|
I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth
are
not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is
often
composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to
contradict
each other. Take the handkerchief incident in "Othello." Poor
Desdemona could
not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that
the Moor saw. Desdemona
believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello
believed she had given it
away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio
wipe his beard with it?
Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the
catastrophe.
But we need
not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them
in real life
anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
free-lance
reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
report a
banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
knife into his
pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
knife
discovered--also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets
for silver
goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a
thief? Yet he was
perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
his innocence was proved.
Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
clothes, and had hired a suit at
a pawnbroker's. The waist of
the trousers was too small, and after an
excellent dinner he felt
uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some
stitches behind. As he was
doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in
his direction; being a
timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket.
The speeches
came on, and when he had got his "take" he left to transcribe
it,
having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated.
The
pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt,
were
of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the
suit.
You remember that Browning in "The Ring and the Book," tells the
story
of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view
before
he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not
been
annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
Yet with patience you
find that these apparent contradictions are only
different aspects of one
truth. "Mostly," he says, "matters of any
consequence are three-sided or
four-sided or polygonal.... For myself,
I am never satisfied that I have
handled a subject properly till I have
contradicted myself three times." I
fancy it is this discovery of
the falsity of isolated facts that makes us
more reasonable and less
cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that
there are other facts
that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson
says that "a
lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies"; but
he is
wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a
quarter)
which is the most dangerous lie--for a fact seems so absolute,
so
incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of
facts,
their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by
a
famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to
in
another connection. He was being examined about the visit of
Government
experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager.
And
this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and
witness:
"Did you tell him to tell them the
facts?"
"Yes."
"The whole facts?"
"No."
"What
facts?"
"_Selected facts_."
It was a daring reply, but he knew his
jury, and he knew that in the
midst of the Boer War they would not give a
verdict against anybody
bearing his name.
If in such a matter as the
use of salt, which ought to be reducible to
a scientific formula it is so
hard to come at the plain truth of things,
we cannot wonder that it dodges us
so completely in the jungle of
politics and speculation. I have heard a
skilful politician make a
speech in which there was not one misstatement of
fact, but the whole of
which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of
the world it is
so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the
truth in
the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one
generation
is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by "works"
is
displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded
by
justification by "service" which is "works" in new terms. Which
is
truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not
be
different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into
many
different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth.
In this
perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth
demonstrated in
the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and
the fact that Indians
die because they don't take it.
[Illustration:
0163]
[Illustration: 0164]
ON GREAT MEN
|I was
reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of
him
expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be "the greatest man since
Milton."
I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally
enough to ask
myself who were the great Englishmen in history--for the
sake of argument,
the six greatest. I found the question so exciting
that I had reached the end
of my journey (I was in a bus at the time)
almost before I had reached the
end of my list. I began by laying down
my premises or principles. I would not
restrict the choice to men of
action. The only grievance I have against
Plutarch is that he followed
that course. His incomparable "Lives," would be
still more satisfying, a
still more priceless treasury of the ancient world,
if, among his crowd
of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with
Socrates and
Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work
survived
them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected
the
blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a
mere
homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his
kind,
but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that
he
had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would
not
exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man.
Henry
Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men.
"Greatness,"
he said, "consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon
mankind,
and goodness in removing it from them." And it was to satirise
the
traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire
"The
Life of Jonathan Wild the Great," probably having in mind the
Marlboroughs
and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
traditional view, we
cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad
man. I regard Bismarck as a
bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that
he was a great man. He towers
over the nineteenth century like a baleful
ogre, a sort of Bluebeard,
terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless,
ruthless jests, heaving with his
volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent,
merciless as a tiger, but great beyond
challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a
sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born
as a terrific afterthought
of nature.
Nor is power alone a sufficient
title to greatness. It must be power
governed by purpose, by a philosophy,
good or bad, of human life, not by
mere spasms of emotion or an itch for
adventure. I am sure Pericles was
a great man, but I deny the ascription to
Alcibiades. I am sure about
Cæsar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud
though his name sounds
down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or
a-moral, but it must
have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and
not from mere
accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is
measured
by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension
of
the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of
living.
Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen?
For
our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is
the
greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of
the
world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has
a
magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him
never
to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to
a
lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's phrase, "poor indeed." There
is
nothing English for which we would exchange him. "Indian Empire or
no
Indian Empire," we say with Carlyle, "we cannot do without
our
Shakespeare."
For the second place, the choice is less obvious,
but I think it goes
indisputably to him who had=
```"... a voice whose
sound was like the sea."=
Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He
breathed his mighty
harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us
the note of
the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all
pervasive,
intangible, indestructible. With him stands his "chief of
men"--the
"great bad man" of Burke--the one man of action in our annals
capable of
measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but
overshadowing
Bismarck in the realm of the spirit--the man at whose name the
cheek
of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding
the
death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy
of
these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at
Drogheda)
first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in
Europe.
But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates
as
the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May
morning
eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing
his
soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his
resounding
eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well
all
statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt
Court
in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of
this
amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery
of
life, and Wordsworth giving "to weary feet the gift of rest,"
and
Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only
less
wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of
others
aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all
the
legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is
still
one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic,
enlightened
man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first
great
Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am
not
quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to
be
Roger--there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic
range
of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition
through
which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.
I am tempted, as
the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a
woman, Florence
Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic "lady of the
lamp," but as the
fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the
adventurer into a new
field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by
a will of iron, a terrific
autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful
and creative woman this nation has
produced.. But I reject her, not
because she is unworthy, but because she
must head a companion fist of
great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two
candidates from among
our English saints--Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In
spite of the
intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so
diabolically
at the martyrdom of the "heretic," Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds
his
place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if
greatness
be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield
place to
the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a
deeper
mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our
history.
There is my list--Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred,
Roger
Bacon, John Wesley--and anybody can make out another who cares and
a
better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
unintentionally,
it is all English in the most limited sense. There is
not a Scotsman, an
Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the
kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw.
And I rejoice to find another thing.
There is no politician and no
professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
contains two poets, two men of
action, one scientist and one preacher.
If the representative arts have no
place, it is not because greatness
cannot be associated with them. Bach and
Michael Angelo cannot be left
out of any list of the world's great men. But,
matchless in literature,
we are poor in art, though in any rival list I
should be prepared to see
the great name of Turner.
[Illustration:
0169]
[Illustration: 0170]
ON SWEARING
|A young
officer in the flying service was describing to me the other
day some of his
recent experiences in France. They were both amusing
and sensational, though
told with that happy freedom from vanity and
self-consciousness which is so
pleasant a feature of the British soldier
of all ranks. The more he has done
and seen the less disposed he seems
to regard himself as a hero. It is a
common enough phenomenon. Bragging
is a sham currency. It is the base coin
with which the fraudulent pay
their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big
game hunter of modern
times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave
the impression of
a man who had only been out in the back garden killing
slugs. And Peary,
who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had
only found a
new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the
North Pole
and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the
man who
talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of
that
commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely
to
be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his
country
would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his
mother.
But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me
to
write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was
extraordinarily
good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and
variety that
seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in
it. It
was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent
clinging
convolvulus overgrows my garden. "Hell" was his favourite expletive,
and
he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you
might
scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb,
and
he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used
it
as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite
clear
that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
And in
this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only
secular quality it
possesses--the quality of emphasis. It is speech
breaking bounds. It is
emotion earned beyond the restraints of the
dictionary and the proprieties of
the normal habit. It is like a discord
in music that in shattering the
harmony intensifies the effect. Music
which is all discord is noise, and
speech which is all emphasis is
deadly dull.
It is like the
underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
emptier it seems, and
the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
habit, and emphasis should
be a departure from habit. "When I have said
'Malaga,'" says Plancus, in the
"Vicomte de Bragelonne," "I am no
longer a man." He had the true genius for
swearing. He reserved his
imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. I
can see his nostrils
swell and his eyes flash fire as he cries, "Malaga." It
is a good swear
word. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is
precisely
what a swear word should mean. It should be sound and fury,
signifying
nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like
the
passion that evokes it.
If "Malaga" has one defect it is that it
is not monosyllabic. It was
that defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion
in swearing. "'Damns'
have had their day," he said, and when he swore he used
the "oath
referential." "Odds hilts and blades," he said, or "Odds slanders
and
lies," or "Odds bottles and glasses." But when he sat down to write
his
challenge to Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for
him.
"Do, Sir Lucius, let me begin with a damme," he said. He had to
give
up artificial swearing when he was really in a passion, and take
to
something which had a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all,
it
is the idea of being a little wicked that is one of the attractions
of
swearing. It is a symptom of the perversity of men that it should be
so.
For in its origin always swearing is a form of sacrament. When
Socrates
spoke "By the Gods," he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the
deepest
reverence he could command. But the oaths of to-day are not
the
expression of piety, but of violent passion, and the people who
indulge
in a certain familiar expletive would not find half so much
satisfaction
in it if they felt that, so far from being wicked, it was a
declaration
of faith--"By our Lady." That is the way our ancestors used to
swear,
and we have corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both
faith
and meaning.
The revival of swearing is a natural product of the
war. Violence of
life breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare
it is
the prerogative of the soldier to be "full of strange oaths." In
this
respect Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used
"strange
oaths." He stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was
most
industrious in it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation
that
have come down to us which are not garnished with "damns" or "By
Gods."
Hear him on the morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle
to
gossip Creevey--"It has been a damned serious business. Blucher and
I
have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing--the nearest
run
thing you ever saw in your life." Or when some foolish Court
flunkey
appeals to him to support his claim to ride in the carriage with
the
young Queen on some public occasion--"Her Majesty can make you ride
on
the box or inside the carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's
dog." But
in this he followed not only the practice of soldiers in all
times, but the
fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to
have regarded himself
as above reproach, and could even be shocked at
the language of the Prince
Regent.
"By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is," he
remarks,
speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. "Then he speaks and swears
so
like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into
the
room with him." This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many
vices,
but whose recorded speech is singularly free from bad language.
It
suggests also that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious
of
his own comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps
and
swore as naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with
that
other famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of
blasphemy,
as when, speaking of Grant, he said, "I'll tell you where he beats
me,
and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the
enemy
does out of his sight, but it scares me like Hell." Two centuries
ago,
according to Uncle Toby, our men "swore terribly in Flanders," and
they
are swearing terribly there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last
time
that the Flanders mud, which has been watered for centuries by
English
blood, will ensanguine the speech of English lips. I fancy that
pleasant
young airman will talk a good deal less about "Hell" when he
escapes
from it to a cleaner world.
[Illustration:
0174]
[Illustration: 0175]
ON A HANSOM CAB
|I
saw a surprising spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a
hansom
cab. Not a derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally
see, with
an obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the
box, crawling
along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has
escaped from a
cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way
back--no, but a
lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting
in the shafts and
tossing its head as though it were full of beans
and importance, and a
slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as
a sandboy as he flicked and
flourished his whip, and, still more
astonishing, a real passenger, a lady,
inside the vehicle.
I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving
a cheer to the
driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had
something of
the poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up
whole vistas
of the past--sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of
the
quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box
there
flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four
legs,
the London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of
King
Petrol, when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets,
and
the two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow
place
then, of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dulwich, was
a
formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you
took
your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked
bus-driver,
you settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry
and
the bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the
sins
of that "orf horse," the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices
of
the police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some
abstruse
joke to a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in
the
revelry. The conductor would stroll up to him and continue a
conversation
that had begun early in the morning and seemed to go on
intermittently all
day--a conversation of that jolly sort in which,
as Washington Irving says,
the jokes are rather small and the laughter
abundant.
In those happy
days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside
the bus. The outside
was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It
was an act of courage,
almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the
top alone. Anything might
happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes.
And even the lady I saw in the
hansom last night would not have been
quite above suspicion of being no
better than she ought to be. The
hansom was a rather roguish, rakish
contraption that was hardly the
thing for a lady to be seen in without a
stout escort. It suggested
romance, mysteries, elopements, late suppers, and
all sorts of
wickednesses. A staid, respectable "growler" was much more
fitting for
so delicate an exotic as Woman. If she began riding in
hansoms
alone anything might happen. She might want to go to
public
dinners next--think of it!--she might be wanting to ride
a
bicycle--horrors!--she might discover a shameless taste for
cigarettes,
or demand a living wage, or University degrees, or a vote, just
for all
the world as though she was the equal of Man, the
Magnificent....
As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so
gaily and
challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back
to
the coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How
clumsy,
and impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of
fable,
mighty, but blind and blundering. He floundered along the
streets,
reeling from right to left like a drunken giant, encountering
the
kerb-stone, skimming the lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state
of
boorish revolt, standing obstinately and mulishly in the middle of
the
street or across the street amidst the derision and rejoicing of
those
whose empire he threatened, and who saw in these pranks the assurance
of
his ultimate failure. Memory went back to the old One a.m. from the
Law
Courts, and to one night that sums up for me the spirit of those days
of
the great transition....
It was a jocose beast that, with snortings
and trumpetings, used to
start from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One
a.m. The fellow knew
his power. He knew that he was the last thing on wheels
to skid along
the Edgeware Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard,
worthless men
who wrote him down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote
articles=
````(from Our Peking Correspondent)=
in Fleet Street,
and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
chauffeurs from other
routes returning home, who when the car was "full
up" hung on by teeth and
toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded
in with the driver; barmaids
and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen--yes,
cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in
motor buses! You might see them in the
One a.m. from the Law Courts any
morning, red faced and genial as only
cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes
at each other from end to end
of the car, passing the snuff-box, making
innocent merriment out of the
tipsy gentleman with the tall hat who has said
he wants to get out at
Baker Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from
right to left, is
being swept on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What
winks are
exchanged, what jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when
the
top hat, under the impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to
the
floor--oh, then the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the
tipsy
gentleman opens his dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But
these
revels soon are ended.
An ominous grunt breaks in upon the
hilarity inside the car:=
````First a shiver, and then a
thrill,
````Then something decidedly like a spill--
````` O. W.
Holmes,
`````_The Deacon's Masterpiece_ (DW)=
and we are left
sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with
the clock over the
shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
It is the spirit of
Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
himself. He disapproves of
the passengers having all the fun. Is he not
a humorist too? May he not be
merry in the dawn of this May morning?
We take our fate like Englishmen,
bravely, even merrily.
The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment.
This is worth living
for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base
betrayer of the
innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though
it is two
or three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the
morning! Who
cares?
Only the gentleman with the big bag in the
corner.
"'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?" he asks the conductor with
tears
in his voice.
The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help
the driver. They busy
themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn
handles, they work
pumps, they probe here and thump there.
They come
out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They
have the cheerful
philosophy of people who meddle with things that
move--cab drivers,
bus-drivers, engine-drivers.=
```If, when looking well won't move
thee.
`````Looking ill prevail?=
So they take a breather, light
cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it
again.
Meanwhile all the hansoms
in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
like sharks upon the dead
whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
and every cabman flings a jibe
as he passes.
"Look 'ere," says one, pulling up. "Why don't yer take
the
genelmen where they want to go? That's what I asks
yer.
Why--don't--yer--take--the--genelmen--where--they--want--to go?
It's
only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't
want
to go."
For the cabman is like "the wise thrush who sings his
song twice over."
"'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!" cries
another.
"We can't 'elp larfin', yer know," says a third
feelingly.
"Well, you keep on larfin'," says the chauffeur looking up
from the
inside of One a.m. "It suits your style o' beauty."
A mellow
voice breaks out:=
````We won't go home till morning,
````Till
daylight does appear.=
And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen
in comic chorus.
Those who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither
sing nor
whistle, croak.
We sit inside patiently. We even joke too.
All but the man with the big
bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his
life-long enemy.
He appeals again to the conductor, who
laughs.
The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back,
puts
his head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and
says:
"It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning."
We think
better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is
that of the
politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart.
He is like Dick
Steele--"when he was sober he was delightful; when he
was drunk he was
irresistible."
"She won't go any more to-night," says the
conductor.
So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal
away. All but
the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a
problem
that looks insoluble.
Two of us jump into a hansom that still
prowls around, the last of the
shoal of sharks.
"Drive up West End
Lane."
"Right, sir."
Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's
face, wreathed in smiles,
beams down on us.
"I see what was coming all
the way from Baker Street," he savs. "I see
the petrol was on
fire."
"Ah!"
"Yus," he says. "Thought I should pick you up about
'ere."
"Ah!"
"No good, motors," he goes on, cheerfully. "My
opinion is they'll go
out as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the
aristocracy are
giving 'em up and goin' back to 'orses."
"Hope they'll
get better horses than this," for we are crawling
painfully up the tortuous
reaches of West End Lane.
"Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's
overworked. 'E ain't earned more
than three bob to-night. That's jest what'
e's earned. Three bob. It's
the cold weather, you know. That's what it is.
It's the cold weather
as makes 'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And
'e does go after
all, even if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't
say of that
there motor-bus."
We had no reply to this thrust, and the
lid dropped down with a sound of
quiet triumph.
And so home. And my
dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
Monster, reeking with
strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
laughter and standing for
ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road
with the clock opposite pointing
to a quarter to two, a rueful face in
the corner staring fixedly at a big bag
and a tipsy gentleman in a
tall hat finding his way back to Baker Street in
happy converse with a
policeman.
Gone is the old London over which the
shade of Mr Hansom presided like
a king. Gone is the "orf horse" with all its
sins; gone is the
rosy-cheeked driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent
whip and his
tales of the streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you
your
ticket, talked to you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about
the
weather, the Boat Race, or the latest clue to the latest mystery.
We
amble no more. We have banished laughter and leisure from the
streets,
and the face of the motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the
symbol
of the change. We have passed into a breathless world, a world
of
wonderful mechanical contrivances that have quickened the tempo of
life
and will soon have made the horse as much a memory as the bow and
arrow
or the wherry that used to be the principal vehicle of
Elizabethan
London. As I watched the hansom bowling along Regent Street until
it
was lost in the swirl of motor-buses and taxis I seemed to see in it
the
last straggler of an epoch passing away into oblivion. I am glad it
went
so gallantly, and I am half sorry I did not give the driver a
parting
cheer as he flicked his whip in the face of the
night.
[Illustration: 0183]
[Illustration:
0184]
ON MANNERS
I
|It is always
surprising, if not always agreeable, to see ourselves
as others see
us. The picture we present to others is never the
picture we
present to ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally
it is a much
plainer picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always
a strange
picture. Just now we English are having our portrait painted
by an American
lady, Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been
appearing in the press. It
is not a flattering portrait, and it seems to
have angered a good many people
who deny the truth of the likeness very
passionately. The chief accusation
seems to be that we have no manners,
are lacking in the civilities and
politenesses of life, and so on, and
are inferior in these things to the
French, the Americans, and other
peoples. It is not an uncommon charge, and
it comes from many quarters.
It came to me the other day in a letter from a
correspondent, French
or Belgian, who has been living in this country during
the war, and who
wrote bitterly about the manners of the English towards
foreigners. In
the course of his letter he quoted with approval the following
cruel
remark of Jean Carriere, written, needless to say, before the
war:
"Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal eleve du
fait
qu'il manque de manieres; il ignore encore la politesse, voila
tout."
The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic.
On the
whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more
bearable.
I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on
her. I have
enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to
be taken
up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment,
and
we suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we
should
be told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us.
At
the same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of
Burke's
warning about the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some
forty
millions of us, and we have some forty million different manners, and
it
is not easy to get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will
take
this "copy" to the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who
preceded
him was a monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all
civility; another
is all bad temper, and between the two extremes you
will get every shade of
good and bad manners. And so through every phase
of society.
Or
leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the
widest
differences of manner in different parts of the country. In
Lancashire and
Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There
is a deep-seated
distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the
code of conduct differs
as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral
town as the manner of Paris
differs from the manner of Munich. But
even here you will find behind the
general bearing infinite shades of
difference that make your generalisation
foolish. Indeed, the more
you know of any people the less you feel able to
sum them up in broad
categories.
Suppose, for example, you want to
find out what the manners of our
ancestors were like. Reading about them only
leaves you in complete
darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him
lamenting--apropos of the
Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the
London streets because
of the strangeness of his appearance--lamenting the
deplorable manners
of the people. "Lord!" he says, "to see the absurd nature
of Englishmen
that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that
looks
strange." Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find
him
describing the English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
But,
on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
earlier,
found our manners altogether delightful. "To mention but a
single
attraction," he says in one of his letters, "the English girls
are divinely
pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses.
They have one
custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go
anywhere on a visit the
girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you
arrive, they kiss you when you go
away, and they kiss you again when you
return. Go where you will, it is all
kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if
you had once tasted how soft and fragrant
those lips are, you would wish
to spend your life there." Erasmus would find
the manners of our maidens
a good deal changed to-day. They would offer him,
not kisses, but a
cigarette.
I fancy it is true that, taken in the
bulk, we are stiffer in bearing
and less expansive than most peoples. There
is enough truth in the
saying of O'Connell which I have already quoted to
make it good
criticism. Our lack of warmth may be due in part to our
insularity; but
more probably it is traceable not to a physical but to a
social source.
Unlike the Celtic and the Latin races, we are not democratic.
We have
not the ease that comes from the ingrained tradition of human
equality.
The French have that ease. So have the Spanish. So have the Irish.
So
have the Americans. But the English are class conscious. The dead
hand
of feudalism is still heavy upon our souls. If it were not, the
degrading
traffic in titles would long since have been abolished as an
insult to our
intelligence. But we not only tolerate it: we delight
in this artificial
scheme of relationship. It is not human values, but
social discriminations
that count. And while human values are cohesive
in their effect, social
discriminations are separatist. They break
society up into castes, and
permeate it with the twin vices of snobbery
and flunkeyism. The current of
human intercourse is subdivided into
infinite artificial channels, and the
self-conscious restraints of a
people uncertain of their social relationships
create a defensive manner
which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its
true root is a
timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his
ground
tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is proud:
it
may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away from
this
fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners
for
independence, and to lose servility without acquiring
civility.
The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as
suffer from
a sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were
invented
to keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the
impression
that he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular
if he
had more _abandon_. I would not have him imitate the rather
rhetorical
politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of
the
spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness
which
makes the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is
probably
what Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her
the
impression that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of
good
manners that they exist most where they do not exist at all--that is
to
say, where conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told
James
Hogg that no man who was content to be himself, without either
diffidence or
egotism, would fail to be at home in any company, and I do
not know a better
recipe for good manners.
II
I was riding in a bus yesterday
afternoon when I overheard a
conversation between a couple of smartly dressed
young people--a youth
and a maiden--at the other end of the vehicle. It was
not an amusing
conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about.
Indeed,
I could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be
about
anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which
consist
chiefly of "Awfullys" and "Reallys!" and "Don't-you-knows" and
tattle
about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and
similar
common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter
but
because of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the
speakers
were alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of
wind.
The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to
hear,
while others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not
of
approval. They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved
an
air of being unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of
not
being aware that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact,
their
manner indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings.
They
were really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the
bus.
If they had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in
quite
reasonable tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly
and
defiantly to an empty bus. They would have made no impression on
an
empty bus. But they were happily sensible of making quite a
marked
impression on a full bus.
But it was not the impression they
imagined. It was another impression
altogether. There are few more unpleasing
and vulgar habits than that of
loud, aggressive conversation in public
places. It is an impertinence to
inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who
do not want to know about
them, and who may want to read or doze or think or
look out of the
window at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The
assumption
behind the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is
an
announcement to the world that we are someone in particular and
can
talk as loudly as we please whenever we please. It is a sort of
social
Prussianism that presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by
a
superior egotism. The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in
the
world is mistaken. On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an
inverted
self-consciousness. These young people were talking loudly, not
because
they were unconscious of themselves in relation to their fellows,
but
because they were much too conscious and were not content to be
just
quiet, ordinary people like the rest of us.
I hesitate to say
that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not
lived abroad sufficiently
to judge. But it is a common experience
of those who travel to find, as I
have often found, their country
humiliated by this habit of aggressive
bearing in public places. It is
unlovely at home, but it is much more
offensive abroad, for then it is
not only the person who is brought into
disrepute, but the country he
(and not less frequently she) is supposed to
represent. We in the bus
could afford to bear the affliction of that young
couple with tolerance
and even amusement, for they only hurt themselves. We
could discount
them. But the same bearing in a foreign capital gives the
impression
that we are all like this, just as the rather crude boasting of
certain
types of American grossly misrepresent a people whose
general
conduct, as anyone who sees them at home will agree, is
unaffected,
unpretentious, and good-natured.
The truth, I suspect, is
that every country sends abroad a
disproportionate number of its "bounders."
It is inevitable that it
should be so, for the people who can afford to
travel are the people who
have made money, and while many admirable qualities
may be involved
in the capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain
coarse
assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got
so
hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are
better
than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot
attune
his voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second
generation,
this congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high
school
it is apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the
bus
yesterday.
So far from being representative of the English, they
are violently
unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite
direction. Take
an average railway compartment. It is filled with people who
distrust
the sound of their own voices so much, and are so little
afflicted
with egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers
and
monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract
attention
without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a
happy
mean between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and
the
overbearing note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to
talk
of our affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply,
without
desiring to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard,
without
wishing to be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then
we
have achieved that social ease which consists in the adjustment of
a
reasonable confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the sensibilities of
others. |
|
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