Chapter VI: Part 6

I know not what it is, it may be youth and its permanent memories, but when I see a gun firing at the moon cocked up at its utmost elevation, I feel that the weapon has suffered an indignity. It is as though it were an animal going through a performance. For the natural position of a gun is some slight elevation for a normal range, and not this isolated, head-in-the-air, barking attitude which the guns of captivity too often wear. They are noblest, these poor prisoners, when they stand level with the earth as though they were firing at close range in the hopeless effort to stop an advancing wave.

Well, anyhow, there it was, all lifted up, absurdly, like a dog baying.

Then, when I got nearer to the gun, and looked closely at it, I saw something which I have seen so often in a million German things that it has become a commonplace for them in my mind, but I know it is perilous to whisper it on this side of the Channel. The thing that has become a commonplace in my mind is the fact that Germans cannot _make_, but can only _copy_. They have many negative virtues, very unsuited to their vast aberrations. They are fairly industrious, very simple, normally kind and domestic, and in their dreamy way, they half catch now and then what the older civilisation of Europe expresses in strong and positive beauty. But they copy. They are impressed. They are a soft metal and ancient Europe is the die. What made me think of this commonplace was the seeing on that gun--actually engraved upon a modern gun!--a poor little copy of Louis XIV. Think of it! After now much more than two hundred years! There it was before my astonished eyes, and I could hardly believe it; the motto of the great king copied upon a Hohenzollern gun! It was like reading the "_Honi soit qui mal y pense_" of the Plantagenets on the Menu of a Cosmopolitan Hotel....

For Louis XIV in his proudest moment had engraved upon his cannon, just above the middle point where cannons turn upon their trunnions, a great "L" written in a flourishing script, with a crown above it, and then along the breach, just above the touch-hole, he had had engraved upon a sort of scroll the phrase "_Ultima ratio regum_." It was a famous phrase in Europe then. The greatest of English writers made good fun of it when he said: "It seems that his arguments have been turned against himself."

That was Louis XIV's manner; and, I say, I thought everybody had forgotten it. I thought that no one remembered that motto except a few miserable people like myself who potter about doing useless things. But I was wrong. The last King of Prussia, the last of the Hohenzollerns, the man upon whom the famous oracle of the thirteenth century has fallen, _he_ remembered it--William II, last and most grotesque German Emperor, was responsible for this silly thing.

For there on that gun in the wretched little, absurd little, squalid little station square of a little port, with no one to pay it the honour even of curiosity, I remarked graven things slavishly copied from Louis XIV. First, just above the trunnion, there was a crown and under it, in exactly the same flourishing script of the seventeenth century, the two letters "W. R." interlaced, and between them an eagle looking fiercely to its right.... So I take it that this gun was worked for the King of Prussia.

Then at the breach there was a scroll, and in the scroll was a similar script just like that of Louis XIV. And the motto ran: "_Ultima ratio regis_"--"_regis_" mind you, not "_regum_."

We all have the defects of our qualities, and there does go with the German, even with the Prussian, simplicity, an astonishing lack of critical power. "_Ultima ratio regum_" is one thing: "_Ultima ratio regis_" is quite another. It reminded me of the famous quotation: "Frailty, thy name is lady."

Now why was that script ever engraven? (The date was 1909.) Against whom was this ephemeral Prussian king going to use his argument--his last argument? I carry back my mind to 1909, and I can remember no one against whom at that moment he was preparing to argue in such a fashion. It was a quiet time. There was no worry within the Prussian state; Agadir had not been heard of. Yet that was the date and that was the motto. And there was the eagle and there was the inscribed flourishing initial, and there was the crown.

I know very well that some, perhaps most, of my readers--of those who do me the honour to read this rambling--will think me a fool for what I am next to say. But I confess a sentimentality towards that gun. When I was a boy and they were teaching me to drive in the artillery school at Toul they used to give us a sort of vile body on which to experiment our horses and ourselves: old guns of '48--old bronze guns. And these the French had made with great art. They were beautiful things. What touched me most about them was that each of them had a name. One was called "Liberty," another "The Voice of the People," another "Equality," and so on. It is a human instinct and a just one to give names to things. It is part of the truth that we ourselves are made in the image of God. Why, even my boat, which is but a material, inanimate body (may She forgive me), has a name. I must tell you, though you ridicule me, that when I saw that German gun I wished it also had a name.

And what sort of name should it have had? It could not have had a name for an abstract virtue or idea, like a French gun. It might have had the name of a great German man, but the names of such men are soon exhausted. It might have had the name of a jest, for jests are innumerable; but then the reader would have had to understand the jest which would probably have been local--like "Grandmamma" or "Archie" or the huge French gun I knew in my youth, which the men of my youth called "Silence in the Ranks"--an enormous piece on the top of a fort. Indeed, I cannot conceive what name could have been given to this one gun out of so many guns. Still I wish it had had a name.

If it had had a name I could look back on it, now that I have left it, and say to myself: "What fun I had in those few minutes before the train came in, examining the outward expression of ----, his character, his toilet, his elevation, and all the rest of it!"

But the gun had no name, and so I must still carry it in my mind anonymously as "the German gun."

Of all the hundreds of guns that I have seen lying about or being carried on trucks or drawn by horses, or standing in the great factories during these years, only one gun has touched me more, and this also was a German gun. I saw it in February, 1915. It lay derelict in a ditch close to the road near the river Ourcq, within an hour of Meaux, and Paris not forty miles away. It was perhaps the extreme gun of all the invasion; the mark of the high tide. It lay pitifully on one side, like the corpse in Beaudelaire's poem. One wheel it had not at all, but only the axle sticking up into the air, and the other wheel was rotted into the ground. And there lay the poor dead German gun like a fool.

I said to my companion: "Why does not some one of the peasants take it away and keep it for a relic?" To which my companion answered in the hard French fashion (which differs so much from the more human English way): "Why should he?"

ON A TAG PROVIDER

There are a great number of trades in the world of which one does not hear, because men do not make a full living by them. Most of them are interesting trades.

There is the famous example of the man who gave his trade on the Inquisition Form as "Maker of smoked glasses through which to watch such total eclipses of the sun as may be visible from Greenwich." There is the less known but equally remarkable case of the worm-eater; and to this I can swear to, because I read it in print with my own eyes. It happened years ago in a police court in London. The magistrate said to the poor man who was (as is the fashion of the poor) in trouble, "What is your trade?" to which he answered, "I am a worm-eater." It turned out that he was not a person who ate little worms, nor, metaphorically, a man who made his living out of dejection and humility, but a person who simulated the action of worms upon old wood. He was employed by the furniture fakers to discharge a load of very fine shot from a great distance at wood which had already been scraped and treated with acid and chipped about so that it looked old. This very fine shot made very fine holes which made the wood look as if it had been worm-eaten. Thus was he a worm-eater.

Then there are the men who do the hind legs of an animal in a pantomime, and there is the trade of the man who is not exactly a detective but, as it were, a detective's servant, and is not let into the secret but simply told to watch. There are great numbers of these honest folk. You may see them all up and down London, and you may mark them by two things. First of all, they always have something new about them, usually a new hat, because they are miserable men and their employers think that if they looked too poor they would be too conspicuous. It is a muddle-headed idea, but there it is. Therefore, they are always given something new in the way of clothing, and usually a hat. This done, they are apt to stay all day within a very narrow area, looking at a particular door and at the same time trying to look as though they were not looking at it. In this they fail. I had a long conversation with one of these innumerable London police-spies two years ago, and gave him great agony by going up to the house after he had spoken to me and warning the people inside.

But of all these hidden trades, the one I like most is that of Tag-Provider (as it used to be called in the old days of party politics). I believe the last of them is dead; at any rate, when I saw him ten years ago he was in a very anxious state, coughing, badly broken by age, and telling me he knew not which way to turn for a meal; yet he had had his prosperous days.

He lived in a little room, a lodging, at the top of an old house overlooking the river. I came across him quite by accident through my habit of writing rhymes--a pastime to which I have been given all my life. These rhymes I often print and sometimes sign; that is how he got hold of my name. He wrote to me and asked me whether I would go and look over some of his rhymes and see whether I thought they suited. When I got his letter I thought he was a poet who wanted advice, so I wrote my regular answer that I knew nothing about poetry and could not give advice. He wrote again imploringly, saying that he was not a poet in the ordinary sense but that in his profession it was necessary to introduce rhymes from time to time, and that my judgment really would be of great service to him, for he was good enough to say that I had quite a knack of rhyming, especially at rhyming words of three syllables, which is difficult. So I went round to see him, and being younger than I am now I was able to enjoy his conversation well enough for half an hour or more. He was very proud of his work, and had round his room autograph letters of congratulation which had been sent to him by the most famous politicians of his time. It was he who invented (it was one of the last of his actions) the tag "We want eight and we won't wait." When he asked me if this could be improved, I suggested "No fleet, no meat." He said this would not go down. I asked him why not. He said, "Because the public could not remember very short rhymes." They had to be rather long to have any effect, but not too long. He told me (and he was very proud of it) that he was also the inventor of "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right." "Here," said he proudly to me, "you have a very fine example of irregular rhyme with two balanced statements in opposition and contrast." "The first," he added, "is concrete, the second abstract: the first is purely historical without moral sequence, the second contains the deepest political and moral lesson."

I wish he had lived to the present day. He might have given us something really good and new, which we badly lack.

He also wrote "One tongue, one flag, one throne." He was not so proud of that, because, he said, that some fool had imported it into the United States, where it did not go down. The enthusiasts kept the "one tongue" part, but they did not know what to add, which spoiled the whole show. He did not make up the phrase "blood is thicker than water," but I suggested to him a very good way in which it could be turned into a poem during any one of those recurrent moments (they turn up every ten years or so) when our politicians are morally certain of wangling the American alliance. The rhyme I suggested was this:

Blood is thicker than water--
And so it oughter.

We had a great debate over this, and I fear it was his obstinacy which prevented this really fine rhyme from getting floated. It would have made a great difference, and we might, by this time, have acquired fame between us, had it not been for this silly old man's objections. So true is it that great events spring from small causes!

His objection, oddly enough, was not one of metre but one of grammar; and he added to this what I think another very silly objection, but one you constantly find in critics of good verse. He said "and so it oughter" made bad syntax with the first line. I said it did not: it must be read elliptically. The full sentence would be "And so it ought to be"; and I then pointed out to him that the very greatest poets had used the elliptical form and that it had appeared in a thousand interesting phrases. I cited to him from that splendid twenty-first sonnet:

... I have found a face
More beautiful than gardens: More desired
Than boys in exile love their native place.

He read this several times and said that it did not parse either. I told him that the form had been used by the poet Homer. This had no effect on him. He said it might be all very well in Asia Minor but it would not go down in England, and so, after quite a long dispute, he refused my version. But there it stands, and I am still proud of it:

Blood is thicker than water--
And so it oughter.

If ever the Anglo-American Alliance _is_ wangled, remember that poem.

I asked him whether he had also produced political tags that did not rhyme, for I had heard a great number in my time, such as "Rome on the Rates." He said he had produced many such pieces of English prose, but that this was not one of them. He wished it had been, for he thought it a very telling phrase, and he could quote me one which had won no fewer than 117 votes. That was not bad in the old days when votes were less common than they are now, and when 117 was worth getting.

He was also very proud of his internal rhymes, particularly of those concerning the land:

Less of a pleasure place for the rich
And more of a treasure place for the people.

It was the "pleasure and treasure" rhyme that made the success of that particular tag, he said, and I was quite willing to believe him. But even as he spoke tears came into his eyes, and he added, "You will hardly believe me, sir, when I tell you the agony I have gone through in trying to find a rhyme for 'people.' It is one of the most difficult words in the English language to get a rhyme for. There are many rhymes for the abhorred rich, but none suitable for 'people.' There is 'steeple,' but I think that is about all; and it is dreadfully difficult to work in 'steeple.' I worked at it for three nights and then gave it up in despair. However, the thing in its final form did well enough, as I have told you."

I suggested to him that he might have turned the difficulty by using some other word for "people," as, for instance, hoipolloi, mob, populace, gutter-snipes, boors, dregs, dross, scum and other accurate and suitable words, but he at once stopped me. "None of these will do," he said, "because the People do not like being called those names." "Then," said I, "there is 'citizens,' 'the Britons,' 'Britishers,' and so forth"; but he still wagged his beard from side to side, saying that none of them would fit, "besides which," he added, "they are just as difficult to rhyme to as the other. It can't be done."

I asked him whether he had made Harmsworth's phrase "Rolling the French in mud and blood." He said yes, but he had originally written it with a blank--"Rolling the (blank) in mud and blood," and had hawked it all round London for years according as our foreign policy changed. The mud and the blood made a very good rhyme, and any old nation would do to fit into the blank. He had used the words "Russians" and "Spaniards," and even--I say it with horror--"Yankees," for he was at work as long ago as the Alabama claim, which I wasn't. He only wished he had lived long enough to put "Germans," but it happened just to fit in with the French at the moment he wrote it. He sold it to Harmsworth (he told me), and it came out in his papers, "We will roll the French in mud and blood." It did great service, for it frightened the French to death and kept them out of Morocco in 1899.

I next asked him if he had written the famous rhyme--

We don't want to fight,
But by jingo if we do,

--which is one of the happiest memories of my childhood. He was immensely flattered--but had to deny the authorship.

"I only wish I had written it, sir," he said (he called me "sir" the whole time, and it pleases me to remember the honour he paid me). "I only wish I _had_ written it! That was a real corker! None of the others led to anything so big: this one very nearly made a war and moved a whole fleet at immense expense from one part of the Mediterranean to the other. No small feat! But what I did write, sir, if you will believe me--and I never got the credit for it--was a most excellent tag called 'Ninepence for fourpence.' It occurred to me in this way. I was sitting in one of Lockhart's cafés, which I patronised in those days, drinking a stir of brown with a slab of thick." I nodded, for the terms were familiar to me; and he continued: "As I did so a man came in with a shilling and said he would have a scone and a cup of tea and a pat of butter (in those days, sir, we had not the advantage of margarine. You young folks have a better time than ever we had!) The man came in, I say, with a shilling and put it down and said he would have a scone and a cup of tea and a pat of butter, and that was threepence. Then they gave him ninepence change. Then he put it back again and said he had changed his mind (the shilling was still lying on the counter), and asked what he could get for one-and-ninepence. The woman who was serving was very flurried with the crush of people, and she said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'One and ninepence. I have paid threepence--that is one and three and nine, makes ... no, I'll tell you what!'--putting down another shilling--'That makes two and ninepence together. Look here, that's too much.' Then he shifted the coins about a bit while she served other people in her hurry, and then she looked at him again all fussed and said, 'Now then! Make up your mind!' and he said, 'Well, I will tell you what, I think I can afford fourpence. Will you give me a sausage with some bread and a cup of tea?'; and she said, 'Oh, how you do pester!' Then he put down fourpence, picked up the ninepence change and the shillings, and in this way, after he had had his sausage and tea and bread and butter, he won ninepence by risking fourpence. He was a wizened-looking man with a cunning look and a fixed smile. I have always remembered him; and that is how I got my idea of ninepence for fourpence; but if you will believe me, sir, I sent that into the Central Office and they used it and never paid me!"

"What a shame!" said I. "What are you usually paid?" "Why, sir," he answered, "I used to work on a royalty basis, but it was so difficult to keep the accounts when millions and millions of people used the phrase and when it was printed in all sorts of pamphlets, that I changed my contracts and sold out and out. But now," he added sadly, "I cannot sell a thing. It is a terrible thing the way in which a change of custom takes the bread out of an old man's mouth." I said it was, indeed. "And yet," he continued eagerly, "it is an older trade than you think for. Believe me, sir, it has been in our family for generations." I was astonished to hear this, for I believed tags to be quite modern, but he assured me it was not so. "My own great-grandfather," he said, "was the author of 'No taxation without representation,' and that was a stunner. It rhymed and it took root, two things that often go together, and the old man on his death bed told my father, who has told me, how it was done, but you will excuse me if I do not tell you that because it is a secret of the trade; it used to be my livelihood and that livelihood may creep up again." He said these last words rather doubtfully, and was interrupted by a dreadful cough.

I asked him whether he used a rhyming dictionary, like Wordsworth, the great poet. He said, between the intervals of his coughing, "No, sir, no! I find it cramps the style! I ascribe a great deal of Wordsworth's failures to this deleterious habit. I walk the streets, keeping my mind as vacant as possible and then the things occur to me--or rather they did once occur to me," he added sadly. Then he sighed and said, "There is no market any more."

This was years ago. I have hoped against hope that the trick would return, but time has gone by and apparently the market for such things is dead and, as I said before, I think the old man is dead, too. But what a lot of good he did in his time, and how true it is of him, as of many other lesser men, that they achieved far more than they knew, and that their reward was not proportionate to their achievement.

ON "AND"

Dark eyes adventure bring: the blue, serene,
Do promise Paradise--and yours are green.

This little jewel--called "The Lover's Complaint"--is ascribed by some to Herrick. They are wrong. It proceeds from a younger but already faltering pen.

I introduce it only at the head of this to illustrate the singular depth, the weight, the value of the word "and." Even in the English tongue, the noblest vehicle of expression (but in this point weak), the word "and" plays its subtle parts.

We lack the double "and" of antiquity--that subtle repetitive effect in which the classics abound. We have no "_que_" to our "_et_"; we have no [Greek: te] to our [Greek: kai] we have only our plain "and." But even so, our plain "and" has much diversity about it: a versatile, mercurial word: a knight in the chess play of prose.

"How is this?" you say. "'And' would seem to be but a redundant word to express some addition already apparent."

"'He was drunk, disorderly!' 'And' would seem to be stuck in between the two affirmations from a sort of laziness of the mind."

You are wrong. It is a great pleasure to me to tell you that you are wrong.

Even if "and" only pursued this function of letting the mind repose it might be welcomed as a bed; but it does much more. It introduces emphasis, as in the poignant sentence: "Their choice was turbot--and boiled." It also has an elevating effect, hooking up something to the level of the rest; as where it is written:

Nibbity, bibbity, bobbity bo!--
_And_ the little brown bowl--
We'll drink to the Barley Mow!

The little brown bowl would have come in absurdly: it would have jolted the mind like a bump in the road, were it not for that precious little "and," which catches it neatly up, putting upon one level that which goes before with that which comes after.

"And" is also indicative. Thus a man whom you meet talks glibly upon one subject after another, rapidly, yet more rapidly, tumbling over himself, desiring to avoid your eye. But he must take breath. You seize your moment and you say, "And what about that five pounds?" The "and" makes all the difference. It makes your remark part of the conversation. A gesture, not a blow.

In the same way you can recall an omitted name. When you have praised Tom, Dick, Harry, you add gently, "And Jack, what about Jack?" It is a pleasant, easy reproach or a reminder. Very much nicer than saying, "Why not a word about Jack?"--which would be brutal.

"And" is also what the older grammarians have called stammerative--that is, it fills a chasm in the public speeches of public men, though here it is not so useful as certain other sounds. I have made a study of the sounds common to politicians in distress. I find that out of one hundred occasions "er--er" will come in eighty times; "I--I--I" eleven times; the less graceful "and ..., and ..., and" during periods of embarrassment only accounts for five. Moreover, the repeated "and" is hardly ever used in the absolute; by public speakers it is nearly always used with "er."

"And" also has the value of an affix. It comes before a lot of little phrases, where it acts like glue, sticking that little phrase on to the rest--"and" if, "and" even, "and" though; a humble use, but necessary enough, allowing the mind to work in a soft material.

"And" has various rhetorical uses which are to be admired--you can make long lists with it.

So attractive is "and" to the human mind that it will often expand itself, developing like a lot of soap bubbles--"and so," "and moreover," "and also." But the best of all these phrases--the king of them--is "and also, what is more." It is the most familiar of all phrases in the mouths of politicians. Do violence to yourself, force yourself to listen to a politician making speeches in private conversation as is the politician's way. You will hear that phrase repeated. "And also, what is more." It is native to the tub-thumping fraternity. These things give a sentence the advantage of piling up wordy wealth, as it were, very satisfactory to the fatigued or the empty or the hesitant.

Those great men, our fathers, felt about "and" something reverend or peculiar, so that they hardly thought of it as a word, but as a sort of symbol. They put it at the end of the alphabet, calling it "ampersand." It is one of the worst things about our detestable time that this ancient national thing "ampersand" is forgotten. The old refrain used to be: a, b, c, ..., x, y, z, _ampersand_--that long word "ampersand," that fine ritual title, referred to the symbol "&" which "and" alone of words possesses. You find it in the old horn books. The children of England knew it by heart for centuries. But the modern flood came: it is gone.

The enemies of "and" will have it that a good style in English is to be obtained by cutting out "and." These are the same people who say that a good style is to be obtained by cutting out adjectives. There are no such short cuts. Also, to be an enemy of "and" is to be an enemy of all good things. It is to fear exuberance, which is the tide of life.

"And" has, again, rhythmical value, as in the ecclesiastical or liturgical line:

And Parson and Clerk and the Devil and all

--with hosts of other lines which dignify the vast storehouse of the English lyric.

Of the modern masterpieces there is one--the best known of all, perhaps--where "and" does an enormous amount of work, which is the poem of _Innisfree_. It gives the rhythm as well as the mystery. I should like to see what the fools who are for cutting out "and" would make of that poem.

But the most sublime use of "and," alas! we have not. It is the "and" disjunctive; on which turned one of the great moments of history.

For you must know that when the second Council of Nicea finally condemned the monstrosities of the Iconoclasts, a saintly bishop from Cyprus wrote his opinion in Greek saying, "I revere, I embrace the sacred images, [Greek: kai] I give worship to the Life-giving Trinity"--which is as much as to say, that he would be polite enough to an image, _but_ his worship he reserved for the only true object of worship.

Now, this pronouncement was carried to a Council of the West, sitting at Frankfort, where there were bishops of the Pyrenees, of Gaul, of the Rhine Valley, of the Low Countries, of the Burgundian Hills, of the Swiss Mountains--indeed of all parts whatsoever that owed allegiance to Charlemagne.

At that moment Charlemagne was already wishing to be an emperor in the West. Those who served him were only too glad to find the Empire of the East--which claimed to be universal--making a howler. But the swarm of holy and unholy men at Frankfort were abominably ignorant of Greek. They did not understand the disjunctive value of [Greek: kai]. They thought it a mere barbaric "and." They translated this famous phrase "I jumble up in one worship God and images." They rushed out with some fury against such a doctrine. They registered their hatred of it. On this point also Gibbon has (as one might expect) abominably falsified history.... But no matter.

The Bishops of Frankfort said what they had to say. In vain did those of Rome, who were acquainted with Greek, tell them that they had taken the sentence exactly upside down--that it meant "I do _not_ worship the images. I distinguish the observance I give them from the worship I offer to That which alone is worthy of worship." They still clung to their primitive error. With difficulty were they led back into the right fold.

What great consequences their ignorance might have had! We might to-day be deprived of the Bambino. We might have lost Brou (but not Santiago, I think; for the Spaniards, and in particular the Galicians, are of a temper which will stand no nonsense. Though 1462 General Councils had condemned images, the Spaniard would have had them all the same: in which I praise him. Honour to the Pilar!).

Now, though it does not concern the little word "and," yet I am reminded (by this mention of the Second Council of Nicea) of a certain story which, as you may not previously have heard it, I will now proceed to relate. With that story I shall conclude; nor will your prayers and entreaties, however loud and passionate, move me to continue. I will tell you the story; then I will have done.

The story is this. As the Eastern bishops were travelling to the second Council of Nicea, the more worldly of them (these were the greater part) were very much disgusted to meet one particularly good bishop who had been bred a shepherd. He was poor. His manners were bad. He did not shave regularly. He was badly dressed. He was what they call in Birmingham "no class."

They jeered at him a little, but more than their jeering was their fear lest they should lost caste by entering the Imperial City in such company. So after this saintly man had made himself quite intolerable at dinner, they cast up a plot against him.

He had come with only one deacon, sitting each of them upon a mule, the one a brown mule, the other mottled. The mules were stabled in the great inn of the village where all were assembled. When the saintly, but not smart, bishop had gone to his rest, the smart bishops secretly sent a bravo into the stable to cut off the heads of the two mules. "In this way," said these wicked, worldly bishops, "we shall be spared the humiliating presence of the boor when we enter the imperial town; nor will men ever know that we kept such low company."

Long before it was dawn the poor Bishop's deacon, like a good deacon, a good rustic deacon, shook himself out of sleep. He went down to the stable with a lantern to get ready the beasts against the morning journey. With what horror did he not see there two heads lying upon the ground! The one was of his own mottled mule, the other of his master's brown mule. The mottled head lay severed upon the straw beside the brown head, the headless trunks leaning all collapsed against the stall sides.

The deacon, rushing up to his master, banged at the door, saying, "My Lord! My Lord! Evil men have cut off our mules' heads!" The Right Reverend, only half awake, said, "Sew them on again! When I wake I will attend to it."

The deacon went down to the stable. With many tears he sewed on the two heads of the dead mules. The Bishop, when he had risen from sleep, said his prayers, came down into the stable, where, he having blessed the two mules, they came to life again in the most natural manner in the world. When he had breakfasted, he rejoined his deacon. Mounting the two beasts, they rode out into the break of the day. But, the light broadening as they approached the city gate, the crowd saw with astonishment a brown mule with a mottled head abreast of a mottled mule with a brown head, for the deacon, confused in the half darkness of the morning, had sewed the wrong heads to the wrong bodies.

Note the effect--as the veracious chronicler gives it. "Thus by that very action whereby these evil men had hoped to bring their companion to shame they did but the rather thrust him into glory; for their cruelty to the dumb beasts did but serve to heighten his holiness, making proof of God's power through him who could bring the dead to life."

Many are the morals of this tale, one of which is that it is silly to take more trouble than is necessary. For if the wicked Bishops had only drugged the mules instead of cutting their heads right off there would have been no miracle, nor glory to their despised colleague. Another is that if a thing is true you must believe it, however astonishing and unlikely it may sound in the ear of the unbeliever. Another is that a bishop has the right to get up rather later than the lower branches of the hierarchy. There are many other morals; but I will end. For if I go on I shall certainly bring "and" into my own sentences, _which up to this point I have managed to avoid_. "And" is not really necessary at all.

THE CAD'S ENCYCLOPÆDIA

I have a wealthy friend. He made his money by accident during the war. The Government owed him £500. A careless clerk (who was talking to a minx at the time) added three noughts without thinking, and on his modestly pointing out the error, the department wrote back to say they never made mistakes. And so it rested at that. After long hesitation how to get rid of all this money, he is at last engaged upon what I cannot but think a very useful work. I only wish that every rich man could be inspired by similarly valuable ideas, instead of frittering away money upon buying newspapers and souls and uneatable food in noisy restaurants.

This rich friend of mine had always had the idea, when he was poor, of getting together a Cad's Encyclopædia.

All the publishers whom he approached told him (with truth) that nothing is more venturesome than an Encyclopædia, and that even when one is pretty sure of a large public for one's subject the outlay is very heavy and the risk considerable.

My friend had--in the days of his poverty--prepared a detailed memorandum in which he urged the advantage of his scheme. He pointed out that there was an enormous number of Cads in the world, and that even those who read books and could afford to buy an Encyclopædia amounted to many millions. He urged the complete novelty of the scheme, the long-felt want, and all the rest of it. But they replied to him that a fatal drawback was the name.

"No doubt," said the head of one great firm, "there is a demand, and Cads naturally desire a book of reference of their own for their guidance and instruction; even those who are not Cads, but only interested in the subject of Cads, would also want it for making research. But few would buy it under that title because it is one which men avoid applying to themselves and dislike having applied to them by others. You will have noticed," said the great man genially, "that men are eager to ascribe to themselves ignorance, fatuous good nature, even appalling vices, but never Caddishness."

My friend could not but see the justice of the last remark, but he still maintained that a thing was more successful in the long run under its true name. He persisted in his idea, and when the accident of which I speak had suddenly made him rich he proceeded to realise it.

The first volume will be out next October. It will be privately published by a new firm created for the purpose. I hope I shall receive no correspondence upon it, because I cannot be bothered to negotiate its sale, but I shall give my friend the best advice as to how to put it upon the market in the unavoidable shyness of the usual agents.

This Encyclopædia was not an easy thing to get together, apart from the expense. First of all there was the difficulty of apportioning space. That is a difficulty attaching to all Encyclopædias, but particularly to an Encyclopædia on, and for the use of, and conveying information upon, Cads. In an Encyclopædia of Agriculture, for instance, the editors can make a fair guess as to what space will be wanted for each pest attaching to particular forms of vegetation, but it was difficult indeed to determine which habits of the Cad would require most description; what should be set aside for his house, what for his clothes, what for his manners; how many pages should be allowed to the Cad in Literature; how many inches to the more exotic types of Cad, such as the Negroid Cad, the Dago Cad, the International Wagon-lit Cad, and so on.

Then there was a great debate between my friend and his sister on the vexed question of the She-Cad. I took part in this and strongly proclaimed my own opinion, which I have held for years after a very close examination of the matter, that there is no such thing as a She-Cad. A Cad is the opposite of a gentleman, just as a civilian is the opposite of a soldier, or a layman of a cleric. But there are no She-Gentlemen and therefore there are no She-Cads. To this it was objected by my friend's sister that she had personally known and handled several She-Cads, and she began to give examples. But I am glad to say my friend agreed with me that the type did not exist, and showed how every example his sister quoted was a false type and no more a She-Cad than the lemon sole is a sole, or margarine butter.

Under V. (a volume which we hope to reach--if the next great war can be staved off--round about 1930) we have, I am glad to say, a long and valuable article on the Virtues of Cads. This article is from various pens. All the introductory part has been written by an expert at party headquarters, and the diagrams have been drawn by a diner-out who has always got on well with Cads and has an exhaustive knowledge of their habits. There is a special division on the financial virtues of Cads by a banker and on the spiritual virtues of Cads by a divine of modernist complexion. But the subject is so large that we have a reference in small capitals at the end of the article to other special articles in the same department, and especially to what may be called the Calendar of Saints among Cads, that is, short biographies of Cads who have excelled in one or other of the virtues.

Among the special articles, that devoted to the Literary Cad is treated in two aspects--one by an opponent of such Cads, the other by an eminent writer who is himself a Cad. Under the same letter "L," we have a biography and bibliography of the Cad's Laureate who--thank Heaven--is still with us.

"C," which will appear in the second volume, due next December, will have under the heading "Candour" an article where the necessary presence of candour in Caddishness is developed in a masterly fashion by a psychological expert, and the fatal effect upon Caddishness of worldly wisdom and subtlety is conclusively proved by an aged novelist. No one can be a Cad (it is there clearly proved) who has not a simple heart. Under the same letter, at the word "Concert" we have "The Cads' Concert"; a full description, with a detailed bibliography of the latest development in Cad literature, which is the publication to the whole world of everything told one in private, and a great deal that has not been told one at all.

Under "I" there will be an equally interesting and lengthy article upon the Iconography of Cads, with a list of their principal portraits and busts, including public statues of London and other great cities; and under "T" a short, but very illuminating, essay upon the Theology of Cads, illustrated by experts from the whole range of apologetics, beginning with the opinions of the Early Fathers on the matter, and ending, at any rate for the moment, with those of Mr. Wells.

A number of details which would hardly occur to the general reader have been picked out with singular accuracy of judgment by my friend, whose industry and zeal I cannot over-praise. For instance, he himself deals, under "S," with the Cad and Spurs--showing why Cads hate Spurs when they do not wear them themselves, and why when they do wear them themselves they wear them too often and in incongruous surroundings.

Similarly we have the Cad and Checks--divided into cheques on a bank and checks which you wear, the latter coming first for alphabetical reasons. This should, perhaps, appear in the article on Cads and Apparel, under "A," but though the article "Apparel" is exhaustive in its way, readers are referred to special departments of this sort for more detailed acquaintance with their subject. Among other points the famous sentence: "_In colour he affected the maroon, in pattern a quiet check_," is exhaustively discussed by various hands and its disputed authorship finally established.

Under "A," by the way, we also have Cad's Architecture--a very difficult subject--and a more general psychological and medical heading of Animosity in Cads. The colouring of Cads, natural and artificial, we have, after some debate, put forward to the letter "P" under Pigment, because "C" was getting unwieldy. But Cad Catching or the art of hunting and tracking down a Cad will be included in its natural place with many diagrams and a list of the principal drugs, wines and tobaccos used in the trade.

Cad Curing, on the other hand--that is, the art of curing a Cad of his Caddishness--has been rejected from the heading "C" under the very just decision that it is a false category. There is, properly speaking, no curing of a Cad, because Caddishness is not a disease but a condition which we are perfectly open to accept and even to admire if we please. The whole subject has therefore been relegated to "E," where it is dealt with under the rubric "Elimination." It also appears in the first volume briefly by way of cross-reference under Auto-suggestion with formulæ for daily repetition, such as "_Whatever else I am, I am a gentleman_," or again, "_It is all imagination. I didn't really offend them at all._" In this department we have valuable exercises described, one of the most original of which is the setting apart of certain streets in London of a particular length (among others, Gower Street and the Cromwell Road) down which the patient is advised to walk at his ordinary gait, repeating the formula, over and over again just after he has paid a call at some house where he found himself coldly received.

The Encyclopædia can be bought at a reduction of 20 per cent. by those who pay for the whole twelve volumes in advance. My friend, who has already learned the elements of finance (he got his fortune a full six years ago), has calculated that at the present rate of 7 per cent. which any fool can obtain upon good security to-day, he is up about 13_s._ 2_d._ a copy on each subscriber who falls into the trap. He is preparing a cheaper edition to appear immediately after the lists of the first expensive edition are closed. This cheaper edition will consist of the unsold sheets of the first, cut down and put into new cases. I forgot to add that there are a certain number of coloured plates in each volume and a very thorough and exhaustive index, on the new American system, known technically as "The Labyrinth." There is also a number of very handsome maps showing the geographical distribution of Cads and elaborate curves, giving their vital statistics, growth and decay. Every set has attached to it a general "All In" policy of insurance with two new clauses specially drawn up, one for the use of Cads threatened by the various dangers peculiar to their rank, and the other for Non-Cads, ensuring them against the various dangers peculiar to the Cad's approach and neighbourhood. All this insurance is free.

ON THE MELTING OF THE ICE

I wish I had been there when the ice melted; in the days when the great river valleys were formed, when the rich meadows were laid down from the mud of the flooded rivers, and when the gravels were rolled along, forming beaches one below the other as the waters subsided, when Northern Europe was carved.

Men were there and saw it. Some say it was so little a while ago that the great monarchies of the hot places, Egypt and Assyria, were in their splendour, and there is something to be said for that saying.

It was an Englishman, spontaneous, individual, but at the same time exact, who started that hare. And the hare may be more than a phantasm. When you read the arguments it looks as though he were right. And if he were right, what an explanation of history!... The Ice Melting but 5 or 6,000 years ago.

Then indeed could we explain how it is that the North was unheard of during all these early centuries, and how it was that an increasing field increasingly breeding men, expanded towards the North, and how it is that you have no records of the North before the first movements of tribes 3,000 years ago, and their greater movement 2,000 years ago, and then at last the very late story of the brief Scandinavian adventure with its marvellous epics. And it would explain also the very small numbers of the North and the way in which the North got its language so largely from the South--for what we call the "Teutonic languages" to-day (of which we have no appreciable record till about Charlemagne's time), turn out to be for half their matter at least (and research will increase the proportion) built up of words from the Mediterranean. [Read Wiener, his revolutionary book and the collapse of the "Early Gothic" fraud.]

But apart from what it would explain in history, what a vision it must have been whenever it took place! For the melting of the ice was very rapid. The geologists do not always use their eyes. Look at those great scoops in the chalk hills shorn out by the water as it swung from left to right through the valleys, and see those enormous floods racing down.

See how those huge stones were rolled along which form the gravels of the higher levels, and ask yourselves in what a current they drove! Or wonder at the great sawings through the rock which unite and drain the old lakes of the Pyrenees! That was a sight to see! It is just possible that some one recorded it. Some traveller thrust up northward by exile or by avarice may have come with his slaves and his retinue to the edges of the enormous thing. He may have seen the Rhone tumbling like a sea released through the gap of the Jura. Or he may have seen the white seething at the mouths of the river which laid down the Camargue.

We see no such things nowadays.

Imagine yourself in a galley bowling westward under the Levanter compelled to go further north than you had wished: the wind dropping. Then your hanging about all night off the coast of what is now the Stes. Maries, and then at morning hearing with fright, but with wonder, on your starboard beam to the North, the enormous noise of waters, and seeing the flecks of foam go by you, and catching on the horizon a sort of low tumble or cataract or flood reaching the sea over twenty miles of beach and carrying with it half a county of stones from the hills. There the stones are to this day--a vast plain of sterile pebbles from a fist to a pea. The ancients said that Hercules once passed that way.

Or think what it must have been to stand on the Ventoux and see the melting of the ice from Auvergne. Or to stand driven upward on to the hills of the Artois, and to see the waters rising in the Dover strait below.

For the thing went very quickly, make no doubt of that.

There is a superstition for the moment in favour of slow, very slow, changes in the affairs of this earth. I think that superstition has arisen from a muddle-headed hope that slow work can exclude a Creator and Will. At any rate there is no proof for it. Some of the processes have been very slow (they are exceedingly slow to-day), but some jerks have been rapid enough: revolutionary: catastrophic: and the last melting of the ice was of these.