Part 9

When you are found walking with the Great in the street (a thing which, as a rule, they feel a certain shyness in doing, at least in company with people of your position), it is as well, if your companion meets another of his own Order, to stand a little to one side, to profess interest in the objects of a neighbouring shop window, or the pattern of the railings. Such at least is the general rule to be laid down for those who have not the quickness or ability to seize at once the better method, which is as follows:

Catch if you can the distant approach of the Other Great before your Great has spotted him, then, upon some pretext, preferably accompanied by the pulling out of your watch, depart: for there is nothing that so annoys the Great during the conference of any two of them, as the presence of a third party of your station.

Since my remarks must be put into a brief compass (though I have much more to say upon this all-important subject) I will conclude with what is perhaps the soundest piece of advice of all.

Never under any occasion or temptation, bestow a gift even of the smallest value, upon the Great. Never let yourself be betrayed into a generous action, nor, if you can possibly prevent it, so much as a generous thought in their regard. They are not grateful. They think it impertinent. And it looks odd. There is a note of equality about such things (and this particularly applies to unbosoming yourself in correspondence) which is very odious and offensive. Moreover, as has been proved in the case of countless unhappy lives, when once a man of the middle class falls into the habit of asking the Great to meals, of giving them books or pictures or betraying towards them in any fashion a spirit of true companionship, he bursts; and that, as a rule, after a delay quite incredibly short. Some men of fair substance have to my knowledge been wholly ruined in this manner within the space of one parliamentary session, a hunting season, or even a single week at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight; from which spot I send these presents, and where, by the way, at the time of writing, the stock of forage in the forecastle is extremely low, with no supplies forthcoming from the mainland.

God bless you!

XXIV

ON LYING

He that will set out to lie without having cast up his action and judged it this way and that, will fail, not in his lie, indeed, but in the object of it; which is, _imprimis_, to deceive, but _in ultimis_ or fundamentally, to obtain profit by his deceit, as Aristotle and another clearly show. For they that lie, lie not vainly and wantonly as for sport (saving a very few that are habitual), but rather for some good to be got or evil to be evaded: as when men lie of their prowess with the fist, though they have fought none--no, not even little children--or in the field, though they have done no more than shoot a naked blackamoor at a furlong. These lie for honour. Not so our stockers and jobbers, who lie for money direct, or our parliament men, who lie bestraught lest worse befall them.

Lies are distinguished by the wise into the Pleasant and the Useful, and again into the Beautiful and the Necessary. Thus a lie giving comfort to him that utters it is of the Lie Pleasant, a grateful thing, a cozening. This kind of lies is very much used among women. This sort will also make out good to the teller, evil to the told, for the pleasure the cheat gives; as, when one says to another that his worst actions are now known and are to be seen printed privately in a Midland sheet, and bids him fly.

The lie useful has been set out _ut supra_, which consult; and may be best judged by one needing money. Let him ask for the same and see how he shall be met; all answers to him shall be of this form of lie. It is also of this kind when a man having no purse or no desire to pay puts sickness on in a carriage, whether by rail or in the street, crying out: "Help! help!" and wagging his head and sinking his chin upon his breast, while his feet patter and his lips dribble. Also let him roll his eyes. Then some will say: "It is the heat! The poor fellow is overcome!" Others, "Make way! make way!" Others, men of means, will ask for the police, whereat the poorer men present will make off. But chiefly they that should have taken the fare will feel kindly and will lift the liar up gently and convey him and put him to good comfort in some waiting place or other till he be himself--and all the while clean forget his passage. For such is the nature of their rules. Lord Hincksey, now dead, was very much given to this kind of lie, and thought it profitable.

You shall lie at large and not be discovered; or a little, and for once, and yet come to public shame, as it was with Ananias and his good wife Sapphira in Holy Scripture, who lied but once and that was too often. While many have lied all their lives long and come to no harm, like John Ade, of North-Chapel, for many years a witness in the Courts that lied professionally, then a money-lender, and lastly a parliament-man for the county: yet he had no hurt of all this that any man could see, but died easily in another man's bed, being eighty-three years of age or thereabouts, and was very honourably buried in Petworth at a great charge. But some say he is now in Hell, which God grant!

There is no lie like the winsome, pretty, flattering, dilating eyelid-and-lip-and-brow-lifting lie such as is used by beauty impoverished, when land is at stake. By this sort of lie many men's estates have been saved, none lost, and good done at no expense save to holiness. Of the same suit also is the lie that keeps a parasite in a rich man's house, or a mixer attendant upon a painter, a model upon a sculptor, and beggars upon all men.

Fools will believe their lies, but wise men also will take delight in them, as did the Honourable Mr. Gherkin, for some time His Majesty's Minister of State for the Lord Knows What, who, when policemen would beslaver him, and put their hands to their heads and pay court in a low way, told all that saw it what mummery it was; yet inwardly was pleased. The more at a loss was he when, being by an accident in the Minories too late and his hat lost, his coat torn and muddy, he made to accost an officer, and civilly saying, "Hi----" had got no further but he took such a crack on the crown with a truncheon as laid him out for dead, and he is not now the same as he was, nor ever will be.

Ministers of religion will both show forth to the people the evil of lying and will also lie themselves in a particular manner, very distinct and formidable: as was clear when one denounced from the pulpit the dreadful vice of hypocrisy and false seeming, whereat a drunkard not yet sober, hearing him say, "Show me the hypocrite!" rose where he was, full in church, and pointed to the pulpit, so that he was thrust out for truth-telling by gesture in that sacred place; as was that other who, when the preacher came to "Show me the drunkard," jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the parson's wife: a very mutinous act. But to Lying.

He that takes lying easily will take life hardly; as the saw has it, "Easy lying makes hard hearing," but your constructed and considered, your well-drafted lie--that is the lie for men grown, men discreet and fortunate. To which effect also the poet Shakespeare says in his _Sonnets_--but no matter! The passage is not for our ears or time, dealing with a dark woman that would have her Will: as women also must if the world is to wag, which leads me to that sort of lie common to all the sex of which we men say that it is the marvellous, the potent, the dextrous, the thorough, or better still, the mysterious, the uncircumvented and not explainable, the stopping-short and confounding-against-right-reason lie, the triumphant lie of Eve our mother: Iseult our sister: Judith, an aunt of ours, who saved a city, and Jael, of holy memory.

But if any man think to explain that sort of lie, he is an ass for his pains; and if any man seek to copy it he is an ass sublimate or compound, for he attempts the mastery of women.

Which no man yet has had of God, or will.

Amen.

XXV

THE DUPE

The Dupe is an honest creature, and such honesty is the noblest work of God. The Dupe is not the servant of the Knave, but his ally. The Dupe does not, as too simple a political philosophy would have it, serve only for a material on which the Knave shall work; he is also the moral support of the Knave, strengthening and comforting the Knave's most inward soul and lending lubrication to the friction of public falsehood. For the Knave is of many sorts, and the Dupe helps them all.

The plumb Knave, or Knave Absolute, finds in the Dupe such an honest creature as does not revile him, and it is good to know that one is loved by some few honest souls. Thus the Knave Absolute is foolish indeed when he lets the Dupe see by gesture or tone that he thinks him a fool, for the Dupe is very sensitive and touchy in all weathers.

The Knave Qualified (in his many incarnations) must have the Dupe about him or perish. Thus the Knave who would save his soul by self-deception feeds, cannibal-like, upon the straightforwardness of the Dupe, and says to himself: "How can I be such a Knave after all, since these good Dupes here heartily agree with me?"

The Knave Cowardly props himself upon that sort of courage in the Dupe which always accompanies virtue. "I run a risk," says he, "in proposing the State purchase of this or that at such and such a price. My friend the Old Knave went under thus in 1895; but the Good Dupe is a buckler in the fight; he will dare all because his heart is pure."

The Knave Slovenly looks to the Dupe to see to details and to meet men in ante-chambers, and to have kind, honest eyes in bargaining. This sort of Knave will have two or even three Dupes for private secretaries, and often one for a brother-in-law.

The Dupe is in God's providence very numerous, for his normal rate of breeding is high in the extreme, his normal death-rate low. On this account those curious in this part of natural history may watch the Dupes going about in great herds, conducted and instructed by the Knave; nor is the one to be distinguished from the other by the coat, but rather by the snout and visage, the eyes and, if one be old enough to open the mouth, by the teeth. The Dupe, upon the other hand, will not be of great service in any physical struggle and must not be depended upon for this. It is his delight to browse and when disturbed he scatters rather than flies. Here and there a Rogue Dupe will turn upon his pursuers, in which case he is invariably devoured.

The Dupe has his habitat, but that not easily defined, as in the suburbs of great cities, and in those towns called residential, where the leisured and the inane make their lives seem so much longer than those of others. But there are exceptions also to this, and the Dupe will sometimes migrate in vast numbers from one spot to another in such few years as wholly to discomfit the calculations of the Knaves. Some of these have been found to stand up in public halls before numbers whom they had thought to be Dupes (seeing that the locality was Little Partington) but only to discover a great boiling of Anti-Dupes, men working with their hands or what-not, quite undeceivable, as often as not Atheist, and ready to storm the platform and tear the Knave alive.

The Dupe loves courtesy and, as has been said above, will tolerate no hint of impatience. On the other hand, he needs no breaking in and will carry upon the back from his earliest years. It is incredible to travellers when they first come across the Dupe what burdens he will bear in this fashion, so that sometimes the whole Plain appears to be a moving mass of gold bags, public salaries, contracts, large houses, yachts, motor-cars, opera houses, howdahs sheltering masters and mistresses, cases of wine, rich foods, and charitable institutions, all as it were endowed with a motion of their own until you stoop down and perceive that the whole of this vast weight sways securely upon the backs of an enormous migratory body of Dupes upon the trek for a Better Land.

The Dupe also differs from other creatures in that he will sleep comfortably with such things upon his back, nor ever roll over upon them, and that he will bear them to a great old age and even to death itself without dispute. Indeed the Dupe unburdened has about him a forlorn and naked feeling to which it were a pity to condemn him. His food must be ample, but there is no need to prepare it carefully, and he will eat almost anything that is given him, except a leek, which he will not touch unless he be told that it is an onion. Of wheat he takes very little, but he insists that a great portion be put before him, that he may munch and trample upon it. Why he manifests this appetite is not known, but upon any attempt to lessen the ration he will kick, buck, and rear, and behave in a manner altogether out of his nature.

The Dupe must be given drink at irregular intervals, but he loves to treat it shyly, and to flirt with it as it were. There is no prettier sight than to see a number of Dupes met together arching and curvetting, side-glancing and denying, before they plunge their heads and manes into the life-giving liquid.

It is the reward of the Dupe that he is all his life very consistently happy, and on this account many not born Dupes, imitate the Dupes and would be of them, in which they fail, for the Dupe is God's creature and not man's, and proceeds by moral generation as has already been affirmed.

XXVI

THE LOVE OF ENGLAND

Love of country is general to mankind, yet is not the love of country a general thing to be described by a general title. Love changes with the object of love. The country loved determines the nature of its services.

The love of England has in it the love of landscape, as has the love of no other country: it has in it as has the love of no other country, the love of friends. Less than the love of other countries has it in it the love of what may be fixed in a phrase or well set down in words. It lacks, alas, the love of some interminable past nor does it draw its liveliness from any great succession of centuries. Say that ten centuries made a soil, and that in that soil four centuries more produced a tree, and that that tree was England, then you will know to what the love of England is in most men directed. For most men who love England know so little of her first thousand years that when they hear the echoes of them or see visions of them, they think they are dealing with a foreign thing. All Englishmen are clean cut off from their long past which ended when the last Mass was sung at Westminster.

The love of England has in it no true plains but fens, low hills, and distant mountains. No very ancient towns, but comfortable, small and ordered ones, which love to dress themselves with age. The love of England concerns itself with trees. Accident has given to the lovers of England no long pageantry of battle. Nature has given Englishmen an appetite for battle, and between the two men who love England make a legend for themselves of wars unfought, and of arms permanently successful; though arms were they thus always successful would not be arms at all.

The greatness of the English soul is best discovered in that strong rebuke of excesses, principally of excess in ignorance, which a minority of Englishmen perpetually express, but which has not sufficed as yet to save the future of England. In no other land will you so readily discover critics of that land ready to bear all for their right to doubt the common policy; but though you will nowhere discover such men so readily, nowhere will you discover them so impotent or so few.

The love of England breeds in those who cherish it an attachment to institutions which is half reverential, but also half despairing. In its reverence this appetite produces one hundred living streams of action and of vesture and of custom. In its despair, in its refusal to consider upon what theory the institution lies, it permits the institution to sterilise with age and to grow fantastic.

The love of England has never destroyed, but at times, and again at closer and at closer times (while we have lived) it has failed to save. Yet it will save England in the end. Men are more bound together by this music in their souls than by any other, wherever England is or is spoken of by Englishmen. Here you may discover what religion has been to many, and also you may discover here how legend and how epics arise. In men cut off from England, the love of England grows into a set repetitive thing, a thing of peculiar strength yet almost barren. Nourished and exampled by England, flourishing upon the field of England, the love of England is a love of the very earth: of the smell of growing things and of certain skies, and of tides in river-mouths, and of belts of sea.

If a man would understand this great thing England which is now in peril and which has so worked throughout the world, he must not consider the accident of England's success and failure, nor certain empty lands filled without battle, nor others ruined by folly, nor certain arts singularly discovered and perfected by England, nor other arts as singularly neglected and decayed. Nor must he contrast the passionate love of England with some high religion of which it takes the place, nor with some active work in contrast with which it seems so empty and unproducing a thing. He must not set it against a creed (it is not so high as that), nor against a conquest or a true empire such as Spain and Rome possessed.

If a man would understand the love of England he must do what hardly any one would dare to do: that is, he must clearly envisage England defeated in a final war and ask himself, "What should I do then?"

XXVII

THE STORM

There is a contemptible habit of mind (contemptible in intellect, not in morals) which would withdraw from the mass of life the fecundity of perception.

The things that we see are, according to the interpretation of the mystics, every one of them symbols and masks of things unseen. The mystics have never proved their theory true. But it is undoubtedly true that the perception of things when it is sane is manifold; it is true that as we grow older the perception of things is increasingly manifold, and that one perception breeds one hundred others, so that we advance through life as through a pageant enjoying in greater and greater degree day by day (if we open ourselves to them) the glorious works of God.

There is a detestable habit of mind, which either does not understand, or sneers at, or despises, or even wholly misses--when it is persisted in--this faculty for enjoyment, which even our gross senses endow us with. This evil habit of the mind will have us neglect first colour for form, then form for mere number. It would have us reject those intimations of high and half-remembered things which a new aspect of a tree or house or of a landscape arouses in us. It would compel us to forget, or to let grow stale, the pleasure with which the scent of woods blest us in early youth. Perpetually this evil habit of the mind would flatten the diversity of our lives, suck out the sap of experience, kill humour and exhaust the living spring. It whispers to us the falsehood that years in their advance leave us in some way less alive, it adds to the burden upon our shoulders, not a true weight of sad knowledge as life, however well lived, must properly do, but a useless drag of despair. It would make us numb. In the field of letters it would persuade us that all things may be read and known and that nothing is worth the reading or the knowing, and that the loveliest rhythms or the most subtle connotations of words are but tricks to be despised. In the field of experience it would convince us that nothing bears a fruit and that human life is no more than anarchy or at best an unexplained fragment. Even in that highest of fields, the field of service, it would persuade us that there is nothing to serve. And if we are convinced of that, then every faculty in us turns inward and becomes useless: may be called abortive and fails its end.

These thoughts arose in me as I watched to-day from the platform of my Mill the advance of a great storm cloud; for in the majestic progress which lifted itself into the sky and marched against the north from the Channel I perceived that which the evil, modern, drying habit of thought would neglect and would attempt to make material, and also that which I very well knew was in its awfulness allied to the life of the soul.

For very many days the intense heat had parched the Weald. The leaves dropped upon the ash and the oak, the grass was brown, our wells had failed. The little river of the clay was no more than several stagnant pools. We thought the fruits would wither; and our houses, not built for such droughts and such an ardent sun, were like ovens long after the cool of the evening had come.

At the end of some days one bank of cloud and then another had passed far off east or far to the west, over the distant forest ridge or over Egdean Side, missing us. We had printed stuff from London telling us how it had rained in London--as though rain falling in London ever fell upon earth or nourished fruits and men!

We thought that we were not to be allowed any little rain out of Heaven. But to-day the great storm came up, marching in a dark breastplate and in skirts of rain, with thunders about it; and it was personal. It came right up out of the sea. It walked through the gate which the River Adur has pierced, leaving upon either side the high chalk hills; the crest of its helmet carried a great plume of white and menacing cloud.

No man seeing this creature as it moved solemn and panoplied could have mistaken the memory or the knowledge that stirred within him at the sight. This was that great master, that great friend, that great enemy, that great idol (for it has been all of these things), which, since we have tilled the earth, we have watched, we have welcomed, we have combated, we have unfortunately worshipped. This was that God of the Storm which has made such tremendous music in the poets.

The Parish Church, which had seemed under the hard blue sky of the early morning a low brown thing, with its square tower of the Templars and of the Second Crusade, stood up now white, menacing, and visionary against the ink of the cloud. The many trees of the rich man's park beyond were taller, especially the elms. They stood absolutely and stubbornly still, no leaves upon them moving at all. The Downs an hour away first fell dull, low, and leaden. These were but half seen, and at last faded altogether into the gloom. The many beasts round about were struck with silence. The fowls nestled together, and the only sign that animate nature gave of an approaching stroke was the whinny of a horse in a stable where the door was left wide open to the stifling air, and the mad circling and swooping of a bird distracted by the change in the light.