Part 6

I do not think that Reginald wants Pamela to be less enthusiastic. He only wants her to preserve some proportion in regard to things. He feels as Jamie Soutar, of Drumtochty, in Ian Maclaren's story, felt. Jamie had "a gift o' discreemination," and was distressed by the purple adjectives of Mr. Hopps, the little Cockney. When Mr. Hopps raved about the sunset, Jamie observed that it was "no bad."

"No bad!" said Mr. Hopps. "I call it glorious, and if it hisn't, then I'd like to know what his."

"Man," replied Soutar austerely, "ye'll surely keep ae word for the 21st o' Reevelation."

Had any native used such words as "magnificent" in Drumtochty there would have been an uneasy feeling in the glen; the man must be suffering from wind in the head, and might upset the rotation of crops, sowing his young grass after potatoes, or replacing turnip with beet.

Reginald would not expect Pamela to put so harsh a bridle as this upon her tongue. He would only suggest that she should be sparing of her superlatives and her enthusiasm, so that when she used them they conveyed some sort of meaning and some sense of value. And probably Pamela would find that in curing herself she had cured Reginald. He would let himself "go" a little more if she let herself "go" a little less. For his iciness is probably an attempt to moderate her tropical fervour.

TEA AND MR. BENNETT

I knew that my friend Mr. Arnold Bennett was a handy man. It is his foible to do many things, and he does most of them surprisingly well. The villagers in the poem were left wondering how the schoolmaster's small head "could carry all he knew"; and I have myself often idly wondered how Mr. Bennett has managed to become an expert in so many arts and crafts in the intervals of pouring out a stream of books and plays that would alone seem the abundant occupation of all his waking hours. I suppose the explanation is, first, that he has in an unusual degree an industrious habit under iron discipline and an orderly mind that parcels out its minutes as a miser parcels out his gold; and, second, that he has a devouring curiosity about life.

He is a taster of life. He goes about like a country boy at a fair, taking a shy at every Aunt Sally, a ride on every roundabout, a shot at every shooting-range. The bearded woman delights him, and Punch and Judy hold him as the glittering eye of the ancient mariner held the wedding guest. He never grows tired of the show. He keeps into middle age the juvenile wonder which most of us lose when we lose our youth--hence the unfailing freshness of his mind. He is always interesting, because he is always interested. I would trust him to get along on a desert island as comfortably as any living man. He would write his own books, pen his own criticisms, paint his own pictures, make his own music, sail his own boat, take his own physic, run his own farm, engross his own conveyance, drive his own car, cook his own dinner--probably cut his own hair. For he can explain to you why the barbers of Italy are superior to the barbers of France and wherein the Dutch barber fails to touch the highest pinnacle of his calling. And all these things he would do, not clumsily or grudgingly as one driven into a corner by cruel circumstance, but joyfully, as a boy on a picnic. He would rejoice that at last he could do things as they should be done, instead of having them done for him by others in ways in which they should not be done.

For example, he would be able to have a cup of tea worth drinking. I did not know, but I am not surprised to learn, that he is an artist with the tea-pot. "I would undertake," he has just told the world, "to make better tea than nineteen-twentieths of the housewives of this country." If it were anybody else, we should say this was conceit; but Mr. Bennett without this note of childlike self-assurance would not be the Mr. Bennett we love. We should not know him. We should think he was just an ordinary man like the rest of us, and pass him by in the crowd. Moreover, when he tells us that he is a master craftsman with the tea-pot, I have no doubt he is speaking the truth. He will, I am sure, have studied this great subject as profoundly as he has studied the technique of play-writing.

And I daresay he would agree that it is at least as well worth studying as play-writing. Plays are only a very occasional affair in our life, but tea flows on for ever. At this moment I hear the pleasant clatter of the tea-things in the next room, and I suppose there is hardly a house in the land where the kettle is not boiling and the cups are not tinkling. When I went to see my lawyer yesterday afternoon he rang for "another cup," and if I go to see my publisher to-morrow afternoon he will ring for "another cup," too. Next to the Russians, we are, I suppose, the greatest tea-topers in the world. Tea-drinking has ceased to be merely a custom and has become a ritual as well. It is what the pipe of reconciliation is to the Indian or the eating of salt is to the Mussulman.

Yet though every day we drink enough tea to float the British Navy, it is probably true, as Mr. Bennett suggests, that few of us know how to make it. I do not pretend to be one of the few. But I delight in the rare occasions on which I get the real article, and in a casual way, quite different I am sure from Mr. Bennett's orderly experiments, I have picked up the rudiments of a system from those whose brews have pleased me. Thus from one great artist of the tea-pot, a fine old gentleman with a long white beard, who used to sit and watch the kettle boiling as anxiously as the doctor feels the pulse of his patient, I learned that the water should be poured on the tea the moment it comes to the boil. From another, a learned scientist, I gathered that boiling water (from another kettle, I fancy) should be poured in the pot before the tea is put in. A bachelor acquaintance of mine, on whom I called one afternoon, indoctrinated me with the idea of washing the tea with a rapid drench of boiling water drawn off instantly before pouring in the water intended for the brew. From another friend (this time a lady) I picked up the fact that the way to weaken your tea is not to pour more water into the tea-pot, but to dilute the beverage in the cup.

A small matter you say; but the art of making tea is composed of these small delicacies. What, for example, could seem a matter of more indifference than that of the order in which you pour the milk and the tea in the cup? Yet it is a capital point. Put the tea in first, and the virtue seems to have gone out of the cup; put the milk in first, and the subtle law of the art is observed. And the proportion of milk must be exact; you cannot add to it afterwards and get the same effect.

I pass by such fundamental points as the selection of the right tea for the water and the duty of pouring off the tea quickly so as to catch the first fine rapture of the leaf. But I hope I have said enough to set tongues wagging on this fruitful subject, and enough to win the respect (perhaps even the envy) of Mr. Arnold Bennett. I don't mind confessing that that is the reason I am writing this article. I am weary of the omniscience of Mr. Bennett. I am humiliated by the sense of the number of things I don't know or can't do when I am in his presence or read his books. If I did not love him I should hate him. I should write to the papers to denounce him as a charlatan. I should guy his pictures and scoff at his books and make fun of his criticisms about this, that and the other and quote slighting things about Jacks-of-all-trades and generally make myself unpleasant. But since I love him I content myself with saying firmly and even defiantly, that I have ideas on the art and science of tea-making, too. True, I have never made it, but I could make it at a pinch.

ON BUYING AND SELLING

Janet said that she had seen John Staunton in the village in his new car. He was very pleased with it, and apparently still more pleased that he had sold his old car just before the big reduction in the makers' prices was announced, with the result that he had got a new car for an old of the same make, and was some pounds in pocket into the bargain. "I should be ashamed to gloat over such a transaction," she said. Indeed, she was doubtful whether it was morally right to benefit in such a way.

I agreed that it was perhaps indecent to "gloat" over such a stroke of luck, but I could not agree that any reasonable moral consideration had been outraged by the affair. The question raised the problem of what is fair in the way of deals of this sort. What, for example, ought one to say of the case of the eminent statesman of these days, who, looking over the stock of a second-hand book-dealer, saw a copy of the first edition of Gray's Elegy marked at a few shillings, and bought it, took it away, and has probably got it to-day. He had got a prize worth, I think, in the neighbourhood of two hundred pounds. He knew its value, and apparently the bookseller did not. What was the "morality" in that case? Ought he to have summoned the bookseller and said, "My dear sir, are you aware that this little book which you offer me at the ridiculous price of a few shillings is worth a couple of hundred pounds?" I think that would be demanding too much of human nature. Bookbuying and bookselling is a business transaction like any other, and it is the bookseller's business to know what his stock is worth. All the same, I hope the eminent statesman sent the bookseller a substantial Christmas box without telling him what a fool he had been.

After all, the traffic in curiosities is a sort of sport in which sometimes the seller and sometimes the buyer wins the trick. I heard the other day an amusing incident of a man who was fond of collecting old furniture. He was walking in a remote country district when the rain came on, and he took shelter in a barn, at the door of which the farmer was standing. The collector noticed in a corner of the barn an old chest containing fodder of some sort. He looked at it, saw that it was obviously very old, spoke to the farmer about it, found he knew nothing of its value, and bought it for a comparatively small sum. Not long after a friend of his who knew of the bargain wandered to the same farm in the hope of picking up something for himself. He went into the barn and there, behold! was another old chest, containing some more old fodder. Only it wasn't an old chest. Like the other, it was simply a modern-antique--a bait for hungry trout to snap at. The farmer was just an agent. He did not invite people to buy, and he did not pretend that the pieces were old. He just sold them at a price if they were asked for. Was he morally culpable? Was he more culpable than the buyer would have been if he had taken advantage of the farmer's real instead of supposed ignorance?

If we applied the code of strict morality in these matters and asserted that no one must benefit by another's lack of knowledge, what would become of the Stock Exchange? It would have to close its doors forthwith. Nearly every transaction between a buyer and a seller is in the nature of a duel in which one backs his supposed knowledge against the other's supposed ignorance. If I have reason to know, let me say, that salt-water has got into the Mexican oil wells, is it wicked of me to sell out my shares in the company to some innocent person who does not possess that piece of information? After all, I may be wrong, and he may know more than I do. He may know that the menace was true, but he may have the later information that it has been overcome. Every transaction of this sort is admittedly a competition in knowledge or calculation, and each side takes the risk in the hope of taking the profit.

There are, of course, cases in which it would be dishonourable to profit by private knowledge. If I knew that a certain firm was going bankrupt and sold my shares in it to a man who could not possibly know and from whom I deliberately concealed my own absolute knowledge on the point, I should be guilty of an act which would not be morally distinguishable from theft. Or if I went into a remote house of a poor peasant, found a First Folio Shakespeare--think of it!--the market price of which is now over five thousand pounds, discovered that the peasant was ignorant of its value, and took it away for a pound or two, I should be morally, though not legally, a thief. Fortunately I shall never have such a temptation thrust on me. I wonder what I should do if I had.

The difference between such a case and that of the Gray's _Elegy_ is that the seller in the latter case was a business man setting his knowledge against the buyer's, and in the other he would be an innocent who was being rooked. In the matter of John Staunton I see no question of impropriety. One chanced to sell luckily and the other to buy unluckily. That is all. But I agree with Janet that John oughtn't to have "gloated" openly over the transaction. He should have purred to himself privately.

ON BIG WORDS

I was cutting down the nettles by the hedge with a bill-hook when a small man with spectacles, a straw hat, a white alpaca jacket, and a book under his arm came up, stopped, and looked on. I said "Good evening," and he said "Good evening." Then, pointing to my handiwork, he remarked:

"You find the nettles very difficult to eradicate?"

I said I found them hard to keep down.

"They disseminate themselves most luxuriantly," he said.

I replied that they spread like the dickens.

"But they have their utility in the economy of Nature," he said.

I replied that Nature was welcome to them as far as I was concerned.

He then remarked that it was most salubrious weather, and I agreed that it had been a fine day. But he was afraid, he said, that the aridity of the season was deleterious to the crops, and I replied that my potatoes were doing badly. After that, I think it occurred to him that we did not speak the same language, and with another "Good evening" he passed on and I returned to the attack on the nettles.

It is an excellent thing to have a good vocabulary, but one ought not to lard one's common speech or everyday letters with long words. It is like going out for a walk in the fields with a silk hat, a frock-coat, and patent leather boots. No reasonable person could enjoy the country in such a garb. He would feel like a blot on the landscape. He would be as much out of place as a guest in a smock-frock at a Buckingham Palace garden-party. And familiar conversation that dresses itself up in silk-hatted words is no less an offence against the good taste of things. We do not make a thing more impressive by clothing it in grand words any more than we crack a nut more neatly by using a sledge-hammer. We only distract attention from the thought to the clothes it wears. If we are wise our wisdom will gain from the simplicity of our speech, and if we are foolish our folly will only shout the louder through big words.

Take for example that remark of Dr. Johnson's about the swallows. "Swallows certainly sleep all the winter," he said. "A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a river." It was a foolish belief, but it would be unfair to scoff at Johnson for not being better informed than his contemporaries. It is that bumptious word "conglobulate" that does for him. It looks so learned and knowing that it calls attention to the absurdity like a college cap on a donkey's ears. A fine use of words does not necessarily mean the use of fine words. That was the mistake which Humpty-Dumpty made in _Alice in Wonderland_. He thought that "impenetrability" was such a magnificent word that it would leave Alice speechless and amazed. Many writers are like that. When the reporter says that So-and-So "manipulated the ivories" (meaning that he had played the billiard-balls into position), or that So-and-So "propelled the sphere" (meaning that he had kicked the football), he feels that he has got out of the rut of common speech when in fact he has exchanged good words for counterfeit coin. That is not the way of the masters of language. They do not vulgarise fine words. They glorify in simple words, as in Milton's description of the winged host:

Far off their coming shone...

Quite ordinary words employed with a certain novelty and freshness can wear a distinction that gives them not only significance but a strange and haunting beauty. I once illustrated the point by showing the effects which the poets, and particularly Wordsworth and Keats, extract from the word "quiet." Shakespeare could perform equal miracles with the trivial word "sweet," which he uses with a subtle beauty that makes it sing like a violin in the hands of a master. Who can be abroad in the sunshine and singing of these spring days without that phrase, "the sweet o' the year," carolling like a bird in the mind? It is not a "jewel five words long." It is a dewdrop from the very mint of Nature. But Shakespeare could perform this magic with any old word. Take "flatter." A plain, home-spun word, you would say, useful for the drudgery of speech but nothing more. Then Shakespeare takes it in hand, and it shines bright as Sirius in the midnight sky:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye.

I once wanted to use for purposes of quotation a familiar stanza of Burns, but one word, the vital word, escaped me. I give the stanza, with the word I lacked missing:

To make a happy fireside clime For weans and wife-- That's the true (_missing word(s)_) and sublime Of human life.

You, perhaps, know the missing word; but I could not recall it. I tried all the words that were serviceable, and each seemed banal and commonplace. I dare not, for shame, mention the words I tried to use as patches for Burns. When I turned up the poem and found that poignant word "pathos," I knew the measure of my failure to draw the poet's bow.

We carry big words in our head for the expression of our ideas, and short words in our heart for the expression of our emotions. Whenever we speak the language of true feeling, it is our mother tongue that comes to our lips. It is equal to any burden. Take the familiar last stanza of Wordsworth's: "Three years she grew in sun and shower":

Thus Nature spake--the work was done-- How soon my Lucy's race was run! She died, and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, And never more will be.

It is so simple that a child might have said it, and so charged with emotion that a man might be forgiven if he could not say it. _A Shropshire Lad_ is full of this surge of feeling dressed in home-spun, as when he says:

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

Even in pictorial description the most thrilling effects, as in the case I have quoted from Milton, are produced not by the pomp of words but by the passion of words. In two rapid, breathless lines:

The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, With one stride comes the dark,

Coleridge flashes on the mind all the beauty and wonder of the tropic night. And though Shakespeare, like Milton and Wordsworth, could use the grand words when the purpose was rhetorical or decorative, he did not go to them for the expression of the great things of life. Then he speaks with what Raleigh calls the bare intolerable force of King Lear's:

Do not laugh at me, For as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia.

The higher the theme rises the more simple and austere becomes the speech, until the words seem like nerves bared and quivering to the agony of circumstance:

_Lear_. And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never! Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.-- Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,-- Look there, look there! [_He dies._

_Edgar_. He faints! My lord, my lord!--

_Kent_. Break, heart; I prithee, break!

_Edgar_. Look up, my lord.

_Kent_. Vex not his ghost: O let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer.

The force of words can no farther go. And my friend in the white alpaca jacket will notice that they are all very little ones.

DO WE BUY BOOKS?

I have recently been in the throes of a double removal, and in the course of the operation comments were made by one person or another concerned in it on the prominence of books in my belongings. The van-man, with a large experience of removals, paid the tribute of astonishment at the spectacle, and the people who came to look at the house gaped at the books as though they were the last thing they expected to see in a decent suburban residence. Hitherto I had been rather ashamed of my library. In the course of a longish life I have accumulated some 2000 books. There is not much rubbish among them, for I have thinned them out periodically, but there are shameful blanks that are unfilled, and it had never occurred to me to think that they formed an unusual collection for a middle-class household.

But the inquiries I have made since lead me to the conclusion that they do, and that in the average suburban home the last thing that is thought about is the furnishing of a library. People who will spend many hundreds and even thousands of pounds in the course of years in making their house beautiful never give a serious thought to books. They will ransack London for suitable fittings, for rugs and hangings, china and cut-glass, mirrors and what-nots, but the idea of providing themselves with a moderate and well-selected library does not occur to them. If they gather books at all they gather them haphazard and without thought. A well-known publisher told me the other day that he was recently asked to equip a library in a new house in North London, and the instruction he received was to provide books that would fit the shelves which had been fixed. It was not the contents of the books that mattered, but the size.

This was no doubt an exceptional case, but it does represent something of the attitude of the average man to books. People who will spend one hundred and fifty pounds on a piano as a matter of course will not spend ten pounds a year or even five pounds a year in enriching their homes with all the best thought of all time. Go into any average provincial town and the last thing you will find is a decent book-shop. I recall more than one great industrial town of a population of over a hundred thousand which has only one such shop, and that is generally kept going by the sale of school-books. It is not because we cannot afford to buy books. We spend two hundred millions sterling a year on beer, and I doubt whether we spend two hundred million pence on literature. Many people can afford to buy motor-cars at anything from two hundred pounds who would be aghast at the idea of spending half a guinea occasionally on a book. They think so meanly of their minds as that.