Part 9

The years passed, and in due course the imaginative graces of my childhood were destroyed by the boys of my own age at school. They compelled me to exchange a hundred star-roofed palaces, three distinct kingdoms of dreams, and my enchanted flute-player for a threadbare habit of mimicry that left me cold and unprotected from the winds in the large places of life. There was something at once pathetic and ridiculous in our childish efforts to imitate our elders, but as it seemed that our masters and grown-up relatives were in the conspiracy to make us materialistically wise before our time, a boy would have needed a rare force of character to linger with his childhood and refuse to ape the man. So, for a while, I saw my glad musician no more, though sometimes I thought I heard him playing far away, and the child within me was warmed and encouraged even while my new-found manhood was condemning the weakness. I knew now that no man worthy of the name was escorted through life by a fairy flute-player, and that dreamers and wool-gatherers invariably sank to be poets and musicians, persons who wear bowler-hats with frock-coats, have no crease in their trousers, and come to a bad end. Fortunately, all education that is repressive rather than stimulating is only skin-deep, and it was inevitable that sooner or later I should meet the flute-player again. One Saturday afternoon in high summer I avoided cricket and went for a long walk in the woods, moved by a spirit of revolt against all the traditions and conventions of boy-life; and presently, in a mossy clearing, all splashed and wetted by little pools of sunlight, I found him playing to an audience of two squirrels and a redstart. When he saw me he winked the eye that glittered over his parading fingers, as though he had left me only five minutes before, but I had not listened long before I realised that I must pay the price of my infidelity. It was the old music and the old magic, but try as I might I could not hear it so clearly as I had when I was a child. The continuity of my faith had been broken, and though he was willing to forgive, I myself could not forget those dark years of doubt and denial; and while I often met him in the days that followed, I never won back to the old childish intimacy. I sought his company eagerly and listened passionately to his piping, but I was conscious now that this was a strange thing, and sometimes when he saw by my eyes that I was moved by wonder rather than by the love of beauty, he would put his flute in his pocket and disappear. The world is an enchanted place only to the incurious and tranquil-minded.

Nevertheless, though like all boys I had been forced to discard my childish dreams before I had really finished with them, the lovely melodies of the flute-player served to enrich my latter years at school with much of the old enchantment. Often enough he would play to me at night during preparation, and I would spend my time in trying to set words to his tunes instead of doing my lessons. It was then that I regretted the lost years that had dulled my ear and prevented me from winning the inmost magic of his song, compared with which my verses seemed but the shadow of a shadow. Yet I saw that he was content with my efforts, and gradually made the discovery that while great achievement is granted to the fortunate, it is the fine effort that justifies a man to himself. What did it matter whether my songs were good or bad? They were the highest expression I could find for the rapture of beauty that had filled my heart as a child when I had been gifted to see life with clean and truthful eyes. For the songs the flute-player played to me were the great dreams of my childhood, the dreams that a wise man prolongs to the day of his death.

I do not hear him often now, for I have learnt my lesson, and though my hands tremble and my ear deceives me, I am by way of being a flute-player myself. This article, it is clear, is a child’s dream, and so have been, and will be, I hope, all the articles I shall ever write. What else should we write about? We have learnt a few long words since we grew up, and a few crimes, but no new virtues. That is why I like to get back to the nursery floor, and play with the old toys and think the old thoughts. We knew intuitively then a number of beautiful truths that circumstance appears to deny now, and we grown men are the poorer in consequence. It is folly to find life ugly when the flute lies within our reach and we can pipe ourselves back to the world of beauty with a song made of an old dream.

As for the flute-player, if I see him no more with wakeful eyes, I know that he is never very far away. Likely enough one of these wintry evenings, in the hour before bedtime, when the fire burns brighter and brighter in the hearth, I shall look up and see him sitting astride of the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks over his shining flute. Not many nights ago I heard some one playing the flute out in the street, and I went down and found a poor fellow blowing his heart out for rare _sous_. There was not much enchantment about him—he had been dismissed from a music-hall orchestra for drinking red wine to excess—but he was a real flute-player, and I could well imagine that such a man might be driven to intemperance by the failure to achieve those “unheard melodies” not to be detected by the sensual ear. To be a bad flute-player must be rather like being a bad poet, a joyous but sadly finite life. He was a sad dog, this earthly musician, and he frankly conceived the ideal state as a kind of communal Bodega where thirsty souls could find peace in satiety. I gave him fivepence to help him on his way, and left him to make doleful music in the night till he had enough money to supply his crimson dreams. But he ought not to have said that my flute-player was only an amateur.

THE WOOL-GATHERER

WHEN he walked down the streets with his head drooping towards the pavement and his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat the grown-ups would say, “There goes poor Mr. X. wool-gathering as usual”; and we children used to wonder what he did with all the wool and where he found it to gather. Perhaps he collected it from the thorn-bushes whereon the sheep had scratched themselves, or perhaps, being a magician, he had found a way to shear the flocks that we often saw in the sky on fine and windy days. At all events, for a while his strange calling made us regard him with interest as a man capable of doing dark and mysterious things. Then the grown-ups tried to dispel our illusions by explaining that they only meant that he was absent-minded, a dreamer, an awful warning to young folk who had their way to make in the world. This admirable moral lesson, like most of their moral lessons, failed because they did not appreciate the subtlety of our minds. We saw that the wool-gatherer did no recognisable work, wore comfortably untidy clothes, walked in the mud as much as he wanted to, and, in fine, lived a life of enviable freedom; and we thought that on the whole when we grew up we should like to be wool-gatherers too. Even the phrase “absent-minded” excited our admiration; for we knew that it would be a fine thing if our thoughts could travel in foreign countries, where there are parrots and monkeys loose in the woods, while our bodies were imprisoned in the schoolroom under the unsympathetic supervision of the governess of the moment. Although we no longer credited him with being a magician, the tardy explanations of the grown-ups had, if anything, increased his glamour. It seemed to us that he must be very wise.

He lived in an old house a little way out of the town, and the house stood in a garden after our own heart. We knew by the shocked comments of our elders that it had formerly been cut and trimmed like all the other gardens with which we were acquainted, but it was now a perfect wilderness, a delightful place. My brother and I got up early one morning when the dew was on the world and explored it thoroughly. `We found a goat in an outhouse and could see the marks in the meadow that had once been a lawn, where he was tethered during the day. The wool-gatherer was evidently in the habit of sitting under a tree that stood at one corner, for the earth was pitted with the holes that had been made by the legs of his chair. Being a wise man, we thought it probable that he conversed with his goat and could understand the answers of that pensive animal, who wagged his beard at us when we peeped shyly into his den. In the long grass by the tree we found a book bound like a school prize lying quite wet with the dew. It was full of cabalistic signs, and we took care to leave it where we found it lest it should be black magic, though now I would support the theory that Mr. X. read his Homer in the original. Taking it altogether, it was the most sensible garden we had ever seen, with plenty of old fruit-trees, but with none of those silly flower-beds that incommode the careless feet of youth. Our expedition enhanced our opinion of the wool-gatherer’s wisdom.

Here at least was a grown-up person who knew how to live in a decent fashion, and when he ambled by us in the market-place, his muddy boots tripping on the cobbles, and the pockets of his green-grey overcoat pulled down by the weight of his hands, our eyes paid him respectful tribute. He really served a useful purpose in our universe, for he showed us that it was possible to grow old without going hopelessly to the bad. Sometimes, considering the sad lives of our elders who did of their own free will all the disagreeable things that we were made to do by force, we had been smitten with the fear that in the course of years we, too, would be afflicted with this melancholy disease. The wool-gatherer restored our confidence in ourselves. If he could be grown-up without troubling to be tidy or energetic, why, then, so could we! It amused us to feel that our affronted rulers were itching to give him a good talking to and to send him off to brush his clothes and his boots; but he was beyond the reach of authority, this splendid man. And one of these days we thought that we, too, would enjoy this delightful condition of freedom, for, like many grown men and women, we did not realise that liberty is a state of mind and not an environment.

We had never seen the inside of his house, but we could imagine what it was like. No doubt he kept his servants in proper order and did not allow them to tidy up, so that his things lay all over the room where he could find them when he wanted them. He had a friendly cat, with whom we were acquainted, so that he would not lack company, and probably on wet days when he could not go out into the garden he had the goat in to play with him. He went to bed when he liked and got up when he liked, and had cake for every meal instead of common bread. A man like that would be quite capable of having a sweetshop in one of the rooms, with a real pair of scales, so that he could help himself whenever he wanted to. Whenever our own lives grew a little dull we played at being the wool-gatherer, but although he occupied such a large part of our thoughts we never dared to speak to him, because we were afraid of his extraordinary wisdom. This was not our normal reason for avoiding the society of grown-up people.

When one day a funeral passed us in the street, and we were told that it was the wool-gatherer’s, we shook our heads sceptically. The coffin was quite new and shiny, and all the horses had their hoofs neatly blacked, and we thought we knew our man better than that. But as day followed day and we met him no more our doubts were overcome, and we knew that he was dead. After a while his will was published in the local newspaper, and the grown-ups were greatly impressed, because it seemed that he had been very rich and had left all his money to hospitals. Secretly we patronised them for their tardy discovery of our man’s worth; it had not needed any newspaper to tell us that he was remarkable. But when some new people took his house and cut down all the bushes and tidied up the garden we were really hurt, and began to realise what we had lost. Where should we play now these hot nights of summer when the hours passed so slowly and we could not sleep? They had made his beautiful wilderness as dull as our own, and our dreams must find a new playground. We never heard what happened to the goat.

Now that I am myself grown-up, though children occasionally flatter me by treating me as an equal, I revert sometimes to our earliest thoughts and wonder what the wool-gatherer did with all his wool. Perhaps he wove it into blankets for the poor dreamless ones of the world. They are many, for it is not so easy to be absent-minded as people think; in the first place, it is necessary to have a mind. It is wrong also to believe that wool-gatherers fill no useful place in life. I have shown how Mr. X., lost in his world of dreams, was yet of real service to us as children, and in the same way I think that we who live the hurried life derive genuine satisfaction from the spectacle of the dreamers sauntering by. If they serve no other purpose, they are at least milestones by aid of which we can estimate our own speed, and if no one were idle we would win no credit from our marvellous energy. Also they are happy, and the philosopher will always hesitate to condemn the way of life of a man who succeeds in that task. Perhaps we should all be better off gathering wool!

THE PERIL OF THE FAIRIES

IT is something to have heard once in a lifetime the ecstatic thrill that glorifies Essex Hall while that intellectual pirate Mr. Bernard Shaw sails out and scuttles a number of little merchant ships of thought that have never hurt anybody. The applause and admiring laughter that punctuate his periods really suggest that Fabianism makes people happy, while the continued prosperity of the group gives the lie to the cynic who reminded me how popular ping-pong was while the craze lasted, and how utterly forgotten it is to-day. But I had to rub my eyes while I stood in the overcrowded room, listening to Puck in Jaeger, more witty, perhaps, than the old Puck, but no less boyishly malicious, and ask myself whether, after all, this was only the old magic in a new form. True, civilisation had perforce made him larger in order that human beings might appreciate his eloquence, and I saw no traces of wings or magic flowers. But beyond that I recognised the same pitying contempt for mortals, the same arrogant confession of his own faults, the same naïve cunning. And then (perhaps a turn of the voice did it, or some slight slurring of the words) the enchantment passed, the ears of his audience resumed their ordinary dimensions, and I offered mentally two teaspoonfuls of honey to the real Puck, for I saw that he had tricked me into recognising his qualities in the most serious man the twentieth century knows.

Yet, though I found Mr. Shaw to be only a prophet and his fellow-Fabians honest enthusiasts instead of bewitched weavers, I cannot say that the discovery left my mind at ease for the welfare of the fairy kingdom that is so important to every one who has not forgotten it. What if this terrible seriousness were to spread? What if every one were to turn prophet? What if a night should come when never a child in all the Duke of York’s Theatre would clap its hands to keep Tinker Bell alive? At first I wished to reject this frightful end of all our play and laughter and wonder as impossible. Yet sinister stories of children who preferred sewing-machines and working models to dolls and tin soldiers rose in my mind, and it is hardly more than a step from that degree of progress to the case of the child who may find the science of sanitation more interesting than tales of fairies. The possibility should make even the extremists shudder, but it must be remembered that many honest people believe in technical education, and that for that matter practically the whole of the teaching in our schools takes the form of an attack on the stronghold of the imaginative child. It is our barbarous custom to supplant a child’s really beautiful theories with the ugly crudities which we call facts, and it is impossible to realise how much humanity loses in the process. As for the fairies, frail little folk at best, how shall they prevail against the criticism of our sulphur and the cunning of our permanganate of potash? Shall we always be able to distinguish them from microbes?

It may be well to pause here and see whither the wise, serious men of to-day are taking us. I suppose they will abolish Will-o’-the-Wisp by draining all the marshes, and their extreme industry will render Puck’s kindly household labours ludicrously unnecessary. They will turn their swords against all the bad barons, unjust kings, and spiteful magicians, whose punishment has been hitherto the fairies’ special task; and this they will do in blackleg fashion, neither demanding nor receiving their just wages of beauty and immortality. They will scornfully set aside the law, so dear to the younger inhabitants of nurseries, by which it is always the youngest son or the youngest daughter whom the gods delight to honour. They will fill with porridge and deck with flannel underclothing the little flower-girls and crossing-sweepers, whose triumphs set faith in the eyes of babes. With their hard, cruel facts they will completely wreck the fairy civilisation which has taken centuries of dreaming and wondering children to construct. They will brush our fancies away like cobwebs.

A while ago, when I was a little boy, some enemy seeing me admire the stars thought it necessary to tell me exactly what they were; later, my natural interest in the extraordinary behaviour of the sea led another enemy to place a globe in my hands, and prick the bubble of the universe with ridiculous explanations. So it is that when I regard the heavens I see enormous balls of rotting chemicals, rendered contemptibly small by distance, floating in a thin fluid called space; so it is that when I look at the sea my mind is occupied with stupid problems about the route of floating bamboos, when I ought to be exalted as one who peers out through the darkness towards the Unknown. Where there were two then, there are to-day twenty kindly persons about every child, eager to prove the things it would like to believe in superstitions, and eager to explain away its miracles in terms of dustcarts and vegetable soup. Our babies are taught to hang out their stockings and to batter in their empty egg-shells, but are reminded at the same moment that these charming rituals are but follies, and that the capital of Scotland is Edinburgh. Youngsters babble Imperialism and Socialism when they ought to be standing on their heads to look at the Antipodes, and their parents commend their common sense. Already, I fear, the wings of many of the fairies are beginning to fade, and Puck capers but mournfully in his lonely haunts.

But fairies, goblins, elves, call them what you will, they are worth having, and that is why I would entreat the wise men who are arranging to-morrow for us to spare them, even though they have forgotten themselves all that the presence of fairies in the world is worth. By all means feed the children and give them Union Jacks, but let their faith in the beautiful be looked to as well. And, finally, to the serious person who says with raised eyebrows, “You can’t honestly say you believe in fairies!” I would answer this: In a world which at present is fiercely antagonistic to the belief in any emotion less material than hunger, it is impossible to avoid occasional doubt concerning the existence of anything which it is not possible to eat. But when I am in the company of those who really do believe I do not fail to hear the echoes of fairy laughter in their speech, and see the flicker of fairy wings reflected in their eyes, and with this knowledge I am content.

DRURY LANE AND THE CHILDREN

WE have noticed that in writing about pantomimes the critics of our contemporaries usually make two rather serious mistakes. The first is the assumption that pantomime is really intended for the amusement of children, and the second (which to a certain extent is implicit in the first) is the conclusion that most pantomimes are unsatisfactory because they fail to provide the children with suitable fare. A glance at any pantomime audience should dispel the first illusion. Even at matinées the children are in the minority, while at night the disproportion is quite startling. To us it seems that the real purpose of modern pantomime is to give conscientious objectors to music-halls an opportunity of witnessing a music-hall entertainment without shame. It follows that, even if the second criticism were just, it would not be very important; but though we agree that the average pantomime is far removed from the ideal entertainment for children, it is at all events quite harmless, and contains a number of elements that children like. They appreciate the colour of the pageant, the papier-mâché treasures, the gilt moons and ultramarine sunsets, the jewelled and gilt scenery; they like the funny clothes and red noses and boisterous horseplay of the low comedians; they like the “little girls” in short skirts, in whom the sophisticated recognise the tired ladies of the ballet; they like, in fact, nearly all the things which writers with sentimental views on children think it necessary to condemn. As a general rule they do not care for the love-making or the singing; after a long experience of pantomimes we are prepared to say that they are right, though our reasons are not perhaps theirs. The singing in pantomimes is nearly always extremely bad, and the fact that the principal boy is always the principal girl makes the love-scenes ridiculous. The wonder is that in an entertainment that must at all costs be made attractive to adults there should be so much that gives genuine pleasure to young people.