Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

And there was Dick Turpin. He, too, loved the moonlight for very practical reasons. He loved it not because it silvered the oak, but because of that deep shadow of the oak in which he could stand with Black Bess and await the coming of his victim.

And it is that shadow which is the real secret of the magic of moonlight. The shadows of the day have beauty but no secrecy. The sunlight is too strong to be wholly or even very materially denied. Even its shadows are luminous and full of colour, and the contrast between light and shade is not the contrast between the visible and the invisible, between the light and the dark: it is only a contrast between degrees of brightness. Everything is bright, but some things are more bright than others. But in the moonlight the world is etched in black and white. The shadows are flat and unrevealing. They have none of the colour values produced by the reflected lights in the shadows of the day. They are as secret as the grave; distinct personalities, sharply figured against the encompassing light, not mere passages of colour tuned to a lower key. And the quality of the encompassing light itself emphasises the contrast. The moon does not bring out the colour of things, but touches them with a glacial pallor:

.... Strange she is, and secret.
Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.

See the moonlight fall upon your house-front and mark the wonderful effect of black and white that it creates. Under the play of the moonbeams it becomes a house of mysteries. The lights seem lighter than by day, but that is only because the darks are so much darker. That shadow cast by the gable makes a blackness in which anything may lurk, and it is the secrecy of the shadow in a world of light that is the soul of romance.

Take a walk in the woods in the bright moonlight over the tracks that you think you could follow blindfold, and you will marvel at the tricks which those black shadows of the trees can play with the most familiar scenes. Keats, who was as much of a moonlighter in spirit as Scott, knew those impenetrable shadows well:

.... tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

In this moonlight world you may skip at will from the known to the unknown, have publicity on one side of the way and secrecy on the other, walk in the light to see Jessica's face, and in the shadow to escape the prying eyes of Shylock. Hence through all time it has been the elysium of lovers, and "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns," has been the goddess whom they serve,

To whose bright image nightly by the moon,
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.

Perhaps it is the eternal lover in us that responds so unfailingly to the magic of the moonlight.

ON GIVING UP TOBACCO

This evening I am morally a little unapproachable. I feel too good to be true. Perhaps it would be possible for me to endure the company of Mr. Pecksniff; but that good man is dead, and I am lonely in a world that is not quite up to my moral handicap. For I have given up tobacco. For a whole day not a wreath of smoke has issued from my lips, not a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette has had the victory over me.... For a whole day! I had not realised how long a day could be. It is as though I have ceased to live in time and have gone into eternity. I once heard a man say: "Dear me! How time flies!" It struck me at the moment as a true and penetrating remark, and I have often repeated it since. But now I know it to be false. I know that that man must have been a slave to tobacco, that subtle narcotic that gives the illusion of the flight of time. If he had the moral courage to follow my example, he would not say "How time flies!" He would say, as I do (with tears in his voice, and with a glance at his pipe on the mantel-piece), "How time stands still!" He would find that a day can seem as long as a year; that he can lengthen his life until he is terrified at the prospect of its endlessness.

I have been contemplating this thing for years. Some day, I have said to myself, I will have a real trial of strength with this Giant Nicotine who has held me thrall to his service. Long have I borne his yoke--ever since that far-off day when I burned a hole in my jacket pocket with a lighted cigar that I hid at the approach of danger. (How well I remember that day: the hot sunshine, the walk in the fields, the sense of forbidden joys, the tragedy of the burnt hole, the miserable feeling of physical nausea.) I have kicked against the tyranny of a habit that I knew had become my master. It was not the tobacco I disliked. Far from it. I liked the tobacco; but disliked the habit of tobacco. The tendency of most of us is to become creatures of habit and to lose our freedom--to cease to be masters of our own actions. "Take away his habits, and there is nothing of him left," says a character in some play, and the saying has a wide application. I did not possess a pipe: it was the pipe that possessed me. I did not say with easy, masterful assurance, "Come, I have had a hard day (or a good dinner); I will indulge myself with a pipe of tobacco." It was the pipe which said, "Come, slave, to your devotions." And though as the result of one of my spiritual conflicts I threw away my pipe and resolved to break the fall with an occasional cigarette, I found it was the old tyrannous habit in a new disguise. The old dog in a new coat, as Johnson used to say.

There are some people who approach the question frivolously. The young man called John in the "Breakfast Table" is an example. When the lady in bombazine denounced tobacco and said it ought all to be burned, the young man John agreed. Someone had given him a box of cigars, he said, and he was going to burn them all. The lady in bombazine rejoiced. Let him make a bonfire of them in the backyard, she said. "That ain't my way," replied the young man called John. "I burn 'em one at a time--little end in my mouth, big end outside." Similarly wanting in seriousness was the defence of tobacco set up by the wit who declared that it prolonged life. "Look at the ancient Egyptians," he said. "None of them smoked, _and they are all dead_." Others again discover virtues to conceal the tyranny. Lord Clarendon, when he was Foreign Minister, excused the fact that his room always reeked with tobacco smoke on the ground that it was necessary to his work. "The art of diplomacy," he said, "is the judicious administration of tobacco." No one knew better how to handle a cigar case than Bismarck, and it is no very extravagant fancy to see in the events of to-day the enormous fruit of an interlude of tobacco between him and Disraeli in the council chamber at Berlin.

There are some who say they smoke because it soothes their nerves, and others who say they smoke because it is an aid to social intercourse. It is true that you can sit and smoke and say nothing without feeling that the spirit of communion is broken. That was the case of Carlyle and his mother and of Carlyle and Tennyson, brave smokers all and silent to boot. They let their pipes carry on a conversation too deep for words. And lesser people, as Cowper knew, conceal their bankruptcy of words in wreaths of smoke:

The pipe, with solemn, interposing puff,
Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
Then pause, and puff, and speak, and puff again.

And, while some say they smoke for company, others claim to smoke for thought and inspiration. "Tobacco is the sister of Literature," says Sir Walter Raleigh, loyal in this to his great namesake who brought the good gift to our shores. Heaven forbid that I should deny the debt we who write owe to tobacco, but I am bound to confess that brother Literature did some handsome things before he found his sister. Homer and Euripides, Virgil and Horace wrote quite tolerably without the help of tobacco, though no one can read Horace without feeling that he had the true spirit of the tobacco cult. Had he been born a couple of thousand years later, what praises of the weed of Havana he would have mingled with his praises of Falernian!

But if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we smoke not for this or that respectable reason--not always even because we enjoy it--but because we have got into the habit and can't get out of it. And in this, as in other cases, it is the surrender of the will more than the thing yielded to that is the mischief. All the great systems of religion have provided against the enslavement of the individual to his habits. The ordinances of abstinence are designed, in part at all events, to keep the will master of the appetites. They are intended--altogether apart from the question of salvation by works--to serve as a breach with habits which, if allowed uninterrupted sway, reduce the soul to a sort of bondage to the body.

It is against that bondage of habit that I have warred to-day. I shall not describe the incidents of the struggle: the allurements of the tobacconists' shops--and what a lot of tobacconists' shops there are!--the insidious temptation of a company of men smoking contentedly after lunch, the heroism of waving away the offered cigarette or cigar as though it were a matter of no importance, the constant act of refusal. For this is no case of one splendid deed of heroism. You do not slay Apollyon with a thrust of your sword and march triumphantly on your way. You have to go on fighting every inch of the journey, deaf to the appeals of Gold Flake and Capstan and Navy Cut and the other syrens that beckon you from the shop windows. And now evening has come and the victory is mine. I have singed the beard of the giant. I am no longer his thrall. To-morrow I shall be able to smoke with a clear conscience--with the feeling that it is an act of my own free choice, and not an act of slavish obedience to an old habit....

How I shall enjoy to-morrow!

THE GREAT GOD GUN

A few days ago I saw the Advent of the Great God Gun. The goddess Aphrodite, according to ancient mythology, rose out of the foam of the sea, and the Great God Gun, too, emerged from a bath, but it was a bath of fire--fire so white and intense that the eyes were blinded by it as they are blinded by the light of the unclouded sun at midday.

Our presence had been timed for the moment of his coming. We stood in a great chamber higher than a cathedral nave, and with something even less than the dim religious light of a cathedral nave. The exterior of the temple was plain even to ugliness, a tower of high, windowless walls faced with corrugated iron. Within was a maze of immense mysteries, mighty cylinders towering into the gloom above, great pits descending into the gloom below, gigantic cranes showing against the dim skylight, with here and there a Cyclopean figure clad in oily overalls and with a face grimy and perspiring.

The signal was given. Two shadowy figures that appeared in the darkness above one of the cylinders began their incantations. A giant crane towered above them and one saw its mighty claw descend into the orifice of the cylinder as if to drag some Eurydice out of the hell within. Then the word was spoken and somewhere a lever, or perhaps only an electric button, was touched. But at that touch the whole front of the mighty cylinder from top to bottom opened and swung back slowly and majestically, and one stood before a pillar of flame forty feet high, pure and white, an infinity of intolerable light, from whence a wave of heat came forth like a living thing. And as the door opened the Cyclops above--strange Dantesque figures now swallowed up in the gloom, now caught in the light of the furnace--set the crane in motion, and through the open door of the cylinder came the god, suspended from the claw of the crane that gripped it like the fingers of a hand.

It emerged slowly like a column of solid light--mystic, wonderful. All night it had stood imprisoned in the cylinder enveloped by that bath of incalculable hotness, and as it came out from the ordeal, it was as white as the furnace within. The great hand of the crane bore it forward with a solemn slowness until it paused over the mouth of one of the pits. I had looked into this pit and seen that it was filled nearly to the brim with a slimy liquid. It was a pit of oil--tens of thousands of gallons of high-flash rape oil. It was the second bath of the god.

The monster, the whiteness of his heat now flushing to pink, paused above the pit. Then gravely, under the direction of the iron hand that held him suspended in mid-air, he began to descend into the oil. The breech end of the incandescent column touched the surface of the liquid, and at that touch there leapt out of the mouth of the pit great tongues of flame. As the red pillar sank deeper and deeper in the pit the flames burst up through the muzzle and licked with fury about the ruthless claw as if to tear it to pieces. But it would not let go. Lower and lower sank the god until even his head was submerged and he stood invisible beneath us, robed in his cloak of oil.

And there we will leave him to toughen and harden as he drinks in the oil hungrily through his burning pores. Soon he will be caught up in the claw of the crane again, lifted out of his bath and lowered into an empty pit near by. And upon him will descend another tube, that has passed through the same trials, and that will fit him as the skin fits the body. And then in due course he will be provided with yet another coat. Round and round him will be wound miles of flattened wire, put on at a tension of unthinkable resistance. And even then there remains his outer garment, his jacket, to swell still further his mighty bulk. After that he will be equipped with his brain--all the wonderful mechanism of breech and cradle--and then one day he will be carried to the huge structure near by, where the Great God Gun, in all his manifestations, from the little mountain ten-pounder to the leviathan fifteen-inch, rests shining and wonderful, to be sent forth with his message of death and destruction.

The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to "bow down to wood and stone." Poor savage! If we could only take him, with his childlike intelligence, into our temple to see the god that the genius and industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast that a hundred men could not lift him, of such incredible delicacy that his myriad parts are fitted together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and even the hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of whose throat there issue thunders and lightnings that carry ruin for tens of miles--how ashamed the poor savage would be of his idols of wood and stone! How he would abase himself before the god of the Christian nations!

And what a voracious deity he is! Here in the great arsenal of Woolwich one passes through miles and miles of bewildering activities, foundries where the forty-ton hammer falls with the softness of a caress upon the great column of molten metal, and gives it the first crude likeness of the god, where vast converters are sending out flames of an unearthly hue and brightness, or where men clothed in grime and perspiration are swinging about billets of steel that scorch you as they pass from the furnace to the steam-press in which they are stamped like putty into the rough shape of great shells; shops where the roar of thousands of lathes drowns the voice, and where the food of the god is passing through a multitude of preparations more delicate than any known to the kitchens of Lucullus; pools of silence where grave scientific men are at their calculations and their tests, and where mechanics who are the princes of their trade show you delicate instruments gauged to the hundred-thousandth of an inch that are so precious that they will scarcely let you handle them; mysterious chambers where the high explosives are handled and where the shells are filled, where you walk in felt slippers upon padded floors and dare not drop a pin lest you wake an earthquake, and where you see men working (for what pay I know not) with materials more terrible than lightnings, themselves partitioned off from eternity only by the scrupulous observance of the stern laws of this realm of the sleeping Furies.

A great town--a town whose activities alone are equal to all the labour of a city like Leeds--all devoted to the service of the god who lies there, mystic, wonderful, waiting to speak his oracles to men. I see the poor savage growing more and more ashamed of his wood and stone. And this, good savage, is only a trifling part of our devotions. All over the land wherever you go you shall find furnaces blazing to his glory, mountains shattered to make his ribs, factories throbbing day and night to feed his gigantic maw and to clothe his servants.

You shall go down to the great rivers and hear a thousand hammers beating their music out of the hulls of mighty ships that are to be the chariots of the god, in which he will go forth to preach his gospel. You shall go down into the bowels of the earth and see half-naked men toiling in the blackness by the dim light of the safety lamp to win that wonderful food which is the ultimate food of the god, power to forge his frame, power to drive his chariots, power to wing his bolts. You shall go to our temples of learning and the laboratories of our universities and see the miracles of destruction that science, the proudest achievement of man, can wring out of that astonishing mystery coal-tar. You shall go to our ports and watch the ships riding in proudly from the seas with their tributes from afar to the god. And behind all this activity you shall see a nation working day and night to pay for the food of the god, throwing all its accumulated wealth into the furnace to keep the engines going, pawning its future to the uttermost farthing and to the remotest generation.

And wherever the white man dwells, good savage, the same vision awaits you--

... where Rhine unto the sea,
And Thames and Tiber, Seine and Danube run,
And where great armies glitter in the sun,
And great kings rule and men are boasted free.

Everywhere the hammers are ringing, the forests are falling, the harvests are being gathered, and men and women toil like galley slaves chained to the oar to build more and more of the image and feed him more lavishly with the food of death. You cannot escape the great traffic of the god though you go to the outposts of the earth. The horses of the pampas are being rounded up to drag his wagons, the sheep of Australia are being sheared to clothe his slaves, the pine trees of Lapland are being split for his service, the silence of the Arctic seas is broken by the throbbing of his chariots. As a neutral, good savage, you shall be free to go to Essen and see marvels no less wonderful than these you have seen at Woolwich, and all through Europe from Bremen to the Golden Horn the same infinite toil in the service of the Great God Gun will greet your astonished eyes.

Then, it may be, you will pass to where the god delivers his message; on sea where one word from his mouth sends a thousand men and twenty thousand tons of metal in one huge dust storm to the skies; on land where over hundreds of miles of battle front the towns and villages are mounds of rubbish, where the desolate earth is riven and shattered by that treacly stuff you saw being ladled into the shells in the danger rooms at Woolwich or Essen, where the dead lie thick as leaves in autumn, and where in every wood you will come upon the secret shrines of the god. At one light touch of the lever he lifts his head, coughs his mighty guttural speech and sinks back as if convulsed. He has spoken, the earth trembles, the trees about him shudder at the shock. And standing in the observatory you will see far off a great black, billowy mass rise in the clear sky and you will know that the god has blown another god like unto him into fragments, and that in that mass that rises and falls is the wreckage of many a man who has looked his last upon the sun and will never till the home fields again or gladden the eyes of those he has left in some distant land.

And then, to complete your experience, you shall hear from the prophets of the Great God Gun the praises of his gospel, how that gospel is an abiding part of the white man's faith, how it acts as a moral medicine to humanity, purging it of its vices and teaching it the higher virtues (a visit to the music halls and the Strand at midnight will help your simple mind to realise this), and how the words of the poet, uttered in satire--

That civilisation doos git forrad
Sometimes upon a powder cart--

were in truth the words of eternal wisdom.

I see the poor savage returning sadly to his home and gazing with mingled scorn and humiliation at his futile image of wood and stone. Perhaps another feeling will mingle with his sadness. Perhaps he will be perplexed and puzzled. For he may have heard of another religion that the white man serves, and it may be difficult for his simple mind to reconcile that religion with the gospel of the Great God Gun.

ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR

I was going down to the country the other night when I fell into conversation with a soldier who was going home on leave. He was a reservist, who, after leaving the Army, had taken to gardening, and who had been called up at the beginning of the war. He had many interesting things to tell, which he told in that unromantic, matter-of-fact fashion peculiar to the British soldier. But something he said about his cousin led him to make a reference to Lord Kitchener, and I noticed that he spoke of the great soldier as if he were living.

"But," said I, "do you think Kitchener wasn't drowned?"

"Yes," he replied, "I can't never believe he was drowned."

"But why?"

"Well, he hadn't no escort. You're not going to make me believe he didn't know what he was doing when he went off and didn't have no escort. It stands to reason. He wasn't no stick of rhubub, as you might say. He was a hard man on the soldier, but he had foresight, he had. He could look ahead. That's what he could do. He could look ahead. What did he say about the war? Three years, he said, or the duration, and he was about right. He wasn't the man to get drowned by an oversight--not him. Stands to reason.

"Same with Hector Macdonald," he said, warming to his theme. "He's alive right enough. He's fighting for the Germans. Why, I know a man who see him in a German uniform before the war began. I should know him if I see him. He inspected me often. He made a fool of himself at Monte Carlo and that sort o' thing, and just went off to get a new start, as you might say.

"And look at Hamel. He ain't dead--course not. He went to Germany--that's what he did. Stands to reason."

"And what has become of Kitchener?" I asked. "Is he fighting for the Germans too?"

Well no. That was too tall an order even for his credulity. He boggled a bit at the hedge and then proceeded:

"He's laying by--that's what he's doing. He's laying by. You see, he'd done his job. He raised his army and made the whole job, as you may say, safe, and he wasn't going to take a back seat and be put in a corner. Not him. Stands to reason. Why should he? And him done all what he had done. So he just goes off and lays by until he's wanted again. Then he'll turn up all right. You'll see."

"But the ship was blown up," I said, "and only one boatload of survivors came to shore. There were 800 men who perished with Lord Kitchener. Not one has been heard of. Are they all 'laying by'? And where are they hiding? And why? And were they all in Lord Kitchener's secret?"

He seemed a little gravelled by these considerations, but unmoved.

"I can't never believe that he's dead," he said with the air of a man who didn't want to be awkward and would oblige if he possibly could. "I can't do it.... With his foresight and all.... And no escort, mind you.... No, I can't believe it.... Stands to reason."

And as he sank back in his seat and lit a cigarette I realised that the legend of Kitchener had passed beyond the challenge of death. I had heard much of that legend, much of mysterious letters from prisoners in Germany who had seen a very tall and formidable-looking man and hinted that that man's name was--well, whose would you think? Why, of course.... But here was the popular legend in all its naked simplicity and absoluteness. It did not rest upon fact. It defied all facts and all evidence. It was an act of tyrannic faith. He was not dead, because the mind simply refused to believe that he was dead. And so he was alive. And there you are.

No doubt there was much in the circumstances of the great soldier's end that helped the growth of the myth. He filled so vast a place in the public mind and vanished so swiftly that his total disappearance seemed unthinkable. No living man had seen him die and no man had seen his body in death. He had just walked out into the night, and from the night he would return.

But, apart from the mystery of circumstance, the legend is a tribute to the strange fascination which this remarkable man exercised over the popular mind. It endowed him with qualities which were supernatural. In a world filled with the tragedy of mortality, here was a man who could daunt death itself. And when death stabbed him suddenly in the dark of that wild night off the Orkneys and flung his body to the wandering seas, the popular mind rejected the thought as a sort of blasphemy and insisted on his victory over the enemy. "Stands to reason." That's all. It just "stands to reason."

It seems a childish superstition, and yet if we could probe this belief to the bottom we might find that there is a truth beneath the apparent foolishness. It is that truth which Whitman, in his "Drum Taps," expresses over his fallen comrade--

O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
Nor the bayonet stab what you really are!

There is something in the heroic soul that defies death, and the simple mind only translates that faith in the deathlessness of the spirit into material terms. Drake lies in his hammock in Nombre Dios Bay, but he lies "listening for the drum and dreamin' arl the time of Plymouth Hoe."

Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when your powder's running low--
"If the Dons sight Devon
I'll leave the port of Heaven,
And we'll drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago."

And so the legend of Drake's drum lives on, and long centuries after, in the midst of another and fiercer storm, men sail the seas and hear that ghostly inspiration to brave deeds and brave death. The torch of a great spirit never goes out. It is handed on from generation to generation and flames brightest when the night is darkest. And that I think is the truth that dwells at the back of my companion's obstinate credulity. Kitchener has become to him a symbol of something that cannot die, and his non-metaphysical mind must have some material immortality to give his faith an anchorage. And so, out in the vague shadows of the borderland he sees the stalwart figure still at his post--"laying by," it is true, but watching and waiting and "listening for the drum" that shall summon him back to the field of action.

As the train slowed down at a country station and he prepared to go out into the night, he repeated in firm but friendly accents: "No, I can't never believe that he's dead.... Stands to reason." And as he bade me "Good-night," I said, "I think you are right. I think he is living, too." And as the door closed, I added to myself, "Stands to reason."

ON TALK AND TALKERS

The other day I went to dine at a house known for the brilliancy of the conversation. I confess that I found the experience a little trying. In conversation I am naturally rather a pedestrian person. The talk I like is the talk which Washington Irving had in mind when he said that "that is the best company in which the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant." I do not want to be expected to be brilliant or to be dazzled by verbal pyrotechnics. I like to talk in my slippers, as it were, with my legs at full stretch, my mind at ease, and with all the evening before me. Above all, I like the company of people who talk for enjoyment and not for admiration. "I am none of those who sing for meat, but for company," says Isaac Walton, and therein is the secret of good talk as well as of cheerful song. But at this dinner table the conversation flashed around me like forked lightning. It was so staccato and elusive that it seemed like talking in shorthand. It was a very fencing match of wit and epigram, a sort of game of touch-and-go, or tip-and-run, or catch-as-catch-can, or battledore and shuttlecock, or demon patience, or anything you like that is intellectually and physically breathless and baffling. I thought of a bright thing to say now and then, but I was always so slow in getting away from the mark that I never got it out. It had grown stale and out of date before I could invest it with the artistic merit that would enable it to appear in such brilliant company. And so, mentally out of breath, I just sat and felt old-fashioned and slow, and tried to catch the drift of the sparkling dialogue. But I looked as wise as possible, just to give the impression that nothing was escaping me, and that the things I did not say were quite worth saying. That was Henry Irving's way when the conversation got beyond him. He just looked wise and said nothing.

There are few things more enviable than the quality of good talk, but this was not good talk. It was clever talk, which is quite a different thing. There was no "stuff" in it. It was like trying to make a meal off the east wind, which it resembled in its hard brilliancy and lack of geniality. It reminded me of the tiresome witticisms of Mr. Justice Darling, who always gives the impression of having just come into court from the study of some jest book or a volume of appropriate quotations. The foundation of good talk is good sense, good nature, and the gift of fellowship. Given these things you may serve them up with the sauce of wit, but wit alone never made good conversation. It is like mint sauce without the lamb.

Fluent talkers are not necessarily good conversationalists. Macaulay talked as though he were addressing a public meeting, and Coleridge as though he were engaged in an argument with space and eternity. "If any of you have got anything to say," said Samuel Rogers to his guests at breakfast one morning, "you had better say it now you have got a chance. Macaulay is coming." And you remember that whimsical story of Lamb cutting off the coat button that Coleridge held him by in the garden at Highgate, going for his day's work into the City, returning in the evening, hearing Coleridge's voice, looking over the hedge and seeing the poet with the button between forefinger and thumb still talking into space. His life was an unending monologue. "I think, Charles, that you never heard me preach," said Coleridge once, speaking of his pulpit days. "My dear boy," answered Lamb, "I never heard you do anything else."

Johnson's talk had the quality of conversation, because, being a clubbable man, he enjoyed the give-and-take and the cut-and-thrust of the encounter. He liked to "lay his mind to yours," as he said of Thurlow, and though he was more than a little "huffy" on occasion he had that wealth of humanity which is the soul of hearty conversation. He quarrelled heartily and forgave heartily--as in that heated scene at Sir Joshua's when a young stranger had been too talkative and knowing and had come under his sledge hammer. Then, proceeds Boswell, "after a short pause, during which we were somewhat uneasy;--Johnson: Give me your hand, Sir. You were too tedious and I was too short.--Mr. ----: Sir, I am honoured by your attention in any way.--Johnson: Come, Sir, let's have no more of it. We offend one another by our contention; let us not offend the company by our compliments." He always had the company in mind. He no more thought of talking alone than a boxer would think of boxing alone, or the tennis player would think of rushing up to the net for a rally alone. He wanted something to hit and something to parry, and the harder he hit and the quicker he parried the more he loved the other fellow. That is the way with all the good talkers of our own time. Perhaps Mr. Belloc is too cyclonic and scornful for perfect conversation, but his energy and wit are irresistible. I find Mr. Bernard Shaw far more tolerant and much less aggressive in conversation than on paper or on the platform. But the princes of the art, in my experience, are Mr. Birrell, Lord Morley, and Mr. Richard Whiteing, the first for the rich wine of his humour, the second for the sensitiveness and delicacy of his thought, the third for the deep love of his kind that warms the generous current of his talk. I would add Mr. John Burns, but he is really a soloist. He is too interesting to himself to be sufficiently interested in others. When he is well under way you simply sit round and listen. It is capital amusement, but it is not conversation.

It is not the man who talks abundantly who alone keeps the pot of conversation boiling. Some of the best talkers talk little. They save their shots for critical moments and come in with sudden and devastating effect. Lamb had that art, and his stammer was the perfect vehicle of his brilliant sallies. Mr. Arnold Bennett in our time uses the same hesitation with delightful effect--sometimes with a shattering truthfulness that seems to gain immensely from the preliminary obstruction that has to be overcome. And I like in my company of talkers the good listener, the man who contributes an eloquent silence which envelops conversation in an atmosphere of vigilant but friendly criticism. Addison had this quality of eloquent silence. Goldsmith, on the other hand, would have liked to shine, but had not the gift of talk. Among the eloquent listeners of our day I place that fine writer and critic, Mr. Robert Lynd, whose quiet has a certain benignant graciousness, a tolerant yet vigilant watchfulness, that adds its flavour to the more eager talk of others.

It was a favourite fancy of Samuel Rogers that "perhaps in the next world the use of words may be dispensed with--that our thoughts may stream into each other's minds without any verbal communication." It is an idea which has its attractions. It would save time and effort, and would preserve us from the misunderstandings which the clumsy instrument of speech involves. I think, as I sit here in the orchard by the beehive and watch the bees carrying out their myriad functions with such disciplined certainty, that there must be the possibility of mutual understanding without speech--an understanding such as that which Coleridge believed humanity would have discovered and exploited if it had been created mute.

And yet I do not share Rogers's hope. I fancy the next world will be like this, only better. I think it will resound with the familiar speech of our earthly pilgrimage, and that in any shady walk or among any of the fields of asphodel over which we wander we may light upon the great talkers of history, and share in their eternal disputation. There, under some spreading oak or beech, I shall hope to see Carlyle and Tennyson, or Lamb and Hazlitt and Coleridge, or Johnson laying down the law to Langton and Burke and Beauclerk, with Bozzy taking notes, or Ben Jonson and Shakespeare continuing those combats of the Mermaid Tavern described by Fuller--the one mighty and lumbering like a Spanish galleon, the other swift and supple of movement like an English frigate--or Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims still telling tales on an eternal May morning. It is a comfortable thought, but I cannot conceive it without the odd, cheerful din of contending tongues. I fancy edging myself into those enchanted circles, and having a modest share in the glorious pow-wows of the masters. I hope they won't vote me a bore and scatter at my approach.

ON A VISION OF EDEN

I had a glimpse of Eden last night. It came, as visions should come, out of the misery of things. In all these tragic years no night spent in a newspaper office had been more depressing than this, with its sense of impending peril, its disquieting _communique_, Wytschaate lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the map with its ever retreating British line; the struggle to write cheerfully in spite of a sick and foreboding heart--and then out into the night with the burden of it all hanging like a blight upon the soul. And as I stood in the dark and the slush and the snow by the Law Courts I saw careering towards me a motor-bus with great head-lights that shone like blast furnaces on a dark hillside. It seemed to me like a magic bus pounding through the gloom with good tidings, jolly tidings, and scattering the darkness with its jovial lamps. Heavens, thought I, what strangers we are to good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and radiant, for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear. The bus stopped and I got inside, and inside it was radiant too--so brilliant that you could not only see that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh and blood and not mere phantoms in the darkness, but that you could read the paper with luxurious ease.

But I did not read the paper. I didn't want to read the paper. I only wanted just to sit back and enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit bus. It was as though at one stride I had passed out of the long and bitter night of the black years into the careless past, or forward into the future when all the agony would be a tale that was told. One day, I said to myself, we shall think nothing of a bus like this. All the buses will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at midnight through streets as bright as day. The gloom will have vanished from Trafalgar Square and the fairyland of Piccadilly Circus will glitter once more with ten thousand lights singing the praises of Oxo and Bovril and Somebody's cigarettes and Somebody else's pills. We shall look up at the stars and not fear them and at the moon and not be afraid. The newspaper will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor slaughter the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts.

And as I sat in the magic bus and saturated myself with this intoxicating vision of the Eden that will come when the madness is past, I wondered what I should do on entering that blessed realm that was lost and that we yearn to regain. Yes, I think I should fall on my knees. I think we shall all want to fall on our knees. What other attitude will there be for us? Even my barber will fall on his knees. "If I thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said firmly the other day, "I'd fall on my knees _this very night_." He spoke as though nothing but peace would induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of thing. I tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found it beyond me. It rather resembled the naked commercialism of King Theebaw, who when his favourite wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts if she recovered, and when she died brought up a park of artillery and blew their temple down. But my barber, nevertheless, had the root of the matter in him, and I would certainly follow his example.

But then--what then? Well I should want to get on to some high and solitary place--alone, or with just one companion who knows when to be silent and when to talk--there to cleanse my soul of this debauch of horror. I would take the midnight train and ho! for Keswick. And in the dawn of a golden day--it must be a golden day--I would see the sun

Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye

and set out by the lapping waves of Derwentwater for glorious Sty Head and hear the murmurs from Glaramara's inmost caves and scramble up Great Gable and over by Eskhause and Scafell and down into the green pastures of Langdale. And there in that sanctuary with its starry dome and its encompassing hills I should find the thing I sought.

Then, like the barber, I shall be moved to do something desperate. I shall want some oblation to lay on the altar, and if I know my companion he will not have forgotten his hundred foot of rope or his craft of the mountains and together we will

Leave our rags on Pavey Ark,
Our cards on Pillar grim.

And then, the consecration and the offering complete, back to the world that is shuddering, white-faced and wondering, into its Paradise Regained.... Why, here is St. John's Wood already. And Lord's! Of course, I _must_ have a day at Lord's. It will be a part of the ritual of reconciliation. The old players will not be there, for the gulf with the past is wide and the bones of many a great artist lie on distant fields. But we must recapture their music and pay homage to their memory. Yes, I will take my lunch to Lord's--or perchance the Oval--and sit in the sunshine and hear the merry tune of bat and ball, and walk over the greensward in the interval and look at the wicket, and talk for a whole day with my companion of the giants of old and of the doughty things we have seen them do. Haig and Hindenburg, Tirpitz and Jellicoe, all the names that have filled our nightmare shall be forgotten: there shall fall from our lips none but the names of the goodly game--"W.G." and Ranji, Johnny Briggs and Lohmann, Spofforth and Bonner, Ulyett and Barnes (a brace of them) and all the jolly host. We'll not forget one of them. Not one. For a whole day we will go it, hammer and tongs.

And there are ever so many more things I shall want to do. I shall want to go and see the chestnuts at Bushey Park on Chestnut Sunday. I shall want to send Christmas cards, and light bonfires on the Fifth, and make my young friends April fools on the First, and feel what a tennis racket is like, and have hot cross buns on Good Friday and pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. I shall want to go and sit on the sands and hear nigger minstrels again, and talk about the prospects of the Boat Race, and take up all the pleasant threads of life that fell from our hands nearly four years ago. In short, I shall plunge into all the old harmless gaieties that we have forgotten, have no time for, no heart for, no use for to-day.

But the bus has stopped and I am turned out of Eden into the snow and the slush and the never-ending night. The magic chariot goes on with its blazing lights, and a bend in the road quenches the pleasant vision in darkness.

ON A COMIC GENIUS

"Like to see Harry Lauder? Of course I should like to see Harry Lauder. But how can I decently go and see Harry Lauder with Lord Devonport putting us on rations, with every hoarding telling me that extravagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square aflame with commands to me to go to the bank or the post-office and put every copper I have, as well as every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan? Do you realise that the five shillings I should pay for a seat to see Harry Lauder would, according to the estimate of the placards on the walls, buy thirty-one and a half bullets to send to the Germans? Now, on a conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bullets ought to----"

"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has subscribed L52,000 to the War Loan. In going to see him, therefore, you are subscribing to the War Loan. You are making him your agent. You pass the cash on to him and he passes the bullets on to the Germans. It is a patriotic duty to go and see Harry Lauder."

I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, but it seemed a good enough answer to the hoardings, and I went. It was a poor setting for the great man--one of those dismal things called revues, that are neither comedies nor farces, nor anything but shambling, hugger-mugger contraptions into which you fling anything that comes handy, especially anything that is suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster young women. I confess that I prefer my Harry without these accompaniments. I like him to have the stage to himself. I like Miss Ethel Levy to be somewhere else when he is about. I do not want anything to come between me and the incomparable Harry any more than I want anyone to help me to appreciate the Fifth Symphony by beating time with his foot and humming the melody.

And for the same reason. The Fifth Symphony or any other great work of art creates a state of mind, a spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed by any intrusive and alien note. And it is this faculty of creating a state of feeling, an authentic atmosphere of his own, that is the characteristic of the art of Harry Lauder, and the secret of the extraordinary influence he exercises over his public. If you are susceptible to that influence the entrance of the quaint figure in the Scotch cap, the kilt and the tartan gives you a sensation unlike anything else on the stage or in life. Like Bottom, you are translated. Your defences are carried by storm, your severities disperse like the mist before the sun, you are no longer the man the world knows; you are a boy, trooping out from Hamelin town with other boys to the piping of the magician. The burden has fallen off your back, the dark mountain has opened like a gateway into the realms of light and laughter, and you go through, dancing happy, to meet the sunshine.

This atmosphere is not the result of conscious art or of acting in the professional sense. It would even be true to say that Harry Lauder is not an actor at all. Contrast him with the other great figure of the music-hall stage in this generation, Albert Chevalier, and you will understand what I mean. Chevalier is never himself, but always somebody else, and that somebody else is astonishingly real--an incomparable coster, a serio-comic decayed actor, a simple old man celebrating the virtues of his "Old Dutch." With his great powers of observation and imitativeness he gives you a subtle study of a type. He is so much of an artist that his own personality never occurs to you. If Chevalier came on as Chevalier you would not know him.

But Harry Lauder is the most personal thing on the stage. You do not want him to imitate someone else: you want him to be just himself. It doesn't much matter what he does, and it doesn't much matter how often you have seen him do it. In fact, the oftener you have seen him do it the better you like it. His jokes may be old, but they are never stale. They ripen and mellow with time; they are like old friends and old port that grow better with age. His songs may be simple and threadbare. You don't care. You just want him to go on singing them, singing about the bluebells in the dells and the bonnie lassie, and the heather-r, the bonnie pur-r-ple heather-r, and pausing to explain to you the thrifty terms on which he has bought "the ring." You want to see him walk, you want to see him skip--oh, the incomparable drollery of that demure little step!--you want to hear him talk, you want to hear him laugh. In short, you just want him to be there doing anything he likes and making you happy and idyllic and childlike and forgetful of all the burden and the mystery of this inexplicable world.

He has art, of course--great art; a tuneful voice; a rare gift of voice-production, every word coming full and true, and with a delicate sense of value; a shrewd understanding of the limits of his medium; a sly, dry humour which makes his simple rusticity the vehicle of a genial satire. And his figure and his face add to his equipment. His walk is priceless. His legs--oh, who shall describe those legs, those exiguous legs, so brief and yet so expressive? Clothed in his kilt and his tartan, he is grotesque and yet not grotesque, but whimsical, droll, a strange mixture of dignity and buffoonery. Your first impulse is to laugh at him, your next and enduring impulse is to laugh with him. You cannot help laughing with him if you have a laugh in you, for his laugh is irresistible. It is so friendly and companionable, so full of intimacies, so open and sunny.