Part 5

I have not seen him for years, but I can call him well to mind even now; a little man with hair loosely parted in the centre and falling over his temples, and eyeglasses insecurely perched halfway down a long nose. In the small town in which he (and I too) lived at that time, there were in all five working-men’s clubs. He was a member of all five. Why, I do not know, except that beer was very much cheaper in these places than it was elsewhere. But even that does not explain why he was a member of them all. But so it was. Nightly into one or other of these working-men’s clubs, he carried his insecure eyeglasses and his Oxford manner, and was well received, with the respect due to ‘a character,’ rather than with the hardly suppressed laughter that followed him elsewhere. There he would take a friend, and over the beer (which was both cheap and excellent) he would talk at length, letting the ball of conversation roll easily down the long cadences of his speech. His favourite theme, I remember, was the utter worthlessness of the middle-classes, to which he belonged, and he was the first person of my acquaintance to speak of them as ‘the bourgeois.’ It is years since I last saw him, but I trust that some school still knows him, chalky and pedantic, day by day, and that at least five working-men’s clubs still see him, magnificent over his beer, night by night.

The second man was a spectacled smoky fellow, getting on in years, whom I knew but slightly. His trade was the writing of boys’ stories, not for expensive illustrated books but for penny dreadfuls. What else he had done to earn his bread, when he was only an aspirant, I do not know, but that was his trade when I knew him. Year after year, he chronicled the adventures of Dick This or Jack the Other at School or among Pirates or Red Indians; and his pay was one guinea for every thousand words, which was not bad, for he could turn out a good many thousand words in a week and could also fill up with Boom! Crash! Bang! a kind of writing that boys like. Although the scenes of his tales were laid in all parts of the world, there was no nonsense about him; he did not travel in search of local colour, but used a gazetteer and trusted to his powers of invention, which were well-tried and excellent. But his heart was not in the work and he took no pride in it. At regular intervals he would simply send off so many thousand words to the Boys’ Monster Tales Publishing Company Limited, and his stories came out under many different names, not one of which was his own. He had a wife but no family, few friends, and belonged to no club or society. The thing he lived for was a great work in metaphysics, at which he had been engaged for many years, and which was to be called ‘The Mind of the Universe.’ All his spare time and energy were given to thinking out the problems that he had set himself, and he would weary his few visitors with interminable talk in a philosophical jargon of his own making. Years before, he had read a little handbook on Spinoza, which had brought a new set of problems into his world, and which had so intrigued him that he had determined to devote the remainder of his life to metaphysics. But he had also made up his mind not to study the philosophers, because their theories might keep him from original thought: he meant to think everything out for himself. When he had erected his system, the world would recognise it for what it was, and forgive his preposterous stories of ‘Jack Marraway and the Terror of the Prairie’ and the rest. He was wrong. I am no metaphysician but I know that his stories were better than his grand original system of metaphysics. For, after years of labour, he had only succeeded in enunciating paradoxes that were stale jokes in Ionia, in dragging out cumbersome creaking theories that even the long extinct State University of Hochensteilschwarzburg would have rejected at a glance; and all written in that terrible jargon of his. Yet it was a manly thing to do, and though all his labour was worth little, it was not in vain, for it gave him secret incommunicable pleasure and he felt himself to be a man marked off from the common run of men; which he was. For the rest, he smoked prodigious quantities of ‘Meadowsweet Flake’--a vile tobacco, grossly doctored and scented.

The other man I never knew personally, but I received many accounts of him, and his reputation, the legend of him, has been very dear to me. He was a shopkeeper and sold, at a considerable profit, optical instruments, spectacles and whatnot. But what set him apart from other men was that he had had more bad verse through his hands than any other person in these islands. It was his one great hobby to collect bad verse and publish it in anthologies. He must have known more poetasters than any other man living or dead. On the death of a well-known politician, or immediately after any great public event, he would set to work and gather up all the offscourings of the ‘Poets’ Corners’ of obscure country papers. Thus, he it was, and no other, who edited _The Best Poetical Tributes to the late Joseph Chamberlain_, and many other anthologies. His system was, I fancy, to compel every contributor to become a subscriber and take several copies of the volume in hand, so that it was ensured a sale. The verse was always bad, the very worst conceivable, for no one who wrote good verse would have suffered him to live. Why he did it--and he produced innumerable volumes--is a mystery, for there could not have been much money in it, and the same energy and impudence would have given him a fortune in the quack medicine business. I have thought sometimes that he was a satirist of a particularly deep kind, but I have been assured by those who knew him that he was entirely serious and innocently proud of the good work he was doing. Nor did he allow his literary service to interfere with his trade. In the centre of his shop-window there was a coloured life-size bust of Shakespeare with a pair of eyeglasses on its nose. The bust hinted delicately to all passers-by that though our man was but a shopkeeper, he too had served the Muse and was the editor of the Hundred Best, etc.; the eyeglasses, through which one caught the mild glance of the poet, indicated the nature of the shop. It was admirable! And though the man himself is dead, the shop remains and with it the bust. I saw it only a short time ago, and was gladdened; indeed, there seems something lacking now when I see Shakespeare without his eyeglasses; but one cannot, of course, be dogmatic about such matters of taste.

All three men lived in one town, where I too lived for a season. And there were others, more wonderful still, whom I cannot describe in this place, nor perhaps in any other, for I write to be believed.

THE BOGEY OF SPACE

When Lafcadio Hearn comes to the end of _The Romance of the Milky Way_, he tells us, a little wistfully, that the lovely old Japanese legend, which makes the heavens ‘seem very near and warm and human,’ has sometimes enabled him ‘to forget the monstrous facts of science, and the stupendous horror of Space.’ And elsewhere, he writes of the terror that he felt, in common with his philosophic guide, Herbert Spencer, at the notion of infinite Space--‘the mere vague idea of that everlasting Night into which the blazing of millions of suns can bring neither light nor warmth.’ Most of us, I think, have been kept from sleep, at some time or other, by similar emotions. ‘Of the Kosmos in the last resort,’ wrote Stevenson, ‘science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling.’ From time to time, astronomers, thinking of nothing but their strange study, have brought us news of the macrocosm, bewildering measurements, and ghastly phenomena, the full import of which, suddenly realised in a quiet hour, has left us sick at heart. From these monstrous data our imagination has dizzily fashioned a vision of the universe compared with which the hells of the theologians seemed lively and companionable.

At such times all existence begins to look like an unending nightmare. We see the bright unnumbered throng of stars as so many specks of dust on the dark mantle of old Chaos, most ancient of devils. And even they appear remote and unfriendly. The fixed stars know nothing of us: the old homely constellations have an alien look. In the scarred white face of the moon we can read the destiny of our own beautiful planet, soon to be a cold cinder. Good and evil alike are as nothing in the face of the illimitable darkness that awaits us. Our most heroic endeavour cannot lighten the gloom. The greatest of our prophets and poets cannot break the silence for long; it has swallowed the shouts and songs of countless generations. Man, with all his pleasant green places, is only the tiniest accident, a slight tremor of a wheel, something that the next stroke of the machine will put to rights, obliterating him and all his works. But these shuddering negations, to which we have been led by a few scientific data, do not disturb us long. A few hours’ sleep or a brisk walk destroys the whole mournful fabric, and we step out lively as before. A few misguided men, having much to do with these things, make some sort of a creed of such folly, and angrily deny that man has an immortal soul. In this they are wise according to their lights, for believing themselves to be caged in such a universe their only hope lies in a speedy extinction. The soul has no better place in their dreary cosmos than a skylark would have in a Birmingham factory.

Blake was once at a friend’s house when the talk turned on the vastness of Space. At last Blake, who was always irritated by this sort of talk, broke in with, ‘It is false. I walked the other evening to the end of the heath, and touched the sky with my finger.’ Those who are familiar with Blake’s habit of mind, his way of using daring figures of speech as if they were literal statements of fact, will not dismiss this remark as the raving of a genial madman. To Blake, the artist, this perpetual raising of scientific bogeys, this emphasising of the emptiness of the universe, to the distress of our imagination, was nothing short of criminal. He believed in the ‘determinate and bounding form’ of all things, in ‘the bounding line and its infinite inflections and movements.’ ‘Leave out this line,’ he wrote, ‘and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again....’ And chaos is the arch-enemy of the artist, who strives to fashion from the corrupt materials at hand the enduring forms of his imagination. To Blake the sky appeared a most excellent canopy, a majestical roof fretted with golden fire, as it did to Hamlet or any other man. So, too, our earth appears a lovely, fruitful dwelling-place. But, according to science, one is a nightmare of space, the other a putrescent cinder. This may be the truth for science, in which there are no nightmares, but it is not the truth for us. Science, with all its data and phenomena, appeals only to one small part of a man, but the ultimate truth must appeal to the whole man, to the emotional, reasoning, moral, imaginative creature with an immortal soul. It is poetry, in the widest sense of the term, that makes this appeal, and poetry alone. The sky and the earth that we find in poetry and that we have seen for ourselves, the blue canopy stretched over the beautiful dwelling-place, are nearer the ultimate truth than anything that science can tell us.

When we go to science for an account of the cosmos and recoil in horror from the nightmarish thing that we find there, it does not mean that science is necessarily wrong (though, for the most part, it is only guessing), but that we have gone to it for something that it cannot give, and does not pretend to give--an ultimate truth that will satisfy every demand of our highly complex nature. We cannot take science out of its own limited sphere of activity without being horror-struck at the result. Thus, if we went to science, in one or other of its various branches, for a minute description of a red rose, a glass of wine, a wonderful sunset, or a lovely child, the result, in every instance, would seem to be an outlandish thing of horror. So it is with the universe; when we can apprehend it as we can a rose or a sunset, not through science but through the poetry that saturates our being, we shall see the universe in all its majesty and splendour, with all its blazing multi-coloured suns, strange planets and wild moons, moving in the endless dance.

Men like Hearn suffered because they would not keep science within its natural limits. They allowed the bogey talk of the astronomers to frighten them. Hearn never seemed to see that the old Japanese legend which made the heavens seem very near and warm and human was probably nearer the ultimate truth of things than the monstrous facts that he was always trying to forget. He needed large doses of Blake as an antidote to Herbert Spencer. As for the notion of infinite space and ‘that everlasting night,’ of which the astronomical dabblers have made so much, it is nothing but a bleak fiction. For my part, I have ceased to be troubled by any horror of that space in which star-systems move like specks of dust, for I have long held that the whole affair is in reality an illusion, an elaborate jest of the gods. Even the scientists are less confident than they were, for the new Einstein theory (which mathematical friends have vainly tried to explain to me) seems to emphasise the illusory aspect of space, making our old theories and elaborate calculations look rather foolish. Meanwhile, the cosmos now appears to be more of a joke than ever, but whatever conclusions the scientists may arrive at, of one thing I am certain--it is a good joke. Probably it is the ultimate, universal, everlasting joke, of which the greatest of our jests are but distorted reflections and fleeting shadows.

A ROAD TO ONESELF

Sometimes, on one of these sunny autumn mornings, when I turn my back on the town and take to the highway, I seem to have the world to myself. I walk forward, as it were, into a great sunlit emptiness. Once I am a little way out of the town it is as if the world had been swept clean of men. I pass a few young mothers, who are proudly ushering their round-eyed solemn babes into the presence of the morning sun, a lumbering cart or two, and maybe a knot of labourers, who look up from their task with humorous resignation in their faces; these and others I overtake and pass by, and then there is often an end of my fellows. I alone keep a lounging tryst with the sun, himself, I fancy, a mighty, genial idler and the father of all dreamers and idlers among men.

A light mist covers the neighbouring hills, which are almost imperceptible, their shapes and colours showing but faintly, so that they seem to stand aloof--things of dream. As I go further along the shining road I seem to be lounging into a vast, empty room. There are sights and sounds in plenty; cows looking over the walls with their great, mournful eyes; here and there a thin blue column of smoke; the cawing of rooks about the decaying woods; and, distantly sounding, the creak of a cart, a casual shout or two, a vague hammering, and, more distant still, the noise of the town, now the faint murmur of a hive. Yet to me, coming from the crowded, tumultuous streets, it seems empty because I meet no one by the way. The road, for all its thick drift of leaves, deep gold and brown, at either side, seems to lie naked in the sunshine, and I drink in this unexpected solitude as eagerly as a dusty traveller takes his ale. For a time, it comes as a delectable and quickening draught, and though outwardly a sober, meditative, almost melancholy pedestrian, I hold high festival in the spirit, drink deep, and revel with the younger gods.

One of the greatest dangers of living in large towns is that we have too many neighbours and human fellowship is too cheap. We are apt to become wearied of humanity; a solitary green tree sometimes seems dearer to us than an odd thousand of our fellow-citizens. Unless we are hardened, the millions of eyes begin to madden us; and for ever pushed and jostled by crowds we begin to take more kindly to Malthus, and are even willing to think better of Herod and other wholesale depopulators. We begin to hate the sight of men who would appear as gods to us if we met them in Turkestan or Patagonia. When we have become thoroughly crowd-sick, we feel that the continued presence of these thousands of other men and women will soon crush, stamp, or press our unique, miraculous individuality into some vile pattern of the streets; we feel that the spirit will perish for want of room to expand in: and we gasp for an air untainted by crowded humanity.

Some such thoughts as these come to me, at first, in my curious little glimpse of solitude. I am possessed by an ampler mood than men commonly know, and feel that I can fashion the world about me to my changing whims; my spirit overflows, and seems to fill the quiet drooping countryside with sudden light and laughter; the empty road and vacant fields, the golden atmosphere and blue spaces are my kingdoms, and I can people them at will with my fancies. Beautiful snatches of poetry come into my head, and I repeat a few words, or even only one word, aloud and with passionate emphasis, as if to impress their significance and beauty upon a listening host. Sometimes I break into violent little gusts of laughter, for my own good pleasure. At other times I sing, loudly and with abandon: to a petrified audience of one cow and three trees I protest melodiously that Phyllis has such charming graces that I could love her till I die, and I believe it, too, at the time. I brag to myself, and applaud and flatter myself. I even indulge in one or two of those swaggering day-dreams of boyhood in which one finds oneself suddenly raised to some extraordinary eminence, the idol of millions, a demi-god among men, from which height one looks down with kindly scorn on those myopic persons who did not know true greatness when they saw it, sarcastic schoolmasters and jeering relatives for the most part.

Only by such heightened images, seemingly more applicable to centuries of riotous life than half an hour’s sauntering, can I suggest in stubborn words the swelling mood that first comes to me with this sudden, unexpected seclusion.

But as the morning wears away, the jubilation arising from this new expansion of oneself dwindles and perishes; the spirit wearies of its play. The road stretches out its vacant length, a few last leaves come fluttering down, and the sun grows stronger, sharpening the outline of the hills. The day is lovelier than ever. But I meet no one by the way, and even the distant sounds of men’s travail and sport have died down. After a time the empty road and silent valley become vaguely disquieting, like a great room spread for a feast, blazing with lights, opulent in crimson and gold, and yet all deserted and quiet as the grave. I ask myself if all men have been mewed up in offices and underground warehouses, by some ghastly edict, unknown to me, which has come into force this very morning. Have I alone escaped? Or I wonder if the Last Day has dawned, and been made plain to men not by sound of trump, but by some sign in the sky that I have overlooked; a vast hand may have beckoned to all men or the heavens may have opened while I was busy lighting my pipe. Have all but one of the weary children of earth been gathered to their long rest? I walk in loneliness.

Suddenly, I see a tiny moving figure on the road before me, and immediately it focuses my attention. What are walls, fields, trees, and cows compared with this miraculous thing, a fellow human being, played upon by the same desires and passions, his head stuffed with the same dreams and fluttering thoughts? In one of the world’s greatest romances is not the most breathless moment concerned with the discovery of a human footprint in the sand? Does not the world’s story begin with one human being meeting another? As I keep my eyes fixed on the nearing figure the last of my vague fancies and egotistical imaginings are blown away; my mind is engrossed by the solidly romantic possibilities of the encounter. Just as I was glad to escape from the sight and sound of men, so I am eager now to break my solitude: the circle is complete. And as we come up together, the stranger and I, I give him a loud greeting, and he, a little startled, returns the salute; and so we pass on, fellow-travellers and nameless companions in a great adventure, knowing no more of each other than the brief sight of a face, the sound of a voice can tell us. We only cry out a Hail and Farewell through the mist, yet I think we go on our way a little heartened.

THE EDITOR

I have just learned from a little paragraph in a newspaper that another old acquaintance of mine has gone--old Wimpenny-Brown, ‘for many years editor of the _Wallerdale Herald_’--as the paragraph is careful to inform me. But there is little need, for it was in his editorial days that I met Wimpenny-Brown, and I can only think of him as an editor. Apart from a few early years spent as a reporter on a lesser London paper, all his time had been given to the _Wallerdale Herald_. It was an obscure provincial sheet, Liberal-cum-Radical in tone, strongly upholding Free Trade and much given to enunciating those few leading principles ‘upon which the prosperity and happiness of this country must inevitably depend.’ But in the days when I knew its editor, the _Herald_ was nothing more to me than a frame, the necessary boundaries of gilt and moulding, that set off his personality. Thus framed, my old acquaintance was a man to be sought out and gathered to oneself. To a youngster in quest of the absurd, as I was at that time, he was meat and drink. Even so long ago, he was considered one of the old school, and so true to type that he seemed to have been specially created to verify the comic novelists. He seemed to dwell in the great shadow of Mr. Potts, of the _Eatanswill Gazette_, and to be closely related to that solemn editorial host of Colonels and Majors dear to the American humorist.