undoubtedly a little offended at some time inour lives when we realise that Nature has so little regard for ourpassions and our tears. She is a consoler, but it is on her own terms. Matthew Arnold found the secret of life in becoming as resigned toobedience as the stars and the tide. Who knows but, if we do this, Nature may be found to care after all? But she does not care in theway in which most of us want her to care. The religious discoveredthat long ago. They found that Nature was guilty of neutrality inhuman affairs if they did not go further and suspect her of enmity. Itis only when philosophy has been added to religion that men have beenable to reconcile without gloom the indifference of Nature with theidea of the love of God. And even the religious and the philosophersare puzzled by the spectacle of the worm that writhes on the gardenpath while the robin pecks at it, triumphant in his fatness andpraising the fine weather. 

XVII

EGGS: AN EASTER HOMILY

Having decided to write on Easter, I took out a volume of _TheEncyclopĉdia Britannica_ in order to make up the subject of eggs, andthe first entry under "Egg" that met my eye was:

"EGG, AUGUSTUS LEOPOLD (1816-1863), English painter, was born on the2nd of May, 1816, in London, where his father carried on business as agun-maker. "

I wish I had known about Augustus five years ago. I should like tohave celebrated the centenary of an _egg_ somewhere else than in aLondon tea-shop. Augustus Leopold Egg seems to have spent a life inkeeping with his name. He was taught drawing by Mr Sass, and in lateryears was a devotee of amateur theatricals, making a memorableappearance, as we should expect of an Egg, in a play called _Not soBad as We Seem_. He also appears to have devoted a great part of hislife to painting bad eggs, if we may judge by the titles of his mostfamous pictures--_Buckingham Rebuffed, Queen Elizabeth discovers sheis no longer young, Peter the Great sees Catherine for the FirstTime_, and _Past and Present, a Triple Picture of a Faithless Wife_. She was a lady, no doubt, who could not submit to the marriage yolk. Anyhow, she had a great fall, and Augustus did his best to put hertogether again. "Egg, " the _Encyclopĉdia_ tells us finally, "wasrather below the middle height, with dark hair and a handsome, well-formed face. " He seems to have been a man, take him for all inall: we shall not look upon his like again. 

Even so, Augustus was not the only Egg. He was certainly not the eggin search of which I opened the _Encyclopĉdia_. The egg I was lookingfor was the Easter egg, and it seemed to be the only egg that was notmentioned. There were birds' eggs, and reptiles' eggs, and fishes'eggs, and molluscs' eggs, and crustaceans' eggs, and insects' eggs, and frogs' eggs, and Augustus Egg, and the eggs of the duck-billedplatypus, which is the only mammal (except the spiny ant-eater) whoseeggs are "provided with a large store of yolk, enclosed within ashell, and extruded to undergo development apart from the maternaltissues. " I do not know whether it is evidence of the irrelevance ofthe workings of the human mind or of our implacable greed ofknowledge, but within five minutes I was deep in the subject of eggsin general, and had forgotten all about the Easter variety. I foundmyself fascinated especially by the eggs of fishes. There are so manyof them that one was impressed as one is on being told the populationof London. "It has been calculated, " says the writer of the article, "that the number laid by the salmon is roughly about 1000 to everypound weight of the fish, a 15-lb. Salmon laying 15, 000 eggs. Thesturgeon lays about 7, 000, 000; the herring 50, 000; the turbot14, 311, 000; the sole 134, 000; the perch 280, 000. " This is the sort ofsentence I always read over to myself several times. And when I cometo "the turbot, 14, 311, 000, " I pause, and try to picture to myself theman who counted them. How does one count 14, 311, 000? How long does ittake? If one lay awake all night, trying to put oneself to sleep bycounting turbots' eggs instead of sheep, one would hardly have donemore than make a fair start by the time the maid came in to draw thecurtains and let in the sun on one's exhausted temples. A person likemyself, ignorant of mathematics, could not easily count more that10, 000 in an hour. This would mean that, even if one lay in bed forten hours, which one never does except on one's birthday, one wouldhave counted only 100, 000 out of the 14, 311, 000 eggs by the time onehad to get up for breakfast. That would leave 14, 211, 000 still to becounted At this point, most of us, I think, would give it up indespair. After one horrible night's experience, we would jump into ahot bath muttering: "Never again! Never again!" like a statesman whocan't think of anything to say, and send out for a quinine-and-irontonic. Our friends meeting us later in the day would say with concern:"Hullo! you're looking rather cheap. What have you been doing?"; andwhen we answered bitterly: "Counting turbots' eggs, " they would hurryoff with an apprehensive look on their faces. The naturalist, it isclear, must be capable of a persistence that is beyond the reach ofmost of us. I calculate that, if he were able to work for 14 hours aday, counting at the rate of 10, 000 an hour, even then it would takehim 122-214 days to count the eggs of a single turbot. After that, itwould take a chartered accountant at least 122-214 days to check hisfigures. One can gather from this some idea of the enormous industryof men of science. For myself, I could more easily paint the SistineMadonna or compose a Tenth Symphony than be content to loose myselfinto this universe of numbers. Pythagoras, I believe, discovered asort of philosophy in numbers, but even he did not count beyond seven. 

After the fishes, the reptiles seem fairly modest creatures. Theordinary snake does not lay more than twenty or thirty eggs, and eventhe python is content to stop at a hundred. The crocodile, though awicked animal, lays only twenty or thirty; the tortoise as few as twoor four; and the turtle does not exceed two hundred. But I am notreally interested in eggs--not, at least, in any eggs but birds'eggs--or should not have been, if I had not read _The EncyclopĉdiaBritannica_. The sight of a fly's egg--if the fly lays an egg--fillsme with disgust--and frogs' eggs attract me only with the fascinationof repulsion. What one likes about the birds is that they lay suchpretty eggs. Even the duck lays a pretty egg The duck is a plain bird, rather like a char-woman, but it lays an egg which is (or can be) aslovely as an opal. The flavour, I agree, is not Christian, but, likeother eggs of which this can be said, it does for cooking. Hens' eggsare less attractive in colour, but more varied. I have always thoughtit one of the chief miseries of being a man that, when boiled eggs areput on the table, one does not get first choice, and that all thelittle brown eggs are taken by women and children before one's ownturn comes round. There is one sort of egg with a beautiful sunburntlook that always reminds me of the seaside, and that I have not tastedin a private house for above twenty years. To begin the day with suchan egg would put one in a good temper for a couple of hours. Butalways one is fobbed off with a large white egg of demonstrativeuncomeliness. It may taste all right, but it does not look all right. Food should appeal to the eye as well as to the palate, as everyonerecognises when the blancmange that has not set is brought to thetable. At the same time, there is one sort of white egg that is quitedelightful to look at. I do not know its parent, but I think it is ablack hen of the breed called Spanish. Not everything white in Natureis beautiful. One dislikes instinctively white calves, white horses, white elephants and white waistcoats. But the particular egg of whichI speak is one of the beautiful white things--like snow, or a breakingwave, or teeth. So certain am I, however, that neither it nor thelittle brown one will ever come my way, while there is a woman or achild or a guest to prevent it, that when I am asked how I like theeggs to be done I make it a point to say "poached" or "fried. " Itgives me at least a chance of getting one of the sort of eggs I likeby accident. As for poached eggs, I agree. There are nine ways ofpoaching eggs, and each of them is worse than the other. Still, thereis one good thing about poached eggs: one is never disappointed. Oneaccepts a poached egg like fate. There is no sitting on tenterhooks, watching and waiting and wondering, as there is in regard to boiledeggs. I admit that most of the difficulties associated with boiledeggs could be got over by the use of egg-cosies--appurtenances of thebreakfast table that stirred me to the very depths of delight when Ifirst set eyes on them as a child. It was at a mothers' meeting, whereI was the only male present. Thousands of women sat round me, sewingand knitting things for a church bazaar. Much might be written aboutegg-cosies. Much might be said for and much against. They would beeffective, however only if it were regarded as a point of honour notto look under the cosy before choosing the egg. And the sense ofhonour, they say, is a purely masculine attribute. Children never hadit, and women have lost it. I do not know a single woman whom I wouldtrust not to look under an egg cosy--not, at least, unless she wereforbidden eggs by the doctor. In that case, any egg would seemdelicious, and she would seize the nearest, irrespective of class orcolour. 

This may not explain the connection between eggs and Easter. But thenneither does _The Encyclopĉdia Britannica_. I have looked up both thearticle on eggs and the article on Easter, and in neither of them canI find anything more relevant than such remarks as that "the eggs ofthe lizard are always white or yellowish, and generally soft-shelled;but the geckos and the green lizards lay hard-shelled eggs" or"Gregory of Tours relates that in 577 there was a doubt about Easter. "In order to learn something about Easter eggs one has to turn to somesuch work as _The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable_, which tells us that"the practice of presenting eggs to our friends at Easter is Magian orPersian, and bears allusion to the mundane egg, for which Ormuzd andAhriman were to contend till the consummation of all things. " Theadvantage of reading _Tit-Bits_ is that one gets to know hundreds ofthings like that. The advantage of not reading _Tit-Bits_ is that oneis so ignorant of them that a piece of information of this sort is asfresh and unexpected as the morning's news every Easter Monday. NextEaster, I feel sure, I shall look it up again. I shall have forgottenall about the mundane egg, even if Ormuzd and Ahriman have not. Ishall be thinking more about my breakfast egg. What a piece of work isa man! And yet many profound things might be said about eggs, mundaneor otherwise. I wish I could have thought of them. 

XVIII

ENTER THE SPRING

One would imagine from the way in which some people are talking thatthis is an early spring. I do not think it is. The daffodils certainlycame before the swallows dared, but they came reluctantly and in lessgenerous profusion than usual--at least, in one county. As for theswallow, it may have arrived by Saturday, but it has not arrived onthe day on which I am writing. "About the middle of March, " says MrCoward, "the first swallows arrive, " but I have met no one who hasseen one even in the first week in April. The sky seems empty withoutthem. This is, no doubt, an illusion. There are plenty of rooks andpigeons, and there are always starlings desperately hustling from thechimney-pot across to the plum-tree and back again. But the starlingis most interesting, not when he is in the air, but when he is atrest--making queer noises in his effulgent, tight-fitting clothes, sometimes like a baby in a cradle, sometimes like a girl trying towhistle, always experimenting with sound rather than singing. Onelooks forward to the swallows and martins and swifts because theyreally do live the life of the air. The sky is their domain, and noroof or tree or even telegraph wire. Till they arrive the air is anall but stagnant pool. They transform it into a scene of whirlpools. They do for the air what the hum of insects does for the garden. Theybanish the stillness of winter and lead the year in the movements of aremembered dance. Spring, however, awakens gradually, and does notplunge precipitately into an orgy. First, the home birds sing, orrather redouble their singing, for the wren and the robin hardly everleft off. This, I think, must be an exceptional year for the chorus ofwrens. Last year the lane that leads to the station was at this time alane of chaffinches: this year it is a lane of wrens. Last year thegarden was a garden of thrushes: this year it is a garden of wrens. That is possibly an exaggeration, but this little Tetrazzini among thebirds has never seemed to me to trill so dominantly and over so wide arule. As for the thrushes, I do not know what has happened to them. Iheard plenty of them on the outskirts of London in February, but here, fifty miles from London, it is as though they were an exterminatedrace. Whether gardeners or cats or some other epidemic is to blame, the trees are silent of them. Even the blackbird is not too commonhere this year, but then a country gardener regards a blackbird as aTurk regards an Armenian. I wish thrushes and blackbirds could read, so that one could put up a notice offering them sanctuary even at theexpense of one's gooseberries and strawberries. Strange that astrawberry should appear more delightful to anyone than the song of ablackbird! I know, I may say, the feeling of helpless rage that wellsup in the human breast at the sight of a blackbird stealing one'sstrawberries. Thank God, I am not impervious to moral indignation. Ifshouting "Stop thief!" could save the strawberries, my voice would befor saving them. But I do not believe in capital punishment for pettytheft, and, anyhow, if I must lose either a song or a strawberry, Ihad rather lose the strawberry. 

The larks luckily take to the fields and do not trust themselves neareither cats or gardeners. They do not always escape even in thefields, and the dead bodies of some of them are served in a pudding ina Fleet Street restaurant. But, on the whole, considering what adangerous neighbour man is, they escape fairly lightly. There is asort of "live and let live" truce between them and the human race. Thechaffinches, too--the greatest bird multitude there is, perhaps, afterthe house-sparrows--are free enough to sing. They have been, duringthe past week, sailing out on short voyages from the tops of trees, like flycatchers, dancing in the air after their victims and thenreturning to the spray. The green-finch--that beautiful-winged MrsGummidge among birds--is also abundant, and slips down nervously everynow and then among the groundsel in the unweeded garden. I confess thegreenfinch has all my sympathy, but it rather bores me. What the deuceis it worrying about? There is no poetry in its lamentation--only asort of habitual formula of a poor, lorn woman. If birds could read, Ithink I should add to the notices I put up a little board containingthe words:

 "No bottles. No hawkers, No greenfinches. "

I should feel really sorry if they took any notice of my notice, butit might convey a hint to them that it would be good policy on theirpart to cheer up for at least five minutes in the day and that, in anycase, there is no need to say the same thing over and over again. Every bird, it is true, says the same thing over and over again--atany rate, more or less the same thing. Birds such as the robin and thethrush vary their song as the chaffinch and the willow-wren do not. But even the robin and the thrush have a recognisable pattern. Fortunately, they are not always, like the greenfinch, thinking of theold 'un and thinking out loud. 

The goldfinches have begun to fly about the garden again with theirlittle sequins of song, as someone has delightfully described theirmusic. They have their eyes, I hope, on the pear-tree--now as white asan Alp--where they built and brought up a large family last year. Thecornflowers in the flower border are already in bud, and I am toldthat this is the temptation to which goldfinches most easily yield. Ihope so, at any rate. I should have a garden blue with cornflowers, ifI were sure that this would entice the seven colours of the goldfinchto make their home in it. Last Saturday, two lesser spottedwoodpeckers invaded the garden. One always imagines a woodpecker as abird of more substantial size, and it is surprising to see this littlecreature, patterned on the back like something made in the Omegaworkshop, no bigger than a sparrow, as it hastily visits apple and figtree and even wygelia. As it climbed the wygelia, indeed, a sparrowstooped down from an upper branch to study it, and then advanced inthe direction of the woodpecker. The woodpecker lay back from thetrunk of the tree--lying on its back in the air, as it were, andfluttering its wings while holding on with its claws--and seemed toinvite the sparrow to come on. I don't think the sparrow had ever seena woodpecker before. Its curiosity rather than its wrath was arousedby the strange spectacle. It did not want to hurt the foreigner, butonly to look at him. After having looked its fill, it moved off to asafer tree. Then the woodpecker, whose heart had no doubt been in itsboots for the past five minutes, also loosed its hold on the bark andmade off over the gate for a less exciting garden. 

Outside the garden the spring began on Good Friday. It came in withthe chiffchaff. For three years in succession I have heard the firstchiffchaff in exactly the same place--a clump of nut-trees on the topof a high bank. At this time of year, too, before the leaves are out, it is easy to see it. And there are few more charming birds to watch. With its little beak as slender as a grass-seed, and its body movingamong the branches like a tiny shadow rather than flesh and bones, itpauses again and again in the midst of its eating to take an upwardglance and utter its mite of music--as monotonous as a Thibetan'spraying wheel. Still lovelier is the willow-wren that follows it. Itis as though the chiffchaff were the first sketch of a willow-wren. The willow-wren is the perfected work of art, with little shades ofgreen added and a voice that, small though its range is, is perhapsthe most exquisite that will fill the air till the nightingalearrives. When I went out on Sunday morning, I prophesied that I wouldhear the first willow-wren, and, though I heard only one in ahill-side copse where the cowslips are just getting their bells ready, the prophecy came true. Not that I am much of a prophet. I don't knowhow often I have prophesied the arrival of the swallow. And, indeed, it is the surprises in nature, rather than the things that oneforesees, that are the pleasantest--especially if one is easilysurprised, as I am. Whoever ceases to be surprised, for instance, bythe sight of a goldcrested wren? I heard its tiny pinpoint of voicelast Sunday afternoon when I was walking past a plantation where thebullace was in flower, and, on looking into the trees, saw the littlethimble-sized creature making free with invisible insects--his beak ishardly big enough to eat a visible one--and performing acrobatics likea tit. One of the charms of the goldcrest is that he does not look ona human being as a wild beast. The blackbird regards a man as apoliceman; the greenfinch bolts for it if you so much as look at him, but the goldcrest feels as secure in your presence as if you werebehind bars in a cage in the Zoological Gardens. One could probablymake him jump if one went up to him and shouted suddenly into his ear, or even by making a violent gesture. But his first instinct is not torun. That, for a bird, is a considerable compliment. There can benothing more distressing to a man of strictly honourable intentionsthan to have to creep about hedges furtively like a criminal in orderto get a good look at a bird. Why he should want to look at birds atall it is difficult to explain. I suppose it is a sort of disease, like going to the "movies" or doing exercises. All I know is that, ifyou get it, you get it very badly. You would stop Shakespeare himself, if he were reciting a new sonnet to you, and bid him be quiet and lookhalf-way up the elm where the nuthatch was beating away--up and down, like a blacksmith--at a nut or something in a knob of the tree. StPaul might be reading out to you the first draft of his Epistle to theRomans; you would quite unscrupulously interrupt him with a "Hush, man! There's a tree-creeper somewhere about. Listen, there he is! Ifyou keep quiet, perhaps we'll be able to see him. " I assure you, it isas bad as that. As for a man who takes out a noisy dog, or who whacksat loose stones with his stick on the road, you would regard him as amisbehaved and riotous person and would not call him your friend. Everything has to be subordinated to the hope of catching sight of ahypothetical bird--which you have probably seen dozens of timesalready. Truly, there is no accounting for human vices. There is, however, at least this to be said in favour of bird-watching, that itis the pleasantest of the vices, that it is cheaper than golf, anddoes not harden the arteries like tea-drinking. And after all, if oneis going to get excited at all, one may as well get excited about thecolours and songs of birds as about most things. 

XIX

THE DAREDEVIL BARBER

To roll over Niagara Falls in a barrel is an odd way of courtingdeath, but it seems that death must be courted somehow. Danger is moreattractive to many men than drink. They prefer gambling with theirlives to gambling with their money. They have the gambler's faith intheir lucky star. They are preoccupied with the vision of victory tothe exclusion of all timid thoughts. They have a dramatic sense thatsets them anticipatorily on a stage, bowing to the applause of themultitude. It is the applause, I fancy, rather than the peril itself, that entices them. The average boy who performs a deed of derring-doperforms it before his admiring fellows. Even in so small a thing asringing a bell and running away he likes to have spectators. Few boysring bells out of mischief when they are alone. Poor Mr CharlesStephens, the "Daredevil Barber" of Bristol, who lost his life atNiagara Falls in his six-foot barrel the other Sunday, made sure thatthere would be plenty of witnesses of his adventure. Not only had he aparty of sightseers in motors along the road following the cask on itsperilous voyage but he had a cinematograph photographer ready toimmortalise the affair on a film. Two other persons, it is said, hadalready accomplished a similar feat. One of them, a woman, "was justabout gone, " according to a witness, "when we got her out of thebarrel. " The other "was a used-up man for several weeks. " Thishowever, did not deter the daredevil barber. Had he not already on oneoccasion put his head into a lion's mouth? Had he not boxed in alion's den? Had he not stood up to men with rifles who shot lumps ofsugar from his head? It may seem an extraordinary way to behave in aworld in which there are so many reasonable opportunities for heroism, but men are extraordinary creatures. There is no adventure so wildthat they will not embark on it. There are men who, if they took itinto their heads that there was one chance in a hundred of reachingthe moon by being precipitated into space in some kind of torpedo, would volunteer for the adventure. They do these mad things alike fortrivial and noble ends. They love a stunt even (or especially) at therisk of their lives. Half the aeroplane accidents are due to the factthat many men prefer risk to safety. To do some things that otherpeople cannot do seems to them the only way of justifying theirexistence. It is an initiation into aristocracy. Every man is therival of all other men, and he is not satisfied till he has beatenthem. If he is a great cricketer, or a great poet, or a CabinetMinister, or wins the Derby, his ambition as a rule is fulfilled andhe does not feel the need of jumping down Etna or hanging by his toesfrom the Eiffel Tower in order to create a sensation. But if a man isno use at either poetry or football, he must do something. Blondinbecame a world-famous figure simply by walking along a tight-ropealong which neither Shakespeare nor Shelley could have walked. It maybe that they would have had no desire to walk along it, but in anycase Blondin was able to feel that he could beat the greatest of menin at least one game. In his own business he stood above the ApostlePaul and Michelangelo and Napoleon. He was a king and, even if you didnot envy him his trade, you had to envy him his throne. He was a manyou would have liked to meet at dinner, not for the sake of hisconversation, but for the sake of his uniqueness. One remembers howone stood with heart in mouth as he set out with his balancing-pole inhis hand on his journey across the rope blindfolded and pretending tostumble every ten yards. A single false step and he would have fallenfrom the height of a tower to certain death, for there was no net tocatch him. Strange that one should have cared whether he fell or not!But ninety-nine out of a hundred did care. We watched him asbreathlessly as though he were carrying the future of the world in hishands. He knew that he was interesting us, engrossing us, and that washis reward. It was a reward, no doubt, that could be measured in gold. But it is more than greed of gold that sets men courting death in suchways. The joy of being unique is at least as great as the joy of beingrich. And the surest way of becoming unique is to trail one's coat inthe presence of Death and challenge him to tread on the tail of it. 

Not that even the most daring seeker after uniqueness fails to takenumerous precautions for his safety. No man is mad enough to set outalong a tight-rope in hobnailed boots with out previous practice. Nowoman who has not learned to swim has ever tried to swim the EnglishChannel from Dover to Cape Grisnez. Even the daredevil barber ofBristol insured himself, so far as he could, against the perils of hisadventure. He had an oxygen tank in the barrel which would have kepthim alive for a time if the barrel had not been swept under the Falls, and he had friends patrolling the waters to recover the barrel. Likethe schoolboy who takes risks, he did not feel that he was going toget caught. "I have the greatest confidence, " he said, "that I shallcome through all right. " His previous escapes must have given him theassurance that he was not born to die of danger. Not only had heserved through the war, but he had once plucked a woman from therailway line when the express was so near that it tore her skirt. Hemust have felt that one man at least could live in perfect safety inthe kingdom of danger. He was probably less nervous as he crept intohis barrel than a schoolgirl would be in getting into the boat on thechute. He had we may be sure, his thrill, but was it the thrill ofbeing in peril or the thrill of being conspicuous? Some men, ofcourse, there are who love danger for danger's sake, and who would runrisks in an empty world. Men of this kind make good spies, and, intheir youth, good burglars. Theirs is the desire of the moth for thestar--or at any rate of the moth that feels it is different from everyother moth and can successfully dare the candle flame. To play withfire and not to be consumed is a universal pleasure. The child passesits finger through the gas-flame and glories in the sensation. It islike playing a game of touch with danger. The triumph of escape givesone a delicious moment. That is why many men invent dangers forthemselves. It is simply for the pleasure of escaping them. There areboys who enjoy wrenching knockers off doors, not because knockers arean interesting kind of bric-à-brac, but because there is just a chanceof being caught in the act by the police. I once knew a youth who hada drawer filled with knockers. He felt as proud of them as a youngIndian would have been of an equal number of the scalps of hisenemies. They proved that he was a brave. Every man would like to be abrave, though every man dare not. I confess I never had much ambitionto wrench knockers, but that may have been because I was perfectlycontent with the world as it is without making it any more dangerous. I often think that people who put their heads into lions' mouths donot realise what a dangerous place the planet is without anyartificial stimulus. 

Did the daredevil barber of Bristol ever realise, I wonder, the dangerhe was in every time he raised a fork with a piece of roast beef tohis lips? Either the beef might have choked him or it might have givenhim ptomaine poisoning, or, if it failed of either of these, there areat least half-a-dozen fatal diseases which vegetarians say are causedby eating it. Even if we take for granted that there is little dangerin plain beef, are there not curries and sausages and pork-pies onwhich a lover of risks may exercise his daring in the restaurants? Iknow people who are afraid to eat fish on a Monday lest it may havegone bad over the week-end. Others live in terror of mackerel andherrings. I myself have always admired the gallantry of Londoners whogo into a chance restaurant and order lobster or curried prawns. Thenthere are all the tinned foods, a spoil for heroes. I have known aV. C. Who was frightened of tinned salmon. And a man's food is not morebeset with perils than his drink. Even if he confines himself towater, he is in danger at every sip. If the water is too hard, it maydeposit destruction in his arteries. If it is too soft, it may givehis child rickets. Or it may be populous with germs and give himtyphoid fever. If, on the other hand, he is dissatisfied with thedrink of the beasts and takes to beverages the use of whichdistinguishes men from oxen, what a nightmare procession of potentialills lies in wait for him! You may read an account of them in anytemperance tract. The very enumeration of them would drive a weak manto water, if water itself were not suspect. But, alas, even to breatheis to put oneself in danger. There are more germs in a bus than thereare stars in the firmament, and one cannot walk along the Strandwithout all sorts of bacilli shooting their little arrows at one atevery breath. If men realised these things--truly realised them--theywould see that there is no need to go to the North Pole in order tolive dangerously. A walk from Charing Cross to St Paul's would then beseen to be as rich in hairbreadth escapes as a voyage to an island ofhead-hunters. The man who lives the most thrilling life I know is aman who rarely stirs beyond his garden. Every time he is pricked by athorn or gets a little earth in his finger-nail, he rushes into thehouse to bathe his hands in lysol and, for days afterwards, he keepsfeeling his jaw to see whether it is stiffening with the first signsof tetanus. He lives in a condition of recurrent alarm. He gets morefrights in a week than an ordinary traveller could get in a year. Ihave often advised him to give up gardening, seeing that he finds itso exciting. I have come to the conclusion, however, that he enjoysthose half-hourly rushes to the lysol-bottle--the desperate game ofhide-and-seek with lockjaw. He needs no barrel to roll him overNiagara in order to gaze into "the bright eyes of danger. " He findsall the danger he wants at the root of the meanest brussels sproutthat blows. 

XX

WEEDS: AN APPRECIATION

A weed, says the dictionary, is "any plant that is useless, troublesome, noxious or grows where it is not wanted. " The dictionaryalso adds: "_colloq. _, a cigar. " We may omit for our present purposethe harmless colloquialism, but the rest of the definition deserves tobe closely examined. Socrates, I imagine, could have found a number ofpointed questions to put to the dictionary maker. He might have begunwith two of the commonest weeds, the nettle and the dandelion. Havinggot his opponent--and the opponents of Socrates were all of the samemental build as Sherlock Holmes's Dr Watson--eagerly to admit that thenettle was a weed, he would at once put the definition to the test. "The story goes, " he would say, quoting Mrs. Clark Nuttall's admirablework, _Wild Flowers as They Grow_, "that the Roman soldiers broughtthe most venomous of the stinging nettles to England to flagellatethemselves with when they were benumbed with the cold of this--tothem--terribly inclement isle. It is certain, " he would add from thesame source, "that physicians at one time employed nettles to stingparalysed limbs into vigour again, also to cure rheumatism. In view ofall this, " he would ask, "does it not follow either that the nettle isnot a weed or that your definition of a weed is mistaken?" And hisopponent would be certain to answer: "It does follow, O Socrates. " Asecond opponent, however, would rashly take up the argument. He wouldpoint out that even if the Romans had a mistaken notion thatnettle-stings were useful as a preventive of cold feet, and if oursuperstitious ancestors made use of them to cure rheumatism, as oursuperstitious contemporaries resort to bee-stings for the samepurpose, the nettle was at all times probably useless and is certainlyuseless to-day. Socrates would turn to him with a quiet smile and ask:"When we say that a plant is useless, do we mean merely that we as amatter of fact make no use of it, or that it would be of no use evenif we did make use of it?" And the reply would leap out: "Undoubtedlythe latter, O Socrates. " Socrates would then remember his Mrs. Nuttallagain, and refer to an old herbal which claimed that "excessivecorpulency may be reduced" by taking a few nettle-seeds daily. Hewould admit that he had never made a trial of this cure, as he had nodesire to get rid of the corpulency with which the gods had seen fitto endow him. He would claim, however, that the usefulness of thenettle had been proved as an article of diet, that it was once afavourite vegetable in Scotland, that it had helped to keep peoplealive at the time of the Irish famine, and that even during the recentwar it had been recommended as an excellent substitute for spinach. "May we not put it in this way, " he would ask, "that you call a nettleuseless merely because you yourself do not make use of it?" "It seemsthat you are right, O Socrates. " "And would you call an aeroplaneuseless, merely because you yourself have never made use of anaeroplane? Or a pig useless, merely because you yourself do not eatpork?" There would be a great wagging of heads among the opponents, after which a third would pluck up courage to say: "But, surely, Socrates, nettles as we know them to-day are simply noxious plantsthat fulfil no function but to sting our children?" Socrates wouldsay, after a moment's pause: "That certainly is an argument thatdeserves serious consideration. A weed, then, is to be condemned, youthink, not for its uselessness, but for its noxiousness?" This wouldbe agreed to. "Then, " he would pursue his questions, "you wouldprobably call monkshood a weed, seeing that it has been the cause notmerely of pain but even of death itself to many children. " Hisopponent would grow angry at this, and exclaim: "Why, I cultivatemonkshood in my own garden. It is one of the most beautiful of theflowers. " Then there would be some wrangling as to whether uglinesswas the test of weeds, till Socrates would make it clear that thiswould involve omitting speedwell and the scarlet pimpernel from thelist. Someone else would contend that the essence of a weed was itstroublesomeness, but Socrates would counter this by asking themwhether horseradish was not a far more troublesome thing in a gardenthan foxgloves. "Oh, " one of the disputants would cry in desperation, "let us simply say that a weed is any plant that is not wanted in theplace where it is growing. " "You would call groundsel a weed in thegarden of a man who does not keep a canary, but not a weed in thegarden of a man who does?" "I would. " Socrates would burst outlaughing at this, and say: "It seems to me that a weed is moredifficult to define even than justice. I think we had better changethe subject and talk about the immortality of the soul. " The only partof the definition of a weed, indeed, that bears a moment'sinvestigation is contained in the three words: "_colloq. _, a cigar. "

In my opinion, the safest course is to include among weeds all plantsthat grow wild. It is also important to get rid of the notion thatweeds are necessarily evil things that should be exterminated likerats. I remember some years ago seeing an appalling suggestion thatfarmers should be compelled by law to clear their land of weeds. Thewriter, if I remember correctly, even looked forward to the day when afarmer would be fined if a daisy were found growing in one of hisfields. Utilitarianism of this kind terrifies the imagination. Thereare some people who are aghast at the prospect of a world ofsimplified spelling. But a world of simplified spelling would beArcadia itself compared to a world without wild flowers. According tocertain writers in _The Times_, however, we are faced with thepossibility of a world without wild flowers, even if the Board ofAgriculture takes no hand in the business. These writers tell us thatthe reckless plucking of wild flowers has already led to a greatdiminution in their numbers. Daffodils grow wild in many parts ofEngland, but, as soon as they appear, hordes of holiday-makers rush tothe scene and gather them in such numbers as to injure the life of theplants. I am not enough of a botanist to know whether it is possiblein this way to discourage flowers that grow from bulbs. If it is, itseems likely enough that, with the increasing popularity of countrywalks, there will after a time be no daffodils or orchises left inEngland. If one were sure of it, one would never pluck a bee-orchisagain. One does not know why one plucks it, except that the bee-shapedflower is one of the most exquisite of Nature's toys, and one isgreedy of possessing it. Children try to catch butterflies for thesame reason. If it were possible to catch a sunset or a blue sea, nodoubt we should take them home with us, too. It may be that art isonly the transmuted instinct to seize and make our own all thebeautiful things we see. The collector of birds' eggs and the painterare both collectors of a beauty that can be known only in hints andfragments. Still, the painter is justified by the fact that hisborrowings actually add to the number of beautiful things. If thecollector of eggs and the gatherer of flowers can be shown to beactually anti-social in their greed, we cannot be so enthusiasticabout them. I confess that on these matters I have an open mind. Forall I know, the discussion on wild flowers in _The Times_ may bemerely a scare. At the same time, it seems reasonable to believe thatif flowers that propagate themselves from seed were all gathered assoon as they appeared, there would before long be no flowers left. Inotice that one suggestion has been made to the effect thatflower-lovers should provide themselves with seeds and should scatterthese in "likely places" during their country walks. I do not likethis plotting on Nature's behalf. Besides, it might lead to somerather difficult situations. If this general seed-sowing became amatter of principle, for instance, I should probably sow daisies on myneighbour's tennis lawn, poppies and fumitory in his cornfield, anddandelions in his meadow. It is not that I am devoted to the dandelionas a flower, though it has been praised for its beauty, but at a laterstage a meadow of a million dandelion-clocks seems to me to be one ofthe most beautiful of spectacles. But I would go further than this. Ishould never see a hill-side cultivated without going out at night andsowing it with the seeds of gorse and thistle. Not that I should bearany ill-will to the farmer, but it is said that the diminution ofwaste land, with its abundance of gorse and thistles, has led to agreat diminution in the number of linnets and goldfinches. The farmer, perhaps, can do without linnets and goldfinches, but we who make ourliving in other ways cannot. I should sow tares among his wheat, ifnecessary, if I believed that tares would tempt a bearded tit or agolden oriole. 

Still, I cannot easily persuade myself that a Society for theProtection of Weeds is even now necessary. I have great faith inweeds. If they are given a fair chance, I should back them against anycultivated flower or vegetable I know. Anyone who has ever had agarden knows that, while it is necessary to work hard to keep theshepherd's purse and the chickweed and the dandelion and the wartwortand the hawkweed and the valerian from growing, one has to take nosuch pains in order to keep the lettuces and the potatoes fromgrowing. For myself, I should, in the vulgar phrase, back theshepherd's purse against the lettuces every time. If the weeds in thegarden fail to make us radiantly happy, it is not because they areweeds, but because they are the wrong weeds. Why not the ground-ivyinstead of the shepherd's purse, that lank intruder that not only is aweed but looks like one? Why not bee-orchises for wartwort, andgentians for chickweed? I have no fault to find with the foxglovesunder the apple-tree or with the ivy-leaved toad-flax that hangs withits elfin flowers from every cranny in the wall. But I protest againstthe dandelions and the superfluity of groundsel. I undertake that, ifrest-harrow and scabious and corn-cockle invade the garden, I shallnever use a hoe on them. More than this, if only the right weedssettled in the garden, I should grow no other flowers. But shepherd'spurse! Compared with it, a cabbage is a posy for a bridesmaid, andsprouting broccoli a bouquet for a prima donna. After all, one oughtto be allowed to choose the weeds for one's own garden. But then whenone chooses them, one no longer calls them weeds. The periwinkle, theprimrose and the mallow--we spare them with our tongue as with ourhoe. This, perhaps, suggests the only definition of a weed that ispossible. A weed is a plant we hoe up or, rather, that we try to hoeup. A flower or a vegetable is a plant that the hoe deliberatelymisses. But, in spite of the hoe, the weeds have it. They survive andmultiply like a subject race. .. . Well, perhaps better a weed than ageranium. 

XXI

A JUROR IN WAITING

The train was crowded with jurymen. Every one of them was sayingsomething like "It's a disgrace, " "It's a perfect scandal, " "No othernation would put up with it, " and "Here we all are grumbling; and whatare we going to do about it? Nothing. That's the British way. " Theywere not complaining of any act of injustice perpetrated against aprisoner. They were complaining of their own treatment. Fifty or sixtyof them had been summoned from the four ends of the county, and keptpacked away all day under a gallery at the back of the court, wherethere was not even room for all of them to sit down, and where therewas certainly not room for all of them to breathe. It would have beenan easy thing for the Clerk of the Court to choose a dozen jurymen inthe first ten minutes of the day, and to dismiss the rest on theirbusiness. He might, if necessary, have also picked a reserve jury, andselected the jury for the next day's cases. The law revels in expense, however and so a great number of middle-aged men were taken away fortwo whole days from their businesses and compelled to sit in filthyair and on benches that would not be endured in the gallery of atheatre, with nothing to do but watch the backs of the heads of acontinuous procession of barristers and bigamists. 

Few jurors would have complained, I think if there had been anyrational excuse for detaining them. What they objected to so bitterlywas the fact that no use was made of them, and that they were keptthere for two days, though it must have been obvious to everyone thatthe majority of them might as well he at home. It may be, however, that there is some great purpose underlying the present system ofcalling together a crowd of unnecessary jurymen. Perhaps it is a formof compulsory education for middle-aged men. It shows them the machineof the law in action, and enables them to some extent to say fromtheir own observation whether it is being worked in a fair and humaneor in a harsh and vindictive spirit. One cannot sit through onecriminal case after another at the Assizes without gaining aconsiderable amount of material for forming a judgment on this matter. The juror in waiting, as he sees a pregnant woman swooning in the dockor a man with a high, pumpkin-shaped back to his head led off down thedark stairs to five years' penal servitude, becomes a keen critic ofthe British justice that may have been to him until then merely aphrase. How does British justice emerge from the test? Well, it may bethat this judge was a particularly kind judge and that the policemenof this county are particularly kindly policemen, but I confess that, much as I detest other people's boasting, I came away with theimpression that the boast about British justice is justified. I do notbelieve that it is by any means always justified in the mouths ofstatesmen who use it as an excuse for their own injustice, and I wouldnot trust every judge or every jury to give a verdict free frompolitical bias in a case that involved political issues. But in theordinary case--"as between, " in the words of the oath, "our sovereignlord the King and the prisoner at the bar"--it seems to me, if my twodays' experience can be taken as typical, that British justice is notonly just but merciful. 

The evidence is, perhaps, insufficient, as, in most cases, thesentences were deferred. But what pleased one was the general lack ofvindictiveness in the prosecution or in the police evidence. Hardly abigamist climbed into the dock--and there was an apparently endlessstream of them--to whom the local police did not give a glowingcertificate of character. The chief constable of the county went intothe witness-box to testify that one bigamist was "reliable, " "a, goodworker, " etc. "His general conduct, " a policeman would say of another, "as regards both the women, was good. " The barristers, as was natural, dwelt on the Army record of most of the men, and, even when a clienthad pleaded guilty, would appeal to the judge to remember that he hadbefore him a man with a stainless past. "But wait, wait, " the judgewould interrupt; "you know bigamy is a very serious offence. " "I quiteagree with your lordship, " counsel would reply nervously, "but I begof you to take into consideration that the prisoner was carried awayby his love for this woman--" This was where the judge always grewindignant. He was a little man with big eyebrows, a big nose, a bigmouth, and white whiskers. His whiskers made him appear a little likeMatthew Arnold in a wig and scarlet, save that he did not look as ifhe were sitting above the battle. "You tell me, " he declared warmly, "that he loved this woman, while he admits that he deceived her intomarrying him and falsely described himself in the marriage certificateas a bachelor. " Counsel would again nervously agree with his lordshipthat his client had done wrong in deceiving the woman, but in threesentences he would have found another way round to the portraiture ofthe prisoner as all but a model for the young. Certainly, the greatincrease in the offence of bigamy proves at least the hollowness ofall the talk about the growing indifference to the marriage tie. Whatever we may think of bigamists--and there are black sheep in everyflock--the bigamist is manifestly a much-married man. He is a person, I should say, with the bump of domesticity excessively developed. Themerely immoral man, as most of us know him, does not ask for thesanction of the law for his immorality. He does not feel the want of"a home from home, " as the bigamist does. The increase in bigamy, itseems clear enough, is largely due to the war, which not only gave menopportunities for travel such as they had never had before, butenabled them to travel in a uniform which was itself a passport tomany an impressionable female heart. Men had never been so muchadmired before. Never had they had so wide a choice of femaleacquaintances. "I am amazed, " said Clive on a famous occasion, "at myown moderation. " Many a bigamist, as he stands in the dock in thesedays of the cool fit, could conscientiously put forward the same plea. But the most that any of them can say is that they thought the firstwife was dead or that she wanted to bring up the children RomanCatholics. 

The first wife in one of the bigamy cases went into the witness-box, and I saw what to me was an incredible sight--an Englishwoman ofthirty who could neither read nor write. Red-haired, tearful, weary, she did not even know the months of the year. She said a telegram hadbeen sent to her husband saying she was dangerously ill in February. "Was that this year or last year?" asked counsel. "I don't know, sir, "she said. "Come, come, " said the judge, "you must know whether youwere suffering from a dangerous illness this year or last. " "No, sir, "she replied shakily; "you see, sir, not bein' a scholar, I couldn't'ardly tell, sir. " Then a bright idea struck her. "My hospital paperscould tell the date, sir. " She produced from her pocket a paper sayingthat she had undergone an operation in a hospital in September 1919. That was all that could be got out of her. The counsel on the otherside rose to cross-examine her about the dates. "You had an operationin September, you say. Were you laid up at any other time during thepast two years?" "No, sir. " "But you have sworn that you were ill inFebruary, when a telegram was sent to your husband?" "Yes, sir. " "Andnow you say that you weren't ill at any other time except inSeptember?" "No, sir. " "So you weren't ill in February?" "Oh yes, sir;I had the 'flu, sir. " She was as obstinate about it all as the childin _We are Seven_. But she kept assuring us that she was no scholar. Her husband said that he had received a letter saying she was dead, and, though he had lost it, he quoted it at length "as far as he couldremember it. " It was a beautiful letter, expressing regret that he hadnot been at the side of the deathbed, where, the writer was sure, whatever faults had been on either side would have been forgiven. "Younever were dead?" the judge asked the woman. "No sir, " she replied inthe same tone of _We are Seven_ seriousness. 

A girl was put in the dock, charged with having stolen a Post Officesavings bank book. A policeman, giving evidence, said: "Until the 6thof December she was in the Wacks. " "You say, " said the judge, ratherbewildered by the good appearance of the girl, "that she was in theworkhouse!" "In the Wacks, my lord. " "I think he means the Royal AirForce, " prosecuting counsel helped the judge out of his perplexity. And the word "Wraf" went from mouth to mouth round the court. The girlwas guilty, but the judge told her that he was not going to send herto prison. "I don't think it would do you any good, and I don't thinkthe interests of society call for it, " he said. "What I'm going to dois to bind you over to come up for judgment if called upon. Now, goaway home, and be a good girl, and, if you are, you won't hearanything more about it. You have done a very disgraceful thing, butyou can live it down by good conduct in the future. " There was anotherthief, a boy of eighteen, who had been deserted by his mother at theage of three, and whom the judge also told, though not in those words, to go and sin no more. There was also a boy who had forged hisfather's consent to his marriage, and he and his girl wife werelectured like children and sent home to do better in future. As thejudge said to the boy: "This is not a thing you are likely to doagain. " His wife, who was expecting a baby, had to be carried faintingfrom the dock. Counsel could not bring himself to say that she wasexpecting a baby. He said that she was "in a certain condition. " Themodesty of the law is marvellous. One of the most interesting of theprisoners was a little sleek-headed man accused of fraud, who keptmoving his head about like a tortoise's out of its shell. His head wasblack and shining where it was not bald and shining. He hadgold-rimmed spectacles and a sallow face. He glided his hands over theknobs on the front of the dock with a reptilian smoothness. He hadpersuaded a number of tradesmen and hotel-keepers that he was anEnglish peer. He had even complained to one shopkeeper of thesmallness of a wallet, as he needed something larger to hold thetitle-deeds relating to the peerage. In another case, a young man, staying in a house, had stolen, along with other things, his hostess'sfalse teeth, her best dress and a great quantity of underclothing. Aparcel of clothing had been recovered from a second-hand shop and wasshown to the lady when in the witness-box. She took up one of thegarments and fingered it. "Well, " said the prosecuting counsel, encouragingly, "is that your best dress?" "Naoh, " she saidmelancholily, "that's me ypron. " Then there was a young man who stolea motor-bicycle by presenting a revolver at the head of the owner. Hedenied that he had stolen it, and maintained that, after he hadapologised to the owner "for having treated him so abruptly, " they hadbecome friendly and he had been told to take the bicycle away and payfor it later. Alas! there is a limit to human credulity. Besides, theyoung man had a crooked mouth. After two days in court, one begins tobelieve that one can tell an honest man from a liar by looking at him. Probably one is over-confident. 

XXII

THE THREE-HALFPENNY BIT

As a rule, there is nothing that offends us more than a new kind ofmoney. We felt humiliated in the early days of the war when we were nolonger paid in heavy little discs of gold, and had to accept paperpounds and ten-shillingses. We even sneered at the design. We alwayssneer at the design of new money or a new stamp. But we hated thepaper even more than the design. We could not believe it had anyvalue. We spent it as though it were paper. One would as soon havethought of collecting old newspapers as of playing the miser with it. That is probably the true secret of the fall in the value of money. Economists explain it in other ways. But it seems likeliest that papermoney lost its value because we did not value it. Shopkeepers tookadvantage of our foolish innocence, and the tailor demanded sums inpaper that he would never have dared to ask in gold. I doubt if thehabit of thrift will ever be restored till the gold currency comesback. Gold is the only metal for which human beings have any lastingrespect. No one but a child would save up pennies. There is somethingin gold--the colour, perhaps, reminding us of the sun, the god of ourancestors--that puts us into the mood of worshippers. The children ofIsrael found it impossible not to worship the golden calf. They havegone on worshipping it ever since. Had the calf been of paper, theywould, I feel confident, have remained good Christians. 

The influence of hatred on the expenditure of money is seen in ourattitude to threepenny bits. Nine out of ten people feel sincerelyindignant when a threepenny bit is given to them in their change. Theshopkeeper who gives you two threepenny bits instead of a sixpenceknows this and, as he hands you the money, says apologetically: "Doyou mind?" You say: "Not at all, " but you do. You know that they willbe a constant misery to you till you get rid of them. You know that ifyou give one of them to a bus conductor, even if he is able torestrain himself, he will feel like throwing you off the top of thebus. When at length you spend one of them in a post office--one neverhas the same scruples about Government institutions--you hurry outwith a guilty air, not having dared to look the lady at the counter inthe eye. In the nineteenth century, when people went to church, theyused to get rid of their threepenny bits at the collection. They atonce relieved themselves of a nuisance, and enjoyed the luxury offlinging the gleam of silver on to the plate. Many a good Baptist hastrusted to his threepenny bit's being mistaken for a sixpence, by theneighbours, at least--perhaps even by Heaven. He has a notion that thewidow's mite was a threepenny bit, and feels that his gift is in agreat tradition. 

The popular hatred of certain coins, however, goes back to a farearlier date than the invention of the threepenny bit. Even gold, whenit was first introduced into the English coinage, was met with such astorm of denunciation that it had to be withdrawn. This was in thetime of Henry III. , who issued a golden penny to take the place of thesilver penny that had hitherto been the chief English coin. It wasonly in the reign of Edward III. That gold coins became established inEngland They may have helped to recommend themselves to the nation bytheir intensely anti-French character. They bore the French arms, andannounced that King Edward was King of England and France. France is acountry lying close to the shores of England, and is of greatstrategic importance to her. I do not know whether the copper coinswhich first came into England in the time of Charles II. Raised anyclamour of public protest. The nation, I fancy, was so relieved to getback to cakes and ale that it was not inclined to be censorious aboutthe new halfpennies and farthings. In the old days, people had madetheir own halfpennies and farthings by the simple process of cuttingpennies into halves and quarters. They also issued private coins onthe same principle on which we nowadays write cheques. Municipalitiesand shopkeepers alike issued these tokens, or promises to pay, andwithout them there would not have been sufficient currency for thetransaction of business. The copper coins of Charles II. Were intendedto put a stop to this unofficial sort of money, but towards the end ofthe eighteenth century there was such a scarcity of copper currencythat local shopkeepers and bankers defied the law and again began toissue their own coins. I have in my possession what looks like aGeorge III. Shilling, with the King's head on one side and, on theother, inside a wreath of shamrocks, the inscription: "Bank Token, 10Pence Irish, 1813. " It was turned up by the plough on a Staffordshirefarm a few years ago. Speaking of this reminds me that a separateIrish coinage continued even after the Union of 1800. It was not till1817 that English gold and silver became current in Ireland, and Irishpennies and halfpennies were struck as late as the reign of George IV. The Scottish coins came to an end more than a century earlier. Thename of one of them, however, the "bawbee, " has survived in popularhumour. Some people say that the name is merely a corruption of"baby, " referring to the portrait of Queen Mary as an infant. It seemsto me as unlikely a derivation as could be imagined. 

Of all the English coins, the first appearance of which occasionedpopular anger, none had a worse reception than the two-shilling piecewhich appeared in 1849. "This piece, " says Miss G. B. Rawlings in_Coins and How to Know Them_, a book rich in information, "wasunfavourably received, owing to the omission of 'Dei Gratia' after theQueen's name, and was stigmatised as the godless or graceless florin. "The florin, however, so called after a Florentine coin, had come tostay, but since 1851 it has been as godly in inscription as any of theother money in one's pocket. The coin has survived, but hardly thename. One can with an effort call a spade a spade, but who would thinkof calling a florin a florin? The coin itself for a time bore theinscription: "One Florin, Two Shillings, " as though the name calledfor translation. Since the introduction of the florin, there have beenmany coins that aroused popular hatred. The four-shilling piece, especially, that was struck in the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, was received with a howl of execration. Men went about in constantdread of argument with shopkeepers as to whether they had given them afour-shilling or a five-shilling piece. In the interests of thenational good temper the coin ceased to be struck after 1890Englishmen, however, disliked the entire Jubilee coinage. Theydisliked the Queen's portrait, and they disliked especially a sixpencewhich could be easily gilded to look like a half-sovereign. Thesixpences were hurriedly withdrawn, but schoolboys continued totreasure them in the belief that they were worth fabulous sums. Likegroats, the delight of one's childhood, they began to be desirable assoon as they ceased to be common. When King Edward VII. Came to thethrone, there was another outburst of hatred of new money. The chiefobjection to it was that the King's effigy had been designed by aGerman and had not even been designed well. It was at this time, perhaps, when people began to hate the money in their pockets, thatthe reign of modern extravagance began. To get rid of a sovereignbearing a design by Herr Fuchs seemed a patriotic duty. Thrift andpro-Germanism were indistinguishable. 

Much as men detest new sorts of money in their own country, however, many of us take a childish pleasure on our first arrival in France inhandling strange and unfamiliar coins. One of the great pleasures oftravel is changing one's money. There is a certain lavishness aboutthe coinage of the Continent that appeals to our curiosity. Even ingetting a five-franc piece we never know whether it will bear theemblem of a republic, a kingdom or an empire. Coins of Greece andItaly jingle in our pocket with those of the impostor, Louis Napoleon, and those of the wicked Leopold, King of the Belgians. In SwitzerlandI remember even getting a Cretan coin, which I was humiliated by beingunable to pass at a post office. The postal official took down a hugediagram containing pictures of all the European coins he was allowedto accept. He studied Greek coins and, for all I know, Jugo-Slavcoins, but nowhere could he find the image of the coin I had profferedhim. Crete for him did not exist. He shook his head solemnly andhanded the coin back. Is there any situation in which a man feelsguiltier than when his money is thrust back on him as of no value?This happens oftener, perhaps, in France than in any other country. France has the reputation of being the country of bad money. Thereputation is, I believe, exaggerated, though I have known a Boulognetram conductor to refuse even a 50-centime piece as bad. I remembervividly a warning given to me on this subject during my first visit toFrance. I was sitting with a friend in an estaminet in a small villagein the north of France, when an English chauffeur insinuated himselfinto the conversation. He was eager to give us advice about France andthe French. "I like the French, " he said, "but you can't trust them. Look out for bad money. They're terrors for bad money. I'd have beendone oftener myself, only that luckily I married a Frenchwoman. She'sin the ticket office at the Maison des Delits--you probably know thename--it's a dancing-hall in Montmartre. Any time I get a bad 5 francpiece, I pass it on to her, and she gets rid of it in the change tosome Froggie. My God, they _are_ dishonest! I wouldn't say a wordagainst the French, but just that one thing. They're dishonest--damneddishonest. " He sat back on the bench, a figure of insular rectitudebut of cosmopolitan broadmindedness. Is it not the perfect compromise?

XXIII

THE MORALS OF BEANS

"Nine bean-rows will I have there, " cries Mr Yeats in describing hisUtopia in _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_. I have only two. They run eastto west between the second-early potatoes and the red-currant bushes. They are broad beans. They are in flower just now, and every flower isa little black-and-white butterfly. That, however, is the good side ofthe account. If you look closer at them, you will see that each ofthem appears as if its head had been dipped into coal-dust. There is acongregation of the blackest of all insects hiding in horridcongestion among the leaves and flowers at the top. Compared to them, the green-fly on the roses has almost charm. There is something slummyand unwashed-looking about the black blight. These insects are as foulas a stagnant pond. Though they have wings, they seem incapable offlight. They are microbes of a larger growth--a disease and adesecration. On the other hand, there is one good point about them:they are very stupid. Instead of spreading themselves out along theentire extent of the bean and so lessening their peril, they massthemselves in hordes in the very tops of the plants as though they hadall some passionate taste for rocking in the wind like the baby on thetree-top. This is what gives the gardener his opportunity. He has butto walk along the rows, pinching off the top of each plant, andfilling his flat little basket (called, I believe, a trug) with them, and lo, the beans are safe, and produce all the finer and fuller podsas a result of their having been stunted. 

At this point the moral thrusts out its head. There are those whobelieve that beans have no morals. To call a man "Old bean" gives him, it is said, a pleasant feeling that he is something of a dog. Gilbert, again, in _Patience_ has a reference to "a not-too-French French bean"that suggests a ribald estimate of this family of plants. The broadbean, on the other hand, seems to me to exude morality--not least, when it parts with its head to save its life. There is no betterpreacher in the vegetable garden. It is the very Chrysostom of thegospel of frustration--the gospel that a great loss may be a greatgain--the gospel that through their repressions men may all the moresuccessfully achieve their ends. 

Nor is this gospel confined to the sect of the beans (which are by ahappy paradox both broad and evangelical). The apple-trees bear thesame message in their unpruned branches--unpruned owing to a longabsence from home during the winter. It is an amazing fact--I speak asan amateur--but it is an amazing fact, if it is a fact, that anapple-tree, if it is left to itself, will not grow apples. It has anentirely selfish purpose in life. Its aim is to be a tree, living toitself, producing a multitude of shoots and leaves. It succeeds inliving a rich and fruitful life only when the gardener has come withthe abhorred shears and lopped its branches till it must feel like afrustrate thing. The fruit is the fruit of frustration. Were it notfor this frustration, it would ultimately return to a state ofwildness, and would become a crabbed and barren weed, fit only to be aperch for birds. 

Thus, it seems to me, the broad bean and the apple-tree are persuasivedefenders of civilisation and of those concomitants of civilisationmorality and the arts. Heretics frequently arise, both in ethics andin the arts, who say: "No more restraints! Give the bean its head. "There are psycho-analysts who appear to regard frustration as the oneserious evil in life, and the apostles of _vers libre_ denounce metreand rhyme because these merely serve to frustrate the natural impulsesof the imagination. As a matter of fact, it is this very frustrationthat gives poetry much of its depth and vehemence. Great geniusexpresses itself, not in the freedom of formlessness, but in thelimitations of form. Shakespeare's passion turned instinctively to themost frustrative of all poetic forms--that of the sonnet--in order toexpress itself in perfection. It is, as a rule, those who have nothingto say who wish to say it without the terrible frustrations of form. Obviously, there is a golden mean in the arts as in all things, andthere comes a point at which form passes into formalism. Geniusrequires just enough frustration to increase its vehemence, and so totransmute nature into art. It is possible that some frustration of acomparable kind is needed in order to transmute nature into morality, and that the man who would, in Milton's phrase, make of his life apoem must submit to commandments as difficult as those of metre orrhyme. It is not merely the Christians and the Stoics who havemaintained this; Epicurus himself was a believer in virtue as a meansto happiness. This, indeed, is a commonplace written all over the faceof nature. There is no great happiness without opposition except forchildren. The climber struggles with the hill, the rower with thewater, the digger with the earth. They are all men who live on theunderstanding that the pleasures of difficulty are greater even thanthe pleasures of ease. 

The biographies of famous men are prolific of examples that supportthe theory of frustration. Homer, they say, was blind, and the legendseems to suggest that his blindness, far from injuring, abetted hisgenius. Tyrtĉus, being physically unable to fight, became the poet offighting, and achieved more with his words than did most men withtheir weapons. Demosthenes, again, was an orator frustrated by manydefects. Everyone knows the story of his wretched articulation and howhe shut himself up and practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth inorder to overcome it. Few of the great orators, indeed, seem to havesucceeded in oratory without difficulty. Neither Cicero nor Burkespoke with the natural ease of many a young man in a Y. M. C. A. Debatingsociety. And the great writers, like the great orators, have been, inmany instances, men doomed in some important respect to leadfrustrated lives. Mr Beerbohm recently said that he has never known aman of genius whose life was not marred by some obvious defect. Peoplehave talked for two thousand years of the desirability of _mens sanain corpore sano_, but if everybody possessed this--possessed it frombirth and without effort--there would probably soon be a shortage ofgenius. The sanity of genius is not the sanity of the healthy mindedathlete: it is the sanity of the human spirit struggling againstforces that threaten to frustrate it. The greatest love-poetry has notbeen written by men who have found easy happiness in love. Donne'spoems are the poems of a frustrated lover. Keats's greatest poetry wasthe fruit of unfulfilled love. Thus genius turns poverty into riches. Few men of genius are enviable save in their genius. Beethoven, afrustrate lover and ultimately a deaf musician, is a type of genius atits most sublime. 

Charles Lamb, as we read the _Essays_, seems at times to be one of themost enviable of men, but that is only because he is supremelylovable. Who knows how much we owe to the defects of his life? Eventhe impediment in his speech seems to have been one of the conditionsof his genius. He tells us that, if he had not stammered, he wouldprobably have been a clergyman, and, if he had been a clergyman, hewould hardly have been Elia. His life, too, was that of a tragicbachelor--he whose writings breathe the finest spirit of firesidecomedy. There could be no better example of the truth that genius is, as a rule, a response to apparently hostile limitations. 

On the whole, then, the common-sense attitude to life is, not todeplore one's limitations, but to make the best of them. No man needenvy another his good fortune too bitterly. Good fortune has wasted asmany men as it has assisted. George Wyndham was one of the mostfortunate men of his time--strong, handsome, an athlete, an orator, astatesman, a writer with a sense of style, popular, rich, and withnine out of ten of the attributes that we envy most. Had achievementcome less easily to him, he might have been a greater man. There havebeen ugly men who have been more enviable. There have been weedy menwho were more enviable. There have been poor men who were moreenviable. But the truth is, one does not know whom to envy. It isprobably wise to envy nobody. 

It would be foolish, however, to pretend that frustration is adesirable thing in itself, apart from all other considerations. Thebeans nod their heads to no such gospel. Frustration may easily reachthe point of destruction. One might frustrate one's broad beansexcessively by pulling them up by the roots or cutting them down towithin an inch of the ground. There must still be room left for thelife of the plant to find a new outlet. The beans do not preach asermon against liberty, but only against lawlessness. But, for all Iknow, they may preach different gospels to different amateurgardeners. Each of us finds in nature what he wishes to find. Iconfess I myself am prejudiced in favour of sermons of a consolingkind. It is consoling to think that, in a world of defects, a defectoften carries with it its own compensation--that strength, as thepreachers say, may be made perfect in weakness. But, when one looksround and enumerates the miseries of human beings, one wonders how farthis is, after all, true except for men whose gifts are naturallygreater than hog, dog or devil can imperil. 

XXIV

ON SEEING A JOKE

Almost any man can make a joke, but it sometimes requires a clever manto see one. It is said that a Scotsman "jokes wi' deeficulty. " What wereally mean is that it is often difficult to see a Scotsman's jokes oreven to know whether he is joking or being serious. As a matter offact, the Scots are an unusually humorous race. They make jokes, however, with the long faces of undertakers, and one is sometimesafraid to laugh for fear of appearing frivolous on a solemn occasion. I have in mind one brilliant Scottish professor who, whether he isjocular or serious, invariably monologises in the tones of a mancondoling with a widow. He half-shuts his eyes and folds his hands, and, for the first minute or two, takes an evil delight in leaving youin doubt whether he is launching into a tragic narrative or whether hewill suddenly look up through his spectacles and expect to see youlaughing. His English friends are in a constant state of embarrassmentbecause they know that he is a humorist of genius, but his humour isso subtle that they do not trust themselves to see the point when itcomes and laugh at the right place. Now, there are only two thingsthat can make the professor look sterner than he looks while givingbirth to a joke. One is, if you laugh too early: the other is, if thegreat moment comes and you don't laugh at all. He makes no complaint, but he sits back in his chair, looking like an embittered owl. Andeverybody else in the room has a sense of ghastly failure--his ownfailure, not the professor's. To miss seeing a joke is, in somecircumstances, far worse than to miss making the point of a jokevisible. If one were in the position of a Queen Victoria, one might, of course, quench the professor by merely saying: "We are not amused. "But even Queen Victoria, when she said this, did not mean that she hadnot seen the joke but that she had seen it and didn't like it. It isnot only the subtle and Scottish jokes, however, that are at timesdifficult to see with the naked eye. There is also the joke that hitsyou in the eye like a blow and blinds you. Captain Wedgwood Bennreferred to a joke of this kind in the House of Commons on theauthority of Mr Stephen Gwynn. A judge of the Irish High Court, herelated, was recently travelling on a tram which was held up byBlack-and-Tans. The Black-and-Tans, who, like the Most High, are norespecters of persons, called on the judge to descend, using thequaint colloquial formula: "Come down, you Irish bastard; put up yourhands. " Captain Wedgwood Benn does not unfortunately possess atwentieth-century sense of humour, and he did not see this particularjoke. The comedy of a judge's being addressed as an Irish bastard didnot strike him. I doubt if half-a-dozen members of the House ofCommons realised the beauty of the joke till Sir Hamar Greenwood gotup and explained it. "I happen to know the judge, " said the twinklingChief Secretary. "He told the story himself with great glee, and hereit is. Mr Justice Wylie, the last, and one of the best judgesappointed in Ireland, was riding on a tramcar to a hunting meet. Whenhe got to the end of his ride, there were some policemen on duty, andthey did use a word which, I trust, no hon. Member of this House willever use in calling him down from the tram. They did him no harm. Hetreated it as a joke, and he would be the man most surprised to findit quoted in the House and in the _Observer_ as an example of thedecadence of the Irish police. " I agree with Sir Hamar. A joke is ajoke, and many Irishmen, unlike Mr Justice Wylie, are undulythin-skinned. The only criticism I would make on Sir Hamar Greenwood'sidea of a joke is that he appears to suggest that it would have beenless funny if the Black-and-Tans had done the judge some harm. Ishould have expected him rather to dilate on the attractions of lifein the Irish police force for men with a sense of humour. Suppose thejudge had been robbed of his watch, or had had his front teeth brokenwith the muzzle of a revolver like the University Professor at Cork, would not that have made the incident still funnier? Suppose he hadbeen carried round as a hostage on a motor-lorry, or shot with abucket over his head, as has happened to other innocent men, would itnot have been a theme for Aristophanes, who got so much fun out of theidea of one person's being beaten in mistake for another?

I am confident that distinguished Englishmen will behave in the spiritof Mr Justice Wylie, when there is an outbreak of humour among theEnglish police. Mr Justice Darling will, no doubt, enjoy himselfhugely on the day on which an armed policeman first holds up hismotor-car, and addresses him: "'Ullo, you blasted old Bolshevik, comeoff the perch, and quick about it, and put up the 'Idden 'And!" Thereare some judges who would complain to the Home Office, if such a thinghappened to them. Mr Justice Darling, however, has a keen sense ofhumour. I feel certain that on arriving in Court after his experienceshe would tell the story with great glee. He would turn up his facesideways, as he does when he is amused, and say to the jury: "A mostamusing thing happened to me this morning, by the way . .. " There is noend, indeed, to the directions in which a police force saturated withthe Greenwoodian sense of fun might add to the gaiety of nations. Theymight arm themselves with squirts, and laughing Cabinet ministerswould have to duck as they passed down Whitehall in order to avoid adrenching. Pluffing peas at the bishops on their way to the House ofLords would also be good sport, so long as they did not really hurtany of them. To bash the Lord Chancellor's hat over his eyes would begoing too far, as it involves a money loss, but a harmless blow on thecrown with a bladder would be rather amusing. It would also be amusingif a number of policemen were told off to greet Mr Lloyd George withcries of "Welsh attorney, " and to chaff him with genial scurrilitieson his arrival at the House. If these things happened, there arekilljoys, I know, who would immediately set up a clamour for therestoration of discipline in the police force. Mr Lloyd George, however, has always been a man who can not only make a joke but takeone, and I am sure that he at least would defend the democratic rightof the policeman to a bit of chaff. 

Nor would I confine the right of chaff to the police force. I wouldmake it universal. I should like to see it introduced into the Churchitself. Even the dullest sermon would become entertaining if theverger had the right and the habit of interpolating such remarks as:"Cheese it, Pussyfoot!" or "Ring off, you bleedin' old bore, ringoff!" There has been too little of this sort of popular raillery inrecent years. The bus-drivers used to be past masters at it, pokingtheir quiet fun impartially at their fellow-drivers and ordinarycitizens. Whether it is that the drivers of motor-buses realise thatno joke could be heard above the din, or whether it is that they feelas ill-tempered as they look, their arrival has made fatal inroads onthe geniality of London. An artist with uncut hair can still awaken aspark of the old wit if he goes down a back street, and women andchildren will revive for his benefit the venerable witticism: "Getyour hair cut!" But, generally speaking, there has been a notabledecline in the humours of insult within living memory. The Germans, always fond of a joke, made an effort to revive it during the war. Itwas a common thing for them, we are told, on capturing a prisoner, toaddress him as "Schweinhund" or "Verdammte Engländer, " or by someother good-humoured phrase of the same kind. I regret to say that someEnglishmen were so deficient in the sense of humour that, instead oftaking this in the spirit in which it was offered, they bitterlyresented it. I cannot, indeed, recall a single instance of anEnglishman who properly appreciated the joke of being called a"Schweinhund" by a man he had never seen before. You will seek in vainthrough the literature of prisoners of war for a returned soldier whotells the story of the names he was called with the glee that itdeserves. And yet, no doubt, the Germans enjoyed the joke thoroughly, and would have been surprised to find it quoted in the _Observer_ asan example of the decadence of the German Army. 

Perhaps, however, the "Schweinhund" joke does not afford an entirelyfair comparison. It is a simple joke, whereas in the Greenwood jokethere are two elements. There is the element of insult, and there isthe element of mistaken identity. It is not merely that somebody orother was called "You Irish bastard, " but that the wrong person wascalled "You Irish bastard. " Thus, if a policeman addressed a woman inOxford Street in the words: "'Op it, you old bitch, " it would be onlymildly funny, if the woman were a poor woman. But it would beimmensely funny if she turned out to be a marchioness. Themarchioness, no doubt, would be enchanted, and would tell the storywith great glee. If she were a sentimentalist, she might say toherself:

 "Is this really the way in which ordinary human beings are treated by the police? This is a hideous state of affairs in which bullies in uniform are allowed to address foul insults to whom they please. Thank heaven, it has happened to someone like me. Now, I can tell the Home Secretary, and he will put an end to the whole system. "

One never knows what a modern Home Secretary might do, but I doubt ifone could be found who would reply to the marchioness: "Well, he didyou no harm. You know, to me it all seems rather funny. " And yet mostthings have their funny side if you look on them in the right spirit. It would have been a funny thing if the hangman had executed the wrongprisoner instead of Crippen. The hanged man would not have seen thejoke, but impartial onlookers would have seen it, and Crippen wouldhave seen it. Similarly, if a drunken man threw a brick at his wifeand hit the missionary by mistake, who could help laughing? Even thewife, if she had a sense of humour, would have to join in. Over-sensitive souls, such as Shelley was might view the incident withpain and mourn over a world in which human beings treated each otherin such a way. But life is a hard school, and it is not well to beover-sensitive. After all, if we all became angels, there would be nojokes left. We should have no clowns in the music-halls--no comicboxing-turns with glorious thumpings on unexpecting noses. Heaven is aplace without laughter because there is no cruelty in it--no insultsand no accidents. As for us, we are children of earth, and may as wellenjoy the advantages of our position. So let us laugh, "Ha, ha!"--letus laugh, "Ho, ho!"

 The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. 

And never was it so full of a number of things as since a CoalitionGovernment came into power--queer, delightful things, for instance, like policemen who call judges "bastard, " as who should say: "Cheerio, old thing!" Our grandfathers would not have seen that joke. That isone of the things that convince me of the reality of progress. 

XXV

GOING TO THE DERBY

"Do they have as much fun at the Derby as they used to?" I heard anold gentleman in a white hat, canary gloves, and buttoned boots askinga fellow-passenger in a London train. Fun? No; one would hardly callit that. Looking back on it after forty years one will no doubt callit fun. But it is certainly not fun while it lasts. 

The two most important features of the Derby are getting there andgetting away again. Getting there is harder work than bricklaying orjournalism. You may ride in a motor-car, but your motor will be asuseless to you as a submarine in a swimming bath. From Sutton to Epsomand from Epsom to the Downs a long procession of motor-cars, buses, waggonettes, greengrocers' carts, lorries, school carts, drays, andhuman beings stretches like a serpent of infinite length--a serpentthat is apparently too sick to move. One thinks of it as an oldserpent that has made itself very ill by swallowing machinery. 

Every few minutes it gives the machinery in its inward parts a shake, and makes one more effort to crawl. A queer rattle, shiver, and groanrun through it from tip to tail. But the effort is too much for it. Itimmediately subsides on a lame and impotent stomach, and hour afterhour passes with no other diversion except the antics of an occasionalnervous horse that rises on his hind legs and waves his forefeet inthe back of your neck over the hood of the motor. 

There is a common belief that the crowd that goes to the Derby is acheerful crowd--that it sings and plays concertinas and changes hats. There could not be a greater delusion. It is as quiet and determinedas a procession of men and women going to hear Dr Horton preaching atHampstead. Not a song--well, one song. Not a joke--well, one joke, when a fat man saw a poor brown lop-eared ass in a field of daisies, and called out: "There's the winner o' the Durby!" He apparently feltit was a very good joke, for he repeated it to parties on the tops ofbuses and parties on greengrocers' carts and parties in furniturevans. 

The sun, however, was unpropitious for jokes. Even the East Ender, whohad worked an edging of red and white wool into his pony's mane andhung rosettes of red, white, and blue at its ears, was too busyperspiring and hating his hundred thousand neighbours to smile. He wasalso busy weighing his chances of getting to Epsom Downs beforeJudgment Day. I admired his spirit in waving a whip with a knot ofcoloured ribbons. There was little other colour to be seen. We were aprocession of victims--red as beef, steaming like the window of afried-fish shop, dusty, swollen-veined--and we could only sink backhelpless and gasping in the grip of the monstrous procession ofwheeled things that advanced more slowly than any snail that was everknown on this side of the Ural Mountains. 

I doubt if that procession ever reached Epsom Downs. I did so onlybecause I got out and walked; and even then the first two races wereover. Half England seemed already to have arrived on the hills, and tohave pitched its wigwams there. The other half was blocking up theroad for ten miles back, and could not possibly arrive in time for theDerby; but the half who had arrived had already set up a city ofbooths and flags on hill after hill as far as the eye could see. 

There may have been encampments of this vastness in the days ofXerxes, but surely never since. It was oppressive, overwhelming. Therewere so many people there that there was no room for anybody. Therewas no room, so far as I could see, for the man who plays thethree-card trick on the top of an open umbrella, or for the man withthe tape and pencil, and even the beggars who prayed by the roadsidefor your success were few. There was simply a crush--an enormous, sweltering, and appallingly silent crush. Even the bookmakers seemedto be awed by it. They stood on their stands beside blackboards fullof horses' names and mystical figures, but they did not yell at youhoarsely, bullyingly, as bookmakers ought to do. If, having looked atthe elephantine portrait advertisement of one of them, you wished tobet with him, he would consent in a listless way, and say wearily tohis clerk: "Nine-nine-one, seventy shillings to a dollar Polumetis, "as he handed you a blue, red, and green card. 

I do not blame him for not being enthusiastic. I am myself no longerenthusiastic about Polumetis. Still, one wished for a little violencebesides the violence of the sun and of the man who tried to sell you ashilling's worth of sausage and who said he was "the only firm, theonly firm in the place. " Camden Town on a Saturday night could givepoints to Derby Day for colour and uproar. Derby Day is so big, perhaps, that it is frightened of itself. But I forgot. There was oneviolent man. He was fat, hatless, and sweating, and he was hoarse withshouting superlatives about his tips to a circle of poor old men, "dunchers" in caps, small boys in jerseys, and tired-looking countrygirls. 

"If only I could tell you where I got my information, " he declared, "you'd--you'd be s'prised. If any of you has got twenty-five pahndabaht him--if you've got even a tenner--why, you've only got tenbob--well, you can't exactly have a gamble for ten bob, but you can'ave a bit o' fun, anyway. If you take my advice--it's 'ere on thisbit o' paper--you can 'ave it for a bob--I can give you three 'orsesthat'll turn your ten bob into a tenner see? Some people tell youTetratema's going to win. "

He made a face of disgust, popularly known as giving Tetratema theraspberry, "Don't you believe it. Didn't I tell you Tagrag? Didn't Itell you Arion? 'Ere, take my tip, and you'll dance all the w'y 'omewith joy tonight. Dance? Why, you'll go 'ome jazzin' all the w'y. "

And he spread out his fat hands and threw out his fat stomach, anddanced on the grass, just to show one how one ought to behave if onebacked a Derby winner. 

Meanwhile, his partner, dressed as a red and white jockey, in a peakedcap and incongruous puttees, moved round the circle thrusting hisslips of tips almost angrily on us. "Go on, " he ordered us. "What's abob to a gambler? You people read the papers and believe what you seein 'em. The papers! I tell you stryte--the worst pack of rogues andbookmakers in England. " A simple old man of ninety, who had lost histeeth, beckoned to him and paid him a shilling for his tip. The jockeytook him aside and whispered impressively into his ear. Then he said, in a loud voice: "Are you satisfied, sir?" "Quite satisfied, " quaveredthe old man. I wish I could have stayed near him. I should like tohave seen him jazzing later in the evening. 

Sausages, lemonade, fried fish, chewing gum, bets, ladies standing onthe roofs of taxis, a try-your-strength machine, extemporisedconveniences of civilisation, with youths standing by them and yelling"Commodytion!" hills of humanity in all attitudes of dazedness anddespair, the thunder and the shouting of the distant bookmakers underthe stands, the quiet of the ten thousand free-lance bookmakers whowere, I suppose, breaking the law in the open spaces; the dust, thesun, the smell, faces smeary with fruit, the cunning tinker in an oldkhaki hat with striped ribbon, who was selling some twopennyinstrument that was supposed to imitate either the bark of a dog orthe song of a nightingale--one could not tell which from the noise hemade with it; stand after stand packed to the sky with what are calledserried ranks of human beings, who looked like immense banks ofmany-coloured shingle, and who, as they raised a million pairs offield-glasses to two million eyes, scintillated in the distance like abank of shingle after a wave has broken on it on a tropical noon--itwas certainly an amazing medley of spectacle and odour. 

It is said that an important horse-race took place. It is even saidthat Polumetis ran in it. I looked for him everywhere--over people'sheads, under people's heads, through motor-buses, round the corners ofrefreshment tents, in the sky above, and on the earth beneath. But noPolumetis was to be seen anywhere--except on my race-card, where Iread about his lilac-coloured jockey. A jockey in lilac--howbeautiful, how Japanese! And, indeed, all the jockeys as they paradeddown the field before the race seemed to have robbed a rainbow. 

They brought meaning and beauty into an otherwise bald andunconvincing mob. I assure you I love horse-racing--if I could see it. But of all the people who congregated the little crooked hills ofEpsom, I doubt if ten people in a hundred saw it. You knew that thehorses had started only because, as you lay dreaming, the millionpeople on the stands suddenly made you jump with a loud, sharp, andterrifying bark, which said: "They're off!" in one syllable. 

Then there was deep silence, and somebody near me said: "The favouritecan't be leading, or they would be shouting. " Then from the standscame a murmur like bees, a muttering as of a man talking in his sleep, a growling as of wind in a cave. This only served to intensify thesilence of a defeated people. One knew that something awful must behappening. Perhaps even Polumetis was winning. 

Above the heads of the crowd the heads of jockeys began to be visible. A fool cried out: "The favourite wins. " Another: "Allenby has it. "Then one had a glimpse of three horses close--well, fairly close--oneach other's tails, and none of them the grey Tetratema. I noticedthat on one of them crouched a jockey in exquisite grass-green. Hepassed like a fine phrase out of a poem of which one does not know therest. But I did not really know who had won till the numbers were putup on the board. Then a badly shaven man in a bowler cried: "Spion Kophas won! Bravo!" and clapped his friend on the back. The rest of uslooked at him with contempt. The tinker-nosed man who played theinstrument that sang like a dog or barked like a nightingale began tosqueak it into people's ears. 

The crowd began pouring itself through itself, and the dust from itsfeet rose like a cloud till it was difficult to see across the course. 

And the motor-car broke down on the way home. 

And Polumetis didn't win. 

And I'm as tired as a dog. .. . 

And so say all of us. 

XXVI

THIS BLASTED WORLD

Everything has begun to have a blasted look till the sun shines. Theferns have been beaten down by the wind and the rain, and lie witheredand broken-backed among the brambles, waiting till some poor manthinks it worth his while to go off with a load of them on his backfor bedding. The brambles, too, all hoops and arches, have the air ofdying things, though white blossoms still continue to appear, and thefruit is not yet all ripened and many of the leaves are as red andbright as flowers. The edges of most of the leaves have began tocrumple: they are victims of a creeping sickness that eats into themand dirties them, and makes bramble and fern together an inextricablewilderness of refuse. 

This, however, is only if one looks too closely. The hill that losesitself among the rocks on the sea-shore is capped and patched withjust such refuse as this, but how happily the rust-colour of dyingthings is broken by the grey of the loose stone walls--"hedges, " theycall them in Cornwall--that seem to totter up the hill like old men!The mist of rain that leaves each individual plant bedraggled seems tomake the red and green and grey pattern of the patched hill only morebeautiful and mysterious. The truth is, winter speaks with two voiceseven in these early days. She has one voice that sends cold shiversdown our backs. She has another voice that is refreshment like waterfrom a spring. She speaks with the first voice in the crooked trees. In the summer they were cloaked and glorious. Now, when their cloaksseem so much more necessary, they are left naked, poor creatures, their backs to the sea-wind, with the air of runaways unable toescape. They seem bent and poised for flight, but when a blast of windcomes and tugs at them they are as the stump of a tooth that will notmove, and the leaves (such of them as are left), which in summer madea music as pleasant as that of windbells, rattle in their brancheslike the laughter of a skeleton. The oak and the thorn-bush couldscarcely writhe more if they were crippled by rheumatism. Every leafon the sycamore is spotted as if with some foul black acid. 

Here, too, however, as soon as the leaves have fallen, the world isrestored to cheerfulness. The withering tree seems a sufferer. Thefallen leaf is an imp, an adventurer. As the wind sweeps round a bendin the road, leaf after leaf is up and performing cart-wheels down theroad as if Christmas Day had come. Thousands of them, borne along in adance of this kind, advance with the beflustered, orderly air of aprocession of starlings. The world ceases to be a universal grave. Itis at the very least a dance and a dust-storm. 

There are some days, no doubt, on which the chill damp in the airseems to terrify almost every living thing into hiding, and thestillness of the dead world is not disturbed by any bird or insect. Even the jackdaws have mysteriously disappeared like melted snow. Butno sooner does the storm in the sky break up into floating islands ofcloud and the sun shine than all the world begins to glitter again, bramble and ivy and stone, and a host of tiny and coloured creaturesresume their game of an infinite general post in the bright air. Theivy especially is a little continent of life where-ever it grows. Clambering over a wall or climbing up among the sloes in a blackthornit attracts bee and wasp and fly, blue fly and grey fly and green fly, to graze on the pollen of its late flowers. The ivy is the last of theplants to flower, and insects come to it as from the ends of the earthin rejoicing myriads. Among the berries in the hedges the birds, too, rejoice. The robin, though for the most part, I believe, a meat-eater, becomes unambiguously happy at this time of year. He has usurped themorning, and, while one is lying in bed, he is boasting in the treesoutside where the thrush and the blackbird will in a few months beboasting with their scarcely more beautiful voices. I am halfpersuaded that his song becomes different at this season. As he sitsand sways on the top of a cypress and looks down on a rich and eatableworld, he seems to have cast every note of pensive sadness out of hisbeing and to sing aloud the rapture of a happy stomach. He is nolonger the singer of elegy but of ecstasy. He is as unlike his oldsimple, friendly, appealing, pathetic self as a beggar who has comeinto a fortune. He actually swaggers, and, as he does so, he can filla garden or a wood at the end of October with the pleasure of spring. 

The large titmouse in its dark cap, and the blue-tit, almost toopretty for an English winter in its blue and yellow coat, also hastento the feast of the berries. I do not know whether, under the ironreign of high prices, people have ceased to hang out coco-nuts intheir gardens for the blue-tits; at present, fortunately, the berriesare abundant, and it is pleasant to see a tit venture to the edge ofthe road in quest of one and then fly off into hiding, like a thief, with a red ball in his beak. A scarcely less pretty bird that one seesflying across the road now and then with cries of alarm is the greywagtail. The grey wagtail, you probably know, is the wagtail that isnot grey. As it struggles and shrills through the sunny air, it seemsa delight mainly of yellow. Both its cries and its flight make onethink that it lives in constant terror of falling. It proceeds throughthe air in a series of efforts and ups-and-downs, and its long tailseems perpetually to threaten to misguide it into collapse. Down amongthe rocks and in the fields near them, the real grey wagtailsabound--the pied wagtails, as they are called--with their white cheeksand their less hysterical voices that greet one in passing with apleasant little "Cheerio!" As they alight from the air beside apuddle, they indulge in a little prance as though they were trying tocut a figure of eight on nothing or were essaying in some manner tosweep their tails out of way. Their whole existence, however, is adance. Whether they pick their food from the rocks or in a field ofcows, the alert head and jerking tail are never still, but arenervously ready for flight almost before the hint of danger. And theyhave usually with them as nervous companions the rock-pipits, charminglittle tight-skinned, low-crowned birds that hurry off wavily throughthe air, reiterating their solitary note of fear as they fly. Thestarlings, which seemed to disappear for a time, have now returned tothe fields near the sea. They have left their wonderful sheensomewhere behind them, and are mottled and plebeian. Still, to see acloud of them alighting in a field at the end of a swift circle offlight is a pretty enough spectacle. 

The evolutions of cavalry and still more of aeroplanes are elementarycompared to this. Close-packed as they are, a thousand of them willwheel in order without an accident and alight each on his own patch ofground with the easy grace of acrobats. It is only when they havefound their feet that the disorder begins. Whether it is worms orinsects or verdure they seek among the grazing cows, there isevidently little enough to go round, and starling fights starling withpeck and protest all over the field. It is a scene of civil war, savethat the birds do not form themselves into sides but each wrestleswith its neighbour at random. But, after all, they are very hungry. They cluster ravenously on the green patches, even on the sides of theold stone walls. They have evidently not had the economic questionsettled for them as the cows have. 

Luckily, other birds are either less desperate or more pacific bynature. The stone-chat as he flits from bramble to bramble in hisblack cap, white collar, and red bib is a bird of charming behaviouras well as of charming colour. There is nothing in him at discord withthese rainbow days. For stormy as they are, the days are rainbow daysto an astonishing extent. Seldom have I seen such a violence ofrainbows. The colours almost startle one, like a courting ape's. Everypassing shower builds an arch of the seven colours like a palace onthe sea. Then it draws near till the foot of the rainbow stands a fewyards below over the breaking waves. Sea-birds sail through it, and, if a pot of gold is really to be found at the end of it, I must oftenlately have been within touching distance of a fortune. .. . At night, Jupiter--it is Jupiter, is it not? that hangs in the V of Aldebaranabout eight or nine in the evening just now--stills the world towonder as the rainbow does by day. He is so splendid a fire as to seemalmost solitary, even when the moon is shining. A few evenings ago, heshed a path of light over the sea as the moon does, and seemed tolight up the sands on the far side of the bay. .. . It is undoubtedly ablasted world, but what a beautiful blasted world! It is a pity thatwe and the starlings are so belly-driven that we cannot settle down toenjoy it. Peck, peck. My worm, I think. Peck, peck, peck.