Part 7

Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist. He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding. When the novelist was asked to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs, he replied: "I suppose they don't know how to spell." That is probably the case of the Thompsons. They don't know how to spell.

But whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own forms with obstinate pride. We feel an outrage on our names as if it were an outrage on our persons. It was such an outrage that led to one of Stevenson's most angry outbursts. Some American publisher had pirated one of his books. But it was not the theft that angered him so much as the misspelling of his name. "I saw my book advertised as the work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, "and I own I boiled. It is so easy to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is full length on the title-page of your booty. But no, damn him, not he! He calls me Stephenson." I am grateful to Stevenson for that word. It expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me Thompson. Thompson, indeed!

I felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that snob, Sir Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of the first Lord Chelmsford. He was addressed one day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers (whoever they may have been) boiled within him. "Do I look like a person of the name of Smith?" he asked scornfully, and passed on. And as the blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, "Do I look like a person of the name of Thompson? Now do I?" And yet I suppose one may fall as much in love with the name of Smith as with the name of Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own. I should like to try the experiment on Sir F. E. Smith. I should like to address him as Sir Frederic Thesiger and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it.

It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity that annoys us when people play tricks with our names. We want to be ourselves and not somebody else. We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and the fathers that begat us. We may not know much about our ancestors, and may not care much about them. Most of us, I suppose, are in the position of Sydney Smith. "I found my neighbours," he said, "were looking up their family tree, and I thought I would do the same, but I only got as far back as my great-grandfather, _who disappeared somewhere about the time of the Assizes_." If we go far enough back we shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the Assizes, or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't. But, such as they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those fellows, the Thompsons.

And there is another reason for the annoyance. To misspell a man's name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that you need not trouble to find out. It is to offer him the subtlest of all insults--especially if he is a Scotsman. The old prides and hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and I believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, Mr. Macdonald by calling him Mr. M'Donald or _vice versa_. Indeed, I recall the case of a malignant Scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of Mackintosh because he knew it made him "boil," as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as Thompson makes me boil.

Nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity. I like a man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or steals another. I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that his real name was Piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and went into the Church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house of the Duke of Northumberland. He even put the Percy arms on his monument in Dromore Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own name, altered the maiden name of his wife from Gutteridge to Godriche. I am afraid Bishop Percy was a snob.

There are, of course, cases in which men change their names for reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family association and so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually "something rotten about him," as Johnson would say. He stamps himself as a counterfeit coin, like M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocaste." When he first started business his brass plate ran "Fellaire (de Sisac)." On removing to new premises he dropped the parentheses and put up a plate with "Fellaire, de Sisac." Changing residence again, he dropped the comma and became "Fellaire de Sisac."

It is possible of course to go to the other extreme--to err, as it were, on the side of honesty. I know a lady who began life with the maiden name of Bloomer. She married a Mr. Watlington and became Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington. Her husband died and she married a Mr. Dodd, whereupon she styled herself Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd. She is still fairly young and Mr. Dodd, I regret to say, is in failing health. Already I have to write her name in smallish characters to get it into a single line on the envelope. I see the time approaching when I shall have to turn over and write, let us say,

There is no need to be so aggressively faithful to one's names as all this. It is hard on your children and trying to your friends, who may have difficulty in remembering which husband came before the others. After all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the shorter it is the better.

But the spirit of the thing is right. Let us avoid disguises. Let us stick to our names, be they ever so humble. Let us follow the great example of Cicero. His name originated with an ancestor who had a nick or dent at the tip of his nose which resembled the opening in a vetch--_cicer_. When he was standing for public office some anxious friends suggested that the young man should assume a nobler name, but he declined, saying that he would make the name of Cicero more glorious than the Scauri or Catuli. And grandly did he redeem the promise. The Scauri and the Catuli live to-day only by the fact that Cicero once mentioned them, while we know Cicero far better than we know our next door neighbour. It is a good precedent for Thomson. I have a mind to make that name outlast the Cecils and Marlboroughs, if not the Pyramids. And cursed be he who desecrates it with a "p."

ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF

A friend of mine, to whom I owe so much of my gossip that I sometimes think that he does the work and I only take the collection, told me the other day of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me as significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to-day. He observed two people in ecstasies before a certain landscape. It was quite a nice picture, but my friend thought their praises were extravagant. Suddenly one of the two turned to the catalogue. "Why, this is not the Leader picture at all," said she. "It is No. So-and-so." And forthwith the two promptly turned away from the picture they had been admiring so strenuously, found No. So-and-So, and fell into raptures before that.

Now I am not going to make fun of these people. I am not going to make fun of them because I am not sure that I don't suffer from their infirmity. If I don't I am certainly an exceptional person, for the people who really think for themselves are almost as scarce as virtuous people were found to be in the Cities of the Plain. We are most of us second-hand thinkers, and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all. Those good people before the picture were not thinking their own thoughts: they were thinking what they thought was the right thing to think. They had the luck to find themselves out. Probably it did not do them any good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs they were, what empty echoes of an echo they had discovered themselves to be. They had been taught--heaven help them!--to admire those vacant prettinesses of Leader and they were so docile that they admired anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't his.

It reminds me of the story of the two Italians who quarrelled so long and so bitterly over the relative merits of Tasso and Ariosto that at last they fought a duel. And as they lay dying on the ground one of them said to the other, "And to think that I have never read a line of them." "Nor I either," said the other. Then they expired. I do not suppose that story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit. Men are always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices they have inherited from somebody else, ideas they have borrowed second-hand. Many of us go through life without ever having had a genuine thought of our own on any subject of the mind. We think in flocks and once in the flock we go wherever the bellwether leads us.

It is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with this servility of mind. Horace Walpole was enraptured with the Rowley Poems when he thought they were the work of a mediæval monk: when he found they were the work of Chatterton himself his interest in them ceased and he behaved to the poet like a cad. Yet the poems were far more wonderful as the productions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they would have been as the productions of a man of sixty. The literary world of the eighteenth century thought Ossian hardly inferior to Homer; but when Macpherson's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture into the deepest pit of oblivion. Yet, as poetry, it was as good or bad--I have never read it--in the one case as in the other.

There is a delicious story told by Anatole France which bears on this subject. In some examination in Paris the Military Board gave the candidates a piece of dictation consisting of an unsigned page. It was printed in the papers as an example of bad French. "Wherever did these military fellows," it was asked, "find such a farrago of uncouth and ridiculous phrases?" In his own literary circles Anatole France himself heard the passage held up to laughter and torn to tatters. The critic who laughed loudest, he says, was an enthusiastic admirer of Michelet. Yet the passage was from Michelet himself, from Michelet at his best, from Michelet in his finest period. How the great sceptic must have enjoyed that evening!

It is not that we cannot think. It is that we are afraid to think. It is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it. Even some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed in thinking independently. We only succeed in getting into other flocks. Think of that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us some years ago, the Cubists and Dottists and Spottists and Futurists and other cranks, who filled London with their shows, and set all the "advanced" people singing their praises. They were not real praises that expressed genuine feeling. They were the artificial enthusiasms of people who wanted to join in the latest fashion. They would rave over any imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion--rather than not be thought clever enough to find a meaning in things that had no meaning.

We are too timid to think alone, too humble to trust our own feeling or our own judgment. We want some authority to lean up against, and when we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little independent thought as children reciting the "twice-times" table. I would rather a man should think ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo. I once heard an Evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, speaking of Shakespeare, gravely remark that he "could never see anything in that writer." I smiled at his naïveté, but I respected his courage. He couldn't see anything in Shakespeare and he was too honest to pretend that he could. That is far better than the affectations with which men conceal the poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility.

In other days the man that dared to think for himself ran the risk of being burned. Giordano Bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a description of the Oxford of his day which shows how tyrannical established thought can be. Aristotle was almost as sacred as the Bible, and the University statutes enacted that "Bachelors and Masters who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five shillings for every point of divergence and for every fault committed against the Logic of the Organon." We have liberated thought from the restraints of the policeman and the executioner since then, but in liberating it we have lost our reverence for its independence and integrity. We are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease to think at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely as we follow the fashions in hats.

The evil, I suppose, lies in our education. We standardise our children. We aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching them to be themselves--new incarnations of the human spirit, new prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world. We are more concerned about putting our thoughts into their heads than in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom. They are not in fear of the stake, but they are in fear of the judgment of the world, which has no more title to respect than those old statutes of Oxford which we laugh at to-day. The truth, I fear, is that thought does not thrive on freedom. It only thrives under suppression. We need to have our liberties taken away from us in order to discover that they are worth dying for.

ON SAWING WOOD

I do not think this article will be much concerned with the great art of sawing wood; but the theme of it came to me while I was engaged in that task. It was raining hard this morning, and it occurred to me that it was a good opportunity to cut some winter logs in the barn. The raw material of the logs lies at the end of the orchard in the shape of sections of trunks and branches of some old apple trees which David cut down for us last autumn, to enable us to extend the potato-patch by digging up a part of the orchard. I carried some of the sections into the barn and began to saw, but I was out of practice and had forgotten the trick. The saw would go askew, the points would dig in, and the whole operation seemed a clumsy failure.

Then I remembered. You are over-doing it, I said. You are making a mess of the job by too much energy--misdirected energy. The trick of sawing wood is to work within your strength. You are starting at it as if you intended to saw through the log at one stroke. It is the mistake the Rumanians have made in Transylvania. They bit off more than they could chew. You are biting off more than you can chew, and you and the log and the saw get at cross purposes, with the results you see. The art of the business is to work easily and with a light hand, to make the incision with a firm stroke that hardly touches the surface, to move the saw forward lightly so that it barely touches the wood, to draw it back at a shade higher elevation, and above all to take your time and to avoid too much energy. "Gently does it," is the motto.

It is a lesson I am always learning and forgetting. I suppose I am one of those people who are afflicted with too eager a spirit. We want a thing done, but we cannot wait to do it. We rush at the task with all our might and expect it to surrender on the spot, and when it doesn't surrender we lose patience, complain of our tools, and feel a grievance against the perversity of things. It reminds me of the remark which a professional made to me at the practice nets long ago. He was watching a fast bowler who was slinging the ball at the batsman like a whirlwind, and with disastrous results for himself. "He would make a good bowler," said the professional, "if he wouldn't try to bowl three balls at once." Recall any really great bowler you have known and you will find that the chief impression he left on the mind was that of ease and reserve power. He was never spending up to the hilt. There was always something left in the bank. I do not speak of the medium-paced bowler, like Lohmann, whose action had a sort of artless grace that masked the most wily and governed strategy; but of the fast bowler, like Tom Richardson or Mold or even Spofforth. With all their physical energy, you felt that their heads were cool and that they had something in hand. There was passion, but it was controlled passion.

And if you have tried mowing a meadow you will know how much the art consists in working within your powers, easily and rhythmically. The temptation to lay on with all your might is overpowering, and you stab the ground and miss your stroke and exhaust yourself in sheer futility. And then you watch John Ruddle at the job and see the whole secret of the art reveal itself. He will mow for three hours on end with never a pause except to sharpen the blade with the whetstone he carries in his hip pocket. What a feeling of reserve there is in the beautiful leisureliness of his action! You could go to sleep watching him, and you feel that he could go to sleep to his own rhythm, as the mother falls asleep to her own swaying and crooning. There is the experience of a lifetime in that masterful technique, but the point is that the secret of the technique is its restraint, its economy of effort, its patience with the task, its avoidance of flurry and hurry, and of the waste and exhaustion of over-emphasis. At the bottom, all that John Ruddle has learned is not to try to bowl three balls at once. He is always master of his job.

And if you chance to be a golfer, haven't you generally found that when you are "off your game" it is because you have pitched the key, as it were, too high? You smite and fail, and smite harder and fail, and go on increasing the effort, and as your effort increases so does your futility. You are playing over your strength. You are screaming at the ball instead of talking to it reasonably and sensibly. Then perhaps you remember, cut down your effort to the scope of your powers, and, behold, the ball sails away on its errand with just the right flight and just the right direction and just the right length. And you purr to yourself and learn once more that the art of doing things is moderation.

It is so in all things. The man who wins is the man who keeps cool, whose effort is always proportioned to his power, who gives the impression that there is more in him than ever comes out. I have seen many a man lose the argument, not because he had the worse case, but because he was too eager, too impatient, too unrestrained in presenting it. What is the secret of the extraordinary influence which Viscount Grey exercises over the mind but the grave moderation and reserve of his style? There are scores of more eloquent speakers, more nimble disputants than he, but there has been no one in our time with the same authority and finality of speech. He conveys the sense of a mind disciplined against passion, austere in its reserve, implacably honest, understating itself with a certain cold aloofness that leaves controversy silent. Take his indictment of Germany as an example. It was as though the verdict of the Day of Judgment had fallen on Germany. Yet it was a mere grave, dispassionate statement of the facts without a word of extravagance or violence. It was the naked truthfulness of it that was so terrible and unanswerable.

And much the most impressive description I have seen of the horrors of war was in the letter of a German artillery officer telling his experiences in the first great battle of the Somme. Yet the characteristic of the letter was its plainness and freedom from any straining after effect. He just left the thing he described to speak for itself in all its bare horror. It was a lesson we people who write would do well to remember. Let us have fewer adjectives, good people, fewer epithets. Remember, the adjective is the enemy of the noun. It is the scream that drowns the sense, the passion that turns the argument red in the face and makes it unbelievable. Was it not Stendhal who used to read the _Code Napoléon_ once a year to teach him its severity of style?

* * * * *

It is still raining. I will return to the barn and practise the philosophy of moderation on those logs.

VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME

I

A soldier, whom I met in the train the other day, said that the most unpleasant thing in his experience of the war was the bodies which got caught in the barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left corrupting in the sun. "It isn't healthy," he said. There was no affectation of bravado in the remark. He made it quite simply, as if he were commenting on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating of the carriage. It was not the tragedy of the thing that affected him, but its insanitariness. Yet he was obviously a kindly and humane man, and he talked of his home with the yearning of an exile. "It makes you think something of your home," he said, speaking of the war. "I shan't never want to leave my home when I get out of this, and I shan't never grumble at the missus again," he added, as though recalling the past.

I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers back from the war has been struck by this attitude of mind towards death. I remember a friend of mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle of the Somme while trying to save one of his men who had been wounded, telling me of the horror of the first days of his experience of war, and of the subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had been his friend blown to pieces by his side. "It is as though war develops another integument," he said. "Your sensibilities are atrophied. Your nerve ends are deadened. Your normal feelings perish, and you become a part of a machine that has no feelings--only functions."

In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent in the minds of most of us. There has not been since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years ago such a harvesting of untimely death as we have witnessed during the last two and a half years. If the ghostly army of the slain were to file before you, passing in a rank of four for every minute that elapsed, you could sit and watch it day and night for five years without pause before the last of the phantom host had gone by. And if behind the dead there followed the maimed, blind, and mentally shattered, you could sit on for twenty years and still the end of the vast procession would not be in sight. If we had been asked three years ago whether the human mind could endure such a deliberate orgy of death in its most terrible form, we should have said the thing was incredible. Yet we live through it without revolt, clamour about the shortage of potatoes, crowd the cinemas to see the latest extravagance of Charlie Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily tale of dead that fills the obscure columns of the newspapers--such of them as trouble any longer to give that tale at all.