TREMENDOUS TRIFLES

By G. K. Chesterton

PREFACE

These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission of theEditor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared. They amountto no more than a sort of sporadic diary--a diary recording one day intwenty which happened to stick in the fancy--the only kind of diary theauthor has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keepby keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are thetopics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, itprobably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a windowblind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking atsomething that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could notwrite an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the postor wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "TheBed-Post; Its Significance--Security Essential to Idea of Sleep--NightFelt as Infinite--Need of Monumental Architecture, " and so on. He couldnot sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, evenin the form of a summary. "The Window-Blind--Its Analogy to the Curtainand Veil--Is Modesty Natural?--Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc. , etc. " None of us think enough of these things on which the eyerests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy?Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts thatrun across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocularathletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a colouredcloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone elsemay do it better, if anyone else will only try. 

 CONTENTS:

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

I. Tremendous Trifles

Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly in thefront garden, because their villa was a model one. The front garden wasabout the same size as the dinner table; it consisted of four strips ofgravel, a square of turf with some mysterious pieces of cork standing upin the middle and one flower bed with a row of red daisies. One morningwhile they were at play in these romantic grounds, a passing individual, probably the milkman, leaned over the railing and engaged them inphilosophical conversation. The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter, were at least sharply interested in his remarks. For the milkman (whowas, I need say, a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offeringthem in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for. AndPaul closed with the offer with a business-like abruptness, explainingthat he had long wished to be a giant that he might stride acrosscontinents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas in an afternoondinner stroll. The milkman producing a wand from his breast pocket, waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner; and in an instant themodel villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll's house at Paul'scolossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds tovisit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas, he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little corkrockery in the garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger thanthe tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world forseveral minutes trying to find something really large and findingeverything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or fiveprairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside thehut of an intellectual backwoodsman who came out of it at that momentwith an axe in one hand and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in theother. The man looked at the book and then at the giant, and then at thebook again. And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evilof pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe. " So thebackwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and, working eight hours aday for about a week, cut the giant's head off; and there was an end ofhim. 

Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddlyenough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long wished tobe a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he immediately becameone. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst ofan immense plain, covered with a tall green jungle and above which, atintervals, rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolicpictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Towardthe middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic andimpossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance, that it lookedlike some incident of the end of the world. And far away on the fainthorizon he could see the line of another forest, taller and yet moremystical, of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever. He set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has notcome to the end of it yet. 

Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highestqualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfitfor children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it isnot childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in factthe almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating the pages thatfollow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences upon Europeanliterature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own preference inits most favourable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girlscall telling a story. 

I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scrapsthat follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplaceexistence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other greatliterary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest bysprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographicalvariety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere. Let itbe granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight; and thetwo alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school advises usto go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. Theschool to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at theman until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him longenough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is afar greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actuallybefore us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give uptheir meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose. The purpose of theKipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man maysee if he is active and strides from continent to continent like thegiant in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how manyextraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spurhimself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have takenthe laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made an idlediary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walkingin a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says thatthese are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I canonly gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says thatI am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it isso. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacturethan that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add this notunimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one has only to become apigmy like Peter to discover that. 

I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in gettingto the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was themost celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of anexceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look likeinsects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it isfrom the level that things look high; I am a child of the level and haveno need of that celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to thehills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcassto the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is in anattitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. Iwill sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me likeflies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will neverstarve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder. 

II. A Piece of Chalk

I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summerholidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doingnothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up awalking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket. I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house, belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village), and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brownpaper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistookthe purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. Sheseemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must bewanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted todo; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mentalcapacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities oftoughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I onlywanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure inthe least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was aquestion, not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thingcomparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that Iwanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparentlysupposing that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paperwrappers from motives of economy. 

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I notonly liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primaltwilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-colouredchalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, andblood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out ofdivine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman;and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, andpossibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected howprimeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one'spocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, theinfant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirelyabout the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; andthe age of the great epics is past. 

. .. .. 

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

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

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

. .. .. 

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

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

Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk. 

. .. .. 

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer thanChichester at which it was even remotely probable that there would besuch a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without white, my absurdlittle pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if therewere no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain forexpedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again andagain, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imaginea man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some saltwater with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immensewarehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of whitechalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stoopedand broke a piece off the rock I sat on; it did not mark so well as theshop chalks do; but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a tranceof pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grandpeninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even moreadmirable. It is a piece of chalk. 

III. The Secret of a Train

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

. .. .. 

About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing outsidethe station at Oxford intending to take the train to London. Andfor some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind or theemptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice fell uponme that I would not go by that train at all, but would step out on theroad and walk at least some part of the way to London. I do not knowif other people are made like me in this matter; but to me it is alwaysdreary weather, what may be called useless weather, that slings intolife a sense of action and romance. On bright blue days I do not wantanything to happen; the world is complete and beautiful, a thing forcontemplation. I no more ask for adventures under that turquoise domethan I ask for adventures in church. But when the background of man'slife is a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy, I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail manrefuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in lettersof lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall happen, then theimmortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees thatsomething shall happen, if it be only the slaughter of a policeman. Butthis is a digressive way of stating what I have said already--thatthe bleak sky awoke in me a hunger for some change of plans, that themonotonous weather seemed to render unbearable the use of the monotonoustrain, and that I set out into the country lanes, out of the town ofOxford. It was, perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse cameupon me out of the city and the sky, whereby it was decreed that yearsafterwards I should, in an article in the DAILY NEWS, talk about SirGeorge Trevelyan in connection with Oxford, when I knew perfectly wellthat he went to Cambridge. 

As I crossed the country everything was ghostly and colourless. Thefields that should have been green were as grey as the skies; thetree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds and ascloudy. And when I had walked for some hours the evening was closing in. A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon, as if pale with reluctanceto leave the world in the dark. And as it faded more and more the skiesseemed to come closer and to threaten. The clouds which had been merelysullen became swollen; and then they loosened and let down the darkcurtains of the rain. The rain was blinding and seemed to beat likeblows from an enemy at close quarters; the skies seemed bending over andbawling in my ears. I walked on many more miles before I met a man, andin that distance my mind had been made up; and when I met him I askedhim if anywhere in the neighbourhood I could pick up the train forPaddington. He directed me to a small silent station (I cannot evenremember the name of it) which stood well away from the road and lookedas lonely as a hut on the Andes. I do not think I have ever seen such atype of time and sadness and scepticism and everything devilish as thatstation was: it looked as if it had always been raining there ever sincethe creation of the world. The water streamed from the soaking wood ofit as if it were not water at all, but some loathsome liquid corruptionof the wood itself; as if the solid station were eternally falling topieces and pouring away in filth. It took me nearly ten minutes to finda man in the station. When I did he was a dull one, and when I asked himif there was a train to Paddington his answer was sleepy and vague. Asfar as I understood him, he said there would be a train in half an hour. I sat down and lit a cigar and waited, watching the last tail of thetattered sunset and listening to the everlasting rain. It may havebeen in half an hour or less, but a train came rather slowly into thestation. It was an unnaturally dark train; I could not see a lightanywhere in the long black body of it; and I could not see any guardrunning beside it. I was reduced to walking up to the engine and callingout to the stoker to ask if the train was going to London. "Well--yes, sir, " he said, with an unaccountable kind of reluctance. "It is goingto London; but----" It was just starting, and I jumped into the firstcarriage; it was pitch dark. I sat there smoking and wondering, as westeamed through the continually darkening landscape, lined with desolatepoplars, until we slowed down and stopped, irrationally, in the middleof a field. I heard a heavy noise as of some one clambering off thetrain, and a dark, ragged head suddenly put itself into my window. "Excuse me, sir, " said the stoker, "but I think, perhaps--well, perhapsyou ought to know--there's a dead man in this train. "

. .. .. 

Had I been a true artist, a person of exquisite susceptibilitiesand nothing else, I should have been bound, no doubt, to be finallyoverwhelmed with this sensational touch, and to have insisted ongetting out and walking. As it was, I regret to say, I expressed myselfpolitely, but firmly, to the effect that I didn't care particularly ifthe train took me to Paddington. But when the train had started withits unknown burden I did do one thing, and do it quite instinctively, without stopping to think, or to think more than a flash. I threwaway my cigar. Something that is as old as man and has to do withall mourning and ceremonial told me to do it. There was somethingunnecessarily horrible, it seemed to me, in the idea of there beingonly two men in that train, and one of them dead and the other smokinga cigar. And as the red and gold of the butt end of it faded like afuneral torch trampled out at some symbolic moment of a procession, I realised how immortal ritual is. I realised (what is the origin andessence of all ritual) that in the presence of those sacred riddlesabout which we can say nothing it is more decent merely to do something. And I realised that ritual will always mean throwing away something;DESTROYING our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods. 

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

IV. The Perfect Game

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

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

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

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

"Don't be too sorry for me, " said Parkinson, with his simple sarcasm. "Ishall get over it in time. But it seems to me that the more a man likesa game the better he would want to play it. Granted that the pleasurein the thing itself comes first, does not the pleasure of success comenaturally and inevitably afterwards? Or, take your own simile of theKnight and his Lady-love. I admit the gentleman does first and foremostwant to be in the lady's presence. But I never yet heard of a gentlemanwho wanted to look an utter ass when he was there. "

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

"I do not think, however, " said Parkinson, "that you are in anyimmediate danger of effecting that sort of destruction. I do not thinkyour croquet will vanish through its own faultless excellence. You aresafe for the present. "

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

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

"We shall have to give this up, " said Parkinson, as he missed a ballalmost for the first time, "I can't see a thing. "

"Nor can I, " I answered, "and it is a comfort to reflect that I couldnot hit anything if I saw it. "

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

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

Words were wholly inadequate, so I slouched heavily after thatimpossible ball. Again I hit it away into the night, in what I supposedwas the vague direction of the quite invisible stick. And in the deadsilence I heard the stick rattle as the ball struck it heavily. 

I threw down my mallet. "I can't stand this, " I said. "My ball has goneright three times. These things are not of this world. "

"Pick your mallet up, " said Parkinson, "have another go. "

"I tell you I daren't. If I made another hoop like that I should see allthe devils dancing there on the blessed grass. "

"Why devils?" asked Parkinson; "they may be only fairies making fun ofyou. They are sending you the 'Perfect Game, ' which is no game. "

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

V. The Extraordinary Cabman

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

On the day that I met the strange cabman I had been lunching in a littlerestaurant in Soho in company with three or four of my best friends. Mybest friends are all either bottomless sceptics or quite uncontrollablebelievers, so our discussion at luncheon turned upon the most ultimateand terrible ideas. And the whole argument worked out ultimately tothis: that the question is whether a man can be certain of anythingat all. I think he can be certain, for if (as I said to my friend, furiously brandishing an empty bottle) it is impossible intellectuallyto entertain certainty, what is this certainty which it is impossibleto entertain? If I have never experienced such a thing as certainty Icannot even say that a thing is not certain. Similarly, if I have neverexperienced such a thing as green I cannot even say that my nose is notgreen. It may be as green as possible for all I know, if I have reallyno experience of greenness. So we shouted at each other and shook theroom; because metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing. Andthe difference between us was very deep, because it was a difference asto the object of the whole thing called broad-mindedness or the openingof the intellect. For my friend said that he opened his intellect as thesun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, openinginfinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I openedmy mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doingit at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonlysilly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever. 

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

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

I looked at the man. No ordinary dishonest cabman would think ofcreating so solid and colossal and creative a lie. And this man wasnot a dishonest cabman. If ever a human face was heavy and simple andhumble, and with great big blue eyes protruding like a frog's, if ever(in short) a human face was all that a human face should be, it was theface of that resentful and respectful cabman. I looked up and down thestreet; an unusually dark twilight seemed to be coming on. And for onesecond the old nightmare of the sceptic put its finger on my nerve. Whatwas certainty? Was anybody certain of anything? Heavens! to think of thedull rut of the sceptics who go on asking whether we possess a futurelife. The exciting question for real scepticism is whether we possess apast life. What is a minute ago, rationalistically considered, excepta tradition and a picture? The darkness grew deeper from the road. Thecabman calmly gave me the most elaborate details of the gesture, thewords, the complex but consistent course of action which I had adoptedsince that remarkable occasion when I had hailed him outside EustonStation. How did I know (my sceptical friends would say) that I had nothailed him outside Euston. I was firm about my assertion; he was quiteequally firm about his. He was obviously quite as honest a man as I, and a member of a much more respectable profession. In that moment theuniverse and the stars swung just a hair's breadth from their balance, and the foundations of the earth were moved. But for the same reasonthat I believe in Democracy, for the same reason that I believe in freewill, for the same reason that I believe in fixed character of virtue, the reason that could only be expressed by saying that I do not chooseto be a lunatic, I continued to believe that this honest cabman waswrong, and I repeated to him that I had really taken him at the cornerof Leicester-square. He began with the same evident and ponderoussincerity, "You hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said----"

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

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I looked at the strange cabman as he lessened in the distance and themists. I do not know whether I was right in fancying that although hisface had seemed so honest there was something unearthly and demoniacabout him when seen from behind. Perhaps he had been sent to tempt mefrom my adherence to those sanities and certainties which I had defendedearlier in the day. In any case it gave me pleasure to remember thatmy sense of reality, though it had rocked for an instant, had remainederect. 

VI. An Accident

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

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

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

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

But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing towards the trafficof the Strand, I discovered that there is a truth behind this phrase, as there is behind all popular phrases. I did really have, in that shortand shrieking period, a rapid succession of a number of fundamentalpoints of view. I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost asmany seconds. My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sinceremen is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded astate of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper name has everbeen found. The ancients called it Stoicism, and I think it must be whatsome German lunatics mean (if they mean anything) when they talkabout Pessimism. It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing thathappens--as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiouslyenough, came a very strong contrary feeling--that things mattered verymuch indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic. It wasa feeling, not that life was unimportant, but that life was muchtoo important ever to be anything but life. I hope that this wasChristianity. At any rate, it occurred at the moment when we went crashinto the omnibus. 

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

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

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

VII. The Advantages of Having One Leg

A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement andcasting about for some phrase of consolation that should not be eitherinsolent or weak, said at last, "I think one can live through thesegreat sorrows and even be the better. What wears one is the littleworries. " "That's quite right, mum, " answered the old woman withemphasis, "and I ought to know, seeing I've had ten of 'em. " It is, perhaps, in this sense that it is most true that little worries are mostwearing. In its vaguer significance the phrase, though it contains atruth, contains also some possibilities of self-deception and error. People who have both small troubles and big ones have the right to saythat they find the small ones the most bitter; and it is undoubtedlytrue that the back which is bowed under loads incredible can feel afaint addition to those loads; a giant holding up the earth and allits animal creation might still find the grasshopper a burden. But Iam afraid that the maxim that the smallest worries are the worst issometimes used or abused by people, because they have nothing but thevery smallest worries. The lady may excuse herself for reviling thecrumpled rose leaf by reflecting with what extraordinary dignity shewould wear the crown of thorns--if she had to. The gentleman may permithimself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he would behave muchbetter if it were a mere matter of starvation. We need not deny thatthe grasshopper on man's shoulder is a burden; but we need not pay muchrespect to the gentleman who is always calling out that he would ratherhave an elephant when he knows there are no elephants in the country. Wemay concede that a straw may break the camel's back, but we like to knowthat it really is the last straw and not the first. 

I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right to grumble, so long as they grumble about something else. It is a singular fact thatif they are sane they almost always do grumble about something else. Totalk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickestway to go off your head. But people with great troubles talk aboutlittle ones, and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf veryoften has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly a veryclear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in askingthat he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do no deny thatmolehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have thisevil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are moreinvisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere. Noone ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over ahassock. William III. Died by falling over a molehill; I do not supposethat with all his varied abilities he could have managed to fall over amountain. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may aska happy man (not William III. ) to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positivepoverty I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidentallimitations that are always falling across our path--bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointmentsor arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts, findingunpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse, findingpunctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures to be drawnfrom all these that I sing--I sing with confidence because I haverecently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures which arisefrom having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot, with the onlyalternative course of standing on one leg like a stork--a stork is apoetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it. 

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

This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity of some Doriccolumn. The students of architecture tell us that the only legitimateuse of a column is to support weight. This column of mine fulfils itslegitimate function. It supports weight. Being of an animal and organicconsistency, it may even improve by the process, and during these fewdays that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness or dislocationof the one leg may find compensation in the astonishing strength andclassic beauty of the other leg. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr. George Meredith's novel might pass by at any moment, and seeing me inthe stork-like attitude would exclaim, with equal admiration and a moreliteral exactitude, "He has a leg. " Notice how this famous literaryphrase supports my contention touching this isolation of any admirablething. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, wishing to make a clear and perfectpicture of human grace, said that Sir Willoughby Patterne had a leg. Shedelicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive factthat he had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous and irrelevant, a reflection, and a confusion. Two legs would have confused Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London. That having had onegood leg he should have another--this would be to use vain repetitionsas the Gentiles do. She would have been as much bewildered by him as ifhe had been a centipede. 

All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object. All surrenderof life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity, alldesolation has for its real aim this separation of something so that itmay be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed. I feel grateful for the slightsprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating divisionbetween one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is torealise that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strongand splendid a foot is; in the other I can realise how very muchotherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is whollyexhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful andbeautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If youwish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for amoment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God's imageis made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision ofall visible things--wink the other eye. 

VIII. The End of the World

For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious townof Besançon, which stands like a sort of peninsula in a horse-shoe ofriver. You may learn from the guide books that it was the birthplace ofVictor Hugo, and that it is a military station with many forts, near theFrench frontier. But you will not learn from guide books that the verytiles on the roofs seem to be of some quainter and more delicate colourthan the tiles of all the other towns of the world; that the tiles looklike the little clouds of some strange sunset, or like the lustrousscales of some strange fish. They will not tell you that in thistown the eye cannot rest on anything without finding it in some wayattractive and even elvish, a carved face at a street corner, a gleam ofgreen fields through a stunted arch, or some unexpected colour for theenamel of a spire or dome. 

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Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colours so simpleand yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together and make a fairytale. I sat down for a little outside a café with a row of little toytrees in front of it, and presently the driver of a fly (as we shouldcall it) came to the same place. He was one of those very large and darkFrenchmen, a type not common but yet typical of France; the RabelaisianFrenchman, huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he wasa sort of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything butEnglish. And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of twonations. For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity likea huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets, thisFrenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise--as if pleasurewere a kind of pagan religion. After some talk which was full of theadmirable civility and equality of French civilisation, he suggestedwithout either eagerness or embarrassment that he should take me in hisfly for an hour's ride in the hills beyond the town. And though it wasgrowing late I consented; for there was one long white road under anarchway and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord. Wedrove through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans, and Iremember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we passed out ofthe city I heard simultaneously the three sounds which are the trinityof France. They make what some poet calls "a tangled trinity, " and I amnot going to disentangle it. Whatever those three things mean, howor why they co-exist; whether they can be reconciled or perhaps arereconciled already; the three sounds I heard then by an accident allat once make up the French mystery. For the brass band in the Casinogardens behind me was playing with a sort of passionate levity someramping tune from a Parisian comic opera, and while this was going onI heard also the bugles on the hills above, that told of terribleloyalties and men always arming in the gate of France; and I heard also, fainter than these sounds and through them all, the Angelus. 

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After this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having leftFrance behind me, or, perhaps, even the civilised world. And, indeed, there was something in the landscape wild enough to encourage sucha fancy. I have seen perhaps higher mountains, but I have neverseen higher rocks; I have never seen height so near, so abrupt andsensational, splinters of rock that stood up like the spires ofchurches, cliffs that fell sudden and straight as Satan fell fromheaven. There was also a quality in the ride which was not onlyastonishing, but rather bewildering; a quality which many must havenoticed if they have driven or ridden rapidly up mountain roads. I meana sense of gigantic gyration, as of the whole earth turning about one'shead. It is quite inadequate to say that the hills rose and fell likeenormous waves. Rather the hills seemed to turn about me like theenormous sails of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelicwings. As we drove on and up into the gathering purple of the sunsetthis dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below. Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof. I staredat them until I fancied that I was staring down at a wooded plain. Belowme steeps of green swept down to the river. I stared at them until Ifancied that they swept up to the sky. The purple darkened, night drewnearer; it seemed only to cut clearer the chasms and draw higher thespires of that nightmare landscape. Above me in the twilight wasthe huge black hulk of the driver, and his broad, blank back was asmysterious as the back of Death in Watts' picture. I felt that I wasgrowing too fantastic, and I sought to speak of ordinary things. Icalled out to the driver in French, "Where are you taking me?" and itis a literal and solemn fact that he answered me in the same languagewithout turning around, "To the end of the world. "

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

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

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

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

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

"It is in Walham Green, " I whispered hoarsely. "You see it on the Londonomnibuses. 'World's End and Walham Green. ' Oh, I know how good this is;I love your vineyards and your free peasantry, but I want the Englishend of the world. I love you like a brother, but I want an Englishcabman, who will be funny and ask me what his fare 'is. ' Your buglesstir my blood, but I want to see a London policeman. Take, oh, take meto see a London policeman. "

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

"You will understand, " I said, "if ever you are an exile even forpleasure. The child to his mother, the man to his country, as acountryman of yours once said. But since, perhaps, it is rather too longa drive to the English end of the world, we may as well drive back toBesançon. "

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

IX. In the Place de La Bastille

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

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So it was, certainly, with the Bastille. The destruction of the Bastillewas not a reform; it was something more important than a reform. It wasan iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. The people saw thebuilding like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and theystruck at it as at a carved fact. For of all the shapes in which thatimmense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps themost oppressive are big buildings. Man feels like a fly, an accident, in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of thespirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man couldunmake it. Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the streettaking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, a ritualmeaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religiousservice. If, for instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageousenough to capture and smash up the Bank of England, you might argue forever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch theroot of the economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind wouldnever forget it. It would change the world. 

Architecture is a very good test of the true strength of a society, for the most valuable things in a human state are the irrevocablethings--marriage, for instance. And architecture approaches nearer thanany other art to being irrevocable, because it is so difficult to getrid of. You can turn a picture with its face to the wall; it would be anuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with its face to the wall. Youcan tear a poem to pieces; it is only in moments of very sincere emotionthat you tear a town-hall to pieces. A building is akin to dogma; itis insolent, like a dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claimspermanence like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architectureof the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it isobviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to seeanything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky thatdoes not change like the clouds of the sky. But along with this decisionwhich is involved in creating a building, there goes a quite similardecision in the more delightful task of smashing one. The two ofnecessity go together. In few places have so many fine public buildingsbeen set up as here in Paris, and in few places have so many beendestroyed. When people have finally got into the horrible habit ofpreserving buildings, they have got out of the habit of building them. And in London one mingles, as it were, one's tears because so few arepulled down. 

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As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty andGlory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like so manysuch squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and silent line ofhorsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and prosaic enough, but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their helmets; and theirhelmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans. I had seen themby twos and threes often enough before. I had seen plenty of them inpictures toiling through the snows of Friedland or roaring roundthe squares at Waterloo. But now they came file after file, like aninvasion, and something in their numbers, or in the evening light thatlit up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie intowhich they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet and cry out, "The French soldiers!" There were the little men with the brown facesthat had so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as coolly asthey now rode through their own. And when I looked across the square Isaw that the two other corners were choked with blue and red; heldby little groups of infantry. The city was garrisoned as against arevolution. 

Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker. Hesaid he was not going to "Chomer. " I said, "Qu'est-ce que c'est que lechome?" He said, "Ils ne veulent pas travailler. " I said, "Ni moi nonplus, " and he thought I was a class-conscious collectivist proletarian. The whole thing was curious, and the true moral of it one not easy forus, as a nation, to grasp, because our own faults are so deeply anddangerously in the other direction. To me, as an Englishman (personallysteeped in the English optimism and the English dislike of severity), the whole thing seemed a fuss about nothing. It looked like turning outone of the best armies in Europe against ordinary people walkingabout the street. The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or lessharmlessly. But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticismsone is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not) as docile asthe English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled, so to speak, through the whole noisy night. This people has a natural faculty forfeeling itself on the eve of something--of the Bartholomew or theRevolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment. It is this sense ofcrisis that makes France eternally young. It is perpetually pulling downand building up, as it pulled down the prison and put up the columnin the Place de La Bastille. France has always been at the point ofdissolution. She has found the only method of immortality. She diesdaily. 

X. On Lying in Bed

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience ifonly one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on thepremises. I think myself that the thing might be managed with severalpails of Aspinall and a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweepingand masterly way, and laid on the colour in great washes, it might dripdown again on one's face in floods of rich and mingled colour like somestrange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages. I am afraidit would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form ofartistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling wouldbe of the greatest possible use; in fact, it is the only use I think ofa white ceiling being put to. 

But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never havediscovered it. For years I have been looking for some blank spaces ina modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any reallyallegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, "Il me faut des géants. "But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern roomssuch as we all live in I was continually disappointed. I found anendless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain offine links between me and my desire. I examined the walls; I found themto my surprise to be already covered with wallpaper, and I found thewallpaper to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearinga ridiculous resemblance to each other. I could not understand why onearbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely devoid of any religiousor philosophical significance) should thus be sprinkled all over mynice walls like a sort of small-pox. The Bible must be referring towallpapers, I think, when it says, "Use not vain repetitions, as theGentiles do. " I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colours, rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called TurkishDelight. I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight really is; but Isuppose it is Macedonian Massacres. Everywhere that I went forlornly, with my pencil or my paint brush, I found that others had unaccountablybeen before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture withtheir childish and barbaric designs. 

. .. .. 

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

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

. .. .. 

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

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphaticcaution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (likejournalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious thatthe indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the cautionI mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do itwithout any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do itwithout a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If hedoes it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientificexplanation, he may get up a hypochondriac. 

XI. The Twelve Men

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

It seems that they always summon jurymen in this sweeping alphabeticalway. At one official blow, so to speak, Battersea is denuded of all itsC's, and left to get on as best it can with the rest of the alphabet. ACumberpatch is missing from one street--a Chizzolpop from another--threeChucksterfields from Chucksterfield House; the children are crying outfor an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street corner is weepingfor her Coffintop, and will not be comforted. We settle down with arollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race, the C's of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totallyinaudible manner by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in hissecond childhood. We understand, however, that we are to well and trulytry the case between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at thebar, neither of whom has put in an appearance as yet. 

. .. .. 

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

All the time that the eye took in these light appearances and the brainpassed these light criticisms, there was in the heart a barbaric pityand fear which men have never been able to utter from the beginning, butwhich is the power behind half the poems of the world. The mood cannoteven adequately be suggested, except faintly by this statement thattragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of humanlife. Never had I stood so close to pain; and never so far away frompessimism. Ordinarily, I should not have spoken of these dark emotionsat all, for speech about them is too difficult; but I mention them nowfor a specific and particular reason to the statement of which I willproceed at once. I speak these feelings because out of the furnace ofthem there came a curious realisation of a political or social truth. Isaw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what a jury reallyis, and why we must never let it go. 

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

. .. .. 

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

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

. .. .. 

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

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

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

XII. The Wind and the Trees

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

As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible and violentwitchcraft, a phrase comes back into my mind. I remember a little boy ofmy acquaintance who was once walking in Battersea Park under just suchtorn skies and tossing trees. He did not like the wind at all; it blewin his face too much; it made him shut his eyes; and it blew off hishat, of which he was very proud. He was, as far as I remember, aboutfour. After complaining repeatedly of the atmospheric unrest, he said atlast to his mother, "Well, why don't you take away the trees, and thenit wouldn't wind. "

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

. .. .. 

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

Just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more ragged andrises into fantastic crests or tattered tails, so the human city risesunder the wind of the spirit into toppling temples or sudden spires. Noman has ever seen a revolution. Mobs pouring through the palaces, bloodpouring down the gutters, the guillotine lifted higher than the throne, a prison in ruins, a people in arms--these things are not revolution, but the results of revolution. 

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

The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved. Sothere must always be a battle in the sky before there is a battle on theearth. Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom, it islawful also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restorethe kingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in thetrees. It is lawful to pray "Thine anger come on earth as it is inHeaven. "

. .. .. 

The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees. The greathuman heresy is that the trees move the wind. When people begin tosay that the material circumstances have alone created the moralcircumstances, then they have prevented all possibility of seriouschange. For if my circumstances have made me wholly stupid, how can I becertain even that I am right in altering those circumstances?

The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment issimply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts--includingthat one. To treat the human mind as having an ultimate authority isnecessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking. And nothing willever be reformed in this age or country unless we realise that the moralfact comes first. 

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

When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not longago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you will havediscovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman. The Englishman, among his million delightful virtues, really has thisquality, which may strictly be called "hand to mouth, " because underits influence a man's hand automatically seeks his own mouth, instead ofseeking (as it sometimes should do) his oppressor's nose. And a man whosays that the English inequality in land is due only to economic causes, or that the drunkenness of England is due only to economic causes, issaying something so absurd that he cannot really have thought what hewas saying. 

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

. .. .. 

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

XIII. The Dickensian

He was a quiet man, dressed in dark clothes, with a large limp strawhat; with something almost military in his moustache and whiskers, butwith a quite unmilitary stoop and very dreamy eyes. He was gazing with arather gloomy interest at the cluster, one might almost say the tangle, of small shipping which grew thicker as our little pleasure boat crawledup into Yarmouth Harbour. A boat entering this harbour, as every oneknows, does not enter in front of the town like a foreigner, but creepsround at the back like a traitor taking the town in the rear. Thepassage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic, and inconsequence the bigger ships look colossal. As we passed under a timbership from Norway, which seemed to block up the heavens like a cathedral, the man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden figurehead carved like awoman, and said, like one continuing a conversation, "Now, why have theyleft off having them. They didn't do any one any harm?"

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

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

"Like Mr. Quilp, " I answered, "when he battered the wooden Admiral withthe poker. "

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

"Do you come to Yarmouth for that?" he asked. 

"For what?"

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

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

"I always come, " he answered quietly, "to find Peggotty's boat. It isn'there. "

And when he said that I understood him perfectly. 

There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred to the peoplewho live there. I myself have never come to the end of the list ofBatterseas. But there are two to the stranger and tourist; the poorpart, which is dignified, and the prosperous part, which is savagelyvulgar. My new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost; to thelatter he would only distantly allude. 

"The place is very much spoilt now. .. Trippers, you know, " he would say, not at all scornfully, but simply sadly. That was the nearest he wouldgo to an admission of the monstrous watering place that lay alongthe front, outblazing the sun, and more deafening than the sea. Butbehind--out of earshot of this uproar--there are lanes so narrow thatthey seem like secret entrances to some hidden place of repose. Thereare squares so brimful of silence that to plunge into one of them islike plunging into a pool. In these places the man and I paced up anddown talking about Dickens, or, rather, doing what all true Dickensiansdo, telling each other verbatim long passages which both of us knewquite well already. We were really in the atmosphere of the olderEngland. Fishermen passed us who might well have been characters likePeggotty; we went into a musty curiosity shop and bought pipe-stopperscarved into figures from Pickwick. The evening was settling down betweenall the buildings with that slow gold that seems to soak everything whenwe went into the church. 

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

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

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

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

After a pause I said, "Do you remember what the angel at the sepulchresaid?"

"Not particularly, " he answered; "but where are you off to in such ahurry?"

I walked him rapidly out of the still square, past the fishermen'salmshouses, towards the coast, he still inquiring indignantly where Iwas going. 

"I am going, " I said, "to put pennies in automatic machines on thebeach. I am going to listen to the niggers. I am going to have myphotograph taken. I am going to drink ginger-beer out of its originalbottle. I will buy some picture postcards. I do want a boat. I am readyto listen to a concertina, and but for the defects of my educationshould be ready to play it. I am willing to ride on a donkey; that is, if the donkey is willing. I am willing to be a donkey; for all this wascommanded me by the angel in the stained-glass window. "

"I really think, " said the Dickensian, "that I had better put you incharge of your relations. "

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

With that we came out suddenly on the wide stretch of the sands, whichwere black with the knobs and masses of our laughing and quite desperatedemocracy. And the sunset, which was now in its final glory, flung farover all of them a red flush and glitter like the gigantic firelightof Dickens. In that strange evening light every figure looked at oncegrotesque and attractive, as if he had a story to tell. I heard a littlegirl (who was being throttled by another little girl) say by way ofself-vindication, "My sister-in-law 'as got four rings aside her weddin'ring!"

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

XIV. In Topsy-Turvy Land

Last week, in an idle metaphor, I took the tumbling of trees and thesecret energy of the wind as typical of the visible world moving underthe violence of the invisible. I took this metaphor merely because Ihappened to be writing the article in a wood. Nevertheless, now that Ireturn to Fleet Street (which seems to me, I confess, much better andmore poetical than all the wild woods in the world), I am strangelyhaunted by this accidental comparison. The people's figures seem aforest and their soul a wind. All the human personalities which speak orsignal to me seem to have this fantastic character of the fringe of theforest against the sky. That man that talks to me, what is he but anarticulate tree? That driver of a van who waves his hands wildly at meto tell me to get out of the way, what is he but a bunch of branchesstirred and swayed by a spiritual wind, a sylvan object that I cancontinue to contemplate with calm? That policeman who lifts his handto warn three omnibuses of the peril that they run in encountering myperson, what is he but a shrub shaken for a moment with that blastof human law which is a thing stronger than anarchy? Gradually thisimpression of the woods wears off. But this black-and-white contrastbetween the visible and invisible, this deep sense that the oneessential belief is belief in the invisible as against the visible, is suddenly and sensationally brought back to my mind. Exactly atthe moment when Fleet Street has grown most familiar (that is, mostbewildering and bright), my eye catches a poster of vivid violet, onwhich I see written in large black letters these remarkable words:"Should Shop Assistants Marry?"

. .. .. 

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

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

"Do Feet Improve Boots?"--"Is Bread Better when Eaten?"--"ShouldHats have Heads in them?"--"Do People Spoil a Town?"--"Do WallsRuin Wall-papers?"--"Should Neckties enclose Necks?"--"Do Hands HurtWalking-sticks?"--"Does Burning Destroy Firewood?"--"Is Cleanliness Goodfor Soap?"--"Can Cricket Really Improve Cricket-bats?"--"Shall We TakeBrides with our Wedding Rings?" and a hundred others. 

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

. .. .. 

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

XV. What I Found in My Pocket

Once when I was very young I met one of those men who have madethe Empire what it is--a man in an astracan coat, with an astracanmoustache--a tight, black, curly moustache. Whether he put on themoustache with the coat or whether his Napoleonic will enabled him notonly to grow a moustache in the usual place, but also to grow littlemoustaches all over his clothes, I do not know. I only remember that hesaid to me the following words: "A man can't get on nowadays by hangingabout with his hands in his pockets. " I made reply with the quiteobvious flippancy that perhaps a man got on by having his hands in otherpeople's pockets; whereupon he began to argue about Moral Evolution, soI suppose what I said had some truth in it. But the incident now comesback to me, and connects itself with another incident--if you can callit an incident--which happened to me only the other day. 

I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps throughsome absent-mindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with somereason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I hadat least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief; Ihad a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I shouldfind there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me atidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all mypossessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done withthem, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets. If once anythingslips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell. I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets are stillthere; the same presumption applies to the things that I have droppedinto the sea. But I regard the riches stored in both these bottomlesschasms with the same reverent ignorance. They tell us that on thelast day the sea will give up its dead; and I suppose that on the sameoccasion long strings of extraordinary things will come running out ofmy pockets. But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and thereis really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all surprisedat finding among them. 

. .. .. 

Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence. I here only wishbriefly to recall the special, extraordinary, and hitherto unprecedentedcircumstances which led me in cold blood, and being of sound mind, toturn out my pockets. I was locked up in a third-class carriage for arather long journey. The time was towards evening, but it might havebeen anything, for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shadewas painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting sheet ofquite colourless rain. I had no books or newspapers. I had not even apencil and a scrap of paper with which to write a religious epic. Therewere no advertisements on the walls of the carriage, otherwise I couldhave plunged into the study, for any collection of printed words isquite enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity. WhenI find myself opposite the words "Sunlight Soap" I can exhaust all theaspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, and Summer poetry before I go on to theless congenial subject of soap. But there was no printed word or pictureanywhere; there was nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blankwet without. Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting. So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats, andbegan thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood. Just as I hadbegun to realise why, perhaps, it was that Christ was a carpenter, rather than a bricklayer, or a baker, or anything else, I suddenlystarted upright, and remembered my pockets. I was carrying about withme an unknown treasury. I had a British Museum and a South Kensingtoncollection of unknown curios hung all over me in different places. Ibegan to take the things out. 

. .. .. 

The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of Batterseatram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase. They shookdown in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course, they touched mypatriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes; also they provided mewith the printed matter I required, for I found on the back of them someshort but striking little scientific essays about some kind of pill. Comparatively speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets mightbe regarded as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should myrailway journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for afew months longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into thecontroversial aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders proand con upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolicquality of the tickets that moved me most. For as certainly as the crossof St. George means English patriotism, those scraps of paper meant allthat municipal patriotism which is now, perhaps, the greatest hope ofEngland. 

The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket-knife, Ineed hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral meditationsall to itself. A knife typifies one of the most primary of thosepractical origins upon which as upon low, thick pillows all our humancivilisation reposes. Metals, the mystery of the thing called iron andof the thing called steel, led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream. I saw into the intrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man amongall the common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violentbattle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splinteredagainst something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man. I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth. I saw all theswords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial war. For the knife isonly a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword. I opened itand looked at that brilliant and terrible tongue which we call a blade;and I thought that perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needsof man. The next moment I knew that I was wrong; for the thing that camenext out of my pocket was a box of matches. Then I saw fire, which isstronger even than steel, the old, fierce female thing, the thing we alllove, but dare not touch. 

The next thing I found was a piece of chalk; and I saw in it all the artand all the frescoes of the world. The next was a coin of a very modestvalue; and I saw in it not only the image and superscription of our ownCaesar, but all government and order since the world began. But I havenot space to say what were the items in the long and splendid processionof poetical symbols that came pouring out. I cannot tell you all thethings that were in my pocket. I can tell you one thing, however, that Icould not find in my pocket. I allude to my railway ticket. 

XVI. The Dragon's Grandmother

I met a man the other day who did not believe in fairy tales. I do notmean that he did not believe in the incidents narrated in them--that hedid not believe that a pumpkin could turn into a coach. He did, indeed, entertain this curious disbelief. And, like all the other people Ihave ever met who entertained it, he was wholly unable to give me anintelligent reason for it. He tried the laws of nature, but he soondropped that. Then he said that pumpkins were unalterable in ordinaryexperience, and that we all reckoned on their infinitely protractedpumpkinity. But I pointed out to him that this was not an attitude weadopt specially towards impossible marvels, but simply the attitude weadopt towards all unusual occurrences. If we were certain of miracleswe should not count on them. Things that happen very seldom we all leaveout of our calculations, whether they are miraculous or not. I do notexpect a glass of water to be turned into wine; but neither do I expecta glass of water to be poisoned with prussic acid. I do not in ordinarybusiness relations act on the assumption that the editor is a fairy; butneither do I act on the assumption that he is a Russian spy, or the lostheir of the Holy Roman Empire. What we assume in action is not that thenatural order is unalterable, but simply that it is much safer to beton uncommon incidents than on common ones. This does not touch thecredibility of any attested tale about a Russian spy or a pumpkin turnedinto a coach. If I had seen a pumpkin turned into a Panhard motor-carwith my own eyes that would not make me any more inclined to assumethat the same thing would happen again. I should not invest largely inpumpkins with an eye to the motor trade. Cinderella got a ball dressfrom the fairy; but I do not suppose that she looked after her ownclothes any the less after it. 

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

. .. .. 

The man had come to see me in connection with some silly societyof which I am an enthusiastic member; he was a fresh-coloured, short-sighted young man, like a stray curate who was too helpless evento find his way to the Church of England. He had a curious green necktieand a very long neck; I am always meeting idealists with very longnecks. Perhaps it is that their eternal aspiration slowly lifts theirheads nearer and nearer to the stars. Or perhaps it has something todo with the fact that so many of them are vegetarians: perhaps they areslowly evolving the neck of the giraffe so that they can eat all thetops of the trees in Kensington Gardens. These things are in every senseabove me. Such, anyhow, was the young man who did not believe in fairytales; and by a curious coincidence he entered the room when I had justfinished looking through a pile of contemporary fiction, and had begunto read "Grimm's Fairy tales" as a natural consequence. 

The modern novels stood before me, however, in a stack; and you canimagine their titles for yourself. There was "Suburban Sue: A Tale ofPsychology, " and also "Psychological Sue: A Tale of Suburbia"; there was"Trixy: A Temperament, " and "Man-Hate: A Monochrome, " and all those nicethings. I read them with real interest, but, curiously enough, I grewtired of them at last, and when I saw "Grimm's Fairy Tales" lyingaccidentally on the table, I gave a cry of indecent joy. Here at least, here at last, one could find a little common sense. I opened the book, and my eyes fell on these splendid and satisfying words, "The Dragon'sGrandmother. " That at least was reasonable; that at least was true. "TheDragon's Grandmother!" While I was rolling this first touch of ordinaryhuman reality upon my tongue, I looked up suddenly and saw this monsterwith a green tie standing in the doorway. 

. .. .. 

I listened to what he said about the society politely enough, I hope;but when he incidentally mentioned that he did not believe in fairytales, I broke out beyond control. "Man, " I said, "who are you that youshould not believe in fairy tales? It is much easier to believe in BlueBeard than to believe in you. A blue beard is a misfortune; but thereare green ties which are sins. It is far easier to believe in a millionfairy tales than to believe in one man who does not like fairy tales. Iwould rather kiss Grimm instead of a Bible and swear to all his storiesas if they were thirty-nine articles than say seriously and out ofmy heart that there can be such a man as you; that you are not sometemptation of the devil or some delusion from the void. Look at theseplain, homely, practical words. 'The Dragon's Grandmother, ' that is allright; that is rational almost to the verge of rationalism. If there wasa dragon, he had a grandmother. But you--you had no grandmother! If youhad known one, she would have taught you to love fairy tales. You had nofather, you had no mother; no natural causes can explain you. You cannotbe. I believe many things which I have not seen; but of such thingsas you it may be said, 'Blessed is he that has seen and yet hasdisbelieved. '"

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It seemed to me that he did not follow me with sufficient delicacy, so Imoderated my tone. "Can you not see, " I said, "that fairy tales in theiressence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlastingfiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible?Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wildand full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full ofroutine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of thefairy tale is--what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? Theproblem of the modern novel is--what will a madman do with a dull world?In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, andsuffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos. In theexcellent tale of 'The Dragon's Grandmother, ' in all the other tales ofGrimm, it is assumed that the young man setting out on his travelswill have all substantial truths in him; that he will be brave, fullof faith, reasonable, that he will respect his parents, keep his word, rescue one kind of people, defy another kind, 'parcere subjectis etdebellare, ' etc. Then, having assumed this centre of sanity, the writerentertains himself by fancying what would happen if the whole world wentmad all round it, if the sun turned green and the moon blue, if horseshad six legs and giants had two heads. But your modern literaturetakes insanity as its centre. Therefore, it loses the interest even ofinsanity. A lunatic is not startling to himself, because he is quiteserious; that is what makes him a lunatic. A man who thinks he is apiece of glass is to himself as dull as a piece of glass. A man whothinks he is a chicken is to himself as common as a chicken. It is onlysanity that can see even a wild poetry in insanity. Therefore, thesewise old tales made the hero ordinary and the tale extraordinary. But you have made the hero extraordinary and the tale ordinary--soordinary--oh, so very ordinary. "

I saw him still gazing at me fixedly. Some nerve snapped in me under thehypnotic stare. I leapt to my feet and cried, "In the name of Godand Democracy and the Dragon's grandmother--in the name of all goodthings--I charge you to avaunt and haunt this house no more. " Whetheror no it was the result of the exorcism, there is no doubt that hedefinitely went away. 

XVII. The Red Angel

I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales badfor children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him I cannever count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest lettersaying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even ifthey are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy tales, because it frightens them. You might just as well say that it is cruelto give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry. All thiskind of talk is based on that complete forgetting of what a child islike which has been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make themup for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hellsthan Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big andblack to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly andcacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, tobegin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in themeven when he does not like them. There is just as much difficulty insaying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as there is in ourswhen we walk of our own free will into the torture-chamber of a greattragedy. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes fromthe universe of the soul. 

. .. .. 

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they arealarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. Theydislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to bealone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnosticsworship it--because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsiblefor producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairytales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that isin the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy talesdo not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give thechild is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The babyhas known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. Whatthe fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. 

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a seriesof clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, thatthere is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, andstronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at thedarkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro gianttaller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him aCyclops. But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I readan authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equaldimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similarinexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, somebad riddles, and a brave heart. Sometimes the sea at night seemed asdreadful as any dragon. But then I was acquainted with many youngestsons and little sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as thesea. 

Take the most horrible of Grimm's tales in incident and imagery, theexcellent tale of the "Boy who Could not Shudder, " and you will see whatI mean. There are some living shocks in that tale. I remember speciallya man's legs which fell down the chimney by themselves and walked aboutthe room, until they were rejoined by the severed head and body whichfell down the chimney after them. That is very good. But the pointof the story and the point of the reader's feelings is not that thesethings are frightening, but the far more striking fact that the hero wasnot frightened at them. The most fearful of all these fearful wonderswas his own absence of fear. He slapped the bogies on the back and askedthe devils to drink wine with him; many a time in my youth, when stifledwith some modern morbidity, I have prayed for a double portion of hisspirit. If you have not read the end of his story, go and read it; it isthe wisest thing in the world. The hero was at last taught to shudderby taking a wife, who threw a pail of cold water over him. In that onesentence there is more of the real meaning of marriage than in all thebooks about sex that cover Europe and America. 

. .. .. 

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

"There may be Heaven; there must be Hell. "

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

. .. .. 

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

. .. .. 

I have thought vaguely of all this staring at a great red fire thatstands up in the room like a great red angel. But, perhaps, you havenever heard of a red angel. But you have heard of a blue devil. That isexactly what I mean. 

XVIII. The Tower

I have been standing where everybody has stood, opposite the greatBelfry Tower of Bruges, and thinking, as every one has thought (thoughnot, perhaps, said), that it is built in defiance of all decencies ofarchitecture. It is made in deliberate disproportion to achieve the onestartling effect of height. It is a church on stilts. But this sort ofsublime deformity is characteristic of the whole fancy and energyof these Flemish cities. Flanders has the flattest and most prosaiclandscapes, but the most violent and extravagant of buildings. HereNature is tame; it is civilisation that is untamable. Here the fieldsare as flat as a paved square; but, on the other hand, the streets androofs are as uproarious as a forest in a great wind. The waters of woodand meadow slide as smoothly and meekly as if they were in the Londonwater-pipes. But the parish pump is carved with all the creatures out ofthe wilderness. Part of this is true, of course, of all art. We talk ofwild animals, but the wildest animal is man. There are sounds in musicthat are more ancient and awful than the cry of the strangest beastat night. And so also there are buildings that are shapeless in theirstrength, seeming to lift themselves slowly like monsters from theprimal mire, and there are spires that seem to fly up suddenly like astartled bird. 

. .. .. 

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

But it is true that there is something in it that breaks the outlineof perfect and conventional beauty, something that dots with anger theblind eyes of the Apollo and lashes to a cavalry charge the horsesof the Elgin Marbles. Christianity is savage, in the sense that it isprimeval; there is in it a touch of the nigger hymn. I remember a debatein which I had praised militant music in ritual, and some one asked meif I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band. I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ definitelyapproved a natural noisiness at a great moment. When the street childrenshouted too loud, certain priggish disciples did begin to rebuke them inthe name of good taste. He said: "If these were silent the very stoneswould cry out. " With these words He called up all the wealth of artisticcreation that has been founded on this creed. With those words Hefounded Gothic architecture. For in a town like this, which seems tohave grown Gothic as a wood grows leaves, anywhere and anyhow, any oddbrick or moulding may be carved off into a shouting face. The front ofvast buildings is thronged with open mouths, angels praising God, ordevils defying Him. Rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems toscream. The miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out. 

But though this furious fancy is certainly a specialty of men amongcreatures, and of Christian art among arts, it is still most notable inthe art of Flanders. All Gothic buildings are full of extravagant thingsin detail; but this is an extravagant thing in design. All Christiantemples worth talking about have gargoyles; but Bruges Belfry is agargoyle. It is an unnaturally long-necked animal, like a giraffe. Thesame impression of exaggeration is forced on the mind at every corner ofa Flemish town. And if any one asks, "Why did the people of these flatcountries instinctively raise these riotous and towering monuments?" theonly answer one can give is, "Because they were the people of theseflat countries. " If any one asks, "Why the men of Bruges sacrificedarchitecture and everything to the sense of dizzy and divine heights?"we can only answer, "Because Nature gave them no encouragement to doso. "

. .. .. 

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

The Spaniards (it was said) are passionate because their country ishot; Scandinavians adventurous because their country is cold; Englishmennaval because they are islanders; Switzers free because they aremountaineers. It is all very nice in its way. Only unfortunately I amquite certain that I could make up quite as long a list exactly contraryin its argument point-blank against the influence of their geographicalenvironment. Thus Spaniards have discovered more continents thanScandinavians because their hot climate discouraged them from exertion. Thus Dutchmen have fought for their freedom quite as bravely as Switzersbecause the Dutch have no mountains. Thus Pagan Greece and Rome and manyMediterranean peoples have specially hated the sea because they had thenicest sea to deal with, the easiest sea to manage. I could extend thelist for ever. But however long it was, two examples would certainlystand up in it as pre-eminent and unquestionable. The first is that theSwiss, who live under staggering precipices and spires of eternal snow, have produced no art or literature at all, and are by far the mostmundane, sensible, and business-like people in Europe. The other is thatthe people of Belgium, who live in a country like a carpet, have, by aninner energy, desired to exalt their towers till they struck the stars. 

As it is therefore quite doubtful whether a person will go speciallywith his environment or specially against his environment, I cannotcomfort myself with the thought that the modern discussions aboutenvironment are of much practical value. But I think I will not writeany more about these modern theories, but go on looking at the Belfryof Bruges. I would give them the greater attention if I were not prettywell convinced that the theories will have disappeared a long timebefore the Belfry. 

XIX. How I Met the President

Several years ago, when there was a small war going on in South Africaand a great fuss going on in England, when it was by no means so popularand convenient to be a Pro-Boer as it is now, I remember making a brightsuggestion to my Pro-Boer friends and allies, which was not, I regret tosay, received with the seriousness it deserved. I suggested that a bandof devoted and noble youths, including ourselves, should express oursense of the pathos of the President's and the Republic's fate bygrowing Kruger beards under our chins. I imagined how abruptly thisdecoration would alter the appearance of Mr. John Morley; how startlingit would be as it emerged from under the chin of Mr. Lloyd-George. Butthe younger men, my own friends, on whom I more particularly urgedit, men whose names are in many cases familiar to the readers of thispaper--Mr. Masterman's for instance, and Mr. Conrad Noel--they, I felt, being young and beautiful, would do even more justice to the Krugerbeard, and when walking down the street with it could not fail toattract attention. The beard would have been a kind of counterblast tothe Rhodes hat. An appropriate counterblast; for the Rhodesian power inAfrica is only an external thing, placed upon the top like a hat; theDutch power and tradition is a thing rooted and growing like a beard;we have shaved it, and it is growing again. The Kruger beard wouldrepresent time and the natural processes. You cannot grow a beard in amoment of passion. 

. .. .. 

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

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

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

. .. .. 

And now I come to the third and greatest surprise of all that thisstrange old man gave me. When he asked me, dryly enough, but not withouta certain steady civility that belongs to old-fashioned country people, what I wanted and what I was doing, I told him the facts of the case, explaining my political mission and the almost angelic qualities of theLiberal candidate. Whereupon, this old man became suddenly transfiguredin the sunlight into a devil of wrath. It was some time before I couldunderstand a word he said, but the one word that kept on recurring wasthe word "Kruger, " and it was invariably accompanied with a volley ofviolent terms. Was I for old Kruger, was I? Did I come to him and wanthim to help old Kruger? I ought to be ashamed, I was. .. And here hebecame once more obscure. The one thing that he made quite clear wasthat he wouldn't do anything for Kruger. 

"But you ARE Kruger, " burst from my lips, in a natural explosion ofreasonableness. "You ARE Kruger, aren't you?"

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

I saw the old man once again on the fierce night of the poll, when hedrove down our Liberal lines in a little cart ablaze with the blue Toryribbons, for he was a man who would carry his colours everywhere. Itwas evening, and the warm western light was on the grey hair and heavymassive features of that good old man. I knew as one knows a fact ofsense that if Spanish and German stockbrokers had flooded his farmor country he would have fought them for ever, not fiercely like anIrishman, but with the ponderous courage and ponderous cunning of theBoer. I knew that without seeing it, as certainly as I knew withoutseeing it that when he went into the polling room he put his crossagainst the Conservative name. Then he came out again, having given hisvote and looking more like Kruger than ever. And at the same hour onthe same night thousands upon thousands of English Krugers gave thesame vote. And thus Kruger was pulled down and the dark-faced men in thephotograph reigned in his stead. 

XX. The Giant

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

. .. .. 

I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to bewandering in the Temple Gardens towards the end of twilight. I sat downon a bench with my back to the river, happening to choose such a placethat a huge angle and façade of building jutting out from the Strandsat above me like an incubus. I dare say that if I took the same seatto-morrow by daylight I should find the impression entirely false. Insunlight the thing might seem almost distant; but in that half-darknessit seemed as if the walls were almost falling upon me. Never before haveI had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics, the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth. Thatpile of wealth and power, whatever was its name, went up above andbeyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb. I had anirrational sense that this thing had to be fought, that I had to fightit; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion but an indolentjournalist with a walking-stick. 

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

. .. .. 

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

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

And this is really all that we can do when we fight something reallystronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment; itdeals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock and jar theunthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil; just as a pebble ona railway can stagger the Scotch express. It is enough for the greatmartyrs and criminals of the French revolution, that they have surprisedfor all time the secret weakness of the strong. They have awakened andset leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever the coward in the heartsof kings. 

. .. .. 

When Jack the Giant-Killer really first saw the giant his experience wasnot such as has been generally supposed. If you care to hear it I willtell you the real story of Jack the Giant-Killer. To begin with, themost awful thing which Jack first felt about the giant was that he wasnot a giant. He came striding across an interminable wooded plain, andagainst its remote horizon the giant was quite a small figure, like afigure in a picture--he seemed merely a man walking across the grass. Then Jack was shocked by remembering that the grass which the man wastreading down was one of the tallest forests upon that plain. The mancame nearer and nearer, growing bigger and bigger, and at the instantwhen he passed the possible stature of humanity Jack almost screamed. The rest was an intolerable apocalypse. 

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

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

Then he picked up Jack between a big finger and thumb and threw himaway; and as Jack went through the air he felt as if he were flying fromsystem to system through the universe of stars. But, as the giant hadthrown him away carelessly, he did not strike a stone, but struck softmire by the side of a distant river. There he lay insensible for severalhours; but when he awoke again his horrible conqueror was still insight. He was striding away across the void and wooded plain towardswhere it ended in the sea; and by this time he was only much higher thanany of the hills. He grew less and less indeed; but only as a reallyhigh mountain grows at last less and less when we leave it in a railwaytrain. Half an hour afterwards he was a bright blue colour, as are thedistant hills; but his outline was still human and still gigantic. Thenthe big blue figure seemed to come to the brink of the big blue sea, andeven as it did so it altered its attitude. Jack, stunned and bleeding, lifted himself laboriously upon one elbow to stare. The giant once morecaught hold of his ankle, wavered twice as in a wind, and then went overinto the great sea which washes the whole world, and which, alone of allthings God has made, was big enough to drown him. 

XXI. A Great Man

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has alwaysseemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veilsfrom private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanousbut blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused forexposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anythingso valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it nevergives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a milliontimes in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal tomeet him in real life. The Yellow Pressman seems to have no power ofcatching the first fresh fact about a man that dominates all afterimpressions. For instance, before I met Bernard Shaw I heard thathe spoke with a reckless desire for paradox or a sneering hatred ofsentiment; but I never knew till he opened his mouth that he spoke withan Irish accent, which is more important than all the other criticismsput together. 

Journalism is not personal enough. So far from digging out privatepersonalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities on thesurface. Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression of this kindwhich we have all felt when we met great poets or politicians, but whichnever finds its way into the newspapers. I mean the impression thatthey are much older than we thought they were. We connect great men withtheir great triumphs, which generally happened some years ago, and manyrecruits enthusiastic for the thin Napoleon of Marengo must have foundthemselves in the presence of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic. 

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

. .. .. 

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

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

Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature of theforest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force. For the meaning ofwoods is the combination of energy with complexity. A forest is notin the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense with delicacy. Uniqueshapes that an artist would copy or a philosopher watch for years if hefound them in an open plain are here mingled and confounded; but it isnot a darkness of deformity. It is a darkness of life; a darkness ofperfection. And I began to think how much of the highest human obscurityis like this, and how much men have misunderstood it. People will tellyou, for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead. Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate; itis only the live tree that grows too many branches. 

. .. .. 

These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out intodeep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening wasso far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all toitself. I went along that road according to directions that had beengiven me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling beyond which thewood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious courtesyand fineness of that character I was to meet went out from him upon thevalley; for I felt on all these things the finger of that quality whichthe old English called "faërie"; it is the quality which those can neverunderstand who think of the past as merely brutal; it is an ancientelegance such as there is in trees. I went through the garden and sawan old man sitting by a table, looking smallish in his big chair. Hewas already an invalid, and his hair and beard were both white; not likesnow, for snow is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or evenfierce; rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came upquite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand, andI saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young. He was the onegreat man of the old world whom I have met who was not a mere statueover his own grave. 

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

XXII. The Orthodox Barber

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

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

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

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

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

. .. .. 

But among the minor and milder aspects of the same principle, I have nohesitation in placing the problem of the colloquial barber. Before anymodern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist (I insistwith violence) that he shall always be very much pleased when his barbertries to talk to him. His barber is humanity: let him love that. If heis not pleased at this, I will not accept any substitute in the way ofinterest in the Congo or the future of Japan. If a man cannot love hisbarber whom he has seen, how shall he love the Japanese whom he has notseen?

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

. .. .. 

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

"There seems to be a lot in the papers about this new shaving, sir. Itseems you can shave yourself with anything--with a stick or a stone or apole or a poker" (here I began for the first time to detect a sarcasticintonation) "or a shovel or a----"

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

"Or a button-hook, " I said, "or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram or apiston-rod----"

He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, "Or a curtain rod or acandle-stick, or a----"

"Cow-catcher, " I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstaticduet for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he toldme. He explained the thing eloquently and at length. 

"The funny part of it is, " he said, "that the thing isn't new at all. It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before. There isalways a notion that the razor might be done without somehow. But noneof those schemes ever came to anything; and I don't believe myself thatthis will. "

"Why, as to that, " I said, rising slowly from the chair and trying toput on my coat inside out, "I don't know how it may be in the case ofyou and your new shaving. Shaving, with all respect to you, is a trivialand materialistic thing, and in such things startling inventions aresometimes made. But what you say reminds me in some dark and dreamyfashion of something else. I recall it especially when you tell me, with such evident experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is notreally new. My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge ofmaking everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shiftsoff one thing it shifts on to another. If one man has not the toil ofpreparing a man's chin, I suppose that some other man has the toil ofpreparing something very curious to put on a man's chin. It would benice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody. It would be nicerstill if we could go unshaved without annoying anybody--

 "'But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand, Brother, nor you nor I have made the world. '

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

"In the first and darkest of its books it is fiercely written that a manshall not eat his cake and have it; and though all men talked until thestars were old it would still be true that a man who has lost his razorcould not shave with it. But every now and then men jump up with the newsomething or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice, that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there is no realdifference between being shaved and not being shaved. The difference, they say, is only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionaryand relative. Shavedness is immanent in man. Every ten-penny nail isa Potential Razor. The superstitious people of the past (they say)believed that a lot of black bristles standing out at right angles toone's face was a positive affair. But the higher criticism teaches usbetter. Bristles are merely negative. They are a Shadow where Shavingshould be. 

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

"Nevertheless, " I added, as I paid the bill, "I have really beenprofoundly interested in what you told me about the New Shaving. Haveyou ever heard of a thing called the New theology?"

He smiled and said that he had not. 

XXIII. The Toy Theatre

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

. .. .. 

Take the case of bricks. If you publish a book to-morrow in twelvevolumes (it would be just like you) on "The Theory and Practiceof European Architecture, " your work may be laborious, but it isfundamentally frivolous. It is not serious as the work of a child pilingone brick on the other is serious; for the simple reason that if yourbook is a bad book no one will ever be able ultimately and entirely toprove to you that it is a bad book. Whereas if his balance of bricksis a bad balance of bricks, it will simply tumble down. And if I knowanything of children, he will set to work solemnly and sadly to build itup again. Whereas, if I know anything of authors, nothing would induceyou to write your book again, or even to think of it again if you couldhelp it. 

Take the case of dolls. It is much easier to care for an educationalcause than to care for a doll. It is as easy to write an article oneducation as to write an article on toffee or tramcars or anything else. But it is almost as difficult to look after a doll as to look after achild. The little girls that I meet in the little streets of Batterseaworship their dolls in a way that reminds one not so much of play asidolatry. In some cases the love and care of the artistic symbol hasactually become more important than the human reality which it was, Isuppose, originally meant to symbolize. 

I remember a Battersea little girl who wheeled her large baby sisterstuffed into a doll's perambulator. When questioned on this course ofconduct, she replied: "I haven't got a dolly, and Baby is pretending tobe my dolly. " Nature was indeed imitating art. First a doll had been asubstitute for a child; afterwards a child was a mere substitute for adoll. But that opens other matters; the point is here that such devotiontakes up most of the brain and most of the life; much as if it werereally the thing which it is supposed to symbolize. The point is thatthe man writing on motherhood is merely an educationalist; the childplaying with a doll is a mother. 

Take the case of soldiers. A man writing an article on military strategyis simply a man writing an article; a horrid sight. But a boy making acampaign with tin soldiers is like a General making a campaign with livesoldiers. He must to the limit of his juvenile powers think about thething; whereas the war correspondent need not think at all. I remembera war correspondent who remarked after the capture of Methuen: "Thisrenewed activity on the part of Delarey is probably due to hisbeing short of stores. " The same military critic had mentioned a fewparagraphs before that Delarey was being hard pressed by a column whichwas pursuing him under the command of Methuen. Methuen chased Delarey;and Delarey's activity was due to his being short of stores. Otherwisehe would have stood quite still while he was chased. I run after Joneswith a hatchet, and if he turns round and tries to get rid of me theonly possible explanation is that he has a very small balance at hisbankers. I cannot believe that any boy playing at soldiers would be asidiotic as this. But then any one playing at anything has to be serious. Whereas, as I have only too good reason to know, if you are writing anarticle you can say anything that comes into your head. 

. .. .. 

Broadly, then, what keeps adults from joining in children's games is, generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure in them; it is simplythat they have no leisure for them. It is that they cannot afford theexpenditure of toil and time and consideration for so grand and grave ascheme. I have been myself attempting for some time past to completea play in a small toy theatre, the sort of toy theatre that used to becalled Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured; only that I drew and colouredthe figures and scenes myself. Hence I was free from the degradingobligation of having to pay either a penny or twopence; I only had topay a shilling a sheet for good cardboard and a shilling a box for badwater colours. The kind of miniature stage I mean is probably familiarto every one; it is never more than a development of the stage whichSkelt made and Stevenson celebrated. 

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

All this gives me a feeling touching the real meaning of immortality. In this world we cannot have pure pleasure. This is partly becausepure pleasure would be dangerous to us and to our neighbours. But it ispartly because pure pleasure is a great deal too much trouble. If I amever in any other and better world, I hope that I shall have enoughtime to play with nothing but toy theatres; and I hope that I shall haveenough divine and superhuman energy to act at least one play in themwithout a hitch. 

. .. .. 

Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one'sconsideration. All the essential morals which modern men need to learncould be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered, it reminds usof the main principle of art, the principle which is in most dangerof being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists oflimitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist inexpanding things. Art consists of cutting things down, as I cut downwith a pair of scissors my very ugly figures of St. George and theDragon. Plato, who liked definite ideas, would like my cardboard dragon;for though the creature has few other artistic merits he is at leastdragonish. The modern philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcometo a sheet of the plain cardboard. The most artistic thing about thetheatrical art is the fact that the spectator looks at the whole thingthrough a window. This is true even of theatres inferior to my own; evenat the Court Theatre or His Majesty's you are looking through a window;an unusually large window. But the advantage of the small theatreexactly is that you are looking through a small window. Has not everyone noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seenthrough an arch? This strong, square shape, this shutting off ofeverything else is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essentialof beauty. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. 

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

XXIV. A Tragedy of Twopence

My relations with the readers of this page have been long and pleasant, but--perhaps for that very reason--I feel that the time has come when Iought to confess the one great crime of my life. It happened a long timeago; but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse to revealsuch dark episodes long after they have occurred. It has nothing to dowith the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League. That body is so offensivelyrespectable that a newspaper, in describing it the other day, referredto my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar Jepson; and it is believedthat similar titles are intended for all of us. No; it is not by theconduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton, of the Rev. JamesDouglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even of that fine and virile oldecclesiastic, Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish (or rather, am driven bymy conscience) to make this declaration. The crime was committed insolitude and without accomplices. Alone I did it. Let me, with thecharacteristic thirst of penitents to get the worst of the confessionover, state it first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible form. There is at the present moment in a town in Germany (unless he has diedof rage on discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper to whom I stillowe twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant knowing that I owedhim twopence. I carried it away under his nose, despite the fact thatthe nose was a decidedly Jewish one. I have never paid him, and it ishighly improbable that I ever shall. How did this villainy come to occurin a life which has been, generally speaking, deficient in the dexteritynecessary for fraud? The story is as follows--and it has a moral, thoughthere may not be room for that. 

. .. .. 

It is a fair general rule for those travelling on the Continent that theeasiest way of talking in a foreign language is to talk philosophy. Themost difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities. Thereason is obvious. The names of common necessities vary completelywith each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint. How, forinstance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would be called a"scuttle"? If he has ever seen the word scuttle it has been in theJingo Press, where the "policy of scuttle" is used whenever we giveup something to a small Power like Liberals, instead of giving upeverything to a great Power, like Imperialists. What Englishman inGermany would be poet enough to guess that the Germans call a glove a"hand-shoe. " Nations name their necessities by nicknames, so tospeak. They call their tubs and stools by quaint, elvish, and almostaffectionate names, as if they were their own children! But any one canargue about abstract things in a foreign language who has ever got asfar as Exercise IV. In a primer. For as soon as he can put asentence together at all he finds that the words used in abstract orphilosophical discussions are almost the same in all nations. They arethe same, for the simple reason that they all come from the things thatwere the roots of our common civilisation. From Christianity, fromthe Roman Empire, from the mediaeval Church, or the French Revolution. "Nation, " "citizen, " "religion, " "philosophy, " "authority, " "theRepublic, " words like these are nearly the same in all the countries inwhich we travel. Restrain, therefore, your exuberant admiration for theyoung man who can argue with six French atheists when he first lands atDieppe. Even I can do that. But very likely the same young man does notknow the French for a shoe-horn. But to this generalisation thereare three great exceptions. (1) In the case of countries that are notEuropean at all, and have never had our civic conceptions, or the oldLatin scholarship. I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for"citizenship" at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak's word for "theRepublic" has been familiar to me from the nursery. (2) In the case ofGermany, where, although the principle does apply to many words suchas "nation" and "philosophy, " it does not apply so generally, becauseGermany has had a special and deliberate policy of encouraging thepurely German part of its language. (3) In the case where one does notknow any of the language at all, as is generally the case with me. 

. .. .. 

Such at least was my situation on the dark day on which I committed mycrime. Two of the exceptional conditions which I have mentioned werecombined. I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German. Iknew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which holdour European civilisation together--one of which is "cigar. " As it was ahot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort of beer-garden, andordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the lager, and paid forit. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gazingrapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus mountains. After aboutten minutes, I suddenly remembered that I had not paid for the cigar. Iwent back to the place of refreshment, and put down the money. But theproprietor also had forgotten the cigar, and he merely said gutturalthings in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said"cigar, " and he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down themoney to wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought thatmy rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particularcigar, and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill, seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture that myrejection was a rejection of cigars in general, not of that particulararticle. He mistook this for the ordinary impatience of common men, andrushed forward, his hands filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressingthem upon me. In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but themore cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars werebrought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment. I tried invain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact that I had alreadyhad the cigar. I imitated the action of a citizen smoking, knocking offand throwing away a cigar. The watchful proprietor only thought I wasrehearsing (as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar hewas going to give me. At last I retired baffled: he would not take themoney and leave the cigars alone. So that this restaurant-keeper (inwhose face a love of money shone like the sun at noonday) flatly andfirmly refused to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; andI took that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months. Ihope that on the last day the angels will break the truth very gently tothat unhappy man. 

. .. .. 

This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and themoral of it is this--that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. Theidea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions atall, because it is an abstract idea. And civilisation obviously would benothing without debt. So when hard-headed fellows who study scientificsociology (which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation ismaterial or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves how many ofthe things that make up our Society, the Law, or the Stocks and Shares, or the National Debt, you would be able to convey with your face andyour ten fingers by grinning and gesticulating to a German innkeeper. 

XXV. A Cab Ride Across Country

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

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

But the absurdity of the modern English convention is that it does notlet a man sit still; it only perpetually trips him up when it has forcedhim to walk about. Our Sabbatarianism does not forbid us to ask a manin Battersea to come and talk in Hertfordshire; it only prevents hisgetting there. I can understand that a deity might be worshipped withjoys, with flowers, and fireworks in the old European style. I canunderstand that a deity might be worshipped with sorrows. But I cannotimagine any deity being worshipped with inconveniences. Let the goodMoslem go to Mecca, or let him abide in his tent, according to hisfeelings for religious symbols. But surely Allah cannot see anythingparticularly dignified in his servant being misled by the time-table, finding that the old Mecca express is not running, missing hisconnection at Bagdad, or having to wait three hours in a small sidestation outside Damascus. 

So it was with me on this occasion. I found there was no telegraphservice at all to this place; I found there was only one weak threadof train-service. Now if this had been the authority of real Englishreligion, I should have submitted to it at once. If I believed thatthe telegraph clerk could not send the telegram because he was at thatmoment rigid in an ecstasy of prayer, I should think all telegramsunimportant in comparison. If I could believe that railway porters whenrelieved from their duties rushed with passion to the nearest place ofworship, I should say that all lectures and everything else ought togive way to such a consideration. I should not complain if the nationalfaith forbade me to make any appointments of labour or self-expressionon the Sabbath. But, as it is, it only tells me that I may very probablykeep the Sabbath by not keeping the appointment. 

. .. .. 

But I must resume the real details of my tale. I found that there wasonly one train in the whole of that Sunday by which I could even getwithin several hours or several miles of the time or place. I thereforewent to the telephone, which is one of my favourite toys, and down whichI have shouted many valuable, but prematurely arrested, monologues uponart and morals. I remember a mild shock of surprise when I discoveredthat one could use the telephone on Sunday; I did not expect it to becut off, but I expected it to buzz more than on ordinary days, to theadvancement of our national religion. Through this instrument, in fewerwords than usual, and with a comparative economy of epigram, I ordered ataxi-cab to take me to the railway station. I have not a word to say ingeneral either against telephones or taxi-cabs; they seem to me twoof the purest and most poetic of the creations of modern scientificcivilisation. Unfortunately, when the taxi-cab started, it did exactlywhat modern scientific civilisation has done--it broke down. The resultof this was that when I arrived at King's Cross my only train was gone;there was a Sabbath calm in the station, a calm in the eyes of theporters, and in my breast, if calm at all, if any calm, a calm despair. 

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

. .. .. 

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

It was one of those days which more than once this year broke theretreat of winter; a winter day that began too late to be spring. Wewere already clear of the obstructing crowds and quickening our pacethrough a borderland of market gardens and isolated public-houses, whenthe grey showed golden patches and a good light began to glitter oneverything. The cab went quicker and quicker. The open land whirledwider and wider; but I did not lose my sense of being battled withand thwarted that I had felt in the thronged slums. Rather the feelingincreased, because of the great difficulty of space and time. The fasterwent the car, the fiercer and thicker I felt the fight. 

The whole landscape seemed charging at me--and just missing me. Thetall, shining grass went by like showers of arrows; the very treesseemed like lances hurled at my heart, and shaving it by a hair'sbreadth. Across some vast, smooth valley I saw a beech-tree by thewhite road stand up little and defiant. It grew bigger and bigger withblinding rapidity. It charged me like a tilting knight, seemed to hackat my head, and pass by. Sometimes when we went round a curve of road, the effect was yet more awful. It seemed as if some tree or windmillswung round to smite like a boomerang. The sun by this time was ablazing fact; and I saw that all Nature is chivalrous and militant. Wedo wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek the nobler sortof war; and see all the trees as green banners. 

. .. .. 

I gave my address, arriving just when everybody was deciding to leave. When my cab came reeling into the market-place they decided, withevident disappointment, to remain. Over the lecture I draw a veil. When I came back home I was called to the telephone, and a meek voiceexpressed regret for the failure of the motor-cab, and even saidsomething about any reasonable payment. "Whom can I pay for my ownsuperb experience? What is the usual charge for seeing the cloudsshattered by the sun? What is the market price of a tree blue on thesky-line and then blinding white in the sun? Mention your price for thatwindmill that stood behind the hollyhocks in the garden. Let me pay youfor. .. " Here it was, I think, that we were cut off. 

XXVI. The Two Noises

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

. .. .. 

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

Somewhere at the back, in some pleasure ground or casino or place ofentertainment, an undaunted brass band was playing against the cosmicuproar. I do not know what band it was. Judging from the boisterousBritish Imperialism of most of the airs it played, I should think it wasa German band. But there was no doubt about its energy, and when I camequite close under it it really drowned the storm. It was playing suchthings as "Tommy Atkins" and "You Can Depend on Young Australia, " andmany others of which I do not know the words, but I should think theywould be "John, Pat, and Mac, With the Union Jack, " or that fine thoughunwritten poem, "Wait till the Bull Dog gets a bite of you. " Now, Ifor one detest Imperialism, but I have a great deal of sympathy withJingoism. And there seemed something so touching about this unbroken andinnocent bragging under the brutal menace of Nature that it made, if Imay so put it, two tunes in my mind. It is so obvious and so jolly tobe optimistic about England, especially when you are an optimist--andan Englishman. But through all that glorious brass came the voice of theinvasion, the undertone of that awful sea. I did a foolish thing. As Icould not express my meaning in an article, I tried to express it ina poem--a bad one. You can call it what you like. It might be called"Doubt, " or "Brighton. " It might be called "The Patriot, " or yet again"The German Band. " I would call it "The Two Voices, " but that title hasbeen taken for a grossly inferior poem. This is how it began--

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

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

Then I revived a little, remembering that after all there is an Englishcountry that the Imperialists have never found. The British Empiremay annex what it likes, it will never annex England. It has not evendiscovered the island, let alone conquered it. I took up the two tunesagain with a greater sympathy for the first--

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

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

Then the two great noises grew deafening together, the noise of theperil of England and the louder noise of the placidity of England. Itis their fault if the last verse was written a little rudely and atrandom--

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

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

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

XXVII. Some Policemen and a Moral

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

Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something abouttheir appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what theknife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of favourite cat, and soon. They also said I was damaging the tree; which was, I am sorry tosay, not true, because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophicalimportance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hour'sanimated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinishedpoem, which was read with great care, and, I trust, with some profit, and one or two other subtle detective strokes, the elder of the twoknights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, thatI was a journalist, that I was on the DAILY NEWS (this was the realstroke; they were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants), thatI lived in a particular place as stated, and that I was stoppingwith particular people in Yorkshire, who happened to be wealthy andwell-known in the neighbourhood. 

In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary at lastthat he ended up by representing himself as a reader of my work. Andwhen that was said, everything was settled. They acquitted me and let mepass. 

"But, " I said, "what of this mangled tree? It was to the rescue of thatDryad, tethered to the earth, that you rushed like knight-errants. You, the higher humanitarians, are not deceived by the seeming stillnessof the green things, a stillness like the stillness of the cataract, aheadlong and crashing silence. You know that a tree is but a creaturetied to the ground by one leg. You will not let assassins with theirSwedish daggers shed the green blood of such a being. But if so, why amI not in custody; where are my gyves? Produce, from some portion of yourpersons, my mouldy straw and my grated window. The facts of which I havejust convinced you, that my name is Chesterton, that I am a journalist, that I am living with the well-known and philanthropic Mr. Blank ofIlkley, cannot have anything to do with the question of whether I havebeen guilty of cruelty to vegetables. The tree is none the less damagedeven though it may reflect with a dark pride that it was wounded by agentleman connected with the Liberal press. Wounds in the bark do notmore rapidly close up because they are inflicted by people who arestopping with Mr. Blank of Ilkley. That tree, the ruin of its formerself, the wreck of what was once a giant of the forest, now splinteredand laid low by the brute superiority of a Swedish knife, that tragedy, constable, cannot be wiped out even by stopping for several months morewith some wealthy person. It is incredible that you have no legal claimto arrest even the most august and fashionable persons on this charge. For if so, why did you interfere with me at all?"

I made the later and larger part of this speech to the silent wood, forthe two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came. It isvery possible, of course, that they were fairies. In that case thesomewhat illogical character of their view of crime, law, and personalresponsibility would find a bright and elfish explanation; perhaps if Ihad lingered in the glade till moonrise I might have seen rings of tinypolicemen dancing on the sward; or running about with glow-worm belts, arresting grasshoppers for damaging blades of grass. But taking thebolder hypothesis, that they really were policemen, I find myself ina certain difficulty. I was certainly accused of something which waseither an offence or was not. I was let off because I proved I was aguest at a big house. The inference seems painfully clear; either it isnot a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or elseit is a proof of innocence to know a rich man. Suppose a very poorperson, poorer even than a journalist, a navvy or unskilled labourer, tramping in search of work, often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps, failing in his rent. Suppose he had been intoxicated with the greengaiety of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees andcould give no description of a dwelling-place except that he had beenfired out of the last. As I walked home through a cloudy and purpletwilight I wondered how he would have got on. 

Moral. We English are always boasting that we are very illogical; thereis no great harm in that. There is no subtle spiritual evil in the factthat people always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to bragabout their virtues that they become insufferable. But there is this tobe said, that illogicality in your constitution or your legal methodsmay become very dangerous if there happens to be some great nationalvice or national temptation which many take advantage of the chaos. Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and hours; a temperateman may obey his instincts. 

Take some absurd anomaly in the British law--the fact, for instance, that a man ceasing to be an M. P. Has to become Steward of the ChilternHundreds, an office which I believe was intended originally to keep downsome wild robbers near Chiltern, wherever that is. Obviously this kindof illogicality does not matter very much, for the simple reason thatthere is no great temptation to take advantage of it. Men retiring fromParliament do not have any furious impulse to hunt robbers in the hills. But if there were a real danger that wise, white-haired, venerablepoliticians taking leave of public life would desire to do this (if, for instance, there were any money in it), then clearly, if we went onsaying that the illogicality did not matter, when (as a matter of fact)Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was hanging Chiltern shop-keepers every day andtaking their property, we should be very silly. The illogicality wouldmatter, for it would have become an excuse for indulgence. It is onlythe very good who can live riotous lives. 

Now this is exactly what is present in cases of police investigationsuch as the one narrated above. There enters into such things a greatnational sin, a far greater sin than drink--the habit of respecting agentleman. Snobbishness has, like drink, a kind of grand poetry. Andsnobbishness has this peculiar and devilish quality of evil, that it isrampant among very kindly people, with open hearts and houses. But it isour great English vice; to be watched more fiercely than small-pox. If aman wished to hear the worst and wickedest thing in England summed up incasual English words, he would not find it in any foul oaths or ribaldquarrelling. He would find it in the fact that the best kind of workingman, when he wishes to praise any one, calls him "a gentleman. " It neveroccurs to him that he might as well call him "a marquis, " or "a privycouncillor"--that he is simply naming a rank or class, not a phrasefor a good man. And this perennial temptation to a shameful admiration, must, and, I think, does, constantly come in and distort and poison ourpolice methods. 

In this case we must be logical and exact; for we have to keep watchupon ourselves. The power of wealth, and that power at its vilest, isincreasing in the modern world. A very good and just people, withoutthis temptation, might not need, perhaps, to make clear rules andsystems to guard themselves against the power of our great financiers. But that is because a very just people would have shot them long ago, from mere native good feeling. 

XXVIII. The Lion

In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street. Wetalk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is theman in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with theselamp-posts and pavements; everything from his meals to his martyrdoms. When first an Englishman looks at a French town or village his firstfeeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town or village;when he looks again he sees that this comparative absence of thepicturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain, precipitous frontageof the houses standing up hard and flat out of the street like thecardboard houses in a pantomime--a hard angularity allied perhaps tothe harshness of French logic. When he looks a third time he sees quitesimply that it is all because the houses have no front gardens. Thevague English spirit loves to have the entrance to its house softened bybushes and broken by steps. It likes to have a little anteroom of hedgeshalf in the house and half out of it; a green room in a double sense. The Frenchman desires no such little pathetic ramparts or haltingplaces, for the street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him. 

. .. .. 

The French have no front gardens; but the street is every man's frontgarden. There are trees in the street, and sometimes fountains. Thestreet is the Frenchman's tavern, for he drinks in the street. It is hisdining-room, for he dines in the street. It is his British Museum, forthe statues and monuments in French streets are not, as with us, of theworst, but of the best, art of the country, and they are often actuallyas historical as the Pyramids. The street again is the Frenchman'sParliament, for France has never taken its Chamber of Deputies soseriously as we take our House of Commons, and the quibbles of mereelected nonentities in an official room seem feeble to a people whosefathers have heard the voice of Desmoulins like a trumpet under openheaven, or Victor Hugo shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of thesecond Republic. And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines inthe street so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, sothat the street can never be commonplace to him. 

Take, for instance, such a simple object as a lamp-post. In Londona lamp-post is a comic thing. We think of the intoxicated gentlemanembracing it, and recalling ancient friendship. But in Paris a lamp-postis a tragic thing. For we think of tyrants hanged on it, and of anend of the world. There is, or was, a bitter Republican paper in Pariscalled LA LANTERNE. How funny it would be if there were a Progressivepaper in England called THE LAMP POST! We have said, then, that theFrenchman is the man in the street; that he can dine in the street, anddie in the street. And if I ever pass through Paris and find him goingto bed in the street, I shall say that he is still true to the geniusof his civilisation. All that is good and all that is evil in France isalike connected with this open-air element. French democracy and Frenchindecency are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors. Compared to a café, a public-house is a private house. 

. .. .. 

There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through themind in the streets of this especial town of Belfort. First of all, itlies close upon the boundary of France and Germany, and boundaries arethe most beautiful things in the world. To love anything is to love itsboundaries; thus children will always play on the edge of anything. They build castles on the edge of the sea, and can only be restrained bypublic proclamation and private violence from walking on the edge of thegrass. For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to thebeginning of it. 

Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the verymargin of Germany, and although there were many German touches inthe place--German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatricalbarmaids dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants--yetthe fixed French colour seemed all the stronger for these specksof something else. All day long and all night long troops of dusty, swarthy, scornful little soldiers went plodding through the streets withan air of stubborn disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despisedyou, but French soldiers as if they despised you and themselves evenmore than you. It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nationwhich has made it good at war and science and other things in which whatis necessary is combined with what is nasty. And the soldiers and thecivilians alike had most of them cropped hair, and that curious kind ofhead which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call abullet-head. Indeed, we are speaking very appropriately when we call ita bullet-head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen havebeen bullets--yes, and explosive bullets. 

. .. .. 

But there was a second reason why in this place one should thinkparticularly of the open-air politics and the open-air art of theFrench. For this town of Belfort is famous for one of the most typicaland powerful of the public monuments of France. From the café table atwhich I sit I can see the hill beyond the town on which hangs the highand flat-faced citadel, pierced with many windows, and warmed in theevening light. On the steep hill below it is a huge stone lion, itselfas large as a hill. It is hacked out of the rock with a sort of giganticimpression. No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a commonstatue; no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguishthe monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises, shaking theworld. The face of the lion has something of the bold conventionalityof Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left like a shapeless cloud oftempest, as if it might literally be said of him that God had clothedhis neck with thunder. Even at this distance the thing looks vast, andin some sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago. It commemorates the fact that this town was never taken by the Germansthrough all the terrible year, but only laid down its arms at last atthe command of its own Government. But the spirit of it has been inthis land from the beginning--the spirit of something defiant and almostdefeated. 

As I leave this place and take the railway into Germany the news comesthicker and thicker up the streets that Southern France is in a flame, and that there perhaps will be fought out finally the awful modernbattle of the rich and poor. And as I pass into quieter places for thelast sign of France on the sky-line, I see the Lion of Belfort stand atbay, the last sight of that great people which has never been at peace. 

XXIX. Humanity: an Interlude

Except for some fine works of art, which seem to be there by accident, the City of Brussels is like a bad Paris, a Paris with everything noblecut out, and everything nasty left in. No one can understand Paris andits history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balanceand justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; butit may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of rosesis also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, butquite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, theyare martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality. Forthe indecency of many of their books and papers is not of the sort whichcharms and seduces, but of the sort that horrifies and hurts; they aretorturing themselves. They lash their own patriotism into life with thesame whips which most men use to lash foreigners to silence. The enemiesof France can never give an account of her infamy or decay which doesnot seem insipid and even polite compared with the things which theNationalists of France say about their own nation. They taunt andtorment themselves; sometimes they even deliberately oppress themselves. Thus, when the mob of Paris could make a Government to please itself, itmade a sort of sublime tyranny to order itself about. The spirit is thesame from the Crusades or St. Bartholomew to the apotheosis of Zola. The old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth. The newrealists torture men morally for a physical truth. 

Now Brussels is Paris without this constant purification of pain. Itsindecencies are not regrettable incidents in an everlasting revolution. It has none of the things which make good Frenchmen love Paris; it hasonly the things which make unspeakable Englishmen love it. It hasthe part which is cosmopolitan--and narrows; not the part which isParisian--and universal. You can find there (as commonly happens inmodern centres) the worst things of all nations--the DAILY MAIL fromEngland, the cheap philosophies from Germany, the loose novels ofFrance, and the drinks of America. But there is no English broad fun, no German kindly ceremony, no American exhilaration, and, above all, noFrench tradition of fighting for an idea. Though all the boulevards looklike Parisian boulevards, though all the shops look like Parisian shops, you cannot look at them steadily for two minutes without feeling thefull distance between, let us say, King Leopold and fighters likeClemenceau and Deroulède. 

. .. .. 

For all these reasons, and many more, when I had got into Brussels Ibegan to make all necessary arrangements for getting out of it again;and I had impulsively got into a tram which seemed to be going out ofthe city. In this tram there were two men talking; one was a littleman with a black French beard; the other was a baldish man with bushywhiskers, like the financial foreign count in a three-act farce. Andabout the time that we reached the suburb of the city, and the trafficgrew thinner, and the noises more few, I began to hear what they weresaying. Though they spoke French quickly, their words were fairly easyto follow, because they were all long words. Anybody can understand longwords because they have in them all the lucidity of Latin. 

The man with the black beard said: "It must that we have the Progress. "

The man with the whiskers parried this smartly by saying: "It must alsothat we have the Consolidation International. "

This is a sort of discussion which I like myself, so I listened withsome care, and I think I picked up the thread of it. One of the Belgianswas a Little Belgian, as we speak of a Little Englander. The other was aBelgian Imperialist, for though Belgium is not quite strong enough to bealtogether a nation, she is quite strong enough to be an empire. Beinga nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire onlymeans kicking your inferiors. The man with whiskers was the Imperialist, and he was saying: "The science, behold there the new guide ofhumanity. "

And the man with the beard answered him: "It does not suffice to haveprogress in the science; one must have it also in the sentiment of thehuman justice. "

This remark I applauded, as if at a public meeting, but they were muchtoo keen on their argument to hear me. The views I have often heardin England, but never uttered so lucidly, and certainly never so fast. Though Belgian by nation they must both have been essentially French. Whiskers was great on education, which, it seems, is on the march. All the world goes to make itself instructed. It must that the moreinstructed enlighten the less instructed. Eh, well then, the Europeanmust impose upon the savage the science and the light. Also (apparently)he must impose himself on the savage while he is about it. To-day onetravelled quickly. The science had changed all. For our fathers, they were religious, and (what was worse) dead. To-day humanity hadelectricity to the hand; the machines came from triumphing; all thelines and limits of the globe effaced themselves. Soon there would notbe but the great Empires and confederations, guided by the science, always the science. 

Here Whiskers stopped an instant for breath; and the man with thesentiment for human justice had "la parole" off him in a flash. Withoutdoubt Humanity was on the march, but towards the sentiments, theideal, the methods moral and pacific. Humanity directed itself towardsHumanity. For your wars and empires on behalf of civilisation, what werethey in effect? The war, was it not itself an affair of the barbarism?The Empires were they not things savage? The Humanity had passed allthat; she was now intellectual. Tolstoy had refined all human souls withthe sentiments the most delicate and just. Man was become a spirit; thewings pushed. .. . 

. .. .. 

At this important point of evolution the tram came to a jerky stoppage;and staring around I found, to my stunned consternation, that it wasalmost dark, that I was far away from Brussels, that I could notdream of getting back to dinner; in short, that through the clingingfascination of this great controversy on Humanity and its recentcomplete alteration by science or Tolstoy, I had landed myself Heavenknows where. I dropped hastily from the suburban tram and let it go onwithout me. 

I was alone in the flat fields out of sight of the city. On one sideof the road was one of those small, thin woods which are common in allcountries, but of which, by a coincidence, the mystical painters ofFlanders were very fond. The night was closing in with cloudy purpleand grey; there was one ribbon of silver, the last rag of the sunset. Through the wood went one little path, and somehow it suggested that itmight lead to some sign of life--there was no other sign of life on thehorizon. I went along it, and soon sank into a sort of dancing twilightof all those tiny trees. There is something subtle and bewildering aboutthat sort of frail and fantastic wood. A forest of big trees seemslike a bodily barrier; but somehow that mist of thin lines seems like aspiritual barrier. It is as if one were caught in a fairy cloud or couldnot pass a phantom. When I had well lost the last gleam of the highroad a curious and definite feeling came upon me. Now I suddenlyfelt something much more practical and extraordinary--the absence ofhumanity: inhuman loneliness. Of course, there was nothing really lostin my state; but the mood may hit one anywhere. I wanted men--any men;and I felt our awful alliance over all the globe. And at last, when Ihad walked for what seemed a long time, I saw a light too near the earthto mean anything except the image of God. 

I came out on a clear space and a low, long cottage, the door of whichwas open, but was blocked by a big grey horse, who seemed to prefer toeat with his head inside the sitting-room. I got past him, and foundhe was being fed by a young man who was sitting down and drinking beerinside, and who saluted me with heavy rustic courtesy, but in a strangetongue. The room was full of staring faces like owls, and these I tracedat length as belonging to about six small children. Their father wasstill working in the fields, but their mother rose when I entered. Shesmiled, but she and all the rest spoke some rude language, Flamand, Isuppose; so that we had to be kind to each other by signs. She fetchedme beer, and pointed out my way with her finger; and I drew a pictureto please the children; and as it was a picture of two men hitting eachother with swords, it pleased them very much. Then I gave a Belgianpenny to each child, for as I said on chance in French, "It must be thatwe have the economic equality. " But they had never heard of economicequality, while all Battersea workmen have heard of economic equality, though it is true that they haven't got it. 

I found my way back to the city, and some time afterwards I actuallysaw in the street my two men talking, no doubt still saying, one thatScience had changed all in Humanity, and the other that Humanity was nowpushing the wings of the purely intellectual. But for me Humanity washooked on to an accidental picture. I thought of a low and lonely housein the flats, behind a veil or film of slight trees, a man breaking theground as men have broken from the first morning, and a huge grey horsechamping his food within a foot of a child's head, as in the stablewhere Christ was born. 

XXX. The Little Birds Who Won't Sing

On my last morning on the Flemish coast, when I knew that in a few hoursI should be in England, my eye fell upon one of the details of Gothiccarving of which Flanders is full. I do not know whether the thing isold, though it was certainly knocked about and indecipherable, but atleast it was certainly in the style and tradition of the early MiddleAges. It seemed to represent men bending themselves (not to say twistingthemselves) to certain primary employments. Some seemed to besailors tugging at ropes; others, I think, were reaping; others wereenergetically pouring something into something else. This is entirelycharacteristic of the pictures and carvings of the early thirteenthcentury, perhaps the most purely vigorous time in all history. The greatGreeks preferred to carve their gods and heroes doing nothing. Splendidand philosophic as their composure is there is always about it somethingthat marks the master of many slaves. But if there was one thingthe early mediaevals liked it was representing people doingsomething--hunting or hawking, or rowing boats, or treading grapes, ormaking shoes, or cooking something in a pot. "Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira voluptas. " (I quote from memory. ) The Middle Agesis full of that spirit in all its monuments and manuscripts. Chaucerretains it in his jolly insistence on everybody's type of trade andtoil. It was the earliest and youngest resurrection of Europe, the timewhen social order was strengthening, but had not yet become oppressive;the time when religious faiths were strong, but had not yet beenexasperated. For this reason the whole effect of Greek and Gothiccarving is different. The figures in the Elgin marbles, though oftenreining their steeds for an instant in the air, seem frozen for ever atthat perfect instant. But a mass of mediaeval carving seems actuallya sort of bustle or hubbub in stone. Sometimes one cannot help feelingthat the groups actually move and mix, and the whole front of a greatcathedral has the hum of a huge hive. 

. .. .. 

But about these particular figures there was a peculiarity of which Icould not be sure. Those of them that had any heads had very curiousheads, and it seemed to me that they had their mouths open. Whether orno this really meant anything or was an accident of nascent art I do notknow; but in the course of wondering I recalled to my mind the fact thatsinging was connected with many of the tasks there suggested, that therewere songs for reapers and songs for sailors hauling ropes. I wasstill thinking about this small problem when I walked along the pierat Ostend; and I heard some sailors uttering a measured shout as theylaboured, and I remembered that sailors still sing in chorus while theywork, and even sing different songs according to what part of their workthey are doing. And a little while afterwards, when my sea journey wasover, the sight of men working in the English fields reminded meagain that there are still songs for harvest and for many agriculturalroutines. And I suddenly wondered why if this were so it should be quiteunknown, for any modern trade to have a ritual poetry. How did peoplecome to chant rude poems while pulling certain ropes or gatheringcertain fruit, and why did nobody do anything of the kind whileproducing any of the modern things? Why is a modern newspaper neverprinted by people singing in chorus? Why do shopmen seldom, if ever, sing?

. .. .. 

If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing whileauditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all theseparate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songsfor all the separate things that have to be done in a bank? As the trainfrom Dover flew through the Kentish gardens, I tried to write a fewsongs suitable for commercial gentlemen. Thus, the work of bank clerkswhen casting up columns might begin with a thundering chorus in praiseof Simple Addition. 

"Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er. Hear theStars of Morning shouting: 'Two and Two are four. ' Though the creeds andrealms are reeling, though the sophists roar, Though we weep and pawnour watches, Two and Two are Four. "

"There's a run upon the Bank--Stand away! For the Manager's a crank andthe Secretary drank, and the

 Upper Tooting Bank Turns to bay! Stand close: there is a run On the Bank. Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run, That she fired with every gun Ere she sank. "

. .. .. 

And as I came into the cloud of London I met a friend of mine whoactually is in a bank, and submitted these suggestions in rhyme to himfor use among his colleagues. But he was not very hopeful about thematter. It was not (he assured me) that he underrated the verses, or inany sense lamented their lack of polish. No; it was rather, he felt, anindefinable something in the very atmosphere of the society in which welive that makes it spiritually difficult to sing in banks. And I thinkhe must be right; though the matter is very mysterious. I may observehere that I think there must be some mistake in the calculations of theSocialists. They put down all our distress, not to a moral tone, butto the chaos of private enterprise. Now, banks are private; butpost-offices are Socialistic: therefore I naturally expected that thepost-office would fall into the collectivist idea of a chorus. Judge ofmy surprise when the lady in my local post-office (whom I urged to sing)dismissed the idea with far more coldness than the bank clerk had done. She seemed indeed, to be in a considerably greater state of depressionthan he. Should any one suppose that this was the effect of the versesthemselves, it is only fair to say that the specimen verse of thePost-Office Hymn ran thus:

 "O'er London our letters are shaken like snow, Our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go. The news that may marry a maiden in Sark, Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park. "

Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):

 "Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park. "

And the more I thought about the matter the more painfully certain itseemed that the most important and typical modern things could not bedone with a chorus. One could not, for instance, be a great financierand sing; because the essence of being a great financier is that youkeep quiet. You could not even in many modern circles be a public manand sing; because in those circles the essence of being a public man isthat you do nearly everything in private. Nobody would imagine a chorusof money-lenders. Every one knows the story of the solicitors' corps ofvolunteers who, when the Colonel on the battlefield cried "Charge!" allsaid simultaneously, "Six-and-eightpence. " Men can sing while chargingin a military, but hardly in a legal sense. And at the end of myreflections I had really got no further than the sub-conscious feelingof my friend the bank-clerk--that there is something spirituallysuffocating about our life; not about our laws merely, but about ourlife. Bank-clerks are without songs, not because they are poor, butbecause they are sad. Sailors are much poorer. As I passed homewards Ipassed a little tin building of some religious sort, which was shakenwith shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own tongue. THEY weresinging anyhow; and I had for an instant a fancy I had often had before:that with us the super-human is the only place where you can find thehuman. Human nature is hunted and has fled into sanctuary. 

XXXI. The Riddle of the Ivy

More than a month ago, when I was leaving London for a holiday, afriend walked into my flat in Battersea and found me surrounded withhalf-packed luggage. 

"You seem to be off on your travels, " he said. "Where are you going?"

With a strap between my teeth I replied, "To Battersea. "

"The wit of your remark, " he said, "wholly escapes me. "

"I am going to Battersea, " I repeated, "to Battersea viâ Paris, Belfort, Heidelberg, and Frankfort. My remark contained no wit. It containedsimply the truth. I am going to wander over the whole world until oncemore I find Battersea. Somewhere in the seas of sunset or of sunrise, somewhere in the ultimate archipelago of the earth, there is one littleisland which I wish to find: an island with low green hills and greatwhite cliffs. Travellers tell me that it is called England (Scotchtravellers tell me that it is called Britain), and there is a rumourthat somewhere in the heart of it there is a beautiful place calledBattersea. "

"I suppose it is unnecessary to tell you, " said my friend, with an airof intellectual comparison, "that this is Battersea?"

"It is quite unnecessary, " I said, "and it is spiritually untrue. Icannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. Icannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleepand custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them isto go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the realpleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to seeFrance? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany?I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I amseeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot onforeign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as aforeign land. Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact andheavy, and that if you utter that word 'paradox' I shall hurl it at yourhead. I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical. It isnot my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go to England is togo away from it. "

But when, after only a month's travelling, I did come back to England, Iwas startled to find that I had told the exact truth. England did breakon me at once beautifully new and beautifully old. To land at Dover isthe right way to approach England (most things that are hackneyed areright), for then you see first the full, soft gardens of Kent, whichare, perhaps, an exaggeration, but still a typical exaggeration, of therich rusticity of England. As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller withwhom I had fallen into conversation felt the same freshness, though foranother cause. She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and hadnever yet seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm in thatsimple and splendid way which is natural to Americans, who are the mostidealistic people in the whole world. Their only danger is that theidealist can easily become the idolator. And the American has becomeso idealistic that he even idealises money. But (to quote a very ablewriter of American short stories) that is another story. 

"I have never been in England before, " said the American lady, "yetit is so pretty that I feel as if I have been away from it for a longtime. "

"So you have, " I said; "you have been away for three hundred years. "

"What a lot of ivy you have, " she said. "It covers the churches andit buries the houses. We have ivy; but I have never seen it grow likethat. "

"I am interested to hear it, " I replied, "for I am making a little listof all the things that are really better in England. Even a month onthe Continent, combined with intelligence, will teach you that there aremany things that are better abroad. All the things that the DAILY MAILcalls English are better abroad. But there are things entirely Englishand entirely good. Kippers, for instance, and Free Trade, and frontgardens, and individual liberty, and the Elizabethan drama, and hansomcabs, and cricket, and Mr. Will Crooks. Above all, there is the happyand holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine thatShakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or aGerman. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light burstsupon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of Mrs. Gallup andthe Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the matter of a capitalletter. I withdraw my objections; I accept everything; bacon did writeShakespeare. "

"I cannot look at anything but the ivy, " she said, "it looks socomfortable. "

While she looked at the ivy I opened for the first time for many weeksan English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Balfour in whichhe said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved because itrepresented something in the nature of permanent public opinion ofEngland, above the ebb and flow of the parties. Now Mr. Balfour is aperfectly sincere patriot, a man who, from his own point of view, thinkslong and seriously about the public needs, and he is, moreover, a manof entirely exceptionable intellectual power. But alas, in spite ofall this, when I had read that speech I thought with a heavy heart thatthere was one more thing that I had to add to the list of the speciallyEnglish things, such as kippers and cricket; I had to add the speciallyEnglish kind of humbug. In France things are attacked and defended forwhat they are. The Catholic Church is attacked because it is Catholic, and defended because it is Catholic. The Republic is defended becauseit is Republican, and attacked because it is Republican. But here is theablest of English politicians consoling everybody by telling them thatthe House of Lords is not really the House of Lords, but something quitedifferent, that the foolish accidental peers whom he meets every nightare in some mysterious way experts upon the psychology of the democracy;that if you want to know what the very poor want you must ask the veryrich, and that if you want the truth about Hoxton, you must ask for itat Hatfield. If the Conservative defender of the House of Lords werea logical French politician he would simply be a liar. But being anEnglish politician he is simply a poet. The English love of believingthat all is as it should be, the English optimism combined with thestrong English imagination, is too much even for the obvious facts. In acold, scientific sense, of course, Mr. Balfour knows that nearly all theLords who are not Lords by accident are Lords by bribery. He knows, and(as Mr. Belloc excellently said) everybody in Parliament knows the verynames of the peers who have purchased their peerages. But the glamourof comfort, the pleasure of reassuring himself and reassuring others, istoo strong for this original knowledge; at last it fades from him, and he sincerely and earnestly calls on Englishmen to join with him inadmiring an august and public-spirited Senate, having wholly forgottenthat the Senate really consists of idiots whom he has himself despised;and adventurers whom he has himself ennobled. 

"Your ivy is so beautifully soft and thick, " said the American lady, "itseems to cover almost everything. It must be the most poetical thing inEngland. "

"It is very beautiful, " I said, "and, as you say, it is very English. Charles Dickens, who was almost more English than England, wrote one ofhis rare poems about the beauty of ivy. Yes, by all means let us admirethe ivy, so deep, so warm, so full of a genial gloom and a grotesquetenderness. Let us admire the ivy; and let us pray to God in His mercythat it may not kill the tree. "

XXXII. The Travellers in State

The other day, to my great astonishment, I caught a train; it was atrain going into the Eastern Counties, and I only just caught it. Andwhile I was running along the train (amid general admiration) I noticedthat there were a quite peculiar and unusual number of carriages marked"Engaged. " On five, six, seven, eight, nine carriages was pasted thelittle notice: at five, six, seven, eight, nine windows were big blandmen staring out in the conscious pride of possession. Their bodiesseemed more than usually impenetrable, their faces more than usualplacid. It could not be the Derby, if only for the minor reasons thatit was the opposite direction and the wrong day. It could hardly bethe King. It could hardly be the French President. For, though thesedistinguished persons naturally like to be private for three hours, theyare at least public for three minutes. A crowd can gather to seethem step into the train; and there was no crowd here, or any policeceremonial. 

Who were those awful persons, who occupied more of the train than abricklayer's beanfeast, and yet were more fastidious and delicate thanthe King's own suite? Who were these that were larger than a mob, yetmore mysterious than a monarch? Was it possible that instead of ourRoyal House visiting the Tsar, he was really visiting us? Or does theHouse of Lords have a breakfast? I waited and wondered until the trainslowed down at some station in the direction of Cambridge. Thenthe large, impenetrable men got out, and after them got out thedistinguished holders of the engaged seats. They were all dresseddecorously in one colour; they had neatly cropped hair; and they werechained together. 

I looked across the carriage at its only other occupant, and our eyesmet. He was a small, tired-looking man, and, as I afterwards learnt, anative of Cambridge; by the look of him, some working tradesman there, such as a journeyman tailor or a small clock-mender. In order to makeconversation I said I wondered where the convicts were going. His mouthtwitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said: "I don'ts'pose they're goin' on an 'oliday at the seaside with little spadesand pails. " I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein ofliterary invention, I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down toCambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge, andhad seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then when wehad ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak, grey eyes of the little man grew sadder and emptier than an open sea. Iknew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same, because allmodern sophists are only sophists, and there is such a thing as mankind. Then at last (and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tuneone is trying to remember) he said: "Well, I s'pose we 'ave to do it. "And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and hissecond speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of theEnglish democracy, its profound sense of humour, its profound sense ofpathos, and its profound sense of helplessness. 

. .. .. 

It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out. For everypractical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of atea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party itis equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, ifpossible without bodily violence. Now people talk of democracy asbeing coarse and turbulent: it is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse and turbulent: for itmeans appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy means appealingto the different people. Democracy means getting those people to votewho would never have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christianethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who havenot the cheek to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in myfriend in the train. The only two types we hear of in this argumentabout crime and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types. 

We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were noproblem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything: as ifone need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief inbodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. Forif comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to bevirtuous--which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker andmore watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist whosays, with a sort of splutter, "Flog the brutes!" or who tells youwith innocent obscenity "what he would do" with a certain man--alwayssupposing the man's hands were tied. 

This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak andunbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarianand the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meetanyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like thisman that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectuallydoubtful. So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could be"done" to criminals, he feels bitterly how much better it would be ifnothing need be done. But something must be done. "I s'pose we 'ave todo it. " In short, he is simply a sane man, and of a sane man there isonly one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heartand comedy in his head. 

. .. .. 

Now the real difficulty of discussing decently this problem of theproper treatment of criminals is that both parties discuss the matterwithout any direct human feeling. The denouncers of wrong are as cold asthe organisers of wrong. Humanitarianism is as hard as inhumanity. 

Let me take one practical instance. I think the flogging arranged in ourmodern prisons is a filthy torture; all its scientific paraphernalia, the photographing, the medical attendance, prove that it goes to thelast foul limit of the boot and rack. The cat is simply the rack withoutany of its intellectual reasons. Holding this view strongly, I open theordinary humanitarian books or papers and I find a phrase like this, "The lash is a relic of barbarism. " So is the plough. So is the fishingnet. So is the horn or the staff or the fire lit in winter. What aninexpressibly feeble phrase for anything one wants to attack--a relic ofbarbarism! It is as if a man walked naked down the street to-morrow, andwe said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion. There isnothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism. Man is arelic of barbarism. Civilisation is a relic of barbarism. 

But torture is not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it issimply a relic of sin; but in comparative history it may well be calleda relic of civilisation. It has always been most artistic and elaboratewhen everything else was most artistic and elaborate. Thus it wasdetailed exquisite in the late Roman Empire, in the complex and gorgeoussixteenth century, in the centralised French monarchy a hundred yearsbefore the Revolution, and in the great Chinese civilisation to thisday. This is, first and last, the frightful thing we must remember. In so far as we grow instructed and refined we are not (in any sensewhatever) naturally moving away from torture. We may be moving towardstorture. We must know what we are doing, if we are to avoid the enormoussecret cruelty which has crowned every historic civilisation. 

The train moves more swiftly through the sunny English fields. They havetaken the prisoners away, and I do not know what they have done withthem. 

XXXIII. The Prehistoric Railway Station

A railway station is an admirable place, although Ruskin did not thinkso; he did not think so because he himself was even more modern than therailway station. He did not think so because he was himself feverish, irritable, and snorting like an engine. He could not value the ancientsilence of the railway station. 

"In a railway station, " he said, "you are in a hurry, and therefore, miserable"; but you need not be either unless you are as modern asRuskin. The true philosopher does not think of coming just in time forhis train except as a bet or a joke. 

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to be latefor the one before. Do this, and you will find in a railway stationmuch of the quietude and consolation of a cathedral. It has many of thecharacteristics of a great ecclesiastical building; it has vast arches, void spaces, coloured lights, and, above all, it has recurrence orritual. It is dedicated to the celebration of water and fire the twoprime elements of all human ceremonial. Lastly, a station resembles theold religions rather than the new religions in this point, that peoplego there. In connection with this it should also be remembered that allpopular places, all sites, actually used by the people, tend to retainthe best routine of antiquity very much more than any localities ormachines used by any privileged class. Things are not altered so quicklyor completely by common people as they are by fashionable people. Ruskincould have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the UndergroundRailway than in the grand hotels outside the stations. The great palacesof pleasure which the rich build in London all have brazen and vulgarnames. Their names are either snobbish, like the Hotel Cecil, or(worse still) cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole. But when I go in athird-class carriage from the nearest circle station to Battersea to thenearest circle station to the DAILY NEWS, the names of the stations areone long litany of solemn and saintly memories. Leaving Victoria I cometo a park belonging especially to St. James the Apostle; thence I go toWestminster Bridge, whose very name alludes to the awful Abbey; CharingCross holds up the symbol of Christendom; the next station is called aTemple; and Blackfriars remembers the mediaeval dream of a Brotherhood. 

If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million feet of thecrowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear down old things by sheerwalking. But the educated kick them down out of sheer culture. 

I feel all this profoundly as I wander about the empty railway station, where I have no business of any kind. I have extracted a vast number ofchocolates from automatic machines; I have obtained cigarettes, toffee, scent, and other things that I dislike by the same machinery; I haveweighed myself, with sublime results; and this sense, not only of thehealthiness of popular things, but of their essential antiquity andpermanence, is still in possession of my mind. I wander up to thebookstall, and my faith survives even the wild spectacle of modernliterature and journalism. Even in the crudest and most clamorousaspects of the newspaper world I still prefer the popular to the proudand fastidious. If I had to choose between taking in the DAILY MAIL andtaking in the TIMES (the dilemma reminds one of a nightmare), I shouldcertainly cry out with the whole of my being for the DAILY MAIL. Evenmere bigness preached in a frivolous way is not so irritating as meremeanness preached in a big and solemn way. People buy the DAILY MAIL, but they do not believe in it. They do believe in the TIMES, and(apparently) they do not buy it. But the more the output of paper uponthe modern world is actually studied, the more it will be found to bein all its essentials ancient and human, like the name of Charing Cross. Linger for two or three hours at a station bookstall (as I am doing), and you will find that it gradually takes on the grandeur and historicallusiveness of the Vatican or Bodleian Library. The novelty is allsuperficial; the tradition is all interior and profound. The DAILY MAILhas new editions, but never a new idea. Everything in a newspaper thatis not the old human love of altar or fatherland is the old human loveof gossip. Modern writers have often made game of the old chroniclesbecause they chiefly record accidents and prodigies; a church struckby lightning, or a calf with six legs. They do not seem to realise thatthis old barbaric history is the same as new democratic journalism. Itis not that the savage chronicle has disappeared. It is merely that thesavage chronicle now appears every morning. 

As I moved thus mildly and vaguely in front of the bookstall, my eyecaught a sudden and scarlet title that for the moment staggered me. Onthe outside of a book I saw written in large letters, "Get On or GetOut. " The title of the book recalled to me with a sudden revolt andreaction all that does seem unquestionably new and nasty; it remindedme that there was in the world of to-day that utterly idiotic thing, a worship of success; a thing that only means surpassing anybody inanything; a thing that may mean being the most successful personin running away from a battle; a thing that may mean being the mostsuccessfully sleepy of the whole row of sleeping men. When I saw thosewords the silence and sanctity of the railway station were for themoment shadowed. Here, I thought, there is at any rate somethinganarchic and violent and vile. This title, at any rate, means the mostdisgusting individualism of this individualistic world. In the fury ofmy bitterness and passion I actually bought the book, thereby ensuringthat my enemy would get some of my money. I opened it prepared to findsome brutality, some blasphemy, which would really be an exception tothe general silence and sanctity of the railway station. I was preparedto find something in the book that was as infamous as its title. 

I was disappointed. There was nothing at all corresponding to thefurious decisiveness of the remarks on the cover. After reading itcarefully I could not discover whether I was really to get on or toget out; but I had a vague feeling that I should prefer to get out. A considerable part of the book, particularly towards the end, wasconcerned with a detailed description of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Undoubtedly Napoleon got on. He also got out. But I could not discoverin any way how the details of his life given here were supposed to helpa person aiming at success. One anecdote described how Napoleon alwayswiped his pen on his knee-breeches. I suppose the moral is: always wipeyour pen on your knee-breeches, and you will win the battle of Wagram. Another story told that he let loose a gazelle among the ladies of hisCourt. Clearly the brutal practical inference is--loose a gazelle amongthe ladies of your acquaintance, and you will be Emperor of the French. Get on with a gazelle or get out. The book entirely reconciled me tothe soft twilight of the station. Then I suddenly saw that there was asymbolic division which might be paralleled from biology. Brave men arevertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughnessin the middle. But these modern cowards are all crustaceans; theirhardness is all on the cover and their softness is inside. But thesoftness is there; everything in this twilight temple is soft. 

XXXIV. The Diabolist

Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element oftruth. Things that really happened have been mentioned, such as meetingPresident Kruger or being thrown out of a cab. What I have now to relatereally happened; yet there was no element in it of practical politics orof personal danger. It was simply a quiet conversation which I had withanother man. But that quiet conversation was by far the most terriblething that has ever happened to me in my life. It happened so long agothat I cannot be certain of the exact words of the dialogue, only of itsmain questions and answers; but there is one sentence in it for which Ican answer absolutely and word for word. It was a sentence so awful thatI could not forget it if I would. It was the last sentence spoken; andit was not spoken to me. 

The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school. An artschool is different from almost all other schools or colleges in thisrespect: that, being of new and crude creation and of lax discipline, it presents a specially strong contrast between the industrious and theidle. People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work ordo no work at all. I belonged, along with other charming people, to thelatter class; and this threw me often into the society of men who werevery different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very differentfrom mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied; I wasengaged about that time in discovering, to my own extreme and lastingastonishment, that I was not an atheist. But there were others also atloose ends who were engaged in discovering what Carlyle called (I thinkwith needless delicacy) the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth. 

I value that time, in short, because it made me acquainted with a goodrepresentative number of blackguards. In this connection there are twovery curious things which the critic of human life may observe. Thefirst is the fact that there is one real difference between men andwomen; that women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk inthrees. The second is that when you find (as you often do) three youngcads and idiots going about together and getting drunk together everyday you generally find that one of the three cads and idiots is (forsome extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot. In these smallgroups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is almost always oneman who seems to have condescended to his company; one man who, while hecan talk a foul triviality with his fellows, can also talk politics witha Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic. 

It was just such a man whom I came to know well. It was strange, perhaps, that he liked his dirty, drunken society; it was strangerstill, perhaps, that he liked my society. For hours of the day he wouldtalk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture; for hours of the nighthe would go where I have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. Hewas a man with a long, ironical face, and close and red hair; he wasby class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for somereason, to walk like a groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sortof Super-jockey; as if some archangel had gone on the Turf. And I shallnever forget the half-hour in which he and I argued about real thingsfor the first and the last time. 

. .. .. 

Along the front of the big building of which our school was a part rana huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think, than those that lead up toSt. Paul's Cathedral. On a black wintry evening he and I were wanderingon these cold heights, which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under thestars. The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning andblowing fire; for some gardener (I suppose) was burning something in thegrounds, and from time to time the red sparks went whirling past us likea swarm of scarlet insects in the dark. Above us also it was gloom;but if one stared long enough at that upper darkness, one saw verticalstripes of grey in the black and then became conscious of the colossalfaçade of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as ifHeaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism. 

. .. .. 

The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said it, I really had not known that I was; but the moment he had said it I knewit to be literally true. And the process had been so long and full thatI answered him at once out of existing stores of explanation. 

"I am becoming orthodox, " I said, "because I have come, rightly orwrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old beliefthat heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing thana crime, for an error begets crimes. An Imperialist is worse than apirate. For an Imperialist keeps a school for pirates; he teaches piracydisinterestedly and without an adequate salary. A Free Lover is worsethan a profligate. For a profligate is serious and reckless even in hisshortest love; while a Free Lover is cautious and irresponsible even inhis longest devotion. I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous. "

"You mean dangerous to morality, " he said in a voice of wonderfulgentleness. "I expect you are right. But why do you care aboutmorality?"

I glanced at his face quickly. He had thrust out his neck as he had atrick of doing; and so brought his face abruptly into the light of thebonfire from below, like a face in the footlights. His long chin andhigh cheek-bones were lit up infernally from underneath; so thathe looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit. I had anunmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness; and even as I paused aburst of red sparks broke past. 

"Aren't those sparks splendid?" I said. 

"Yes, " he replied. 

"That is all that I ask you to admit, " said I. "Give me those few redspecks and I will deduce Christian morality. Once I thought like you, that one's pleasure in a flying spark was a thing that could come andgo with that spark. Once I thought that the delight was as free as thefire. Once I thought that red star we see was alone in space. But nowI know that the red star is only on the apex of an invisible pyramid ofvirtues. That red fire is only the flower on a stalk of living habits, which you cannot see. Only because your mother made you say 'Thank you'for a bun are you now able to thank Nature or chaos for those red starsof an instant or for the white stars of all time. Only because you werehumble before fireworks on the fifth of November do you now enjoy anyfireworks that you chance to see. You only like them being red becauseyou were told about the blood of the martyrs; you only like thembeing bright because brightness is a glory. That flame flowered out ofvirtues, and it will fade with virtues. Seduce a woman, and that sparkwill be less bright. Shed blood, and that spark will be less red. Bereally bad, and they will be to you like the spots on a wall-paper. "

He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair ofhis soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religionproduced humility or humility a simple joy: but he admitted both. Heonly said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted thatfor every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out: will not theexpanding pleasure of ruin. .. "

"Do you see that fire?" I asked. "If we had a real fighting democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are. "

"Perhaps, " he said, in his tired, fair way. "Only what you call evil Icall good. "

He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the stepsswept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in thelow, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, butthe words were inaudible. I stopped, startled: then I heard the voice ofone of the vilest of his associates saying, "Nobody can possibly know. "And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in everysyllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diabolist say, "I tell you Ihave done everything else. If I do that I shan't know the differencebetween right and wrong. " I rushed out without daring to pause; and asI passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious loveof God. 

I have since heard that he died: it may be said, I think, that hecommitted suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure, not withtools of pain. God help him, I know the road he went; but I have neverknown, or even dared to think, what was that place at which he stoppedand refrained. 

XXXV. A Glimpse of My Country

Whatever is it that we are all looking for? I fancy that it is reallyquite close. When I was a boy I had a fancy that Heaven or Fairyland orwhatever I called it, was immediately behind my own back, and that thiswas why I could never manage to see it, however often I twisted andturned to take it by surprise. I had a notion of a man perpetuallyspinning round on one foot like a teetotum in the effort to find thatworld behind his back which continually fled from him. Perhaps this iswhy the world goes round. Perhaps the world is always trying to lookover its shoulder and catch up the world which always escapes it, yetwithout which it cannot be itself. 

In any case, as I have said, I think that we must always conceive ofthat which is the goal of all our endeavours as something which is insome strange way near. Science boasts of the distance of its stars;of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almostmenacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Alwaysthe Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand"; and Looking-glass Land is onlythrough the looking-glass. So I for one should never be astonished ifthe next twist of a street led me to the heart of that maze in which allthe mystics are lost. I should not be at all surprised if I turned onecorner in Fleet Street and saw a yet queerer-looking lamp; I should notbe surprised if I turned a third corner and found myself in Elfland. 

I should not be surprised at this; but I was surprised the other day atsomething more surprising. I took a turn out of Fleet Street and foundmyself in England. 

. .. .. 

The singular shock experienced perhaps requires explanation. In thedarkest or the most inadequate moments of England there is one thingthat should always be remembered about the very nature of our country. It may be shortly stated by saying that England is not such a fool asit looks. The types of England, the externals of England, alwaysmisrepresent the country. England is an oligarchical country, and itprefers that its oligarchy should be inferior to itself. 

The speaking in the House of Commons, for instance, is not only worsethan the speaking was, it is worse than the speaking is, in all oralmost all other places in small debating clubs or casual dinners. Ourcountrymen probably prefer this solemn futility in the higher places ofthe national life. It may be a strange sight to see the blind leadingthe blind; but England provides a stranger. England shows us the blindleading the people who can see. And this again is an under-statementof the case. For the English political aristocrats not only speak worsethan many other people; they speak worse than themselves. The ignoranceof statesmen is like the ignorance of judges, an artificial and affectedthing. If you have the good fortune really to talk with a statesman, youwill be constantly startled with his saying quite intelligent things. Itmakes one nervous at first. And I have never been sufficiently intimatewith such a man to ask him why it was a rule of his life in Parliamentto appear sillier than he was. 

It is the same with the voters. The average man votes below himself; hevotes with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one. A man ought tovote with the whole of himself as he worships or gets married. A manought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye forfaces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with hishands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour ofit should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, theyshould be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is, the difficulty with English democracy at all elections is that it issomething less than itself. The question is not so much whether only aminority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority ofthe voter votes. 

. .. .. 

This is the tragedy of England; you cannot judge it by its foremost men. Its types do not typify. And on the occasion of which I speak I foundthis to be so especially of that old intelligent middle class which Ihad imagined had almost vanished from the world. It seemed to me thatall the main representatives of the middle class had gone off in onedirection or in the other; they had either set out in pursuit of theSmart Set or they had set out in pursuit of the Simple Life. I cannotsay which I dislike more myself; the people in question are welcome tohave either of them, or, as is more likely, to have both, in hideousalternations of disease and cure. But all the prominent men who plainlyrepresent the middle class have adopted either the single eye-glass ofMr Chamberlain or the single eye of Mr. Bernard Shaw. 

The old class that I mean has no representative. Its food was plentiful;but it had no show. Its food was plain; but it had no fads. It wasserious about politics; and when it spoke in public it committed thesolecism of trying to speak well. I thought that this old earnestpolitical England had practically disappeared. And as I say, I took oneturn out of Fleet Street and I found a room full of it. 

. .. .. 

At the top of the room was a chair in which Johnson had sat. Theclub was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a time when even thene'er-do-weel was virile. But all these things by themselves might bemerely archaism. The extraordinary thing was that this hall had all thehubbub, the sincerity, the anger, the oratory of the eighteenth century. The members of this club were of all shades of opinion, yet there wasnot one speech which gave me that jar of unreality which I often have inlistening to the ablest men uttering my own opinion. The Toryism of thisclub was like the Toryism of Johnson, a Toryism that could use humourand appealed to humanity. The democracy of this club was like thedemocracy of Wilkes, a democracy that can speak epigrams and fightduels; a democracy that can face things out and endure slander; thedemocracy of Wilkes, or, rather, the democracy of Fox. 

One thing especially filled my soul with the soul of my fathers. Eachman speaking, whether he spoke well or ill, spoke as well as he couldfrom sheer fury against the other man. This is the greatest of ourmodern descents, that nowadays a man does not become more rhetoricalas he becomes more sincere. An eighteenth-century speaker, when he gotreally and honestly furious, looked for big words with which to crushhis adversary. The new speaker looks for small words to crush him with. He looks for little facts and little sneers. In a modern speech therhetoric is put into the merely formal part, the opening to which nobodylistens. But when Mr. Chamberlain, or a Moderate, or one of the harderkind of Socialists, becomes really sincere, he becomes Cockney. "Thedestiny of the Empire, " or "The destiny of humanity, " do well enoughfor mere ornamental preliminaries, but when the man becomes angry andhonest, then it is a snarl, "Where do we come in?" or "It's your moneythey want. "

The men in this eighteenth-century club were entirely different; theywere quite eighteenth century. Each one rose to his feet quivering withpassion, and tried to destroy his opponent, not with sniggering, butactually with eloquence. I was arguing with them about Home Rule; atthe end I told them why the English aristocracy really disliked an IrishParliament; because it would be like their club. 

. .. .. 

I came out again into Fleet Street at night, and by a dim lamp I sawpasted up some tawdry nonsense about Wastrels and how London was risingagainst something that London had hardly heard of. Then I suddenlysaw, as in one obvious picture, that the modern world is an immense andtumultuous ocean, full of monstrous and living things. And I saw thatacross the top of it is spread a thin, a very thin, sheet of ice, ofwicked wealth and of lying journalism. 

And as I stood there in the darkness I could almost fancy that I heardit crack. 

XXXVI. A Somewhat Improbable Story

I cannot remember whether this tale is true or not. If I read it throughvery carefully I have a suspicion that I should come to the conclusionthat it is not. But, unfortunately, I cannot read it through verycarefully, because, you see, it is not written yet. The image and theidea of it clung to me through a great part of my boyhood; I may havedreamt it before I could talk; or told it to myself before I could read;or read it before I could remember. On the whole, however, I am certainthat I did not read it, for children have very clear memories aboutthings like that; and of the books which I was really fond I can stillremember, not only the shape and bulk and binding, but even the positionof the printed words on many of the pages. On the whole, I incline tothe opinion that it happened to me before I was born. 

. .. .. 

At any rate, let us tell the story now with all the advantages of theatmosphere that has clung to it. You may suppose me, for the sake ofargument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch restaurantsin the City where men take their food so fast that it has none of thequality of food, and take their half-hour's vacation so fast that it hasnone of the qualities of leisure; to hurry through one's leisure is themost unbusiness-like of actions. They all wore tall shiny hats as ifthey could not lose an instant even to hang them on a peg, and they allhad one eye a little off, hypnotised by the huge eye of the clock. Inshort, they were the slaves of the modern bondage, you could hear theirfetters clanking. Each was, in fact, bound by a chain; the heaviestchain ever tied to a man--it is called a watch-chain. 

Now, among these there entered and sat down opposite to me a man whoalmost immediately opened an uninterrupted monologue. He was like allthe other men in dress, yet he was startlingly opposite to them in allmanner. He wore a high shiny hat and a long frock coat, but he wore themas such solemn things were meant to be worn; he wore the silk hat as ifit were a mitre, and the frock coat as if it were the ephod of a highpriest. He not only hung his hat up on the peg, but he seemed (such washis stateliness) almost to ask permission of the hat for doing so, andto apologise to the peg for making use of it. When he had sat down ona wooden chair with the air of one considering its feelings and given asort of slight stoop or bow to the wooden table itself, as if it were analtar, I could not help some comment springing to my lips. For the manwas a big, sanguine-faced, prosperous-looking man, and yet he treatedeverything with a care that almost amounted to nervousness. 

For the sake of saying something to express my interest I said, "Thisfurniture is fairly solid; but, of course, people do treat it much toocarelessly. "

As I looked up doubtfully my eye caught his, and was fixed as his wasfixed in an apocalyptic stare. I had thought him ordinary as he entered, save for his strange, cautious manner; but if the other people had seenhim then they would have screamed and emptied the room. They did not seehim, and they went on making a clatter with their forks, and a murmurwith their conversation. But the man's face was the face of a maniac. 

"Did you mean anything particular by that remark?" he asked at last, andthe blood crawled back slowly into his face. 

"Nothing whatever, " I answered. "One does not mean anything here; itspoils people's digestions. "

He limped back and wiped his broad forehead with a big handkerchief; andyet there seemed to be a sort of regret in his relief. 

"I thought perhaps, " he said in a low voice, "that another of them hadgone wrong. "

"If you mean another digestion gone wrong, " I said, "I never heard ofone here that went right. This is the heart of the Empire, and the otherorgans are in an equally bad way. "

"No, I mean another street gone wrong, " and he said heavily and quietly, "but as I suppose that doesn't explain much to you, I think I shall haveto tell you the story. I do so with all the less responsibility, becauseI know you won't believe it. For forty years of my life I invariablyleft my office, which is in Leadenhall Street, at half-past five in theafternoon, taking with me an umbrella in the right hand and a bag in theleft hand. For forty years two months and four days I passed out of theside office door, walked down the street on the left-hand side, tookthe first turning to the left and the third to the right, from where Ibought an evening paper, followed the road on the right-hand side roundtwo obtuse angles, and came out just outside a Metropolitan station, where I took a train home. For forty years two months and four days Ifulfilled this course by accumulated habit: it was not a long streetthat I traversed, and it took me about four and a half minutes to do it. After forty years two months and four days, on the fifth day I went outin the same manner, with my umbrella in the right hand and my bag in theleft, and I began to notice that walking along the familiar street tiredme somewhat more than usual; and when I turned it I was convinced that Ihad turned down the wrong one. For now the street shot up quite a steepslant, such as one only sees in the hilly parts of London, and in thispart there were no hills at all. Yet it was not the wrong street; thename written on it was the same; the shuttered shops were the same; thelamp-posts and the whole look of the perspective was the same; onlyit was tilted upwards like a lid. Forgetting any trouble aboutbreathlessness or fatigue I ran furiously forward, and reached thesecond of my accustomed turnings, which ought to bring me almost withinsight of the station. And as I turned that corner I nearly fell on thepavement. For now the street went up straight in front of my face like asteep staircase or the side of a pyramid. There was not for miles roundthat place so much as a slope like that of Ludgate Hill. And this wasa slope like that of the Matterhorn. The whole street had lifted itselflike a single wave, and yet every speck and detail of it was the same, and I saw in the high distance, as at the top of an Alpine pass, pickedout in pink letters the name over my paper shop. 

"I ran on and on blindly now, passing all the shops and coming to a partof the road where there was a long grey row of private houses. I had, I know not why, an irrational feeling that I was a long iron bridge inempty space. An impulse seized me, and I pulled up the iron trap of acoal-hole. Looking down through it I saw empty space and the stairs. 

"When I looked up again a man was standing in his front garden, havingapparently come out of his house; he was leaning over the railings andgazing at me. We were all alone on that nightmare road; his face was inshadow; his dress was dark and ordinary; but when I saw him standing soperfectly still I knew somehow that he was not of this world. And thestars behind his head were larger and fiercer than ought to be enduredby the eyes of men. 

"'If you are a kind angel, ' I said, 'or a wise devil, or have anythingin common with mankind, tell me what is this street possessed ofdevils. '

"After a long silence he said, 'What do you say that it is?'

"'It is Bumpton Street, of course, ' I snapped. 'It goes to OldgateStation. '

"'Yes, ' he admitted gravely; 'it goes there sometimes. Just now, however, it is going to heaven. '

"'To heaven?' I said. 'Why?'

"'It is going to heaven for justice, ' he replied. 'You must have treatedit badly. Remember always that there is one thing that cannot be enduredby anybody or anything. That one unendurable thing is to be overworkedand also neglected. For instance, you can overwork women--everybodydoes. But you can't neglect women--I defy you to. At the same time, youcan neglect tramps and gypsies and all the apparent refuse of the Stateso long as you do not overwork it. But no beast of the field, no horse, no dog can endure long to be asked to do more than his work and yet haveless than his honour. It is the same with streets. You have worked thisstreet to death, and yet you have never remembered its existence. Ifyou had a healthy democracy, even of pagans, they would have hung thisstreet with garlands and given it the name of a god. Then it would havegone quietly. But at last the street has grown tired of your tirelessinsolence; and it is bucking and rearing its head to heaven. Have younever sat on a bucking horse?'

"I looked at the long grey street, and for a moment it seemed to me tobe exactly like the long grey neck of a horse flung up to heaven. Butin a moment my sanity returned, and I said, 'But this is all nonsense. Streets go to the place they have to go. A street must always go to itsend. '

"'Why do you think so of a street?' he asked, standing very still. 

"'Because I have always seen it do the same thing, ' I replied, inreasonable anger. 'Day after day, year after year, it has always gone toOldgate Station; day after. .. '

"I stopped, for he had flung up his head with the fury of the road inrevolt. 

"'And you?' he cried terribly. 'What do you think the road thinks ofyou? Does the road think you are alive? Are you alive? Day after day, year after year, you have gone to Oldgate Station. .. . ' Since then I haverespected the things called inanimate. "

And bowing slightly to the mustard-pot, the man in the restaurantwithdrew. 

XXXVII. The Shop Of Ghosts

Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can getfor a halfpenny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun, the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles. You can getthem for nothing. Also I make an exception of another thing, which I amnot allowed to mention in this paper, and of which the lowest price is apenny halfpenny. But the general principle will be at once apparent. In the street behind me, for instance, you can now get a ride on anelectric tram for a halfpenny. To be on an electric tram is to be ona flying castle in a fairy tale. You can get quite a large number ofbrightly coloured sweets for a halfpenny. Also you can get the chance ofreading this article for a halfpenny; along, of course, with other andirrelevant matter. 

But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array of valuablethings you can get at a halfpenny each you should do as I was doing lastnight. I was gluing my nose against the glass of a very small anddimly lit toy shop in one of the greyest and leanest of the streetsof Battersea. But dim as was that square of light, it was filled (as achild once said to me) with all the colours God ever made. Those toys ofthe poor were like the children who buy them; they were all dirty; butthey were all bright. For my part, I think brightness more importantthan cleanliness; since the first is of the soul, and the second of thebody. You must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion inthe modern world. 

. .. .. 

As I looked at that palace of pigmy wonders, at small green omnibuses, at small blue elephants, at small black dolls, and small red Noah'sarks, I must have fallen into some sort of unnatural trance. That litshop-window became like the brilliantly lit stage when one is watchingsome highly coloured comedy. I forgot the grey houses and the grimypeople behind me as one forgets the dark galleries and the dim crowdsat a theatre. It seemed as if the little objects behind the glass weresmall, not because they were toys, but because they were objects faraway. The green omnibus was really a green omnibus, a green Bayswateromnibus, passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way toBayswater. The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint; he wasblue with distance. The black doll was really a negro relieved againstpassionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming andonly man is black. The red Noah's ark was really the enormous shipof earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea, red in the firstmorning of hope. 

Every one, I suppose, knows such stunning instants of abstraction, suchbrilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the faceof one's own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles ormoustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the slowness oftheir growth and the suddenness of their termination. The return to realthinking is often as abrupt as bumping into a man. Very often indeed(in my case) it is bumping into a man. But in any case the awakening isalways emphatic and, generally speaking, it is always complete. Now, inthis case, I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousnessthat I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy-shop; butin some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final. Therewas still in my mind an unmanageable something that told me that I hadstrayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I had already done some oddthing. I felt as if I had worked a miracle or committed a sin. It was asif I had at any rate, stepped across some border in the soul. 

To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop andtried to buy wooden soldiers. The man in the shop was very old andbroken, with confused white hair covering his head and half his face, hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial. Yet thoughhe was senile and even sick, there was nothing of suffering in hiseyes; he looked rather as if he were gradually falling asleep in a notunkindly decay. He gave me the wooden soldiers, but when I put down themoney he did not at first seem to see it; then he blinked at it feebly, and then he pushed it feebly away. 

"No, no, " he said vaguely. "I never have. I never have. We are ratherold-fashioned here. "

"Not taking money, " I replied, "seems to me more like an uncommonly newfashion than an old one. "

"I never have, " said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose; "I'vealways given presents. I'm too old to stop. "

"Good heavens!" I said. "What can you mean? Why, you might be FatherChristmas. "

"I am Father Christmas, " he said apologetically, and blew his noseagain. 

The lamps could not have been lighted yet in the street outside. Atany rate, I could see nothing against the darkness but the shiningshop-window. There were no sounds of steps or voices in the street; Imight have strayed into some new and sunless world. But something hadcut the chords of common sense, and I could not feel even surpriseexcept sleepily. Something made me say, "You look ill, FatherChristmas. "

"I am dying, " he said. 

I did not speak, and it was he who spoke again. 

"All the new people have left my shop. I cannot understand it. They seemto object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators. They say that I give peoplesuperstitions and make them too visionary; they say I give peoplesausages and make them too coarse. They say my heavenly parts are tooheavenly; they say my earthly parts are too earthly; I don't know whatthey want, I'm sure. How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthlythings too earthly? How can one be too good, or too jolly? I don'tunderstand. But I understand one thing well enough. These modern peopleare living and I am dead. "

"You may be dead, " I replied. "You ought to know. But as for what theyare doing, do not call it living. "

. .. .. 

A silence fell suddenly between us which I somehow expected to beunbroken. But it had not fallen for more than a few seconds when, in theutter stillness, I distinctly heard a very rapid step coming nearer andnearer along the street. The next moment a figure flung itself into theshop and stood framed in the doorway. He wore a large white hat tiltedback as if in impatience; he had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons, a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat. Hehad large, wide-open, luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor; hehad a pale, nervous face, and a fringe of beard. He took in the shopand the old man in a look that seemed literally a flash and uttered theexclamation of a man utterly staggered. 

"Good lord!" he cried out; "it can't be you! It isn't you! I came to askwhere your grave was. "

"I'm not dead yet, Mr. Dickens, " said the old gentleman, with a feeblesmile; "but I'm dying, " he hastened to add reassuringly. 

"But, dash it all, you were dying in my time, " said Mr. Charles Dickenswith animation; "and you don't look a day older. "

"I've felt like this for a long time, " said Father Christmas. 

Mr. Dickens turned his back and put his head out of the door into thedarkness. 

"Dick, " he roared at the top of his voice; "he's still alive. "

. .. .. 

Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and morefull-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, fanning hisflushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne. He carriedhis head well back like a soldier, and his hot face had even a lookof arrogance, which was suddenly contradicted by his eyes, which wereliterally as humble as a dog's. His sword made a great clatter, as ifthe shop were too small for it. 

"Indeed, " said Sir Richard Steele, "'tis a most prodigious matter, for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley and hisChristmas Day. "

My senses were growing dimmer and the room darker. It seemed to befilled with newcomers. 

"It hath ever been understood, " said a burly man, who carried his headhumorously and obstinately a little on one side--I think he was BenJonson--"It hath ever been understood, consule Jacobo, under our KingJames and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty customs werefallen sick, and like to pass from the world. This grey beard mostsurely was no lustier when I knew him than now. "

And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like Robin Hood, say insome mixed Norman French, "But I saw the man dying. "

"I have felt like this a long time, " said Father Christmas, in hisfeeble way again. 

Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him. 

"Since when?" he asked. "Since you were born?"

"Yes, " said the old man, and sank shaking into a chair. "I have beenalways dying. "

Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like a man calling a mob torise. 

"I understand it now, " he cried, "you will never die. "

XXXVIII. The Ballade of a Strange Town

My friend and I, in fooling about Flanders, fell into a fixed affectionfor the town of Mechlin or Malines. Our rest there was so restful thatwe almost felt it as a home, and hardly strayed out of it. 

We sat day after day in the market-place, under little trees growingin wooden tubs, and looked up at the noble converging lines of theCathedral tower, from which the three riders from Ghent, in the poem, heard the bell which told them they were not too late. But we took asmuch pleasure in the people, in the little boys with open, flatFlemish faces and fur collars round their necks, making them looklike burgomasters; or the women, whose prim, oval faces, hair strainedtightly off the temples, and mouths at once hard, meek, and humorous, exactly reproduced the late mediaeval faces in Memling and Van Eyck. 

But one afternoon, as it happened, my friend rose from under his littletree, and pointing to a sort of toy train that was puffing smoke in onecorner of the clear square, suggested that we should go by it. We gotinto the little train, which was meant really to take the peasants andtheir vegetables to and fro from their fields beyond the town, andthe official came round to give us tickets. We asked him what placewe should get to if we paid fivepence. The Belgians are not a romanticpeople, and he asked us (with a lamentable mixture of Flemish coarsenessand French rationalism) where we wanted to go. 

We explained that we wanted to go to fairyland, and the only questionwas whether we could get there for fivepence. At last, after a greatdeal of international misunderstanding (for he spoke French in theFlemish and we in the English manner), he told us that fivepence wouldtake us to a place which I have never seen written down, but which whenspoken sounded like the word "Waterloo" pronounced by an intoxicatedpatriot; I think it was Waerlowe. 

We clasped our hands and said it was the place we had been seeking fromboyhood, and when we had got there we descended with promptitude. 

For a moment I had a horrible fear that it really was the field ofWaterloo; but I was comforted by remembering that it was in quite adifferent part of Belgium. It was a cross-roads, with one cottage at thecorner, a perspective of tall trees like Hobbema's "Avenue, " and beyondonly the infinite flat chess-board of the little fields. It was thescene of peace and prosperity; but I must confess that my friend's firstaction was to ask the man when there would be another train back toMechlin. The man stated that there would be a train back in exactly onehour. We walked up the avenue, and when we were nearly half an hour'swalk away it began to rain. 

. .. .. 

We arrived back at the cross-roads sodden and dripping, and, findingthe train waiting, climbed into it with some relief. The officer onthis train could speak nothing but Flemish, but he understood the nameMechlin, and indicated that when we came to Mechlin Station he would putus down, which, after the right interval of time, he did. 

We got down, under a steady downpour, evidently on the edge of Mechlin, though the features could not easily be recognised through the greyscreen of the rain. I do not generally agree with those who find raindepressing. A shower-bath is not depressing; it is rather startling. Andif it is exciting when a man throws a pail of water over you, why shouldit not also be exciting when the gods throw many pails? But on thissoaking afternoon, whether it was the dull sky-line of the Netherlandsor the fact that we were returning home without any adventure, I reallydid think things a trifle dreary. As soon as we could creep under theshelter of a street we turned into a little café, kept by one woman. Shewas incredibly old, and she spoke no French. There we drank black coffeeand what was called "cognac fine. " "Cognac fine" were the only twoFrench words used in the establishment, and they were not true. Atleast, the fineness (perhaps by its very ethereal delicacy) escaped me. After a little my friend, who was more restless than I, got up and wentout, to see if the rain had stopped and if we could at once stroll backto our hotel by the station. I sat finishing my coffee in a colourlessmood, and listening to the unremitting rain. 

. .. .. 

Suddenly the door burst open, and my friend appeared, transfigured andfrantic. 

"Get up!" he cried, waving his hands wildly. "Get up! We're in the wrongtown! We're not in Mechlin at all. Mechlin is ten miles, twenty milesoff--God knows what! We're somewhere near Antwerp. "

"What!" I cried, leaping from my seat, and sending the furniture flying. "Then all is well, after all! Poetry only hid her face for an instantbehind a cloud. Positively for a moment I was feeling depressed becausewe were in the right town. But if we are in the wrong town--why, wehave our adventure after all! If we are in the wrong town, we are in theright place. "

I rushed out into the rain, and my friend followed me somewhat moregrimly. We discovered we were in a town called Lierre, which seemed toconsist chiefly of bankrupt pastry cooks, who sold lemonade. 

"This is the peak of our whole poetic progress!" I criedenthusiastically. "We must do something, something sacramental andcommemorative! We cannot sacrifice an ox, and it would be a bore tobuild a temple. Let us write a poem. "

With but slight encouragement, I took out an old envelope and one ofthose pencils that turn bright violet in water. There was plenty ofwater about, and the violet ran down the paper, symbolising the richpurple of that romantic hour. I began, choosing the form of an oldFrench ballade; it is the easiest because it is the most restricted--

 "Can Man to Mount Olympus rise, And fancy Primrose Hill the scene? Can a man walk in Paradise And think he is in Turnham Green? And could I take you for Malines, Not knowing the nobler thing you were? O Pearl of all the plain, and queen, The lovely city of Lierre. 

 "Through memory's mist in glimmering guise Shall shine your streets of sloppy sheen. And wet shall grow my dreaming eyes, To think how wet my boots have been Now if I die or shoot a Dean----"

Here I broke off to ask my friend whether he thought it expressed a morewild calamity to shoot a Dean or to be a Dean. But he only turned up hiscoat collar, and I felt that for him the muse had folded her wings. Irewrote--

 "Now if I die a Rural Dean, Or rob a bank I do not care, Or turn a Tory. I have seen The lovely city of Lierre. "

"The next line, " I resumed, warming to it; but my friend interrupted me. 

"The next line, " he said somewhat harshly, "will be a railway line. We can get back to Mechlin from here, I find, though we have to changetwice. I dare say I should think this jolly romantic but for theweather. Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagneand my adventures dry. Here is the station. "

. .. .. 

We did not speak again until we had left Lierre, in its sacred cloud ofrain, and were coming to Mechlin, under a clearer sky, that even madeone think of stars. Then I leant forward and said to my friend in a lowvoice--"I have found out everything. We have come to the wrong star. "

He stared his query, and I went on eagerly: "That is what makes lifeat once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When Ithought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires usbecause it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is thatwe don't fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way. "

He silently nodded, staring out of the window, but whether I hadimpressed or only fatigued him I could not tell. "This, " I added, "issuggested in the last verse of a fine poem you have grossly neglected--

 "'Happy is he and more than wise Who sees with wondering eyes and clean The world through all the grey disguise Of sleep and custom in between. Yes; we may pass the heavenly screen, But shall we know when we are there? Who know not what these dead stones mean, The lovely city of Lierre. '"

Here the train stopped abruptly. And from Mechlin church steeple weheard the half-chime: and Joris broke silence with "No bally HORSD'OEUVRES for me: I shall get on to something solid at once. "

 L'Envoy

 Prince, wide your Empire spreads, I ween, Yet happier is that moistened Mayor, Who drinks her cognac far from fine, The lovely city of Lierre. 

XXXIX. The Mystery of a Pageant

Once upon a time, it seems centuries ago, I was prevailed on to takea small part in one of those historical processions or pageants whichhappened to be fashionable in or about the year 1909. And since I tend, like all who are growing old, to re-enter the remote past as a paradiseor playground, I disinter a memory which may serve to stand among thosememories of small but strange incidents with which I have sometimesfilled this column. The thing has really some of the dark qualities ofa detective-story; though I suppose that Sherlock Holmes himself couldhardly unravel it now, when the scent is so old and cold and most of theactors, doubtless, long dead. 

This old pageant included a series of figures from the eighteenthcentury, and I was told that I was just like Dr. Johnson. Seeing thatDr. Johnson was heavily seamed with small-pox, had a waistcoat all overgravy, snorted and rolled as he walked, and was probably the ugliest manin London, I mention this identification as a fact and not as a vaunt. Ihad nothing to do with the arrangement; and such fleeting suggestions asI made were not taken so seriously as they might have been. I requestedthat a row of posts be erected across the lawn, so that I might touchall of them but one, and then go back and touch that. Failing this, Ifelt that the least they could do was to have twenty-five cups of teastationed at regular intervals along the course, each held by a Mrs. Thrale in full costume. My best constructive suggestion was the mostharshly rejected of all. In front of me in the procession walked thegreat Bishop Berkeley, the man who turned the tables on the earlymaterialists by maintaining that matter itself possibly does not exist. Dr. Johnson, you will remember, did not like such bottomless fancies asBerkeley's, and kicked a stone with his foot, saying, "I refute him so!"Now (as I pointed out) kicking a stone would not make the metaphysicalquarrel quite clear; besides, it would hurt. But how picturesqueand perfect it would be if I moved across the ground in the symbolicattitude of kicking Bishop Berkeley! How complete an allegoric group;the great transcendentalist walking with his head among the stars, butbehind him the avenging realist pede claudo, with uplifted foot. But Imust not take up space with these forgotten frivolities; we old men growtoo garrulous in talking of the distant past. 

This story scarcely concerns me either in my real or my assumedcharacter. Suffice it to say that the procession took place at nightin a large garden and by torchlight (so remote is the date), that thegarden was crowded with Puritans, monks, and men-at-arms, and especiallywith early Celtic saints smoking pipes, and with elegant Renaissancegentlemen talking Cockney. Suffice it to say, or rather it is needlessto say, that I got lost. I wandered away into some dim corner of thatdim shrubbery, where there was nothing to do except tumbling over tentropes, and I began almost to feel like my prototype, and to share hishorror of solitude and hatred of a country life. 

In this detachment and dilemma I saw another man in a white wigadvancing across this forsaken stretch of lawn; a tall, lean man, whostooped in his long black robes like a stooping eagle. When I thoughthe would pass me, he stopped before my face, and said, "Dr. Johnson, Ithink. I am Paley. "

"Sir, " I said, "you used to guide men to the beginnings of Christianity. If you can guide me now to wherever this infernal thing begins you willperform a yet higher and harder function. "

His costume and style were so perfect that for the instant I reallythought he was a ghost. He took no notice of my flippancy, but, turninghis black-robed back on me, led me through verdurous glooms and windingmossy ways, until we came out into the glare of gaslight and laughingmen in masquerade, and I could easily laugh at myself. 

And there, you will say, was an end of the matter. I am (you will say)naturally obtuse, cowardly, and mentally deficient. I was, moreover, unused to pageants; I felt frightened in the dark and took a man for aspectre whom, in the light, I could recognise as a modern gentleman ina masquerade dress. No; far from it. That spectral person was my firstintroduction to a special incident which has never been explained andwhich still lays its finger on my nerve. 

I mixed with the men of the eighteenth century; and we fooled as onedoes at a fancy-dress ball. There was Burke as large as life and a greatdeal better looking. There was Cowper much larger than life; he oughtto have been a little man in a night-cap, with a cat under one arm anda spaniel under the other. As it was, he was a magnificent person, andlooked more like the Master of Ballantrae than Cowper. I persuaded himat last to the night-cap, but never, alas, to the cat and dog. When Icame the next night Burke was still the same beautiful improvement uponhimself; Cowper was still weeping for his dog and cat and would notbe comforted; Bishop Berkeley was still waiting to be kicked in theinterests of philosophy. In short, I met all my old friends but one. Where was Paley? I had been mystically moved by the man's presence; Iwas moved more by his absence. At last I saw advancing towards usacross the twilight garden a little man with a large book and a brightattractive face. When he came near enough he said, in a small, clearvoice, "I'm Paley. " The thing was quite natural, of course; the man wasill and had sent a substitute. Yet somehow the contrast was a shock. 

By the next night I had grown quite friendly with my four or fivecolleagues; I had discovered what is called a mutual friend withBerkeley and several points of difference with Burke. Cowper, I thinkit was, who introduced me to a friend of his, a fresh face, squareand sturdy, framed in a white wig. "This, " he explained, "is my friendSo-and-So. He's Paley. " I looked round at all the faces by this timefixed and familiar; I studied them; I counted them; then I bowed to thethird Paley as one bows to necessity. So far the thing was all withinthe limits of coincidence. It certainly seemed odd that this oneparticular cleric should be so varying and elusive. It was singularthat Paley, alone among men, should swell and shrink and alter like aphantom, while all else remained solid. But the thing was explicable;two men had been ill and there was an end of it; only I went againthe next night, and a clear-coloured elegant youth with powdered hairbounded up to me, and told me with boyish excitement that he was Paley. 

For the next twenty-four hours I remained in the mental condition ofthe modern world. I mean the condition in which all natural explanationshave broken down and no supernatural explanation has been established. My bewilderment had reached to boredom when I found myself once more inthe colour and clatter of the pageant, and I was all the more pleasedbecause I met an old school-fellow, and we mutually recognised eachother under our heavy clothes and hoary wigs. We talked about all thosegreat things for which literature is too small and only life largeenough; red-hot memories and those gigantic details which make up thecharacters of men. I heard all about the friends he had lost sight ofand those he had kept in sight; I heard about his profession, and askedat last how he came into the pageant. 

"The fact is, " he said, "a friend of mine asked me, just for to-night, to act a chap called Paley; I don't know who he was. .. . "

"No, by thunder!" I said, "nor does anyone. "

This was the last blow, and the next night passed like a dream. Iscarcely noticed the slender, sprightly, and entirely new figure whichfell into the ranks in the place of Paley, so many times deceased. Whatcould it mean? Why was the giddy Paley unfaithful among the faithfulfound? Did these perpetual changes prove the popularity or theunpopularity of being Paley? Was it that no human being could supportbeing Paley for one night and live till morning? Or was it that thegates were crowded with eager throngs of the British public thirstingto be Paley, who could only be let in one at a time? Or is there someancient vendetta against Paley? Does some secret society of Deists stillassassinate any one who adopts the name?

I cannot conjecture further about this true tale of mystery; and thatfor two reasons. First, the story is so true that I have had to put alie into it. Every word of this narrative is veracious, except the oneword Paley. And second, because I have got to go into the next room anddress up as Dr. Johnson.