Chapter VI: Part 6

I was in a company the other evening in which the talk turned upon the familiar theme of the Government and its fitness for the job in hand. The principal assailant was what I should call a strenuous person. He seemed to suggest that if the conduct of the war had been in the hands of earnest-minded persons--like himself, for example--the business would have been over long ago.

"What can you expect," he said, the veins at the side of his forehead swelling with strenuousness, "from men who only play at war? Why, I was told by a man who was dining with Asquith not long ago that he was talking all the time about Georgian poetry, and that apparently he knew more about the subject than anybody at the table. Fiddling while Rome is burning, I call it."

"Did you want him to hold a Cabinet Council over the dinner-table?" I asked. The strenuous person killed me with a look of scorn.

But all the same, so far from being shocked to learn that Mr. Asquith can talk about poetry in these days, the fact, if it be a fact, increases my confidence in his competence for his task. I should suffer no pain even if I heard that he took a hand of cards after dinner, and I hope he takes care to get a game of golf at the week-end. I like men who have great responsibilities to carry their burdens easily, and to relax the bow as often as possible. The bigger the job you have in hand the more necessary it is to cultivate the habit of detachment. You want to walk away from the subject sometimes, as the artist walks away from his canvas to get a better view of his work. I never feel sure of an article until I have put it away, forgotten it, and read it again with a fresh mind, disengaged from the subject and seeing it objectively rather than subjectively. It is the affliction of the journalist that he has to face the light before he has had time to withdraw to a critical distance and to see his work with the detachment of the public.

There is nothing more mistaken than the view that because a thing is serious you must be thinking about it seriously all the time. If you do that you cease to be the master of your subject: the subject becomes the master of you. That is what is the matter with the fanatic. He is so obsessed by his idea that he cannot relate it to other ideas, and loses all sense of proportion, and often all sense of sanity. I have seen more unrelieved seriousness in a lunatic asylum than anywhere else.

The key to success is to come to a task with a fresh mind. That was the meaning of the very immoral advice given by a don to a friend of mine on the day before an examination. "What would you advise me to read to-night?" asked my friend, anxious to make the most of the few remaining hours. "If I were you," said the don, "I shouldn't read anything. I should get drunk." He did not mean that the business was so unimportant that it did not matter what he did. He meant that it was so important that he must forget all about it, and come to it afresh from the outside. And he used the most violent illustration he could find to express his meaning.

It is with the mind as with the soil. If you want to get the best out of your land you must change the crops, and sometimes even let the land lie fallow. And if you want to get the best out of your mind on a given theme you must let it range and have plenty of diversion. And the more remote the diversion is from the theme the better. I know a very grave man whose days are spent in the most responsible work, who goes to see Charlie Chaplin once or twice every week, and laughs like a schoolboy all the time. I should not trust his work less on that account: I should trust it all the more. I should know that he did not allow it to get the whip hand of him, that he kept sane and healthy by running out to play, as it were, occasionally.

I think all solemn men ought to take sixpenny-worth of Charlie Chaplin occasionally. And I'm certain they ought to play more. I believe that the real disease of Germany is that it has never learned to play. The bow is stretched all the time, and the nation is afflicted with a dreadful seriousness that suggests the madhouse by its lack of humour and gaiety. The oppressiveness of life begins with the child. Germany is one of The two countries in the world where the suicide of children is a familiar social fact. Years ago when I was in Cologne I christened it the City of the Elderly Children, and no one, I think, can have had any experience of Germany without being struck by the premature gravity of the young. If Germany had had fewer professors and a decent sprinkling of cricket and football grounds perhaps things might have been different. I don't generally agree with copybook maxims, but all work and no play does make Jack (or, rather, Hans) a dull boy.

Perhaps it is true that we play too much; but I'm quite sure that the Germans have played too little, and if there must be a mistake on one side or the other, let it be on the side of too much play.

ON THE INTELLIGENT GOLF BALL

I read the other day an article by my colleague "Arcturus" which I thought was a little boastful. It referred to a bull-dog. Now I cannot tell what there is about a bull-dog that makes people haughty, but it is certain that I have never known a case in which the companionship of that animal has not had this effect. The man who keeps a bull-dog becomes after a time only fit for the company of a bull-dog. He catches the august pride of the animal, seems to think like a bulldog, to talk in the brief, scornful tones of a bulldog, and even to look fat and formidable like a bull-dog. That, however, is not an uncommon phenomenon among those who live with animals. Go to a fat stock show and look at the men around the cattle pens. Or recall the pork butchers you have known and tell me----. But possibly you, sir, who read these lines, are a pork butcher and resent the implication. Sir, your resentment is just. You are the exception, sir--a most notable exception.

But my object here is not merely to warn "Arcturus" of the perilous company he is keeping. I refer to his bull-dog panegyric also to justify me in enlarging on my own private vanity. If he is permitted to write to the extent of a column on a bull-dog, I can at least claim the same latitude in regard to a sensible subject like golf. And I have this advantage over him, that I have a real message. I have a hint to offer that will mean money in pocket to you.

And first let me say that I have nothing to teach you in the way of play. I am in that stage of the novitiate that seems sheer imbecility. When I get a good stroke I stare after it as stout Cortez stared at the Pacific, "with a wild surmise." But it is because I am a bad player that I feel I can be useful to you. For most of my time on the links is spent in looking for lost balls. Now, I do not object to looking for balls. I rather enjoy it. It is a healthy, open-air occupation that keeps the body exercised and the mind fallow. There are some people who think the spectacle of a grown-up man (with a family) looking in an open field for a ball that isn't there is ridiculous. They are mistaken. It is really, seen from the philosophic angle, a very noble spectacle. It is the symbol of deathless hope. It is part of the great discipline of the game. It is that part of the game at which I do best. There is not a spinney over the whole course that I do not know by heart. There is not a bit of gorse that I have not probed and been probed by. I must have spent hours in the ditches, and I have upon me the scars left by every hedgerow. And the result is that, while I am worthless as a golfer, I think I may claim to be quite in the first class at finding lost balls.

Now all discoveries hinge upon some sudden illumination. I had up to a certain point been a sad failure in recovering balls. I watched them fall with the utmost care and was so sure of them that I felt that I could walk blindfold and pick them up. But when I came to the spot the ball was not there. This experience became so common that at last the conclusion forced itself upon me that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it, it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one could only let the thing suppose it was not being looked for it would be taken off its guard. I put the idea into operation, and I rejoice to say it works like a charm.

The method is quite simple. You lose the ball, of course, to begin with. That is easy enough. Then you search for it, and the longer you search the deeper grows the mystery of its vanishing. Your companions come and help you to poke the hedge and stir up the ditch, and you all agree that you have never known such a perfectly ridiculous thing before. And having clearly proved that the ball isn't anywhere in the neighbourhood, you take another out of the bag, and proceed with the game.

So far everything is quite ordinary. The game is over, the ball is lost, and you prepare to go. But you decide to go home by a rather roundabout way that brings you by the spot that you have scoured in vain. You are not going to search for the ball. That would simply put the creature up to some new artifice. No, you are just walking round that way accidentally. What so natural as that you should have your eyes on the ground? And there, sure enough, lies the ball, taken completely unaware. It is so ridiculously obvious that to say that it was lying there when you were looking for it so industriously is absurd. It simply couldn't have been there. You suspect that if after your search, instead of going on with the play you had hidden behind the hedge and watched, you would have seen the creature come out from its hole.

I do not expect to have my theory that the golf-ball has an intelligence accepted. The mystery is explicable, I am told, on the doctrine of the "fresh eye." You look for a thing so hard that you seem to lose the faculty of vision. Then you forget all about it and find it. The experience applies to all the operations of the mind. If I get "stuck" in writing an article I go and do a bit of physical work, ride a bicycle or merely walk round the garden, and the current flows again. Or you have a knotty problem to decide. You think furiously about it all day and get more hopelessly undecided the longer you think. Then you go to bed, and you wake in the morning with your mind made up. Hence the phrase, "I will sleep on it." It is this freshness of the vision, this faculty of passive illumination, that Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote:

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

And yet I cannot quite get rid of my fancy that the golf ball does enjoy the game.

ON A PRISONER OF WAR

There are still a few apples on the topmost branches of the trees in the orchard. They are there because David, the labourer, who used to come and lend us a hand in his odd hours--chiefly when the moon was up--is no longer available. You may remember how David opened his heart to me about enlisting when he stood on the ladder picking the pears last year. He did not like to go and he did not like to stay. All the other chaps had gone, and he didn't feel comfortable like in being left behind, but there was his mother and his wife and his Aunt Jane, and not a man to do a hand's turn for 'em or to dig their gardens if he went. And there was the allotment--that 'ud run to weeds. And ...

Well, the allotment has run to weeds. I passed it to-day and looked over the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession. For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier," we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station. "The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day mingling their tears in the "parlour"--that apartment sacred to Sundays, funerals, and weddings. "Poor boy, what'll he do without his comfortable bed?" moaned his mother.

But by May there came news that David was in France. By June he was in the trenches, and woe sat heavy on the three women to whom the world without David was an empty place.

Then came silence. The postman comes up the lane on his bicycle to our straggling hamlet on the hillside twice a day, and after David had gone his visits to the cottages of the three women had been frequent. Sometimes he put his bicycle at the mother's gate, sometimes at David's gate, less often at Aunt Jane's gate. For David was an industrious correspondent, even though his letters were a laborious compromise between crosses and "hoping you are well as it leaves me at present."

But in August the postman ceased to call. Long before his hour you could see the three women watching for his coming. I think the postman got to dread turning the corner and facing the expectant women with empty hands. He could not help feeling that somehow he was to blame. At first he would stop and point out elaborately the reasons for delay in the post. Then, when this had become thin with time, he adopted the expedient of riding past the cottages very hard with eyes staring far ahead, as though he was going to a fire or was the bearer of an important dispatch.

But at the end of a fortnight or so he came round the corner one morning more in the old style. The women observed the change and went out to meet him. But their faces fell as they looked at the letter and saw that the handwriting was not David's. And the contents were as bad as they could be. The letter was from a lad in the valley who had "joined up" with David. He wrote from a hospital asking for news of his comrade, whom he had seen "knocked over" in the advance in which he himself had been wounded.

For the rest of the day, it was observed, the cottage doors were never opened. Nor did any one venture to break in on the misery of the women inside. The parson's wife came up in her gig from the valley, having heard the news, but she did not call. She only talked to the neighbours, who had had the details from the postman. Every one felt the news like a personal blow, and even the widow Wigley, who lives down in the valley, was full of sympathy. She had never quite got over her resentment at the funeral of David's father. Her own husband had been carried to his grave on a hand-bier, but at the funeral of David's father there was a horse-drawn hearse and a carriage for the mourners. "They were always _such_ people for show," said Mrs. Wigley. And the memory had rankled. But now it was buried.

Next day we saw the mother and the wife set out down the lane for the village post-office, and thereafter daily they went to await the arrival of letters, returning each day silent and hopeless. At last, in reply to inquiries which had been made at the War Office, there came the official statement that David had been reported "wounded and missing." We learned that this usually meant that the man was dead, but the women did not know this.

And, curiously enough, David's mother, who had been the most despairing of women, and seemed to regard David as dead even before he started, now discovered a genius for hopefulness. She had heard of a case from a neighbouring village of a man who had been reported dead, and who afterwards wrote from a prison camp in Germany, and she clung to this precedent with a confident tenacity that we did not try to weaken. It was foolish, of course, we said. She was pinning her faith to a case in a thousand; but the hope gave the women something to live for, and the wound would heal the better for the illusion.

And, after all, she was right. This morning we saw the postman call at the cottage. He handed a post card to the wife, and it was evident that something wonderful and radiant had happened. The women fell on each other "laughing happy." No more going into the house to shut the door on the world. They came out to share the great tidings with their neighbours. "David is alive! David is a prisoner in Germany.... He's wounded.... But he's going on all right.... He can't write yet.... But he will."

Yes, there was the post card all right. The English was not very good and the script was German, but the fact that David was alive in hospital shone clear and indisputable.

"It's as though he's raised from the dead," cried the wife through her tears.

The joy of the old mother was touched with solemnity. She is a great chapel-goer, and her utterance is naturally coloured by the Book with which she is most familiar.

"My son was dead, and is alive again," she said simply; "he was lost and is found."

When I went out into the orchard and saw the red-cheeked apples still clinging to the topmost branches I thought, "Perhaps David will be able to lend me a hand with those trees next autumn after all."

ON THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

In one of those charming articles which he writes in _The New Statesman_, Mr. J. Arthur Thomson tells of the wonderful world of odours to which we are largely strangers. No doubt in an earlier existence we relied much more upon our noses for our food, our safety, and all that concerned us, and had a highly developed faculty of smell which has become more or less atrophied.

Fee, fie, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,

said the Giant in the story. But that was long ago. If we were left to the testimony of our noses we could not tell an Englishman from a hippopotamus. To the bee, on the other hand, with its two or three thousand olfactory pores, the world is primarily a world of smell. If we could question that wonderful creature we should find that it thought and talked of nothing but the odours of the field. We should find that it had a range of experience in that realm beyond our wildest imaginings. We should find that there are more smells in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

We talk of the world as if our sensations were the sum total of experience. But the truth is that there is an infinity of worlds outside our comprehension, worlds of vision and hearing and smell that are beyond our finite capacity, some so microscopic as to escape us at one end of the scale, some so vast and intangible as to escape us at the other end. I went into the garden just now to pick some strawberries. One of them tempted me forthwith by its ripe and luxuriant beauty. I bit into it and found it hollowed out in the centre, and in that luscious hollow was a colony of earwigs. For them that strawberry was the world, and a very jolly world too--abundance of food, a soft bed to lie on, and a chamber of exquisite perfumes. What, I wonder, was the thought of the little creatures as their comfortable world was suddenly shattered by some vast, inexplicable power beyond the scope of their vision and understanding? I could not help idly wondering whether the shell of our comfortable world has been broken by some power without which is as far beyond our apprehension as I was beyond the apprehension of the happy dwellers in the strawberry.

And it is not only the worlds which are peculiar to the myriad creatures of diverse instincts and faculties which are so strangely separate. We ourselves all dwell in worlds of infinite variety. I do not mean the social and professional worlds in which we move, though here, too, the world is not one but many. There is not much in common between the world as it appears to Sarah Ellen, who "runs" four looms in a Lancashire weaving shed during fifty-one weeks in the year, and my Lady Broadacres, who suns herself in Mayfair.

But I am speaking here of our individual world, the world of our private thought and emotions. My world is not your world, nor yours mine. We sit and talk with each other, we work together and play together, we exchange confidences and share our laughter and our experiences. But ultimately we can neither of us understand the world of the other--that world which is the sum of a million factors of unthinkable diversity, trifles light as air, memories, experiences, physical emotions, the play of light and colour and sound, attachments and antipathies often so obscure that we cannot even explain them to ourselves. We may feel a collective emotion under the impulse of some powerful event or personality. We may ebb and flow as a tide to the rhythm of a great melody or to the incantation of noble oratory. The news of a great victory in these days would move us to our common centre and bring all our separate worlds into a mighty chorus of thanksgiving. But even in these common emotions there are infinite shades of difference, and when they have passed we subside again into the world where we dwell alone.

Most of us are doomed to go through life without communicating the mysteries of our experience.

Alas for those who never sing.
But die with all their music in them.

It is the privilege of the artist in any medium to enrich the general life with the consciousness of the world that he alone has experienced. He gives us new kingdoms for our inheritance, makes us the sharers of his visions, opens out wider horizons, and floods our life with richer glories.

I entered such a kingdom the other afternoon. I turned out of the Strand, which was thronged and throbbing with the news of the great advance,--it was the first day of the battle of the Somme--and entered the Aldwych Theatre. As if by magic, I passed from the thrilling drama of the present into a realm

Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing--

into a sunlit world, where the zephyrs fan your cheek like a benediction and the brooks tinkle through the gracious landscape and melody is on every bough and joy and peace are all about you--the idyllic world where the marvellous child, Mozart, reigns like an enchanter. What though the tale of _The Magic Flute_ is foolish beyond words. Who cares for the tale? Who thinks of the tale? It is only the wand in the hand of the magician. Though it be but a broomstick, it will open all the magic casements of earth and heaven, it will surround us with the choirs invisible, and send us forth into green pastures and by the cool water-brooks.

That was Mozart's vision of the world in his brief but immortal journey through it. Perhaps it was only a dream world, but what a dream to live through! And to him it was as real a world as that of Mr. Gradgrind, whose vision is shut in by what Burns called "the raised edge of a bawbee." We must not think that our world is the only one. There are worlds outside our experience. "Call that a sunset?" said the lady to Turner as she stood before the artist's picture. "I never saw a sunset like that." "No, madam," said Turner. "Don't you wish you had?" Perhaps your world and mine is only mean because we are near-sighted. Perhaps we miss the vision not because the vision is not there, but because we darken the windows with dirty hangings.

"I'M TELLING YOU"

The other day I went into the Law Courts to hear a case of some interest, and I soon became more interested in the counsel than in the case. They offered a curious contrast of method. One was emphatic and dogmatic. "I'm not asking you," he seemed to say to the judge and jury, "I'm telling you." The other was winning and conciliatory. He did not thrust his views down the jury's throats; he seemed to offer them for their consideration, and leave it at that. He was not there to dictate to them, but to hold his client's case up to the light, as it were, just as a draper holds a length of silk up before his customer. Now, as a matter of fact, I think the dogmatic gentleman had the better case and the stronger argument, but I noticed next day that the verdict went against him. He won his argument and lost his case.

That is what commonly happens with the dogmatic and argumentative man. He shuts up the mind to reason. He changes the ground from the issue itself to a matter of personal dignity. You are no longer concerned with whether the thing is right or wrong. You are concerned about showing your opponent that you are not to be bullied by him into believing what he wants you to believe. Even Johnson, who was, perhaps, the most dogmatic person that ever lived, knew that success in the argument was often fatal to success in the case. Dr. Taylor once commended a physician to him, and said: "I fight many battles for him, as many people in the country dislike him." "But you should consider, sir," replied Johnson, "that by every one of your victories he is a loser; for every man of whom you get the better will be very angry, and resolve not to employ him; whereas if people get the better of you in argument about him, they'll think, 'We'll send for Dr. ----, nevertheless.'"

But Johnson fought not to convince, but for love of the argumentative victory. A great contemporary of his, whom he never met, and whom, if he had met, he would probably have insulted--Benjamin Franklin, to wit--preferred winning the case to winning the argument. While still a boy, he tells us, he was fascinated by the Socratic method, and instead of expressing opinions asked leading questions. He ceased to use words like "certainly," "undoubtedly," or anything that gave the air of positiveness to an opinion, and said "I apprehend," or "I conceive," a thing to be so and so.

"This habit," he says, "has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions and persuade men into measures that I have been engaged from time to time in promoting. And as the chief ends of conversation are to _inform_ or to be _informed_, to _please_ or to _persuade_, I wish well-meaning and sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition and to defeat most of those purposes for which speech was given us. In fact, if you wish to instruct others, a positive dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may occasion opposition and prevent a candid attention. If you desire instruction and improvement from others, you should not at the same time express yourself fixed in your present opinions. Modest and sensible men, who do not love disputation, will leave you undisturbed in the possession of your errors."

It is really, I suppose, our old friend "compulsion" again. We hate Prussianism in the realm of thought as much as in the realm of action. If I tell you you've got to believe so-and-so, your disposition is to refuse to do anything of the sort. It was the voluntary instinct that breathes in all of us that made Falstaff refuse to give Prince Hal reasons: "I give thee reasons? Though reasons were as plenty as blackberries I would not give thee reasons _on compulsion_--I."

I was once talking to a member of Parliament, who was lamenting that he had failed to win the ear of the House. He was puzzled by the failure. He was a fluent speaker; he knew his subject with great thoroughness, and his character was irreproachable; and yet when he rose the House went out. He was like a dinner-bell. He couldn't understand it. Yet everybody else understood it quite well. It was because he was always "telling you," and there is nothing the House of Commons dislikes so much as a schoolmaster. Probably the most successful speaker, judging by results, who ever rose in the House of Commons was Cobden. He was one of the few men in history who have changed a decision in Parliament by a speech. He did it because of his extraordinarily persuasive manner. He kept the minds of his hearers receptive and disengaged. He did not impress them with the fact that he was right and they were wrong. They forgot themselves when they saw the subject in a clear, white light, and were prepared to judge it on its merits rather than by their prejudices.

One of the few persuasive speakers I have heard in the House of Commons in recent years is Mr. Harold Cox. Many of his opinions I detest, but the engaging way in which he presents them makes you almost angry with yourself at disagreeing with him. You feel, indeed, that you must be wrong, and that such open-mindedness and such a friendly conciliatory manner as he shows must somehow be the evidence of a right view of things. As a matter of fact, of course, he is really a very dogmatic gentleman at the bottom--none more so. As indeed Franklin was. But he has the art to conceal the emphasis of his opinions, and so he makes even those who disagree with him listen to his case almost with a desire to endorse it.

It is a great gift. I wish I had got it.

ON COURAGE

I was asked the other day to send to a new magazine a statement as to the event of the war which had made the deepest impression on me. Without hesitation I selected the remarkable Christmas demonstrations in Flanders. Here were men who for weeks and months past had been engaged in the task of stalking each other and killing each other, and suddenly under the influence of a common memory, they repudiate the whole gospel of war and declare the gospel of brotherhood. Next day they began killing each other again as the obedient instruments of governments they do not control and of motives they do not understand. But the fact remains. It is a beam of light in the darkness, rich in meaning and hope.

But if I were asked to name the instance of individual action which had most impressed me I should find the task more difficult. Should I select something that shows how war depraves, or something that shows how it ennobles? If the latter I think I would choose that beautiful incident of the sailor on the _Formidable_.

He had won by ballot a place in one of the boats. The ship was going down, but he was to be saved. One pictures the scene: The boat is waiting to take him to the shore and safety. He looks at the old comrades who have lost in the ballot and who stand there doomed to death. He feels the passion for life surging within him. He sees the cold, dark sea waiting to engulf its victims. And in that great moment--the greatest moment that can come to any man--he makes the triumphant choice. He turns to one of his comrades. "You've got parents," he says. "I haven't." And with that word--so heroic in its simplicity--he makes the other take his place in the boat and signs his own death warrant.

I see him on the deck among his doomed fellows, watching the disappearing boat until the final plunge comes and all is over. The sea never took a braver man to its bosom. "Greater love hath no man than this ..."

Can you read that story without some tumult within you--without feeling that humanity itself is ennobled by this great act and that you are, in some mysterious way, better for the deed? That is the splendid fruit of all such sublime sacrifice. It enriches the whole human family. It makes us lift our heads with pride that we are men--that there is in us at our best this noble gift of valiant unselfishness, this glorious prodigality that spends life itself for something greater than life. If we had met this nameless sailor we should have found him perhaps a very ordinary man, with plenty of failings, doubtless, like the rest of us, and without any idea that he had in him the priceless jewel beside which crowns and coronets are empty baubles. He was something greater than he knew.

How many of us could pass such a test? What should I do? What would you do? We neither of us know, for we are as great a mystery to ourselves as we are to our neighbours. Bob Acres said he found that "a man may have a deal of valour in him without knowing it," and it is equally true that a man may be more chicken-hearted than he himself suspects. Only the occasion discovers of what stuff we are made--whether we are heroes or cowards, saints or sinners. A blustering manner will not reveal the one any more than a long face will reveal the other.

The merit of this sailor's heroism was that it was done with calculation--in cold blood, as it were, with that "two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage" of which Napoleon spoke as the real thing. Many of us could do brave things in hot blood, with a sudden rush of the spirit, who would fail if we had time, as this man had, to pause and think, to reckon, to doubt, to grow cold and selfish. The merit of his deed is that it was an act of physical courage based on the higher quality of moral courage.

Nor because a man fails in the great moment is he necessarily all a coward. Mark Twain was once talking to a friend of mine on the subject of courage in men, and spoke of a man whose name is associated with a book that has become a classic. "I knew him well," he said, "and I knew him as a brave man. Yet he once did the most cowardly thing I have ever heard of any man. He was in a shipwreck, and as the ship was going down he snatched a lifebelt from a woman passenger and put it on himself. He was saved, and she was drowned. And in spite of that frightful act I think he was not a coward. I know there was not a day of his life afterwards when he would not willingly and in cold blood have given his life to recall that shameful act."

In this case the failure was not in moral courage, but in physical courage. He was demoralised by the peril, and the physical coward came uppermost. If he had had time to recover his moral balance he would have died an honourable death. It is no uncommon thing for a man to have in him the elements both of the hero and the coward. You remember that delightful remark of Mrs. Disraeli, one of the most characteristic of the many quaint sayings attributed to that strange woman. "Dizzy," she said, "has wonderful moral courage, but no physical courage. I always have to pull the string of his shower bath." It is a capital illustration of that conflict of the coward and the brave man that takes place in most of us. Dizzy's moral courage carried him to the bath, but there his physical courage failed him. He could not pull the string that administered the cold shock. The bathroom is rich in such secrets, and life teems with them.

The true hero is he who unites the two qualities. The physical element is the more plentiful. For one man who will count the cost of sacrifice and, having counted it, pay the price with unfaltering heart, there are many who will answer the sudden call to meet peril with swift defiance. The courage that snatches a comrade from under the guns of the enemy or a child from the flames is, happily, not uncommon. It is inspired by an impulse that takes men out of themselves and by a certain spirit of challenge to fate that every one with a sporting instinct loves to take. But the act of the sailor of the _Formidable_ was a much bigger thing. Here was no thrill of gallantry and no sporting risk. He dealt in cold certainties: the boat and safety; the ship and death; his life or the other's. And he thought of his comrade's old parents at home and chose death.

It was a great end. I wonder whether you or I would be capable of it. I would give much to feel that I could answer in the affirmative--that I could take my stand on the spiritual plane of that unknown sailor.

ON SPENDTHRIFTS

While every one, I suppose, agrees that Lady Ida Sitwell richly deserves her three months' imprisonment, there are many who will have a sneaking pity for her. And that not because she is a woman of family who will suffer peculiar tortures from prison life. On the contrary, I have no doubt that a spell of imprisonment is just what she needs. In fact, it is what most of us need, especially most of those who live a life of luxurious idleness. To be compelled to get up early, to clean your cell, to wear plain clothes, to live on plain food, to observe regular hours, and do regular duties--this is no matter for tears, but for thankfulness. It is the sort of discipline that we ought to undergo periodically for our spiritual and even bodily health.

No, the sympathy that will be felt for Lady Ida is the sympathy which is commonly felt for the spendthrift--for the person who, no matter what his income, is congenitally incapable of making ends meet. The miser has no friends; but the spendthrift has generally too many. We avoid Harpagon as though he were a leper; but Falstaff, who, like Lady Ida, could "find no cure for this intolerable consumption of the purse," never lacked friends, and even Justice Shallow, it will be remembered, lent him a thousand crowns. There is no record of its having been repaid, though Falstaff was once surprised, in a moment of bitter humiliation, into admitting the debt. And Charles Surface and Micawber--who can deny them a certain affection? I have no doubt that Mrs. Micawber's papa, who "lived to bail Mr. Micawber out many times until he died lamented by a wide circle of friends," loved the fellow as you and I love him. I should deem it a privilege to bail out Micawber. But Elwes, the miser--ugh! the very name chills the blood.

The difference, I suppose, proceeds from the idea that while the miser is the soul of selfishness, the spendthrift is at bottom a good-natured fellow and a lover of his kind. No doubt the vice of the spendthrift has a touch of generosity, but it is often generosity at other people's expense, and is not seldom as essentially selfish as the vice of the miser. It is rather like the generosity of the man who, according to Sydney Smith, was so touched by a charity sermon that he picked his neighbour's pocket of a guinea and put it in the plate. I have no doubt that Lady Ida if she had got Miss Dobbs's money would have scattered it about with a very free hand, and would have contributed to the collection plate quite handsomely. But she was selfish none the less. It was her form of selfishness to enjoy the luxury of spending money she hadn't got, just as it was Elwes's form of selfishness to enjoy the luxury of saving money that he had got.

The point was very well stated by a famous miser whose son has since been in Parliament (I will not say on which side). The old man had accumulated a vast fortune, but, in the Scotch phrase, would have grudged you "the smoke off his porridge." (He died, by the way, properly enough, through walking home in the rain because he was too mean to take a cab.) He was once asked why he was so anxious to increase his riches, since his son would probably squander them, and he replied, "If my son gets as much pleasure out of squandering my money as I have had out of saving it, I shall not mind." Both the hoarding and the spending, you see, were in his view equally a matter of mere selfish pleasure.

But I admit that the uncalculating spirit that lands people in debt is a more engaging frailty than the calculating spirit of the miser. I know a delightful man who seems to have no more knowledge of the relation of income and expenditure than a kitten. If he gets £100 unexpectedly he does not look at it in relation to his whole needs. He does not remember rent, rates, taxes, baker, butcher, tailor. No. On the strength of it, he will order a new piano in the morning, buy his wife a sealskin jacket in the afternoon, and by the next day be deeper in the mire than ever, and wonder how he got there. And there is Jones's young wife, a charming woman, who is dragging her husband into debt with the same kittenish irresponsibility. She will leave Jones on the pavement with a remark that suggests that she is going into the shop to buy some pins, and will come out with a request for £10 for some "perfectly lovely" thing that has caught her eye. And Jones, being elderly, and still a little astonished at having won the affection of such a divinity, has not the courage to say "No."

To the people afflicted with these loose spending habits I would commend the lesson of a little incident I saw in a tram on the Embankment the other evening. There entered and sat beside me a working man, carrying his "kit" in a handkerchief, and wearing a scarf round his neck, a cloth cap, and corduroy trousers--obviously a labourer earning perhaps 25s. a week. He paid his fare, and then he took from his pocket a packet tied up in a handkerchief. He untied the knot, and there came forth a neat pocket-book with pencil attached. He opened it, and began to write. My curiosity was too much for my manners. Out of the tail of my eye I watched the motion of his fingers, and this is what he wrote: "Tram 1-1/2 _d_." In a flash I seemed to see the whole orderly life of that poor labourer. He had an anchorage in the tossing seas of this troublesome world. He had got hold of a lesson that Lady Ida Sitwell ought to try and learn during the next three months. It is this: Watch your spendings.

For it is the people who are more concerned about getting money than about how they spend it who come to grief. A very acute observer once told me that the principal difference between the Scotch people and the Lancashire people was that the former thought most about how they spent, and the latter most about how much they got. And the difference, he said, was the difference between a thrifty and an unthrifty people. I think that is true. Nothing is more common than to find people worse off as they get better off. They have learned the art of getting money and lost the art of spending it wisely. They pay their way on £200 a year and get hopelessly into debt on £500. They are safe in a rowing boat, but capsize in a sailing boat.

Here is an axiom which I offer to all spendthrifts: We cannot command our incomings; but we can control outgoings.

ON A TOP-HAT

A few days ago I went to a christening to make vows on behalf of the offspring of a gallant young officer now at the front. I conceived that the fitting thing on such an occasion was to wear a silk hat, and accordingly I took out the article, warmed it before the fire, and rubbed it with a hat pad until it was nice and shiny, put it on my head, and set out for the church. But I soon regretted the choice. It had no support from any one else present, and when later I got out of the Tube and walked down the Strand I found that I was a conspicuous person, which, above all things, I hate to be. My hat, I saw, was observed. Eyes were turned towards me with that mild curiosity with which one remarks any innocent oddity or vanity of the streets.

I became self-conscious and looked around for companionship, but as my eye travelled along the crowded pavement I could see nothing but bowlers and trilbys and occasional straws. "Ah, here at last," said I, "is one coming." But a nearer view only completed my discomfiture, for it was one of those greasy-shiny hats which go with frayed trousers and broken boots, and which are the symbol of "better days," of hopes that are dead, and "drinks" that dally, of a social status that has gone and of a suburban villa that has shrunk to a cubicle in a Rowton lodging-house. I looked at greasy-hat and greasy-hat looked at me, and in that momentary glance of fellowship we agreed that we were "out of it."

I put my silk hat away at night with the firm resolution that nothing short of an invitation to Buckingham Palace, or some similar incredible disaster, should make me drag it into the light again. For the truth is that the war has given the top-hat a knock-out blow. It had been tottering on our brows for some time. There was a very hot summer a few years ago which began the revolution. The tyranny of the top-hat became intolerable, and quite "respectable" people began to be seen in the streets with Panamas and straws. But these were only concessions to an irresponsible climate, and the silk hat still held its ancient sway as the crown and glory of our City civilisation. And now it has toppled down and is on the way, perhaps, to becoming as much a thing of the past as wigs or knee-breeches. It is almost as rare in the Strand as it is in Market Street, Manchester. Cabinet Ministers and other sublime personages still wear it, coachmen still wear it, and my friend greasy-hat still wears it; but for the rest of us it is a splendour that is past, a memory of the world before the deluge.

It may be that it will revive. It would not be the first time that such a result of a great catastrophe was found to be only temporary. I remember that Pepys records in his Diary that one result of the Great Plague was that the wig went out of fashion. People were afraid to wear wigs that might be made of the hair of those who had died of infection. But the wig returned again for more than a century, though you may remember that in _The Rivals_ there is an early hint of its final disappearance. There was never probably a more crazy fashion, and, like most crazy fashions, it began, as the "Alexandra limp" of our youth began, in snobbery. Was it not a fact that a bald-headed King wore a wig to conceal his baldness, which set all the flunkey-world wearing wigs to conceal their hair? This aping of the great is always converting some defect or folly into a virtue. When Lady Percy in _Henry IV._ is lamenting Hotspur she says:--

... he was, indeed, the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.
He had no legs that practised not his gait;
And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,
Became the accents of the valiant;
For those that could speak low and tardily,
Would turn their own perfection to abuse.
To seem like him.

In the case of the top-hat the disappearance is due to the psychology of the war. The great tragedy has brought us down to the bed-rock of things and has made us feel somehow that ornament is out of place, and that the top-hat is a falsity in a world that has become a battlefield. I don't think women have shared this feeling to the same extent. I am told there were never so many sealskin coats to be seen as during last winter. But, perhaps, the women will say that men have been only too glad to use the war as an excuse for getting rid of an incubus. And they may be right. We had better not make too great a virtue of what is, after all, a comfortable change. Let us enjoy it without boasting.

Our enjoyment may be short-lived. We must not be surprised if this incredible hat returns in triumph with peace. It has survived the blasts of many centuries and infinite changes of fashion. It is, I suppose, the most ancient survival in the dress that men wear. There is in the Froissart collection at the British Museum an illumination (dating from the fifteenth century) showing the expedition of the French and English against the Barbary corsairs. And there seated in the boats are men clad in armour. They have put their helmets aside and are wearing top-hats! And it may be that when Macaulay's New Zealander, centuries hence, takes his seat on that broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, he will sit under the shelter of a top-hat that has out-lasted all our greatness.