Chapter VII: Part 7

(Faith, Hope, Mother, etc., all turn aside and hide their faces, with convulsive movements of their shoulders. Eventually Hope looks firmly up at the Royal Box, and a loud click is heard as Faith tries to light the electric sword. As it is out of order, she merely holds it up. This is the cue for the play to proceed.)

Justice is rather fierce, and as she speaks about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Britannia rises and with a majestic look sets her teeth and flashes her eyes. Mercy intervenes, telling Justice that they are sisters, Justice acknowledges the soft impeachment, and hides her head on Mercy's shoulder, who reminds her that the quality of Mercy is twice blest, which is very pleasant for her as she _is_ Mercy.

Rolls of drum in the orchestra punctuate what Victory has to say, which is just as easily described as imagined, but is scarcely worth description. Then a soft smile irradiates Britannia's face, and she says:

"And now that Victory's won I call
The fairest sister of you all."

On which Peace advances and crowns Britannia with a green wreath, and a small stuffed pigeon descends from above Britannia's head and hovers. The curtain descends slowly to long soft chords on the orchestra. The applause of relief sounds faintly from various quarters of the house. The curtain instantly ascends again and shows the same picture. It goes up and down five or six times. Then it parts, and Britannia comes out and bows to the house. She smiles at someone behind the curtain, and extends her hand. A small man in a frock coat and an expression of abject misery comes out and clutches it. The audience come to the conclusion that he must be the author, and with the amiable idea of putting him out of his misery applaud again. On which Britannia advances a little to the left and again beckons behind the curtain. On which Child runs out, and (as previously instructed) after an alarmed survey of the house, hides its little face in the ample folds of Britannia's gown. Murmurs of sympathy. Britannia (who has a way with her) encourages the infant (who has done this fifty times before, and is really as brazen as brass) and points to the Royal Box. Child drops curtsy, amid more applause. Faith, Hope, Mother, Wife, History, Geography, Belgium, Peace, Mathematics, Victory, Suicide, Phlebotomy, Green Grocery and any other symbolical figures that there may be, join the group one by one. They all bow, the audience continues applauding: Faith (having mastered the unruly mechanism) lights up her sword. Peace holds aloft the Dove. Belgium's hair falls down....

The lights go up in the theatre, and guinea stall turns to guinea stall with a sigh.

"Oh, George Robey next," she says. "I hope he'll play golf."

* * * * *

Now I want to make my position clear. I think it wonderfully kind of all these eminent ladies to spend all this time and trouble in giving us this patriotic sketch. I think it wonderfully clever of the gentleman who wrote it to have made it all up, and thought of all those rhymes. I think every single sentiment expressed in his drama to be absolutely unexceptionable, and, as we hear from the pulpit, "True in the best sense of the word," without even inquiring what that cryptic utterance means. But there seems to me to be two weighty objections to the whole affair: it is all utterly devoid of the sense of humour and of the sense of decency. You may say that when treating of such deeply-felt matters as Faith and Victory and Mother and Child, a sense of humour would be out of place. I do not agree: it is the absence of the sense of humour that causes it to be so ridiculous. As for the propriety of presenting such things on the stage, I can only say that the Lord Chamberlain ought never to have allowed this and fifty other such pieces to appear, on grounds of indecent exposure. To present under such ruthless imagery the secret and holiest feelings of the heart is much worse than allowing people to appear with no clothes on. It is all true, too: there is its crowning horror. It is just because it is so sacredly true that it is totally unfit for public production. There are things you can't even talk about ... and they are just these things that the author of this abomination has put into the mouths of these eminent actresses. And the bowings and the scrapings, and the return of the actors, all smiles to their friends in the audience.... Oh, swiftly come, George Robey, and let us forget about it!

* * * * *

In this blear-eyed December, which, with its stuffy dark days and absence of sunshine, seems like some drowsy dormouse faintly conscious of being awake, and desiring only to be allowed to go to sleep again, there is an immense amount of activity going on. As in those ample entertainments for the sake of something, there is exhibited on the part of actors, authors and audience an intense desire to be doing something, so in the general life of the country there is a sense of being busy, being strenuous, doing work of some sort in order to experience the narcotic influence of occupation. The country is unhappy, and since England is a very practical country, it is stifling its spiritual unhappiness by being busy. It does things to prevent its thinking about things, and though it does very foolish things, it shows its common-sense in doing something rather than encourage its unhappiness by brooding over it. Herein, it shows its inherent vitality: were it less vital it would abandon itself to gloomy reflection. But it does not: it is tremendously busy, and so with set purpose deprives itself of the tendency to think. That is not very difficult, for, as a nation, we cannot be considered good at thinking.

Now considering that all action of whatever kind is the direct result of thought, it would seem at first sight, when we observe the amazing activities of most people, that these same people must think a great deal. But as a matter of fact, most people, so far from thinking a great deal, hardly think at all, and the greater part of their consistent activity is the result of mere habit. The baby, for instance, who is learning to walk, or the girl who is learning to knit, think immensely and absorbedly about these locomotive and involved accomplishments, just because they have not yet formed the habit of them. But a few years later, the baby who has become a man will give no thought at all to the act of walking and, indeed, to walk (the feat which once so engaged his mind), now sets his mind free to think, and he finds that problems which require to be thought out are assisted to their solution by the act that once required so much attention: similarly the grown-up woman often really talks and attends better to other things when she is engaged in knitting. The accomplishment has soaked in through the conscious to the sub-conscious self, and demands no direction from the practical mind.

It is on the lines of this analogy that we must explain the fact that many very active people are almost incapable of sustained or coherent thought. Many of their activities are matters of habit; they order dinner or look at a picture exhibition or argue about the war with no more thought than the man who walks or the woman who knits. They can be voluble about post-impressionism because at one time they acquired the habit of talking about it, and to do so now requires no more exercise of the reflective or critical qualities than does the ordering of a beef-steak pudding. Oh, if they argue about the war, most people have no original ideas of any kind on the subject: they mix round, as in an omelette, certain facts they have seen in the official telegrams, with certain reflections they have read in the leaders of their papers, and serve up, hot or cold, as their fancy dictates. But they do not think about it.

Thought, in fact, not merely abstract thought, but a far less difficult variety, namely, definite coherent thought about concrete things, is an extremely rare accomplishment among grown up people. We are often told that it is infinitely harder to learn anything when we are of mature age than when we are young, and this is quite true, the reason for it being that we now find it more difficult to think since we have so long relied on muddling along under the direction of habit. And even the people who think they think are not in most cases the real owners of their thoughts. They borrow their thoughts, as from a circulating library, and instead of owning them, return them slightly damaged at the end of a week or two, and borrow some more. They do not think for themselves: they stir about the stale thoughts of others and offer their insipid porridge as a home-industry.

This secondhand method of thinking is strangely characteristic of our race, in contradistinction to French and German methods of thought, and is admirably illustrated by the anecdote concerning the camel. An Englishman, a Frenchman and a German were bidden to write an essay on that melancholy beast, deriving their authorities from where they chose. The Englishman studied books of natural history at the British Museum, and when he had written an essay founded on them, went and shot a camel. The Frenchman took his hat and stick and went to the _Jardin des Plantes,_ where he looked at a real camel, and subsequently had a ride or two on its back. But the German did none of these things: he consulted no authority, he looked at no camel, but shutting himself up in his study, he constructed one from his inner consciousness.

* * * * *

Now whether this offspring of mentality was like a real camel or not, history does not tell us. Probably it was not, any more than the new map of Europe planned by Prussian militarism will prove like the map of Europe as it will appear in the atlases published, let us say, in 1918. But even if the German camel was totally unrecognizable as such, its constructor had shown himself capable of entering on a higher plane of thought than is intelligible to the ordinary Englishman. The German, in fact, as we are beginning to learn, is able to sit down and think, and out of pure thought to build up an image. The English are excellent learners, quick to assimilate and apply what others have thought out, the French are vivid and keen observers, but neither have the power of sustained internal thought which characterizes the Teuton, who incidentally is quite the equal of the Englishman at learning and of the Frenchman at observation. The German, for instance, thought out the doctrine of submarine warfare, and to our grievous cost applied it to our shipping. Similarly they thought out the doctrine of trench warfare, supplemented by gas, then the French, with their marvellously quick powers of observation, saw and comprehended and applied. In fact, the two great German inventions conceived by them, and originally used by them, have been adopted and brought to a higher pitch of perfection by their adversaries. But if only any of our allied nations could pick up from them the power of concentrated and imaginative thought, for the root of the matter is imagination! We proverbially muddle through, and when occasion arises, by dint of a certain stubbornness and admirable stolidity, though pommelled and buffeted, eventually learn by experience a successful mode of resistance. But constitutionally, we appear incapable of initiating ideas. We cannot imagine an occasion, but can only meet the occasion when somebody else imagines it.

Of all the disappointments of this year this is the root. We cannot invent: we can only counter. We have not the power of constructive imagination, which is the mother and father of original actions. But when our adversaries indulge in original actions, we can (on occasion) think out an answer to them which is perfectly effective. We can resist and we can hit back when we are hit, but at present we have not shown that we are capable of imagining and dealing the first blow. Perhaps this may come, for it goes without saying that we were notoriously unready at the beginning of the war, and had our hands full and overfull with countering the blows that were rained on us. We were on the defensive and could barely maintain the defence, and could not possibly have collected that coiled force which is necessary for any offensive movement. But if after sixteen months of war we do not begin to show signs of it, it is reasonable to wonder whether the cause of this is not so much that we lack the battering power, but that our statesmen and our generals lack the imagination out of which original plans are made. True, there have been two original schemes, namely, that of forcing the Dardanelles and capturing Bagdad, and if these show the quality of our originality, perhaps we are better without it ...

It is natural that the stress of war should have brought out the deep-rooted, inherent qualities of the nations engaged, and those qualities are just those that strike you first in a man of whatever nationality. When you know him a little better, you think you detect all sorts of other qualities, but when you come really to know him--singly or collectively--he is usually just such as you first thought him to be. Indeed, it is as Francis said about the orange: the rind has the savour of the fruit within, between the two there is a layer of soft, pulpy stuff. But when you get through that, the man, the essential person is like the taste of the rind. This has been immensely true with regard to the war. On the surface the French strike anyone who comes in contact with them as full of admirable fervour: there is the strong, sharp odour about them, there is a savour that penetrates. Then you get to know them just a little better, and you find a woolly and casual touch about them, which you, in your ignorance born out of a little knowledge, take to be the real spirit of the French. But when intimate acquaintance, or the stripping of the surface takes place, how you must alter your estimate again, going back to your first impression. You meet the fervour, the strong sharp odour again, and it goes into the heart of the nation. The Frenchman is apt on first acquaintance to seem too genuine, too patriotically French to be real. But when you get within, when the stress of war has revealed the nation and shown the strong beating of its heart, how the fervour and the intensity of savour persist! What you thought was superficial you find to be the quality that dwells in the innermost. He will easily talk about _La France_ and _La gloire_ when you first get acquainted with him, but when he stands revealed you find that he talks about it easily because it is the spring and source of his being.

The same holds with the German. When first you get speaking-acquaintance with a German, you consider him brutal and beery and coarse and loud-tongued. You penetrate a little further, and find him watching by the Rhine and musical and philosophical, a peaceful, aloof dreamer. Such, at any rate, was the experience of Lord Haldane. But when the pulpy, stringy layer is stripped off, when the stress of war makes penetration into his real self, you find him again to be as you first thought him, coarse and brutal and clamant, the most overweening individual in all creation. Both with the French and the German you revised your first impressions when you thought you began to know him, only to find when the real man is revealed that he is as you first thought him. And though it is the hardest thing in the world for anyone to form even an approximately true estimate of the race to which he belongs, I think that the same holds of the English. They are at heart very much what they appear to be on the surface, blundering but tenacious, slow to move, but difficult when once on the move to stop. But really, when I try to think what the English are like, I find I can form no conclusion about them, simply because I am of them.

* * * * *

I have just had a long letter from Francis, a letter radiant with internal happiness. The exterior facts of life cannot much contribute to that, for the place where he now is consists, so he tells me, entirely of bare hill-side, lined with shallow trenches, bullets and swarms of drowsy flies. He hints in a cryptic manner his belief that he will not remain there very long, leaving me to make any conjecture I please. But in the lines and between them I read, as I said, a radiance of happiness. He knows, with a strength that throttles all qualms of the flesh, that does not, indeed, allow them to exist at all, the bright shining of the light invisible, that diffused illumination in which no shadow can be cast. And as in that walk we had on the downs, the knowledge fills him not only with inward bliss, but with intense physical enjoyment, so that he can be humorous over the horrors of existence on that damned promontory. He is genuinely amused: for nobody was ever such a poor hand at dissimulation as Francis. He finds things to enjoy in that hell; more than that, he finds that hell enjoyable: his letter breathed that serenity of well-being which is the least imitable thing in the world.

Meantime, he wants the news of everyday happenings, "without any serious reflections, or the internal stomach-ache of pessimists." These rather pointed remarks refer, I am afraid, to my last letter to him, to which he does not otherwise allude. He quotes Mr. Longfellow's best-known poem (I am afraid also) in the spirit of mockery, and says:

"'Life is real, life is earnest,' and if you doubt it,
come out to Suvla Bay and see. We are damned earnest out
here, and I haven't seen anybody who doubts that Life is
extremely real: so are the flies. What I want to know
is the little rotten jokes and nonsense, the things you
talk about when you don't think what you are talking
about. Here's one: the other day I was opening a tin of
potted meat, and a bit of shrapnel came and took the
tin clean out of my hand. It didn't touch me; it simply
whisked it neatly away. Another inch and my hand would
have gone with it. But I hope you don't think I gave
thanks for the lucky escape I had had. Not a bit: I was
merely furious at losing the potted meat. It lay outside
the trench (a trench out here is a tea-spoonful of earth
and pebbles which you pile up in front of you, and then
hide yourself behind it), and I spent the whole of the
afternoon in casting for it, with a hook on a piece of
string. I was much more interested in that than in the
military operations. I wanted my potted meat, which
I think you sent me. Well, what I should like you to
write to me about, is the things that the part of me
which wanted the potted meat would like to hear about.
Patriotism and principles be blowed, bless them! That's
all taken for granted--'granted, I'm sure,' as the
kitchen-maid said.

"Francis.

"P.S.--You alluded to a grey parrot, in one letter. For
God's sake, tell me about the grey parrot. You just
mentioned a grey parrot, and then no more. Grey parrot
is what I want, and your cat, and all the little, rotten
things that are so tremendously important. Write me a
grey parrot letter."

Well, the grey parrot is rather interesting ... and her name is Matilda, and if you want to know why she is Matilda, you have only got to look at her. If words have any suggestiveness to your mind, if there is to you any magic about them, or if they, unbidden, conjure up images, I should not be surprised if the word "Matilda" connoted to you a grey parrot. It would be more surprising if, when you become acquainted with my grey parrot, you did not become aware that she _was_ Matilda. I don't see how you can get away from the fact that she must, in the essentials of her nature, be Matilda. Presently you will see what Matilda-ism is: when it is stated, you will know that you knew it all along, but didn't know you knew it. The same sort of thing happened to somebody, when he became aware that all his life he had been writing prose. And very good prose it was.... Here, then, begins the introduction to Matilda-ism, in general terms to be applied later.

MATILDA-ISM

We all of us know (even the most consistent of us) those
baffling instincts which lead us to act in manners
incompatible with each other, simultaneously. That
is not so puzzling as it sounds (nor sounds quite as
ungrammatical as it is), and an instance will clarify
the principle. For who does not understand and in
measure sympathize with the careful housewife who
embarks on a two-shilling taxicab expedition in order
to purchase some small household commodity at sixpence
less than she could have bought it for across the road?
The motive of her expedition is economy, and therefore
she lashes out into bewildering expenditure in order to
achieve it. Economy, in fact, is the direct cause of her
indulging in totally unnecessary expenditure. She ties
herself to the stake with one hand, ready to be burned
for the sake of her faith, and offers incense to the
heathen gods with the other.

It is this strain of self-contradictory conduct that I
unhesitatingly label Matilda-ism, for, as far as I am
aware, there is no other succinct term in the English
language which sums up and expresses it. (Besides, it
is characteristic of my grey parrot, for as you shall
presently see, this is what Matilda does.) You cannot
explain this incompatibility of action and principle
otherwise: it is not vacillation, it is not infirmity
of purpose, for the economical housewife is one mass of
purpose and her motive is as pure as Parsifal. Simply
in pursuance of her economical design, she rushes into
expense. Nor is it the sign of a weak intellect, for
Matilda's grasp of a subject is, like Mrs. Micawber's,
inferior to none, and yet Matilda is the great example
of the quality which takes its name from her. She
does not spare thought and industry, perhaps, if
anything, she thinks too much, which may account for
the inadequacy of her plumage. She has been ill, too,
lately, which perhaps makes her plumage worse, for she
has been suffering from some obscure affection of the
brain. But since her illness her Matilda-ism has been
more marked than ever, and I prefer to think that it is
Thought which has accounted both for the illness and her
abnormal moultings. She had that rare disease, beloved
of novelists, called Brain-fever. People's hair, we are
told, falls out after brain-fever, and so did Matilda's
feathers. But I am sure that Matilda would sooner go
naked, than cease to think.

Unlike most women, Matilda does not care about her
clothes, and unlike most birds, she does not scoop and
preen herself after breakfast. She gives one shake,
and then settles down to her studies, which consist
in observing, with a scornful wonder, all that goes
on round her. When first she came here, she was in no
hurry to draw conclusions, or commit herself hastily
to irrevocable words, for she sat and waited without
speech for some six weeks, until I thought she was
either dumb or had nothing to say. Then, unlike Mr.
Asquith, she ceased to wait and see, and began calling
the kitchen-maid (Mabel) in a voice so like the cook's,
that that deluded young lady came running from the
scullery into the kitchen, to find no cook there at all,
at all, but only a grey parrot, that sat with stony,
half-closed eyes on her perch. Then, as she went out
again, believing that some discarnate intelligence had
spoken to her, Matilda laughed at her in a rude, hoarse
voice that was precisely like the milkman's, mewed like
the cat, and said "Cuckoo" a number of times. (This she
had learned last spring in the country, and was unaware
that there were no cuckoos in London ever, or even in
the country in November.) Matilda, in fact, with her
powerful intellect and her awful memory, had been taking
stock of everybody, and not telling anybody about it.
Now that it was well within her power to deal with every
situation that could possibly arise in a mocking manner,
she decided to begin talking and taking an active part,
that of the critic, in life. Simultaneously, she began
to reveal what Matilda-ism was. At this period, since
she was too accomplished to be limited to the kitchen, I
took her upstairs. I thought she would meet more people
there, and enlarge, if possible, a mind that was already
vast.

Her first definite elucidation of Matilda-ism was to
make love in the most abandoned manner to the green
parrot. She wooed him in the style that the Bishop of
L-nd-n so rightly deprecates, with loud Cockney whistles
and love-lorn eyes. Of course Joey seemed to like that,
and their cages were moved close together, in the hope
that eventually they would make a match of it, and that
most remarkable babies would chip the shells of their
eggs. Matilda continued to encourage him, and one day,
when their cages were now quite close to each other, the
green gentleman, trembling with excitement, put out a
horned claw, and introduced it into Matilda's cage. On
which Matilda screamed at the top of her voice and bit
it viciously. I thought at the time that this was only
an exhibition of the eternal feminine, which encourages
a man, and then is offended and indignant when he makes
the natural response to her invitations, but in the
light of subsequent events, I believe it to have been
Matilda-ism. She was not being a flirt, simply, while
she adored, she hated also. It was Matilda, you see: all
the time it was Matilda waiting to be classified.

Matilda knew perfectly well what a cat says: she knew,
too, that a cat is called "Puss," and, putting two and
two together, she always said "Meaow" when you went to
her cage and said "Puss." This is synthetic reasoning,
like that of the best philosophers, and, all the world
over, is taken as a mark of the highest intelligence.
Similarly, she knew that my dog is called Taffy, and (by
a converse process inaccessible to any but the finest
minds) if you went to her cage and said "Bow-ow-ow,"
she responded with the neatness of a versicle, "Taffy,
Taffy, Taffy." But--and this is Matilda-ism--when Taffy
came near her cage she invariably mewed to him, and
when a cat came near her cage, she barked. She did not
confuse them; Matilda's brain shines illustriously above
the clouds of muddle. She preferred to abandon synthetic
reasoning, and create Matilda-ism.

I must insist on this, for all the evidence goes to
confirm it. For instance, if you pull a handkerchief
from your pocket, she makes rude noises which cannot
fail to remind you of the blowing of a nose oppressed by
catarrh. Also, when Mabel left, she learned the name of
the new kitchen-maid at once, and never made mistakes
about it. But as she increased in years and wisdom, her
ineradicable leanings towards Matilda-ism increased also.

Then came the crisis in her life, the brain-fever to
which I have alluded. She had a fit, and for five or
six days was seriously ill in the spare-room, set high
above the noises of the street, where no exciting sounds
could reach her. But she recovered, and her recovery
was held to be complete when from the spare-room where
she had undergone her rest-cure, a stream of polyglot
noises one morning issued forth. I took her back into
my sitting-room again, and reminded her of the European
War by saying, "Gott strafe the Kaiser." I thought this
would bring her into touch with the world of to-day
again, but for a long time she remained perfectly
silent. But when I had said, "Gott strafe the Kaiser"
two or three hundred times, she burst into speech with a
loud preliminary scream.

"Gott strafe Polly's head," she cried. "Gott save the
King! Gott save the Kaiser! Gott scratch Polly's head.
Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! Cuckoo! Cuckoo. Puss, Puss, Puss!
Bow-ow-ow!..." And the poor demented bird laughed in
hoarse ecstasy, at having got in touch with synthetic
reasoning again!

Matilda-ism took control of all her thoughts. If a
tea-cup was presented to her notice, she blew her nose
loudly, though I cannot believe that she had ever seen
a tea-cup used as a handkerchief. When Joey was put
near her cage again she called him Taffy. She barked at
the kitchen-maid, and mewed at the cook, and called the
cat Mabel. All her correlations had gone wrong in that
attack of brain-fever, and though she had shown signs
of Matilda-ism before, I never thought it would come
to this. She was a voluble mass of contradictory and
irreconcilable propositions.

All this I wrote to Francis, since he desired domestic
and ridiculous information, but when the letter was
sealed and dispatched, I could not help thinking that
Matilda, real as she is, is chiefly a parable. It
is impossible, in fact, not to recollect that King
Constantine of Greece was very ill last spring (like
Matilda), and subsequently (i) invited the Allies to
land at Salonica, and (ii) turned M. Venizelos out of
office. It all looks traitorous, but perhaps it is mere
Matilda-ism. But I am not sure that it would not be
better for him to have some more brain-fever, and have
done with it.

* * * * *

A postscript must be added. I took Matilda into the
country, when I went there for a few days last week.
One morning she saw a ferret being taken out of a bag,
and instantly sang, "Pop goes the Weasel." I think that
shows a turn for the better, some slight power of sane
synthesis lurks in the melody, for a ferret is a sort
of weasel. I am naturally optimistic, and cannot help
wondering whether a change of air might not produce a
similar amelioration in the case of King Constantine.
Russia, for instance....

I had intended to keep these annals of Matilda detached from the war, but it has wound its way in again, as King Charles's head invaded the chronicles of Mr. Dick. There is no getting away from it: if you light a cigarette, you think of Turkey and the expedition to the Dardanelles; if you drink a glass of wine, you think of the trenches dug through the vineyards of France. And yet, how little, actually, has the war entered into the vital parts of the mass of English people. To large numbers, reckoned by thousands, it has made unhealable wounds, but into larger numbers, reckoned by millions, no prick of the sword has really penetrated. I wonder when some kind of awakening will come, when to the endless dormitories of drowsy sleepers, some smell of the burning, some sound of the flaming beams above their heads and below them will pierce their dreams. I pray God that on that day there will be no terrified plucking from sleep into realities vastly more portentous than any nightmare, but an awakening from sloth into an ordered energy.

But up till now, a profound slumber, or at the most a slumber with coloured dreams, has possessed the spirit of the nation. Occasionally some sleeper, roused by the glare that burns sombrely on the placid night of normal human existence, has awoke and has screamed out words of Pythian warning. But his troubled awakening has but annoyed the myriads of other sleepers. One has growled out, "Oh, for God's sake, go to sleep again: there's the Navy;" another has murmured, "It's unpatriotic to be pessimistic;" a third has whispered, "God always permits us to muddle through." Sometimes the yell has startled another into futile whimperings, but then some retired Colonel, who writes for the papers, like a soft-slippered nurse, pads up to his bedside, and says, "Go to sleep again, dearie, I'm here," and the whimpering ceases, and the nurse pulls down the blind to keep the glare out of the eyes of the sleeper. Occasionally one of them makes such a to-do that an attendant hurries downstairs to fetch a member of the Government from the room where they are having such a pleasant chat over their wine, and he is given a glass of port, and asked to come downstairs in his dressing-gown and join the amusing supper-party. Sometimes he goes, sometimes he drinks his wine and prefers to go to sleep again instead. I don't know what would happen if he refused to go downstairs, and said he would go on screaming. But no one at present contemplates such an upsetting contingency. Besides, there is always the Censor, Auntie Censor, who can be stern when sternness is really wanted, and spank any obstreperous screamer with a ruthless blue pencil.

* * * * *

Everyone knows that particular (and disagreeable) climatic condition, when, during a frost, thaw becomes imminent. It may still be freezing, but there is something in the air which tells those who are susceptible to change just a little before change arrives that a thaw is approaching. The sensation cannot be accounted for by the thermometer, which still registers a degree or two of frost, but to those who have this weather prescience, it is quite unmistakable. Similarly in affairs not appealing to the merely physical sense, it sometimes happens that people are aware of a coming event implying change, before there is any real reason to justify their belief. This is so common a phenomenon that it has even been crystallized into an awkwardly-worded proverb which informs us that coming events cast their shadow before (meaning light), but to adopt the current phrase, there has lately been a great deal of shadow projected from the Dardanelles, and it is now a matter of general belief that that ill-planned, ill-executed expedition is about to be recalled, and that all the eager blood shed there will now prove to have been poured out over an enterprise that shall be abandoned as unrealizable. For many months now hearts have been sick with deferred hope, eyes dim with watching for the dawn that never broke, and it seems probable that "Too late" is to be scrawled in red over another abortive adventure, now to be filed away among failures under the appropriate letter D. It is idle to attempt to see any bright lining to the cloud which hangs over that accursed peninsula: all that can be hoped is that the gallant souls who still hold a corner of it, despite the misadventures, the miscalculations, the mismanagement that have for months punctuated heroism with halts and full stops written in crimson, will be bought off without the crowning record of some huge disaster.

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Christmas approaches, and the furnaces of the world-war are being stoked up to burn with a more hideous intensity, while village choirs practise their hymns and anthems about peace on earth, good will towards men. Every decent Christian Englishman (_pace_ the pacifists) believes in the prime importance of killing as many Germans as possible, and yet no decent Christian Englishman will somehow fail to endorse with a genuine signature the message of the angelic host, even though his fingers itch for the evening paper, which he hopes contains some news of successful slaughter. That sounds like another instance of Matilda-ism, and mere discussion, as confined to the narrow sphere of rational argument, might easily leave the defender of such an attitude with not a leg to stand upon. But all the time (for argument at best can only prove what is not worth explaining) he will know at heart that his position has not been shaken by the apparent refutation, and he will give you his word (than which there is nothing greater and nothing less) that his contention, logically indefensible, is also unassailable. He can't explain, and it is better not to try. But he knows how it feels, which is more vital than knowing how to account for it. Logic and Euclid are not, after all, irrefutable, though they may be, by human reason, the final guides to human conduct.

Everything cannot be referred to reason as to a supreme arbiter. Reason will lead you a long way across the plain, but beyond the plain there is, like a row of visionary blue mountains, a range of highland which is the abode of the riddles, the questions, the inconsistencies which are quite outside the level lands of reason. No one can tell why the Omnipotent Beneficence (some people hate to see the word God) ever allowed cancer and malarial mosquitoes and Prussian militarism to establish themselves so firmly on the earth which is the Lord's. It is impossible to explain this away, and unless you argue from the fact of their undoubted existence that there is no such thing as the Omnipotent Beneficence, and become that very silly thing called an atheist, the best thing you can do (collectively) is to look for the germs of cancer with a view to their destruction, cover with paraffin the breeding places of the mosquito, and help, if you have the good fortune still to be useful, in the extermination of Prussian militarism. All these three things are, very possibly, manifestations of the devil, and even if they are not (improbable as it sounds), they are so like manifestations of the devil, that we are justified in mistaking them for such. I am quite convinced of that, and am impervious to any argument about it. I "am in love and charity" (in my microscopic degree) "with my neighbours," but that would not prevent me killing a German with all the good will in the world, if I was put in the firing line, any more than it would prevent me squashing a malaria-carrying mosquito with my Prayer Book. And if I could sing (which I can't) I would bellow "Peace on earth, good will towards men," at the top of my voice, even while I was poising the Prayer Book or drawing a bead on the Prussians. "Inconsistent," I daresay, but why be consistent? Besides, deep down, I know it is consistent.

Yet, though we all recognize the essential consistency of this apparent inconsistency, how we long, as with the yearning for morning through the dark hours of pain, for the time when such complication of instinct will have vanished. Twelve leaden months have dropped sullenly, one by one, into the well of time, salt with human tears, and those who were optimistic a year ago, believing that when Christmas next came round, Europe would have recovered from this madness of bloodshed, are less confident in their outlook for another Christmas. But few, I think, if a stroke of the pen could give back to the world that menacing tranquillity which preceded the war, would put their name to so craven a document. Now that we know what those faint and distant flashes of lightning meant in the years that saw us all sunk in the lethargy of opulent prosperity, now that we know what those veiled drowsy murmurs of thunder from Central Europe portended, we would not take in exchange for the days of direst peril, the false security that preceded them. Even as America now is drunk with dollars, so that no massacre of her citizens on the high seas will reduce her from the attitude of being too proud to fight, to the humbler office of resenting crimes that send her defenceless citizens without warning to the bottomless depths of the Atlantic, so we, with our self-sufficiency and our traditional sense of supremacy, could not be bothered to listen to the warnings of the approaching storm till with hail of fire it burst on us. Then, it is true, we ceased to dream, but ever since our kind nurses have done their best to cozen back those inert hours. "I'm sitting up, dearie," they say. "Just wait and see."

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And at this point I will again pass over a year, that comprises the war events of 1916. In the spring the great German attack against Verdun opened, and for months the French stood steadfast, until that hail of hammer blows exhausted itself. Early in June was fought the naval battle of Jutland, announced by the German Press as so stupendous a victory, that for the rest of the year their fleet sheltered in Kiel, presumably because they had destroyed the British naval supremacy for ever. In August came the fall of Gorizia, and next month the entry of Rumania into the war, and a disastrous campaign followed. In Greece King Constantine continued his treacherous manoeuvres, but failed to exhaust the patience of the Allies. In December, lastly, came the bombastic announcement that the invincible and victorious Germany was willing from motives of magnanimous humanity, to grant peace to the crushed and trampled Allies, who had dared to dispute the might of her God-given destiny. A suitable reply was returned.

JANUARY, 1917

It is a year since last I wrote anything in this book, and the year has passed with such speed that I can scarcely believe that the ink of December is dry. Nothing makes time slide away so fast as regular monotonous employment, and not only this year, but the year before that, and five months before that, seem pressed into a moment, dried and flattened. But all the things that happened before that, when in August, 1914, the whole of one's consciousness was changed, is incredibly remote.

The war has made a cleavage across the continuity of life, and while the mind and the conscious self get to be at home in the changed existence, the line of cleavage does not become obliterated, but, on the contrary, appears steeper and more sheer-sided. The edges of the chasm have been covered over with the green growth of habit, of the adjustment that alone renders fresh conditions possible; but further and further away becomes the consciousness that there was once a time in which all Europe was not at war. In those golden years people used to discuss, just as they would discuss ghosts or the approach of a comet, the possibility of a German war, that would lead all Europe into the gate of Hell. But it was discussed theoretically as a subject of polite conversation, when topics that were really of interest, like Suffragettes or Home Rule in Ireland, ran dry. You talked about the comet, Halley's comet, that was going to destroy the world, and then you talked about a European war, that was going to destroy the world. And then you played the guessing game.... It was all one: just a matter of remote possibilities, based on an idea that you did not believe in. And then it came, not Halley's comet, or a ghost, but the third incredible happening. All that was before has receded into dim ages. You feel that "once upon a time," as in stories you tell to children, there was somebody else masquerading under your own name, and suppose that as by some conjuring trick he was mysteriously identical with you. If you were closely questioned you would allow that in 1913 you did this or that; you wanted something (and perhaps got it); you lived in a house in a certain street, and were popularly supposed to be the same person who lives in that or another house now. You would have to admit these facts, but deep down in yourself you would cling to the secret belief that it was somebody else who, under your name, did the things and lived the life that is supposed to have been yours. A label was attached to you then, which gave your name and address, and you find the same label round your neck still. For the sake of convenience you continue to answer to your name, and, in a manner of speaking, are responsible for the old lease. But all the time you feel that another person wears the label now. A different identity (that is your private opinion) inhabits your house. He wears the same (or similar) boots and shoes; he comes when he is called; he has a face that is still recognized by his friends. But though his friends recognize him, you scarcely recognize him yourself. He, who was nurtured in peace, has now but a remote memory of those tranquil years, and thinks they must surely belong to someone else. All he knows now is that since the foundation of the world he has lived in the midst of this grim struggle, which, since the foundation of the world, was as inevitable as the succession of night and day. Before the storm broke, somebody (himself probably, since everyone else says so) knew only that life was a pleasant business (or unpleasant, as the case may be), and that it would go on for a certain number of years, and that then an end would come to it. It was all very jolly, and a railway strike or the rise of the income-tax to, say, one and sixpence in the pound was the sum of the inconvenience ahead. In due time he would get pneumonia or cancer, or be run over by a motor-bus; but all those disheartening possibilities seemed quite remote. Then came the war, and it cleaved his former life from his present life as by an impassable chasm. That being so, he adjusted himself to his present life, and, if he was wise, ceased to waste time over thinking of the "jolly days" which preceded the changed conditions. And if he was wiser still, he did not throw the memory of the "jolly days" away, but put them in a box and locked it up. And if he was wisest of all, he said: "I am different, but the eternal things are not different," and went on just as usual.

Indeed, why you do a thing matters far more than what you do. It is easy to conceive of a thoroughly lethargic person who, for mere want of vitality, lives a most respectable life. He has not energy enough--and thereby is less of a man--to commit the usual errors. But the question seriously arises as to whether he had not better be more of a man and commit them. I hasten over this difficult phase, and conceive of him again as more vital than ever, and abstaining from the usual crimes because he is now above them rather than below them. He looks down on them instead of gazing feebly up at them. In actual result, his conduct as regards errors is the same, but who can doubt about the respective values of the respective conducts? The two are poles apart (though in net and tangible result the extremes meet), for no one can say that the man who does not cheat at cards simply from fear of detection has the smallest spiritual affinity with the average person who plays honestly because he is honest.

There is a periodical piece of business in shops and places where they sell things, called stock-taking, and, as its name implies, it consists in the owner going through the goods and seeing what he has got. It is a useful custom, not only in shops, but as applied by ordinary individuals to themselves, and the first day of a New Year is a date commonly in use as the day of internal stock-taking. Very sensible people will tell you that the division of one's life into years is a purely arbitrary arrangement, and that December 31st is not severed from January 1st by any more real division than July 3rd is severed from July 4th. But less superbly-constituted minds fall back on these arbitrary arrangements, and with the sense that they are starting again on January 1st, they often have a look round their cupboards and shelves to see what they have in hand. It is a disagreeable sort of business; you will find that your things have got very dusty and dirty, and that probably there is much that should be thrown away and but little that is worth keeping when you run over your record for the past year. But far more important than your actual conduct (as in the case of the two very different gentlemen, neither of whom cheats at cards) is the motive that inspired your conduct. If you are lucky you will perhaps find that you have done a certain number of good-natured things; you may have done some generous ones, but if you are wise, you will, before you let a faint smile of satisfaction steal over your mobile features, consider why you did them. You may have been good-natured out of kindness of heart; all congratulations if it is so; but you may find you have been good-natured out of laziness, in which case I venture to congratulate you again on having brought that fact home to yourself.... Indeed, this search for motive rather resembles what happens when you turn over a prettily marked piece of rock lying on the grass. It _may_ be all right, but sometimes you discover horrible creepy-crawlies below it, which, when disturbed, scud about in a disconcerting manner. Or again (which is more encouraging), you may come across an object--a piece of conduct, that is to say--which really makes you blush to look at it. But possibly, when you turn it over you may find that you really meant rather well, in spite of your deplorable behaviour. Hoard that encouragement, for you will want as much encouragement as you can possibly find if you intend to do your stock-taking honestly; otherwise, you will assuredly not have the spirit to go through with it. And when the stock-taking is done look at the total, which will certainly be very disappointing, without dismay, but with a sanguine hope that you will find a better show next year. Think it over well, and then dismiss the whole thing from your conscious mind. For to dwell too much on your stock-taking, or to take stock too often, produces a paralysing sort of self-consciousness. The man who sets his past failures continually before him is not likely to be much better in the future; while he who contemplates his past successes gets fat and inert with probably quite ill-founded complacency. One of the shrewdest philosophers who ever lived gives very sage advice on this point when he says: "And when he hath done all that is to be done, as far as he knoweth, let him think that he hath done nothing."... So we, who have not done one tithe of the things that we knew we ought to have done, will certainly have little excuse for thinking we have done something.

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