Chapter IV: Part 4

Most of our work in this artificial civilisation of ours is like that. The shepherd who keeps sheep on the hillside and the labourer who tills the soil are living a noble life compared with the tawdry little things most of us are condemned to do in cities. We have to do them to keep the undertaker at bay, and we are not to be blamed if we go about with Mr. Lynd looking at other people's jobs and wishing we had got them. Thus he stands in front of the motor show-room, with his face glued to the window, envying the lucky salesman inside, who only has one customer in an hour to attend to, makes a pot of money out of him, and has all the rest of the day in which to smoke and gossip at the door and think about things. In the same way I never pass down Charing Cross Road without pausing in front of the book-shops and thinking what an agreeable time those fellows inside have. Why, my idea of happiness is to leave this tiresome world and go into a library and be forgotten, and here are lucky fellows who have to live in a library to earn their living.

But I daresay it is all an illusion. It is an illusion, no doubt, even in the case of postmen, for whom most of us retain a romantic and indestructible affection. They belong to the earliest of our memories, and get entangled in the clouds of glory, which, according to the poet, we trail into this world with us from afar. The clouds of glory fade, but the postman remains as a reminder that we once lived in the Golden Age. Next to the muffin-man, he seemed the most entirely enviable and likeable creature in trousers. The muffin-man, of course, had advantages. There were his muffins to begin with. And there was his bell. To have a bell of your own and to have the privilege of going down any street you liked ringing it as hard as you liked and scattering the good tidings of muffins put a man in a class by himself.

But the postman, if on a lower plane than the muffin-man, had a more continuous joy. He had not a bell of his own, but he had the run of other people's bells. He could ring any bell he liked and bang any knocker as hard as he chose without a thought of running away. And these delights he had every day and several times a day. He could go on ringing bells and knocking at doors till his arm ached. Nobody objected. On the contrary, you looked out for him, hoping that he would come and bang at your door in that breezy way of his. The longer he paused before banging, the better you liked him. It meant--it could only mean--that he had such a lot of letters for you that it took him a long time to find them all.

And, of course, the more letters there were the more joy there must be. That is the miracle with the postman. He brings bad news and good news and indifferent news, but we only remember him by his good news. Like the sun-dial, he only records the sunny hours. He is the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. He comes up the path, probably with a handful of accounts you have not paid, income tax demands, offers from kind gentlemen to lend you ten thousand pounds on your note of hand, applications for subscriptions, and other things that you would be pleased to do without. But no experience of the Barmecide feasts he is capable of offering you affects your faith in him and his good intentions. If he were to turn back in the middle of the path you would be disappointed. If he pass by your gate you are not grateful that he has not brought you ill-news. You suspect that something pleasant has unaccountably gone astray.

That is as it should be. When we have ceased to want to hear the postman's knock we may conclude that we have seen the best of the day, and that the demon of disillusion has us in thrall. It is to have given up hope that that legendary ship of our childhood will ever come home. It was that admirable vessel that made the future such an agreeable prospect. Everything would be possible when our ship came home. That it was a very rich ship and that it was on its way we did not doubt, for we had the word of most responsible people, mothers and aunts and grandmothers, on the subject. We could not understand why it tarried so long, but we did not suspect its _bona fides_ any more than its seaworthiness. Some day--it might be any day, possibly even to-morrow--the postman would come and knock lustily at the door and bring news that the ship was in port or, at least, had been sighted from the shore.

And though we have since discovered that those responsible people were talking less literally than we thought, and that that magic ship, with its golden argosy, was a thing of the fancy, we still see the postman turn in at the gate with a mild flutter of expectation. He is himself a sort of ship, laden with merchandise from afar. In his bag there must be incredible things, and some of them may be for us. It might be assumed that men whose coming gives so much joy are themselves joyful, that they love their calling so much that they would not change with kings, but experience reveals to us the melancholy truth that postmen are as afflicted with the discontents of life as the common run of mortals.

I fancy that if that motor salesman had come to the door and opened out his mind to Mr. Lynd he would have told him that selling motors was all right, but that not selling them, which occupied about nineteen hours out of twenty, was the most sickening job under the sun, and that the thing he really yearned after was to be literary critic, like that Mr. Robert Lynd, who wrote such stunning reviews in the papers. Now that was a job. There he sat, in an arm-chair before a ripping fire, surrounded by all the latest books, with his feet on the mantel-piece and no reason to put on his boots from morning to night, reading books and smoking his hardest, and then taking the author up, as it were, between thumb and forefinger and showing the world what an ugly guy of a fellow he was. Fancy being paid to read books and lamm the writers. Fancy being paid for having your name in the paper in big type that anybody could read half a dozen yards away. Yes, that was the sort of soft job he would like. Motors ...

That is the way of things. We are all apt to think we should be happy if we were doing somebody else's work--the king's, for example. Even the nursery rhyme inculcates in us the notion that kings are happy as the day is long, yet no intelligent coal-heaver who knew the blessings of liberty and obscurity would be able to endure the boredom and routine of a calling which compels a man to live as publicly as a bee in an observation hive. I have known people even envy a bishop's gaiters, but I should be surprised to learn that there was a single bishop on the bench who did not wish he could go about in trousers again, and take up a plain hum-drum occupation in which he could be as good as he liked without announcing it about the legs. The truth probably is that all these dreams of soft jobs are vanity and that the canker and the worm can gnaw at the heart of the best of them. I offer this modest reflection to Mr. Lynd in the hope that he will not cease to write beautiful articles in order to be an incompetent motor salesman or to mix drugs in a chemist's shop. I do not think he is the sort of man who could sell anything, and I fancy he is just the sort of man who would mix the drugs more than they ought to be mixed.

WHY I DON'T KNOW

I was asked the other day by one of those journals which love vast, resounding themes with which to astonish their readers to write an article on the most important man in the world. I declined, partly because I was busy and partly because I was lazy, but chiefly because I had not a ghost of a notion of the answer. Of course, it would have been possible for me to have discussed the claims of this man and that to pre-eminence, to have contrasted M. Poincaré with Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bernard Shaw with Mr. Charlie Chaplin, M. Trotsky with Signor Mussolini, Einstein with Rutherford, and so on; but I should not have answered the question. No one can answer the question. We can all guess; but one thing is pretty certain. We shall all guess wrong. The most important man in the world is somewhere, but he will not be known until he is dead, and we are all dead with him; not until our posterity looks back upon this time and says with one voice, "Behold, the man," as we to-day look back to the great age of Elizabeth and say, "Lo! Shakespeare." No one said it then, and no one thought it. Nearly two centuries had to pass before the true magnitude of this peak became visible and even then it had to be discovered by observers from afar, by the critics of a foreign land and a foreign tongue.

Was there ever a period in history when the world knew where to look for its chief of men? If ever it might have been expected to pick him out with the certainty of being right it would have been when Augustus Cæsar reigned at Rome over the whole known world. He was so supreme that he seemed less a man than a god. But down in a little province of his vast empire there was a Boy growing up who was destined to change the whole face of the world and to outshine Augustus as the sun outshines a rush-light. The magnificence of Augustus and his empire is an empty memory of nineteen centuries ago, but Christianity is still the mightiest force in the affairs of men.

Or suppose you had been living in the year 1506 in Valladolid, and had asked yourself who was the most important man alive. You would have said the Pope or the Emperor or Ferdinand, without knowing that they were nothing compared with a poor old man who was dying in poverty and neglect in a mean street of that famous city. He did not know himself how vast a thing he had done and how his name would outlive and outsoar those of kings and warriors, poets and statesmen. He did not know that he had not simply found a new way to the East Indies, but had discovered a New World, and that all the vast continent of America would be the everlasting memorial of his life of struggle and disappointment. One would like to think that the spirit of Columbus "poised in the unapparent" has the satisfaction of knowing what a resounding name he has left behind him.

Let us go on a few years. I will imagine that in 1530 I am asked, not by an editor--for that breed had not then been invented--but by some other curious inquirer, to direct him to the king of men then living. I should probably have answered with some confidence. It was the day of the Great Kings. I suppose three men of such remarkable powers as Henry VIII., Charles V., and Francis I. never reigned in Europe simultaneously. It was only a question of which was the greatest to decide who was the most important man in the world. I daresay I should have decided for Henry; but of course I should have been wrong. The most important man in the world was a person of whom I should not then have heard--a wandering scientist born on the Vistula, Copernicus by name, into whose profound mind there had come the most stupendous conception that ever thrilled the thought of man. The earth was not, as had been supposed through all the ages, the fixed centre of the universe around which the stars moved in obedient subjection, but a little planet rushing with the rest round its great over-lord, the sun. With that terrific discovery, the whole conception of the cosmos was changed, the earth became a speck of dust in the unthinkable vast, religion assumed new meanings, and man fell from his proud pre-eminence as the lord of creation. In its effects it was the most momentous thing that ever happened in the secular history of man; but the point here is that if you and I had been living then and had had Copernicus pointed out to us in the street we should not have known that he was beyond all comparison the most tremendous figure in the world.

Take another illustration. The end of the eighteenth century was a time of great men. If we had guessed then who was the most important man alive we should have been puzzled to decide between Pitt and Burke, Johnson and Washington, Nelson and Napoleon, and a multitude of others. None of us would have thought of looking for him in the person of a certain gentle, unassuming instrument-maker who filled a modest position in Glasgow University. Yet if the most important man in the world is he who sets in motion the forces--whether of ideas or physical powers--that most profoundly affect the life of men, then no one living from, say, 1760 to 1800, was comparable with James Watt. He inaugurated the Age of Steam. He released the greatest power that the ingenuity of man has ever invented, and the train that thunders through the land, and the ship that ploughs the sea, and the engine that drives a thousand looms are among the prolific children of his genius.

And so I repeat that I do not know who is the most important man in the world. He may be a solitary thinker wrestling with some vast conception that is destined to reshape all our thought. He may be some unknown scientist from whose laboratory there will emerge one day a power that will shake the heavens. He may be a prophet or a teacher who will help us to solve the riddle of this unintelligible world. He may be a discoverer or even a poet. I am sure he will not be a soldier, and I don't think he will be a politician. These people make a great noise in the world, but they rarely do anything that matters to posterity. The most important man in the world is probably making no noise at all. His noise will come late like the sound of a great gun heard from afar. But it is a noise that will echo down the ages.

ON ANTI-CLIMAX

The centenary of the birth of Coventry Patmore has produced many handsome tributes to that once popular, but now little-read poet. When I was a boy _The Angel in the House_ was as familiar as _In Memoriam_, and Patmore was a more prominent figure in the literary landscape than Browning. He has long lost that eminence, but his haughty genius, like that of Landor, will always command the respectful, if slightly chilly, admiration of certain minds. "I shall dine late," said Landor, "but the rooms will be well-lighted and the company fit, though few."

Patmore, who outlived his earlier reputation, felt the same assurance about himself. And rightly, for though it is probable that the dust will be allowed to gather on the unthumbed _Angel in the House_, some of his later poems have an energy and nobility that will keep them alive. _The Farewell_, for example, has the ring of deathlessness in it as assuredly as Drayton's _Parting_, of which it is reminiscent, or Browning's _Last Ride Together_. He will not be forgotten, too, for another reason. Fine poet though he was, he could come to grief badly, and the stanza with which he closed his most famous poem will live as an example of anti-climax:

But here their converse had its end;
For, crossing the Cathedral Lawn,
There came an ancient college-friend,
Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan,
Lifted his hat and bowed and smiled,
And filled her kind large eyes with joy,
By patting on the cheek her child,
With, "Is he yours, this handsome boy?"

"Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan"! Shades of Parnassus! It is easy to see how he came to grief. He had carried his high theme to a close, and wished to end his flight with composed wings and the negligible twitter of the bird at rest. But in the attempt to be simple he stumbled, as much greater poets like Wordsworth have stumbled, on the banal and the commonplace. We suffer from it something of the shock we receive from the historic greeting by Stanley of Livingstone in the depths of the African forest, which is an immortal example of anti-climax. The expedition for the discovery of Livingstone touched the epic note of grand adventure. It held the attention of the world, and the moment of the meeting was charged with the high emotions of a sublime occasion. And when they met (so the record stands), Stanley held out his hand and said, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." At that artificial word the epic collapses to the dimensions of a suburban reception. It is not easy to imagine what salutation would have fitted the end of so mighty a quest, but if Stanley had said, "Dr. Livingstone, I suppose," or preferably simply the name, the feeling of the occasion would not have been outraged, so slight are the things which separate the sublime from the ridiculous.

A lack of humour as much as of taste is usually the source of the anti-climax, as in the familiar example from the prize poem on the Mayflower:

And so, directed by the hand of God,
They sailed away until they reached Cape Cod.

The impossible transition from the plane of high spiritual ideas to a mere geographical fact was made grotesque by the name which only a very humourless person could have used in such a connection. Similarly, in the hardly less familiar illustration of bathos:

Here comes Dalhousie, the great God of War,
Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar,

the plunge from the Homeric vein to the Army List could only have been possible to a man who lacked humour even more than the sense of poetry.

That was what was wrong with Alfred Austin, the great master of bathos, who perpetrated more banalities than any poet since Pye. I like best his tribute to the dauntless soldiers:

They did not know what blench meant,
So they stayed in their entrenchment.

Here the grotesqueness of the rhyme emphasises the absurdity of the illustration. It is not staying in an entrenchment, but leaving an entrenchment that requires courage. Like the much greater Patmore, Austin could collapse into the commonplace in trying to achieve the simple and artless, as when he wrote:

The spring time, O, the spring time,
Who does not know it well--
When the little birds begin to sing
And the buds begin to swell.

Contrast these tinkling syllables with the surge of emotion with which another poet could charge the song of the birds and the bloom of the flowers:

Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon,
How can ye blume sae fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae fu' o' care?

I suppose no poet was ever more royally regardless of the smaller niceties of the poet's craft than Burns was, but it would not be easy to find in all his work a case where he comes down with the broken wing of anti-climax.

THE UNKNOWN WARRIOR[1]

[1] Written on the day of the interment of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey.

We shall not know his name. It will never be known, and we should not seek to know it. For in that nameless figure that is borne over land and sea to mingle its dust with the most sacred dust of England, we salute the invisible hosts of the fallen. We do not ask his name or whence he comes. His name is legion and he comes from a hundred fields, stricken with a million deaths.

Gaily or sadly, he went out to battle. We see him, as in a vision, streaming in by a thousand roads, down from the Hebrides and the glens of the North, from the mines of Durham and the shipyards of the Clyde and Tyne and the bogs of Ireland, out of the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, up from the pastures of East Anglia and the moors of Devon, over the seas from distant lands, whither he had gone to live his life and whence he returns at the call of a duty that transcends life. In his speech we hear the echoes of a hundred countrysides, from the strong burr of Aberdeen to the lilt of Dorset and the broad-vowelled speech of Devon; but whatever the accent it mingles in that song about Tipperary which, by the strangest of ironies, lives in the mind with the sound of the tramp of millions to battle.

He takes a thousand shapes in our minds. We see him leaving the thatched cottage in some remote village, his widowed mother standing at the doorway and shading her eyes to catch the last glimpse of him as he turns into the high-road that shuts him from her sight; we see him throwing aside his books and bounding out of school or college with the light of adventure in his eye; we see him closing his little shop, laying aside his pen, putting down mallet and chisel, hammer and axe. We see him taking a million pitiful farewells, his young wife hanging about his neck in an agony of grief, his little children weeping for they know not what, with that dread foreboding that is the affliction of childhood, the old people standing by with a sorrow that has passed beyond the relief of tears. Here he is the lover and there the son and there the husband and there the brother, but everywhere he is the sacrifice. While others remain behind, perhaps to win ignoble riches and rewards, he goes out to live in mud and filth and die a lonely and horrible death far from his home and all that he loved.

And he is chosen, not because he is the tainted wether of the flock, meetest for sacrifice, but because he is the pride of the flock. In him we see the youth of England, all that is bravest and best and richest in promise, brains that could have won the priceless victories of peace, sinews that could have borne the burden of labour, singers and poets and statesmen in the green leaf, the Rupert Brookes, the Raymond Asquiths, the Gladstones, the Keelings, the finest flower of every household, all offered as a sacrifice on the insane and monstrous altar of war.

And with the mind's eye we follow him as he is swallowed up in the furnace. We see him falling on that desperate day at Suvla Bay, perishing in the deserts of Mesopotamia, struck down in the snowstorm on Vimy Ridge, dying on the hundred battlefields of the Somme, disappearing in the sea of mud churned up at Passchendaele, falling like autumn leaves in the deadly salient of Ypres, stricken in those unforgettable days of March, when the Fifth Army broke before the German onset. His bones lie scattered over a thousand alien fields from the Euphrates to the Scheldt and lie on the floor of every wandering sea. From the Somme to Zeebrugge his cemeteries litter the landscape, and in those graves lie the youth of England and the hearts of those who mourn.

Now one comes back, the symbol of all who have died and who will never return. He comes, unknown and unnamed, to take his place among the illustrious dead. And it is no extravagant fancy to conceive the spirits of that great company, the Chathams and Drydens and Johnsons, poets, statesmen and warriors, receiving him into their midst in the solemn Abbey as something greater and more significant than they. For in him they will see the emblem of the mightiest tribute ever laid on the nation's altar. In him we do reverence to that generation of Britain's young menhood that perished in the world's madness and sleeps for ever in foreign lands.

None of us will look on that moving scene without emotion. But something more will be required of us than a spasm of easy, tearful emotion that exhausts itself in being felt. What have we, the living, to say to the dead who pass by in shadowy hosts? They died for no mean thing. They died that the world might be a better and a cleaner place for those who lived and for those who come after. As that unknown soldier is borne down Whitehall he will issue a silent challenge to the living world to say whether it was worthy of his sacrifice. And if we are honest with ourselves we shall not find the answer easy.

NAMING THE BABY

I take no responsibility in the matter. It is true that I was consulted, but only in a sort of Elder Statesman capacity. I happened to be the grandfather in the case, and my opinion was asked, not as having any artistic merit, but as a tribute to my ancestral status. Moreover, I was to be the godfather, and could not be decently left out of the discussion.

At this stage the current was running strong in favour of "Martin."

"Why Martin?" I asked. "There has never been a Martin in the family, and the only Martins I can recall are Martin Luther and Martin Tupper. But why commemorate them?"

"We aren't proposing to commemorate them. We are not thinking of them. We are thinking of Martin on its merits. There's a nice clean, sharp quality about it. It's not too unusual, and just unusual enough--plain and not too plain. It has distinction without frills. That's the case for Martin."

"But if you want a name with that sort of flavour," said I, "why not Crispin?"

"Crispin, by Jove! That's an idea. Why, Sylvia, why didn't you think of Crispin? Of course, it's Crispin. It fits him like a glove. Here, pass Crispin over to me. What clarity! What austerity! What a flavour of the antique world! Henry the Fifth before Agincourt, and all the rest of it. It's like a beautiful frosty morning--sunshine and a nip in the air, a clean wind and a clear sky."

But when at the next conference the subject was resumed, Crispin had passed under a cloud. It was a little too chill--a little too much of autumn about it. And it called attention to itself. Now Philip--that had the smack of high summer. It was round and full and came trippingly from the tongue. And as for its traditions, these were abundant, Philip of Macedon and Philip Sidney.

"And Philip the Second," I said.

"Well, we must take the good with the bad. And after all the name's the thing."

"Have you thought of Christopher?"

"Yes, for one whole evening Christopher went like a gale of wind. I forget why we dropped it. Why did we drop it, Sylvia? There must have been some reason, but I can't for the life of me think what it was or what it could be. Christopher.... Yes, I think we shall have to reconsider Christopher, Sylvia."

That evening there was a ring on the telephone. "It's all right," said the voice. "We've had a brainwave. We've decided on Antony--A-n-t-o-n-y--no 'h' of course."

"You mean the sinner, not the saint. I don't like Mark Antony. Can't forgive him that affair of Cicero's head."

"Well, they all used to do things like that in those days."

"But why allude to the fellow?"

"We are not alluding to him."

"You can't help alluding to him. It's the greatest one-man name in the world. Why not go for simplicity? There's John. Glorious name, John--fits anybody--splendid traditions, John Milton, John Dryden, John Bright, John Bunyan, John Donne----"

"Then you don't like Antony."

"I don't say that. I said I didn't like Mark Antony."

When the jury met again, however, Antony, like Philip and Christopher, was out of the running, and Martin had reappeared. There was such a quietude about Martin, you know. It was calm, it was self-controlled, it was full of peace, and yet it wasn't dull. There couldn't possibly be anything wrong with a fellow named Martin.

"Well," said I, "Martin Luther kicked up a tolerable dust in the world, and Martin Tupper was as dull as an oyster. Now Stephen----"

"Yes, Stephen is a fine name. We've thought a lot about Stephen. It has just the right note of romance without being romantic. I think we turned it down because we thought it was rather 'defeatist' in spirit. There was Stephen who was stoned--wasn't he?--and King Stephen who lost his crown--didn't he?--and Uncle Stephen who was drowned, and things like that. We don't want to start the boy with a 'defeatist' name. But Stephen is beautiful, I think we shall have to think about Stephen again, Sylvia."

And they did. "We've settled on Stephen," was the eleventh-hour bulletin from headquarters.

I was a little late when I reached the church, and the christening group was already around the font with the clergyman in attendance. The service proceeded at once, and reached the point at which the clergyman demanded the name of "this child."

"Michael," came the astonishing reply.

I looked up and caught a mischievous glint in the maternal eye. "Well, you see," she said afterwards, "we were quite exhausted with the search, and fell on Michael in desperation. And he was born on St. Michael's Day. And there was Michael Angelo, you know. Anyhow, it's done now, and can't be undone. But I do hope Michael----"

"Mike," I said.

"No, no, it's to be Michael--I do hope Michael will like it."

* * * * * *

"How's Michael?" I asked a few days later when the father visited me.

"The baby is going on splendidly," he said.

"'The baby,'" I said. "Why not Michael?"

"Oh, something's got to be done. We can never leave the poor child with that name tied to him. We think of calling him Martin."

"Or Stephen," I said.

THE CULT OF THE KNIFE AND FORK

I was walking in the Chiltern Hills with a friend not long ago when we turned into the inn at Chenies for lunch. There were only two people in the dining-room--a man and, I take it, his wife, who were sitting at a table laden with a cold roast of beef, vegetables, pickles, cheese and bread, and large tankards of beer. The man was a hefty person with red hair, a red face, and a "fair round belly." He took no notice of our entrance, and he took no notice of the timid little woman in front of him. He gave his undivided attention to his knife and fork and the joint before him. He cut and came again with the steady gravity of a man who took his victuals seriously and had no time for frivolous talk. When at last the fury of his appetite abated, he took a last deep draught from the tankard, drew his napkin across his mouth, stretched himself, and, speaking for the first time to the timid little woman in front of him, said:

"Well, we'd better be getting on if we're going to catch that train to Rickmansworth" (two stations or so off).

"But what do we want to stop at Rickmansworth for?" ventured the timid little woman.

"What do we want to stop at Rickmansworth for?" repeated the man in a tone in which astonishment and indignation struggled for mastery. "_Well, I suppose we've got to have tea!_"

He spoke as though the deepest feelings of his nature had been wounded. He was having a day's outing in the country, and here was this insensible woman before him who actually wanted to know what they were going to Rickmansworth for. What had they come out for if it was not to have lunch at Chenies and tea at Rickmansworth? In his mind Chenies lived as a place where you got lashings of cold beef and pickles, washed down with good ale, at the inn, and Rickmansworth as a place where you called to have tea and eggs and bread and butter and jam. I do not speak disrespectfully of those to whom the memory of good food hangs like a halo round a place. Hazlitt remembered Llangollen, not merely because he first read the _New Eloise_ there, but because he read it to the accompaniment of a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. And again: "I remember the leg of Welsh mutton and the turnips that day had the finest flavour imaginable," he says, when referring to his first meeting with Coleridge.

Indeed, not the least of Hazlitt's charms is his hearty delight in the table. His adventures have a trick of ending in the cheerful music of knife and fork. Thus he tells how in his youthful days when he was trying to live by art he painted a portrait of a Manchester manufacturer, and being very hungry, having lived for the past fortnight chiefly on coffee, he slurred over the painting of his sitter's coat in order that he might hear the five guineas reward jingling in his pocket. Then, the guineas secure, he hurried to the market-place and dined on sausages and mashed potatoes, "a noble dish for strong stomachs; and while they were getting ready and I could hear them hissing in the pan, I read a volume of _Gil Blas_ containing the account of the fair Aurora."

But with all the gusto of these and many similar allusions to food, it will be observed that the pleasures of eating were incidental and not primary. It was the associations of the food that made it memorable. The sherry and the chicken, like Llangollen itself, were irradiated by the spirit of Rousseau, and the Welsh mutton and the turnips lingered on the palate of memory with the impression of Coleridge's astonishing eloquence. It was the intellectual zest of the occasion that added a touch of poetry to the food. The Welsh mutton caught the rapture of the prophet, the sherry glowed with the fire of new thought and the hissing of the sausages and mash in the pan was mingled with the tale of the fair Aurora. That is the way to dignify the remembrance of our creature comforts. It is no dishonour even to the Finsteraarhorn to remember the noble bowl of steaming hot soup that you had in the hut when the climb was done, and many a fine walk is rounded off in retrospect by the fare that awaited us at the inn. Even bread and cheese and beer may be suffused with the glory of a great adventure and Mr. George Saintsbury, who has as much zest over his food as Hazlitt had, will grow lyrical even over sandwiches, taken to the right accompaniment of time and place.

But to remember Chenies for its beef and pickles is to exalt beef and pickles to too high a place in our affections. I have known men who have travelled much and who seem to have brought nothing back from their travels but menu cards. Such a one was coming up the other day from Devonshire, whither he had been for a holiday. I know no finer country for a holiday, nor one better worth growing dithyrambic about. After much travelling and many affairs of the heart with the English counties I think my verdict has gone finally to Devonshire. Where shall we find such colour, such moorlands, such a variety of coast-line, so warm and generous a feeling about Nature and man? If I had a second innings on earth and had my choice of birthplace I think I should choose to be born a Devon man. So I think would that man in the railway-carriage, but for other reasons than mine. He was an amiable and gossipy man who babbled to the company about his holiday experiences. He had been to many places on the South Devon coast, but so far as one could gather he had been eating all the time. Every place recalled some meal. There was Dartmouth, for example. If you ever went to Dartmouth be sure to go to such-and-such a tea-shop. Top-hole it was. Best place for tea in the town. You could have what they called "a light tea," and a very nice tea it was, with home-made jam and Devonshire cream. His face glowed with the succulent thought. Or you could have a heavy tea, a sort of a high tea, the constituents of which he recited with great precision, as a man might particularise his strokes at golf or his hands at cards or the mountains he had climbed.

Then there was Teignmouth. He went there and it was a fine place. And if you ever went to Teignmouth he had one piece of advice to give. Don't miss having lunch at the "Boar's Head" or some such place. No end of a lunch. And reasonable too. Not cheap, mind you. He was not a person who believed in cheapness. But the quality! And with this introduction he travelled over the menu, the record of which occupied quite a substantial part of the journey to London. After this he continued the itinerary of his travels in quest of meals. He went up the Teign to Newton Abbot, and there or thereabouts he struck a most wonderful cockle tea. The cockles, it seemed, came out of the river, and it was his solid conviction that Newton Abbot was a place very well worth visiting if it was only to know what cockles could be like when they came fresh out of the water, and were taken to the accompaniment of the right sort of tea.

And so he babbled on about the places he had been to and the food he had eaten in them until one might have thought that Devonshire was a land strewn with tea-shops and restaurants. I offer him as a cautionary tale for those who take the cult of the knife and fork a thought too seriously.

A SOLILOQUY IN A GARDEN

I spent this morning hoeing in a part of the garden which had run to weeds very miserably. Thistles, nettles, chickweed, and a multitude of other undesirable growths had taken possession and extinguished every decent inhabitant of the soil. There are few more depressing spectacles than a garden that has fallen on evil times and has become a sort of slum of nature, where everything that is beautiful and wholesome has been trampled out of existence and everything that is coarse and worthless riots in profusion and triumph. As I hoed the weeds up I indulged in the familiar reflection on the prodigality with which Nature looks after the weeds and the parsimony she shows for the more delicate and beautiful of her children. Lincoln said that God must love the common people, or He would not have made so many of them. Nature must love the weeds, or she would not have made them such sturdy fellows and given them such a lusty hold on life.

For the truth is that in the battlefield of the garden barbarism is never suppressed. All the cunning of the gardener is needed to keep it in reasonable check. Let the watchman sleep but a week and the barbarian hosts will have begun to overrun the civilised population that his labour and science have planted and nurtured. Let him sleep for a month and the work of a season will be undone. The strawberry bed will be a ruin, the vegetable garden will be yellow with charlock and creeping buttercup, and white with sheep's parsley, and scarlet with poppies, and the flower-beds will be a forlorn picture of rank growths. It is a familiar saying of the gardener that one year's seeds means ten years' weeds, and it is certainly a slow business to redeem soil that has once lapsed into foulness.

This train of thought took a wider circle as I proceeded with my task. The garden became a symbol that seemed to offer a not inapposite comment on the problem that is disturbing so many minds at this time. Mankind has for some years made so shocking an exhibition of itself that there seems nothing to be said in our defence. On the face of it, the argument is with the Dean Inges who regard the human growth as incurably bad and progress as an idle illusion. We just go round and round in circles. Sometimes we seem to be getting our garden of life civilised and cultivated. At last, we say, we have got the weeds under. Then suddenly we relapse into barbarism and all our delicate cultures vanish before the onrush of the blind furies and savageries that may be chained in us, but are never extinguished. It is a depressing philosophy, and in the light of our recent experience it would not be easy to entertain the dream of human perfectibility which was so popular an idea with the philosophic Radical of a century ago. It would hardly be possible to claim that human nature is better than it was a thousand or perhaps ten thousand years ago. Our garden is as full of potential weeds as ever it was, and when they spring up they are as obscene and devastating as ever they were.

If that were all we might despair. But it is not less true that the gardening has not been in vain. Even in the presence of the terrific reaction of these days it is possible to maintain that human society has won great victories over the weeds of human nature. Man may not be better than he was ten thousand years ago, but the community of men is better. The laws under which we live are humaner laws than ever obtained in the past. There is more equity and justice in our common relations, more respect for human life, more sense of human rights and liberties. We make war savagely, but we do not massacre the women and children, and we do not enslave the defeated as the Greeks did.

Contrast the position of women in the modern world with their position in the Tudor world, or the treatment of children to-day with their treatment in the not far distant days when Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote _The Cry of the Children_, and we have a measure of real progress. When Dr. Clifford was once interrupted by a "voice" which denied that the world was growing better, he replied: "But I know it is growing better. I know that when I was a child of eight, I was called at five o'clock in the morning to go to work in a factory for twelve hours a day, and I know that to-morrow morning there will not be a child in all the land who will suffer that wrong." Or to apply another test. Turn to Plutarch's _Lives_ and count the violent deaths that befell his subjects. I doubt whether one in four died a natural death. To be famous in the ancient world was to be doomed. But there is little personal peril in being either famous or infamous in these days.

And so I think the case is not quite so black as our pessimists paint it. We shall never subdue the old Adam that dwells in us, but we have collectively developed a social conscience which does keep him in check. The gardening is not profitless. The weeds are always lurking in the soil ready to spring up and turn the garden to a desolation, just as the germs of pneumonia are said to be in every nostril waiting for the moment of weakness in the body to leap to the attack. The moral to be drawn from these desperate times is not the futility of weeding, but the urgency of it. We can easily be too despairing about ourselves. Perhaps after all we are only in the infancy of our days, and though as men and women we may never achieve perfectibility we need not despair of strengthening our social defences against future collapses into barbarism. Human nature may be as bad as it seems, but it is still possible to say with Arnold that there is a stream of tendency in us that makes for righteousness. So let us get on with our weeding.

A NIGHT'S LODGING

I awoke this morning with the sort of feeling a healthy child awakes with on Christmas Day. That is to say, I awoke with delight at the idea of getting up. I was in a strange bed in a strange city. I had arrived in the strange city late overnight, and had had to take what lodging I could find. Until I lay down in my bed I had no idea how uncomfortable a bed could be. It was as cold as charity and as hard as a tax-gatherer. The bolster was the shape of a large round sausage, and the pillow was the shape of a sausage also. They were a relentless pair of ruffians, cold-hearted, passionless brutes, stolid and unresponsive, deaf alike to appeal or rebuke. I coaxed them with the flat of my hand, and they scowled unmoved; I smote them with my closed fist, and they took no more notice of it than if their name had been Dempsey.

I did not know that I could hate any inanimate thing so much as I hated that pillow and that bolster. I did not know that such oceans of blind anger were bottled up within me. I banged them against each other with savage joy. I threw them on the floor and danced and stamped on them. I knelt on them; I sat on them; finally I kicked them, not in the hope of doing them any good (hope had by this time died within me), but for the simple delight of kicking the abominations.

Then, warmed with these various exercises, I put the things back and got into bed. It was as I expected. The mattress was a fit companion for the pillow and bolster. It lay like a newly ploughed field, every furrow deeply graven, every ridge with the edge of a dulled razor. It was not a field of warm loam or generous greensand that yielded to the touch. It was a field of stubborn Essex clay, cold and dank and merciless. The expanse was enormous. It seemed that during that measureless night I travelled miles to and fro across the field in search of a furrow into which I could wedge myself. I tried it on the east side, and I tried it on the west, and I tried it all between. I tried it longitudinally; I tried it latitudinally; I tried it diagonally. The way with a bed like this, I said to myself, is not to get in the furrows, but to lie across the ridges. But when I did that I felt like a toad under the harrow, when "ilka tooth gies him a tig," and I resumed my search for a furrow that would give me a welcome.

In the intervals I slept and had wild dreams in which I met Apollyon straddling across my path. He came at me with fire belching from his nostrils, but I gave him a mighty thwack with a bolster I happened to be carrying, and he fell with an awful thud and split his head open on a ridge of the ploughed field where the combat occurred. I daresay I slept more than I imagined, for I share Lord Granville's view on the subject. Believing that he was a victim of insomnia, he took a house in Carlton House Terrace, within sound of Big Ben, and was comforted to find that, in spite of nights which seemed to pass without a wink of sleep, he only heard the great bell once or twice.

I did not do so well as that. As I fought with the furrows I heard all the night sounds of the strange city without--the ringing of tram bells, the jolting of wagons, the songs of revellers, and so on--die down until all was quiet. I dozed and wakened and wakened and dozed, praying for the dawn as fervently as ever Wellington prayed for Blücher. Once I dreamed that I had gone into Hell, and heard the cries of the souls in torment, and waking I found that the strange city without was coming to life again with a jangle of hoots and whistles and screams. Perhaps, I felt, my dream was not very far wrong. I lay and listened to the mad chorus. I had never imagined that there could be so many whistles whistling with such different notes, high notes and low notes, clear notes and foggy notes, shrieking and growling like a whole menagerie of wild beasts hungering for blood. Intermittent noises began to be heard in the corridor. People were moving about. There was a swishing sound from the next room. A church clock outside began to strike, and I counted the strokes as a miser counts his money--one, two three, four, five, six, SEVEN. It seemed too good to be true. I punched the pillow to make certain I was awake, and, under the comfortable assurance that release was at hand, fell to sleep again in my furrowed field. When I woke next, the room was light. I leapt from bed and kicked the pillow joyfully across the room. But the bolster I subjected to no such indignity. After all, it had done me a good turn with Apollyon, and I called the account square.

Two hours later I am in the train fleeing from the strange city. I had never been to it before, and I daresay I shall never go to it again. But I shall always remember it as the City of Dreadful Night. I feel now that I, too, have been with Æneas into Hell. Perhaps it is unfair to the strange city. I daresay love and peace and beauty dwell there as abundantly as in most places. But I am content to leave the discovery of them to others.

THOSE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR

The case which has occupied the courts recently of the man who beat a tin can as a way of retaliating upon a neighbour who strummed the piano touches one of the most difficult problems of urban life. We who live in the cities all have neighbours, and for the most part "thin partitions do our realms divide." It is true that, however thin the walls, we seldom know our neighbours. If the man who has lived next door to me in a northern suburb for the last half-dozen years stopped me in the Strand or came and sat down beside me in a restaurant I should not, as the saying is, know him from Adam. In this vast whirlpool of London he goes his way and I go mine, and I daresay our paths will not cross though we go on living beside each other until one or other of us takes up a more permanent abode.

I do not know whether he is short or tall, old or young, or anything about him, and I daresay he is in the same state of contented ignorance about me. I hear him when he pokes the fire on his side late at night, and I suppose he hears me when I poke the fire on my side. Our intercourse is limited to the respective noises we make with the fire-irons, the piano, and so on. When he has friends to visit him we learn something about him from the sounds they make, the music they affect, and the time they go away (often unconscionably late). But apart from that vague intimation, my neighbour might be living in Mars and I might be living in Sirius, for all we know, or care, about each other. Perhaps some day his house (or mine) will be on fire, and then I daresay we shall become acquainted. But apart from some such catastrophe as this there seems no reason why we should ever exchange a word on this side of the grave.