In a Canadian Canoe; The Nine Muses Minus One, and Other Stories

I  LIKE to watch those trees reflected in the water. They are so suggestive, by reason of their being reflected wrong way up. All objective, outside facts are as trees, and the mind of man is as a river, and he consequently reflects everything in an inverted way. That is the reason why, if I try to guess a coin and say heads, it is always tails. That is the reason why, if I go to get a spoon out of my plate-basket in the dark, I always take out thirteen successive forks before I find one. It explains nearly everything. Probably the correct way to dine is really to begin with the fruit and end with the oysters. Itinerant musicians should begin by making a collection and leave out the other part. Anything that can be done backwards is better done backwards. When I leave for a moment the presence of royalty I am always required to walk backwards. That shows that royalty, together with Her Privy Council, which is the collected wisdom of the nation, thinks that it is best to walk backwards. And so it is. It is not only happier and holier, but it is also more piquant. You can never tell until you’ve kicked it whether you have backed into a policeman or a lamp-post. New possibilities are open to you. Anything may happen, and generally does. So, too, in skating. A good skater told me that the only enjoyable method of progression is the outside edge backwards. “It makes you feel like a bird,” he said; “and I don’t believe you can get that sensation of flight any other way.” He simply seemed to float on the ice. You see, he was a good skater. At last he galumphed into a snow-heap, flew just like a bird for a few yards, then came down hard and hurt a lady. Look at these railway collisions, too. We all know what an awful thing a railway collision is: and how does it always happen? It happens from two trains wanting to go to the same spot and arriving there simultaneously. If both trains had respectively reversed their directions, no collision could have happened. A train should never be allowed to go anywhere, but only to back to the place whence it came. But, as I should like these pages to be of solid, material use to any young men who are really trying to lead the philosophical life, and are quite earnest in their desire to avoid the Scylla of action without falling into the Charybdis of thought, I will put my facts and deductions clearly and briefly. The facts are two:—

(1) That a tree is reflected in the water wrong way up.

(2) That the reflection of such a reflection would be right way up.

From No. 2 we deduce that the best literary method is to crib some other man’s ideas or reflections; and this is what I always do when I write an article.

From No. 1 we deduce that as all reflection is the reverse of the thing reflected, it is best to act altogether without reflection; and this is what the editor always does when he prints my articles; and what you yourselves do when you pay two-and-sixpence for this volume in spite of it.

In the meanwhile, my dear old sympathetic canoe has been going slowly backwards on its own account, and must be stopped.

It was only the other night that I took my canoe out in the moonlight, when the river is solitary and quiet. I shall not take it by night any more, because it is too sympathetic. A man came and leaned over one of the bridges and watched the reflection of the spangled skies in the ripple. He sighed, and said, “Pree lil starsh!” Then he swore hard at them. Then he sighed again, and his cap tumbled off into the water. “Ish all over now,” he said solemnly, and walked wearily away. My boat simply shuddered. I could feel it shudder.

After that it got absurdly sentimental. Now I hate and I despise sentiment. I suppose it was the effect of the moonlight. It made some verses. At least I suppose the boat made them. I found them in my blazer pocket afterwards, and I’m sure I recognised the handwriting. So I will give them in full. (You will do nothing of the kind.—Ed.)

I’m not going to discuss the merit of those verses. There may be something in them which the world will one day learn to cherish, or there may not be; but I deprecate the weakness and sentimentality which cause verse. We want to be strong, really strong. We want more of the spirit of that Gallic chieftain who wanted a tin heart made for himself. The story is well enough known, and you will find it in Livy: it is in one of the lost books; but I give it for the benefit of readers who are not classical. I do not scorn such readers. I can remember the time when I had not the finished scholarship, the critical insight, the almost insolent familiarity with the more recondite parts of history, which—with all modesty be it spoken—I know that I now possess.

I have forgotten some of the names, all the dates, and a few of the facts. But these are not the essentials. Such things are but the dry bones of history. We want the flesh and blood and sinews—the words, the large, beautiful, vague words that smudge over a difficulty until you can’t see it.

To understand why the Gallic Chieftain wanted a tin heart, we must first of all appreciate the man’s character.

When the Gallic tribe, to which he belonged, formed one of their sudden plans (Gallorum subita sunt consilia), he was always in the front of the battle; but when he was at home he used to smoke his pipe in the back yard, because his wife and her mother would not allow it in the house. He had plenty of fighting courage, but no domestic courage. And there were other points in which he saw that he was weak. Sometimes, for instance, he found some aged veteran in the streets, in a state of destitution, with a card on his breast to say that he had lost his wife in a colliery explosion, selling sulfura, or playing on the tuba telescopica, an instrument resembling the trombone, but more deleterious. Whenever this happened, he would buy the matches, or give the man money. It was weak of him, but he couldn’t help it.

The tribe to which he belonged was transcendental, heterodox, habitually untruthful, and characterised by a belief that the affections resided in the heart. So, when this poor chieftain found that he was getting too good and kind (ah, how many of us have felt like that!—I often have), he concluded that something must be wrong with his heart, and went to a medicine man or fakir. And he said: “O fakir, would you fake me up a tin heart? For the heart which I have is too unpleasantly soft, and I want a metal one.” The fakir agreed to make the change for twelve ducats. But just at this time an accident happened to the budget of this tribe, and a tax of ten ducats per pound was put on plumbum album—no, my boy, not white lead: it means tin. So it was quite clear to the fakir that he could not afford to give the man a tin heart, and yet he had signed the document. Besides, he wanted those twelve ducats.

So he gave the man chloroform, removed his heart, and then proceeded to do his best with a cheap substitute. But the cheap substitute refused to be faked, and the fakir was still hard at work trying to make something which should do quite as well as a tin heart and last longer, when he noticed signs of reviving consciousness in the chieftain. He had no more chloroform to give him, and no time to lose. So he hurriedly sewed up the incision, and left the man with no heart at all, neither of flesh, nor of tin, nor of cheap substitute.

Then the chieftain started off home, and he looked very cheerful indeed. He tripped up two blind men, and threw their sulfura down a grating. Then he went into a public-house, and spent his week’s stipendium. Finally, he reeled home, kicked his wife, smoked two cigars in the drawing-room, broke his mother-in-law’s head, forgot to wipe his boots, said he wanted some tea, and went to sleep with his feet on the crimson plush mantelpiece.

Now, next day another Gaul was going down the street when he saw two goats being harnessed to a milk-cart. It at once occurred to him that it would be as well to throw off the Roman yoke. So another insurrection was started, and the Gallic chieftain who had no heart was put in the forefront of the battle.

Just as the trumpets sounded for a charge, this Gallic chieftain remembered that he had left his handkerchief in the tent, and went to look for it in a hurry, and got himself disliked. But as the rest of the tribe were mostly killed in the charge, he did not mind that much. The survivors said: “Our noble chief has begun to be a coward.” But he was not afraid of his wife, and used bad language in her presence during mealtimes. One of the survivors went so far as to run a lance through the place where the chieftain’s heart ought to have been. The chieftain smiled, and said sarcastically that he was not an umbrella-stand.

Death is connected with the stoppage of the heart’s action; consequently this chieftain never died, and it is argued that during the Syro-Phœnician attempt to——

Here there is a hiatus in the manuscript. A scribe has added a note in the margin pallido atramento, “The chieftain is still alive. I have seen him. I have written his name at the foot of the manuscript.” I have looked there, and simply found the words “Venditus iterum.”

But the other day I bought a cigar which was all case and no inwards. The tobacconist who sold it me said it was a Regalia Gallica; and he looked as if he had been in this world a long time, and had seen the wickedness of it. I simply mention this as a coincidence. There may be nothing in it, like the cigar. But it is a curious case, if nothing else—also like the cigar.