Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough

ON TALKING TO ONE'S SELF

I was at dinner at a well-known restaurant the other evening when I became aware that some one sitting alone at a table near by was engaged in an exciting conversation with himself. As he bent over his plate his face was contorted with emotion, apparently intense anger, and he talked with furious energy, only pausing briefly in the intervals of actual mastication. Many glances were turned covertly upon him, but he seemed wholly unconscious of them, and, so far as I could judge, he was unaware that he was doing anything abnormal. In repose his face was that of an ordinary business man, sane and self-controlled, and when he rose to go his agitation was over, and he looked like a man who had won his point.

It is probable that this habit of talking to one's self has a less sinister meaning than it superficially suggests. It may be due simply to the energy of one's thought and to a concentration of mind that completely shuts out the external world. In the case I have mentioned it was clear that the man was temporarily detached from all his surroundings, that he was so absorbed by his subject that his eyes had ceased to see and his ears to hear. He was alone with himself, or perhaps with his adversary, and he only came back to the present with the end of his dinner and the paying of his bill. He was like a man who had emerged from another state of consciousness, from a waking sleep filled with tumultuous dreams. Obviously he was unaware that he had been haranguing the room in quite an audible voice for half an hour, and I daresay that if he were told that he had the habit of talking to himself he would deny it as passionately as you (or I) would deny that you (or I) snore in our sleep. And he would deny it for precisely the same reason. He doesn't know.

And here a dreadful thought assails me. What if I talk to myself, too? What if, like this man, I get so absorbed in the drama of my own mind that I cannot hear my own tongue going nineteen to the dozen? It is a disquieting idea. A strong conviction to the contrary, I see, amounts to nothing. This man, doubtless, had a strong conviction to the contrary—probably expressed an amused interest in any one talking to himself as he passed him in the street. And the fact that my friends have never told me of the failing goes for nothing also. They may think I like to talk to myself. More probably, they may know that I do not like to hear of my failings. I must watch myself. But, no, that won't do. I might as well say I would watch my dreams and keep them in check. How can the conscious state keep an eye on the unconscious? If I do not know that I am talking how can I stop myself talking?

Ah, happy thought. I recall occasions when I have talked to myself, and have been quite conscious of the sound of my voice. They have been remarks I have made on the golf links, brief, emphatic remarks dealing with the perversity of golf clubs and the sullen intractability of golf balls. Those remarks I have heard distinctly, and at the sound of them I have come to myself with a shock, and have even looked round to see whether the lady in the red jacket playing at the next hole was likely to have heard me or (still worse) to have seen me.

I think this is evidence conclusive, for the man who talks to himself habitually never hears himself. His words are only the echo of his thoughts, and they correspond so perfectly that, like a chord in music, there is no dissonance. It was thus with the art student I saw copying a picture at the Tate Gallery. "Ah, a little more blue," he said, as he turned from the original to his own canvas, and a little later: "Yes, that line wants better drawing." Several people stood by watching his work and smiling at his uttered thoughts. He alone was unconscious that he had spoken.

There are, it is true, cases in which the conscious and unconscious states seem to mingle—in which the intentional word and the unintentional come out almost in the same breath. It was so with Thomas Landseer, the father of Sir Edwin. He was one day visiting an artist, and inspecting his work. "Ah, very nice, indeed!" he said to his friend. "Excellent colour; excellent!" Then, as if all around him had vanished, and he was alone with himself, he added: "Poor chap, he thinks he can paint!"

And this instance shows that whether the habit is a mental weakness or only a physical defect it is capable of extremely awkward consequences, as in the case of the banker who was ruined by unwittingly revealing his secrets while walking in the street. How is it possible to keep a secret or conduct a bargain if your tongue is uncontrollable? What is the use of Jones explaining to his wife that he has been kept late at the office if his tongue goes on to say, entirely without his knowledge or consent, that had he declared "no trumps" in that last hand he would have been in pocket by his evening at the club? I see horrible visions of domestic complications and public disaster arising from this not uncommon habit.

And yet might there not be gain also from a universal practice of uttering our thoughts aloud? Imagine a world in which nobody had any secrets from anybody—could have no secrets from anybody. I see the Kaiser, after consciously declaring that his only purpose is peace, unconsciously blurting out to the British Ambassador that the ultimatum to Serbia is a "plant"—that what Germany means is war, that she proposes to attack Belgium, and so on. And I see the British Ambassador, having explained that England is entirely free from commitments, adding dreamily, "But if there's a war we shall be in it." In the same way Jones, after making Smith a firm offer of £30 for his horse, would say, absentmindedly, "Of course it would be cheap at £50, and I might spring £55 if he is stiff about it."

It would be a world in which lies would have no value and deception would be a waste of time—a world in which truth would no longer be at the bottom of the well, but on the tip of every man's tongue. We should have all the rascals in prison and all the dishonest traders in the bankruptcy court. Secret diplomacy would no longer play with the lives of men, for there would be no secrets. Those little perverse concealments that wreck so many lives would vanish. You, sir, who find it so easy to nag at home and so difficult to say the kind thing that you know to be true, would be discovered to your great advantage and to the peace of your household.

Yes, I think the world would go very well if we all had tongues that told our true thoughts in spite of us. But what a lot of us would be found out. My own face crimsons at the thought. So, I think, does yours.

ON BOSWELL AND HIS MIRACLE

As I passed along Great Queen Street the other evening, I saw that Boswell's house, so long threatened, is at last falling a victim to the housebreaker. The fact is one of the by-products of the war. While the Huns are abroad in Belgium the Vandals are busy at home. You may see them at work on every hand. The few precious remains we have of the past are vanishing like snows before the south wind.

In the Strand there is a great heap of rubbish where, when the war began, stood two fine old houses of Charles II.'s London. Their disappearance would, in normal times, have set all the Press in revolt. But they have gone without a murmur, so preoccupied are we with more urgent matters. And so with the Elizabethan houses in Cloth Fair. They have been demolished without a word of protest. And what devastation is afoot in Lincoln's Inn among those fine reposeful dwellings, hardly one of which is without some historic or literary interest!

In the midst of all this vandalism it was too much perhaps to hope that Boswell's house would escape. Bozzy was not an Englishman; his residence in London was casual, and, what is more to the point, he has only a reflected greatness. Macaulay's judgment of him is now felt to be too harsh, but even his warmest advocate must admit that his picture of himself is not engaging. He was gross in his habits, full of little malevolences (observe the spitefulness of his references to Goldsmith), and his worship of Johnson was abject to the point of nausea.

He made himself a sort of doormat for his hero, and treasured the dirt that came from the great man's heavy boots. No insult levelled at him was too outrageous to be recorded with pride. "You were drunk last night, you dog," says Johnson to him one morning during the tour in the Hebrides, and down goes the remark as if he has received the most gracious of good mornings. "Have you no better manners?" says Johnson on another occasion. "There is your want." And Boswell goes home and writes down the snub together with his apologies. And so when he has been expressing his emotions on hearing music. "Sir," said Johnson, "I should never hear it if it made me such a fool."

Once indeed he rebelled. It was when they were dining with a company at Sir Joshua Reynolds's. Johnson attacked him, he says, with such rudeness that he kept away from him for a week. His story of the reconciliation is one of the most delightful things in that astonishing book:

"After dinner, when Mr. Langton was called out of the room and we were by ourselves, he drew his chair near to mine and said, in a tone of conciliatory courtesy, 'Well, how have you done?' Boswell: 'Sir, you have made me very uneasy by your behaviour to me when we were last at Sir Joshua Reynolds's. You know, my dear sir, no man has a greater respect or affection for you, or would sooner go to the end of the world to serve you. Now, to treat me so—' He insisted that I had interrupted him, which I assured him was not the case; and proceeded, 'But why treat me so before people who neither love you nor me?' Johnson: 'Well I am sorry for it. I'll make it up to you in twenty different ways, as you please.' Boswell: 'I said to-day to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you tossed me sometimes, I don't care how often or how high he tosses me when only friends are present, for then I fall upon soft ground; but I do not like falling upon stones, which is the case when enemies are present. I think this is a pretty good image, sir.' Johnson: 'Sir, it is one of the happiest I ever have heard.'"

Is there anything more delicious outside Falstaff and Bardolph, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Indeed, Bardolph's immortal "Would I were with him wheresoe'er he be, whether in heaven or in hell," is in the very spirit of Boswell's devotion to his hero.

It was his failings as much as his talents that enabled him to work the miracle. His lack of self-respect and humour, his childish egotism, his love of gossip, his naive bathos, and his vulgarities contributed as much to the making of his immortal book as his industry, his wonderful verbal memory, and his doglike fidelity. I have said that his greatness is only reflected. But that is hardly just. It might even be more true to say that Johnson owes his immortality to Boswell. What of him would remain to-day but for the man who took his scourgings so humbly and repaid them by licking the boot that kicked him? Who now reads London, or The Vanity of Human Wishes, or The Rambler? I once read Rasselas, and found it pompous and dull. And I have read The Lives of the Poets, and though they are not pompous and dull, they are often singularly poor criticism, and the essay on Milton is, in some respects, as mean a piece of work as ever came out of Grub Street.

But The Life! What in all the world of books is there like it? I have been reading it off and on for more than thirty years, and still find it inexhaustible. It ripens with the years. It is so intimate that it seems to be a record of my own experiences. I have dined so often with Johnson at the Mitre and Sir Joshua's and Langton's and the rest that I know him far better than the shadows I meet in daily life. I seem to have been present when he was talking to the King, and when Goldsmith sulked because he had not shared the honour; when he met Wilkes, and when he insulted Sir Joshua and for once got silenced; when he "downed" Robertson, and when, for want of a lodging, he and Savage walked all night round St. James's Square, full of high spirits and patriotism, inveighing against the Minister and resolving that "they would stand by their country."

And at the end of it all I feel very much like Mr. Birrell, who, when asked what he would do when the Government went out of office, replied, "I shall retire to the country, and really read Boswell." Not "finish Boswell," you observe. No one could ever finish Boswell. No one would ever want to finish Boswell. Like a sensible man he will just go on reading him and reading him, and reading him until the light fails and there is no more reading to be done.

What an achievement for this uncouth Scotch lawyer to have accomplished! He knew he had done a great thing; but even he did not know how great a thing. Had he known he might have answered as proudly as Dryden answered when some one said to him that his Ode to St. Cecilia was the finest that had ever been written. "Or ever will be," said the poet. Dryden's ode has been eclipsed more than once since it was written; but Boswell's book has never been approached. It is not only the best thing of its sort in literature: there is nothing with which one can compare it.

Boswell's house is falling to dust. No matter! His memorial will last as long as the English speech is spoken and as long as men love the immortal things of which it is the vehicle.

ON SEEING OURSELVES

A friend of mine who is intimate enough with me to guess my secrets, said to me quizzingly the other day: "Do you know 'Alpha of the Plough?'"

"I have never seen the man," I said promptly and unblushingly. He laughed and I laughed.

"What, never?" he said.

"Never," I said. "What's more, I never shall see him."

"What, not in the looking-glass?" said he.

"That's not 'Alpha of the Plough,'" I answered. "That is only his counterfeit. It may be a good counterfeit, but it's not the man. The man I shall never see. I can see bits of him—his hands, his feet, his arms, and so on. By shutting one eye I can see something of the shape of his nose. By thrusting out the upper lip I can see that the fellow wears a moustache. But his face, as a whole, is hidden from me. I cannot tell you even with the help of the counterfeit what impression he makes on the beholder. Now," I continued, pausing and taking stock of my friend, "I know what you are like. I take you all in at one glance. You can take me in at a glance. The only person we can none of us take in at a glance is the person we should most like to see."

"It's a mercy," said he.

I am not sure that he was right. In this matter, as in most things in this perplexing world, there is much to be said on both sides. It is lucky for some of us undoubtedly that we are condemned to be eternal strangers to ourselves, and that not merely to our physical selves. We do not know even the sound of our own voices. Mr. Pemberton-Billing has never heard the most sepulchral voice in the House of Commons, and Lord Charles Beresford does not know how a foghorn sounds when it becomes articulate. I have no idea, and you have no idea, what sort of impression our manner makes on others. If we had, how stricken some of us would be! We should hardly survive the revelation. We should be sorry we had ever been born.

Imagine, for example, that eminent politician, Mr. Sutherland Bangs, M.P., meeting himself out at a dinner one evening. Mr. Sutherland Bangs cherishes a comfortable vision of himself as a handsome, engaging fellow, with a gift for talk, a breezy manner, a stylish presence, and an elegant accent. And seated beside himself at dinner he would discover that he was a pretentious bore, that his talk was windy commonplace, his breezy manner an offence, his fine accent an unpleasant affectation. He would say that he would never want to see that fellow again. And, realising that that was Mr. Sutherland Bangs as he appears to the world, he would return home as humble and abject as Mr. Tom Lofty in The Good-Natured Man was when his imposture was found out. "You ought to have your head stuck in a pillory," said Mr. Croaker. "Stick it where you will," said Mr. Lofty, "for by the lord, it cuts a poor figure where it sticks at present." Mr. Sutherland Bangs would feel like that.

But if making our own acquaintance would give some of us a good deal of surprise and even pain, it would also do most of us a useful turn as well. Burns put the case quite clearly in his familiar lines:

    O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us
      To see oursels as others see us:
    It wad frae monie a blunder free us
      An' foolish notion.

We should all make discoveries to our advantage as well as our discomfiture. You, sir, might find that the talent for argument on which you pride yourself is to me only irritating wrong-headedness, and I might find that the bright wit that I fancy I flash around makes you feel tired. Jones's eyeglass would drop out of his eye because he would know it only made him look foolish, Brown would see the ugliness of his cant, and Robinson would sorry that he had been born a bully and as prickly as a hedgehog. It would do us all good to get this objective view of ourselves.

It is not necessarily the right view or the complete view. You remember that ingenious fancy of Holmes' about John and Thomas. They are talking together and don't quite hit it off, and Holmes says it is no wonder since six persons are engaged in the conversation. "Six!" you say, lifting your eyebrows. Yes, six, says he. There is John's ideal John—that is, John as he appears to himself; Thomas's ideal John—that is, John as Thomas sees him; and the real John, known only to his Maker. And so with Thomas, there are three of him engaged in the talk also. Now John's ideal John is not a bit like Thomas's ideal John, and neither of them is like the real John, and so it comes about that John and Thomas—that is, you and I—get at cross purposes.

If I (John) could have your (Thomas's) glimpse of myself, my appearance, my manner, my conduct, and so on, it would serve as a valuable corrective. It would give that faculty of self-criticism which most of us lack. That faculty is simply the art of seeing ourselves objectively, as a stranger sees us who has no interest in us and no prejudice in our favour. Few of us can do that except in fleeting flashes of illumination. We cannot even do it in regard to the things we produce. If you paint a picture, or write an article, or make a joke, you are pretty sure to be a bad judge of its quality. You only see it subjectively as a part of yourself—that is, you don't see it at all. Put the thing away for a year, come on it suddenly as a stranger might, and you will perhaps understand why Thomas seemed so cool about it. It wasn't because he was jealous or unfriendly, as you supposed: it was because he saw it and you didn't.

Even great men have this blindness about their own work. How else can we account for a case like Wordsworth's? He was one of the three greatest poets this country has produced, and also an acute critic of poetry, yet he wrote more flat-footed commonplace than any man of his time. Apparently he didn't know when he was sublime and when he was merely drivelling. He didn't know because he never got outside the hypnotism of self.

I have sometimes felt angry with that phrase, "What do they know of England, who only England know?" It is the watchword of a shallow Imperialism. But I felt a certain truth in it once. I was alone in the Alps, in an immense solitude of peak and glacier, and as I waited for the return of my guide, who had gone on ahead to prospect, I looked, like Richard, "towards England." In that moment I seemed to see it imaginatively, comprehensively, as I had never, never seen it in all the years of my life in it. I saw its green pastures and moorlands, its mountains and its lakes, its cities and its people, its splendours and its squalors as if it was all a vision projected beyond the verge of the horizon. I saw it with a fresh eye and a new mind, seemed to understand it as I had never understood it before, certainly loved it as I had never loved it before. I found that I had left England to discover it.

That is what we need to do with ourselves occasionally. We need to take a journey from our self-absorbed centre, and see ourselves with a fresh eye and an unprejudiced judgment.

ON THE ENGLISH SPIRIT

I have seen no story of the war which, within its limits, has pleased me more than that which Mr. Alfred Noyes told in the newspapers in his fascinating description of his visit to the Fleet. It was a story of the battle of Jutland. "In the very hottest moment of this most stupendous battle in all history," he says, "two grimy stokers' heads arose for a breath of fresh air. What domestic drama they were discussing the world may never know. But the words that were actually heard passing between them, while the shells whined overhead, were these: 'What I says is, 'e ought to have married 'er.'"

If you don't enjoy that story you will never understand the English spirit. There are some among us who never will understand the English spirit. In the early days of the war an excellent friend of mine used to find a great source of despair in "Tipperary." What hope was there for a country whose soldiers went to battle singing "Tipperary" against a foe who came on singing "Ein' feste Burg"? Put that way, I was bound to confess that the case looked black against us. It seemed "all Lombard Street to a China orange," as the tag of other days would put it. It is true that, for a music-hall song, "Tipperary" was unusually fresh and original. Contrast it with the maudlin "Keep the home fires burning," which holds the field to-day, and it touches great art. I never hear it even now on the street organ without a certain pleasure—a pleasure mingled with pain, for its happy lilt comes weighted with the tremendous emotions of those unforgettable days. It is like a butterfly caught in a tornado, a catch of song in the throat of death.

But it was only a music-hall song after all, and to put it in competition with Luther's mighty hymn would be like putting a pop-gun against a 12-inch howitzer. The thunder of Luther's hymn has come down through four centuries, and it will go on echoing through the centuries till the end of time. It is like the march of the elements to battle, like the heaving of mountains and the surge of oceans. In nothing else is the sense of Power so embodied in the pulse of song. And the words are as formidable as the tune. Carlyle caught their massive, rugged strength in his great translation:

    A safe stronghold our God is still,
    A trusty shield and weapon;
    He'll help us clear from all the ill
    That hath us now o'ertaken….

Yes, on the face of it, it seemed a poor lookout for "Tipperary" against such a foe. But it wasn't, and any one who knew the English temperament knew it wasn't. I put aside the fact that for practical everyday uses a cheerful tune is much better than a solemn tune. "Tipperary" quickens the step and shortens the march. Luther's hymn, so far from lightening the journey, would become an intolerable burden. The mind would sink under it. You would either go mad or plunge into some violent excess to recover your sanity. It is the craziest of philosophy to think that because you are engaged in a serious business you have to live in a state of exaltation, that the bow is never to be unstrung, that the top note is never to be relaxed. You will not do your business better because you wear a long face all the time; you will do it worse. If you are talking about your high ideals all day you are not only a nuisance: you are either dishonest or unbalanced. We are not creatures with wings. We are creatures who walk. We have to "foot it" even to Mount Pisgah, and the more cheerful and jolly and ordinary we are on the way the sooner we shall get over the journey. The noblest Englishman that ever lived, and the most deeply serious, was as full of innocent mirth as a child and laid his head down on the block with a jest. Let us keep our course by the stars, by all means, but the immediate tasks are much nearer than the stars—

    The charities that soothe and heal and bless
    Are scattered all about our feet—like flowers.

It is just this frightful gravity of the German mind that has made them mad. They haven't learned to play; they haven't learned to laugh at themselves. Their sombre religion has passed into a sombre irreligion. They have grown gross without growing light-hearted. The spiritual battle song of Luther has become a material battle song, and "the safe stronghold" is no longer the City of God but the City of Krupp. They have neither the splendid intellectual sanity of the French, nor the homely humour of the English. It is this homely humour that has puzzled Europe. It has puzzled the French as much as the Germans, for the French genius is declamatory and needs the inspiration of ideas and great passions greatly stated. It was assumed that, because the British soldier sang "Tipperary," moved in an atmosphere of homely fun, indulged in no heroics, never talked of "glory," rarely of patriotism or the Fatherland, and only joked about "the flag," there was no great passion in him. Some of our frenzied people at home have the same idea. They still believe we are a nation of "slackers" because we don't shriek with them.

The truth, of course, is that the English spirit is distrustful of emotion and display. It is ashamed of making "a fuss" and hates heroics. The typical Englishman hides his feelings even from his family, clothes his affections under a mask of indifference, and cracks a joke to avoid "making a fool of himself." It is not that he is without great passions, but that he does not like talking about them. He is too self-conscious to trust his tongue on such big themes. He might "make an exhibition of himself," and he dreads that above all things. This habit of reticence has its unlovely side; but it has great virtues too. It keeps the mind cool and practical and the atmosphere commonplace and good-humoured. It gives reserves of strength that people who live on their "top notes" have not got. It goes on singing "Tipperary" as though it had no care in life and no interest in ideas or causes. And then the big moment comes and the great passion that has been kept in such shamefaced secrecy blazes out in deeds as glorious as any that were done on the plains of windy Troy. Turn to those stories of the winning of the V.C., and then ask yourself whether the nation whose sons are capable of this noble heroism deserves to have the whip of Zabern laid across its shoulders by any jack-in-office who chooses to insult us.

Those two stokers, putting their heads out for a breath of fresh air in the midst of the battle, are true to the English type. Death was all about them, and any moment might be their last. But they were so completely masters of themselves that in the brief-breathing space allowed them they could turn their minds to a simple question of everyday conduct. "What I says is, 'e ought to have married 'er." That is not the stuff of which heroics are made; but it is the stuff of which heroism is made.

ON FALLING IN LOVE

Do not, if you please, imagine that this title foreshadows some piquant personal revelation. "Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, sir." I have not fallen in love for quite a long time, and, looking in the glass and observing what Holmes calls "Time's visiting cards" on my face and hair, I come to the conclusion that I shall never enjoy the experience again. I may say with Mr. Kipling's soldier that

    That's all shuv be'ind me
    Long ago and fur away.

But just as poetry, according to Wordsworth, is emotion recalled in tranquillity, so it is only when you have left the experience of falling in love behind that you are really competent to describe it or talk about it with the necessary philosophic detachment.

Now of course there is no difficulty about falling in love. Any one can do that. The difficulty is to know when the symptoms are true or false. So many people mistake the symptoms, and only discover when it is too late that they have never really had the true experience. Hence the overtime in the Divorce Court. Hence, too, the importance of "calf love," which serves as a sort of apprenticeship to the mystery, and enables you to discriminate between the substance and the shadow.

And in "calf love" I do not include the adumbrations of extreme childhood like those immortalised in Annabel Lee:—

    I was a child and she was a child
    In that kingdom by the sea.

* * * * *

    But we loved with a love that was more than love,
    I and my Annabel Lee.

I know that love. I had it when I was eight. "She" was also eight, and she had just come from India. She was frightfully plain, but then—well, she had come from India. She had all the romance of India's coral strand about her, and it was India's coral strand that I was in love with. Moreover, she was a soldier's daughter, and to be a soldier's daughter was, next to being a soldier, the noblest thing in the world. For that was about the time when, under the inspiration of The Story of the Hundred Days, I had set out with a bag containing a nightshirt and a toothbrush to enlist in the Black Watch. (It was a forlorn adventure that went no further than the railway station.) Finally she had given me, as a token of her love, Poor Little Gaspard's Drum, wherein I read of Napoleon and the Egyptian desert, and, above all, of the Mamelukes. How that word thrilled me! "The Mamelukes!" What could one do but fall in love with a girl who used such incantations?

But this is not the true calf love. That comes with the down upon the lip. People laugh at "calf love," but one might as well laugh at the wonder of dawn or the coming of spring. When David Copperfield fell in love with the eldest Miss Larkins, he was really in love with the opening universe, and the eldest Miss Larkins happened to be the only available lightning conductor for his emotion.

The important thing is that you should contract "calf love" while you are young. It is like the measles, which is harmless enough in childhood, but apt to be dangerous when you are grown up. The "calf love" of an elderly man is always a disaster. Hence the saying, "There's no fool like an old fool." An elderly man should not fall in love. He should walk into it. He should survey the ground carefully as Mr. Barkis did. That admirable man took the business of falling in love seriously:

"'So she makes,' said Mr. Barkis, after a long interval of reflection, 'all the apple parsties, and does all the cooking, do she?'

"I replied that such was the fact.

"'Well, I'll tell you what,' said Mr. Barkis. 'P'raps you might be writin' to her?'

"'I shall certainly write to her,' I rejoined.

"'Ah!' he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me. 'Well! If you was writin' to her, p'raps you'd recollect to say that Barkis was willin', would you?'"

This is a model of caution in the art of middle-aged love-making. The mistake of the "Northern Farmer" was that he applied the same middle-aged caution to youth. "Doänt thou marry for munny; but goä wheer munny is," he said to his son Sammy, who wanted to marry the poor parson's daughter. And he held up his own love-making as an inspiration for Sammy:

    And I went wheer munny wor, and thy moother coom to and
    Wi' lots o' munny laäid by, and a nicetish bit o' land.
    Maybe she worn'd a beauty: I nivver giv' it a thowt;
    But worn'd she as good to cuddle and kiss as a lass as an't nowt?

I have always hoped that Sammy rejected his father's counsel and stuck to the poor parson's daughter.

There is no harm of course in marrying money. George Borrow said that there were worse ways of making a fortune than marrying one. And perhaps it is true, though I don't think Borrow's experience was very convincing. I have known people who "have gone where money was" and have fallen honestly and rapturously into love, but you have got to be very sure that money in such a case is not the motive. If it is the penalty never fails to follow. Mr. Bumble married Mrs. Corney for "six teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a milk-pot, with a small quantity of secondhand furniture and twenty pounds in money." And in two months he regretted his bargain and admitted that he had gone "dirt cheap." "Only two months to-morrow," he said. "It seems a age."

Those who believe in "love at first sight" take the view that marriages are made in heaven and that we only come to earth to fulfil our destiny. Johnson, who was an excellent husband to the elderly Mrs. Porter, scoffed at that view and held that love is only the accident of circumstance. But though that is the sensible view, there are cases like those of Dante and Beatrice and Abelard and Heloise, in which the passion does seem to touch the skies. In those cases, however, it rarely ends happily. A more hum-drum way of falling in love seems better fitted to earthly conditions. The method of Sir Thomas More was perhaps the most original on record. He preferred the second of three sisters and was about to marry her when it occurred to him—But let me quote the words in which Roper, his son-in-law, records the incident:

"And all beit his mynde most served him to the seconde daughter, for that he thoughte her the fayrest and best favoured, yet when he considered that it woulde be bothe great griefe and some shame alsoe to the eldest to see her yonger sister in mariage preferred before her, he then of a certeyn pittye framed his fancye towardes her, and soon after maryed her."

It was love to order, yet there was never a more beautiful home life than that of which this most perfect flower of the English race was the centre.

In short, there is no formula for falling in love. Each one does it as the spirit moves.

ON A BIT OF SEAWEED

The postman came just now, and among the letters he brought was one from North Wales. It was fat and soft and bulgy, and when it was opened we found it contained a bit of seaweed. The thought that prompted the sender was friendly, but the momentary effect was to arouse wild longings for the sea, and to add one more count to the indictment of the Kaiser, who had sent us for the holidays into the country, where we could obey the duty to economise, rather than to the seaside, where the temptations to extravagance could not be dodged. "Oh, how it smells of Sheringham," said one whose vote is always for the East Coast. "No, there is the smack of Sidmouth, and Dawlish, and Torquay in its perfume," said another, whose passion is for the red cliffs of South Devon. And so on, each finding, as he or she sniffed at the seaweed, the windows of memory opening out on to the foam of summer seas. And soon the table was enveloped in a rushing tide of recollection—memories of bathing and boating, of barefooted races on the sands, of jolly fishermen who always seemed to be looking out seaward for something that never came, of hunting for shells, and of all the careless raptures of dawn and noon and sunset by the seashore. All awakened by the smell of a bit of seaweed.

It is this magic of reminiscence that makes the world such a storehouse of intimacies and confidences. There is hardly a bird that sings, or a flower that blows, or a cloud that sails in the blue that does not bring us some hint from the past, and set us tingling with remembrance. We open a drawer by chance, and the smell of lavender issues forth, and with that lingering perfume the past is unrolled like a scroll, and places long unseen leap to the inward eye and voices long unheard are speaking to us:—

    We tread the path their feet have worn.
    We sit beneath their orchard trees,
    We hear, like them, the hum of bees,
    And rustle of the bladed corn.

Who can see the first daffodils of spring without feeling a sort of spiritual festival that the beauty of the flower alone cannot explain? The memory of all the springs of the past is in their dancing plumes, and the assurance of all the springs to come. They link us up with the pageant of nature, and with the immortals of our kind—with Wordsworth watching them in "sprightly dance" by Ullswater, with Herrick finding in them the sweet image of the beauty and transience of life, with Shakespeare greeting them "in the sweet o' the year" by Avon's banks long centuries ago.

And in this sensitiveness of memory to external suggestion there is infinite variety. It is not a collective memory that is awakened, but a personal memory. That bit of seaweed opened many windows in us, but they all looked out on different scenes and reminded us of something individual and inexplicable, of something which is a part of that ultimate loneliness that belongs to all of us. Everything speaks a private language to each of us that we can never translate to others. I do not know what the lilac says to you; but to me it talks of a garden-gate over which it grew long ago. I am a child again, standing within the gate, and I see the red-coated soldiers marching along with jolly jests and snatching the lilac sprays from the tree as they pass. The emotion of pride that these heroes should honour our lilac tree by ravishing its blossoms all comes back to me, together with a flood of memories of the old garden and the old home and the vanished faces. Why that momentary picture should have fixed itself in the mind I cannot say; but there it is, as fresh and clear at the end of nearly fifty years as if it were painted yesterday, and the lilac tree bursting into blossom always unveils it again.

It is these multitudinous associations that give life its colour and its poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. "The true harvest of my life," said Thoreau, "is something as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was the summary, the essence, of all his experience. We are like bees foraging in the garden of the world, and hoarding the honey in the hive of memory. And no hoard is like any other hoard that ever was or ever will be. The cuckoo calling over the valley, the blackbird fluting in the low boughs in the evening, the solemn majesty of the Abbey, the life of the streets, the ebb and flow of Father Thames—everything whispers to us some secret that it has for no other ear, and touches a chord of memory that echoes in no other brain. Those deeps within us find only a crude expression in the vehicle of words and actions, and our intercourse with men touches but the surface of ourselves. The rest is "as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was one of the most companionable of men, William Morris, who said:

    That God has made each one of us as lone
    As He Himself sits.

That is why, in moments of exaltation, our only refuge is silence, and the world of memory within answers the world of suggestion without.

"And what does the seaweed remind you of?" said one, as I looked up after smelling it. "It reminds me," I said, "of all the seas that wash our shores, and of all the brave sailors who are guarding these seas day and night, while we sit here secure. It reminds me also that I have an article to write, and that its title is 'A Bit of Seaweed.'"

ON LIVING AGAIN

A little group of men, all of whom had achieved conspicuous success in life, were recently talking after dinner round the fire in the smoking-room of a London club. They included an eminent lawyer, a politician whose name is a household word, a well-known divine, and a journalist. The talk traversed many themes, and arrived at that very familiar proposition: If it were in your power to choose, would you live this life again? With one exception the answer was a unanimous "No." The exception, I may remark, was not the divine. He, like the majority, had found one visit to the play enough. He did not want to see it again.

The question, I suppose, is as old as humanity. And the answer is old too, and has always, I fancy, resembled that of our little group round the smoking-room fire. It is a question that does not present itself until we are middle-aged, for the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, and life then stretches out in such an interminable vista as to raise no question of its recurrence. It is when you have reached the top of the pass and are on the downward slope, with the evening shadows falling over the valley and the church tower and with the end of the journey in view, that the question rises unbidden to the lips. The answer does not mean that the journey has not been worth while. It only means that the way has been long and rough, that we are footsore and tired, and that the thought of rest is sweet. It is nature's way of reconciling us to our common lot. She has shown her child all the pageant of life, and now prepares him for his "patrimony of a little mould"—

      Thou hast made his mouth
    Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
    All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
    All beauty, and all starry majesties,
    And dim transtellar things;—even that it may,
    Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
    Confess—"It is enough."

Yes, it is enough. We accept the verdict of mortality uncomplainingly—nay, we would not wish it to be reversed, even if that were possible.

Now this question must not be confounded with that other, rather foolish, question, "Is Life worth living?" The group round the smoking-room fire would have answered that question—if they had troubled to answer it at all—with an instant and scornful "Yes." They had all found life a great and splendid adventure; they had made good and wholesome use of it; they would not surrender a moment of its term or a fragment of its many-coloured experience. And that is the case with all healthy-minded people. We may, like Job, in moments of depression curse the day when we were born; but the curse dies on our lips. Swift, it is true, kept his birthday as a day of mourning; but no man who hates humanity can hope to find life endurable, for the measure of our sympathies is the measure of our joy in living.

Even those who take the most hopeless view of life are careful to keep out of mischief. A friend of mine told me recently of a day he had spent with a writer famous for the sombre philosophy of his books. In the morning the writer declared that no day ever passed in which he did not wish that he had never been born; in the afternoon he had a most excellent opportunity of being drowned through some trouble with a sailing boat, and he rejected the chance with almost pathetic eagerness. Yet I daresay he went on believing that he wished he had never been born. It is not only the children who live in the world of "Let us make pretend."

No, we are all glad to have come this way once. It is the thought of a second journey over the same ground that chills us and gives us pause. Sometimes you will hear men answer, "Yes, if I could have the experience I have had in this life." By which they mean, "Yes, if I could come back with the certainty of making all the short cuts to happiness that I now see I have missed." But that is to vulgarise the question. It is to ask that life shall not be a splendid mystery, every day of which is

an arch wherethrough Gleams the untravelled world;

but that it shall be a thoroughly safe three per cent. investment into which I can put my money with the certainty of having a good time—all sunshine and no shadows. But life on those terms would be the dreariest funeral march of the marionettes. Take away the uncertainty of life, and you take away all its magic. It would be like going to the wicket with the certainty of making as many runs as you liked. No one would trouble to go to the wicket on those preposterous terms. It is because I may be out first ball or stay in and make a hundred runs (not that I ever did any such heroic thing) that I put on the pads with the feverish sense of adventure. And it is because every dawn breaks as full of wonder as the first day of creation that life preserves the enchantment of a tale that is never told.

Moreover, how would experience help us? It is character which is destiny. If you came back with that weak chin and flickering eye, not all the experience of all the ages would save you from futility.

No, if life is to be lived here again it must be lived on the same unknown terms in order to be worth living. We must come, as we came before, like wanderers out of eternity for the brief adventure of time. And, in spite of all the fascinations of that adventure, the balance of our feeling is against repeating it. For we know that every thing that makes life dear to us would have vanished with all the old familiar faces and happy associations of our former pilgrimage, and there is something disloyal in the mere thought of coming again to form new attachments and traverse new ways. Holmes once wrote a poem about being "Homesick in heaven"; but it would be still harder to be homesick on earth—to be wandering about among the ghosts of old memories, and trying to recapture the familiar atmosphere of things. We should make new friends; but they would not be the same. They might be better; but we should not ask for better friends: we should yearn for the old ones.

There is a fine passage in Guido Rey's noble book on the "Matterhorn" which comes to my mind as a fitting expression of what I think we feel. He was on his way to climb the mountain, when, on one of its lower slopes, he saw standing lonely in the evening light the figure of a grey-headed man. It was Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn—Whymper grown old, standing there in the evening light and gazing on the mighty rock that he had vanquished in his prime. His climbing days were done, and he sought no more victories on the mountains. He had had his day and was content to stand afar off, alone with his memories, leaving the joy of battle to the young and the ardent. There was not one of those memories that he would be without—save, of course, that terrible experience in the hour of his victory over the Matterhorn. But had you asked him if he was still avid for those topless grandeurs and starry majesties he would have said, "It is enough."

TU-WHIT, TU-WHOO!

There are two voices that are most familiar to me on this hillside. One is the voice of the day, the other of the night. Throughout the day the robin sings his song with unflagging spirit. It is not a very brilliant song, but it is indomitably cheerful. Wet or fine, warm or cold, it goes on through the November day from sunrise to sunset. The little fellow hops about, in his bright red waistcoat, from tree to tree. He flutters to the fence, and from the fence to the garden path, and so to the door and into the kitchen. If you will give him decent encouragement he will come on to your hand and take his meal with absolute confidence in your good faith. Then he will trip away and resume his song on the fence.

There are some people who say hard things about the robin—that he is selfish and "gey ill to live wi'" and so on—but to me he seems the most cheerful and constant companion in nature. He is a bringer of good tidings—a philosopher who insists that we are masters of our fate and that winter is just the time when there is some sense in being an optimist. Anybody, he seems to say, can be an optimist when the days are long and the air is warm and worms are plentiful; but it is just when things are looking a little black and the other fellows begin to grouse that I put on my brightest waistcoat, tune up my best whistle, and come and tell you that the unconquerable soul is greater than circumstance.

The other voice comes when night has descended and the valley below is blotted out by the darkness. Then from the copse beyond the orchard there sounds the mournful threnody of the owl. The day is over, he says, and all is lost. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." I only am left to tell the end of all things. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." I've told it all before a thousand times, but you wouldn't believe me. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Now, you can't deny it, for the night is dark and the wind is cold and all the earth is a graveyard. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Where are the songs of spring and the leaves of summer? "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Where the red-cheeked apple that hung on the bough and the butterfly that fluttered in the sunshine? All, all are gone. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo … Tu-whit, tu-whoo … Tu-whit, tu-whoo…."

A cheerless fellow. Some people find him an intolerable companion. I was talking at dinner in London a few nights ago to a woman who has a house in Sussex, and I found that she had not been there for some time.

"I used to find the owl endurable," said she, "but since the war I have found him unbearable. He hoots all night and makes me so depressed that I feel that I shall go mad."

"And so you come and listen to the owl in London?" I said.

"The owl in London?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "the owl that hoots in Carmelite Street and Printing House
Square."

"Ah," she said, "but he is such an absurd owl. Now the owl down in the country is such a solemn creature."

    "He says a very foolish thing
    In such a solemn way,"

I murmured.

"Yes, but in the silence and the darkness there doesn't seem any answer to him."

"Madame," I said, "if you will look up at the stars you will find a very complete answer."

I confess that I find the owl not only tolerable but stimulating. I like to hear the pessimist really let himself go. It is the nameless and unformed fears of the mind that paralyse, but when my owl comes along and states the position at its blackest I begin to cheer up and feel defiant and combative. Is this the worst that can be said? Then let us see what the best is, and set about accomplishing it. "The thing is impossible," said the pessimist to Cobden. "Indeed," said that great man. "Then the sooner we set about doing it the better." Oh, oh, say I to my owl, all is lost, is it? You wait till the dawn comes, and hear what that little chap in the red waistcoat has to say about it. He's got quite another tale to tell, and it's a much more likely tale than yours. I shall go to bed and leave you to Gummidge in the trees until the sun comes up and tells you what a dismal fraud you are.

"Tu-whit, tu-whoo," hoots the owl back at me.

Yes, my dear sir, but you said that last night, and you have been saying it every night I have known you, and always the sun comes up and the spring comes round again and the flowers bloom, and the fields are golden with harvest.

"Tu-whit, tu-whoo."

Oh, bother you. You ought to be a Daily Mail placard.

No doubt the owl is quite happy in his way. Louis XV. expressed the owlish philosophy when he said, "Let us amuse ourselves by making ourselves miserable." I have no doubt the wretched creature did amuse himself after his fashion. I have always thought that, secretly, Mrs. Gummidge had a roaring time. She really enjoyed being miserable and making everybody about her miserable. I have known such people, and I daresay you have known them, too—people who nurse unhappiness with the passion of a miser. They are having the time of their lives now. They go about saying, "Tu-whit, tu-whoo! The Russians are beaten again, or if they are not beaten they will be. Tu-whit, tu-whoo! We're slackers and slouchers and the Germans are too many for us. Tu-whit, tu-whoo. They're on the way to India and Egypt, and nothing will stop them. All, all is lost." But I notice that they enjoy a beef-steak as much as anybody, and do not refuse their soup though they salt it with their tears.

I like that story of Stonewall Jackson and the owl. The owl was a general, and he rushed up to Jackson in the crisis of the first battle of Bull's Run, crying "All is lost! We're beaten!" "Oh," said Jackson, "if that's so I'd advise you to keep it to yourself." Half-an-hour later the charge of Jackson's brigade had won the battle. I do not know what happened to the owl, but I daresay he went on "Tu-whit-ing" and "Tu-whoo-ing" to the end. The owl can't help being an owl.

Ah, there is little red waistcoat singing on the fence. Let us find a worm for the philosopher….

ON POINTS OF VIEW

As I sat in the garden just now, with a writing-pad on my knee and my mind ranging the heavens above and the earth beneath in search of a subject, my eye fell on a tragedy in progress at my elbow. A small greenfly had got entangled in a spider's web, and was fluttering its tiny wings violently to effect an escape. The filaments of the web were so delicate as to be hardly visible, but they were not too delicate to bear the spider whom I saw advancing upon his prey with dreadful menace. I forgot my dislike of greenflies, and was overcome with a fierce antagonism for the fat fellow who had the game so entirely in his hands. Here, said I, is the Hun encompassing the ruin of poor little Belgium. What chance has the weak and the innocent little creature against the cunning of this rascal, who hangs out his gossamer traps in the breeze and then lies in hiding until his victim is enmeshed and helpless? What justice is there in nature that allows this unequal combat?

By this time the spider had reached the fly and thrown a new filament round him. Then at frightful speed he raced to the top of his web and disappeared in the woodwork of the arbour, drawing the new filament tight round the victim, which continued its flutterings for a little time and then gave up the ghost. At this moment I was called in to lunch, and at the table I told the story of the spider and the fly with undisguised hostility to the spider. "That," said Robert, home from the front—"that is simply a sentimental point of view. My sympathies as a practical person are all with the spider. He is the friend of man, the devourer of insects, the scavenger of the gardens. He helps in the great task of keeping the equilibrium of nature. Moreover," said he, "I have seen you kill greenflies yourself. You killed them because you knew they were a nuisance. Why should you object to the spider doing the same useful work for a living?"

"Ah," said I weakly, "I suppose it is because he does it for a living. Now I …" "Now, you," interrupted the other, "do it for a living, too, because you want your fruit trees to bear fruit, and your roses to thrive, and your cabbages to prosper. Who more merciless than you on slugs and other pests that fly or crawl? No, no, we are all out for a living, you as much as the spider, the spider as much as the fly." "We are all Huns," said I. "What a detestable world it is." "Not at all," said he. "It's a very jolly world. I drink to the health of the spider."

"And you have no pity for the fly?" I said. "Not a little bit." he replied. "I am on the side of right." "Whose side is that?" I asked. "Mine," said he. "We must all act according to our point of view. That's what the greenfly does. That's what the spider does. We shall never in this world get all the points of view in accord. We shall go on scrambling for a living to the end. Sometimes the greenfly will be on top, sometimes the spider. Look at that cherry-tree in the orchard. A month ago its branches were laden with fruit. Now there is not a cherry to be seen. The blackbirds and the starlings have stripped the tree as clean as a bone. Their point of view is that the cherries are provided for them, and they are right. They know nothing of the laws of property which man makes for his own protection. It's no use going out to them and asking them to look at your title-deeds, and reminding them of the policeman and the laws against larceny. Our moral code is for us, not for them.

"We are all creatures of our own point of view," he went on. "Before Jones next door bought a motor-car he had very bitter feelings about motorists—used to call them road-hogs, said he would tax these 'land-torpedoes' out of existence, and was full of sympathy and pity for the poor children coming from school. Now he drives a car as hard as anybody; blows the hoggiest of horns; and says it's disgraceful the way parents allow their children to play about in the streets. Nothing has changed except his point of view. He has shifted round to another position, and sees things from a new angle of vision. Samuel Butler hit the comedy of the thing off long ago:—

    What makes all doctrine plain and clear?
    About two hundred pounds a year.
    And that which was proved true before
    Prove false again? Two hundred more."

"Are our points of view then all dictated by our selfish motives as those of your friend the spider, who has probably by this time gobbled my friend the greenfly?" "No, I do not say that. I think that, comprehending all our private points of view, there is an absolute motive running through human society, call it the world spirit, the mind of the race, or what you will, that is something greater and better than we. The collective motion of humanity is, except in very rare cases, nobler than its individual manifestations. I respond and you respond to an abstract justice, an abstract righteousness, which is purer and better than anything we are capable of. We are all at the bottom, I think, better than our actions paint us, better than our limited points of view permit us to be, and in our illuminated moments we catch a glimpse of that Jacob's ladder that Francis Thompson saw, with ascending angels, at Charing Cross. Some one called Shelley 'an ineffectual angel.' I think most of us are ineffectual angels. Take this tragedy that is filling the world with horror to-day. We are fighting like tigers for our own points of view, but in our hearts we are ashamed of the spectacle, and know that humanity is better than its deeds. One day, perhaps, the ineffectual angel will find his wings and outsoar the spider point of view…. And, by the way, suppose we go and see how the spider is getting on."

We went out into the garden and found the web. But the little green corpse had gone, and the spider was digesting his meal somewhere out of sight.

(Note.—This article should be read in connection with that entitled "On the Downs.")

ON BEER AND PORCELAIN

I was reading an American journal just now when I came across the remark that "one would as soon think of drinking beer out of porcelain as of slapping Nietzsche on the back." Drinking beer out of porcelain! The phrase amused me, and set me idly wondering why you don't drink beer out of porcelain. You drink it (assuming that you drink it at all) with great enjoyment out of a thick earthenware mug or a pewter pot or a vessel of glass, but out of china, never. If you were offered a drink of beer out of a china basin or cup you would feel that the liquor had somehow lost its attraction, just as, if you were offered tea out of a pewter pot, you would feel that the drink was degraded and unpleasant. The explanation that the one drink is coarse and the other fine does not meet the case. People drink beer out of glass, and the finer the glass the better they like it. But there is something fundamentally discordant between beer and porcelain.

It is not, I imagine, that porcelain actually affects the taste or quality of the liquor. It is that some subtle sense of fitness is outraged by the association. The harmony of things is jangled. Touch and taste are no longer in sympathy, and we are conscious of a jar to some remote and inexplicable fibre of our being. It is in the realm of the palate that we get the miracle of these affinities and antipathies in their most elementary shape. Who was it who discovered that two such curiously diverse things as mutton and red-currant jelly make a perfect gastronomic chord? By what stroke of inspiration or luck did some unknown cook first see that apple sauce was just the thing to make roast pork sublime? Who was the Prometheus who brought to earth the tidings that a clove was the lover for whom the apple pudding had pined through all the ages?

Seen in the large, this world is just an inexhaustible mine of materials out of which that singular adventurer, man, is eternally bringing to light new revelations of harmony. The musician gathers together the vibrations of the air and discovers the laws of musical agreement, and out of that discovery emerges the stupendous mystery of song. The poet takes words, and out of their rhythms finds the harmonious vehicle for ideas. The scientist sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a symphony before which the mind stands mute and awestruck. The cook takes the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small, spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation—Bach fashioning that immortal Concerto for Two Violins that takes us out like unsullied children into fields of asphodel; Wordsworth looking out over Tintern Abbey and capturing for us that

      Sense sublime
    Of something far more deeply interfused,
    Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
    And the round ocean and the living air,
    And the blue sky and in the mind of man;

Botticelli weaving the magic lines of the Madonna of the Magnificat into a harmony that, once deeply felt, seems to dwell in the heart for ever. And you and I, though we are not captains in the adventure, all have our glimpses—glorious moments when the mind sings in tune with circumstance, when the beauty of the world, or the sense of fellowship with men or the anthem of incommunicable things seems to open out the vision of something that we would fain possess and are meant to possess.

"A mirage," you say, being a cynical person—"a mirage just to keep us going through the desert—a sort of carrot held before the nose of that donkey, man." Well, looking at the world to-day, it does rather seem that, if harmony is the main concern of the adventure, humanity had better give up the enterprise. In the light of the events in which we live, man is not merely the most discordant creature on earth: he is also the most ferocious animal that exists. Dryden's famous lines read like a satire:—

    From harmony, from heavenly harmony.
    This universal frame began;
    From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the
        notes it ran,
    The diapason closing full in man.

If Dryden could see Europe to-day he might at least find one flaw in that ode of which he had so exalted an opinion.

But the story of man is a long story, and we cannot see its drift from any episode, however vast and catastrophic. We are still only in the turbulent childhood of our career, and frightful as our excesses are, there is a motive behind them that makes them profoundly different from the wars of old. That motive is the idea of human liberty, the sanctity of public law, the right of every nation, small or great, to live its life free from the terrorism of force. When, in the ancient or mediaeval world, was there fought a war for a world idea like this? Despotism then had it all its own way. Even the Peace of Rome was only the peace of universal subjugation, not the peace of universal liberty based on law which the world is fighting to establish to-day. Never before has embattled democracy challenged the principle of tyranny for the possession of the world….

Ah, I know what you are thinking as you run your mind over the Allies. Liberty! Does Russia stand for liberty? Yes, in the circumstances of to-day, even Russia stands for liberty, for do not forget that this is not a war of the Russian bureaucracy, but a war sustained by the passion of the Russian people. And, Russia apart or Russia included, who can doubt that the cause of human freedom is in our hands, and the cause of ancient tyranny is in the hands of our enemy? May we not see in these baleful fires the Twilight of the Gods—of those old gods of blood and iron that have held the world in subjection through the long centuries of its travail? May we not see even in the midst of this discord and carnage, this hell of death and destruction, the new birth of humanity—the promise of a world set free?

Perhaps in that distant time when the tragedy of to-day is only an old chapter in the story of the human race it will be seen that Dryden, after all, was not guilty of a grim jest, but that this mighty discord was the announcement of that final harmony for which all that is best in us yearns. It may seem a hard vision to cherish to-day. But we must cherish it, or accept the hideous alternative that this is, after all, in very truth the madhouse of the universe. Can you live with that idea? Would it be worth while living with that idea? If not, then the other holds the field, and it is for all of us in our several ways, small or great, to work so that it may possess the field.

I have wandered somewhat far from the question of the beer and the porcelain, and yet I think you will find that the sequence is not lacking, and that the little window commands a large landscape.