Chapter VIII: Part 8

I see that Dean Inge has been lamenting that he did not live a couple of generations ago. He seems to think that the world was a much more desirable place then, that it has been going to the dogs ever since, and that the only comfortable thought that we can cultivate in this degenerate time is that we shall soon be out of it. Assuming for the moment that the world was a happier place fifty or sixty years ago, I doubt whether it follows that the Dean would have been happier in it than he is in our world to-day. The measure of personal happiness is fortunately not dependent on external circumstances. It is affected by them, of course. Most of us are more agreeable people when we have dined than when we are hungry, when we have slept well than when we have not slept at all, when our horse or our party has won than when it has lost, when things go right than when things go wrong. No philosophy is an anodyne for the toothache, and the east wind plays havoc with the feelings of the best of us. In these and a thousand other ways we are the sport of circumstance, but in this respect we are no better and no worse off than our forbears fifty years ago or five hundred years ago, or than our descendants will be fifty or five hundred years hence.

But our essential happiness or unhappiness is independent of these things. It is a quality of character. It may have a physical basis. Our happiness, said the French lady to Boswell, depends upon the circulation of the blood. It may equally depend on our nervous constitution or the functioning of our organs. I cannot doubt that the Carlyles would have been happier people if they had had better digestions. They lived in that period which is held up to us as the time when it was good to be alive, but it is doubtful whether two more miserable people than they were are to be found on earth to-day, and Carlyle himself damned his own time even more bitterly than the Dean damns this. He would have damned any time in which he had the misfortune to live, for life would always have been a sorrowful affair to him. It was his habit of mind. And the world for each of us is what the mind makes it.

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

In short, whether life is a comedy or a tragedy or just a humdrum affair that cannot be called either, does not depend upon the time in which we happen to live, for it is all these things at all times. It depends upon our point of view. I fancy Little Tich would have found the world as amusing as a country fair if he had lived in the Rome of Caligula, and I am sure that Carlyle would have found it as sad as a funeral if he had lived in the Garden of Eden. There is no question of merit or virtue in the matter. If there is, it is not the meritorious or the virtuous who are usually the most happy. It is they who take life lightly and indifferently who get the most fun out of it. I doubt whether there was ever a more odious monster on earth than Sulla, whose savageries and debaucheries made him not so much a man as a satyr. Yet, except for the hideous disease from which he died, there can hardly ever have been a more fortunate man or one who found the world, in a gross sense, a more amusing place. Even when his corpse was burned with the accustomed solemnities, the wind blew and the rain fell in perfect time and sequence, "so that," as Plutarch says, "his good fortune was firm even to the last, and did as it were officiate at his funeral." Dean Swift cursed the day he was born, though he lived in the relatively comfortable time of Queen Anne, and being the man he was, he would have cursed the day he was born no matter what period of history he had lived in. He carried an unhappy world in the terrific gloom of his own mind.

Indeed, if we want to play with the idea of how we might have been happy, it is not the thought of living in other times that will satisfy us, but the thought of living other men's lives. If I had the privilege of antedating my birth, I would not bother about the period, but would choose very carefully my personality. Among the ancients I should select to be Herodotus, whose immortal work is saturated with the sunshine of as delighted a spirit as ever walked the earth. And among the moderns I would choose with equal confidence to live the life of Macaulay. It is true that he wept very copiously. I have amused myself sometimes in reading his "Life," by collating the occasions on which he was in tears. He could have said with Michelet, "Le don que Saint Louis demande et n'obtient pas, je l'eus 'Le don des larmes.'" Novels and poetry were bedewed with his tears. He wept whenever he was reminded of the sister he had lost, when he visited his old home in Bloomsbury, when he said "Hail!" and when he said "Farewell!" when friends fell away, and when foes, like Peel, passed into silence. But, in spite of his overcharged affection, what a rich, full, joyous life it was! What zest, what kindliness, what noble feeling, what fine living! I put Macaulay lower in the scale of literature than I once did, but in the scale of humanity there is none higher.

There never was a golden age in which happiness was the universal portion, nor one in which it was denied to those who had the gift within. It is a personal affair, not an affair of time, place or condition, and if we are sad, it is idle to lament that we were not born in days when we could have been merry. Sancho Panza is happy in any age, and Don Quixote is always sorrowful.

THE TOP OF THE LADDER

I suppose that if we had been asked, any time during the first twenty years of this century, who was the most enviable of living men, Caruso would, in the popular opinion, have had the first place. He had out-soared challenge. He was the idol of both hemispheres. He earned the income of a prince, and he earned it in the most pleasurable of all ways by giving pleasure to others and winning fame for himself. Yet he declared himself to be "often the unhappiest of men." And his unhappiness was that worst form of unhappiness, the canker of success. "When I was unknown," he said, "I sang like a bird, careless, without thought of nerves. But I am bending to-day beneath the weight of renown which cannot increase, but which the least vocal mishap may compromise. That is why I am often the unhappiest of men."

It is the penalty exacted by success. The top of the ladder is a desirable place, and we all like to get there, but having got there we find that the foothold is precarious and that the drop is deep. A fall from the lower rungs of the ladder does us no harm. We can pick ourselves up and start again with a good heart, and without much hurt to our self-esteem. We may get higher, and in any case we shall not fall lower. And in the meantime there is the joy of "getting there" to spur us on. We are happy in the pursuit of happiness. There it dwells at the top rung of the ladder and if only we can reach it all our yearnings will be satisfied and we shall enter into a seraphic peace of possession that will be undisturbed. And having got there we find that all the fun was in the climbing, and that the prize is a fleeting rainbow. There is no way farther up and the way down is easy. The crowd shouts its applause from below, but Martinelli is coming up behind and will shove Caruso over the top.

But Caruso, like Nelson, had the good fortune not to outlive his triumph. "Go at your zenith" was Nelson's maxim, and it is difficult to read the story of his deliberate exposure of himself at Trafalgar without concluding that he sought death. It was a stroke of his emotional and decisive genius, and it left him immortally at the top of the ladder. Had Wellington died at Waterloo he would have been there with him, instead of being remembered as a grumpy old gentleman who blocked the path and said "damn," and had his windows broken by the mob.

It is asking for trouble to expect a permanent dwelling-place at the top of the ladder, and to pin one's happiness to such an uncertain tenure. Life is a great comedian, and plays merciless practical jokes with its most august victims. It thrust the young Corsican up to a height of power unparalleled in the history of the world and then left him to eat his heart out on a bit of rock in a remote ocean, growing prematurely old and fat and diseased. But Napoleon's penalty was light compared with that of the Kaiser, who must surely hold the record for all time as the sport of the gods. Napoleon at least knew what a fickle thing success was. Starting with nothing, he had won the world, and to his cynical and _realpolitik_ mind there was nothing surprising in his loss of what he had won.

But the Kaiser had never had the salutary teaching of experience. He was born at the top of the ladder, and could conceive of no existence away from that dizzy eminence; he really believed that he belonged to a semi-divine order, and if we had had the misfortune to be born in his circumstances most of us would have had the same illusion. Now, after such splendour of power as Louis XIV. himself never enjoyed, he is cast aside like an old shoe, disowned by his people, repudiated by his relatives, his empire shrunk to the dimensions of a Dutch garden, and he himself become, to all appearances, of no more significance than if he were an Italian organ-grinder or blew the trombone in a German band. He must surely have had a larger measure than any man in history of what Chaucer calls the heaviest of all afflictions:

For of fortune's sharp adversitee,
The worst kind of infortune is this,
A man to have ben in prosperitee
And it remembren when it passèd is.

"And it remembren when it passèd is." It was that bitterness which Caruso feared even when he was at the top of the ladder. It is that bitterness which is about all that life has left to the negligible exile in Holland.

ON FACES--PAST AND PRESENT

In a matter of taste we cannot expect a decisive verdict, and it is probable therefore that the discussion which is proceeding in the Press as to whether we are more handsome than our forefathers will leave this interesting problem unsettled. "Of course men are growing more handsome," says Sir William Orpen, the painter. "Of course men are not growing more handsome," says Professor Geddes, the sociologist. Between the two views comes that of Professor Keith, the anthropologist, who says simply that faces are changing, whether for better or worse he does not venture an opinion.

I have no doubt that Professor Geddes has got his eye on the Greeks. He usually has. And if we bring the ancient Greeks into the competition I do not see how the verdict can go against him. The memorials they have left of the human face and form are still the accepted standard of beauty. The highest praise that the idolaters of that young Apollo, Carpentier, can give him is that he is like a Greek god. And the Romans were handsome fellows, too. Judging from the most famous and most authentic bust of Cæsar, that great man had a face of extraordinary intellectual beauty. If you were to put, let us say, a bust of Mr. Winston Churchill beside that of Cæsar, you would not be disposed to say that we had achieved much in the way of growing handsome in the course of two thousand years. There were ugly fellows then, of course, as there are ugly fellows now. Sulla, with his blotched and satyr face, was as unpleasant in appearance as he was in character, and the great Socrates was no thing of beauty. But in comparing ourselves with the past we must compare best with best.

And if we leave the ancient world and come down to a time of which we have authentic records in portraiture, the evidence is still with Geddes. You would have to stand a long time in the Strand before you saw coming along its populous pavements a face of such sublimity as that of Dante, and I fancy that if Beatrice appeared in a ball-room in Belgravia she would not lack suitors for a dance. Take the men that Dürer and Holbein painted four hundred years ago. It will be hard to match the exquisite sensitiveness and enlightenment that live in the face of Erasmus, or the dignity and noble austerity of Bellini's portrait of the great Doge Loredano, which you may see in the National Gallery. Is there a face comparable with it in the House of Commons to-day? And what of that wonderful face of the Bishop in the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael which you may also see in the National Gallery?

And coming down a century or so later, and to another land, have we much ground for thinking we of to-day are more handsome than Velasquez' Spaniards? Put Sir William Orpen's portraits of the modern English into competition with Velasquez' portraits of the Spaniards of three hundred years ago, and you will feel you have passed to a lower plane of beauty. You may say that it is unfair to compare a supreme artist with a merely clever technician; but the material they have worked on is the faces they have seen about them, and the faces of Velasquez live in the memory like a sonnet of Keats and the faces of Orpen leave no impression behind. Where will the much-praised "Chef" be beside the solemn beauty of Velasquez' "Menippus" three hundred years hence? Where will it be even beside the "Tailor" of Moroni, to which it offers so common-place a challenge?

Or take our own country. While Velasquez was painting the princes and beggars of Spain, Vandyck was painting the princes and nobles of our own Court. By comparison with the faces of Velasquez, the faces of Vandyck are shallow and sentimental; but no one will deny that they are handsome faces. No one will deny, for example, that Charles I. was as handsome as any king we have had in the last century. And I suppose, judging by the records of the young Milton, it would be difficult to find in all our millions to-day a face of equal beauty to his.

I am not suggesting by all this that, so far from growing more handsome, we are growing less handsome. The probability is that the proportion of handsome faces remains about the same in all generations. But no doubt time changes the lines both of face and form. I am told that the armour in the Tower worn by the warriors of the past would be too tight a fit for the average well-developed man of to-day, and I suppose our jaws have narrowed, for the skulls of ancient peoples are remarkable for the evenness of the teeth, while to-day the bulk of us have more teeth than we have room for, and have to have some out or carry them sideways. Changes like these are due to changed conditions--softer foods, more knowledge of the body and its needs, and so on. Women, for example, are taller than they were a few generations ago when convention denied them the muscular exercises of to-day. The coming of the bicycle was their real emancipation. It abolished the long skirt, gave them the freedom of their limbs, and in the end the freedom of their minds. They are not more beautiful than their grandmothers were, but they are different. Perhaps they are better.

IN PRAISE OF MAIDEN AUNTS

I have received a rebuke from a lady at Cardiff, that, though unmerited, calls for respectful attention. In an article written during the crisis in Anglo-French relations, I said that the visits of English Ministers to M. Poincaré made as little impression on him as a visit from his maiden aunt would do. My correspondent takes the illustration as an affront to maiden aunts. "Is a maiden aunt in your opinion the most contemptible thing on earth?" she demands. "If you would say 'Yes,' please open your eyes and think again. If you would say 'No,' will you kindly help us to scotch this vulgar lie by refraining from using this irrelevant metaphor?"

I offer my correspondent and the whole company of maiden aunts a sincere assurance that in taking their names in vain I had no intention to imply a contempt which I certainly did not feel, and which, if I had felt, would have been dishonouring not to them but to me. I wanted to emphasise the disregard of M. Poincaré for the views of the British Government, and chose an illustration which I thought effective. I assumed that however much M. Poincaré loved his maiden aunt (if he has a maiden aunt) he did not act on her advice in state affairs. I still hold that view. I shall give his maiden aunt the credit of thinking that if he followed her opinion he would act with much more wisdom than he has shown. That, I admit, was not in my mind when I wrote, and I will not advance it now as a means of dodging my correspondent's arrow. But while I confess that I thought that maiden aunts were not the persons that prime ministers usually consulted on high politics, I did not mean that they were contemptible or negligible on that account. Maiden aunts, I rejoice to say, have happier and cleaner affairs to occupy them than politics.

Take the most illustrious of all maiden aunts, the dear, lovable, unforgettable Betsy Trotwood. I have had many affairs of the heart in fiction, from Rosalind to Tess, but I do not think that there is any woman who lives in books who ever won my affection more securely and uninterruptedly than Miss Trotwood. It is a pleasure merely to write her name. It must be nearly fifty years since I made that amazing journey with David Copperfield on the Dover road, but I still remember the first meeting with Aunt Betsy as I remember no other adventure in life. David was at his last gasp and I was at my last gasp with him. We could bear no more. And then, looking over the gate--the best-known gate in literature except that "wicket-gate" of another immortal journey--we saw that radiant woman appear with her handkerchief tied over her cap, her gardening gloves on, and her pruning knife in her hand, and there followed that thrilling welcome, the memory of which sweeps over the mind like a wave of glory.

I am told that the boys of to-day do not make that journey on the Dover road, and do not know what it is to feel Aunt Betsy collar them and take them into the parlour and dose them, and bath them and put their tired limbs to bed. Unhappy boys! What a bare, disinherited life is theirs! I would not sacrifice Betsy Trotwood for any memory I have, or the Dover road that brought me to her for any golden road to Samarkand. But I do not recall that Betsy Trotwood cared twopence about politics, or ever mentioned them. She had more serious interests. There were the donkeys to keep at bay, there was Mr. Dick's great mind, "as sharp as a surgeon's lancet," to inquire into, there was her garden, and there was her nephew.

What would David have done without that sublime woman? What would any nephews and nieces do if there were no maiden aunts? Betsy Trotwood was the perfect type and pattern of all the tribe. "There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice, in her gait and carriage." Listen to the fly-driver of whom David and I inquired the way:

"Trotwood?" said he. "Let me see. I know the name too. Old lady?"

"Yes," I said, "rather."

"Pretty stiff in the back?" said he, making himself upright.

"Yes," I said. "I should think it very likely."

"Carries a bag?" said he, "bag with a good deal of room in it: is gruffish and comes down on you sharp? ... My opinion is, she won't stand anything, so here's a penny for you."

Admirable fly-driver! But you were mistaken. The outside of our maiden aunts is apt to be roughish, but, like Gunga Din, they are "white, clear white inside." They come down on you sharp, but they have hearts of gold. They are not maiden aunts because they could not be anything else, or are inferior to their sisters, or have less of the milk of human kindness. They have had their romances and put them by, suffered their bereavements, and learned to turn a brave, even harsh, face to the world; but where shall we find such a welcome from the Dover roads of life as they give us, where such a wealth of disinterested affection, where such treasured memories of our thoughtless selves? How many of us have had such a maiden aunt as Betsy Trotwood, a little stiff in the back, as the fly-driver said, a little severe in face and manner perhaps, a bit of a martinet about taking our physic, keeping out of mischief, and things like that, but withal a boundless ocean of affection, a person who had no use for her own birthdays but never forgot ours, who took us to our first play and showed us over the Tower, and was ready to fetch and carry for us till she dropped. Compare them with bachelor uncles. Here and there you may find a brilliant exception, like the uncle in _The Golden Age_, who went away in an auriferous shower, or Macaulay, who must have been the most gorgeous uncle in history; but they are few, and only reveal the general poverty of the tribe, whereas maiden aunts...

No, madam, heaven forbid that I should speak disrespectfully of maiden aunts. By the great name of Betsy Trotwood, I swear I am guiltless of such base ingratitude.

. . . . . .

Do not remind me, dear reader, that Betsy Trotwood was not a maiden aunt. Let us respect her secret which her creator ought never to have disclosed, and remember her as the chief ornament of the goodly company to which she spiritually belonged.

OCTOBER DAYS

Just below me on the hillside is a forty-acre field that slopes gently down to the valley. Last year it was ploughed by a motor-tractor: this year I rejoice to say it is being ploughed in the old way, as it has been ploughed for a thousand years. I suppose we ought to be grateful for the motor-tractor and the steam-digger that in cheapening production cheapen our food, but I am glad that the farmer below me has returned to the ancient way. When the machine comes in, the poetry goes out, and though poetry has no place in the farmer's ledger it is pleasant to find that he has sound reasons for reverting to the primitive plough. All the operations of the fields are beautiful to see. They are beautiful in themselves and beautiful in their suggestions of the permanence of things in the midst of which we come and go like the guests of a day. Who can see the gleaners in the field, or the haymakers piling the hay on the hay-wain, or the mower bending over the scythe without the stirring of the feelings which the mere beauty of the scene or of the motion does not explain? Indeed the sense of beauty itself is probably only the emanation of the thoughts subtly awakened by the action. It is so with pictures. I do not know any painting that lives in my mind with a more abiding beauty than one of Millet's. It is just a solitary upland field, with a flight of birds and an untended plough lying in the foreground. The barrenness and austerity of the scene are almost forbidding at the first glance, but as the mind dwells on it, it becomes instinct with meaning and emotion. Evening has come and darkness is falling over the land. The labourer has left the field and the rooks are going home. In the midst of the ancient solitude and silence that have taken possession of the earth, the old plough has the passion of personality. It embodies the epic of man's labour with the intensity that direct statement could not convey but only the power of suggestion can give.

And so it is with the scene before me. As I watch the ploughman drawing that straight, undulating line in the yellow stubble of the field, he seems to be not so much a mortal as a part of the landscape, that comes and goes as the seasons come and go, or as the sun comes and goes. His father, it may be, ploughed this field before him, and his father before him, and so on back through the centuries to the days when the monks still drank their sack and ate their venison in the monastery below, which is now only a mound of stones. And over the new-ploughed soil the rooks, who have as ancient an ancestry as himself, descend in clouds to forage as they have descended in these late October days for a thousand years. And after the rooks, the starlings. They have gathered in hosts after the pleasant domestic intimacies of summer for their winter campaigning, and stream across the sky in those miraculous mass manœuvres that affect one like winged and noiseless music. When they swoop down on the upturned soil the farmer blesses them.

He forgets the devastations of the summer in the presence of the ruthless war which the mail-clad host is making on the leather-jackets and other pestilent broods that lurk in the soil. They, too, have their part in the eternal economy of the fields. They are notes in that rhythm of things which touches our transitoriness with the hint of immemorial ancestry. The ploughman has reached the far end of his furrow and rests his horses while he takes his lunch by the hedgerow. That is aflame once more with the returning splendours of these October days. The green of summer has turned to a passion of gold and scarlet and yellow and purple, and all over the landscape the foliage is drunk with colour. The elms that have stood so long garbed in sober green are showing wonderful tufts and curls of bright yellow at the top, like old gentlemen who are growing old gaily. It is as though they have suddenly become vocal and hilarious and are breaking into song. A few days hence they will be a glory of bright yellow. But that last note of triumph does not belong to October. It is in the first days of November that the elm is at its crowning hour. But the beech is at its best now, and the woodlands that spread up the hillside glow, underfoot and overhead, with the fires of fairyland.

In the bright warm sunshine there is a faint echo of the songs of spring. There are chirrups and chatterings from voices that have been silent for long. There is the "spink, spink" of the chaffinch, and from the meadowland at the back there comes at intervals the song of a lark, not the full song of summer, but no mean imitation of it. It is the robin, however, who is now chorister-in-chief. His voice was lost or unnoticed when the great soloists were abroad, but now he is left to sing the requiem of the year alone--unless we include the owl who comes punctually every evening as the dusk falls to my garden, and utters a few owlish incantations.

I can see the ploughman nearing the top end of the field, and can hear the jangle of the harness and his comments to the horses and almost the soft fall of the soil as the furrow is turned over. I think I will bid him adieu, for these October days provide tasks for me as well as for the ploughman. There are still some apples to pick, there is an amazing bed of carrots to be got up, there are laurels to be cut down, there are--oh, joy!--bonfires to be lighted, and there are young fir-trees to be transplanted. I think I will start with the bonfires.

THE END

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