Part 7
Yet, merely as furniture, books are a cheaper and better decoration than blue china or Chippendale chairs. They are better because they put the signature of individuality upon a house. The taste for Chippendale chairs and blue china may be a mere vanity, a piece of coxcombry and ostentation, a fancy that represents, not a genuine personal taste for beautiful things, but an artificial passion for rare or expensive things. But a row of books will give a house character and meaning. It will tell you about its owner. It is a window let into the landscape of his life. When I go into a stranger's library I wander round the bookshelves to learn what sort of a person the stranger is, and when he comes in I feel that I know the key to his mind and the range of his interests. A house without books is a mindless and characterless house, no matter how rich the Persian rugs and how elegant the settees and the ornaments. The Persian rugs only tell you that the owner has got money, but the books will tell you whether he has got a mind as well. I was staying not long ago in a Northern town with a man who had a great house and fine grounds, two or three motor-cars, a billiard-room, and a multitude of other luxuries. The only thing he had not got was books. And the effect left on the mind by all his splendours was that he was pauper. "And where are your books?" asked a famous bookman of my acquaintance who was being shown over a West-End palace by the owner, who, in the last twenty years, had made a colossal fortune. "In the City," was the plutocrat's unblushing reply. He gloried in his poverty.
It is not a question of money. I repeat that books are the cheapest as well as the best part of the equipment of a house. You can begin your library with the expenditure of a couple of shillings. Nearly all the best literature in the world is at your command at two shillings a volume. For five pounds you can get a library of fifty books which contain "riches fineless." Even if you don't read them yourself, they are a priceless investment for your children. Holmes used to say that it took three generations of sprawling in a library to create a reading man; but I believe that any intelligent child who stumbles upon, let us say, Herodotus or _Two Years Before the Mast_ or Prescott's _Conquest of Peru_, or any similar masterpiece, will be caught by the glamour of books and will contract the reading habit for life. And what habit is there to compare with it? What delight is there like the revelation of books, the sudden impact of a master-spirit, the sense of windows flung wide open to the universe? It is these adventures of the mind, the joy of which does not pass away, that give the adventure of life itself beauty and fragrance, and make it
Rich as the oozy bottom of the deep, With sunken wreck and sumless treasuries.
OTHER PEOPLE'S JOBS
I have been following with interest my friend Mr. Robert Lynd's quest of a soft job in the columns of _The Daily News_. I have been following it with interest, not only because I never willingly miss anything which that most witty and wise of writers pens, but also because the subject is near my heart. I say this without shame. There is nothing discreditable in desiring an agreeable occupation, light in labour and heavy in rewards. I do not pretend to have any passion for work, I know very few people who have, and I confess that I find most of those few very undesirable companions. If I were put upon oath I think I should have to admit that my impulse to work is the same humble one as Mr. Chesterton confessed to--
When I myself perceived that I Must work or I should shortly die--
well, then he worked. And when he had driven off the shadow of death far enough to feel comfortable, no doubt he left off and did something pleasant. And so with most of us. It is only our dislike of the undertaker and all that he connotes that sucks us into the tubes in the morning and spews us out at night, and keeps us in the interval counting figures, serving out "sausage and mash," measuring yards of silk, tapping typewriters, saying "Walk this way, ma'am," trying boots on other people's feet, shouting "Full up" on buses, and "Stand clear of the gates" in lifts, and a thousand other things that make you tired to think of--things that have to be done, but are not a man's job to do.
Most of our work in this artificial civilisation of ours is like that. The shepherd who keeps sheep on the hillside and the labourer who tills the soil are living a noble life compared with the tawdry little things most of us are condemned to do in cities. We have to do them to keep the undertaker at bay, and we are not to be blamed if we go about with Mr. Lynd looking at other people's jobs and wishing we had got them. Thus he stands in front of the motor show-room, with his face glued to the window, envying the lucky salesman inside, who only has one customer in an hour to attend to, makes a pot of money out of him, and has all the rest of the day in which to smoke and gossip at the door and think about things. In the same way I never pass down Charing Cross Road without pausing in front of the book-shops and thinking what an agreeable time those fellows inside have. Why, my idea of happiness is to leave this tiresome world and go into a library and be forgotten, and here are lucky fellows who have to live in a library to earn their living.
But I daresay it is all an illusion. It is an illusion, no doubt, even in the case of postmen, for whom most of us retain a romantic and indestructible affection. They belong to the earliest of our memories, and get entangled in the clouds of glory, which, according to the poet, we trail into this world with us from afar. The clouds of glory fade, but the postman remains as a reminder that we once lived in the Golden Age. Next to the muffin-man, he seemed the most entirely enviable and likeable creature in trousers. The muffin-man, of course, had advantages. There were his muffins to begin with. And there was his bell. To have a bell of your own and to have the privilege of going down any street you liked ringing it as hard as you liked and scattering the good tidings of muffins put a man in a class by himself.
But the postman, if on a lower plane than the muffin-man, had a more continuous joy. He had not a bell of his own, but he had the run of other people's bells. He could ring any bell he liked and bang any knocker as hard as he chose without a thought of running away. And these delights he had every day and several times a day. He could go on ringing bells and knocking at doors till his arm ached. Nobody objected. On the contrary, you looked out for him, hoping that he would come and bang at your door in that breezy way of his. The longer he paused before banging, the better you liked him. It meant--it could only mean--that he had such a lot of letters for you that it took him a long time to find them all.
And, of course, the more letters there were the more joy there must be. That is the miracle with the postman. He brings bad news and good news and indifferent news, but we only remember him by his good news. Like the sun-dial, he only records the sunny hours. He is the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. He comes up the path, probably with a handful of accounts you have not paid, income tax demands, offers from kind gentlemen to lend you ten thousand pounds on your note of hand, applications for subscriptions, and other things that you would be pleased to do without. But no experience of the Barmecide feasts he is capable of offering you affects your faith in him and his good intentions. If he were to turn back in the middle of the path you would be disappointed. If he pass by your gate you are not grateful that he has not brought you ill-news. You suspect that something pleasant has unaccountably gone astray.
That is as it should be. When we have ceased to want to hear the postman's knock we may conclude that we have seen the best of the day, and that the demon of disillusion has us in thrall. It is to have given up hope that that legendary ship of our childhood will ever come home. It was that admirable vessel that made the future such an agreeable prospect. Everything would be possible when our ship came home. That it was a very rich ship and that it was on its way we did not doubt, for we had the word of most responsible people, mothers and aunts and grandmothers, on the subject. We could not understand why it tarried so long, but we did not suspect its _bona fides_ any more than its seaworthiness. Some day--it might be any day, possibly even to-morrow--the postman would come and knock lustily at the door and bring news that the ship was in port or, at least, had been sighted from the shore.
And though we have since discovered that those responsible people were talking less literally than we thought, and that that magic ship, with its golden argosy, was a thing of the fancy, we still see the postman turn in at the gate with a mild flutter of expectation. He is himself a sort of ship, laden with merchandise from afar. In his bag there must be incredible things, and some of them may be for us. It might be assumed that men whose coming gives so much joy are themselves joyful, that they love their calling so much that they would not change with kings, but experience reveals to us the melancholy truth that postmen are as afflicted with the discontents of life as the common run of mortals.
I fancy that if that motor salesman had come to the door and opened out his mind to Mr. Lynd he would have told him that selling motors was all right, but that not selling them, which occupied about nineteen hours out of twenty, was the most sickening job under the sun, and that the thing he really yearned after was to be literary critic, like that Mr. Robert Lynd, who wrote such stunning reviews in the papers. Now that was a job. There he sat, in an arm-chair before a ripping fire, surrounded by all the latest books, with his feet on the mantel-piece and no reason to put on his boots from morning to night, reading books and smoking his hardest, and then taking the author up, as it were, between thumb and forefinger and showing the world what an ugly guy of a fellow he was. Fancy being paid to read books and lamm the writers. Fancy being paid for having your name in the paper in big type that anybody could read half a dozen yards away. Yes, that was the sort of soft job he would like. Motors ...
That is the way of things. We are all apt to think we should be happy if we were doing somebody else's work--the king's, for example. Even the nursery rhyme inculcates in us the notion that kings are happy as the day is long, yet no intelligent coal-heaver who knew the blessings of liberty and obscurity would be able to endure the boredom and routine of a calling which compels a man to live as publicly as a bee in an observation hive. I have known people even envy a bishop's gaiters, but I should be surprised to learn that there was a single bishop on the bench who did not wish he could go about in trousers again, and take up a plain hum-drum occupation in which he could be as good as he liked without announcing it about the legs. The truth probably is that all these dreams of soft jobs are vanity and that the canker and the worm can gnaw at the heart of the best of them. I offer this modest reflection to Mr. Lynd in the hope that he will not cease to write beautiful articles in order to be an incompetent motor salesman or to mix drugs in a chemist's shop. I do not think he is the sort of man who could sell anything, and I fancy he is just the sort of man who would mix the drugs more than they ought to be mixed.
WHY I DON'T KNOW
I was asked the other day by one of those journals which love vast, resounding themes with which to astonish their readers to write an article on the most important man in the world. I declined, partly because I was busy and partly because I was lazy, but chiefly because I had not a ghost of a notion of the answer. Of course, it would have been possible for me to have discussed the claims of this man and that to pre-eminence, to have contrasted M. Poincaré with Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bernard Shaw with Mr. Charlie Chaplin, M. Trotsky with Signor Mussolini, Einstein with Rutherford, and so on; but I should not have answered the question. No one can answer the question. We can all guess; but one thing is pretty certain. We shall all guess wrong. The most important man in the world is somewhere, but he will not be known until he is dead, and we are all dead with him; not until our posterity looks back upon this time and says with one voice, "Behold, the man," as we to-day look back to the great age of Elizabeth and say, "Lo! Shakespeare." No one said it then, and no one thought it. Nearly two centuries had to pass before the true magnitude of this peak became visible and even then it had to be discovered by observers from afar, by the critics of a foreign land and a foreign tongue.
Was there ever a period in history when the world knew where to look for its chief of men? If ever it might have been expected to pick him out with the certainty of being right it would have been when Augustus Cæsar reigned at Rome over the whole known world. He was so supreme that he seemed less a man than a god. But down in a little province of his vast empire there was a Boy growing up who was destined to change the whole face of the world and to outshine Augustus as the sun outshines a rush-light. The magnificence of Augustus and his empire is an empty memory of nineteen centuries ago, but Christianity is still the mightiest force in the affairs of men.
Or suppose you had been living in the year 1506 in Valladolid, and had asked yourself who was the most important man alive. You would have said the Pope or the Emperor or Ferdinand, without knowing that they were nothing compared with a poor old man who was dying in poverty and neglect in a mean street of that famous city. He did not know himself how vast a thing he had done and how his name would outlive and outsoar those of kings and warriors, poets and statesmen. He did not know that he had not simply found a new way to the East Indies, but had discovered a New World, and that all the vast continent of America would be the everlasting memorial of his life of struggle and disappointment. One would like to think that the spirit of Columbus "poised in the unapparent" has the satisfaction of knowing what a resounding name he has left behind him.
Let us go on a few years. I will imagine that in 1530 I am asked, not by an editor--for that breed had not then been invented--but by some other curious inquirer, to direct him to the king of men then living. I should probably have answered with some confidence. It was the day of the Great Kings. I suppose three men of such remarkable powers as Henry VIII., Charles V., and Francis I. never reigned in Europe simultaneously. It was only a question of which was the greatest to decide who was the most important man in the world. I daresay I should have decided for Henry; but of course I should have been wrong. The most important man in the world was a person of whom I should not then have heard--a wandering scientist born on the Vistula, Copernicus by name, into whose profound mind there had come the most stupendous conception that ever thrilled the thought of man. The earth was not, as had been supposed through all the ages, the fixed centre of the universe around which the stars moved in obedient subjection, but a little planet rushing with the rest round its great over-lord, the sun. With that terrific discovery, the whole conception of the cosmos was changed, the earth became a speck of dust in the unthinkable vast, religion assumed new meanings, and man fell from his proud pre-eminence as the lord of creation. In its effects it was the most momentous thing that ever happened in the secular history of man; but the point here is that if you and I had been living then and had had Copernicus pointed out to us in the street we should not have known that he was beyond all comparison the most tremendous figure in the world.
Take another illustration. The end of the eighteenth century was a time of great men. If we had guessed then who was the most important man alive we should have been puzzled to decide between Pitt and Burke, Johnson and Washington, Nelson and Napoleon, and a multitude of others. None of us would have thought of looking for him in the person of a certain gentle, unassuming instrument-maker who filled a modest position in Glasgow University. Yet if the most important man in the world is he who sets in motion the forces--whether of ideas or physical powers--that most profoundly affect the life of men, then no one living from, say, 1760 to 1800, was comparable with James Watt. He inaugurated the Age of Steam. He released the greatest power that the ingenuity of man has ever invented, and the train that thunders through the land, and the ship that ploughs the sea, and the engine that drives a thousand looms are among the prolific children of his genius.
And so I repeat that I do not know who is the most important man in the world. He may be a solitary thinker wrestling with some vast conception that is destined to reshape all our thought. He may be some unknown scientist from whose laboratory there will emerge one day a power that will shake the heavens. He may be a prophet or a teacher who will help us to solve the riddle of this unintelligible world. He may be a discoverer or even a poet. I am sure he will not be a soldier, and I don't think he will be a politician. These people make a great noise in the world, but they rarely do anything that matters to posterity. The most important man in the world is probably making no noise at all. His noise will come late like the sound of a great gun heard from afar. But it is a noise that will echo down the ages.
ON ANTI-CLIMAX
The centenary of the birth of Coventry Patmore has produced many handsome tributes to that once popular, but now little-read poet. When I was a boy _The Angel in the House_ was as familiar as _In Memoriam_, and Patmore was a more prominent figure in the literary landscape than Browning. He has long lost that eminence, but his haughty genius, like that of Landor, will always command the respectful, if slightly chilly, admiration of certain minds. "I shall dine late," said Landor, "but the rooms will be well-lighted and the company fit, though few."
Patmore, who outlived his earlier reputation, felt the same assurance about himself. And rightly, for though it is probable that the dust will be allowed to gather on the unthumbed _Angel in the House_, some of his later poems have an energy and nobility that will keep them alive. _The Farewell_, for example, has the ring of deathlessness in it as assuredly as Drayton's _Parting_, of which it is reminiscent, or Browning's _Last Ride Together_. He will not be forgotten, too, for another reason. Fine poet though he was, he could come to grief badly, and the stanza with which he closed his most famous poem will live as an example of anti-climax:
But here their converse had its end; For, crossing the Cathedral Lawn, There came an ancient college-friend, Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan, Lifted his hat and bowed and smiled, And filled her kind large eyes with joy, By patting on the cheek her child, With, "Is he yours, this handsome boy?"
"Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan"! Shades of Parnassus! It is easy to see how he came to grief. He had carried his high theme to a close, and wished to end his flight with composed wings and the negligible twitter of the bird at rest. But in the attempt to be simple he stumbled, as much greater poets like Wordsworth have stumbled, on the banal and the commonplace. We suffer from it something of the shock we receive from the historic greeting by Stanley of Livingstone in the depths of the African forest, which is an immortal example of anti-climax. The expedition for the discovery of Livingstone touched the epic note of grand adventure. It held the attention of the world, and the moment of the meeting was charged with the high emotions of a sublime occasion. And when they met (so the record stands), Stanley held out his hand and said, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." At that artificial word the epic collapses to the dimensions of a suburban reception. It is not easy to imagine what salutation would have fitted the end of so mighty a quest, but if Stanley had said, "Dr. Livingstone, I suppose," or preferably simply the name, the feeling of the occasion would not have been outraged, so slight are the things which separate the sublime from the ridiculous.
A lack of humour as much as of taste is usually the source of the anti-climax, as in the familiar example from the prize poem on the Mayflower:
And so, directed by the hand of God, They sailed away until they reached Cape Cod.
The impossible transition from the plane of high spiritual ideas to a mere geographical fact was made grotesque by the name which only a very humourless person could have used in such a connection. Similarly, in the hardly less familiar illustration of bathos:
Here comes Dalhousie, the great God of War, Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar,
the plunge from the Homeric vein to the Army List could only have been possible to a man who lacked humour even more than the sense of poetry.
That was what was wrong with Alfred Austin, the great master of bathos, who perpetrated more banalities than any poet since Pye. I like best his tribute to the dauntless soldiers:
They did not know what blench meant, So they stayed in their entrenchment.
Here the grotesqueness of the rhyme emphasises the absurdity of the illustration. It is not staying in an entrenchment, but leaving an entrenchment that requires courage. Like the much greater Patmore, Austin could collapse into the commonplace in trying to achieve the simple and artless, as when he wrote:
The spring time, O, the spring time, Who does not know it well-- When the little birds begin to sing And the buds begin to swell.
Contrast these tinkling syllables with the surge of emotion with which another poet could charge the song of the birds and the bloom of the flowers:
Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, How can ye blume sae fair? How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' o' care?
I suppose no poet was ever more royally regardless of the smaller niceties of the poet's craft than Burns was, but it would not be easy to find in all his work a case where he comes down with the broken wing of anti-climax.
THE UNKNOWN WARRIOR[1]
[1] Written on the day of the interment of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey.
We shall not know his name. It will never be known, and we should not seek to know it. For in that nameless figure that is borne over land and sea to mingle its dust with the most sacred dust of England, we salute the invisible hosts of the fallen. We do not ask his name or whence he comes. His name is legion and he comes from a hundred fields, stricken with a million deaths.