Chapter III: Preface (3)

|At a dinner table the other night, the talk turned upon a certain politician whose cynical traffic in principles and loyalties has eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman who did not so much talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up abstractedly and fixedly at some invisible altitude gave him the impression of communing with the Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and apologies, but he wound up triumphantly with the remark:

“But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.”

“So was Madame de Pompadour,” said a voice from the other side of the table.

It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician with a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of democracy who, like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things for ambition and power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through the dull, solemn man on the other side of the table like a rapier. There was no reply. There was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift, searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that gave it larger significance and range.

It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour and finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds of Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought of the ceremony. “Oh, it was very fine,” replied the general; “there was nothing wanting, _except the million of men who have perished in pulling down what you are setting up_.”

And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's son--a miserable friar of a country town--was prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of Christendom.

“What!” said the Cardinal at last to him, “do you think the Pope cares for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend _you--you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you be then--where will you be then?”

“Then, as now,” replied Luther. “Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty God.”

<b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man--one of the profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the brilliant author of the papers on “The Crisis,” that kept the flame of the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of this great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had discoursed “On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.” And Paine answered, “God did not make rich and poor. God made male and female and gave the earth for their inheritance.”</b>

It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. “Indeed,” said the President. “Then whose boots do they black?” There was the same mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. “I do not know, madam,” he said, “but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.”

And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was using his department to further his ambitions. “Raymond,” he said, “you were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly' is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department _go!_” If one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not unreasonably, give the palm to a woman--a poor woman, too, who has been dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he accepted cabinet office: “I should have preferred much,” he said, “to have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her. 'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of the host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's offer, 'I dwell among mine own people.'”

It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on the world's stage.

ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES

|I went recently to an industrial town in the North on some business, and while there had occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and engines and machinery of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers and engines and machinery of all sorts, and I did my best to appear interested and understanding. But I was neither one nor the other. I was only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are important things. Compared with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever written is only a perfume on the gale. There is a practical downrightness about a boiler that makes “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” or “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” or even “Twelfth Night” itself, a mere idle frivolity. All you can say in favour of “Twelfth Night,” from the strictly business point of view, is that it doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank heaven for that.

But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How, for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of a boiler? How--and this was still more important--how could I hope to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional values. In Dante's “Inferno” each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily “waste” to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous rhythms to which I had devoted so much of that life' which should be “real and earnest” and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it came about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.

I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a learned and articulate boiler.

Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a “b” in boilers and a “b” in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit. The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come, I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great room, surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil and butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt of South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all arranged in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme of coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their wings folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which they lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his treasure, he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law of natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life, its survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the key of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the magic word “butterflies” the prison door opened, and out he sailed on the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.

There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial a thing, but it supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm outside the mere routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history of man is written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science of life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics and everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so every hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a compass for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being merely smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the world is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one field of intensive culture will give even our smattering a respectable foundation.

It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters. He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him at home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the further our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery that baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble to dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about by storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon the wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams within a dream--or as Carlyle puts it, “exhalations that are and then are not.” And we share the poet's sense of exile--

In this house with starry dome,

Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,

Shall I never be at home?

Never wholly at my ease?

From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman in “Romany Rye,” you will remember, found his deliverance in studying Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and he thought he heard a voice say, “The marks! the marks! cling to the marks! or-----” And from this beginning--but the story is too fruity, too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he expressed in the desolating phrase, “Le silence étemel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.” For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit of happy and confident adventure.

ON HEREFORD BEACON

|Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.

It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.

Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to----. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell his own story.

He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road, Hereford beacon came in view.

“That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”

He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.

“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.

“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester from about here you know, sir.”

“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn't killed at all. He died in his bed.”

The cabman yielded the point without resentment.

“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”

He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.

“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”

He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.

“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?”

And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us to Wynd's Point.

The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.

It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls--all speak with mute eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.

“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering, like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.

Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.

“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”

There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the cuckoo--his voice failing slightly in these hot June days--wakes you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the deepening gloom of the vast plain.

Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.

Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills, Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.

The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is the moment to turn westward, where

Vanquished eve, as night prevails,

Bleeds upon the road to Wales.

All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.

The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey; the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....

Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.

And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,

In an ocean of dreams without a sound.

Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.

CHUM

|When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a familiar sound. It was the “thump, thump, thump,” of a tail on the floor at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him away, and that I should hear no more his “welcome home!” at midnight. No matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep, he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him “Good dog” and a pat on the head. Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber, satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.

I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person. It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and explained that “he didn't know his own strength.”

But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan, and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up. His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and his genius for friendship.

There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin, and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores. You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.

He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind, that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow. For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. “A man's a man, for a' that,” was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly hostile. “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was his fixed principle, and any one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was _ipso facto_ suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair. Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door; they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of trousers. Perhaps that incident was not unconnected with his passing.

One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully. Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in leaping a stile--he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow--or had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them, for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted. But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all the veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to the revels in his native woods--for he had come to us as a pup from a cottage in the heart of the woodland country--no longer made him tense as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.

ON MATCHES AND THINGS

|I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she returned she brought tea--and sugar. In that moment her disdain was transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.

It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine) had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.

Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand, and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin--rest his gentle soul if he indeed be among the slain.... With what universal benevolence his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking, talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.

It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And matches.... There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time o' day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a commonplace civility.

And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, “No; we haven't any.” They simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly, smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the habit and just go on in their sleep. “Oh, you funny people,” they seem to say, dreamily. “Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach you that there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let the other fools follow on.” And you go away, feeling much as though you had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.

No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, “Can you oblige me with a light, sir?” You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite, wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket, preparing to have “After you, sir,” on your lips at the exact moment when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting for what the other hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless world.

I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine, and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me--but not so often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If--having borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late--I go into his room and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the Peace Conference, or things like that--is he deceived? Not at all. He knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.

But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about Lords and the Oval.

And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning, Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have “thick or clear,” with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago, and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far, in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one “of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and lived with the farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir, nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.”

Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the stimulus of the princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old pastures.

ON BEING REMEMBERED

|As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the bark--some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.

What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of immortality--terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.

If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's “Exegi monumentum ære perennius” is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be among the immortals. “I have raised a monument,” he says, “more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.” The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud declaration--

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had written a song of a sparrow--

And in this bush one sparrow built her nest

Of which I sang one song that will not die.

Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.

Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence. “I'll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. “Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of me comes but once in centuries.”

Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he said grandly; “_I quit the time_.” And beside this we may put Victor Hugo's rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”

But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life? Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true, suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.

Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says:--

_For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (_Oh, you rogue!_) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (“_You were drunk last night, you dog_”), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages._