Bay of Biscay: June 24
Somebody ought to start a series called “Books by Bores for People who Really Want to Know.”
These books would contain that particular information which you need at particular times and seasons, but which you cannot bear to have imparted to you at any other time. Information about the conditions of life on board different liners, for instance. If somebody begins to tell you about this when you are not going on a journey and he has just returned, you withdraw your attention and think of Tom Thumb, as Dr. Johnson did when people talked of the Punic Wars; or, if you are on familiar terms with the informant, you tell him to dry up. But when you are yourself starting on a journey, that is just what you want, in choosing your line and your steamer, and just what you can’t get. Nobody knows. It appears to be a dead secret. I am not going to give a particle of that information here,—I know the result too well. Any digression on any general subject, say the claims of Christian Science, or the merits of Harry Lauder’s songs, would be tolerated, but not that; because those things are topics, and this other thing is instruction. Neither children nor grown-up people can bear to be instructed. Children have to submit to it, until the general Children’s Strike occurs. Grown-up people needn’t and don’t, and if people insist on instructing them, they either kill them, as the Greeks killed Socrates, who was a schoolmaster abroad if ever there was one; or they put them in Coventry and isolate them by not listening, as the House of Commons did to Burke and Macaulay; or they damn them by saying, “So-and-so knows a lot, but he is a bore.” It need only be said once. The man is done for. He has quaffed an invisible and intangible poison more deadly than hemlock. He is a social leper. His approach is like a bell. Wherever he goes, he makes a desert. He can call it peace, if he likes.
That is why I shall say no word about the arrangements, the huge qualities and advantages, of the steamers of the Orient line.
But to go back to the Series of Books by Bores for People who Really Want to Know: I would suggest the following subjects:—
A Book telling you (A) whom to give tips to, and how much, in country-houses and hotels in all the countries of the world.
And (B) how much to public men, men of business, and like officials, anywhere.
Section (B) would be good reading if written by an expert, because the art of tipping or bribing a Prime Minister is no doubt a delicate one, and though one hears so much about the terrible bribery and corruption in many countries, one so rarely meets any one who has actually himself tipped or bribed either a rich Banker, a Magistrate, a General, an Archbishop, or a Minister for Foreign Affairs.