Chapter 14

A youth of no more than twenty-three years entered a first-class carriage at the famous station of Swindon in the county of Wiltshire, proposing to travel to the uttermost parts of the West and to enjoy a comfortable loneliness while he ruminated upon all things human and divine; when he was sufficiently annoyed to discover that in the further corner of the carriage was sitting an old gentleman of benevolent appearance, or at any rate a gentleman of benevolent appearance who appeared in his youthful eyes to be old.

For though the old gentleman was, as a fact, but sixty, yet his virile beard had long gone white and the fringes of hair attaching to his ostrich egg of a head confirmed his venerable appearance.

When the train had started the young man proceeded in no very good temper and with great solemnity to fill a pipe. He turned to his senior, who was watching him in a very paternal and happy manner, and said formally:

“I hope you do not mind my smoking, sir?”

“Not at all,” said the old boy; “it is a habit I have long grown accustomed to in others.”

The young man bowed in a somewhat absurd fashion and felt for his matches. He discovered to his no small mortification that he had none. He was so used to his pipe after a meal that he really could not forgo it. He came off his perch by at least three steps and asked the old man very gently whether he had any matches.

The older man produced a box and at the same time brought out with it a little notebook and a playing card which happened to be in his pocket. The young man took the matches and lit his pipe, surveying the old man the while with a more complacent eye.

“It is very kind of you, sir,” he said a little less stiffly. He handed back the matches, wrapped his rug round his legs, sat down in his place, and knowing that one should prolong the conversation for a moment or two after a favour, said: “I see that you play cards.”

“I do,” said the old man simply; “would you like a game?”

“I don’t mind,” said the young man, who had always heard that it was unmanly and ridiculous to refuse a game of cards in a railway carriage.

The elder man laughed merrily in his strong beard as he saw his junior begin to spread somewhat awkwardly a copy of a newspaper upon his knees. “I’ll show you a trick worth two of that,” he said, and taking one of the first-class cushions, which alone of railway cushions are movable from its place, he came over to the corner opposite the young man and made a table of the cushion between them. “Now,” said he genially, “what’s it to be?”

“Well,” said the young man like one who expounds new mysteries, “do you know piquet?”

“Oh, yes,” said his companion with another happy little laugh of contentment with the world. “I’ll take you on. What shall it be?”

“Pennies if you like,” said the young man nonchalantly.

“Very well, and double for the Rubicon.”

“How do you mean?” said the young man, puzzled.

“You will see,” said the old man, and they began to play.

The game was singularly absorbing. At first the young man won a few pounds; then he lost rather heavily, then he won again, but not quite enough to recoup. Then in the fourth game he won, so that he was a little ahead, and meanwhile the old man chatted merrily during the discarding or the shuffling: during the shuffling especially. He looked out towards the downs with something of a sigh at one moment, and said:

“It’s a happy world.”

“Yes,” answered the younger man with the proper lugubriousness of youth, “but it all comes to an end.”

“It isn’t its coming to an end,” said the elder man, declaring a point of six, “that’s not the tragedy; it’s the little bits coming to an end meanwhile, before the whole comes to an end: that’s the tragedy....” But he added with another of his jolly laughs: “We must play. Piquet takes up all one’s grey matter.”

They played and the young man lost again, but by a very narrow margin: it was quite an absorbing game. As they shuffled again the young man said:

“What did you mean by the little bits stopping, or whatever it was?”

“Oh,” said the old man as though he couldn’t remember, and then he added: “Oh, yes, I mean you’ll find, as you grow older, people die and affections change, and, though it seems silly to mention it in company with higher things, there’s what Shelley called the ‘contagion of the world’s slow stain.’”

Then their conversation was interrupted by the ardour of the game; but as they played the young man was ruminating, and he had come to the conclusion that his senior was imperfectly educated and was probably of the middle classes, whereas he himself was destined to be a naval architect, and with that object had recently left the university for an office in the city. The young man thought that a man properly educated would never quote a tag: he was wrong there. As he had allowed his thoughts to wander somewhat the young man lost that game rather heavily, and at the end of it he was altogether about ten shillings to the bad. It was his turn to shuffle. The older man was at leisure to speak, and did so rather dreamily as he gazed at the landscape again.

“Things change, you know,” he said, “and there is the contagion of the world’s slow stain. One gets preoccupied: especially about money. When men marry they get very much preoccupied upon that point. It’s bad for them, but it can’t be helped.”

“You cut,” said the young man.

His elder cut and they played again. This time as they played their game the old man broke his rule of silence and continued his observations interruptedly:

“Four kings,” he said.... “It isn’t that a man gets to think money all-important, it is that he has to think of it all the time.... No, three queens are no good. I said four kings.... four knaves.... The little losses of money don’t affect one, but perpetual trouble about it does, and” (closing up the majority of tricks which he had just gained) “many a man goes on making more year after year and yet feels himself in peril.... _And_ the last trick.” He took up the cards to shuffle them. “Towards the very end of life,” he continued, “it gets less, I suppose, but you’ll feel the burden of it.” He put the pack over for the younger man to cut. When that was done he dealt them out slowly. As he dealt he said: “One feels the loss of little material things: objects to which one was attached, a walking-stick, or a ring, or a watch which one has carried for years. Your declare.”

The young man declared, and that game was played in silence. I regret to say that the young man was Rubiconed, and was thirty shillings in the elder’s debt.

“We’ll stop if you like” said the elder man kindly.

“Oh, no,” said the youth with nonchalance, “I’ll pay you now if you like.”

“Not at all, I didn’t mean that,” said the older man with a sudden prick of honour.

“Oh, but I will, and we’ll start fair again,” said the young man. Whereupon he handed over his combined losses in gold, the older man gave him change, they shuffled again, and they went on with their play.

“After all,” said the older man, musing as he confessed to a point of no more than five, “it’s all in the day’s work.... It’s just a day’s work,” he repeated with a saddened look in his eyes, “it’s a game that one plays like this game, and then when it’s over it’s over. It’s the little losses that count.”

That game again was unfortunate for the young man, and he had to shell out fifteen and six. But the brakes were applied, Bristol was reached, the train came to a standstill, and the young man, looking up a little confused and hurried, said: “Hello, Bristol! I get out here.”

“So do I,” said the older man. They both stood up together, and the jolt of the train as it stopped dead threw them into each other’s arms.

“I am really very sorry,” said the youth.

“It’s my fault,” said the old chap like a good fellow, “I ought to have caught hold. You get out and I’ll hand you your bag.”

“It’s very kind of you,” said the young man. He was really flattered by so much attention, but he knew himself what a good companion he was and he could understand it; besides which they had made friends during that little journey. He always liked a man to whom he had lost some money in an honest game.

There was a heavy crowd upon the platform, and two men barging up out of it saluted the old man boisterously by the name of Jack. He twinkled at them with his eyes as he began moving the luggage about, and stood for a moment in the doorway with his own bag in his right hand and the young man’s bag in his left. The young man so saw it for an instant, a fine upstanding figure—he saw his bag handed by some mistake to the second of the old man’s friends, a porter came by at the moment pushing through the crowd with a trolley, an old lady made a scene, the porter apologized, the crowd took sides, some for the porter, some for the old lady; the young man, with the deference of his age, politely asked several people to make way, but when he had emerged from the struggle his companion, his companion’s friends, and his own bag could not be found; or at any rate he could not make out where they were in the great mass that pushed and surged upon the platform.

He made himself a little conspicuous by asking too many questions and by losing his temper twice with people who had done him no harm, when, just as his excitement was growing more than querulous, a very heavy, stupid-looking man in regulation boots tapped him on the shoulder and said: “Follow me.” He was prepared with an oath by way of reply, but another gentleman of equal weight, wearing boots of the same pattern, linked his arm in his and between them they marched him away, to a little private closet opening out of the stationmaster’s room.

“Now, sir,” said he who had first tapped him on the shoulder, “be good enough to explain your movements.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the young man.

“You were in the company,” said the older man severely, “of an old man, bald, with a white beard and a blue sailor suit. He had come from London; you joined him at Swindon. We have evidence that he was to be met at this station and it will be to your advantage if you make a clean breast of it.”

The young man was violent and he was borne away.

But he had friends at Bristol. He gave his references and he was released. To this day he believes that he suffered not from folly, but from injustice. He did not see his bag again, but after all it contained no more than his evening clothes, for which he had paid or rather owed six guineas, four shirts, as many collars and dress ties, a silver-mounted set of brushes and combs, and useless cut-glass bottles, a patented razor, a stick of shaving soap, and two very, very confidential letters which he treasured. His watch, of course, was gone, but not, I am glad to say, his chain, which hung dangling, though in his flurry he had not noticed it. It made him look a trifle ridiculous. As he wore no tie-pin he had not lost that, and beyond his temper he had indeed lost nothing further save, possibly, a textbook upon Thermodynamics. This book he _thought_ he remembered having put into the bag, and if he had it belonged to his library, but he could not quite remember this point, and when the Library claimed it he stoutly disputed their claim.

In this dispute he was successful, but it was the only profit he made out of that journey, unless we are to count his experience, and experience, as all the world knows, is a thing that men must buy.

“King Lear”

The great unity which was built up two thousand years ago and was called Christendom in its final development split and broke in pieces. The various civilizations of its various provinces drifted apart, and it will be for the future historian to say at what moment the isolation of each from all was farthest pushed. It is certain that that point is passed.

In the task of reuniting what was broken—it is the noblest work a modern man can do—the very first mechanical act must be to explain one national soul to another. That act is not final. The nations of Europe, now so divided, still have more in common than those things by which they differ, and it is certain that when they have at last revealed to them their common origin they will return to it. They will return to it, perhaps, under the pressure of war waged by some not Christian civilization, but they will return. In the meanwhile, of those acts not final, yet of immediate necessity in the task of establishing unity, is the act of introducing one national soul to another.

Now this is best accomplished in a certain way which I will describe. You will take that part in the letters of a nation which you maturely judge most or best to reflect the full national soul, with its qualities, careless of whether these be great or little; you will take such a work as reproduces for you as you read it, not only in its sentiment, but in its very rhythm, the stuff and colour of the nation; this you will present to the foreigner, who cannot understand. His efforts must be laborious, very often unfruitful, but where it is fruitful it will be of a decisive effect.

Thus let anyone take some one of the immortal things that Racine wrote and show them to an Englishman. He will hardly ever be able to make anything of it at first. Here and there some violently emotional passage may faintly touch him, but the mass of the verse will seem to him dead. Now, if by constant reading, by association with those who know what Racine is, he at last sees him—and these changes in the mind come very suddenly—he will see into the soul of Gaul. For the converse task, to-day not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of presenting England to the French intelligence—or, indeed, to any other alien intelligence—you may choose the play “King Lear.”

That play has every quality which does reflect the soul of the community in which and for which it was written. Note a few in their order.

First, it is not designed to its end; at least it is not designed accurately to its end; it is written as a play and it is meant to be acted as a play, and it is the uniform opinion of those versed in plays and in acting that in its full form it could hardly be presented, while in any form it is the hardest even of Shakespeare’s plays to perform. Here you have a parallel with a thousand mighty English things to which you can turn. Is there not institution after institution to decide on, so lacking a complete fitness to its end, larger in a way than the end it is to serve, and having, as it were, a life of its own which proceeds apart from its effect? This quality which makes so many English things growths rather than instruments is most evident in the great play.

Again, it has that quality which Voltaire noted, which he thought abnormal in Shakespeare, but which is the most national characteristic in him, that a sort of formlessness, if it mars the framework of the thing and spoils it, yet also permits the exercise of an immeasurable vitality. When a man has read “King Lear” and lays down the book he is like one who has been out in one of those empty English uplands in a storm by night. It is written as though the pen bred thoughts. It is possible to conjecture as one reads, and especially in the diatribes, that the pen itself was rapid and the brain too rapid for the pen. One feels the rush of the air. Now, this quality is to be discovered in the literature of many nations, but never with the fullness which it has in the literature of England. And note that in those phases of the national life when foreign models have constrained this instinct of expansion in English verse, they never have restrained it for long, and that even through the bonds established by those models the instinct of expansion breaks. You see it in the exuberance of Dryden and in the occasional running rhetoric of Pope, until it utterly loosens itself with the end of the eighteenth century.

The play is national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable things—nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things—which, in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every play of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of the English turn, has sent out points further into the region of what is not known than Shakespeare has in sudden flashes of phrase. But “King Lear,” though it contains a lesser number of lines of this mystical and half-religious effect than, say, “Hamlet,” yet as a general impression is the more mystical of the two plays. The element of madness, which in “Hamlet” hangs in the background like a storm-cloud ready to break, in “King Lear” rages; and it is the use of this which lends its amazing psychical power to the play. It has been said (with no great profundity of criticism) that English fiction is chiefly remarkable for its power of particularization of character, and that where French work, for instance, will present ideas, English will present persons. The judgment is grossly insufficient, and therefore false, but it is based upon a proof which is very salient in English letters, which is that, say, in quite short and modern work the sense of complete unity deadens the English mind. The same nerve which revolts at a straight road and at a code of law revolts against one tone of thought, and the sharp contrast of emotional character, not the dual contrast which is common to all literatures, but the multiple contrast, runs through “King Lear” and gives the work such a tone that one seems as one reads it to be moving in a cloud.

The conclusion is perhaps Shakespearean rather than English, and in a fashion escapes from any national labelling. But the note of silence which Shakespeare suddenly brings in upon the turmoil, and with which he is so fond of completing what he has done, would not be possible were not that spirit of expansion and of a kind of literary adventurousness present in all that went before.

It is indeed this that makes the play so memorable. And it may not be fantastic to repeat and expand what has been said above in other words, namely, that King Lear has something about him which seems to be a product of English landscape and of English weather, and if its general movement is a storm its element is one of those sudden silences that come sometimes with such magical rapidity after the booming of the wind.

The Excursion

It is so old a theme that I really hesitate to touch it; and yet it is so true and so useful that I will. It is true all the time, and it is particularly useful at this season of the year to men in cities: to all repetitive men: to the men that read these words. What is more, true as it is and useful as it is, no amount of hammering at people seems to get this theme into their practice; though it has long ago entered into their convictions they will not act upon it in their summers. And this true and useful theme is the theme of little freedoms and discoveries, the value of getting loose and away by a small trick when you want to get your glimpse of Fairyland.

Now how does one get loose and away?

When a man says to himself that he must have a holiday he means that he must see quite new things that are also old: he desires to open that door which stood wide like a window in childhood and is now shut fast. But where are the new things that are also the old? Paradoxical fellows who deserve drowning tell one that they are at our very doors. Well, that is true of the eager mind, but the mind is no longer eager when it is in need of a holiday. And you can get at the new things that are also the old by way of drugs, but drugs are a poor sort of holiday fabric. If you have stored up your memory well with much experience you can get these things from your memory—but only in a pale sort of way.

I think the best avenue to recreation by the magical impressions of the world upon the mind is this: To go to some place to which the common road leads you and then to get just off the common road. You will be astonished to find how strange the world becomes in the first mile—and how strange it remains till the common road is reached again.

It always sounds like a mockery for a man who has travelled to a great many places, as I have, to advise his fellows to travel abroad; they are most of them hard tied. Yet it is really a much easier thing than men bound to the desk and the workshop understand. Britain is but one great port, and its inward seas are narrow—and the fares are ridiculously low. If you are a young man you can go almost anywhere for almost anything, sitting up by night on deck, and not expecting too much courtesy. But, of course, if you shirk the sea you are a prisoner.

Well, then, supposing you abroad, or even in some other part of this highly varied kingdom in which you live, and supposing you to have reached some chosen place by some common road—what I desire to dilate upon here is the truth which every little excursion of business or of leisure (and precious few of leisure) makes me more certain of every day: That just a little way off the road is fairyland.

It was exactly three days ago that I had occasion to go down the railway line that is the most frequented in Europe: I was on business, not leisure, but in the business I had two days’ leisure, and I did what I would advise all other men to do in such a circumstance.

I took a train to nowhere, fixing my starting-point thus:—

I first looked at the map and saw where nearest to me was a quadrilateral bare of railways. This formula, to look for a quadrilateral bare of railways, is a very useful formula for the man who is seeking another world. Then I fixed at random upon one little roadside station upon the main line; I determined to get out there and to walk aimlessly and westward until I should strike the other side of the quadrilateral. I made no plan, not even of the hours of the day.

I came into my roadside station at half-past eight of the long summer night, broad daylight that is, but with night advancing. I got out and began my westward march. At once there crowded upon me any number of unexpected and entertaining things!

The first thing I found was a street which was used by horses as well as by men, and yet was made up of broad steps. It was a sort of stair-case going up a hill. At the top of it I found a woman leading a child by the hand. I asked her the name of the steps. She told me they were called “The Steps of St. John.”

A quarter of a mile further down the narrow lane I saw to my astonishment an enormous castle, ruined and open to the sky. There are many such ruins famous in Europe, but of this one I had never even heard. I went lonely under the evening and looked at its main gate and saw on it a moulded escutcheon, carved, and the motto in French, “Henceforward,” which word made me think a great deal, but resolved no problem in my mind.

I went on again westward as the darkness fell and saw what I had not seen before, though my reading had told me of its existence, a long line of trees marking a ridge on the horizon, which line was the border of that ancient road the Roman soldiers built leading from the west into Amiens. “Along that road,” thought I, “St. Martin rode before he became a monk, and while he was yet a soldier and was serving under Julian the Apostate. Along that road he came to the west gate of Amiens and there cut his cloak in two and gave the half of it to a beggar.”