Chapter III: Part 3

But, to take a recent instance, I do not imagine that Rupert Brooke was conscious of any indebtedness to Thoreau when he wrote:

Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
_And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes._

Yet I do not think it would be possible to deny to these lines an indisputable echo of Thoreau's:

_I hearing get who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;_
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern who had but learning's lore.

It is conceivable that Brooke had not read Thoreau, though not probable. What is probable is that he had read the lines and that their vivid comparison of physical and spiritual apprehension had taken seed in his fertile mind and germinated in due season.

It would not be easy for a man who wrote much to escape reminiscences of this sort. Even if he read nothing he would still inevitably hit on many ideas, similes, images, that others had used before him. The charge of plagiarism is only valid where the borrowing is deliberate and employed without creating new thought and new effects. Perhaps the most familiar illustration is that of Macaulay's New Zealander in the essay on Ranke's _History of the Popes_. It has been traced to many sources. It is found in Mrs. Barbauld and in Volney's _Ruins of Empires_. But the most exact parallel is this from Shelley's introduction to _Peter Bell the Third_:

Hoping that the immortality you have given to the Fudges you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation that when London is an habitation of bitterns; when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream; some transatlantic commentator, etc.

There is the whole vision complete, done in the spirit of comedy a generation before Macaulay dressed it in the pomp of his martial prose. Of course, Macaulay was familiar with the passage, and I assume he would have said that the idea was so exploited that it was common property which anybody was entitled to use who had a need and a use for it. And that is the best excuse that can be urged for most plagiarisms which are not mere cases of brazen theft or sheer desecration. It is the latter offence which is the more inexcusable. Honest stealing may be defended; but to steal and to degrade is past forgiveness. What adequate punishment could one devise for that queer ornament of the Church, Warburton, who in his _Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles_ could, half a century after the publication of the _Areopagitica_, write thus:

Methinks I see her, like a mighty eagle, renewing her immortal youth and purging her opening sight at the unobstructed benign meridian Sun who some pretend to say had been dazzled and abused by an inglorious pestilential meteor; while the ill-affected birds of night would with their envious hootings prognosticate a length of darkness and decay.

If this banal nonsense is compared with Milton's original it will not be easy to deny it the distinction of being the most clumsy example of plagiarism on record. And Pope himself could not only plagiarise but belittle his plunder, as witness his appropriation of Jonson's fine lines:

What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?

which he converts into:

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps and points to yonder glade?

Mr. Kipling, who is not himself, I think, much given to borrowing from others, is the most unequivocal advocate of free trade in plagiarism:

When 'Omer smote his bloomin' lyre,
'E 'eard men sing by land and sea.
And what 'e thought 'e might require
'E went and took--the same as me.

Men knew he stole; 'e knew they knowed.
They never made no noise or fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,
And 'e winked back--the same as us.

That may be the lawless law for the Olympians, but it will not serve humbler folk. You must be a big man to plagiarise with impunity. Shakespeare can take his "borrowed plumes" from whatever humble bird he likes, and, in spite of poor Greene's carping, his splendour is undimmed, for we know that he can do without them. Burns can pick up a lilt in any chapbook and turn it to pure gold without a "by your leave." These gods are beyond the range of our pettifogging meums and tuums. Their pockets are so rich that a few coins that do not belong to them are no matter either way. But if you are a small man of exiguous talents and endeavour to eke out your poverty from the property of others you will discover that plagiarism is a capital offence, and that the punishment is for life. In literature--whatever the case may be in life--there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, and "that in the captain's but a choleric word which in the soldier is flat blasphemy."

THE CASE OF DEAN INGE

We now know, from his own lips, what is wrong with Dean Inge. Nature has denied him the sense of music. He can neither sing nor make a joyful noise. He knows but two tunes, _God Save the King_ and _John Peel_, and even these he, apparently, only recognises from afar. All the rest of the universe of harmony is just a jumble of strange noises to him. The pealing of the organ and the thrilling song of the choristers convey nothing to his imprisoned soul as he sits in his stall at St. Paul's. The release of the spirit, that feeling of getting clear of the encumbering flesh and escaping to a realm where all the burden and the mystery of this unintelligible world seem like a rumour from afar, a tale of little meaning, never comes to him. Let us assume that the escape is an illusion. But what an illusion! What an experience to have missed! Can we wonder that the Dean is a sad man and utters mournful sounds?

Perhaps Shakespeare, with his passion for song, overshot the mark when he said that the man who has not music in his soul

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.

But there is a measure of truth in the axiom. We like complete men--men with all their spiritual limbs as well as all their physical limbs. We like them to have humour as well as gravity, to be able to sing as well as sigh, to love work and to love play, and not to be shut off from any part of the kingdom of the mind. No doubt the Dean will point out that many very eminent men have shared his affliction, and we shall be bound to agree that it is dangerous to generalise in this matter, as in most things. I could conceive him making out a very good case for the non-musical brotherhood. There is, of course, the leading instance of that most human and beautiful of spirits, Charles Lamb, who was even more deficient than the Dean, for he did not know _God Save the King_. But then, unlike the Dean, he had the desire to sing. The spirit was there, but it could find no utterance. He had tried for years, he tells us, to learn _God Save the King_, humming it to himself in quiet corners and solitary places, without, according to his friends, coming "within several quavers of it." No, I do not think, on second thoughts, that we can allow the Dean to claim St. Charles. He was a trier, like Mr. Chesterton. No one would suggest that Mr. Chesterton was musical, but he has the spirit of song in him and in a chorus he is splendid. He emits an enormous and affable rumble that suggests an elephant doing a cake-walk, or large lumps of thunder bumping about irrelevantly in the basement of the harmony.

But the Dean may have Southey. He is surrendered freely and ungrudgingly. He certainly had no feeling for music and no desire to feel it. "You are alive to know what follows," he says, describing a play, "and lo!--down comes the curtain and the fiddles begin their abominations." The fiddles begin their abominations! Take Bob Southey out, good Dean, and relieve us of his unctuous presence. And I am afraid we must let the Dean have Scott, too, though I part with him with sorrow. "I do not know and cannot utter a note of music," wrote Sir Walter; "and complicated harmonies seem to me a babble of confused though pleasing sounds." Pleasing, you observe. I am not sure that we cannot snatch Sir Walter from the Dean's clutches after all. We must part with Tennyson and Ruskin, neither of whom had the sense of music, and with Macaulay, who could only recognise one tune--_The Campbells are Coming_. But we cannot let the Dean have Coleridge, for though he disclaimed any understanding of complicated harmonies, he admits that he loved to hear Beethoven, and the man who could appreciate Beethoven a hundred years ago must not go in the Dean's gloomy galley.

Nor shall old Sam Johnson go there, though he confessed that he was insensible to the power of music. "I told him," says Boswell, "that it affected me to such a degree as to agitate my nerves painfully, producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and of daring resolution, so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest part of the battle. 'Sir,' said he, 'I should never hear it if it made me such a fool.'" But I claim Samuel on the ground that during the tour in the Hebrides he heard with rapt attention the performance of the _Lament of the Scalded Cat_, and still more because at Ashbourne he listened patiently to a great number of tunes on the fiddle, and desired to have _Let ambition fire thy mind_ played over again. It is a small thing, I own--a trivial ground on which to claim him. I have never heard _Let ambition fire thy mind_, but the incident shows that Johnson had the root of the matter in him. Would the Dean, or Bob Southey, have asked to have _Let ambition fire thy mind_ played over again? Would they have listened with rapt attention to _The Lament of the Scalded Cat_? Not they.

But even in the case of the Dean there is one pale, watery gleam of light in the general gloom. He knows _John Peel_. In his sombre heart that jolly song perhaps wakens some latent emotion of joy. It may be that with that key to the prison he might yet be rescued from his dungeon and turned into a happier man. Why should not the choir of St. Paul's try to convert him? Let them step across the Churchyard at night to the Dean's recess and ask in resonant chorus--

D'ye ken John Peel wi' his coat so grey?
D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
D'ye ken John Peel when he's far, far away
With his hounds and his horn in the morning?

and go on asking until the Dean comes to the window with the response--

Yes, I ken John Peel, and Ruby too.
Ranter and Ringwood, Bellman and True,
From a find to a check, from a check to a view.
From a view to a death in the morning.

And now, gentlemen, the chorus, if you please-- all together:

For the sound of his horn called me from my bed, etc.

It would be a great night in St. Paul's Churchyard, and it might do the Dean good. And we should all rejoice to hear him make a joyful noise for a change, even though it could not be called music.

A TALE OF FLEET STREET

No doubt there were greater things in Sir James Barrie's speech to the undergraduates at St. Andrews than the story of his conquest of Fleet Street; but for me, as for many others, there was nothing so interesting. It touched old chords of memory. There are many who have shared Sir James's youthful struggles without sharing his dazzling triumphs. My own thoughts went back more than forty years ago, about the time when Barrie came to London to try his luck in the enchanted street. I recalled two brothers--I knew them well--living in a country town, whose eyes were fixed on the starry realm of Fleet Street from afar. What a remote, impossible, golden world it seemed! Once they had known a fellow that had gone into it. He had been as one of themselves, familiar, companionable, ordinary; but one incredible day he had flown away to Fleet Street as naturally as a bird flies home to its nest, and they remained behind to imagine the sea of glory into which he had passed.

Then one day something happened. The younger of the two boys, Jonathan, noticed that the family copy of the _Standard_ (that fine old paper that perished so lamentably of Tariff Reform) had been cut. An article, a column in length, had disappeared from the leader page. His curiosity was awakened. There was only one person in the household who was likely to have done this thing, and that was his brother, Geoffrey. But to ask Geoffrey about it was impossible. He was a reticent person, who did not throw his confidences about, least of all among younger brothers. But Jonathan knew that he had been writing in the privacy of his bedroom late at night, and suspected that something had come of it. So he went out and purchased another copy of the _Standard_, turned to the column that had been missing, and there saw an article:

ON A COUNTRY CORN EXCHANGE

_From a Correspondent_

Ah! so he had done it, thought Jonathan. He had got his foot in the famous street with the golden pavements. That night he observed Geoffrey with a new feeling of importance, and saw him retire early to his bedroom with the delightful sense of sharing his great secret without his knowledge.

After that he waited for the _Standard_, as eagerly as Geoffrey. He came to know the symptoms of an approaching event, and when he saw his brother cling to the _Standard_ at breakfast and disappear with it into the garden, he knew that it was not the cricket news only--important as that was to both of them in those days--that made the paper so absorbing, and that when it fell to him there would be a gap in its contents. Then he noticed that other papers began to have occasional gaps, and life became a thrilling pursuit of Geoffrey's adventures in Fleet Street.

But the pursuit was not enough. It whetted his appetite for adventures of his own, and he too began to retire to his bedroom early and write long and late, until the door opened and a gentle voice would say, "Child, you ought to be in bed." I fancy it was poor stuff that Jonathan wrote, and Fleet Street showed a cold indifference to it. There was one article on _A Harvest Home_ that grew worn and crumpled by many transits through the post. But the struggle was not in vain. One unforgettable day he opened an evening paper, and there--Lo! Behold! ... And next morning the postman brought a letter from the editor of the paper, stating--could he believe his eyes?--that he would be glad to receive further articles of the same character from his contributor. The sun shone with extraordinary splendour that day, and the birds sang more joyously than they had ever sung before. Jonathan walked on air--with the astonishing letter in his pocket--and he felt that Nature was rejoicing with him.

It is an old tale of far-off, forgotten things, called to mind by the recollections of Sir James Barrie. Perhaps it is worth telling, for the encouragement of other youths whose eager eyes are turned, wisely or unwisely, towards Fleet Street. I have lost sight of one of the brothers for many years; but he came to some prominence, edited a famous paper, and told me that when he went into the office he found, seated at a humble desk, the youth whose wonderful translation to Fleet Street had once filled him with envy and longing. The other brother still writes. I fancy I recognise his hand sometimes in articles that still have the note of that much-travelled manuscript of the _Harvest Home_.

ON THE TOP NOTE

A pleasant-looking young lady (whose name I think was Pamela) sitting opposite me in the bus was complaining to her companion that Reginald was so dead-alive. You couldn't get him excited about anything. He was most _frightfully_ clever, of course--a B.Sc. and all that sort of thing, don't you know; but, oh, so _awfully_ icy. You went to a theatre with him, and you got most _tremendously_ thrilled, and he would say, "Yes, quite nice." Or you got him to read a book that was simply ripping and that you had _wallowed_ in most terrifically, and he would say, "Quite nice." She liked people to be enthusiastic. It was most horribly disappointing when you were _simply boiling_ with excitement to hear someone say, "Yes, quite nice." It made you feel _most awfully_ done in, don't you know. If people enjoyed themselves, why shouldn't they say they enjoyed themselves and let themselves "go" a bit? She always let herself go.

I felt that I agreed with her on the main issue. Reginald was aggravating. I felt that I knew Reginald. I saw him going through life more than a little bored with everything. There's nothing new and nothing true, and no matter, he seems to say. Man delights him not, nor woman neither. He is astonished at nothing, amused by nothing, cheered by nothing. His mind has disciplined his emotions so effectually that they have ceased to have anything to do. He is superior to tears or laughter, and would refuse to be surprised even if he saw the lions by the Nelson Column suddenly stand up and roar for their dinner. As a moderately enthusiastic person, I sympathised with the young lady opposite about Reginald. I wished Reginald would let himself go a bit.

But then it seemed to me that a mist passed before my vision and that Reginald himself was sitting in the seat opposite talking to a friend about Pamela. He liked Pamela very much, he said, but really her gush got on his nerves. She was always on her top note. Everything was most frightfully good or most awfully jolly or most hideously bad. Why couldn't people express themselves reasonably and use words with some respect for their meaning? He wished someone would tell Pam not to shriek every time she opened her mouth. It was such a pity, because she really had a pretty mouth and was a nice girl.

And hearing (imaginatively) Reginald's view of the matter, I was bound to admit that he had a case too. For I share his dislike of these extravagances of speech with which our Pamelas express the warmth of their feelings and the poverty of their minds. I should like to remind Pamela of the caution which Johnson gave to Boswell. He had accompanied Bozzy to Harwich to see him embark for Utrecht. I happened to say, says Boswell, it would be terrible if he should not find a speedy opportunity of returning to London, and be confined in so dull a place.

"Johnson: Don't, sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. It would _not_ be _terrible_, though I _were_ to be detained some time here."

It may have occurred to Boswell that Johnson was hardly the person to rebuke the use of big words; but though Johnson loved long words he did not use wrong words. His sin was not the hysteria of speech, but the pedantry of speech. He liked the fine clothes of language and dressed his thoughts up in full-bottomed wig and ruffles. It was a curious weakness for so great a man whose natural expression was always simple and vigorous. His big words were an after-thought of the pedant imposed on the brief, energetic utterance that was natural to him, as when commenting on some work he said that it "had not wit enough to keep it sweet" and then, pulling himself together, blunted the edge of that swift, keen criticism by saying that "it had not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction." But though Johnson's big words blurred his thought, they did not misrepresent it. They deprived it of force, but not of precision. His rebuke to Boswell was in regard to the extravagance of the word for the occasion. It would have been annoying or inconvenient to be kept at Harwich, but it would not have been terrible.

But the modern habit is not a mere matter of excess, as in the case of Boswell. In the attempt to be emphatic, Pamela murders speech. If you pass her the mustard, she says "Thanks, awfully." If she has enjoyed her game of tennis, she says it has been "awfully jolly," and if she approves of a book, she declares it to be "frightfully good." I am old enough to remember when this verbal atrocity began to be used, and I have lived to see it become the accepted coinage of a certain kind of conversation. It began as a piece of affectation, and has ended as a desolating vulgarity.

I do not think that Reginald wants Pamela to be less enthusiastic. He only wants her to preserve some proportion in regard to things. He feels as Jamie Soutar, of Drumtochty, in Ian Maclaren's story, felt. Jamie had "a gift o' discreemination," and was distressed by the purple adjectives of Mr. Hopps, the little Cockney. When Mr. Hopps raved about the sunset, Jamie observed that it was "no bad."

"No bad!" said Mr. Hopps. "I call it glorious, and if it hisn't, then I'd like to know what his."

"Man," replied Soutar austerely, "ye'll surely keep ae word for the 21st o' Reevelation."

Had any native used such words as "magnificent" in Drumtochty there would have been an uneasy feeling in the glen; the man must be suffering from wind in the head, and might upset the rotation of crops, sowing his young grass after potatoes, or replacing turnip with beet.

Reginald would not expect Pamela to put so harsh a bridle as this upon her tongue. He would only suggest that she should be sparing of her superlatives and her enthusiasm, so that when she used them they conveyed some sort of meaning and some sense of value. And probably Pamela would find that in curing herself she had cured Reginald. He would let himself "go" a little more if she let herself "go" a little less. For his iciness is probably an attempt to moderate her tropical fervour.

TEA AND MR. BENNETT

I knew that my friend Mr. Arnold Bennett was a handy man. It is his foible to do many things, and he does most of them surprisingly well. The villagers in the poem were left wondering how the schoolmaster's small head "could carry all he knew"; and I have myself often idly wondered how Mr. Bennett has managed to become an expert in so many arts and crafts in the intervals of pouring out a stream of books and plays that would alone seem the abundant occupation of all his waking hours. I suppose the explanation is, first, that he has in an unusual degree an industrious habit under iron discipline and an orderly mind that parcels out its minutes as a miser parcels out his gold; and, second, that he has a devouring curiosity about life.

He is a taster of life. He goes about like a country boy at a fair, taking a shy at every Aunt Sally, a ride on every roundabout, a shot at every shooting-range. The bearded woman delights him, and Punch and Judy hold him as the glittering eye of the ancient mariner held the wedding guest. He never grows tired of the show. He keeps into middle age the juvenile wonder which most of us lose when we lose our youth--hence the unfailing freshness of his mind. He is always interesting, because he is always interested. I would trust him to get along on a desert island as comfortably as any living man. He would write his own books, pen his own criticisms, paint his own pictures, make his own music, sail his own boat, take his own physic, run his own farm, engross his own conveyance, drive his own car, cook his own dinner--probably cut his own hair. For he can explain to you why the barbers of Italy are superior to the barbers of France and wherein the Dutch barber fails to touch the highest pinnacle of his calling. And all these things he would do, not clumsily or grudgingly as one driven into a corner by cruel circumstance, but joyfully, as a boy on a picnic. He would rejoice that at last he could do things as they should be done, instead of having them done for him by others in ways in which they should not be done.

For example, he would be able to have a cup of tea worth drinking. I did not know, but I am not surprised to learn, that he is an artist with the tea-pot. "I would undertake," he has just told the world, "to make better tea than nineteen-twentieths of the housewives of this country." If it were anybody else, we should say this was conceit; but Mr. Bennett without this note of childlike self-assurance would not be the Mr. Bennett we love. We should not know him. We should think he was just an ordinary man like the rest of us, and pass him by in the crowd. Moreover, when he tells us that he is a master craftsman with the tea-pot, I have no doubt he is speaking the truth. He will, I am sure, have studied this great subject as profoundly as he has studied the technique of play-writing.

And I daresay he would agree that it is at least as well worth studying as play-writing. Plays are only a very occasional affair in our life, but tea flows on for ever. At this moment I hear the pleasant clatter of the tea-things in the next room, and I suppose there is hardly a house in the land where the kettle is not boiling and the cups are not tinkling. When I went to see my lawyer yesterday afternoon he rang for "another cup," and if I go to see my publisher to-morrow afternoon he will ring for "another cup," too. Next to the Russians, we are, I suppose, the greatest tea-topers in the world. Tea-drinking has ceased to be merely a custom and has become a ritual as well. It is what the pipe of reconciliation is to the Indian or the eating of salt is to the Mussulman.

Yet though every day we drink enough tea to float the British Navy, it is probably true, as Mr. Bennett suggests, that few of us know how to make it. I do not pretend to be one of the few. But I delight in the rare occasions on which I get the real article, and in a casual way, quite different I am sure from Mr. Bennett's orderly experiments, I have picked up the rudiments of a system from those whose brews have pleased me. Thus from one great artist of the tea-pot, a fine old gentleman with a long white beard, who used to sit and watch the kettle boiling as anxiously as the doctor feels the pulse of his patient, I learned that the water should be poured on the tea the moment it comes to the boil. From another, a learned scientist, I gathered that boiling water (from another kettle, I fancy) should be poured in the pot before the tea is put in. A bachelor acquaintance of mine, on whom I called one afternoon, indoctrinated me with the idea of washing the tea with a rapid drench of boiling water drawn off instantly before pouring in the water intended for the brew. From another friend (this time a lady) I picked up the fact that the way to weaken your tea is not to pour more water into the tea-pot, but to dilute the beverage in the cup.

A small matter you say; but the art of making tea is composed of these small delicacies. What, for example, could seem a matter of more indifference than that of the order in which you pour the milk and the tea in the cup? Yet it is a capital point. Put the tea in first, and the virtue seems to have gone out of the cup; put the milk in first, and the subtle law of the art is observed. And the proportion of milk must be exact; you cannot add to it afterwards and get the same effect.

I pass by such fundamental points as the selection of the right tea for the water and the duty of pouring off the tea quickly so as to catch the first fine rapture of the leaf. But I hope I have said enough to set tongues wagging on this fruitful subject, and enough to win the respect (perhaps even the envy) of Mr. Arnold Bennett. I don't mind confessing that that is the reason I am writing this article. I am weary of the omniscience of Mr. Bennett. I am humiliated by the sense of the number of things I don't know or can't do when I am in his presence or read his books. If I did not love him I should hate him. I should write to the papers to denounce him as a charlatan. I should guy his pictures and scoff at his books and make fun of his criticisms about this, that and the other and quote slighting things about Jacks-of-all-trades and generally make myself unpleasant. But since I love him I content myself with saying firmly and even defiantly, that I have ideas on the art and science of tea-making, too. True, I have never made it, but I could make it at a pinch.

ON BUYING AND SELLING

Janet said that she had seen John Staunton in the village in his new car. He was very pleased with it, and apparently still more pleased that he had sold his old car just before the big reduction in the makers' prices was announced, with the result that he had got a new car for an old of the same make, and was some pounds in pocket into the bargain. "I should be ashamed to gloat over such a transaction," she said. Indeed, she was doubtful whether it was morally right to benefit in such a way.

I agreed that it was perhaps indecent to "gloat" over such a stroke of luck, but I could not agree that any reasonable moral consideration had been outraged by the affair. The question raised the problem of what is fair in the way of deals of this sort. What, for example, ought one to say of the case of the eminent statesman of these days, who, looking over the stock of a second-hand book-dealer, saw a copy of the first edition of Gray's Elegy marked at a few shillings, and bought it, took it away, and has probably got it to-day. He had got a prize worth, I think, in the neighbourhood of two hundred pounds. He knew its value, and apparently the bookseller did not. What was the "morality" in that case? Ought he to have summoned the bookseller and said, "My dear sir, are you aware that this little book which you offer me at the ridiculous price of a few shillings is worth a couple of hundred pounds?" I think that would be demanding too much of human nature. Bookbuying and bookselling is a business transaction like any other, and it is the bookseller's business to know what his stock is worth. All the same, I hope the eminent statesman sent the bookseller a substantial Christmas box without telling him what a fool he had been.

After all, the traffic in curiosities is a sort of sport in which sometimes the seller and sometimes the buyer wins the trick. I heard the other day an amusing incident of a man who was fond of collecting old furniture. He was walking in a remote country district when the rain came on, and he took shelter in a barn, at the door of which the farmer was standing. The collector noticed in a corner of the barn an old chest containing fodder of some sort. He looked at it, saw that it was obviously very old, spoke to the farmer about it, found he knew nothing of its value, and bought it for a comparatively small sum. Not long after a friend of his who knew of the bargain wandered to the same farm in the hope of picking up something for himself. He went into the barn and there, behold! was another old chest, containing some more old fodder. Only it wasn't an old chest. Like the other, it was simply a modern-antique--a bait for hungry trout to snap at. The farmer was just an agent. He did not invite people to buy, and he did not pretend that the pieces were old. He just sold them at a price if they were asked for. Was he morally culpable? Was he more culpable than the buyer would have been if he had taken advantage of the farmer's real instead of supposed ignorance?

If we applied the code of strict morality in these matters and asserted that no one must benefit by another's lack of knowledge, what would become of the Stock Exchange? It would have to close its doors forthwith. Nearly every transaction between a buyer and a seller is in the nature of a duel in which one backs his supposed knowledge against the other's supposed ignorance. If I have reason to know, let me say, that salt-water has got into the Mexican oil wells, is it wicked of me to sell out my shares in the company to some innocent person who does not possess that piece of information? After all, I may be wrong, and he may know more than I do. He may know that the menace was true, but he may have the later information that it has been overcome. Every transaction of this sort is admittedly a competition in knowledge or calculation, and each side takes the risk in the hope of taking the profit.

There are, of course, cases in which it would be dishonourable to profit by private knowledge. If I knew that a certain firm was going bankrupt and sold my shares in it to a man who could not possibly know and from whom I deliberately concealed my own absolute knowledge on the point, I should be guilty of an act which would not be morally distinguishable from theft. Or if I went into a remote house of a poor peasant, found a First Folio Shakespeare--think of it!--the market price of which is now over five thousand pounds, discovered that the peasant was ignorant of its value, and took it away for a pound or two, I should be morally, though not legally, a thief. Fortunately I shall never have such a temptation thrust on me. I wonder what I should do if I had.

The difference between such a case and that of the Gray's _Elegy_ is that the seller in the latter case was a business man setting his knowledge against the buyer's, and in the other he would be an innocent who was being rooked. In the matter of John Staunton I see no question of impropriety. One chanced to sell luckily and the other to buy unluckily. That is all. But I agree with Janet that John oughtn't to have "gloated" openly over the transaction. He should have purred to himself privately.

ON BIG WORDS

I was cutting down the nettles by the hedge with a bill-hook when a small man with spectacles, a straw hat, a white alpaca jacket, and a book under his arm came up, stopped, and looked on. I said "Good evening," and he said "Good evening." Then, pointing to my handiwork, he remarked:

"You find the nettles very difficult to eradicate?"

I said I found them hard to keep down.

"They disseminate themselves most luxuriantly," he said.

I replied that they spread like the dickens.

"But they have their utility in the economy of Nature," he said.

I replied that Nature was welcome to them as far as I was concerned.

He then remarked that it was most salubrious weather, and I agreed that it had been a fine day. But he was afraid, he said, that the aridity of the season was deleterious to the crops, and I replied that my potatoes were doing badly. After that, I think it occurred to him that we did not speak the same language, and with another "Good evening" he passed on and I returned to the attack on the nettles.

It is an excellent thing to have a good vocabulary, but one ought not to lard one's common speech or everyday letters with long words. It is like going out for a walk in the fields with a silk hat, a frock-coat, and patent leather boots. No reasonable person could enjoy the country in such a garb. He would feel like a blot on the landscape. He would be as much out of place as a guest in a smock-frock at a Buckingham Palace garden-party. And familiar conversation that dresses itself up in silk-hatted words is no less an offence against the good taste of things. We do not make a thing more impressive by clothing it in grand words any more than we crack a nut more neatly by using a sledge-hammer. We only distract attention from the thought to the clothes it wears. If we are wise our wisdom will gain from the simplicity of our speech, and if we are foolish our folly will only shout the louder through big words.

Take for example that remark of Dr. Johnson's about the swallows. "Swallows certainly sleep all the winter," he said. "A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a river." It was a foolish belief, but it would be unfair to scoff at Johnson for not being better informed than his contemporaries. It is that bumptious word "conglobulate" that does for him. It looks so learned and knowing that it calls attention to the absurdity like a college cap on a donkey's ears. A fine use of words does not necessarily mean the use of fine words. That was the mistake which Humpty-Dumpty made in _Alice in Wonderland_. He thought that "impenetrability" was such a magnificent word that it would leave Alice speechless and amazed. Many writers are like that. When the reporter says that So-and-So "manipulated the ivories" (meaning that he had played the billiard-balls into position), or that So-and-So "propelled the sphere" (meaning that he had kicked the football), he feels that he has got out of the rut of common speech when in fact he has exchanged good words for counterfeit coin. That is not the way of the masters of language. They do not vulgarise fine words. They glorify in simple words, as in Milton's description of the winged host:

Far off their coming shone...

Quite ordinary words employed with a certain novelty and freshness can wear a distinction that gives them not only significance but a strange and haunting beauty. I once illustrated the point by showing the effects which the poets, and particularly Wordsworth and Keats, extract from the word "quiet." Shakespeare could perform equal miracles with the trivial word "sweet," which he uses with a subtle beauty that makes it sing like a violin in the hands of a master. Who can be abroad in the sunshine and singing of these spring days without that phrase, "the sweet o' the year," carolling like a bird in the mind? It is not a "jewel five words long." It is a dewdrop from the very mint of Nature. But Shakespeare could perform this magic with any old word. Take "flatter." A plain, home-spun word, you would say, useful for the drudgery of speech but nothing more. Then Shakespeare takes it in hand, and it shines bright as Sirius in the midnight sky:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye.

I once wanted to use for purposes of quotation a familiar stanza of Burns, but one word, the vital word, escaped me. I give the stanza, with the word I lacked missing:

To make a happy fireside clime
For weans and wife--
That's the true (_missing word(s)_) and sublime
Of human life.

You, perhaps, know the missing word; but I could not recall it. I tried all the words that were serviceable, and each seemed banal and commonplace. I dare not, for shame, mention the words I tried to use as patches for Burns. When I turned up the poem and found that poignant word "pathos," I knew the measure of my failure to draw the poet's bow.

We carry big words in our head for the expression of our ideas, and short words in our heart for the expression of our emotions. Whenever we speak the language of true feeling, it is our mother tongue that comes to our lips. It is equal to any burden. Take the familiar last stanza of Wordsworth's: "Three years she grew in sun and shower":

Thus Nature spake--the work was done--
How soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.

It is so simple that a child might have said it, and so charged with emotion that a man might be forgiven if he could not say it. _A Shropshire Lad_ is full of this surge of feeling dressed in home-spun, as when he says:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Even in pictorial description the most thrilling effects, as in the case I have quoted from Milton, are produced not by the pomp of words but by the passion of words. In two rapid, breathless lines:

The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out,
With one stride comes the dark,

Coleridge flashes on the mind all the beauty and wonder of the tropic night. And though Shakespeare, like Milton and Wordsworth, could use the grand words when the purpose was rhetorical or decorative, he did not go to them for the expression of the great things of life. Then he speaks with what Raleigh calls the bare intolerable force of King Lear's:

Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.

The higher the theme rises the more simple and austere becomes the speech, until the words seem like nerves bared and quivering to the agony of circumstance:

_Lear_. And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.--
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,--
Look there, look there! [_He dies._

_Edgar_. He faints! My lord, my lord!--

_Kent_. Break, heart; I prithee, break!

_Edgar_. Look up, my lord.

_Kent_. Vex not his ghost: O let him pass! he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

The force of words can no farther go. And my friend in the white alpaca jacket will notice that they are all very little ones.

DO WE BUY BOOKS?

I have recently been in the throes of a double removal, and in the course of the operation comments were made by one person or another concerned in it on the prominence of books in my belongings. The van-man, with a large experience of removals, paid the tribute of astonishment at the spectacle, and the people who came to look at the house gaped at the books as though they were the last thing they expected to see in a decent suburban residence. Hitherto I had been rather ashamed of my library. In the course of a longish life I have accumulated some 2000 books. There is not much rubbish among them, for I have thinned them out periodically, but there are shameful blanks that are unfilled, and it had never occurred to me to think that they formed an unusual collection for a middle-class household.

But the inquiries I have made since lead me to the conclusion that they do, and that in the average suburban home the last thing that is thought about is the furnishing of a library. People who will spend many hundreds and even thousands of pounds in the course of years in making their house beautiful never give a serious thought to books. They will ransack London for suitable fittings, for rugs and hangings, china and cut-glass, mirrors and what-nots, but the idea of providing themselves with a moderate and well-selected library does not occur to them. If they gather books at all they gather them haphazard and without thought. A well-known publisher told me the other day that he was recently asked to equip a library in a new house in North London, and the instruction he received was to provide books that would fit the shelves which had been fixed. It was not the contents of the books that mattered, but the size.

This was no doubt an exceptional case, but it does represent something of the attitude of the average man to books. People who will spend one hundred and fifty pounds on a piano as a matter of course will not spend ten pounds a year or even five pounds a year in enriching their homes with all the best thought of all time. Go into any average provincial town and the last thing you will find is a decent book-shop. I recall more than one great industrial town of a population of over a hundred thousand which has only one such shop, and that is generally kept going by the sale of school-books. It is not because we cannot afford to buy books. We spend two hundred millions sterling a year on beer, and I doubt whether we spend two hundred million pence on literature. Many people can afford to buy motor-cars at anything from two hundred pounds who would be aghast at the idea of spending half a guinea occasionally on a book. They think so meanly of their minds as that.

Yet, merely as furniture, books are a cheaper and better decoration than blue china or Chippendale chairs. They are better because they put the signature of individuality upon a house. The taste for Chippendale chairs and blue china may be a mere vanity, a piece of coxcombry and ostentation, a fancy that represents, not a genuine personal taste for beautiful things, but an artificial passion for rare or expensive things. But a row of books will give a house character and meaning. It will tell you about its owner. It is a window let into the landscape of his life. When I go into a stranger's library I wander round the bookshelves to learn what sort of a person the stranger is, and when he comes in I feel that I know the key to his mind and the range of his interests. A house without books is a mindless and characterless house, no matter how rich the Persian rugs and how elegant the settees and the ornaments. The Persian rugs only tell you that the owner has got money, but the books will tell you whether he has got a mind as well. I was staying not long ago in a Northern town with a man who had a great house and fine grounds, two or three motor-cars, a billiard-room, and a multitude of other luxuries. The only thing he had not got was books. And the effect left on the mind by all his splendours was that he was pauper. "And where are your books?" asked a famous bookman of my acquaintance who was being shown over a West-End palace by the owner, who, in the last twenty years, had made a colossal fortune. "In the City," was the plutocrat's unblushing reply. He gloried in his poverty.

It is not a question of money. I repeat that books are the cheapest as well as the best part of the equipment of a house. You can begin your library with the expenditure of a couple of shillings. Nearly all the best literature in the world is at your command at two shillings a volume. For five pounds you can get a library of fifty books which contain "riches fineless." Even if you don't read them yourself, they are a priceless investment for your children. Holmes used to say that it took three generations of sprawling in a library to create a reading man; but I believe that any intelligent child who stumbles upon, let us say, Herodotus or _Two Years Before the Mast_ or Prescott's _Conquest of Peru_, or any similar masterpiece, will be caught by the glamour of books and will contract the reading habit for life. And what habit is there to compare with it? What delight is there like the revelation of books, the sudden impact of a master-spirit, the sense of windows flung wide open to the universe? It is these adventures of the mind, the joy of which does not pass away, that give the adventure of life itself beauty and fragrance, and make it

Rich as the oozy bottom of the deep,
With sunken wreck and sumless treasuries.

OTHER PEOPLE'S JOBS

I have been following with interest my friend Mr. Robert Lynd's quest of a soft job in the columns of _The Daily News_. I have been following it with interest, not only because I never willingly miss anything which that most witty and wise of writers pens, but also because the subject is near my heart. I say this without shame. There is nothing discreditable in desiring an agreeable occupation, light in labour and heavy in rewards. I do not pretend to have any passion for work, I know very few people who have, and I confess that I find most of those few very undesirable companions. If I were put upon oath I think I should have to admit that my impulse to work is the same humble one as Mr. Chesterton confessed to--

When I myself perceived that I
Must work or I should shortly die--

well, then he worked. And when he had driven off the shadow of death far enough to feel comfortable, no doubt he left off and did something pleasant. And so with most of us. It is only our dislike of the undertaker and all that he connotes that sucks us into the tubes in the morning and spews us out at night, and keeps us in the interval counting figures, serving out "sausage and mash," measuring yards of silk, tapping typewriters, saying "Walk this way, ma'am," trying boots on other people's feet, shouting "Full up" on buses, and "Stand clear of the gates" in lifts, and a thousand other things that make you tired to think of--things that have to be done, but are not a man's job to do.