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Title: Over the Fireside with Silent Friends

Author: Richard King

Release date: April 20, 2008 [eBook #25111]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25111

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE
FIRESIDE WITH SILENT FRIENDS ***

Produced by Al Haines

OVER THE FIRESIDE
WITH SILENT FRIENDS

BY RICHARD KING

WITH A "FOREWORD" BY

SIR ARTHUR PEARSON, BART., G.B.E.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

WITH SILENT FRIENDS THE SECOND BOOK OF SILENT FRIENDS PASSION AND
POT-POURRI

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY

MCMXXI

Many of the following Essays appear by kind permission of the Editor
of "The Tatler."

Fifty per cent. of the author's profit on the sale of this book will be
handed over to the National Library of the Blind, Tufton Street,
Westminster, S.W.

I DEDICATE,

THIS LITTLE BOOK TO THOSE V.A.D.'S WHO, THOUGH THE WAR IS OVER, STILL
"CARRY ON" AND TO THOSE OTHER MEN AND WOMEN WHO, LIVING IN
FREEDOM, HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN THE MEN WHO FOUGHT OR DIED FOR IT

FOREWORD

BY SIR ARTHUR PEARSON, BART., G.B.E.

Those who buy "Over the Fireside" will purchase for themselves the real
joy of mentally absorbing the delightful thoughts which Mr. Richard King
so charmingly clothes in words. And they will purchase, too, a large share
of an even greater pleasure—the pleasure of giving pleasure to others—for
the author tells me that he has arranged to give half of the profits arising
from the sale of this book to the National Library for the Blind, thus
enabling that beneficent Institution to widen and extend its sphere of
usefulness.

You will never, perhaps, have heard of the National Library for the Blind,
and even if it so happens that you are vaguely aware of its existence, you
will in no true degree realise all that it means to those who are compelled to
lead lives, which however full and interesting, must inevitably be far more
limited in scope than your own. Let me try to make you understand what
reading means to the intelligent blind man or woman.

Our lives are necessarily narrow. Blind people, however keen their
understanding, and however clearly and sympathetically those around them
may by description make up for their lack of perception, must, perforce,
lead lives which lack the vivid actuality of the lives of others. To those of
them who have always been blind the world, outside the reach of their

hands, is a mystery which can only be solved by description. And where
shall they turn for more potent description than to the pages in which those
gifted with the mastery of language have set down their impressions of the
world around them?

And for people whose sight has left them after the world and much that is
in it has become familiar to them, reading must mean more than it does to
any but the most studious of those who can see. Some are so fortunate as to
be able to enlist or command the services of an intelligent reader, but this is
not given to any but a small minority, and even to these the ability to read at
will, without the necessity of calling in the aid of another, is a matter of real
moment, helping as it does to do away with that feeling of dependence
which is the greatest disadvantage of blindness.

All this Mr. Richard King knows nearly as well as I do, for he has been a
splendidly helpful friend to the men who were blinded in the War, and none
know better than he how greatly they have gained by learning to read anew,
making the fingers as they travel over the dotted characters replace the eyes
of which they have been despoilt.

Disaster sometimes leads to good fortune, and the disaster which befell
the blinded soldier has given to the service of the blind world generally the
affection and sympathy which Mr. Richard King so abundantly possesses.
Your reading of this book—and if you have only borrowed it I hope that
these words may induce you to buy a copy—will help to enable more blind
folk to read than would otherwise have been the case, and thus you will
have added to the happiness of the world, just as the perusal of "Over the
Fireside" will have added to your own happiness.

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Draw your chair up nearer to the fireside.

It is the hour of twilight. Soon, so very soon, another of Life's little days
will have silently crept behind us into the long dim limbo of half-forgotten
years.

We are alone—you and I. Yet between us—unseen, but very real—are
Memories linking us to one another and to the generation who, like
ourselves, is growing old. How still the world outside seems to have grown!
The shadows are lengthening, minute by minute, and presently, the garden,
so brightly beautiful such a little time ago in all the colour of its September
beauty, will be lost to us in the magic mystery of Night. Who knows? if in
the darkest shadows Angels are not standing, and God, returning in this
twilight hour, will stay with us until the coming of the Dawn!

Inside the room the fire burns brightly, for the September evenings are
very chilly. Its dancing flames illumine us as if pixies were shaking their
tiny lanterns in our faces.

DON'T you love the Twilight Hour, when heart seems to speak to heart,
and Time seems as if it had ceased for a moment to pursue its Deathless
course, lingering in the shadows for a while!

It is the hour when old friends meet to talk of "cabbages and kings," and
Life and Love and all those unimportant things which happened long ago in
the Dead Yesterdays. Or perhaps, we both sit silent for a space. We do not
speak, yet each seems to divine the other's thought. That is the wonder of
real Friendship, even the silence speaks, telling to those who understand the
thoughts we have never dared to utter.

So we sit quietly, dreaming over the dying embers. We make no effort,
we do not strive to "entertain." We simply speak of Men and Matters and
how they influenced us and were woven unconsciously into the pattern of
our inner lives.

So the long hour of twilight passes—passes. . . . . .

And each hour is no less precious because there will be so many hours
"over the fireside" for both of us, now that we are growing old.

But we would not become young again, merely to grow old again.

No! NO!

Age, after all, has MEMORIES, and each Memory is as a story that is
told.

Do you know those lovely lines by John Masefield—

"I take the bank and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your cornfield, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
Ever again, nor share the battle yonder

Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers."

And so I hope that a few of the embers in this little book will help to
warm some unknown human heart.

And that is all I ask!

CONTENTS

Books and the Blind
The Blind Man's Problem
Dreams
How to Help
On Getting Away from Yourself
Travel
Work
Farewells!
The "Butters"
Age that Dyes
Women in Love
Pompous Pride in Literary "Lions"
Seaside Piers
Visitors
The Unimpassioned English
Relations
Polite Conversation
Awful Warnings
It's oh, to be out of England—now that Spring is here
Bad-tempered People
Polite Masks
The Might-have-been

Autumn Sowing
What You Really Reap
Autumn Determination
Two Lives
Backward and Forward
When?
The Futile Thought
The London Season
Christmas
The New Year
February
Tub-thumpers
I Wonder If . . .
Types of Tub-thumpers
If Age only Practised what it Preached!
Beginnings
Unlucky in Little Things
Wallpapers
Our Irritating Habits
Away—Far Away!
"Family Skeletons"
The Dreariness of One Line of Conduct
The Happy Discontent
Book-borrowing Nearly Always Means Book-stealing
Other People's Books
The Road to Calvary
Mountain Paths
The Unholy Fear
The Need to Remember
Humanity

Responsibility
The Government of the Future
The Question
The Two Passions
Our "Secret Escapes"
My Escape and Some Others
Over the Fireside
Faith Reached through Bitterness and Loss
Aristocracy and Democracy
Duty
Sweeping Assertions from Particular Instances
How I came to make "History"
The Glut of the Ornamental
On Going "to the Dogs"
A School for Wives
The Neglected Art of Eating Gracefully
Modern Clothes
A Sense of Universal Pity
The Few
The Great and the Really Great
Love "Mush"
Wives
Children
One of the Minor Tragedies
The "Glorious Dead"
Always the Personal Note
Clergymen
Their Failure
Work In the East-end
Mysticism and the Practical Man

Abraham Lincoln
Reconstruction
Education
The Inane and Unimaginative
Great Adventure
Travel
The Enthralling Out-of-Reach
The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy
Faith
Spiritualism
On Reality in People
Life
Dreams and Reality
Love of God
The Will to Faith

OVER THE FIRESIDE

Books and the Blind

Strange as the confession may appear coming from one who, week in,
week out, writes about books, I am not a great book-lover! I infinitely
prefer to watch and think, think and watch, and listen. All the same, I would
not be without books for anything in this world. They are a means of getting
away, of forgetting, of losing oneself, the past, the present, and the future, in
the story, in the lives, and in the thoughts of other men and women, in the
thrill and excitement of extraneous people and things. One of the delights of
winter—and in this country winter is of such interminable length and
dreariness that we hug any delight which belongs to it alone as fervently as
we hug love to our bosoms when we have reached the winter of our lives!
—is to snuggle down into a comfy easy-chair before a big fire and, book in
hand, travel hither and thither as the author wills—hate, love, despair, or
mock as the author inveigles or moves us. I don't think that most of us pay
half enough respectful attention to books seeing how greatly we depend
upon them for some of the quietest pleasures of our lives. But that is the
way of human nature, isn't it? We rarely value anything until we lose it; we
sigh most ardently for the thing which is beyond our reach, we count our
happiest days those across the record of which we now must scrawl, "Too
late!" That is why I always feel so infinitely sorry for the blind. The blind
can so rarely get away from themselves, and, when they do, only with that

effort which in you and me would demand some bigger result than merely
to lose remembrance of our minor worries. When we are in trouble, when
we are in pain, when our heart weeps silently and alone, its sorrow
unsuspected by even our nearest and dearest, we, I say, can ofttimes deaden
the sad ache of the everyday by going out into the world, seeking change of
scene, change of environment, something to divert, for the nonce, the
unhappy tenor of our lives. But the blind, alas! can do none of these things.
Wherever they go, to whatever change of scene they flee for variety, the
same haunting darkness follows them unendingly.

The Blind Man's Problem

It is so difficult for them to get away from themselves, to seek that
change and novelty which, in our hours of dread and suspense, are our most
urgent need. All the time, day in, day out, their perpetual darkness thrusts
them back upon themselves. They cannot get away from it. Nothing—or
perhaps, so very, very few things—can take them out of themselves, allow
them to lose their own unhappiness in living their lives for something,
someone outside themselves. Their own needs, their own loss, their own
loneliness, are perpetually with them. So their emotions go round and round
in a vicious circle, from which there is no possible escape. Never, never can
they give. They have so little to offer but love and gratitude. But, although
gratitude is so beautiful and so rare, it is not an emotion that we yearn to
feel always and always. We want to give, to be thanked ourselves, to cheer,
to succour, to do some little good ourselves while yet we may. There is a
joy in giving generously, just as there is in receiving generously. Yet, there
are many moments in each man's life when no gift can numb the dull ache
of the inevitable, when nothing, except getting away—somewhere,
somehow, and immediately—can stifle the unspoken pain which comes to

all of us and which in not every instance can we so easily cast off. Some
men travel; some men go out into the world to lose their own trouble in
administering to the trouble of other people; some find forgetfulness in
work—hard, strenuous labour; most of us—especially when our trouble be
not overwhelming—find solace in art, or music, and especially in books.
For books take one suddenly into another world, among other men and
women; and sometimes in the problem of their lives we may find a solution
of our own trials, and be helped, encouraged, restarted on our way by them.
I thought of these things the other day when I was asked to visit the
National Library for the Blind in Tufton Street, Westminster. It is hidden
away in a side street, but the good work it does is spread all over the world.
And, as I wandered round this large building and examined the thousands of
books—classic as well as quite recent works—I thought to myself, "How
the blind must appreciate this blessing!" And from that I began to realise
once more how those who cannot see depend so greatly on books—that
means of "forgetting" which you and I pass by so casually. For we can seek
diversion in a score of ways, but they, the blind, have so few, so very few
means of escape. Wherever they go, they never find a change of scene—
merely the sounds alter, that is all. But in books they can suddenly find a
new world—a world which they can see.

Dreams

I can remember talking once to a blinded soldier about dreams. I have
often wondered what kind of dreams blind people—those who have been
blind from birth, I mean—dream, what kind of scenes their vision pictures,
how their friends, and those they love, look who people this world of
sleeping fancy. I have never had the courage to ask those blind people
whom I know, but this soldier to whom I talked, told me that every night

when he goes to bed he prays that he may dream—because in his dreams he
is not blind, in his dreams he can see, and he is once more happy. I could
have sobbed aloud when he told me, but to sob over the inevitable is useless
—better make happier the world which is a fact. But I realised that this
dream-sight gave him inestimable comfort. It gave him something to think
about in the darkness of the day. It was a change from always thinking
about the past—the past when he could laugh and shout, run wild and enjoy
himself as other boys enjoy their lives. And this blinded soldier used to be
reading—always reading. I used to chaff him about it, calling him a book-
worm, urging him to go to theatres, tea-parties, long walks. He laughed, but
shook his head. Then he told me that, although he never used to care much
for reading, books were now one of the comforts of his life. "When I feel
blind," he said—"and we don't always feel blind, you know, when we are in
the right company among people who know how to treat us as if we were
not children, and as if we were not deaf—I pick up a book, and, if I stick to
it and concentrate, I begin to lose remembrance and to live in the story I am
reading and among the people of the tale. And—it is more like seeing the
world than anything else I do!"

How to Help

I must confess, his remark gave me an additional respect for those huge
volumes of books written in Braille which he always carried about with him
than I had ever felt before. When you and I are "fed up" with life and
everybody surrounding us—and we all have these moods—we can escape
open grousing by taking a long walk, or by seeing fresh people and fresh
places, watching, thinking, and amusing ourselves in a new fashion. But the
blind have only books—they alone are the only handy means by which they
can get away from the present and lose themselves amid surroundings new

and strange. All the more need, then, for us to help along the good work
done by the National Library for the Blind. It needs more helpers, and it
needs more money. Working with the absolute minimum of staff and
outside expenses, it is achieving the maximum amount of good. As a
library, I have only to tell you that it contains 6,600 separate works in
56,000 volumes, supplemented by 4,000 pieces of music in 8,000 volumes
—a total of 64,000 items, which number is being added to every week as
books are asked for by the various blind readers. And in helping this great
and good work, I realise now that, to a certain extent, you are helping blind
people to see. For books do take you out of yourself, don't they? They do
help you to lose cognizance of your present surroundings, even if you be
surrounded perpetually by darkness, they do transplant you for a while into
another world—a world which you can see, and among men and women
whom, should the author be great enough, you seem to know as well. Books
are a blessing to all of us—but they are something more than a blessing to
the blind, they are a deliverance from their darkness. And we can all give
them this blessing, if we will—thank Heaven, and the women who give
their lives to the work of the National Library for the Blind!—this blessing,
which is not often heard of, is a work which will grow so soon as it is
known, a work the greatness and goodness of which are worthy of all help.

On Getting Away from Yourself

I always feel so sorry for the blind, because it seems to me they can never
get away from themselves by wandering in pastures new. It is trite to say
that the glory of the golden sunsets, the glory of the mountains and the
valleys, the coming of spring, the radiance of summer—all these things are
denied them. They are. But their great deprivation is that none of these
things can help them to get away from themselves, from the torments of

their own souls, the haunting dreadfulness of their own secret worries. We,
the more fortunate, not only can fill our souls with beauty by the
contemplation of beautiful things, but, when the tale of our inner-life
possesses the torments of Hell, we can turn to them in our despair because
we know that their glory will ease our pain, will help us to forget awhile,
will give us renewed courage to go on fighting until the end. But where all
is blackness, those inner-torments must assume gigantic proportions.
Nothing can take them away—except time and the weariness of a soul too
utterly weary to care any longer. But time works so slowly, and the utter
weariness of the soul is often so prolonged before, as it were, the spirit
snaps and the blessed numbness of indifference settles down upon our
hearts. People who can see have the whole of the wonder of Nature working
for them in their woe. It is hard to feel utterly crushed and broken before a
wide expanse of mountain, moorland, or sea. Something in their strength
and vastness seems to bring renewed vigour to our heart and soul. It is as if
God spoke words of encouragement to you through the wonder which is
His world. But blind—one can have none of these consolations. All is
darkness—darkness which seems to thrust you back once more towards the
terror of your own heart-break. Sometimes I wonder that the blind do not go
mad. To them there is only music and love to bring renewed courage to a
heart weary of its own conflict. To get away from yourself—and not to be
able to do it—oh, that must be Hell indeed! Verily sometimes the human
need of pity is positively terrifying.

Travel

We know what it would be were we never for a single instant able to get
away from the too-familiar scenes and people who, unconsciously, because
of their very familiarity, drive us back upon ourselves. In each life there are

a series of soul crises, when the spirit has to battle against some great pain,
some great trouble, some overwhelming disillusion—to win, or be for ever
beaten. But few, very few souls are strong enough to win that battle
unaided. A friend may do it—though friends to whom you would tell the
secret sorrows of your life are rare! But a complete change of scene and
environment works wonders. Nature, travel, work—all these things can
help you in your struggle towards indifference and the superficially normal.
But where Nature and travel are useless, and work—well, work has to be
something all-absorbing to help us in our conflict—is the only thing left, I
wonder how men and women survive, unless, with sightlessness, some
greater strength is added to the soul, some greater numbness to the
imagination and the heart. But this I so greatly doubt. Truthfully, as I said
before, the need for pity seems sometimes overwhelming, surpassing all
imagining. I am sure that I myself would assuredly have gone mad had I not
been able to lose myself a little in travel and change of scene. When the
heart is tormented by some great pain, the spirit seems too utterly spiritless
to do anything but despair. But life teaches us, among other things, some of
the panaceas of pain. It teaches us that the mind finds it difficult to realise
two great emotions at once, and that, where an emotion helps to take us out
of ourselves, by exactly the strength of that emotion, as it were, is the other
one robbed of its bitterness and its pain. Some people seek this soul-ease
one way and some people by other means, but seek it we all must one day
or another, and it seems to me that one of the wonders of the natural world,
the sunlight and the stars, is that they are always there, magnificent and
waiting, for the weary and the sorrowing to find some small solace in their
woe.

Work

Work and Travel, Travel and Work—and by Work I mean some labour so
absorbing as to drug all thought; and by Travel I mean Nature, and books,
and art, and music, since these are, after all, but dream-voyages in other
men's minds—they alone are for me the panacea of pain. Not the cackle of
the human tongue—that for ever leaves me cold; not the sympathy which
talks and reproves, or turns on the tap of help and courage by the usual trite
source—that never helps me to forget. But Work, and Travel, and (for me)
Loneliness—these are the three things by which I flee from haunting terrors
towards numbness and indifference. Each one, of course, has his own
weapons—these are mine. Years ago, when I was young and timid, I
dreaded to leave the little rut down which I wandered. Now experience has
given me the knowledge that Life is very little after all, and that it is for the
most part worthless where there is no happiness, no forgetfulness of pain,
no inner peace. The opinion of other people, beyond the few who love me,
leaves me cold. The praise or approbation of the world—what is it worth at
best, while it is boring nearly always? Each year as it passes seems to me,
not so much a mere passing of time and distance, but a further peak attained
towards some world, some inner vision, which I but half comprehend. Each
peak is lonelier, but, as I reach it and prepare to ascend the next, there
comes into my soul a wider vision of what life, and love, and renunciation
really mean, until at last I seem to see—what? I cannot really say, but I see,
as it were, the early radiance of some Great Dawn where everything will be
made clear and, at last and at length, the soul will find comfort, and
happiness, and peace. And the things which drag you away from this inner-
vision—they are the things which hurt, which age you before your time,
which rob you of joy and contentment. As a syren they seem to beckon you
into the valleys where all is sunshine and liveliness, and if you go . . . if you
go, alas! it is not long before once more you must set your face, a lonelier
and a sadder man, towards the mountain peaks. That seems to me to be the

story of—oh, so many lives! That seems to me to be the one big theme in a
tale which superficially is all jollity and laughter.

Farewells!

When Youth bids "Good-bye" to anything, it is usually to some very
tremendous thing—or at least, it seems to be tremendous in the eyes of
Youth. But Age—although few people ever suspect—is always saying
Farewell, not to some tremendous thing, because Age knows alas! that very
few things are tremendous, but to little everyday pleasures which Youth, in
the full pride of its few years, smiles at complaisantly, or ignores—for will
they not repeat themselves again and again, tomorrow perhaps, certainly
next year? But the "I Will" of Youth has become the "I may" of Old Age.
That is why Old Age is continually saying "Farewell" secretly in its heart.
Nobody hears it bid "Adieu" to the things which pass; it says "Addio" under
its breath so quietly that no one ever knows: and Old Age is very, very
proud. And Youth, seeing the smile by which Old Age so often hides its
tears, imagines that Age can have no sadness beyond the fact of growing
old. Youth is so strong, so free, so contemptuous of all restraint, so secretly
uncomprehending face to face with the tears which are hastily wiped away.
"For, what has Age to weep over?" it cries. "After all, it has lived its life; it
has had its due share of existence. How stupid—to quarrel with the shadows
when they fall!" But Old Age hearing that cry, says nothing. Youth would
not understand it were it to speak a modicum of its thoughts. Besides, Old
Age is fearful of ridicule; and Youth so often mistakes that fear for envy—
whereas, Old Age envies Youth so little, so very, very little! Would Old Age
be young again? Yes, yes, a thousand times Yes! But would Age be young
again merely to grow old again? No! A hundred thousand times No! Old
Age is too difficult a lesson to learn ever to repeat the process. Resignation

is such a hard-won victory that there remains no strength of will, no desire
to fight the battle all over again. And resignation is a victory—a victory
which nothing on earth can rob us. And because it is a victory, and because
the winning of it cost us so many unseen tears, so many pangs, so much
unsuspected courage, it is for Age one of the most precious memories of its
inner-life. No; Age envies Youth for its innocence, its vigour and its
strength; for its well-nigh unshakable belief in itself, in the reality of
happiness and of love: but Age envies it so little—the mere fact of being
young. It knows what lies ahead of Youth, and, in that knowledge, there can
be no room for envy. The Dawn has its beauty; so too has the Twilight. And
night comes at length to wrap in darkness and in mystery the brightest day.

The "Butters"

Of all the human species—preserve, oh! preserve me from the monstrous
family of the Goats. I don't mean the people who go off mountain climbing,
nor those old gentlemen who allow the hair round their lower jaw to grow
so long that it resembles a dirty halo which has somehow slipped down over
their noses; nor do I mean the sheepish individuals, nor those whom, in our
more vulgar moments, we crossly designate as "Goats." No; the people I
really mean are the people who can never utter a favourable opinion
without butting a "but" into the middle of it; people who, as it were, give
you a bunch of flowers with one hand and throw a bucket of cabbage-water
over you with the other. People, in fact, who talk like this: "Yes, she's a very
nice woman, but what a pity she's so fat!" or, "Yes, she's pretty, but, of
course, she's not so young as she was!" Nothing is ever perfect in the minds
of these people, nor any person either. For one nice thing they have to say
concerning men, women, and affairs, they have a hundred nasty things to
utter. They are never completely satisfied by anything nor anybody, and

they cannot bear that the world should remain in ignorance of the causes of
their dissatisfaction.

It isn't that they know there is often a fly in the amber so much as that
they perceive the fly too clearly, and that amber, even at its best, always
looks to them like a piece of toffee after all. How anybody ever manages to
live with these kind of people perpetually about the house I do not know.
And the worst of it is there seems no cure for the "Goats," and, unlike real
Goats, nothing will ever drive them into the wilderness for ever. Even if you
do occasionally drive them forth, they will return to you anon to inform you
that the wilderness, to which you have never been, is a hundred times nicer
than the cultivated garden which it is your fate to inhabit. The most
beautiful places on this earth are, according to them, just those places which
you have never visited, nor is there any likelihood of you ever being
fortunate enough to do so. If you tell them that the most lovely spot you
have ever seen is Beaulieu in May, when the visitors have gone, they will
immediately tell you that it isn't half so lovely as Timbuctoo—even when
the visitors are there. Should you talk to them of charming people, they will
describe to you the people they know, people whom you really would fall
violently in love with—only there is no chance of you ever meeting them,
because they have just gone to Jamaica. They "butt" their "but" into all your
little pleasures, and even when you really are enjoying yourself, and the
"but" would have to be a bomb to upset your equanimity, they will throw
cold water upon your ardour by gently hinting that you had better enjoy
yourself while you can, because you won't be young much longer. Ough!
Even when one is dead, I suppose, these "Goats" will stand round you and
say: "It's very sad . . . But we all have to die some time." And if they do, I
hope I shall come back suddenly to life to butt in with my own "but" . . .
"But I hope I shan't meet YOU in Heaven."

But I suppose these "butters" enjoy themselves, even though other people
don't enjoy them. They love to take you by the hand, as it were, and lead
you from the sunshine into the shady side of every garden. Not their delight
is it to work the limelight. Rather they prefer to cast a shadow—when they
can't turn out the lights altogether. And, strangely enough, these people are
the very people whose life is passed in the pleasantest places. It may be
that, metaphorically speaking, they have been so long used to the Powers of
existence that they delight in treasuring the weeds. Well, I, for one, wish
that they could live among these weeds for just so long a time as to become
quite sick of them—when, doubtless, they would return to us only too
anxious to see nothing but the simple flowers, and each simple flower an
exquisite joy in itself—although it fades!

Age that Dyes

So many women seem to imagine that when they dip their heads in henna
twenty years suddenly slips from off them into the mess. As a matter of fact,
they invariably pick up an additional ten years with the dye every time.
After all, the hair, even at its dullest and greyest, shows fewer of the painful
signs of Anno Domini than almost any part of the body. The eyes and the
hands, and, above all, the mind—these tell the tale of the passing years far
more vividly for those who pause to read. But then, so very many women
make the mistake of imagining that if their hair is fully-coloured and their
skin fairly smooth the world will be deceived into taking them for twenty-
nine. As a matter of fact, the world is far too lynx-eyed ever to be taken in
by any such apparent camouflage. On the contrary, it adds yet another ten
years to the real age, and classes the dyed one among the "poor old things"
for evermore. No, the truth of the matter is that, to keep and preserve the
illusion of youthfulness long after youth has slipped away into the dead

years behind us, is a far more difficult and complicated matter than merely
painting the face, turning brown hair red, and being divorced. Perhaps one
of the most rejuvenating effects is to show the world, while trying to believe
it yourself, that you don't honestly really care tuppence about growing old.
To show that you do care, and care horribly, is to look every second of your
proper age, with the additional effect of a dreary antiquity into the bargain.
It isn't sufficient to be strictly economical with your smiles for fear lest deep
lines should appear on your face (deep lines will come in spite of your
imitation of a mask), or to dye your hair a kind of lifeless golden, or to draw
your waist in, dress as youthfully as your own daughter, and generally try to
skip about as giddily as your own grandchildren. No, if you want to seem
youthful—and where is the woman who doesn't?—you must think
youthfully all the time. This doesn't mean that you must act youthfully as
well. Oh, dear me, no! Old mutton skipping about like a super-animated
young lamb—that, indeed, gives an impression of old age which
approaches to the antiquity of a curio. No, you must keep your intelligence
alert, your sympathies awake; you must never rust or get into a "rut"; above
all, you must keep in touch with the aims of youth, without necessarily
merely imitating its antics—then a woman will always possess that interest
and that charm which never stales, and which will carry her through the
years with the same triumph as her youth once did, or her beauty—if she
ever possessed any. And if she must use the artificial deceptions of
chemists, which deceive nobody, let her do it so artfully that,
metaphorically speaking, she preserves the lovely mellow atmosphere of an
"old picture," not the blatant colouring of a lodging-house daub.

But, of course, one of the hardest problems of a woman's life is to realise
just when she must acknowlege that her youthful prime is past. Some
women never seem able to solve it. They either hang on to the burlesque
semblance of twenty-five, or else go all to pieces, and take unto themselves
"views" as violent as they are sour. When they cannot command the

uncritical admiration of the gaping crowd, they descend from their thrones
to shy brickbats at everyone who doesn't look at them twice. A wise woman
realises that although at forty she cannot be the centre of attraction for her
youthfulness alone, she can yet command a circle of true friends, which,
though smaller in number, is more deeply devoted in intention. But she will
never be able to keep even these unless her sympathies are wide, her heart
full of understanding, unless she keeps herself mentally alert and her sense
of humour perpetually bright. Should she do so, hers will be the triumph of
real charm; and, providing that she grows older not only gracefully but also
cheerfully, not by plastering herself over with chemical imitations of her
own daughter's youth, but by shading becomingly, as it were, the inevitable
ravages of time, which nothing on earth will ever hide; by dressing not
more than five years younger than she really is—then her attractiveness will
continue until she is an old, old woman. And I would back her in the race
for real devotion against all the flappers who ever flapped their crepe de
chine wings to dazzle the eyes of that cheapest of feminine prey—the
elderly married man.

Women in Love

Have you noticed how a woman displays much more "sang froid" in love
than a man? Her heart may be aflame, but there always seems to be a tiny
lump of ice which keeps her head cool. Only when a woman is not quite
sure of her captor does she begin to lose her feminine "un-dismay." So long
as she is being chased she can always remain calm and collected, perhaps
because she knows that, however hot her lover may be in pursuit, the race
began by giving her a long start, and, being well ahead, she can listen in
camouflaged amusement to the man's protestations of her "divinity" as he
"galollups" madly after her. When you come across lovers in that state of

oblivion to staring eyes—as you do come across them so often during these
beautiful warm evenings—it is always the man who looks supremely
sheepish; the woman doesn't "turn a hair." She simply stares at the intruder
as if she wanted him to see for himself how very attractive she is. The man,
on the other hand, never meets the stranger's eyes. His expression invariably
shows that he is wishing for the earth to open—which, in parenthesis, it
never does when you most want it to. But the girl is quite unembarrassed.
Even when it is she who is making love, a staring and smiling crowd will
not force her to desist. She just goes on stroking her lover's face and kissing
him. But the man looks a perfect fool, and, I am sure, feels it. It seems
indeed, as if he would cry to the onlookers, "Don't blame me. It's human
nature. I shall get over it quite soon!" But the girl seems to say: "By all
means—watch us! This, for me, is 'Der Tag'!" No, you can't disconcert a
woman in love—it makes her quite vain-glorious.

I wonder why love always seems such a splendid "joke" to those who are
out of it, when it was a paralysing reality while they were in it. And yet, as
one looks back upon one's love affairs one invariably refers to the incident
as the time when "I made a fool of myself." And yet love is no laughing
matter. Considering that ninety-nine per cent. of our novels and plays are
about nothing else; considering that our songs and our poetry, and the
scandal we like to hear, all centre around this one theme, we really ought to
take it more seriously. But if we see two lovers making love to each other
we laugh outright. It is very strange! I suppose it is that everybody else's
love affairs are ridiculous; only our own possess the splendour of a Greek
tragedy. Perhaps we share with Nature her sense of humour, which makes
love one of the biggest practical jokes in life. So we jeer at love in order to
hide our own "soreness," just as we laugh at the man who sits down
suddenly in Piccadilly because his foot stepped on a banana skin—we laugh
at him because it wasn't we who sat down. Altogether love is a conundrum,
and we laugh at the answer Fate gives us because we dare not show the

world we want to cry. Laughter is the one armour which only the gods can
pierce. Lovers never laugh—at least, they never laugh at love—that is why
we can turn them into such glorious figures of fun.

But I always wonder why a woman of a "thousand loves" assumes a kind
of "halo," when a man of equal passion only gets called a "libertine," if not
worse things. I suppose we think it must have been so clever of her. We
speak of her as inspiring love, though a man who inspires the same
wholesale affection isn't considered nice for young women to know. It is,
apparently because we realise that a woman very rarely loses her head in
love. She may have had a thousand lovers, but only made herself look a
"silly idiot" over one. But a man looks a "silly idiot" every time. We know
he must have uttered the usual eternal protestations on each occasion. But a
woman only has to listen, and can always hear "the tale" without losing her
dignity. She merely begins to talk when a man comes "down to earth."
While his "soul" had soared verbally she enjoyed him as she enjoys a
"ballad concert," those love songs which say so much and mean so very
little.

Pompous Pride in Literary "Lions"

I always think that the author who places his own photograph as an
illustrated frontispiece to his own book must be either an exceedingly brave
man or an exceedingly misguided one. At any rate, he runs a terrible risk,
amounting almost to certain calamity, in regard to his literary admirers. I
have never yet known an author—and this applies to authoresses as well—
whose face, if you liked his work, was not an acute disappointment the
moment you clapped eyes upon it. For example, I am a devoted admirer of
"Amiel's Journal", but it is years since I have torn Amiel's photograph from

the covers of his book. I could not bear to think that such lovely, such
poetical thoughts, should issue from a man who, in his portrait, anyway,
looks like nothing so much as a melancholy Methodist minister, the most
cheerful characteristic of whom is "Bright's disease."

In the days of my extreme youth I admired a well-known authoress—in
public, be it understood, as is the way of youth. The world was given to
understand that in her seductive heroines she really drew her own portrait.
This same world lived long in blissful ignorance that what was stated to be
a fact was only the very small portion of a half-truth. For years this famous
lady refused to have her photo published. She even went so far as to tell the
world so in every "interview" which journalists obtained from her—either
regarding her views on "How best to obtain an extra sugar-allowance in
war-time," or concerning "Queen Mary's noble example to English women
to wear always the same-sort-of-looking hat." This extreme modesty piqued
the curiosity of her ten million readers enormously. The ten million, of
which I was a member, imagined that she must be too beautiful and too
elegant to possess brains, unless she were a positive miracle. We pictured
her as tall and graceful, with a lovely willowy figure and an expression all
sad tenderness when it wasn't all sweet smiles.

Then one fatal day the famous authoress decided—too late, I'm afraid, by
more than twenty years—to show her face to the ten million worshippers
who demanded so greatly to see it. The irrevocable step being taken,
disillusion jumped to our eyes, as the French say, and nearly blinded us.
Instead of the goddess we had anticipated, all we saw was, gazing at us out
of the pages of an illustrated newspaper, an over-plump, middle-aged
"party" with no figure and a fuzzy fringe, who stood smiling in an open
French window, and herself completely filling it! The shock to our worship
was so intense that it made most of us think several times before spending

7_s_. on her new love story, were it ever so romantic. And so that was the
net result of that!

Wiser far is the other well-known authoress, who apparently had her last
photograph taken somewhere back in the early nineties, and still sends it
forth to the press as her "latest portrait study," which, perhaps, if she be as
wise as she is witty, it will for ever be.

No, I think that authors who insist upon their own photographs appearing
in their own books are either very foolish or puffed out with pompous pride.
Nobody really wants to look at them a second time; or, even if they do, nine
times out of ten those who stay to look remain to wish they hadn't. I have
never yet known an author's face which compared in charm and interest
with the books he writes. Taking literature as a professional example, it
cannot truthfully be said that beauty often follows brains. In the case of
authors, as in so many other cases, to leave everything to the imagination is
by far the better policy in the long run. But there is this consolation, anyway
—we are what we are, after all, and our faces are very often libels on our
"souls."

Granting this, the theory of the resurrection of the body always leaves me
inordinately cold. As far as I, myself, am concerned, the worms can have
my body—and welcome. May I prove extremely indigestible, that's all!
Preferably, I want to "cease upon the midnight without pain," in the middle
of a dynamite explosion. I want, as it were, to return to the dust from which
I came in one big bang! And if I must have a Christian burial, then I hope
that all of me which remains for my more or less sorrowing relatives to
bury, decently and in order, will, at most, be one—old boot! Of course, if I
do die in the middle of an explosion, I grant that, if the resurrection of the
body really be a fact, then I shall find it extremely tiresome to hunt
everywhere for my spare parts. It will be such a colossal bore having to

worry all the other people, also busy collecting themselves, who went up
with me in the "bang," by keeping on demanding of them the information,
"Excuse me, but have you by any chance seen anything of a big-toe nail
knocking about?" I always feel so sorry for those Egyptian princesses
whose teeth and hair, whose jewels and old bones, proved such an
irresistible attraction to the New Zealand and Australian soldiers when they
were in camp near Cairo, that they stole out at night to rob their tombs, and
sent the plunder thus obtained "way back home to the old shack" as
souvenirs of the Great War. It will be so perfectly aggravating for these
royal ladies to resurrect in a tomb which, in parenthesis, they had purposely
constructed to last them until the Day of Judgment—to resurrect therein,
only to discover that some of their necessary parts are either in Auckland, or
in Sydney, or in Melbourne, or, perhaps, in all three cities. It will be but
poor consolation to learn that the rest of them may, perhaps, be discovered
among the sands of the desert—that is to say, if they scratch about long
enough looking for them. Personally, if I get the chance, I shall immediately
go about purloining other people's physical perfections, so that, when at last
I am ready for the next move onward, I shall consist of one part Hercules
and three-parts Owen Nares! I shall indeed look lovely, shan't I? In the
meanwhile, I realise that, physically speaking, I am far better imagined than
understood. Not that I am very much worse than the average? on the other
hand, I am certainly not much better—so who would be the happier for
gazing at my photograph? No, indeed, it cannot be for their beauty that
authors insert their own photographs—sometimes, even, on the outside
covers of their own books! For what beauty they do possess has usually
been lost somewhere on the original negative. If they still yearn to let
themselves be seen, as well as read, I would suggest that the frontispiece be
the one page in the book to be uncut, so that their readers, should they wish
to peep at the author's physiognomy for curiosity's sake, may—if that
curiosity prove its own punishment—leave those first pages uncut until the

book falls to pieces on the bookshelf. For myself, I hate to read some
beautifully written thought, only to have the author's distinctly unbeautiful
face always protruding between me and my delight—like some utterance of
the commonplace in the middle of a discussion on "souls."

I suppose it is that authors—like everybody else—cannot understand that
how they look to themselves and to those who love them, and so are used to
them, they will not necessarily look to other people, who merely want to
gaze upon their photograph because they cannot look upon their waxwork.
We all get so used to our own blemishes by seeing them every morning
when we brush our hair that we have long since ceased to regard them
seriously. But ten to one a stranger will notice nothing else. That is always
the way of a stranger's regard. But, after all, to fail to impress someone who
knows you and loves you is nothing at all; to fail, however, to impress
someone who yearns to become acquainted with you, is very often to lose a
possible friend. Better a thousand times that an adoring reader should keep
yearning to know what her favourite author looks like than, having at last
satisfied her curiosity, she should exclaim disappointedly, "Gosh! To think
that he could look like that!!"

If an author feels that indeed he must show the world what he looks like,
let him issue to the public merely a "vague impression" of himself—a
Cubist one for preference. A Cubist portrait can look like anything . . . but
to look like anything is infinitely preferable to looking like nothing on this
earth, isn't it?

Seaside Piers

The only real excitement I can ever perceive about a Seaside Pier is when
the sea washes half of it away. To me, Seaside Piers are the most deadly
things. You pay tuppence to go on them, and you generally stay on them
until you can stay no longer because—well, because you have paid
tuppence. Having walked along the dreary length of the tail-end which joins
the shore, there seems really nothing to do at the end of your journey except
to spit over the side. Of course, there are always those derelict kind of
amusements such as putting a penny in a slot and being sprayed with some
vile scent; or putting a ha'penny in another slot and seeing a lead ball being
shot into any hole except the one in which, had it disappeared therein, you
would have got your money back. For the rest, I am sure that half the
people remain on them for the simple reason that tuppence is tuppence in
these days or any other days. Of course, there is generally a band which
plays twice, sometimes three times, a day; but it is not a band which ever
does much more than blast its way through a selection from "Carmen," or a
fantasia on "Faust." Of course, if you like crowds—well, a pier is for you
another name for Paradise. Nobody uses the tail-part except to walk to the
end, or from it, on the side which is protected from the wind. But the end of
a pier—where it swells and the band plays—is a kind of receptacle which
receives the human debouch. There you have the spectacle of what human
beings would look like if they were put into a bowl, like goldfish, and had
nothing to do but swim round and round.

I suppose there is an amusement in such a picture—because, look at the
women who come there every morning and bring their knitting! And the
"flappers" and the "knuts"—they seem never to tire of seeing each other
pass and re-pass for a solid hour on end! Why do they go there? It cannot be
to see clothes, because the most you see, as a rule, is a white skirt and
blouse and a brown neck all peeling with the heat! They must go there,
then, because to go on the pier is all part and parcel of the seaside habit—
and an English seaside, anyway, is one big bunch of habits, from the three-

mile promenade of unsympathetic asphalt, with its backing of houses in the
Graeco-Surbiton style, to the railway station at the back of the town, where
antiquated "flies" won't take anybody anywhere under half-a-crown. It
belongs, I suppose, to that strain of fidelity which runs through the British
"soul"—a fidelity which finds expression in facing death sooner than forego
roast beef on Sunday, and will applaud an old operatic favourite until her
front teeth drop out. It is all very laudable, but it has its "trying" side. One
becomes rather tired of the average seaside resort, which is built and
designed rather as if the "authorities" believed that God made Blackpool on
the Seventh Day, and it was their religious duty to erect replicas of His
handiwork up and down the coast. And under this delusion piers, I suppose,
were born.

Well, certainly they are convenient to throw yourself off the end of them.
Happily—or unhappily, whichever way you look at it—the town council
never seem to know quite what to do with them. Beside the penny fair and
the brass band, they only seem to be the haven of rest for fifth-rate
theatrical touring companies, who manage to pay for their summer outing in
the theatre erected at the end. Otherwise their importance consists chiefly in
being a convenient place for the "flapper" to "meet mother," and to carry on
a violent flirtation, without the slightest danger, with any Gay Lothario in
lavender socks who kind o' tickles them with his eyes and makes them
giggle. But for myself, who have no mamma to meet, nor any desire to flop
about with "flappers," piers are deadly things. Their great excitement is
when the sea washes half of them away at a moment when, apparently, five
thousand people living in boarding-houses had only just vacated them. And
sometimes even that miraculous escape seems a pity! What do you think?

Visitors

I always think that visitors are charming "interruptions." They are
delightful when they arrive; they are equally delightful—perhaps more so—
when they go. Only on the third day of their visit are they tiresome, and
their qualities distinctly below the par we expected. Almost anybody can
put up with almost anybody for three days. There is the delight of showing
him over the house, bringing out all our treasures and listening the while
our visitor shows us his envy (or his hypocrisy) by his compliments; there is
the pleasure of taking him round the garden and pointing out our own pet
plants and bulbs. Even the servants can keep smiling through three days of
extra work. But the second night begins to see us becoming exhausted. We
have said everything we wanted to say. We have taken him up to the attic
and to the farthest ends of the pig sty, we have laid down the law
concerning our own pet enthusiasms and tolerated him while he told us
about his own. But a sense of boredom begins to creep into our hearts at the
end of the second evening, which, if there were not the pleasure of bidding
him "Good-bye" on the morrow to keep our spirits up, would end in
exasperation to be fought down and a yawn to be suppressed. The man who
invented "long visits" ought to be made to spend them for the rest of his life
as a punishment. There is only one thing longer—though it sounds rather
like a paradox to say so—and that is a "long day." To "spend a long day"
with anyone sees both you and your hostess "sold up" long before the
evening. Happily, that infliction is a country form of entertainment, and is
reserved principally for relations and family friends who might otherwise
expect us to ask them for a month.

You see, most of us are creatures possessing habits as well as a liver.
Visitors are a fearful strain on both—after forty-eight hours. The strain of
appearing at our most hospitable and best—from the breakfast egg in the
morning to the "nightcap" at night—is one which only those who are given
a bed-sitting-room and a door with a key in it can come through
triumphantly. Visitors usually have nothing to do, while we have our own

work—and the two can rarely mate for long. Of course, there are visitors
who seem born with a gift for visiting; they give us of their brightest and
best for forty-eight hours and have "letters to write" up in their bedroom
during most of the subsequent days of their sojourn. Also there are
hostesses who seem born with the "smile of cordiality" fixed on to their
mouths. They also give of their best and brightest for forty-eight hours and
then, metaphorically, give their guests a latch-key and a time-table of meals,
and wash their hands of them until they meet again on the door-step of
"farewell." But the majority of visitors seem incapable of leading their own
lives in any house except their own. They follow you about and wait for
you at odd corners, until you are either driven to committing murder or
going out to the post-office to send a telegram to yourself killing off a great
aunt and giving an early date for her funeral. Also there are some hostesses
who cannot let their guests alone; who must always be asking them "What
are they going to do to-day," or telling them not to forget that Lady
Sploshykins is coming to tea especially to meet them! Frantic for our
entertainment, they invite all the dull people of the neighbourhood to meals,
and drag us along with them to the dull people's houses on the exchange
visit. They are always terrified that we are "feeling it dull," whereas the
dulness really comes of our not being allowed to stupefy in peace.

"Never outstay your welcome" is one of the social adages I would
impress upon all young people; and "Be extremely modest concerning the
length to which that welcome would be likely to extend" is an addenda to it.
Failing any other calculation, forty-eight hours of being a "fixture" and
twelve hours of packing up are generally the safe limit. Following that
advice, you will generally enjoy the dullest visit and will want to come
again; following that advice, also, your hostess will enjoy seeing you and
hope you will. Not to follow it is to risk losing a friend. Everybody hates
the visitor who comes whenever he is asked and stays far too long when he
arrives.

The Unimpassioned English

I have just been to see the latest musical comedy. Of course, I feel in love
with the heroine. Could I help myself? Even women have fallen in love
with her—so what chance has a mere male, and one at the dangerous age at
that? But what struck me almost as much as the youthful charm and
cleverness of the new American "star" and the invigoratingly "catchy"
music, was the way in which all the young men on the stage put both their
hands into their trouser pockets the moment they put on evening clothes!
They didn't do it in their glad day-rags . . . or, at least, only one hand at a
time, anyway. But immediately they appeared en grande tenue, both their
hands disappeared as if by magic! C'etait bien drole, j'vous assure! Perhaps
. . . who knows? . . . they were but counting their "moneys." . . . For the
chorus ladies are certainly rather attractive, and even a svelte figure has
been known to hold a big dinner! But the fact still remains . . . if one night
some wicked dresser takes it into his evil head to stitch up their trouser
pockets, every one of the young men will have to come on and do physical
"jerks," or go outside and cut his own arms off!

But then, most Englishmen seem at a loss to know what to do with their
limbs when they are not using them for anything very special at the
moment. Have you ever sat and watched the "niggly" things which people
—especially Englishmen—do with their hands when they don't know what
to do with them otherwise? It is very instructive, I assure you. I suppose our
language does not lend itself to anything except being spoken out of our
mouths. Unlike Frenchmen, we have not learnt to talk also with our hands.
We consider it "bad form" . . . like scratching in public where you itch!
Well, perhaps our decision in this respect has added to the general fun of
existence. In life's everyday, one doesn't notice these things, maybe. One
has become so habituated to "Father" drumming "Colonel Bogey" on the
chair-arm; or "Little Willee" playing "shakes" with two ha'pennies and a

pen-knife—that one has ceased to pay any attention to these minor
irritations. And, when we are among strangers, we are so busy watching that
people don't put their hands into our pockets, that we generally put our own
hands into them for safety. . . . Which, perhaps, accounts for the
Englishman's habit . . . who knows?

But on the stage, this custom is an almost mesmeric one to watch. We
certainly do see other people at a disadvantage when they are strutting the
Boards of Illusion . . . men especially. But to a foreigner, who is not used to
seeing a man's hands disappear the moment he is asked to stand up, the
sight must come with something of a shock. For my own part, I think his
amazement is justified. Surely God gave a man two hands for other needs
than to pick things up with or hide them?

Personally, I always think that it is a thousand pities that men are not
expected to knit. They grew up to be idle in the drawing-room, I suppose, in
times when every other woman was a "Sister Susie." But the "Sister Susie"
species is nowadays almost extinct. It requires a German offensive to drive
the modern woman towards her darning needles.

In a recent literary competition in EVE, the subject was "Bores, and how
to make the best of them." Well, personally, I could suffer them—if not
more gladly, at least with a greater resignation—if I were allowed to recite,
"Two plain; one purl" so long as their infliction lasted. As it is, I am left
with nothing else to do except furtively to watch the clock, and secretly to
ring up "OO Heaven" to send down a bombing party to deliver me.

Men of the Latin races are far more wise in this respect. If you tied the
hands of a Frenchman, or an Italian, or even a Spaniard, up behind his back,
the odds are he would be struck dumb! But we Englishmen—we only seem
able to become eloquent when, as it were, we have voluntarily placed our
own hands into the handcuffs of our own trouser pockets. Even

Englishwomen are singularly un-self-revealing with anything except their
tongues. You have only to watch an Englishwoman singing to realise how
extremely limited are her powers of expression. She places both hands over
her heart to represent "Love," and opens them wide to illustrate every other
emotion.

And this self-restriction—especially when you can't hear what she is
singing about, which is not seldom—leads more quickly to the wrinkles of
perplexity than even does the problem of how to circumvent the culinary
soarings of Mrs. Beaton, and yet obtain the same results . . . with eggs at the
price they are! If some producing genius had not conceived the idea of
ending off nearly every musical-comedy song with a dance, and yet another
genius of equally enviable parts had not created the beauty chorus, I don't
know how many a prima donna of the lighter stage would ever be able to
get through her own numbers. For, to dance at the end of her little ditty, and
to have the chorus girls relieve her of further action at the end of the first
verse, brings as great a relief to her as well as to the audience, as do his
trouser pockets to the young man who makes-believe to love her for ever
and for ever . . . and then some, on the stage.

And, because we have taken the well-dressed "poker" as our ideal of
masculine "good form" in society, English men and women always seem to
exude an atmosphere of "slouching" indifference to everything except their
God—and football. It has such a very chilling effect upon exuberant
foreigners when they run up against it. Emotionally, I am sure we are as
developed as any other nation . . . look at our poetry, for example! But we
have so long denied the right to express it, that we have forgotten how it
should be done.

"I shall love you on and on . . . throughout life; after death; until the end
of eternity . . . !" declares the impassioned Englishman, the while he

carelessly shakes the dead-end off his cigarette on to somebody else's
carpet.

"And for you, Egbert, the world will be only too well lost. I will willingly
die with you . . . at any time most convenient to yourself," answers his
equally-impassioned mistress, gently replacing an errant kiss-curl behind
her left ear.

Well, I suppose it does take another Englishman to realise that these two
are preparing for a crime passionel. But a simple foreigner, more used to the
violence of the "movies" in everyday life than we are, might be excused if
he merely believed them to be protesting a preference for prawns in aspic
over prawns without.

Not, however, that it really matters . . . so long as the lovers, like
Maisie, "get right there" at the finish. For, after all, does not
passion mostly end in the same kind of old "tripe" . . . either here in
England or . . . well, let us say . . . the tropics?

Relations

Our Relations are a race apart. They are not often our friends; rarer still
are they our enemies. They are just "relations"—men and women who treat
our endeavours towards righteousness with all the outspoken hostility of
those who dislike us, whom yet we do not want to quarrel with because then
there may be nobody left except the village doctor to bury us.

Relations always seem to know us too little, and too well. The good in us
is continually warped by the bad in us—which, in parenthesis, is the only
one of our secrets relatives ever seem able to keep. To tell the world of our

faults would be like throwing mud at the family tree. Moreover, relations
always seem born with long memories. There is no one in this world who
remembers quite so far back, nor quite so vividly, as a mother-in-law. And
one's relations-in-law are but one's own relations in a concentrated and
more virulent form. And yet everybody is somebody's relation. You
consider that remark trite, perhaps? Well, "trite" it undoubtedly is, and yet it
is extremely difficult to realise. The middle-aged woman whom you find so
charming, so sympathetic, so very "understanding," may send her nephews
and nieces fleeing in all directions the moment she appears among them.
The man you look upon as being an insufferable bore may still be Miss
Somebody-or-other's best beloved Uncle John. It is so hard to explain. It is
almost as hard to explain as the charm of the man your closest woman-
friend marries. What she can see in him you cannot for the life of you
perceive, while he, on his part, secretly wonders why the woman he loves
ever sought friendship with such a pompous, dull ass as you are. Love is
blind, so they say. Well, so is friendship—so are relations—blind to
everything except your faults.

Another odd thing about relations is that only very rarely can you ever
make friends with them. At best, your intimacy amounts to nothing more
than a truce. You are extremely lucky if it isn't open warfare. They know at
once too little about you and too much. They never by any chance
acknowledge that you have changed, that you are a better man than once
you were. What you have once been, in their opinion, you will always be—
so help-them-heaven-to-hide-the-wine-cellar-key! You may change your
friends as you "grow out" of them, or they "grow out" of you; but your
relations are for ever immutable. The friends of your youth you have
sometimes nothing in common with later on, except "memories"; and
except for these "memories" there is little or no tie between you. But the
"memories" of friends centre around pleasant things, whereas the
"memories" of relations seem to specialise at all times in the disagreeable.

Moreover, relations will never acknowledge that you have ever really
grown up. This is one of their most tiresome characteristics. To them you
will always be the little boy who forgot to write profusive thanks for the
half-a-crown they gave you when you first went to school. You can always
tell the man or woman who live among their relatives. They possess no
individuality, no "vision"; they are narrow, self-centred, pompous, clannish
—with that clannishness which means only complete self-satisfaction with
the clan. They take their mental and moral "cue" from the oldest generation
among them. The younger members are, metaphorically speaking, patted on
the head and told to believe in grandpapa as they believe in God.

No, the great benefit of having relations is to come back to them. To visit
them is like stirring up once more the memories of your lost youth, which
time and distance have rendered faint. And to return once more to one's
youth is good for every man. It makes him realise himself, and the "thread"
which has been running through his life linking all the incidents together.
And, as I said before, relations are agreeable adjuncts at your own funeral,
since you may always depend upon them saying nice things about you
when it's too late for you to hear them. Friends will never do that. They
don't need to. They carry your epitaph with them written on their own
hearts. The "nice" things have been said—they have been said to YOU.

Polite Conversation

A man may live to be a hundred; he may have learnt to speak twelve
different languages—all badly; he may know, in fact, everything a man
ought to know, and have done everything a man ought to have done; but
one thing he probably won't have learnt—or, if he has done so, then he
ought to be counted among the Twelve Apostles and other "wonders"—and

that is the fact that, what interests him enormously to talk about won't
necessarily be anything but a bore for other people to listen to. Most people
talk a great deal and tell you absolutely nothing you want particularly to
know. The man or woman who can talk impersonally is as rare as a psychic
phenomenon when you want to see it but won't pay for a manifestation!
Most people can talk of nothing but themselves because nothing else really
interests them. I don't mean to say that they boast, but, what they talk about
is purely their own personal affair—ranging from golf to grandchildren.
That is what makes dogs the most sympathetic listeners in the world. Could
they speak, I fear me they would only tell us about their puppies, or of their
new bone, or of the rat they worried to death the last time they scampered
through the wood. Cats are far more egotistical, and consequently far more
human. They can't talk, it is true; neither can they listen. By their manner
we know exactly what interests them at the moment, and if they appear to
sympathise with us, it is only because what we want at the moment fits in
admirably with their own desires. And so many people are just like cats in
this. They invite us to their houses, presumably because they desire our
company, but, in reality, in order that they may relate to us at length the
incidents, big or small, which have marked the calendar of their recent very
everyday existence.

But we, on our side, are not without our means of revenge. We invite
them back again, under protestations of friendship, and, when we have got
them, and, as it were, chained them down with the fetters of politeness, we
relate to them in our turn everything which has happened to us and ours. We
never ask ourselves if our children, or our cook, or our new hat, or our next
summer holiday can interest anybody outside the radius of their influence.
We demand another human being to smile when we smile, show anger
when we show anger, echo our own admiration for our new hat, and
generally retrace with us our life in retrospect and journey with us into the
problematical future. For, as I said before, the wisdom which realises that

the incidents of our own life need not—very probably do not, although they
may be too polite to show it—interest other people, is the rarest wisdom of
all. Most people will never, never learn it. And the more people love their
own affairs, the more they seek the world for listeners whom, as it were,
they may devour. They usually have hundreds of intimates, and boast at
Christmas of having sent off a thousand cards! As a matter of fact, they very
probably have not one real friend. But that does not trouble them. They
don't require friendship. They only need, as it were, a perpetual pair of ears
into which to pour the trivialities of their daily life. Personally, I get so tired
of listening to stories of children I have never seen; golfing "yarns" which I
have heard before; servants—all as bad as each other; Lloyd George; new
clothes; ailments; what Aunt Emily intends to do with last year's frock, and
of little Flora's cough. I wish it were the fashion for people to ask their
friends to do something, instead of securing their society, with nothing to do
with it when they've got it, except to offer hours for conversation with
literally nothing to say on either side. I should like to read a book in
company, it is nice to work in company; a visit to a theatre with a congenial
companion is delightful—and this, of course, applies to concerts, lectures,
picture galleries, even shopping. But the usual form of friendly
entertainment is a deadly thing. Only a cook, who at the same time is an
artist, can make them possible. For you can endure hours of little other than
the personal note in conversation with the compensation of a culinary chef'
d'oeuvre in front of you. That is why you so often hear of a "perfectly
charming woman with a simply wonderful cook." It's the cook, I fancy, who
is the real charmer.

Awful Warnings

Old Age is bad enough, but a dyspeptic Old Age—that surely is fate
hitting us below the belt! For with advancing years the love of adventure
leaves us; the "Love of a Lifetime" becomes to us of more real consequence
than our pet armchair—but the love of a good dinner, that, at least, can
make the everyday of an octogenarian well worth living. Young people little
realise the awful prophecy implied in that irritating remark—"Don't
gobble!" There is another one, almost equally irritating to youth—"Go and
change your socks!" But, if the truth must be told, you regret the "No" you
said to Edwin when he asked you to "fly with him"; the louis you failed to
place en plein on thirty-six, which you felt was coming up, infinitely less
than that you still persisted to "gobble" when you were warned not to, and
you failed to change your socks while there was yet time. Now it is too late,
alas! How true it is, the saying—"If Youth knew how, and Age only could."
The trouble is that, when elderly people would warn youth, they rarely ever
give concrete examples. They always imply some moral loss which will
happen to young people if they do not follow their elders' advice. But youth
would be far more impressed if age drew a vivid picture of their own
physical and digestive decrepitude. But, of course, age won't do that. Why
should it? No one likes to think that their "every movement tells a story."

Personally, I can foresee a new profession open to those elderly people
who are the victims of their own early indiscretions. Why should they not
tour the country as a collection of awful warnings! Fancy the joy there
would be in the hearts of all those who, as it were, stand bawling at the
cross-roads that the "narrow path" is the broader one in the long run, if they
woke up and saw on the hoardings some such announcement as this:—

Coming! Coming!! Coming!!!

FOR ONE WEEK ONLY!

The Awful End of the Man who
Gobbled his Food!

Mary of the Hooked Figure; or, the Girl who Wouldn't
Change her Wet Socks!

A Picture of Living Vermin; or, the Man who
Never Washed!

The End of the Girl who Would Take the
Wrong Turning!

Parents, Free. Children, One Penny. Schools and
Large Parties by Arrangement.

It would ease the burden of parenthood enormously. It might even "Save
the Children." Maybe they would thank their mother from the bottom of
their hearts because she took them to see these living examples of youthful
folly instead of lugging them to a dull lecture on hygiene. For half the silly
things we do, we do because we don't realise the consequences. The man
who knows everything would gladly give up all his knowledge if he could
turn back the hands of the clock, and, instead of studying the origin of
Arabic, learn to recognise a pair of damp sheets when he got in between
them; while a Woman of a Thousand Love Affairs would forego the
memory of nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine of these if she could return to the
early days and drink a glass of hot water between every meal! For, as I said
before, Love leaves us and enthusiasms die; but Old Age which can sit
down to a good dinner and thoroughly enjoy it without having to have a
medical bulletin stuck up outside its bedroom door for days afterwards, is
an Old Age which no one can call really unhappy. To eat is, at last, about
the only joy which is left to us. The "romantic" will shudder at my

philosophy, I know; but the "romantic" have generally such a lot to live for
beside their meals. Old Age hasn't. That is why elderly people who can
begin to look forward to their dinner—say at five o'clock in the afternoon—
can be said to have reached the "ripe old age" of the Scriptures. If they
can't?—well, over-ripe to rottenness is the only description.

It's oh, to be out of England—now that spring is here!

I don't know if you, fair reader, find that in the spring your fancy turns to
thoughts of love—I know mine doesn't! On the contrary, it turns to thoughts
of sulphur tablets and camomile tea and other sickly or disagreeable
circumventions of the "creakiness" of the human body. For among the
things I could teach Nature is that, when she made man, she did not permit
him to "flower" in the spring and start each year with something at least
resembling his pristine vigour—if he ever had any. But, whereas the spring
gives a new glory to birds, and trees, and plants, she only gives to us—built
in the image of God—spots, a disordered liver, and a muddy complexion. It
seems a piece of gross mismanagement, doesn't it? It would be so delightful
if, once a year, we were filled with extra energy; if our hair sprouted once
more in the colour with which we were born; if the old skin shed itself and
a new one came on so beautiful as to ruin the business of all the "Mrs.
Pomeroys" of this world. But Nature seems, once having made us, to leave
us severely alone; to let us wither on our stalks, as it were, until we drop off
them and are swept away into the dustbin of the worms and weeds. The
mind is a far kinder ally. Oh, no; say what you will in the praise of spring,
to all those who, as it were, have commenced the "bulge" of anno domini, it
is a very trying season. Besides—here in England anyway—it is as
uncertain as a flirt. Sometimes it suddenly comes upon us in the early days
of March or lets mid-winter pay us a visit in the lengthening days of May.

One never quite knows what spring is going to do. One never knows what
kind of clothes to wear to please it. So often one sallies forth arrayed in
winter underwear, because the morning awoke so coldly, only to spend the
rest of the day eating ices to keep the body calm and cool. Or, again, the
spring morning greets us with the warmth of an August day; we jump up
gaily, deck ourselves out in muslin, sally forth, take a sudden "chill," and
spend the rest of the week in bed!

One is always either too hot or too cold. It is the season of the
unaccountable draught. True, it often turns the fancy towards sweet
thoughts of love—but the fancy usually ends with an influenza cold through
indulging in sentimental dalliance upon the grass. On the whole, I always
think that spring in England is nicer to sing about than experience. It is
delightful as a season of "promise"—but, like humanity, it often treats its
promises like pie-crusts. Still, it is spring, and—although the body rarely
recognises the fact except to ruin by biliousness the romance which is
surging in its heart—summer is, as it were, knocking at the door. And from
June to mid-July—that surely is the glory of the year! After July, summer
becomes a little dusty at the hem. Still, dusty, or even dirty, it makes life
worth living. Nevertheless, I only wish that it were greedier and stole three
months away from winter. For winter is too long, and spring is too
uncertain, and autumn too full of "Farewell."

But summer never palls. And we have five summers to make up for,
haven't we? For no one could really enjoy anything during the war except
the war news—when it was favourable. But now we can—well, if not enjoy
ourselves, at least lie back, just whispering to ourselves that, when the sun
shines the world is a lovely place, and, so far as England is concerned, there
is at any rate a kind of camouflaged peace. And so we have to be very very
old if we cannot feel in our hearts a breath of youth and spring. After all,
when the sun shines, we are, or feel we are, of any age—or of no age

whatever. And if we cannot burst into flower like the roses, we can at least
enjoy the beauty of the rose when it blooms—which other roses cannot do.
Thus, with a few small mercies, life is very good when the sun shines, isn't
it?

Bad-tempered People

I would sooner live with an immoral man or woman than a bad-tempered
one. An immoral person can often be a very charming companion, quite
easy to live with—if you take the various excuses for sudden absences at
their face value, and don't probe too deeply into the business; in fact, if you
are not in love with the absentee. A bad-tempered person in the house may
have the morality of the angels—but life with him is a daily "hell," like
always living with strangers, or a mad dog, or in a room full of those
ornaments which belong, almost exclusively, to lodging-houses
everywhere. Briefly, he is always there—ready to burst into flames at any
moment, ready to misunderstand everything anybody does or says, a
perpetual bugbear; and not even the emotional repentances, which are often
the only partially saving grace of bad-tempered people, can atone for the
atmosphere of disturbance which they always inflict. And the man or
woman who loses his temper whenever anything goes in the slightest bit
wrong—well, from them may the Lord deliver me for ever, Amen! They
carry their ill-nature about with them all day and under all circumstances.
Sometimes they seem to imagine that their spirit of disagreeableness is a
sign of the super-man, or of that dominating personality of which Caesar
and Napoleon are historical examples. They frequent restaurants and harry
the already over-harried waiters. It is such a very easy victory—the victory
over a paid servant. But the conquerors stamp themselves for ever and for
ever among Nature's "cads" nevertheless. Anybody who is rude enough can

give a quelling performance of "God Almighty" before menials. Some
people delight to do so, apparently. They possess everything except an
instinctive respect for a man and woman, however lowly, who are earning
their own living. And the lack of it places them among the inglorious army
of the "bounders" for all time. When there is no "inferior" upon whom to
vent the outbursts of their own supreme egoism, they find their wives
extremely useful. In the days when the divorce laws are "sensible," freedom
will be granted for perpetual bad temper sooner than for occasional
unfaithfulness.

Of course, we all have our days when we are like nothing so much as
gunpowder looking for a match. We can't be perfect and serene all the time.
And if ever, as I have just hinted, we do wake up in the morning feeling as
if we could get up and quarrel with a bee because it buzzes, a Beecham pill
will probably soon put us in a regular "click" of a humour. ("Mr. Carter"
never offered me anything; nor did Sir Thomas Beecham. But being fond of
grand opera, I mention the pills "worth a guinea a box" for preference.
Besides, they tell us a "Beecham at night makes you sing with delight!" So
there!) That is one of the reasons why I always advocate a "silence room" in
every household which otherwise is large enough to put the biggest room
aside to play billiards in. I would have it quite small, and decorated in
restful, neutral tints, with the finest view from the window thereof that the
house could supply. I would also have a little window cut out of the door,
through which food could be pushed in to the sufferer without him having
to tell the domestic that it is a fine day and that he hopes her bunion's better.
This little room would be devoted to those inmates of the house who got up
on the wrong side of the bed because both sides were "wrong sides" that
morning. There he, or she, would stay until the world seemed to be bright
again. And they would come forth in their new and serener state of mind,
blessing the idea with all their hearts. For if, as they have to do now, they
had come downstairs in the mood in which they woke up, the whole house

would have known of it to curse it, and most of its members would not be
on polite speaking terms for days afterwards. Of course, the idea could be
recommended also for those people whose temper is always in a state of
uproar. The only difficulty, however, would be, then—they might live in the
silence room all their lives and die there—beloved, because unseen. But
that is the only thing to do with an habitually disagreeable person—lock
him up, and, if you be wise, take away the key of the dungeon with you!

Polite Masks

You never really know anybody—until you have either lived with them,
travelled with them, or drunk a glass of port with them quietly over the
fireside. In almost every other instance, what you become acquainted with
is one of a variety of masks! And everyone has a fine assortment of these,
haven't they? For the most part you don them unconsciously—or rather, you
have got so used to assuming them suddenly that you have lost all
consciousness of effort. But they are masks, nevertheless—and a mask
always hides the truth, doesn't it? Not that I am one of those, however, who
dislike camouflage because it is camouflage. In fact, most of the time I
thank Heaven for it—my own and other people's! The "assumed" is so often
so much more agreeable than the natural, and nine times out of ten all you
require of men and women is that they should at least look pleasant. You've
got to get through this life day after day somehow, and time passes ever so
much quicker for everyone if the hypocrite be a smiling hypocrite at all
times. At every moment of the everyday—preserve me from the sour-
visaged saint.

After all, only love and friendship and the law demand the truth and
nothing but the truth. Among acquaintances, among all the many thousands

you meet through life only to discuss the weather and your own influenza
symptoms—all you ask of them is that they should bring out their smiling
mask as readily as you struggle to assume your own. Only, as I said before,
in love and friendship and the courts of law is the mask an insult, a tragic
disillusion and a sham. In every other circumstance it is usually a blessing.
Without it society, as a social entertainment, would become impossible. For
society is but a collection of men and women wearing masks, each one
vying with the others to make his mask the most attractive, and, at the same
time, the most concealing. But the worst of wearing masks is, that we
become tired at last of holding them in front of our features. This makes the
entertainment of watching the truth peering through the camouflage one of
the most amusing among the many unpremeditated amusements of the
social world. After all, as I said before, so long as your lover and your
friend, and the witnesses you have subpoenaed on behalf of your own case,
show you truth—all you ask of the others is the most agreeable mask they
can put on for the occasion. But even lovers and friends may deceive you,
while some witnesses' idea of the truth in the law courts hasn't that
semblance of reality possessed by the Medium's description of life in the
world beyond. That is what makes matrimony often such a gamble with
loaded dice, and holidays so often more tedious than work. To be in the
company of one's lover for one ecstatic hour tells one nothing of what he
will be when, day after day, one has to live with him in deadly intimacy
until death doth part us both.

Neither do you really know how much, or how little, your friend means
to you, until you have been with her on a cold railway station for hours,
when fate has done its best to make you both lose your tempers and your
luggage. Only a very real love can survive smiling through that period
when, from almost maudlin appreciation, a husband gradually sinks into the
commonplace mood of taking his soul's mate "for granted." Only real
friendship can live through the disillusionment of irritable temper, lack of

imagination, and boredom so often revealed while travelling in the
company of friends. More than half the mutual life of lovers and friends is
spent behind masks—for masks are sometimes necessary to keep love and
friendship great and true. But one must, nevertheless, know something of
the real man and woman behind the mask—even though that which lies
behind it may prove disappointing—before you can prove that your love is
real love, that your friendship is real friendship, that you love your lover or
your friend, not only for what they are, but also in spite of what they are
not.

The Might-Have-Been

It is rare to come across anybody with very definite ideas; it is rarer still
to meet a man and woman brave enough to put their ideas into practice. The
hardest battle in life—and one of the longest—is the battle to live your own
life. No one realises what fighting really means until they stand in battle-
array face to face with relations. But most of us have to fight this battle
sooner or later, and if we fight and yet make a "hash" of the victory we
gain, is it not better so? Relations always think they know what is best for
you. Well, perhaps they do, if the "best" be a circumspect kind of goodness.
But they rarely know what you want, and, until you have got what you
really want, even though you find it is "Dead Sea fruit" after all, the thought
always haunts the disappointed Present by visions of the glorious Might-
Have-Been.

Relatives always seem to imagine that, when you say you want to lead
your own life, it is always a "bad" life you want to lead. They seem to think
that a girl leading her own life is a girl entertaining men friends, until
goodness knows what hour of the night, alone in her bachelor flat, they

picture a man leading his own life as a man whose memoirs would send
shudders down a really nice woman's spine. They never realise that there is
happiness in personal freedom and liberty—happiness which is happy
merely in the independent feeling of self-respect which this freedom and
liberty gives. They would like boys and girls to continue to maturity the
same life which they led when they were children, subject to the same
restrictions, bowing to the same parental point of view. No one knows of
what he is capable until he has begun the battle of life in the world of men,
independent and on his own. Better make a "hash" of everything; better
suffer and endure and grow old in disappointment, than live in a gilded cage
with clipped wings, while kind-hearted people feed you to repletion through
the bars.

A girl or boy, who has no occupation, other than the occupation of mere
amusement, who has no Ideal; who has no interest other than the interest of
passing the time, is not only useless, but detestable as a member of human
society, while his old age is of unhappiness the most unhappy. For what is
Old Age worth if it has no "memories"; and what are "memories" worth if
they are not memories of having lived one's life to the full? To me, to live
one's own life is to live—or, perhaps I ought to say, to strive to live—all
those ideals which Reflection has shown you to be good, and Nature has
given you the power to accomplish. That to me is the fight to live your own
life—the fight to realise yourself, to live the "best" that is in you. For a man
and woman must be able to hold up their heads high, not only face to face
with the world, but face to face with their own selves, before they can say
that Life is happy, that Life has been worth while. The tragic cases are those
who cannot live their own lives because the lives of other people demanded
their sacrifice, a sacrifice which cannot be withheld without loss of self-
respect, of that good fellowship with your own "soul" which some people
call Conscience.

This sacrifice is generally a woman's sacrifice. You may see the victims
of it in any church, in any town, at almost any hour of the day. They are
grey-haired, and sad, and grim, and they hold the more tenaciously to the
promise of happiness in After Life because they have sacrificed, or
permitted to pass by, the happiness of this. To a great extent it is a
"Victorian" sacrifice. They are victims of that passing Belief which was
convinced that a girl of gentle birth ought to administer to her parents, pay
calls, uphold the Church, and do a little needlework all her life, unless some
man came along to marry her and give her emancipation. The happiness
which goes with a career, even if that career fails, is saving daughters from
this parentally imposed "atrophy." They are learning that to live one's own
life is not necessarily to live a "bad" life, but a "fuller" life. Thus the young
are teaching the Old People wisdom—the knowledge that youth has its
Declaration of Rights no less than Middle Age.

Autumn Sowing

I sometimes think the man who first said that "the road to hell is paved
with good intentions" must have said it in November. The autumn is full of
good intentions—just as spring is full of holiday and hope, and summer of
heat and dolce far niente. But, just as the first warm day in June fills you
with a physical vitality which you feel convinced that you must live for
ever, so autumn makes you realise that life is fleeting and the mind has not
yet reached its full development, nor intellectual ambition its complete
fruition. Perhaps it is the touch of winter in the air which braces your mind
and soul and gives you the impression that, given the long autumn evenings
over the fire undisturbed, your brain will soon be capable of tackling the
removal of mountains. If you are unutterably silly (as so many of us are—
alas! for the world's sanity; but thank heaven for the world's humour!) you

will plan a whole curriculum of intellectual labour for the quiet evenings
over the fireside. Oh, the books—good books, I mean—you will read! Oh,
the subjects you will study! Perhaps you will learn Russian, or maybe
something strange and out-of-the-ordinary, like Arabic! You dream of the
moment when, speaking quite casually, you will inform your friends that
you are reading the whole of the novels of Balzac; that you are studying for
the law and hope to pass your "Final" "just for the fun of the thing"; that
you are learning Persian, and intend to retranslate the Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam and discover other Eastern philosophers. In fact, there is no end
to the things you intend to do in the autumn evenings over the fireside when
your labours of the day are over. Briefly, you are going to "cultivate your
mind"; and when people talk about "cultivating their minds," they usually
regard the mind as a kind of intellectual allotment which anyone can till—
given determination, an easy-chair near a big fire, and the long, long
autumn evenings.

What You Really Reap

But alas! all you do . . . all you really do, is . . . Well, as I said before, the
man who first said that "the way to hell is paved with good intentions,"
must have said it in the autumn, or perhaps, in the spring, when he realised
how few of the good intentions he had lived up to. Well, maybe the most
enjoyable part of going to hell is paving the way with, as it were, your back
turned to your eventual goal. And sometimes I rather fancy, in spite of all
the moralist may say, the paving-stones of good intent that you have laid on
your way to perdition will be counted in your favour, and the Recording
Angel will place them to your credit—which she can't do if, metaphorically
speaking, you have not paved a way anywhere, but just been content to live
snugly on the little plot upon which Fate planted you at the beginning, and

you were too dully inert either to cultivate hot-house orchids thereon or
even let it become overgrown with wild oats and roses. And I think
sometimes that on good intentions we eventually mount to heaven. I
certainly know that the good intentions of the early autumn make me very
nearly forgive the cycle of the seasons which robs me of summer and its
joys. And after all, there is always this to be said for a good intention,
nobody knows, yourself least of all, if you may not one day fulfil it. That is
what makes dreaming so exciting. In your dreams you have learnt Russian;
you have read all the novels of Balzac; you will be able to understand Sir
Oliver Lodge when he leaves the realms of spiritualism and talks about the
stars. And maybe—who knows?—by the time that your dreams have
materialised into reality and spring has just arrived, you will be able to tell
Lenin, if you happen to meet him, that you have "seen the daughters of the
lawyer and lost the pen of your aunt"; and you will have read the books of
Paul de Kock because you couldn't struggle through Balzac; and you will
know the composition of the moon and the impossibility of there being a
man in it—which, after all, is a far greater achievement than having played
countless games of bridge, learnt sixty-two steps of the tango, evolved a
racing system, and arrived at loving the Germans, isn't it?

Autumn Determination

But unless your determination be something Napoleonic, you won't have
achieved very much more than this. It has all been so invigorating and
delightful to contemplate; and the way of your decline has been so cosy and
so comfortable, and it has so often ended in a glass of hot "toddy" and so to
bed. You had stage-managed your self-education so beautifully. You had
brought the most comfortable easy-chair right up to the fire; you had put on
your "smoking"—not that garment almost as uncomfortable as evening-

dress, but that coat which is made of velvet, or flannel, softly lined with silk
and deliciously padded: you had brought out all your books—the "First
Steps to Russian," "How to appreciate Balzac," "Introduction to
Astronomy"—put your feet on the fender, cut the end of your best cigar.
Everything simply invited peace and comfort and an intellectual feast.
Then, just one more glimpse at the evening paper—and you would begin . .
. oh yes! you would begin! And so you read about the threatened strike; the
murder in East Ham; the leading article, the marriage of Lady Fitzclarence-
Forsooth to—well, whoever she married, the funny remark the drunken
woman made to the judge when he fined her two-and-six for kissing a
policeman; Mr. Justice Darling's latest mot; the racing, the forthcoming
fashions; the advertisement of Back-Ache Pills; Mr. C. B. Cochran's praise
of his own productions, Mr. Selfridge's praise of his own shop; the "Wants,"
the "Situations Vacant," the . . . Then somebody woke you up to ask if you
were asleep . . . which, of course, you weren't . . . Well . . . well . . . It is past
midnight! So what can one do now? What can one do? Why, go to bed, of
course. Another autumn evening is over. But then, there are plenty more . . .
oh, plenty more. "Good-night."

Two Lives

I often wish that we could all of us lead two lives. I don't mean I wish
that we could live twice as long—though, in reality, it would come to the
same thing. But I would like to live the two lives which I want to lead, and
only do lead in a sort of patchwork-quilt kind of way. I would like to live a
life in which I could wander gipsy-like over the face of the globe—seeing
everything, doing everything, meeting everybody. I should also like to live
a purely vegetable existence in some remote country village—sleeping
away my life in happy domesticity, away from the crowd, free from care,

tranquil, and at peace. I suppose that, even as dreams, they are only too
futile—but they are very pleasant dreams nevertheless. I know that they are
dreams—since I am quite sure that the reality would be far less satisfactory
than it seems in anticipation. There is "always a fly in the amber" as the
saying goes, and my experience is, that the truth more nearly resembles a
great big fly with a tiny speck of amber sticking somewhere to its back. For
in our dream voyages we overlook the fleas, the mosquitoes, the hunt for
lodgings, the struggle with languages, the hundred-and-one disturbances of
the spirit which are inseparable from real voyages of any kind and bombard
our inner tranquillity at every turn. In the same way, when we gaze at the
peaceful landscape of some hidden-away English countryside, we yearn to
live among such peacefulness, forgetting that, though life in the country
may look peaceful to the stranger's eye, experience teaches us that gossip
and scandal and the continual agitation round and round the trivial—an
agitation so great that the trivial becomes colossal—at last rob life of
anything resembling dolce far niente mid country lanes and in the shadow
of some country church. In fact, it seems to me that the emotion which we
seek—the emotion of strange wonderplaces, the emotion of utter restfulness
which falls upon the soul like a benediction—do come to us from time to
time, but at the most unexpected moments and in the most unlikely places.
They come—and we hug them in our memory like precious thoughts. And
sometimes we try to reproduce them artificially, only to discover that "never
anything twice" is one of the lessons of life—and quite the last one we ever
learn, even if we ever do learn it—which is doubtful.

Backward and Forward

Thus for the most part, things look most beautiful when we anticipate
them, or as we look back upon them in memory over the fireside. For

distance lends enchantment, not only to most views, but also to memories
and love. As, metaphorically, we stand on the Mount of Olives gazing down
at the city of Jerusalem, thinking of all that tiny corner of the earth has
meant to men and women, we forget—as we look back—the beastly little
mosquito which bit us on the nose, the interruption or our companion who
wondered what the stones might tell us if they could only speak. So (also
metaphorically), as we set our faces towards the Holy City, filled with the
anticipation of those sublime thoughts and emotions which would surge
through our souls when we eventually arrived there, we were happy in our
ignorance of the fact that, when we did arrive, we felt unutterably dirty and
our head ached, and the corn on our little toe felt more like a cancer than a
corn! Meanwhile, the emotion of the soul, which we expected to find upon
the Mount of Olives, has sometimes come to us quite unexpectedly while
standing in the middle of Clapham Common in the moonlight; and that
glorious spirit of adventure, which to us means "travel," we have felt riding
on a motor-bike through the New Forest at nightfall when the forest seemed
full of pixies and the fading sunset was red and grey and golden like the
transformation scene of a pantomime. But alas! the next day we found the
forest unromantic, and Clapham Common looked indescribably common in
the morning sunlight. Our mood had vanished, and although we tried to
reproduce the same uplifting emotion the following evening, we couldn't—
we had a headache and the gnats were about. So, although I often yearn to
live two lives—one full of travel and adventure, and the other peacefully
over the fireside mid the peace and beauty of the country—I am quite sure
that, were my wish granted, I should find both lives just the same mixture
of unexpected happiness and unanticipated disappointment which I find this
one to be, yet still go smiling on. Very rarely the Time and the Place and the
Mood. But when they do happen to come together—well, life is so
wonderful and so beautiful that to throw in the "Loved one" too would seem

like gilding the rose—a heaven worth sacrificing every stolen happiness in
life for.

When?

One of the greatest—perhaps the greatest—problems which parents have
to face is—when to tell their children the truth about sexual life; how to tell
it; how little to tell—how much. And most parents, alas! are content to drift
—to trust to luck! They themselves have got through fairly well; the
probabilities are, then, that their children will get through fairly well too. So
they, metaphorically speaking, fold their hands and listen, and, when any
part of the truth breaks through the reticence of intimate conversation, they
shake their heads solemnly, strive to look shocked—and often are; or else
they make a joke of it—believing that their children regard the question in
the same reasonable light as they do themselves. But ignorance is never
reasonable, and half ignorance is even more excited. There is a "mystery"
somewhere, and ignorant youth is hot after its solution. And the "mystery"
is solved for them in a dozen ways—all more or less dirty and untrue.
Better far be too frank, so long as your frankness isn't the frankness of
coarse levity, than not to be frank enough. The reticence of parents towards
their children in this matter has turned many a young life of brilliant
promise into a life-long hell. We don't see this hell for the most part, and,
because we don't see it, we fondly believe that it does not exist—or, if it
does exist, that it exists so rarely as scarcely to demand more than a passing
condemnation and a sigh. We hear a great deal about the Hidden Plague. We
hear of the 80,000 cases of syphilis which are registered every year in the
United Kingdom. But we don't know any individual sufferer—or we think
we don't; and so, although we take the figure as an acknowledged fact, we
nevertheless don't realise it—and in any case, it isn't a nice subject of

debate, and, should the word be even mentioned in the presence of our dear,
dear children, we would ask the speaker to leave the house immediately and
never again return! I, too, was one of these poor fools—although I have no
children to suffer from my foolishness. I knew it was a fact, but like others I
didn't realise that fact—like we didn't realise the horror and filth and
tragedy of war, we who never were "out there"; we who never "went over
the top." But lately I have had to visit a friend in one of the largest lock
hospitals in London. And one day I was obliged to walk through the
waiting-room where the men are forced to sit until they are summoned to
see the doctor. And truly I was appalled! There were hundreds of them of all
ages—from 16 to 60. They were not the serious cases, of course, and we
should pass them in the street without realising that they were any but
physically sound men, often of a very splendid type. But each one
represented a blighted life—a future robbed of splendid promise, a present
of misery and unhappiness stalking through the world like shame beneath a
happy mask. I tell you, it brought the truth home to me in a way mere
figures and statistics could never do. As I said before, I was appalled: I was
also very angry. For I knew that ignorance was at the bottom of many of
these sad tragedies—the criminal reticence of the people who know, too
mock-modest to discuss openly a fact of life which, beyond all other facts
of life, should be spoken of bluntly, honestly, therefore decently and
cleanly.

The Futile Thought

Too many fond parents like to imagine that their children know nothing
at all of sexual matters—that they are clean and innocent and ignorant, and
that, as long as they can be kept so, they will not run into danger and
disgrace. But no parent really knows how much or how little their children

know of this matter. Children have ears and imagination, and once they
know anything at all—which is at any time from eight years of age,
sometimes, alas! earlier—they should be told everything, not in a nasty,
furtive fashion, glossing over the ugly part and elevating the decent side
until it is out of all proportion to the truth, but quietly, with dignity, laying
stress on the fact that sexual morality is not a thing of religion and of God,
but of self-respect, of care for the coming generation, and, especially, of that
great love which one day will come into their lives. It should not be called a
"sin"; at the same time it should not be laughed at and made the subject of a
whispered jest. Sexual laxity should be treated in the same way as
dishonesty and untruthfulness—a sin against oneself, against the beauty of
one's own soul, and against those who believe in us and love us and are our
world. Children should be taught to respect the dignity of their own bodies,
of their own minds and soul; not by leaving them in half-ignorance, but by
telling them everything, and telling them it in the right way—which is the
clean and truthful way.

The London Season

If only the people who repeat the words of wisdom uttered by
philosophers lived as if they believed them, how much happier the world
would be! It is, however, so much easier to give, or to repeat, advice, than
to follow it, isn't it? Conventionality is far stronger than common sense, and
a fixed habit more powerful than a revolution. Besides, most people realise
that to give advice is a much more impressive ceremony than merely to
receive it. And I think that the majority of people would far sooner look
impressive than be wise. The appearance of a thing sometimes pleases them
far more than the thing itself. Besides, to give advice is a rather pleasant
proceeding, and those who habitually indulge in it seem incapable of

discouragement. They will inform the "rolling stone" that if he continues his
unresisting methods he will gather no moss, but the rolling stone usually
continues to roll merrily onward. They will protest to the ignorant that "to
be good is to be happy," but very few of them will go out of their way to do
good, if, by being "bad," they can snatch a personal advantage without
anybody being any the wiser. "Life would be endurable if it were not for its
pleasures," they declare in the face of a pile of social invitations. Yet they
still endure that treadmill of entertainments which makes up a London
season, only showing their real feelings by moaning to themselves in the
process. They freely acknowledge that very few of these entertainments
really entertain, but to miss being seen at them would be to risk a disaster
which they would not dare to take. So they go wearily smiling to
amusements which don't amuse, to dances which are too crowded to dance
at, to dinner parties at which they pay in boredom for the food they eat; to
"at homes" which are the most "homeless" things imaginable—travelling
here and there, from one entertainment to another which proves as
unutterably dull as the first one. Not content with these things, they must
perforce be seen at the Opera—although they hate music; visit all the
exhibitions of art—when Maude Goodeman is their favourite painter; talk
cleverly of books which they would never read did not people talk about
them, and generally follow for three long months a time-table of
"enjoyment" which very few of them really enjoy. In the meanwhile, the
only affairs which give them pleasure are the little impromptu ones
arranged on the spur of the moment between friends.

Of course I am not speaking of the debutante. She, "sweet young thing,"
always enjoys any entertainment at which there are plenty of young men
and ices. Nor, judging from observation, do I include among those who
willingly go through the three months' hard labour of a London season
those henna haired ladies—thickening from anno domini—who seem
perfectly happy in the delusion that their juvenile antics are still deliciously

girlish, and whose decollete dresses would seem to declare to the world
that, though their faces may begin to show the wear and tear of life, their
plump backs don't look a day over twenty-five. The one is so young that she
will enjoy anything which requires the endurance of youth. The other is of
that age which is happy hugging to its bosom the adage that a woman can't
possibly look a day older than champagne makes her feel.

No, the person whose life of amusement I pity is the person who accepts
invitations because she daren't refuse them. If the world doesn't see her in
all places where she should be seen, the world always presumes her to be
dead—and people would rather die in reality than live to be forgotten. But
what a price they have to pay to keep their memories green.

No, as I said before, the only entertainments which people really enjoy
are those at which they can be perfectly natural—natural, because they are
perfectly happy. Rarely are they fixed affairs, advertised weeks beforehand.
Mostly are they unpremeditated—-delightful little impromptu amusements
made up of people who really desire to meet each other. Large
entertainments are almost invariably dull. Upon them hangs the heavy
atmosphere or a hostess "paying off old debts in one." The only really
amusing part of them is to watch the amazement on the faces of one half of
the guests that the other half is there at all! That is invariably funny. In the
big affairs the chef and the champagne are the real hosts of the evening. If
England went "dry," I think the London season would join the dodo—
people couldn't possibly endure it on ginger "pop" and cider. But
champagne and a good chef could, I believe, make even a Church Congress
seem jolly. They only bring an illusion of happiness—but what's the odds?
A London season is but an illusion of joy after all.

Christmas

Christmas comes but once a year—and the cynic cries, "Thank God!"
And so, perhaps, do the very lonely. But then Christmas is not a festival for
either the cynic or the desolate. The cynic is as welcome at the annual feast
of turkey and plum pudding as Mr. "Pussyfoot" would be at a "beano";
while the lonely—well, one likes to imagine that there are no lonely ones at
Christmas-time; or, if there are—that somebody has asked them out, or they
have toothache and so wouldn't appreciate even the society of jolly
seraphims. Christmas, except to the young, is essentially a festival of "let's
pretend"—let's pretend that we love everybody, that everybody loves us,
that Aunt Maria isn't a prosy old bore, that Uncle John isn't a profiteer; that
everybody has his or her good points and that all their bad ones are not
sticking out, as they usually appear to us to be, as painfully apparent as
those on the back of a porcupine should you happen to sit down upon one in
a bathing costume! And it is quite wonderful how this spirit of good will
towards all men can be self-distilled, as it were! You try to feel it, and,
strangely enough, you do feel it—at least, up to tea time. The public
exhibition of ecstacy you give at receiving a present you don't want seems
to come to you quite easily and naturally on Christmas morning. Even Aunt
Maria can pretend enthusiasm quite convincingly at the gimcrack you have
given her which her artistic soul loathes, the while she furtively examines
its base to discover if peradventure you have forgotten to erase the price.
You yourself declare, while regarding the sixpenny pen-wiper, that it is not
the gift so much as the thought which pleases you, and you can declare this
lie to the satisfaction, not only of yourself, but, more difficult by far, to the
satisfaction of the wealthy donor who gave it to you because she couldn't
think what to give you—and because, as she piously declares, "Thank God,
you have everything you want!" Yes, indeed, there is something about
Yuletide which makes all men benign, and the joyful hypocrisy of
Christmas Eve sounds quite the genuine emotion when uttered on

Christmas Day. I am bound, however, to confess that the "good will"
becomes a trifle strident towards nightfall. Many things conduce to this.
The children are suffering from overfeeding; Mother is sick of Aunt Maria,
her husband's sister; and Father is more than fed up with the pomposity of
Uncle John. There is a general and half-uttered yearning among everybody
to go upstairs and lie down. The jollifications of the coming evening, when
the grown-ups come into their own and the children are being sick upstairs,
presume the necessity for such a retirement—a kind of regeneration of that
charitable energy required for the festival "jump off." After which the
digestive organs begin to realise what sweated labour means, and Father
makes a speech about his pleasure at seeing so many members of the family
present, and Mother weeps silently for some trouble which always revives
over Christmas dinner and nobody has yet been able to sympathise with,
because nobody has yet known what it is. And, because Christmas night
would otherwise prove somewhat trying even to a family determined to be
loving or to die in the attempt, somebody or other has invented champagne.
It is quite wonderful how the dullest people seem to take unto themselves
wings after the third bottle of Veuve Clicquot has been opened.

So Christmas Day is thus brought to a triumphant conclusion of good
will. And the next morning, of course, is Boxing Day—a most appropriately
named event. Even if fighting isn't strictly legal, backbiting unfortunately is.
Still, the wise relation seeks the frequent seclusion of his own bedroom
during that mostly inglorious day of Christmas aftermath. You see, there is
no knowing what sparks may fly when the digestions of a devoted family
have gone on strike!

Only the children seem to be able to raise the jolly ashes of their dead
selves, phoenix-like from the carcase of the devoured turkey (whose bones
in the morning light of Boxing Day resemble somewhat the Cloth Hall at
Ypres by the end of the war). Even they (bless 'em!) seem able to recover

from the fact that the lovely toys which Uncle John gave them lie broken at
their feet because Uncle John would insist upon playing with them all by
himself. Children can always become philosophers in half a day. It is their
special genius.

Only grown up people have forgotten how to forget. And Christmas,
although the most lovable of all the festivals of the year, is also the saddest
—and the most lonely, alas! There are so many "gaps"—so many empty
places in the heart which the passing of the years will never, never be able
to fill. That is why Mother weeps—it is her privilege. And, truth to tell, so
many people would like to weep too, only they dare not—they dare not. So
they throw themselves into the feverish jollity which Christmas seems to
demand for the sake of the children, and for the sake of the young people
who, because they were so young, will never realise the aftermath of
loneliness which to-day elder people know meant war! So they say to
themselves, "Let us eat and drink and appear merry because to-morrow . . .
to-morrow—who knows?—peradventure we may all meet again!" Thus the
true spirit of Christmas is always as a benediction.

The New Year

There is something "tonic" about the New Year which there isn't about
Christmas, and Birthdays certainly do not possess. After thirty, you wake up
on Christmas morning, look back into the Long Ago, and sigh; after forty,
you wake up on the morning of your birthday, look forward, and ofttimes
despair. But New Year's Day has "buck" in it, and, when you wake up, you
lay down the immediate future with those Good Intentions which somebody
or other once declared paved the way to Hell, but are nevertheless a most
invigorating exercise. Christmas, besides, has been seized upon by

tradesmen and others in whose debt you happen to be to remind you of the
fact. I suppose they hope that the Good Will of the Season will make you
think kindly of their account—which, in parenthesis, perhaps it might, did
not that same Good Will run you into debt in other directions. As for
Birthdays—well, the person who remembers Birthdays is the person at
whose head I should like to hurl the biggest and heaviest paving-stone with
which, as I lie in bed on New Year's morning, I lay out my way to Hell. No,
as I said before, Christmas Days and Birthdays are failures so far as
festivity goes. The former brings along with it bills and accounts rendered,
and you are fed with rood which immediately overwhelms any feeling of
kindliness you may happen to have in your heart, while the latter is like a
settlement day with Time, and Time certainly lets you have nothing off your
account. But New Year's Day, except in Scotland, where, I believe, you are
expected to go out and get drunk—always an easy obligation!—brings with
it nothing but another year, and possesses all the "tonic" quality of novelty,
besides the promise of a much happier and luckier one than the Old Year
which has just been scratched off the calendar. It is like an annual
Beginning Again, and beginning again much better. Besides, New Year's
Day seems to be an anniversary which belongs to you alone, as it were. On
Christmas Day you are expected to do things for other people, and you do
(usually just the things they don't want); while on Birthdays people do
things for you (and you wish to Heaven they'd neglect their duty). But New
Year's Day doesn't belong to anybody but yourself, and you prospect the
future with no reference to anybody whomsoever, and, better still, with no
one likely to refer to you. Oh, the New Leaves you are going to turn! The
blots you are going to erase! The copy-books you are going to keep
spotless! The Big Things you are going to do with what remains of your
life, and the big way you are going to do them! Besides, say what you will,
there comes to you on New Year's Day the very first breath of Spring. The
Old Year is dead, and you kick its corpse down the limbo of the Past and

Done-with the while you plan out the New. So, looking forward in
anticipation, you feel "bucked." You aren't expected to show "good will to
all men" after a previous night's debauch on turkey, plum-pudding, and
sweet champagne. Nobody comes down to breakfast on New Year's
morning and weeps because "Dear Uncle John" was alive (and an
unsociable old bore) "this time last year." Nobody adds to the day's joy by
wondering if they will be "alive next New Year's Day," nor become quite
"huffy" if you cheerfully remark that they very probably will. It doesn't
invite the melancholy to become reminiscent, nor the prophet to assume the
mantle of Solomon Eagle. New Year's Day belongs to nobody but yourself,
and what you are going to make of the 365 days which follow it. You regard
the date as a kind of spiritual Spring Cleaning, and to good housewives
there is all the vigorous promise of a Big Achievement even in buying a pot
of paint and shaking out a duster. And, though Fate usually helps to enliven
Christmas-time by arranging a big railway accident or burning a London
store down, and the newspapers, in search of something to frighten us now
that the war is over, by referring to Germany's "hidden army" and an
unprecedentedly colossal strike in the New Year, the human spirit soars
above these things on the First of January, and Hope, figuratively speaking,
buys a "buzzer" and makes high holiday. Who knows if the New Year may
not be your year, your lucky year? And in this feeling you jump out of bed,
clothe yourself in your "Gladdest Rags," collect your "Goodest" intentions,
and sally forth. Nobody wishes you anything, it's true, but you wish
yourself the moon, and in wishing for it you somehow feel that the New
Year will give it to you.

February

February is the month when, cold-red are the noses—and so (oh help!)
are the "toes-es." No one ever sings about February: scarcely anyone speaks
about It. It is indeed unspeakable. Its only benefit is that, once every four
years, it keeps people younger a day longer. If you're thirty-nine, you're
thirty-nine for an extra twenty-four hours, and at that period of life you're
glad of any small mercy. It is the month when the new-rich depart to sun
themselves in their new-found sun, and the new-poor, and others who are
quite used to poverty, swear at them in secret. Oh, yes, indeed! If the Clerk
of the Weather has a left ear it must surely at this moment be as 'ot as 'ell!
Nobody likes February—it is the step-child of the months.

One simply lives through it as one lives through a necessary duty. It's a
month—and that's all. Thank Heaven! somebody once made it the shortest!
By the end of January most people have had more than enough of the
English Winter even if the English Winter thinks we can ever have enough
of it, and comes back saying "Hello!" to us right into Summer, and starts
ringing us up, as it were, to tell us it's coming back again as early as
October. Just as if we didn't know—just as if we ever wanted to know! The
English Summer is far more modest. Usually it's gone before we have, so to
speak, washed our hands, tidied our hair, and dressed ourselves up to meet
it. But Winter in England not only comes before it is wanted, but outstays
its welcome by weeks. And of all the months it brings with it, February,
though the shortest, seems to linger longest. March may be colder, but the
first day of Spring is marked on its calendar; and we wait for it like we wait
for a lover—a lover in whose embrace we may not yet be, but who is, as it
were, downstairs washing his hands, he has arrived, he is here—and so we
can endure the suspense of waiting for him with a grin. April may fill the
dykes fuller than February, whose skies are supposed to weep all day long,
but generally only succeed in dribbling, but April belongs to Spring—even
though our face and hands and feet are still in Mid-Winter.

February always reminds me of the suburbs—appalling but you've got to
go through them to get to London. Were I a rich man, I would follow Spring
round the World. In that way I should be able to smile through life like
those people who, in snapshots from the Riviera, seem composed
principally of wide grins and thin legs, and whose joie de vivre is usually
published in English illustrated journals in seasons when the English
weather makes you feel that Life is just a Big Damn in a mackintosh. To
follow Spring round the world would be like following a mistress whose
charms never palled, whose welcome was never too warm to be sultry,
whose friendship was never too cold to freeze further promise of intimacy.
What a delightful chase! and what a sweet-tempered man I should be! For,
say what you will, the weather has a lot to do with that spotless robe of
white which is supposed to envelop saints. If you can't be pure and good
and generous and altogether delightful in the Spring, you might as well
write yourself off for evermore among the ignoble army of the eternally
disgruntled. And if you can be all these things in weather that is typically
English and typically February, then a hat would surely hide your halo.

And this is about all the good that February does, so far as I can see.
True, once in four years it also allows old maids to propose. But the three
years when they had to wait to be asked have usually taken all their courage
out of them. Besides, the married people and others who are otherwise
hooked and secure have turned even that benefit into a joke—and no
woman likes to place all her heart-yearnings at the mercy of a laugh. So
that, what Leap-Year once allowed, people have turned into a jeer. But then,
that is all part and parcel of February. Somebody once tried their best to
make it as attractive as possible, even if it could only be so once every four
years. But everybody else has since done their best to rob it of its one little
bit of anaemic joy. Perhaps we ought not to blame them! Nobody ought to
be blamed in February. It is a month which brings out the very worst in
everybody.

Tub-thumpers

I often wonder what born tub-thumpers are like in their own homes.
Perhaps they are as meek and mild as watered buttermilk. Thinking it over,
I think they must be. No self-respecting woman could be tub-thumped at
daily without eyeing furtively the nearest meat-carver. For the genius of a
tub-thumper is that he is usually born deaf. I don't mean to say that he
cannot hear, but he only hears what is convenient for his own arguments to
hear, and the more an explanation is convincing the more he tries to shout it
down, deafening himself as well as the poor fool who is struggling to make
his meaning clear. Each one of us, I suppose, has to "let off steam" some
time somewhere, and round about the Marble Arch, where fiery orators "let
themselves go," must be the safety-valve of many an obscure home.
Occasionally I go there—just to listen to men and women giving an
example of that proverb about "a little knowledge being a dangerous thing."
Moreover, there is a certain psychological interest in this rowdy corner of a
peaceful park. It is typical of England, for one thing. I don't mean to say
that tub-thumping is typical of England, but England is certainly the
harbour of refuge of the crank. You can see there the crankiest of cranks
being as cranky as they know how to be; and you can see also the utterly
good-humoured indifference with which the crowds who listen to them
regard their crankiness—which also has its meaning. The other evening a
middle aged woman of untidy locks was crying that England alone was
responsible for the war. Another—in this instance a young man—was
deploring the recent blockade of Germany, viewing at the same time in
quite a tender light the Zeppelin raids on towns and villages and the
bombardment of undefended ports. In any other country, I think, these
people would have been lynched. But D.O.R.A., as a strenuous female, is
now as dead as 1914 fashions, and the people who heard these friends or
Germany crying out their friendliness listened to them in laughing
tolerance, which must have annoyed the speakers considerably, seeing that

laughter renders unconvincing the very fiercest argument. But they laughed,
and, passing on their way, heard God being described as an "old scoundrel,"
and this seemed to amuse them even more.

I Wonder If . . .

But I sometimes wonder if this indifference towards the facts which are
"big" to so many people and ought, perhaps, to be "big" to everybody, be a
sign of national weakness or of national strength. Personally, I longed,
metaphorically speaking, to tear that female limb from limb and send that
young man to a village under bombardment, there to make him stay a week
in the very hottest portion of Hell's Corner. But had I done so, I realised that
I should not have accomplished the very slightest good. The moment that
you take a crank seriously, from that very moment he imagines that his
"crankiness" is divinely inspired. Far better laugh at him and let him alone.
Laughter is the one unanswerable contradiction, and ridicule is a far more
deadly thing to fight against than fury, no matter if fury wields a hatchet.
Perhaps this utter indifference to the firebrand is our national strength—
even though it comes from a too-sluggish imagination, a too great
imperviousness to new dangers. English people possess too great a sense of
humour ever to become Bolshevik. They may not be witty and vivacious
and effervescingly bright, but they possess an innate sense of the ridiculous
which is their national safeguard against any very bloody form of
revolution. So we suffer infuriated cranks—if not gladly, at least, in the
same manner as we suffer baboons in the Zoo—interesting, and even
amusing in their proper place, but to be shot at sight should they venture to
play the "baboon" amid those hideous red-brick villas which have been
termed an Englishman's castle and his home. After all, every new system
has its ridiculous side, and strangely enough, it is this ridiculous side which

is most apparent at the outset. Only after you have delved below the "comic
froth" do you begin to realise that there is a very vital truth hidden beneath.
Well, a sense of humour blows away that froth in time, and then—as for
example after the Suffragette antics—the real argument behind the capers
and the words becomes known. Thus in England all revolutions are gradual,
and in their very slowness lies their incalculable strength of purpose.

Types of Tub-thumpers

But the various types of cranks always provide a psychological interest to
the student of intellectual freakishness. There are the "cranks" you laugh at;
others who make you wish to murder them outright. Then there are a few
pathetic cases—elderly men, who bring their own little wooden box as well
as the vast majority of their own audience, including a wife, a sister, and a
convert in spectacles—men who, in a mild tone of voice, earnestly strive to
paint as a real story the fable of Jonah and the Whale to a few casual
passers-by—those same passers-by who, because there is no real "fun" to be
got out of such lecturers, pass by with such unsympathetic rapidity. Yet I
always love to listen to these speakers. They are such an illustration of "a
voice crying in the wilderness," and they are so dead-in earnest, and they
mean so well—two direct invitations, as it were, to the world's ridicule. You
can't help admiring them, although mingled with your admiration there is a
strong streak of pity. The simplicity of their faith is colossal. They believe
everything. They believe in the miraculous conversion of drunkards in a
single night through one verse of the Gospel; they believe that we shall all
rise again and sing on and on eternally; they believe that all men and
women are born to evil, and they would feel positively indignant were not
the whitest soul among us really steeped in double-dyed sin. And how they
believe in God!—Oh, yes, how they do believe in God! I cannot say

whether they bring God into their daily lives, but they certainly drag Him to
the Marble Arch. And all the while a very sedate, middle-aged woman and a
grim bespectacled maiden of forty-five try their utmost—or seem so to do
—to look as if they had led lives of the most scarlet sinfulness until they
had heard their elderly friend preach The Word. Nothing ever disturbs these
meetings. They just go on to their appointed close, when the "stand" is
promptly taken by someone who believes in nothing at all, God least of all,
and will tell you the reasons of his disbelief for hours and hours, and still
leave you unconvinced.

If Age only Practised what it Preached!

The Boy Scouts have, I believe, a moral injunction to do at least one
good action every day. Older people applaud that injunction wildly. It is so
admirable—for Boy Scouts. They consider it to be so admirable, indeed,
that they declare it should form part of the moral curriculum of every young
boy and girl. In fact, they declare it to be applicable to everyone—everyone
except themselves. Personally, I think it would be even more admirable
when followed by grown-up people. But most grown-up people seem to
consider that they have done their one world-beneficial action when they
get out of bed in the morning. The rest of the day they will be unselfish—if
it suits their purpose. If only grown-up people practised what they preached
to children we should have the millennium next Monday. If the world is still
"wicked," it isn't because there are not enough moral precepts being flung
about all over it. The trouble is that the people to whom they most apply
pass them on. They consider they don't apply to them at all.

If only children could chastise their parents for telling lies, and being
greedy and selfish, and doing the hundred and one things which they ought

not to have done, ninety-nine per cent. of the mothers and fathers, spiritual
pastors and masters, and "all those who are set in authority over them"—
would not be able to sit down without an "Oo-er!" for weeks. Happily
children are born actors, and can simulate an air of belief, even in the face
of their elders' most bare-faced inconsistency. But—if you can cast back
your memory into long ago—you will remember that one of the most
"shattering" moments or your youth was the time when it first burst upon
your inner vision that all men, and especially grown-up men, are liars.
Certainly, if we really do come "trailing clouds of glory," the clouds soon
evaporate and we lose the glory, not through listening to what men tell us,
but in watching what men do.

Selfishness is surely of the deadly sins the most deadly. Yet selfishness is
what elder people tell youth to avoid most carefully. If everyone only lived
up to half the moral "fineness" which they find so admirable in the tenets of
the Boy Scouts, the world would be worth living in to-morrow. Think of the
hundreds of millions of unselfish acts which would then take place every
day! In a short time there would surely be hardly any more good to do! As it
is, a few kind-hearted, generous, sympathetic people are kept so busy trying
to leaven the selfishness, the hardness, the all-uncharitableness of those
who are out to live entirely for themselves, that, poor things, they are
usually worn to a shadow long before their time!

The virtues are very badly distributed. Some people have so many, and in
such "chunks," and others possess so few and even seem determined to get
rid of those they have as soon as they can. If only youth had a sense or
humour it would surely die from laughing. But it hasn't. It has only faith.
Besides, as I said before, it is a born actor—and in face of the big stick it is
far safer to pretend faith than show ridicule. If we can have children in the
next world—and I have just received a communication from an ardent
spiritualist informing me that an earthly wife can become a mother through

keeping in touch with her dead husband—I think that, metaphorically
speaking, the paternal cane will be "sloshed" both ways. That is to say,
Little Johnny, who has been laid across mother's knee and beaten by her
with a slipper for stealing jam, will, in his turn, strike mother across the
knuckles with a ruler when she, too, is caught "pinching" half-a-crown out
of father's trouser pocket. If heaven be nothing else, it will surely be a place
of justice. The trouble with this old earth is that justice is only meted out by
those who have not yet been found out. In heaven I hope that people who
preach will be punished if they do not put their preaching into practice. It
will, I fear, empty any number of pulpits—alike in the churches, the public
parks, and the home.

But heaven will be none the worse for a little silence. As it is, we earth-
wallahs hear such a lot of high-falutin and observe so much low cunning
that no wonder youth, as it grows more "knowing," becomes more cynical.
It is only when a young man has arrived at years of discretion that he
realises that the most discreet thing to do is to be indiscreet while holding a
moral mask up. When he realises this, he will find it more politic to keep
one eye closed. Brotherly love has to be blind in one eye. Justice finds it
safer to be blind in both. And the fool is he who keeps both eyes open, yet
sees nothing. And so most grown-up people are fools! That is why they
stick together in war-time and always quarrel at a Peace Conference.

Beginnings

Beginnings are always difficult—when they are not merely dull. People
worth knowing are always hard to get to know. On the other hand, people
with whom you become friendly at once usually end by boring you unto
death by the end of the first fortnight. People whom it is easy to get to

know, as a rule know so many people that to be counted among their
acquaintances is like belonging to a friendly host, each one of whom ought
to wear around his neck a regimental number to differentiate him from his
neighbour. But the friend who is born a friend—and some people are born
friends, just as other people are born married—dislikes to be one of a herd.
Friendship, like love, is among autocrats, the most autocratic. There is no
such thing as communism among the passions. But, as I said before, the
people worth getting to know are so difficult to get to know. One has to
hack away, as it were, and keep on hacking away, until one breaks through
the crusts of reserve and prejudice and shyness which always surround the
"soul" of pure gold—or, in fact, the "soul" of any type or quality. But "to
hack" is a very dull occupation: that is why I say all beginnings are difficult
when they are not merely drab. I always secretly envy the people who let
themselves be known quite easily, although I realise that, when you get to
know them, there is usually very little worth knowing. But there are so
many lonely men and women wandering through this sad old world of ours
who are lonely, not because there is not plenty of sympathy and
understanding ready, as it were, to be tapped by the rod of friendship and
love, but because they are too shy to make friends, too reserved to show the
genius of friendship which burns within them. So they go through the world
with open arms which merely clasp thin air. They are too difficult to get to
know, and they do not possess the key which unlocks the secret of dignified
"self-revelation." Between them and the world there is thrust a mask of
reserve and shyness—a mask the expression of which they positively hate,
but are unable to tear it down from their faces. Thus they live lonely in a
world of other lonely souls; no one can help them, and they are too timid of
rebuff to help themselves.

But Friendship cannot be cultivated and tended by a third party—that is
an axiom. It either springs to life inevitably or, metaphorically speaking, it
doesn't turn a hair. The well-meaning person who introduces one friend to

another with the supreme assurance that they will both get on splendidly
together, usually begins by making two people enemies. The friends of
friends are very rarely friends with one another. And jealousy is not entirely
the cause of this immediate estrangement. One friend appeals to one side of
your nature and another friend appeals to a different side, but very, very
rarely do you find two people who make the same appeal—since Heaven
only knows how great is the physical attraction in Friendship as well as in
Love! On the whole, then, the wise man and woman keep their friends
apart. And this for the very good reason, that, either the two friends will
become friends with each other, leaving you out of their soul-communion
altogether, or else they will wonder in a loud voice what on earth you can
find in your other friend to make him seem so attractive to you! In any case,
a tiny thread or malignity is woven into that fabric of an inner life in which
there should be nothing whatever malign.

Friendship resembles Love in the fact that there are usually three stages.
The first stage seems thrilling—but how thankful you are, when you look
back upon it, that it is over! The second stage is full of disappointment—
how different the friendship realised is from the friendship anticipated! The
third stage is philosophical, peaceful, and so happy!—since the worst is
known and the best is known, but how immeasurably the best outweighs the
worst! and how deliciously restful it is to realise that you, too, are loved, as
it were, in spite of yourself and for those qualities in you which are the real
you, although you need must hide them under so much dross. Thus you
both find happiness and peace. And surely friendship—true friendship—is
the happiest and most peaceful state in life? It is the happiest and most
peaceful part of Love: it is the one thing which, if you really find it, makes
the Everyday of life seem worth the while; seem worth the laughter and the
tears, the failures and the victories, the dull beginnings, and the even more
tedious beginnings-over-again, which are, alas! inevitable, except in the

Human Turnip, who, in parenthesis, is too pompously inert ever to make a
start.

A very well-known actress once confessed to me that, no matter how
warm had been her welcome, she invariably felt a feeling of hostility
between the audience and herself when she first walked on the stage. But I
rather think that everyone, except the Human Turnip, who feels nothing
except thirst and hunger and cold, has that feeling at the beginning. No
matter if your advent has been heralded by a fanfare of trumpets, you
invariably feel within yourself that your debut has been accompanied by the
unuttered exclamation: "Oh, my dear! Is that all?" It wears off in time, of
course; but it only bears out my theory that beginnings are always difficult
—when they are not merely dull. I can quite imagine that the first day in
Heaven will be extremely uncomfortable. I know there is no day so long as
the first day of a holiday—or any day which seems so short as the last one.
For one thing, at the beginning of anything you are never your true, natural
self. The "pose," which you carry about with you amid strange
surroundings, hangs like a pall upon your spirits, to bore you as much as it
bores those on whom you wish to make the most endearing impression.
Later on, it wears off—and what you are—you are! and for what you are—
you are either disliked intensely or adored. But you are never completely
happy until you are completely natural, and you are never natural at the
beginning. That is why you should forgive beginnings, as you, yourself,
hope to be forgiven when you, yourself, begin.

Unlucky in Little Things

They say it is better to be born lucky than beautiful. Which contains, by
the way, only small consolation for those of us who have been born both

lucky and ugly. For, after all, to have been born beautiful is a nice "chunk"
of good luck to build upon, and anyway, if you are a woman, constitutes a
fine capital for the increase of future business. But to have been born lucky
is much more exciting than to have been born beautiful; moreover the
capital reserve does not diminish with time. All the same, I don't want to
write about either lucky people or beautiful ones. There are already too
many people writing about them as it is. I want to write about the unlucky
ones—because I consider myself one of them. I do so in the hope that my
tears will find their tears, and, it we must drown, metaphorically speaking,
it is a crumb of comfort to drown in company.

Most unlucky people when they speak about their ill-luck always refer to
such incidents as when they backed the Derby "favourite" and it fell down
within a yard of the winning post. True, that is ill-luck amounting almost to
tragedy. But there is another kind of unlucky person—and about him I can
write from experience, because it is my special brand of misfortune. He is
the unlucky person who is unlucky in little things. After all, not many of us
back horses, and presently fewer of us than ever will be able to do more in
the gambling line than play Beg-o'-my-Neighbour with somebody's old aunt
for a thr'penny-bit stake. Let me give a few instances of this ill-luck, in the
hope that my plaint will strike a responsive chord in the hearts of those who
read this page.

(a) If I am sitting on the top of a 'bus and a fat man gets on that 'bus, that
fat man will sit down beside me as sure as houses! (b) If I am sitting in a
railway carriage hugging to my heart the hope that I may have the
compartment to myself throughout the long non-stop run, for a surety, at the
very last moment, the Woman-with-the-squalling-brat will rush on the
platform and head straight for me! Or, I have only to see the Remarkably
Plain Person hesitating between two tables in a restaurant to know that she
will invariably choose mine! (c) If there is a bad oyster—I get it! If a wasp

flies into the garden seeking repose—I always look to it like a Chesterfield
couch! If one day I have not shaved—my latest "pash" is sure to call!
Should I invest my hard-earned savings in Government Stock it is a sign for
an immediate spread of Bolshevism, and consequent depreciation in all
Government securities. If one day I plan to make a voyage to Cythere—I
will surely catch a cold in my head the night before and, instead of quoting
Swinburne, shall only sneeze and say, "Dearest, I do hope I didn't splash
you!" I fully expect to wake up and find myself rich and famous—the day I
"wake up" to find myself dead! And of course, like everybody with a
grievance, I could go on talking about it for ever. Still, I have given a
sufficient number of instances of my ill-luck for ninety per cent. of people
to respond in sympathy. The "big things" so seldom happen that one can
live quite comfortably without them.

But the "Little Things" are like the poor—they are always with us; or like
relations—perpetually on the doorstep on washing day. Perhaps one ought
to live as if one were not aware of them. To have your eyes fixed steadfastly
on some "star" makes you oblivious, as it were, to the creepy-crawly things
which are creepy-crawling up your leg. The unfortunate thing, however, is,
that there seem so few stars on which to fix your gaze. If you are born
beautiful, or born lucky—you have no use for "stars." To a certain extent
you are a "star" in yourself. But for nous autres there only remains the
exasperation of Little Things which perpetually "go wrong." The only hope,
then, for us is to cultivate that state of despair which can view a whole
accumulation of minor disasters with indifference. When you are indifferent
to "luck" it is quite astonishing what good fortune comes your way. Luck is
rather like a woman—it is, as it were, only utterly abject before a "shrugged
shoulder."

Wallpapers

Life is full of minor mysteries—conundrums of the everyday which
usually centre round the problem: "Why on earth people do certain things
and what on earth makes them do them?" And one of these mysteries is that
of their choice in wallpapers. Of course some wallpapers are so pretty that it
is not at all difficult to realise why people chose them. On the other hand,
some are so extraordinarily hideous that one would really like to see, for
curiosity's sake, the artist who designed them and the purchaser whose
artistic needs they satisfied. Those bunches of impossible flowers linked
together by ribbons, the whole painted in horrible combinations of colour—
how we all know them, and how we marvel at their creation! One imagines
the mental difficulty of the purchaser as to which among the many designs
most appealed to her artistic "eye." Then one pictures how her choice
wavered among several. One figures to oneself how she sat in consultation
with that friend whom most people take with them when they go out to
choose wallpapers, asking her opinion concerning the design which showed
nightmare birds swarming about among terrible trees, and the one which
illustrated brown roses with blue buds growing in regulated bunches on
trellis-work of a most bilious green. One can almost hear the arguments for
and against, and at last, the definite conclusion that the one with the brown
roses and blue buds was the more uncommon—therefore the better of the
two. And one day fate leads your steps towards the bedroom wherein that
wallpaper hangs. As you throw yourself into the one easy chair you take out
your cigarette case to enjoy that "just one more" which is the more
enjoyable because it symbolises that feeling of being "enfin seul" which
always follows conversations with landladies or several hours making
yourselves agreeable to hostesses.

Then you see it!

At first you are amusedly contemptuous. "How perfectly hideous," you
say to yourself. And then, in your idleness of mind, your eye follows the
roses and ribbons in horrible contortions from the skirting board to the
ceiling. Realising what you are doing, and knowing that in that direction
madness lies, you immediately turn your gaze towards the window. You
imagine that you have gained the day. But, alas! you are wrong! Comes a
moment in the early morning when you wake up two hours before you
wanted to, with nothing else to do except to lie awake thinking. And all the
while the brown roses with their blue buds have unconsciously stretched
their tendrils to seize your wandering regard. Before you realise what they
are doing, your eyes are riveted on that horrible bunch half-way up the wall
which being cut in half by the sudden termination of the width of one paper
roll, does not exactly fit the corresponding half of the other. How it
suddenly begins to irritate you—this break in the symmetry of the design!
You force your eyes from contemplating its offence, only to discover that
the bunches of roses which are exposed between the sides of the picture
representing "The Soul's Awakening" and the illuminated text painted by
your hostess when she was young, make an exact square. Above the
pictures you perceive that these same bunches form a "diamond," resting on
one of its right angles! That there are only five of these terrible bunches
between the side of "The Soul's Awakening" and the corner of the wall, and
six between that of "Trust in the Lord" and the door. And all the time you
are becoming more and more irritable. You cannot close your eyes because
you know that when you open them again the same illustrations from
Euclid will await you. The only thing that comforts you is the determination
to write immediately to your Member of Parliament insisting that he drafts
a Bill creating a censor of wallpapers, with dire penalties for any
"circumventors" of the law. That at least would put every seaside landlady
in prison.

Our Irritating Habits

Far more than the Big Things are the Teeny Weeny Little Ones which
more quickly divide lovers. A woman may conveniently overlook the fact
that her husband poisoned his first wife in order to marry her, when she
cannot ignore the perpetual example which he gives her of the truth that
Satan finds some evil still for idle hands to do—by always picking his teeth.
All of us possess some little irritating personal habit, which makes for us
more enemies than those faults for which, on our knees, we beg forgiveness
of Heaven. A woman can drink in the poetry of her lover's passionate
eloquence for ever and ever, amen. But if, in the middle of the night, she
wakes up to find her eloquent lover letting forth the most stentorian snores
she, metaphorically, immediately sits up in bed and begins seriously to
wonder. And the moment love begins to ask itself questions, it is, as it were,
turning over the leaves of the time-table to discover the next boat for the
Antipodes. As I said before, more homes are broken up, not by the flying
fire-irons, but by the irritating little personal idiosyncrasies which men and
women exhibit when they are, so they declare, "quite natural and at their
ease." Only a mother's love can survive the accompaniment of suction
noises with soup. Vice always makes the innocent suffer, but suffering is
often bearable, and sometimes it ennobles us; but chewing raw tobacco—
even perpetually chewing chewing gum—is unbearable, and has a most
ignoble effect on the temper, especially the temper of life's Monday
mornings.

Even for our virtues do we sometimes run the risk of being murdered by
those who, because they think they know us best, consequently admire us
least. Virtue which is waved overhead like a banner is always a perpetual
challenge, and the moment we seem to issue a challenge—even though we
merely challenge the surrounding ether—someone in the concrete bends
down somewhere to pick up a brickbat and, gazing at us, mutters, "How

far? Oh Lord, how far?" Even the expressions of love, in the wrong place,
have been known to hear hatred as their echo. I once knew a man who left
his wife because she could never speak to him without calling him
"darling." She had so absorbed Barrie's theory that the bravest man is but a
"child," that "home" for her husband became a kind of glorified nursery. At
last his spirit became bilious with the cloying sweetness of it all. The climax
came one evening when, after accidentally treading on her best corn and
begging her pardon, she got up, put her loving arms around his neck and,
kissing him, whispered, "Granted, darling, granted before you did it!" Soon
after that he left her for a woman who, herself, trod on every corn he
possessed, and had not the least inclination to say she was sorry. Of course,
he lived to regret his first wife. Most men do.

"Tact," I suppose, is at the bottom of all the difficulty—tact not only to
know instinctively what to do and when to do it, but when to realise that a
wife is still an "audience" and when to realise that, so far as being
completely natural in her company is concerned, she has absolutely ceased
to exist. But, alas! no one has the heart to teach us this necessary lesson in
"tact." We can tell a man of his sin when we dare not tell him it were the
better plan to go right away by himself when he wishes to take his false
teeth out. A wife will promote an angry scene with her husband over the
"other woman"—of whom she is not in the least bit jealous—when she will
never dream of telling him that he doesn't sufficiently wash—which was the
real cause of their early estrangement. Everybody knows his own vices,
whereas most people are blissfully ignorant of their own irritating
idiosyncrasies. I would far sooner be told of my nasty habits than of my
own special brand of original sin. Sin has to be in very disgusting form to
evoke lasting dislike, whereas a "nasty habit" breeds DISGUST, which is a
far more terrible emotion than hatred.

Away—Far Away!

"The bird was there, and rose and fell as formerly, pouring out his
melody; but it was not the same. Something was missing from those last
sweet languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had been some
disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly believe it
since his mate was still sitting about thirty yards from the tree on the five
little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps his midsummer's music had
reached its highest point and was now in its declension. And perhaps the
fault was in me. The virtue that draws and holds us does not hold us always
nor very long; it departs from all things, and we wonder why. The loss is in
ourselves, although we do not know it. Nature, the chosen mistress of our
heart, does not change towards us, yet she is now, even to-day—

Less full of purple colour and hid spice,

and smiles and sparkles in vain to allure us, and when she touches us
with her warm caressing touch, there is, compared with yesterday, only a
faint response." I cull this paragraph from Mr. W. H. Hudson's enchanting
book, "Birds in Town and Village," because, or so it seems to me, it
expresses in beautiful language a fact which has puzzled me all through my
life, making me fear to dare in many things, lest the enthusiasm I then felt
were not repeated when the time for action arrived. We are all more or less
creatures of mood, some more than others, and I, alas! among the moodiest
majority. All through the long, dark, chilly, miserable winter I live in town,
longing sadly, though rapturously, for the summer to come again, and with
its advent my own migration into rural solitudes, far away from the crowd,
surrounded by Nature and lost in her embrace. Yet the end of each summer
finds me with my pilgrimage not yet undertaken. Something has held me
back—a friendship, business, links which were only imaginary fetters, a
host of trivial unimportances masquerading in my mood of the moment as

serious affairs. So the summer has come and gone, and only for an all-too-
brief period have I "got away." Nor have I particularly enjoyed my respite
from the roar of omnibuses, the tramp, tramp, tramp of the crowded
pavements. Somehow or other the war has robbed me of my love of
solitude Somehow or other the peace and beauty and solitude of Nature still
"hurt" me, as they used to hurt me during the years of the great world
tragedy when, across the meadows brilliant with buttercups and daisies,
there used to come the booming of the guns not so very far away "out
there." So, in order to force my mood, and perhaps deaden remembrance of
its pain, I have taken along with me some human companion, only once
more to realise that, when with Nature, each of us should be alone. One
yearns to watch and listen, listen and watch, to lie outstretched on the hill-
side, gazing lazily, yet with mind alert, at every moving thing which
happens to catch one's eye. You can rarely do this in company. So very, very
few people can simply exist silently without sooner or later breaking into
speech or falling fast asleep. Alone with Nature books are the only possible
company—books and one's own unspoken thoughts.

"Family Skeletons"

The worst of keeping a "Family Skeleton" shut up in a cupboard is that
the horrid thing will insist on rattling its old bones at the most inopportune
moments—just, for example, when you are entertaining to tea the nearest
local thing you've got to God—whether she be an "Honourable" (in her own
right, mark you!) or merely the vicar's wife! Whatever family skeletons do
or do not possess, they most assuredly lack tact. They are worse than
relations for giving your "show away" at the wrong moment. If relations do
nothing else, they at any rate sit tightly together around family skeletons, if
only to hide them from full view by the crowd. But, of course, the crowd

always sees them. The crowd always sees everything you don't want it to
see, and is quite blind to the triumphal banners you are waving at it out of
your top-room window. Sometimes I think that the better plan in regard to
family skeletons is to expose them to public view without any dissembling
whatsoever, crying to the world at large, and to the "woman who lives
opposite" in particular, "There! that's our family disgrace! Everybody's got
one. What's yours?" I believe that this method would shut most people up
quite satisfactorily. People only try to learn what they believe you do not
want them to know. If you push the truth before them, they turn away their
heads. To pretend is usually useless. Not very many of us get through life
without experiencing a desire to hide something which everybody has
already seen. Wiser far be honest, even if it costs you a disagreeable quarter
of an hour. Better one disagreeable quarter of an hour than months and
years sitting on a bombshell which any passer-by can explode. Honesty is
always one of the very few invulnerable things. No pin-pricks can pierce it
—and pin-pricks are usually the bane of life. It's like laughter, in that
nobody has yet been found to parry its blows successfully. Shame is a sure
sign of possible defeat—and the world always ranges itself every time on
the side of the probable victor. If you once show people that you can't be
hurt in the way they are trying to hurt you, they soon leave off trying, and
begin to think of your Christian virtues in general and their own more
numerous ones in particular. It's only when your courage is sheer
camouflage that the world tries to penetrate the disguise. Not until a woman
dips her hair in henna and, metaphorically speaking, cries, "See how young
I look now!" that other women begin to remark, "You know, dear, she is not
so youthful as she was!" It's only when the rumour goes round that a man
has had a financial misfortune that everybody to whom he owes anything
fling in their bills. And thus it is with family skeletons. If, as it were, you
ask them to live with you downstairs, everybody ignores them and finds
them "frightfully dull." But the moment you relegate them into the topmost

attic—lo and behold, every single one of your acquaintances expresses a
desire to rush upstairs, ostensibly to look at the view.

Everybody has something which they do not want to expose—like dirty
linen. But everybody's linen gets dirty—that is always something to
remember. There are some poor old fools, however, who really do seem to
imagine that they and theirs are alone immaculate. How they manage to do
so I can never for the life of me imagine. They must be very stupid. But
stupid people are a very great factor in life's everyday, and we must always
try to do something with them, like the left-over remnants of Sunday's
dinner. And, unless we do something with them, they—like Sunday's dinner
—meet our gaze every time we go into the kitchen. At last we hate the sight
of them. But, just as the remnants clinging to an old mutton-bone lose their
terror when Monday arrives without the butcher, so these interfering old
fools sometimes fade away into harmless acquaintances when you show
them that you and your family skeleton are part and parcel of the same
thing, and if they wish to know the one they'll have to accept the other. In
any case, it's usually useless to try and pretend that Uncle George died of
heart failure when he really died of drink, or that the young girl whom Aunt
Maria "adopted" was a waif-and-stray, when everybody knows she is her
own daughter; or that your first wife isn't still alive—probably kicking—or
that your only child suddenly went to Australia because he was seized by
the wander-lust, when everybody knows he had to go there or go to prison.
You may, of course, pretend these things, and if you don't mind the
perpetual worry of always pretending, well and good. But if you imagine
for one instant that your pretending deceives the gallery, you'll be extremely
silly. Why, every time they speak of you behind your back they'll preface
their remarks with information of this kind: "Yes, yes . . . a charming
family. What a thousand pities it is that they all drink!"

But the "skeletons" of our own character—they are the ones which no
cupboard can hold, nor any key lock in. Some time, sooner or later, out they
will come to do a jazz in front of the whole world. The life we lead in the
secret chambers of our own hearts we shall one day enact on the house-
roof. Strive as we may to conform to the conventional ideal of public
opinion, we cannot conform all the time, and our lapses are our undoing—
or maybe, our happy emancipation, who knows? We cannot hide the
pettiness of our nature, even though we profess the broadest principles.
Only one thing can save the ungenerous spirit, and that is to be up against
life single-handed and alone. To know suffering, spiritual as well as
physical; to know poverty, to know loneliness, sometimes to know disgrace,
broadens the heart and mind more than years spent in the study of Greek
philosophy. Life is the only real education, and the philosophy which we
evolve through living the only philosophy of any real importance in the
evolution of "souls."

The Dreariness of One Line of Conduct

We have lots of ways of expressing that a man is in a "rut" without ever
giving the real reason of our adverse criticisms. An author who has "written
himself out," an artist whose pictures we can recognise without ever
looking at the catalogue, the "conventional," the "dull," the lovers who have
fallen out of love—these are all so many victims of the "rut" in life. It is not
their fault either. "Ruts" seem so safe, so delightful—at the beginning. We
rush into them as we would rush into Heaven—and Heaven surely will be a
terrible "rut" unless people have described it wrongly! But, although "ruts"
may often mean a comfortable existence, they are the end of all progress.
We dig ourselves in, and make for ourselves a dug-out. But people in dug-
outs are only safe; they've got to come out of them some time and go "over

the top" if they want to win a war. Unfortunately, in everyday life, the
people who deliberately leave their dug-outs generally get fired at, not only
by their enemies but also by their friends. But they have to risk that. So few
people can realise the terrible effect which "staleness" has upon certain
minds. Staleness is the breeding ground for all sorts of social diseases
which most people attribute to quite other causes. There is a staleness in
work as well as in amusement, in love as well as in hate. Variety is the only
real happiness—variety, and a longing for the improbable. What we have
we never appreciate after we have had it for any length of time. Doctors
will tell you that an illness every nine years is a great benefit to a man. It
makes him appreciate his health when it returns to him; it gives his body
that complete rest which it can only obtain, as a rule, during a long
convalescence, while "spiritually" it brings him face to face with death—
which is quite the finest thing for clearing away the cobwebs which are so
apt to smother the joy and beauty of life. In the same way a complete
change in the mode of living keeps a man's sympathies alive, his mental
outlook clear, his enthusiasms bright; it gives him understanding, and a
keener appreciation of the essentials which go to make up the real secret of
happiness, the real joy of living. The people we call "narrow" are always
the people whose life is deliberately passed in a "rut." They may have
health, and wealth, and nearly all those other things which go to make a
truce in this battle we call Life, but because they have been used to all these
blessings so long, they have ceased to regard them. And a man who is not
keenly alive to his own blessings is a man who is neither happy nor of much
good to the world in which he lives. You have to be able to appreciate your
own good fortune in order to realise the tragedy of the less fortunate.

The Happy Discontent

What is the happiest time of a man's life? Not the attainment of his
ambitions, but when the attainment is just in sight. Every man and woman
must have something to live for, otherwise they become discontented or
dull. People wonder at the present unrest among the working classes. But to
me this unrest is inevitable to the conditions in which they live. They have
no ideal to light up their drudgery with glory. They cannot express
themselves in the dull labour which is their daily task. They just have to go
on and on doing the same monotonous jobs, not in order to enjoy life, but
just in order to live at all. Their "rut" is well-nigh unendurable. Of what
good, for example, is education, an appreciation of art and beauty, any of
those things, in fact, which are the only things which make life splendid and
worth living, if all one is asked to do, day in, day out, is to clean some lift in
the morning and pull it up and down all the rest of the day! To me the
wonder of the working classes is, not that they are restless, but that they are
not all mad! Were they doing their tasks for themselves, I can imagine even
the dullest work might become interesting, because it would lead, if well
done, to development and self-expression. But to do these mechanical
labours solely and entirely for other people, and to know that you must keep
on doing them or starve, well, it seems to me a man needs for his own
sanity everything outside his work to make life worth living. The man who
is working for himself, no matter how dreary his occupation may be, is
rarely restless. He has ambition; there is competition to keep his
enthusiasms alive, he feels that, however lowly his labour may be, it
belongs to him, and its success is his success, too. But can anyone imagine
what a life must be, we will say, cleaning other people's windows for a
wage which just enables him to live? I can imagine it, and, in putting
myself in that position, I cast envious eyes on the freedom of tramps! It
seems to me that, until the world wakes up to the necessity of enabling
work-people to fill their leisure hours with those amusements and pleasures,
of the intellect as well as of the body, which are the reward of wealth, there

will always be a growing spirit or revolution in the world. I could endure
almost any drudgery for eight hours provided during the rest of the day I
could enjoy those things for which my spirit craved. But to do that same
drudgery, day in, day out, with nothing but a Mean Street to come home to,
nothing but a "pub" to give me social joy, while people who appear to live
entirely for enjoying themselves bespatter me with mud from their
magnificent motor-cars as they drive past me with, metaphorically
speaking, their noses in the air, I think I, too, should turn Bolshevik, not
because I would approve of Bolshevism, or even understand what it meant,
but because it would seem to give me something to live for. Except for the
appalling suffering, the death, the disease, the sad "Good-byes" of those
who loved one another, I am beginning to realise that the world was a finer
place in war time. It mingled the classes as they have never been mingled
before, for the untold benefit of every class, it brought out that spirit of
kindness and self-sacrifice which was the most really Christian thing that
the world has seen on such a large scale since the beginning of Christianity;
it seemed to give a meaning to life, and to make even the meanest drudgery
done for the Great Cause a drudgery which lost all its soul-numbing
attributes—that horrible sense of the drudgery of drudgery which is
sometimes more terrible to contemplate than death. Religion ought to give
to life some, if not all this noble meaning. But, alas! it doesn't. I sometimes
think that only those who are persecuted for their beliefs know what real
religion is. The Established Church doesn't, anyway. The world of workers
is demanding a faith, but the Church only gives it admonition, or a
charming address by a bishop on the absolute necessity of going to church.
The clergy never seem to ask themselves what the people are going to
receive in the way of rendering their daily toil more worth while when they
do go to church. But the people have answered it with tragic definiteness.
They stay away! Or perhaps they go to see a football match. Well, who shall
blame them, after the kind of work which they have been forced to do

during the week? I always think that if only the Church followed the crowd,
instead of, metaphorically speaking, banging the big drum outside their
churches and begging them to come inside, they would "get hold" of their
flock far more effectively. After all, why should religion be so divorced
from the joy of life? Death is important, but life is far more so. If the clergy
entered into the real life of the people they would benefit themselves
through a greater understanding, and the people would benefit by this living
example of Christianity in their midst. But so many of the clergy seem to
forget the fact that the leisured classes possess, by their wealth alone, the
opportunity to create their own happiness. The poor have not this
advantage. Their work is, for the most part, deadening. The surroundings in
which they live offer them so little joy. They have only the amusements
which they can snatch from their hours of freedom to make life worth living
at all. And these amusements are the all-important things, it seems to me. If
you can enter into the hours of happiness of men and women, they will be
willing to follow you along those pathways which lead to a greater
appreciation of the Christ ideal. I always think that if the Church devoted
itself to the happiness of its "flock" it would do far more real good than
merely devoting itself to their reformation. Reformation can only come
when a certain amount or inner happiness has been attained.

Book-borrowing Nearly Always Means Book-stealing

Whenever I lend a book—and, in parenthesis, I never lend a book of
which I am particularly fond—I always say "good-bye" to it under my
breath. I have found that, whereas the majority of people are perfectly
honest when dealing with thousands, their sense of uprightness suddenly
leaves them when it is only a question of a thr'penny-bit. As for books and
umbrellas, people seem to possess literally no conscience in regard to them.

Umbrellas you may, perhaps, get back—if you were born under the "lucky
star" with a "golden spoon" in your mouth, and had an octogenarian
millionaire, with no children, standing—or peradventure propped up—as
god-parent at your christening. Few people have qualms about asking for
the return of an umbrella, whereas a book always gets either "Not-quite-
finished-been-so-busy" for an answer, or else the borrower has been so
entranced by it that he has "taken the liberty" to lend it to a friend because
he knew you wouldn't mind! (Of course you don't—you only feel like
murder!) Nor do you really mind, providing that you are indifferent as to
the ultimate fate of the volume. If you are not indifferent . . . well, you
won't have lent it, that's all; it will recline on the bookshelf of the literary
"safe"—which is in your own bedroom, because your own bedroom is the
only place where a book ever is really safe. (Have you noticed how
reluctant people always are to ask for the loan of a book which lies beside
your bed? It is as if this traditional lodgment of the family Bible restrained
them. Usually they never even examine bedside books. They are always so
embarrassed when they happen to pick up a volume of the type of "Holy
Thoughts for Every Day of the Year." They never know what to say to that!)
But a book which lies about downstairs is the legitimate prey of every book
"pincher" who strays across your threshold. Moreover, no one has yet
invented a decent excuse for refusing to lend a book. I wish they had; I
would use it until it was threadbare. You can't very well say what you really
think, since no one likes to be refused the loan of anything because the
owner feels convinced that he will never get it back. So, unless you have a
particular gift for the Lie-Immediate, which embraces either the assertion
that the book in question does not belong to you or else that you have
promised it to somebody else, you meekly utter the prayer that you will be
delighted if the borrower thereof will only be kind enough to let you have it
back soon, which, all the time, you know he won't, and he knows he won't,
and you know that he knows he won't, and he knows that you know that he

won't—all of which passes through your respective minds as he pockets the
book, and you in your heart of hearts bid it a fond farewell!

Other People's Books

I have come to the conclusion that the only books which people are really
fond of are those which rightly belong to other people. To them they are
always faithful. They are faithful to them not in spite of themselves, which
is the way with those "classics" which everybody is supposed to have read
while they were young, and which most people only know by name,
because they belong to that dim and distant future in which are included all
those things which can be done when they are old—they are faithful to
them for the reason that nobody wants to borrow them; they belong to the
literature which people seek in free libraries, if they seek it at all. The books
they really adore are those which somebody else has purchased. Nor are
they ever old books. On the contrary, they are "the very latest." You see it
gives a room a certain cachet if it includes the very recent literary
"sensation," the "novel of the season," which everybody is reading because
everybody is talking about it. So they stick to the books which you yourself
have purchased, under the fond delusion that what you buy is necessarily
yours to do what you like with. Alas! you have forgotten the borrowing
fiend. The borrowing fiend is out for borrowed glory—and few things on
earth will ever stop the progress of those who are out for self-glorification.
True, I once knew a book-lover who was not afraid of telling the would-be
borrower that he never lent books. Needless to say, he had very few literary
friends. But his bookshelves were filled with almost everything worth
reading that had been published.

The Road to Calvary

She was sitting half dreaming, half listening to the old preacher, when
suddenly one sentence in a sermon, otherwise prosy and conventional,
arrested her attention. For the moment she could not remember it, and then
it came to her. "All roads lead to Calvary." Perhaps he was going to be
worth listening to at last. "To all of us sooner or later," he was saying,
"comes the choosing of the ways: either the road leading to success, the
gratification of desires, the honour and approval of our fellow men—or the
path to Calvary." And yet it seems to me that the utterance is only a half-
truth after all. It is the half-truth which clergymen like to utter. They always
picture worldly success as happiness, the gratification of desires happiness
also, but gained at the price of one's own "soul." But there they are wrong.
It seems to me that all roads do lead to Calvary—yes, even the road of the
worldly success, the limelit path of gratification. Whichever path you take,
it leads to Calvary—though there is the Calvary which, as it were, has peace
behind its pain, and the Calvary which has merely loneliness and regret. But
life, it seems to me, leads to Calvary whichever way you follow—the best
one can do is merely to bring a little ray of happiness, ease a little the pain,
share the sorrow and the solitude of those who walk with us along the
rough-hewn pathway. If you live only for yourself you are lonely; if you
live only for others you are also left lonely at last. For it seems to me that
the "soul" of every man and woman is a lonely "soul," no matter if their life
be one long round of pleasure-seeking and success, or merely renunciation.
Only occasionally, very, very occasionally—maybe only once in a lifetime!
—do we ever really feel that our own "soul" and the "soul" of another has
met for an all-too-brief moment, shared for a flash its "secret," mutually
sympathised and understood. For the rest—well, we live for the most part
holding out, as it were, shadowy arms towards shadows which only seem to
be substance. The road to Calvary is a lonely road, and each man and
woman is forced to follow it. There remains then only God—God who

knows us for what we are; God—and the faith that in a life beyond we shall
by our loved ones be also recognised and known. For the rest, we but look
at each other yearningly through iron bars—and from a long, long distance.
The least lonely road which leads to Calvary is the road which leads to
God; the least lonely pilgrims are those who walk with Him. But not
everybody can believe in God, no matter how they yearn. They seek "soul"
realisation in success, in self-gratification, in the applause and passion of
the crowd. The "religious" men condemn and despise them. But they are
wrong. They are more to be pitied. For they do not find consolation in the
things by which they have sought to drug the loneliness of their inner life.
Their Calvary is often the most terrible of all. So it seems to me that
Calvary is at the end of whichever road we take. We are wise when we
realise that it is in our own power to make that road brighter and happier for
others, and that there are always halts of interest and delight, entertainment
and joy, dotted along it for ourselves as well—if we look for them. But we
do not escape Calvary even though we struggle for success, gratify our own
desires, seek the honour and approval of our fellow-men. It is just the Road
of Life, and, provided that we harm no other man in so doing, let us realise
ourselves in worldly ambition and in love and in enjoyment as often as we
may. That is my philosophy, but it is no less lonely in reality than other
people's. Old age is each man's Calvary.

Mountain Paths

And the worst of that road to Calvary which we all of us must follow,
whether it be a long or short way, is that it is always, as it were, a lonely
journey into the Unknown. It is a mystery—a terrific mystery—and
sometimes it frightens us so terribly that men and women have been known
to kill themselves rather than take it. But there is always this to be said of

sorrow—like happiness, it looms so very much larger when seen from a
long way off. As we approach it it becomes smaller. When we reach it,
sometimes it does not seem so very terrible after all; either it is small or else
Nature or God gives to all of us some added courage which helps us to bear
even the greatest affliction. For several years past I have been intimately
associated with a tragedy which most people regard as well-nigh
unsurmountable even by the bravest heart. I have thought so myself—and
there are moments when I think so still, in spite of my long familiarity with
it, and the miracles of bravery I have seen displayed in hearts so young and
so tender that one would have thought they must of necessity fall helpless
beneath the burden laid upon them by Fate. I speak, of course, of the
Blinded Soldier—than whom no better example of courage on the road to
Calvary could possibly be given. Personally, I feel that I would sooner be
dead than blind; but I realise now that I only feel this way because I still,
thank Heaven, have remarkably good sight. Were I to lose my eyes, I hope
—perhaps I know—that I should still strive to fight cheerfully onward. And
this, not because I am naturally brave—I am not—but because I have lived
long enough to see that when, metaphorically speaking, the axe falls, some
added strength is given to the spirit which, granted bodily health, can fight
and go on fighting an apparently overwhelming foe. This is one of the most
wonderful miracles of Human Life, and I have myself seen so many
instances of it that I know it to be no mere fiction of an optimistic desire,
but an acknowledged fact. And this miracle applies to nations as well as to
individuals. In Maurice Maeterlinck's new volume of essays there is one on
"The Power of the Dead." "Our memories are to-day," he writes, "peopled
by a multitude of heroes struck down in the flower of their youth and very
different from the pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost
wholly of the sick and the old, who had already ceased to exist before
leaving the earth. We must tell ourselves that now, in every one of our
homes, both in our cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in

the meanest hovel, there lives and reigns a dead young man in the glory of
his strength. He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour of
which it had never ventured to dream. His constant presence, imperious and
inevitable, diffuses and maintains a religion and ideas which it had never
known before, hallows everything around it, makes the eyes look higher,
prevents the spirit from descending, purifies the air that is breathed and the
speech that is held and the thoughts that are mustered there, and, little by
little, ennobles and uplifts the whole people on a scale of unexampled
vastness." Surely, in beautiful words such as these, Maeterlinck but echoes
the consolation of many a very lonely heart since the tragedy of August,
1914. Without "my boy"—many a desolate heart imagined that it could
never face the road of Calvary which is life now that he is gone. And yet,
when the blow came, something they thought would have vanished for ever
still remained with them. They could not tell if it were a "presence," felt but
unseen, but this they knew—though they could not argue their convictions
—that everything which made life happy, which lent it meaning, was not
lost, had not faded away before the life-long loneliness which faced them; it
still lived on—lived on as an Inspiration and as a Hope that one day the
road to Calvary would come to an end, that they would reach their journey's
end—and find their loved one waiting.

The Unholy Fear

She didn't object to the celebrations for the anniversary of the signing of
Armistice—in fact, she quite enjoyed them—but she did object to the few
minutes' silent remembrance of the Glorious Dead. It depressed her. She
brought out the old "tag" so beloved of people who dread sadness, even
reverential sadness, that "the world is full enough of sorrow without adding
to it unnecessarily!" Not much sorrow had come her way, except the sorrow

of not always getting her own way; and the anniversary of the Armistice
meant for her the Victory Ball at the Albert Hall, a new dress of silver and
paste diamonds, a fat supper, and that jolly feeling of believing that a real
"beano" is justified because, after all, we won the war, didn't we? Therefore,
she disliked this bringing back to the world of the tragic fact—the fact of
what war really means beyond the patriotic talk of politicians, the Victory
celebrations, the rush to pick up the threads which had to be dropped in
1914, and the excitement of getting, or missing, or declining the O.B.E. The
war is over, she keeps saying to herself, thus inferring to everybody that
they ought to forget all about it now. So she ignores the maimed and the
wrecked, the war poor, the sailors and the soldiers, war books, war songs,
all reference to the war, in fact, and most especially the dead. "Why should
we be depressed?" she keeps crying, "the world is sad enough. . . ." Well,
you know the old "tag" of those who are not so much frightened of sorrow
as frightened by the fact that they can neither sympathise with it nor
understand it. She is an exceptional case, you declare. But alas! she isn't.
There are thousands of men and women who, behind a plea of war-
weariness, really mean a desire to forget all those memories, all those
obligations, all that work and faith in a New and Better World which alone
make justified—this war, or any other war. She has not forgotten, so much
as never realised what men suffered and endured in order that she, and all
the rest of her "clan" who remained at home, might live on and rebuild the
happiness and fortunes of their lives. So she dislikes to be reminded of her
obligations to the Present and the Future; she dislikes to remember in
reverence and sorrow the men and boys who, without this war, would now
be continuing happily, safe and sound, the even tenor of their lives. "The
world is sad enough," she again reiterates, and . . . oh, well, just BOSH!

The Need to Remember

For myself, I consider that it would do the world good if it had one whole
day of silent remembrance each year. And if it be depressing—well, that
will be all to the good. The world will come to no harm if it be depressed
once a year—depressed for such a noble cause. After all, we give up one
day per year to the solemn remembrance of the One who died for us—it
would not, therefore, do anything but good if we were to give up one day a
year to the memory of those millions who died for us no less. Sunday, too,
is kept as a quiet day, in order that the world may be encouraged to
contemplate those ideals for which it has erected churches in which it bows
the knee. Well, one whole day in the year given up to the memory of those
who died that the civilised world might live—who also died for an ideal—
will help us to remember that they died at all. Without some such enforced
remembrance, the world will, alas! only too quickly forget. And in
forgetting how they died, will also forget what they died for. Some people—
the vast majority perhaps—will never remember unless remembrance is
forced upon them. And if the world ever forgets the Glorious Dead, and the
"heritage" which these Glorious Dead left to those who still live on—well,
don't talk to me of Christianity and civilisation and the clap-trap of those
high ideals which everyone prates of, few understand, and still fewer strive
to live up to. If the war has not yet taught the political and social and
Christian world wisdom, nothing ever will; and, moreover, it does not
deserve to learn. Yet, only the other day, I heard some elderly gentlemen
discussing the next war—as if the last one were but a slight skirmish far
away amid the hills of Afghanistan. Well, better an era of the most
revolutionary socialism than that the world should once again be plunged
into such another tragedy as it has passed through during the last five years.

Humanity

"Humanity is one, and an injury to one member is an injury to the
whole." I cull this line from Mr. Gilbert Cannan's book, "The Anatomy of
Society." And I quote it because I believe that it sums up in a few words,
not only the world-politics of the future, but the religion—the real, practical
religion, and therefore the only religion which counts in so far as this life is
concerned—of the future as well. The snowball—if I may thus describe it
symbolically—has just begun to roll, but it will gather weight and impetus
with every succeeding year, until, at last, there will be no nations—as we
understand nations to-day—but only one nation, and that nation the whole
of the human race. The times are dead, or rather they are dying, which saw
civilisation most clearly in such things as the luxury of the Ritz Hotels, the
parks and palaces of Europe, the number of tube trains and omnibuses
running per hour along the rail and roadways of London, and the imitation
silk stockings in which cooks and kitchenmaids disport themselves on
Sundays. A New Knowledge is abroad—and that New Knowledge is a
fuller realisation that the new world is for all men and all women who work
and do their duty, for all humanity, and not merely for the few who get rich
upon the exploitation of poverty and helplessness of the masses. And this
realisation carries with it the realisation that the governments of the future
will be more really governments of the people for the people—and by
people I do not mean merely those of Britain or France, or whichever nation
men happen to belong to, but humanity all over the world. The things which
nowadays only money can buy must be brought within the grasp of the
poorest, and civilisation must be recognised as coming from the bottom
upwards, and not only from the top—a kind of golden froth which strives to
hide the dirt and misery and suffering beneath. So long as slums exist, so
long as poverty is exploited, so long as the great masses of men and women
are forced to lead sordid, unbeautiful, cramped, hopeless, and helpless lives,
as they are forced to live now—call no nation civilised. So long as these

things exist—call no nation religious. The one is a mockery of human life;
the other is a mockery of God.

It always strikes me that the greatest lack in all education—and this
applies to the education of princes as well as paupers—is the spirit of
splendid vision. Most things are taught, except the "vision" of self-respect
and responsibility. The poor are not taught to respect themselves at all, and
certainly their lives do not give them what their education has forgotten.
They are never encouraged to learn that each individual man and woman is
not only responsible to him and herself, but to all men and all women.
Certainly the rich never teach it them. For the last thing which rich people
ever realise is that their wealth carries with it human obligations, human
responsibilities, as well as the gratifications of their own appetites and
pleasures. The only objects of education seem to be to teach men to make
money, nothing is ever done to teach them how best to make life full of
interest, full of human worth, full of those "visions" which will help to
make the future or the human race proud in its achievements. The failure of
education as an intellectual, social, and moral force is best shown the
moment men and women are given the opportunity to do exactly as they
please. Metaphorically speaking, the poor with money in their pockets
immediately go on the "booze," and the rich "jazz." And men of the poor
work merely for the sake of being able to booze, and the rich merely for the
sake of being able to jazz. And the rich condemn the poor for boozing, and
the poor condemn the rich for jazzing—but this, of course, is one of life's
little ironies.

Responsibility

Personally, I blame the poor for boozing less than I blame the rich for
"jazzing." If I had to live the lives which millions of working men and
women lead, and amid the same surroundings, and with the same hopeless
future—I would booze with the booziest. You can't expect the poor to
respect themselves when the rich do not respect them. Without any feeling
of human responsibility in the wealthier classes, you cannot expect to find
any human responsibility in the lower orders. And by human responsibility
I do not mean some vague thing like "Government for the People," or
subscriptions to hospitals, or bazaars for the indigent blind, or anything of
that sort—though these things are excellent in themselves. I mean
something more practical than that. Hospitals should be state-owned, and
the indigent blind should be pensioned by the state. These things should not
be left to private enterprises, since they are human responsibilities and
should be borne by humanity. I mean that all owners of wealth should be
made to realise their moral responsibilities to their own workmen—the men
and women who help to create their wealth—and that with poverty there
should not go dirt and drudgery and that total lack of beauty and
encouragement to a cleaner, finer life without which existence on earth is
Hell—Hell being preached at from above.

The Government of the Future

The worst of government by the people is that the moment the people put
them into power they are gracefully forgotten. The only real government by
the people comes through the people themselves in the form of disturbances
and strikes and revolutions. Then, alas, the tiny craft of Progress is borne
towards the ocean on a river of bad blood—which means waste and
unnecessary suffering, and leaves a whole desert of anger and revenge
behind it. The most crying need of the times is the very last to be heard by

governments. They are so engrossed in the financial prosperity of the
country that they forget the social and moral prosperity altogether—and
financial prosperity without social and moral progress is but the beginning
of bankruptcy after all. A government, to be a real government and so to
represent authority in the eyes of the people, has not only to nurse and to
harbour, but also to rebuild. It does something more than govern. It has
been placed there by the people in order that it may help rebuild the lives of
the people—so that, besides helping capital to increase and develop, it at
the same time safeguards the people against exploitation by capital, and
sees to it that, through this capital, the people are enabled to live cleaner,
better, happier lives, are given an equal chance in the world, and
encouraged and given the opportunity to live self-respecting lives—lives
full not only of responsibility to themselves, but to humanity at large. That
to my mind is the true socialism—and it is a socialism which could come
within the next ten years, and without any sign of revolution, were the
Government to realise that it is something more than the foster-mother of
capital—that it is also a practical rebuilder of the human race—yes, even
though it has to cut through all the red-tape in the world and throw the
vested interests, owners and employers, on the scrap-heap of things inimical
to human happiness in the bulk. Sometimes I think that the franchise of
women will do a great deal towards this juster world when it comes.
Women have no "political sense," it is said. Well, thank God they haven't,
say I! They have the human sense—and that will be the only political sense
of any importance in the world of to-morrow.

And this war has been the great revelation. Masses of men and women
who never thought before—or, rather, who thought but vaguely, not
troubling to put their thoughts into words—have by war become articulate.
They are now looking for a leader, and upon their faces there is the
expression of disappointment. They do not yet realise that they have
discovered within their own minds and hearts that Splendid Vision which

once came through one, or, at most, a small group of individuals. This
vision is the vision of humanity as apart from the vision of one special
nation. It sees a new world in which science, the practical knowledge and
the material advancement of the West, combine with the greater peace and
happiness of the East, to make of this world an abiding place, an ideal
nearer the ideal of Heaven. Man, after all, possesses mind. His failure has
been that, so far, he has not learned wisdom—the wisdom to employ that
mind for the realisation of his own soul—that realisation without which life
becomes a mockery and civilisation a sham.

The Question

Can a man love two women at the same time? If he be married to one of
them—Yes. If he isn't—well, I cannot imagine it possible. Nor can I
imagine that every man is capable of this double passion. Some people (in
parenthesis, the lucky ones!) have characters so simple, so direct, so
steadfast, so very peaceful. Their soul is not torn asunder, first this way,
then that, perfectly sincere in all its varying moods, though the mood
changes like the passing seasons. Once having liked a thing, they like it
always, and the opposite has no attraction for them. These people are, as it
were, born husbands and born wives. They are faithful, though their fidelity
may not be exciting. This type could hardly love two people, though they
are quite capable of loving twice. As individuals they are to be envied,
because for them the inner life is one of simplicity and peace. But there are
other people who, as it were, seem to be born two people. They are capable
of infinite goodness; also they are capable of the most profound baseness.
And never, never, never are they happy. For the good that is in them suffers
for the bad, and the bad also suffers, since it knows that it is unworthy. So
their inner life is one long struggle to attain that ideal of perfection which

they prize more than anything else in the world, but are incapable of
reaching—or, rather, they are incapable of sustaining—because, within
their natures, there is a "kink" which always thwarts their good endeavour.
Thus for ever do they suffer, since within their souls there is a perpetual
warfare between the good which is within them and the bad. These people, I
say, can love two people at the same time, since two different people seem
to inhabit the same body, and both yearn to be satisfied; both must be
satisfied at some time or another. The Good within them will always
triumph eventually, even though the Bad must have its day. But do not
blame these people. They suffer far more than anyone can suspect. They
suffer, and only with old age or death does peace come to them. If there are
people born to be unhappy in this world, they are surely in the forefront of
that tragic army!

The Two Passions

Yet these people, as I said before, must be married to one of the two
Adored, if their sentiment for each can be called Love. Love, in which
passion plays the larger part, is so all-absorbing while it lasts, that only the
deep affection and respect which may come through the intimacy of
matrimony can exist within the self-same heart great enough to be called
Love. A man may adore and worship the woman who has proved herself a
perfect mate, who is the mother of his children, and yet be unfaithful to her
—not with any woman who crosses his path and beckons, but with the One
who appeals to the wild, romantic adventurer which is also part of his
nature, though neither the best part, nor the strongest. But I cannot imagine
a man adoring and respecting a woman who is not his wife the while he
loves with a burning passion another woman who promises rapture,
passion, and delight. Passion is so intense while it lasts that there is in the

heart of man no equal place for another woman who holds him by no legal
and moral tie. But a man, having a double nature, can worship his wife, yet
love with passion another woman—even though he hates and despises
himself for so doing. But it is rare, if not impossible, for one woman to
completely satisfy the man whose nature is made up of good and bad, of
high ideals and low cravings, of steadfast fidelity, yet with a yearning for
the wild, untrammelled existence of the mountain tops. With such a man—
and how many there are, if we but knew!—the woman he respects will
always win in the end, even though the woman who entices has also her day
of victory. The Good Woman will suffer—God knows she will! But the man
will suffer too. A man has to be wholly bad to thoroughly enjoy evil. The
man who is only half a saint—secretly goes through hell. That is his
punishment, and it is far more difficult for him to bear than the finger
pointed in contempt. Therefore, I believe that the happiest men and women
are the men and women who are born good and steadfast, simple and true,
or those who cultivate with delight scarcely one unselfish thought. That is
why the vast majority of people live so really lonely, so secretly sad at heart
and soul. Only the born-good or the born-bad know the blessedness of inner
peace.

Our "Secret Escapes"

I suppose that we all of us have our own little secret "dream-sanctuary"—
our way-of-escape which nobody knows anything about, and by which we
go when we are weary of the trivialities of the domestic hearth and sick
unto death of the "cackle-cackle" of the crowds. When we are very young
we long to share this secret little dream-sanctuary with someone else. When
we are older and wiser, we realise that if we don't keep it to ourselves we
are spiritually lost; for, with the best intentions in the world, the best-

beloved, to whom in rapture we give the key, either, metaphorically
speaking, leaves the front gate open or goes therein and turns on a
gramophone. We come into this world alone, and we leave it by ourselves;
and the older we grow the more we realise that, in spite of our own heart's
longing to share, we are most really at peace when we are quite alone in our
own company. When we are young we hope and expect our "dreams" to
become one day a glorious reality. When we are older we realise that our
"dreams" will always remain "dreams", and, strange as it may sound, they
become more real to us, even as "dreams," than do any realities—except
bores and toothache. For the "dreams" of youth become the "let's pretend"
of age. And the person who has forgotten the game of "let's pretend" is in
soul-colour of the dulness of ditch-water. And "let's pretend" is a game
which we can best play by ourselves. Even the proximity of a living being,
content to do and say nothing, robs it of its keenest enjoyment. No, we must
be by ourselves for the world around us to seem really inhabited by people
we love the most amid surroundings nearest our ideal. There are no bores in
our dream-world. Nothing disagreeable happens there. And, thank Heaven,
we can enter it almost anywhere—sometimes if we merely close our eyes!
And we can be our real selves in this dream-world of ours too, there is
nobody to say us nay; there are no laws and no false morals; we are fairy
kings and queens in a fairy kingdom. I always pity the man or woman who
is no monarch in this very real kingdom of shadows which lies all around
us, and which we can enter to reign therein whenever the human "jar" is
safely out of the way. There we can be our true selves and live our true life,
in what seems a very real world—a world, moreover, which we hope one
day will be the reality of Heaven.

My Escape and Some Others

Everybody, as I said before, has his or her own receipt for "getting away."
Some find it in long "chats" over the fireside with old friends; some in
reading and music and art; some in travel, some in "good works" and just a
few in "bad" ones. A new hat will often lift a woman several floors nearer to
the seventh heaven. A good dinner in prospect will sometimes elevate the
spirit of man out of the dreary "rut" and give that soupcon of something-to-
live-for which can take the ordinary everyday and turn it into a day which
belongs to the extraordinary. For myself, I like to get out into the country
alone; or, if I can't do that, or the weather sees to it that I shan't, I like to get
by myself—anywhere to dream, or, preferably, to explore some unknown
district or street or place in my own company. Sometimes I find that to open
a new book or a favourite old one, soon takes the edge off "edgyness," and
makes me see that the pin-pricks of life are merely pin-pricks, from which,
unless there are too many of them, I shan't die, however much I may suffer.
But even when reading—I like best to read alone—I am never really at ease
when at any moment a companion may suddenly break the silence and
bring me back to reality by asking the unseen listening gods "if they've
locked the cat out?" You condemn me? Well, perhaps I am wrong. And if
you can find happiness perpetually surrounded by people, then I envy you.
It is so much easier to go through life requiring nothing but food, friends,
and a bank balance, than always to hide misanthropic tendencies behind a
social smile. I envy you, because I realise that the fight to be alone, the fight
to be yourself, is the longest fight of all—and it lays you open to suspicion,
unfriendliness, even dislike, everywhere you go. But, if I must be honest, I
will confess that I hate social pastimes. To work and to dream, to travel, to
listen to music, to be in England in the springtime, to read, to give of myself
to those who most specially need me—if any there be?—that is what I now
call happiness, the rest is merely boredom in varying degree. My only
regret is that one has generally to live so long to discover what the
constituents of happiness are, or what is worth while and what worthless;

what makes you feel that the everyday is a day well spent, and not a day
merely got through somehow or other. You lose so much of your youth, and
the best years of your life, trying to find happiness along those paths where
other people informed you that it lay. It takes so many years of experience
to realise that most of the things which men call "pleasure" are but, as it
were, tough dulness covered with piquant sauce—a tough mess of which,
when you tire of the piquant sauce the toughness remains just so long as
you go on trying to eat it.

Over the Fireside

Most especially do I feel sorry for those people who cannot find a certain
illusion of happiness in reading. I thank whatever gods there be that I can
generally find the means of "getting-away" between the covers of a book. A
book has to be very puerile indeed if I cannot enjoy it to a certain extent—
even though that extent be merely a mild ridicule and amusement. I can
even enjoy books about books—if they are very well done, which is rare. I
am not particularly interested in authors—especially the photographs of
authors, which usually come upon their admirers with something
approaching shock—because I always think that the most interesting part of
an author is what he writes, not what he looks like. What he writes is
generally what he is. You can't keep everything of yourself out of anything
you may write—and thank Heaven for it! Apart from the story—often
indeed, before the story itself—the most delightful parts of any book are the
little gleams of the writer's point of view, of his philosophy, of his own life-
experiences, which glint through the matter in hand, and sometimes raise a
commonplace narrative into a volume of sheer entrancing joy. And perhaps
one of the most difficult things to write is to write about books—I don't
mean "reviews." (Almost anybody can give their opinion on books they

have read, and tell you something about them—which is nine hundred and
ninety per cent. of literary reviews.) But to write about books in a way
which amuses you, or interests you, and makes you want immediately to
read the book in question—that is a more difficult feat. And sometimes
what the writer about books says about books is more entertaining than the
books themselves. But then that is because of those little gleams of the
personal which are always so delightful to find anywhere.

Faith Reached Through Bitterness and Loss

Looking back on one's life, I always think it is so strange that just those
blows of fate which logic would consider as certain to destroy such things
as Faith and Belief, optimism and steadfastness of soul-vision, so many
times provide their very foundations. How often those whose Belief in a
Life Hereafter is the firmest have little reason to encourage that belief. We
often find through sorrow, a happiness—no, not happiness, but a peace—
which is enduring. When the waves of agnosticism and atheism have
broken over our souls, the ebb tide is so often Faith and Hope. And, as we
approach nearer and nearer to the time when, in the ordinary course of
events, we so soon shall know, there creeps into our hearts a certainty that
all is not ended with life, a belief which defies reason, and logic, and
common sense, and which, to outsiders, often appears to be merely a
clutching at straws. But these straws save us, and, through their means, we
eventually reach the shore where doubts cannot flourish and agnosticism
gives way to a Faith which we feel more than we can actually define.

Aristocracy and Democracy

I believe in the heart of democracy, but I am extremely suspicious of its
head. Popular education among the masses is the most derelict thing in all
our much-vaunted civilisation. To talk to the masses concerning anything
outside the radius of their own homes and stomachs is, for the most part,
like talking to children. It is not their fault. They have never had a real
chance to be otherwise. When I contemplate the kind of education which
the average child of the slums and country villages is given—and the type
of man and woman who is popularly supposed to be competent to give it—I
do not wonder that they are the victims of any firebrand, crank, or plutocrat
who comes to them and sails into the Mother-of-All-Parliaments upon their
votes. For the last six years I have been placed in circumstances which have
enabled me to observe the results of what education has done for the
average poor man. The result has made me angry and appalled. The figure
is low when I declare that ninety per cent. of the poor not only cannot write
the King's English, but can neither read it nor understand it—beyond the
everyday common words which a child of twelve uses in his daily
vocabulary. Of history, of geography, of the art and literature of his country,
of politics or law, of domestic economy—he knows absolutely nothing.
Nothing of any real value is taught him. Even what he knows he knows so
imperfectly that absolute ignorance were perhaps a healthier mental state.
Until education is regarded with the same seriousness as the law, it is
hopeless to expect a new and better world. For education is the very
foundation of this finer existence. You can't expect an A1 nation among B3
intellects. Ornamental education is not wanted—it is worse than useless
until a useful education has been inculcated. And what is a useful
education? It is an education which teaches a man and woman to be of
some immediate use in the world; to know something of the world in which
they live, and how best to fulfil their duty as useful members of a
community and in the world at large. At present the average boy and girl
are, as it were, educationally dragged up anyhow and launched upon the

world at the first possible moment to earn the few shillings which two
hands and an undeveloped intelligence are worth in the labour market. No
wonder there is Bolshevism and class war and anarchy and revolution.
Where the ruled are ignorant and the ruling selfish—you can never expect
to found a new and happier world.

Duty

As for a sense of duty, to talk to the average man and woman, no matter
what may be their class in life, of a sense of duty, is rather like reading
Shakespeare to a man who is stone deaf. And yet, an education which does
not at the same time seek to teach duty—duty to oneself, to the state, to
humanity at large—is no real education at all. But in the world in which we
live at present, a sense of duty is regarded as nonsense. Labour does not
realise its duties, neither does wealth; neither does the Church, except to
churchmen; nor Parliament, except to the party which provides its funds.
And yet, as I said before, a sense of duty is the very foundation of all real
education.

Even if the children of the poor were taught the rudiments of some trade
while they were at school, the years they spend there would not be so
utterly and entirely wasted. Even though they did not follow up that trade as
their occupation in life, it would at any rate give them some useful interest
in their hours of recreation. As it is they know nothing, so they are
interested in nothing. And this, of course, applies to the so-called educated
people as well. It always amuses me to listen to the well-to-do discussing
the working classes. To hear them one would think that the working classes
were the only people who wasted their time, their money, and their store of
health. It never seems to strike them that the working classes for the most

part live in surroundings which contain no interest whatsoever—apart from
their work. They are given education—and such education! They are given
homes—and such homes! They are plentifully supplied with public houses
—and ye gods, such public houses! The Government hardly realises yet that
it is there, not to listen to its own voice and keep its own little tin-pot throne
intact, but as a means by which the masses may arrive at a healthier, better,
more worthy state of existence. The working-classes are not Bolshevik, nor
do I think they ever will be; but deep down in their hearts there is a
determination that they and their children shall receive the same educational
advantages, the same right to air and light and decent amusement, as the
children of the wealthy. Because I am poor, they say to themselves, why
should I therefore have to inhabit a home unfit for decent habitation, receive
education utterly useless from every practical point of view—be forced to
live in surroundings which absolutely invite degradation of both mind and
body? There will always be poverty, but there ought never to be indecent
poverty. Better education; better housing; better chances for healthy
recreation—these are the things for which the masses are clamouring. Why
is it wrong for a workman who has made money during the war to buy a
piano—and to hear people talk that seems to be one of their most dastardly
crimes—when it is quite all right for his employer, who has made more
money out of the war, to pay five pounds for one good dinner, or a night's
"jazzing"?

Sweeping Assertions from Particular Instances

And this mention of the piano-crime among the munition-makers brings
me to another fact—how utterly impossible it is for the majority of people
to judge any big scheme without having regard to the particular instances
which threaten its success. Because some working people are so utterly

bestial that they are unfit to live in decent homes—so the majority of poor
people are unworthy of better surroundings. You might just as well judge
the ruling classes by the few units who advertise their own extravagant tom-
fooleries! In all questions of reform you have to work, as it were, up to the
vision of an ideal. The real, however disappointing at the outset, will
eventually reach the higher plane—of that I am certain. And in no question
am I more certain of this than in the question of the working classes. The
heart of democracy, as I said before, is absolutely in the right place; only its
"head" is as yet undeveloped. Its mental "view" is restricted—and no
wonder! Everything that has so far been done has helped to restrict that
view. This war has let more "light" into the "soul" of democracy than all the
national so-called education which has ever been devised and made
compulsory. Confiscation of property and all those other tom-fool cries are
but the screams of a handful of silly Bolsheviks. There is no echo in the
heart of the real labouring men and women. If they applaud it, it is only that
these cranks, at least, seem to be fighting for that human right to an equal
share of the common good things of this life which ought to be the
possession of all labour, however lowly. Take the education of the masses
out of the hands of the for the most part ignorant men and women who
nowadays make it their profession to teach it; raise the standard of payment
so that this all-important branch of citizenship will encourage educated and
refined men and women to take up that duty—and give the working classes
decent homes, plenty of air, and the chance of healthful recreation close at
hand, and you have solved the most vital labour problems of this old world
of ours and laid the foundation stones of the new.

How I came to make "History"!

Only those who have worked in the offices of an important newspaper,
know that the Power Behind the Throne—which is the Editorial Chair—is
rarely the Church, scarcely ever the State, infrequently the Capitalist, and
never Labour,—but simply the Advertisement Department.

I was sitting the other afternoon—dreaming, as is my wont; and smoking
cigarettes, which is one of my bad habits,—when the head-representative of
this unseen Power rushed into my sanctum.

"Will you do something for me?" he demanded, with that beneficent
smile on his face which, through experience, I have discovered to be the
prelude of most disagreeable demands.

"Certainly," I answered, inwardly collecting my scattered brains
preparatory to a brilliant defence. "What is it?"

Without more ado he, as it were, threw his bomb.

"Will you write me an Essay on Corsets?"

"On what?" I asked incredulously—knowing that he had been a
distinguished soldier, and suspecting that he had suddenly developed what
the soldiers describe as "a touch of the doolally."

"On Corsets!"

"But I don't know anything about them," I protested, "except that I should
not like to wear them!"

"That doesn't matter," he answered reassuringly. "All we want is a page
of 'matter.'"

Then he proceeded to explain that he had secured several highly-paid
advertisements from the leading corsetieres, and that his "bright idea" was
to connect them together by an essay illustrated by their wares, in order that
those who read might be attracted to buy.

Then he left me.

"Just write a history of corsets," he cried out laughing. Then, by way of
decorating the "bitter pill" with jam, he added: "I'm sure you'll do it
splendidly!"

"Splendidly" I know I could not do it, but to do it—rather amused me.

After all, there is one benefit in writing of something you know nothing
about (and you are certain that ninety-nine per cent. of your readers will not
be able to enlighten you) the necessity for accuracy does not arise. And so, I
settled myself down to invent "history," and, if my historical narrative is all
invention, I can defend myself by saying that if it isn't true—it might be.
And many historical romances cannot boast even that defence.

Most people who write about the early history of the world have to guess
a good deal; so I don't see why I shouldn't state emphatically that, after
years and years and years of profound research, the first corset "happened"
when Eve suddenly discovered that she was showing signs of middle-age in
the middle. So she plaited some reeds together, tied them tightly round her
waist-line, and, sure enough, Adam had to put off making that joke about
"Once round Eve's waist, twice round the Garden of Eden" for many
moons. But Eve, I suppose, discovered later on, as many a woman has also
discovered since her day, that, though a tight belt maketh the waistline
small, the body bulgeth above and below eventually. So Eve began making
a still wider plait—chasing, as it were, the "bulge" all over her body. In this
manner she at last became encased in a belt wide enough to imprison her

torso quite _un_comfortably, but "she kept her figure"—or thought she did
—and thus easily passed for one hundred and fifty years old when, in
reality, she was over six hundred.

And every woman who is an "Eve" at heart has followed in her time the
example of the mother of all of 'em. As they begin to fatten, so they begin to
tighten, and the inevitable and consequential "bulge" is imprisoned as it
"bulgeth" until no corsetiere can do more for them than hint that men like
their divinities a trifle plump in places. But to arrive at this—the last and
only consolation—a woman has to become rigidly encased from her thighs
almost to her neck. She can scarcely walk and she can hardly breathe, and
the fat which must go somewhere has usually gone to her neck, but—thank
Heaven!—"she has kept her figure" (or she likes to think she has), and
many a woman would sooner lose her character than lose her "line."

You may think that this only applies to frivolous and silly women, but
you are wrong. It applied even to goddesses! Historians inform us that the
haughty Juno, discovering that her husband, Jupiter, was going the way of
all flesh and nearly every husband, borrowed her girdle from Venus, with
the result that when Jupiter returned home that evening from business, he
stayed with his wife—the club calling him in vain. Thus was Juno justified
of her "tightness."

But then, many a wife has cause to look upon a well-cut corset as her
best friend. And many a husband, too, has every reason to be grateful to that
article of his wife's apparel which the vulgar will call "stays." In earlier days
a husband used to lock his wife in a pair of iron-bound corsets when he
went away from home, keeping the key in his pocket, and thus not caring a
tinker's cuss if his home were simply overflowing with handsome
gentleman lodgers! The poor wife couldn't retaliate by locking her husband
in such a virtuous prison, because men never wore such things—which,
perhaps, was one or the reasons why they didn't, who knows?

Also, the corset—or rather, the "bulge" of middle-age, which was the real
cause of their ever being worn—has always strongly influenced the

fashions. I don't know it as a positive fact, though I suspect it to be true
nevertheless, that the woman of fashion who first discovered that no
amount of iron bars could keep her from bulging in the right place, but to
the wrong extent, suddenly, thought of the pannier and the crinoline and—
well, that's where she found that she was laughing. For almost any woman
can make her waist-line small: her trouble only really comes when she has
to tackle other parts of her anatomy which begin to show the thickening of
Anno Domini. Panniers and the crinoline save her an enormous amount of
mental agony. On the principle of "What the eye doesn't see, to the
imagination looks beautiful"—the early Victorian lady was wise in her
generation, and her modern sister, who shows the world most things
without considering whether what she exhibits is worth looking at, is an
extremely foolish person. One thing, however, which women have never
been able to fix definitely, is exactly where her waist should be. Men know
where it is, and they put their arms round it instinctively whenever they get
the chance. But women change their mind about it every few years.
Sometimes it is down-down-down, and sometimes it is under their armpits.
A few years ago a woman who had what is known as a "short waist" was
referred to by other women as a "Poor Thing." Then the short-waisted
woman came into fashion—or rather, fashions fashioned themselves for her
benefit—and her long-waisted sister had to struggle to make her waist look
to be where really her ribs were. Only a few weeks back a woman's waist
and bust and hips had all to be definitely defined. Nowadays they bundle
them all, as it were, into clothes cut in a sack-line, and are the very last
letter of the very latest word in fashion. I can well imagine that a few years
hence women will be as severely corseted as they were a short time ago.

I can well remember the time when a woman who held "views" and
discarded her stays sent a shudder through the man who was forced to
dance with her—though whether they were pleasurable shudders or merely
shuddery shudders I do not know. Nowadays, the woman who wears an out-

and-out corset, tightly laced, is either a publican's wife or is just bursting
with middle age. The corset of to-day is little more than the original plaited
grass originated by Mother Eve—in width, that is; in texture it is of a luxury
unimaginable in the Garden of Eden.

Women are not so concerned nowadays that their waist should be the
eighteen inches of 1890 beauty as that their figure elsewhere should not
presume their condition to be at once national and domestic. The modern
corset starts soon and finishes quite early. Thus the cycle from Mother Eve
is now complete. "As we were" has once more repeated itself.

The only novelty which belongs to to-day is that men are wearing corsets
more than ever. A well-known corsetiere has opened a special branch for
her male customers alone. Their corsets, too, are of a most beautiful and
elaborate description—ranging from the plain belt of the famous athlete to
the brocade, rosebud-embroidered "confection" of a well-known general.
Perhaps—say fifty years hence—my grandson will be writing of male
lingerie, and men will rather lose their reputations than lose their figure.
Well, well! if we live in a topsy-turvy world—as they say we do—let's all
be topsy-turvy!

The Glut of the Ornamental

How strange it is that human endeavour is, for the most part, always
expended upon accomplishing something for which no one has any
particular use, while the things which, as it were, are simply begging to be
done, are usually among the great "undone" for which we ask forgiveness
every Sunday morning in church—that is, presuming we go to church.
While there is a world shortage of cooks, the earth is stuffed with lady

typists far beyond repletion. Whereas you can always buy a diamond
necklace (if you have the money), you can hardly find a tiny house, even if
you throw "love" in with the payment. Where you may find a hundred
people to do what you don't want, you will be extremely lucky if you come
across even one ready and willing to do what you really require done.
Nobody seems to like to be merely useful; they would far sooner be
ornamental—and starve. Where a man can have the choice of a thousand
girls who can't even stitch a button on a pillow-case, the feminine expert in
domestic economy will go on economising all by herself, until the only man
who takes any real interest in her is the undertaker! It is all very strange,
and very unaccountable. But I suppose it will forever continue thuswise
until the world ceases to lay its laurels at the foot of Mary and to give
Martha the "go by."

I never can quite understand why the bank clerk who marries a chemist's
"lady" assistant is not considered to marry very much beneath him, whereas
if he elopes with a cook we speak of it as a complete mesalliance. But the
cook would, after all, prove extremely useful to him, whereas the chemist's
"lady" assistant could only make use other knowledge to poison him one
evening without pain. In the same way, if a bankrupt "Milord" takes in
"holy matrimony" a barmaid with a good business head, the world wonders
what heaven was doing to make such an appalling match. Should, however,
he marry "a lady of title" who is entitled to nothing under the will of her late
father, the Duke of Poundfoolish-pennywise, and can't earn anything
herself, the marriage is spoken of as a romance, and the Church blesses it—
and so does the most exclusive society in Balham. Utility seems never to be
wanted. The world only asks for ornaments.

It is the same in the drama, where Miss Peggy Prettylegs of the Frivolity
Follies will draw the salary of a Prime Minister for showing her surname,
while Miss Georgiana de Montmorency, the actress who knows Shakspere

so intimately that she mutters "Dear old Will" in her sleep, is resting so long
in her top flat in Bloomsbury that if she lived on the ground floor she would
inevitably take root.

It is the same in literature, where "Burnt Out Passion" runs through sixty
editions and dies gloriously in a cheap edition with a highly-coloured cover
on the railway book-stalls, while Professor I. Knowall's wonderful treatise
on "What is the Real Origin of Life?" has to be bought by subscription, with
the Professor's rich wife as principal purchaser.

It is the same in love, where the worst husbands have the most loving
wives, and a good wife lives for years with a positive "horror," and is never
known really to smile until she lies dead in her bed!

It is the same in art . . . and yet it is not quite the same here, because the
picture which "sells," and is reproduced on post cards, generally inculcates
a respectable moral, even though the sight of it sends the artistic almost
insane. And yet, where you can find a hundred houses the interiors of which
are covered in wallpapers which make you want to scream, you will find
only a comparative few who prove by their beauty of design just exactly
why they were chosen—and these rooms, in parenthesis, are never let as
lodgings.

Not that there seems any cure for this world-wide rage for the useless.
We have just to accept it as a fact—and wonder! Meanwhile we have to
make the best of the men and women who, metaphorically speaking, would
far sooner sit dressed in the very latest fashion, underclothed in cheap
flannelette, than buy dainty, real linen "undies," and make last year's "do-
up" do for this year's "best."

On Going "to the dogs"

I always secretly wonder what people mean when they say they are
"going to the dogs." Do they mean that they are going to enjoy themselves
thoroughly, with Hell at the end of it?—or do they mean that they are going
to raise Hell in their neighbourhood and prevent everybody else from
enjoying themselves? Personally, I always think that it is a very empty
threat—one usually employed by disillusioned lovers or children. From the
casual study I have made of the authorised "dogs," I find them unutterably
boring "bow-wows." Of course, I am not exactly a canine expert. Like most
men, I have ventured near the kennels once or twice, and made good my
escape almost at the first sound of a real bark. People who are habitually
immoral, who make a habit of breaking all the Commandments, are rarely
any other than very wearisome company. What real lasting joy is there in a
"wild night up West" if you have a "head" on you next morning that you
would pay handsomely to get rid of, and a "mouth"? . . . "Oh, my dear, such
a 'mouth'! Appalling!" Besides, the men and women who are in the race
with you are usually such dreary company. Either they are so naturally bad
that they do not possess the attraction of contrast or variety, or else they are
so bitterly repentant that one has to sit and endure from them long stories
proving that they are more sinned against than sinning, or that they all
belong to old "county families," or are the left-handed offspring of real
earls. In any case, one must needs open yet another bottle to endure the
fiction to the end.

No, I have long since come to the conclusion that most people don't
really enjoy themselves a bit when they are determined to do so. They only
have a thoroughly "good time" unexpectedly, or when they oughtn't to have
it. Of course, there is always the question whether people are most happy
when they don't look so, and whether they are usually most miserable when
apparently smiling their delight. At any rate, if there be one day, or days, in

the whole year when all England looks utterly miserable, it is on a fine
Bank Holiday or at a picnic. Of course, the newspapers will tell you, for
example, that Hampstead Heath was positively pink with happy, smiling
faces. But if you did find yourself in the midst of the Bank Holiday crush,
you would be struck by the hot, irritated, bored, and weary look of this
"happy crowd." Even at the Derby, the only people you see there who, if
they are not happy, at least look so, are those who have just come out of the
saloon bar. Occasionally, someone here or there will let the exuberance of
his "spirits" overflow, but he won't get much encouragement from the rest
of his listeners squashed together in the same char-a-banc. At the most they
will look at each other and smile in a half-discouraging manner, as if to say,
"Yes, dear, he is very funny. But what a common man!" It is all rather
depressing. Only a street accident or standing in a queue will make the
majority of English people really animated. No wonder that foreigners
believe that we take our pleasures sadly. They only observe us when we are
out to enjoy ourselves. But if they could see us at a funeral, or when we're
suffering from cold feet, then they'd see us smiling and singing! No wonder
the French have never really recovered from the gaiety of the British soldier
as he went into battle. But if they really want to see the average Britisher
looking every bit as phlegmatic as his Continental reputation, they should
look at him when he's out for a day's gaiety. No wonder that men, when
they "go to the dogs," go to Paris. "The dogs" at home are too much like a
moral purge to make a long stay in the "kennel" anything but a most
determined effort of the will. We possess, as a nation, so strangely the joie
de mourir without much knowledge of the joie de vivre.

A School for Wives

All marriage is a lottery—that is why the modern tendency is to examine
both sides of the hedge before you ask someone to jump over it with you. A
single man may be said to have his own career in his own hands; but once
married, he runs the risk of having to begin all over again, and recommence
with a load on his back. A good wife can make a man, but a bad wife can
undo a saint. And how's he to know if she be a good wife or a bad 'un until
she's his wife, which is just too late, as the corpse said to the tax collector.
You see, a man has nothing to go on, except to look at what might be his
mother-in-law. A girl is far more fortunate. If a man can afford to keep a
wife, he's already passed the examination as a "highly recommended." He,
at any rate, has to take marriage seriously. No man wants to put his hard-
earned savings into a purse with a hole at the bottom, nor live with a
woman who begins to "nag" the moment she ceases to snore. If only women
were brought up with the idea that marriage is a very serious business, and
not merely the chance to cock-a-snook at Mamma, marriage would be far
less often a failure. But most girls are brought up to regard the serious
business of matrimony from the problematical point of view of whether her
husband will earn enough money to give her a "good time." If it be a
"serious business," as Mamma and Papa and the parish priest assert it to be,
then let her begin as she would begin a business, by starting to learn it. I
don't see why there shouldn't be a School for Wives, and no girl be allowed
to marry until she has at least passed the fourth standard. After all, it is only
fair on the man that he should know that with the sweetest-dearest-loveliest-
little-darlikins-in-the-whole-world he is also getting a woman who knows
how to boil an egg, and make an old mutton bone and a few potatoes go
metaphorical miles. The knowledge would be a great comfort to him when
his little "darlikins'" feet-of-clay began to show through her silk stockings.
As it is, marriage to him is little but a supreme example of buying a pig in a
poke, followed by an immediate slump in his own special purchase.

I never can understand why women immediately become "ruffled" when
a mere man suggests that, if marriage be a serious business, the least a girl
can do is to learn the business side of that business before she enters into
partnership. But "ruffle" they do. Also they think that you have insulted the
sex, rather as if you had accosted a goddess with a "tickler," or stood before
the Sphynx and, regarding her mysterious smile, said, "Give it up, old
Bean!" For, after all, if the man has to pay the piper, it's up to the woman to
know how to make a tune! As it is, so many husbands seem to make money
for their wives to waste it. No wonder there are so many bachelors about,
and no wonder there is an outcry to "tax them." Even then many men will
pay the tax gladly, plus an entertainment tax if necessary—who knows? For
elder people are so fond of drilling into the ears of youth the truism that
passion dies and that marriage, to be successful, must be founded upon
something more enduring than a feeling of delirium under the stars. That is
why a School for Wives would be so useful. After passion is dead, it would
be a poor creature of a husband who couldn't find comfort living in the
same house with a woman who had obtained her certificate for economical
housekeeping and sock-mending. You see, the home is the wife's part of the
business. The husband only comes in on sufferance, to pay the bills, listen
to complaints, and be a "man about the place," should a man be required. A
happy home, a comfortable home, that is a wife's creation. But she can't
create the proper atmosphere merely by being an expert on Futurism in
music, nor by possessing a back which it would be a crime of fashion not to
lay bare. She has got to know the business side of housekeeping and home
economics before an indifferent husband can be turned into a good one. You
ask, why not a School for Husbands? Well, husbands have passed their
"final" when they have earned enough money to keep a wife. The husband
provides the house and the wife makes the home. But most wrecked homes
are wrecked through ignorance, so why not let wisdom be taught? A well-
run home is three parts of a happy one. And if the other part be missing—

well, let's have a divorce. Easy divorce certainly encourages domestic mess-
ups, but they are not half such a "mess" as the mess of a matrimonial
"hash." The home is the other side of a man's business, the side which his
wife runs. Well, as he has had to study to work up his side, why let hers be
such a "jump in the dark," for him? Let the home become a study, even a
science, and let not so many wives reach a forgivable level of domestic
excellence on the "dead bodies" of so many unforgivable "bloomers."
Remember that in matrimony, as in everything else it is the premier
"bloomer" which blows up les chateaux en Espagne. Afterwards you have
to use concrete—and build as you may.

The Neglected Art of Eating Gracefully

Were it not for the fact that we are usually eating at the same time, and so
in no mood to criticise the mastication of others, I am sure that not half so
many people would fall into love, nor be able to keep up the passionate
illusion when fate had pushed them into it. For to watch people eat is, as a
rule, to see them at the same disadvantage as the housemaid sees them
when she calls them in the morning. Very few people can eat prettily. The
majority "munch" in a most unbecoming fashion. For, say what you will, to
eat may possibly be delightful, but it is certainly not a romantic episode of
the everyday. True, restaurants have done their best to add glamour to our
daily chewing. And the better the cuisine, the less time we have for
regarding others. That is why hostesses are usually so harassed over their
menus. Very few guests arrive really hungry. So she has to entice, as it
were, the already replete stomach by delicacies which it really doesn't want,
but is not too distended to enjoy. Thus they are kept busy all the time, and
have no leisure to observe. But I always wish that part of our education
included a course of lessons in the art of eating enough, and of eating it

elegantly. Not one person in a hundred is anything but a monstrous
spectacle in front of a plateful of stewed tripe. But, as I said before, we are,
happily, so busy with our own plateful at the time that we have usually no
leisure to regard their stuffing. Personally, I always think that the only way
to enjoy a really good dinner is to eat it alone. People are delightful over
coffee, but I want only my dreams with salmon mayonnaise.

Of course you can eat and talk, but only the exceptionally clever people
can talk and enjoy what they eat. I always envy them. Many an excellent
dinner have I lost to all intents and purposes because my companion
insisted on being "lively," and expected a "certain liveliness" on my front at
the same moment. If you must eat in company—then two is an ideal
number. But don't place your companion opposite you. Many a "sweet
nothing" has been lost in bitterness because the person to whom it was
addressed saw inevitably a morsel of caviare preparing to become
nourishment. No, the best place for a solitary companion at meals is, either
on the right or on the left, never immediately in front. I have sat opposite
some of the most handsome people, and wished all the time that I could
have changed them into a "view of sheep"—even one of a brick wall would
have been better than nothing. When you are talking to someone at your
side, you can turn your face in their direction for the first few words, and
then look at something else for the rest of the sentence. But if you turn your
head away while talking to someone immediately in front of you—if not
necessarily rude, it gives at least the impression that you are merely talking
because to talk is expected of you, otherwise you are slightly bored. I know
that the popular picture of an Ideal Dinner for Two is one of an exquisitely
gowned woman sitting so close to the man-she-loves that only a spiral table
decoration prevents their noses from rubbing; with a quart bottle of
champagne reclining in a drunken attitude in a bucket of ice, and a basket of
choice fruit untouched on the table. But if you examine that picture of the
ideal, you will always discover that the artist has missed the ugly

foundations of his fancy, as it were, by jumping over the soup and fish, the
joint, the entree, and the sweet, and has got his lovers to the coffee, the
cigar-and-liqueur stage, when, if the truth be known, all the hurdles over
which the "horse of disillusion" may come a nasty cropper have been
passed. So, if you be wise, sit on the side of your best-beloved until the
nourishing part of your gastronomic "enfin seul" is over; and then, if you
must gaze into his eyes and he into yours, move your seat round—and your
evening will probably end by both of you being in the same infatuated state
in which you began it. It is only by the strictest attention to the most minor
among the minor details of life, that a clever woman is able to keep up the
reputation of charm and beauty among her closest intimates. She realises
that Nature has given to very few people a "sneeze" which is not something
of an offence, and that not even one possessing the loveliness of Ninon de
l'Enclos can look anything but a monstrous spectacle when a crumb "goes
down the wrong way." But there are other "pitfalls" which it is in the power
of all of us to avoid, and the "pitfall" of eating ungracefully is not the least
among them.

Modern Clothes

I often think that, if those "Old walls only could speak"—as the "tripper"
yearns for them to do, because he can't think of anything else to remark at
the moment—all they would say to him would be the words, "For God's
sake, you guys, CLEAR OUT!" As a matter of fact, it is just as well that old
walls can't talk, or they might tell us what they thought of us; and you can't
knock out a stone wall—at least, not with any prospect of success—in a
couple of rounds. For we must look very absurd in the eyes of those who
have watched mankind get more absurd and more absurd-looking
throughout the ages. Take, for example, our clothes. No one could possibly

call them comfortable, and, were we not so used to seeing them ourselves,
we should probably call them ugly as well. In the autumn of 1914 we
suddenly woke up to the fact that we belonged to a very good-looking
nation. It was, of course, the cut of the uniform which effected this
transformation. It not only showed off a man's figure, but it often showed it
up—and that is the first and biggest step towards a man improving it.
Sometimes it gave a man a figure who before possessed merely elongation
with practically no width. But the days of khaki are over—thank God for
the cause, but aesthetically it's a pity. We have returned to the drab and
shoddy days of dress before the war, and men look more shoddy and more
drab than ever.

Surely clothes are designed, apart from their warmth, to make the best
show of the body which is in them. Having discovered that style in which
the average man or woman looks his very best, it seemed so needlessly
ridiculous to keep changing it. Beauty and comfort—that surely is the
raison d'etre of apparel—apart from modesty, which, however, a few fig
leaves can satisfy. Fashion opens the gate, as it were, and we pass through
it, one by one, like foolish sheep—without a sheep's general utility. Mr.
Smith, who is short, fat, and podgy, dresses exactly like Mr. Brown, who is
tall, muscular, and well proportioned. Mr. Smith would not look so dreadful
if he wore a coat well "skirted" below the waist, with tight-fitting
knickerbockers and stockings. Mr. Brown's muscles and fine proportions
are very nearly lost in a coat and trousers, which only make his muscular
development look like fat and his fine proportions merely breadth without
much shape. Mrs. Smith, who is modelled on the lines of Venus, bares her
back at the dictates of some obscure couturiere in Paris, and the result gives
a certain aesthetic pleasure. Mrs. Brown, determined also to be in the
fashion, valiantly strips herself, and looks like a bladder of not particularly
fresh lard! Were she to wear a modified fashion of the mode 1760 she
would probably look almost charming.

And so we might go on citing examples and improvements until we had
tabulated and docketed every human being. For an absolute proof that the
present mode of dressing for both men and women is generally wrong, is,
that the men and women who look best in it are those who possess bones
without flesh, length with just that one suggestion of a curve common to all
humanity. And think how much more interesting the world would be were
each of us to dress in that style which showed our good points to advantage.
For, after all, what is the object of clothes, apart from modesty and warmth
—which a blanket and a few safety pins could satisfy—if it be not to create
an effect pleasant to the eye. And why, when once we have discovered a
style which certainly makes the majority of people look their best, should
we wilfully discard it and return to the unimaginative and drab? We
complain that the world of to-day, whatever may be said in its favour,
cannot possibly be called picturesque. Well let us make it picturesque! And
having made it more beautiful—for Heaven's sake let us KEEP it beautiful.
Let it be a sign of cowardice—not one of the greatest signs of courage of
the age—to fail to put on overalls, if we look our best in them! After all,
every reform is in our own hands. But most people seem so entirely
helpless to do anything but, metaphorically speaking, flick a fly off their
own noses, that they leave reformation to God, and look upon their own
unbeautiful effect and the unbeautiful effect of other men as an act of blind
destiny. So we, as it were, sigh "Kismet"—in front of garments which a
monkey, with any logic or reason in his composition, would not deign to
wear. Yes, certainly, if "these old walls could only speak," they would tell us
a few home truths. Our ears would surely burn at their eloquence.

A Sense of Universal Pity

Nearly everybody can "feel sorry"—some, extremely so! Lots of people
can exclaim, "How ghastly!" in front of a mangled corpse—and then pass
shudderingly on their way with a prayer in their hearts that the dead body
isn't their own, nor one belonging to their friends and acquaintances. But
very few people, it seems to me, possess what I will call a sense of
universal pity, which is the intuition to know and sympathise with people
"who have never had a chance"; with men and women who have never had
"their little day"; with the poor, and hungry, and needy; with those whom
the world condemns, and the righteous consider more worthy of censure
than of pity. That is to say, while nearly everybody can sympathise with a
tragedy so palpable that a dog could perceive it, there are very few people
who can sympathise with the misery which lies behind a smiling face, that
sorrow of the "soul" which would sooner die than be found out. They can
realise the tragedy of a broken back, but they cannot realise the tragedy of a
broken heart, still less of a broken spirit. And if that heart and that spirit
struggle to hide their unshed tears behind a mask of cheerfulness, or
bravado, or assumed—and sometimes very real—courage, they neither can
perceive it nor realise it, and the well-spring of their sympathy, should it be
pointed out to them, is a very faint and uncertain trickle indeed. Most of us
like to take the sorrows of other people merely at their face value, and if the
face be cheerful our imagination does not pierce behind that mask to take,
as it were, the secret sorrow in its all-loving arms. But personally, to my
mind, the easiest sorrows of all to bear are the sorrows which need not be
hidden, which, maybe, cannot be hidden, and which bring all our friends
and neighbours around us in one big echoing wail. The sorrows which are
the real tragedies are the sorrows which we carry in our hearts every hour of
our lives, which stalk beside us in our days of happy carelessness, and add
to the misery of our days of woe. We do not speak of them—they are too
personal for that. We could not well describe them—their history would be
to tell the whole story of our lives. But we know that they are there

nevertheless. And the men or women who are our intimates, if they do not
perceive something of this shadow behind our smiles, can never call
themselves our friends, although we may live in the same house with them
and exist side by side on the most friendly terms. That is why, if we probe
deep down into the hearts of most men and women, we discover that, in
spite of all their gaiety and all their outward courage, inside they are very
desolate, and in their hearts they are indescribably lonely.

The Few

But just a few people seem to be enabled to see beneath the surface of
things. Around them they seem to shed an extraordinary kind of
understanding sympathy. They are not entirely the "people in trouble" who
appeal to them; rather they seem able to perceive the misery of a "state of
life"—something which obtains no sympathy because people either
condemn it or fail to realise the steps which led up to it—in the long, long
ago. To them, everybody unfortunate—whether it be by their own fault or
by the economic, moral, or social laws of the country—arouses their
sympathy. It would seem as if Nature had given them the gift of intuition
into another's sorrow—especially when that sorrow is not apparent to the
outside world. You will find these people working, for the most part, among
the poor and needy, in the slums of big cities, in the midst of men and
women whose life is one long, hard struggle to keep both ends meeting
until death releases them from the treadmill which is their life. They do not
advertise themselves nor their philanthropy. One often never hears of them
at all—until they are dead. They do not seek to hide their light under a
bushel, because to them all self-advertisement is indecent. They do not
realise that what they do is "light" at all. But the world does not realise all
that it owes to these unknown men and women, whose sympathies are so

wide, so all-absorbing, that they can give up their lives to minister to the
sorrows and hardships of others—and, in succouring them, find their only
reward. I have known one or two of these people in my life, and they have
given me a clearer insight into the nobility inherent in human nature than all
the saints whose virtues were ever chronicled, than all the wealthy
philanthropists whose gifts and generosity were ever overpraised.

The Great and the Really Great

I always think that one of the most amusing things (to watch), in all life,
is what I term the "Kaiser-spirit" in individuals. Nearly everyone mistakes
the trimmings of greatness for the real article, and most people would
sooner expire than not be able to flaunt these wrappings, or the rags or
them, before somebody's eyes. And this spirit exists in individuals in almost
every grade of society; until you get to the rock bottom of existence, when
the immediate problems of life are so menacing that men and women dare
not play about with the gilded imitations. This "Kaiser-spirit"—or the spirit
which, if it can't inspire homage, will buy the "props" of it and sit among
the hired gorgeousness in the full belief that their own individual greatness
has deserved it—is everywhere. Very few men and women are content to be
simply men and women. They all seek strenuously to be mistaken for Great
Panjandrums. The woman who takes a little air in the park in the afternoon
with two full-grown men sitting up, straight-backed and impassive, on the
box of the carriage, is one example of this. The chatelaine of a jerry-built
villa, who is pleased to consort with anybody except servants and the class
below servants, is another. The majority of people need money, not in order
to live and be happy, but in order to impress the crowd that they are of more
value than those who are thereby impressed. The drama which goes on
around and around the problem of whom to "call upon" and whom to "cut,"

fills the lives of more men and women than the problem of how to make the
best of life and pave one's way to the hereafter. If Christ came back to earth,
He would have to choose one set or another—Belgravia, Bayswater, or
Brixton.

Love "Mush"

I was standing outside a music shop the other day, gazing through the
windows at the songs "everybody is singing." Their titles amused me. Not a
single one promised very much real sense. They were all what I will call
love "mush"—"If you were a flowering rose," and "Come to my garden of
love," were two typical examples. The remainder of the verses—with which
the suburban sopranos will doubtless break the serenity of the suburban
nights this summer—were of a "sloppy" sentimentality combined with a
kind of hypersexual idiocy unparalleled except in an English ballad of the
popular order. On such belief, I said to myself, are young lovers brought up.
Well, I suppose it would be difficult for a youthful soprano to put "her soul"
into a song which asked, "What shall I give my dear one every morning for
his breakfast?" or, "Who'll soothe your brow when the Income Tax is due,
dear?" And yet, sooner or later, she will be faced with some such problems,
and then her beloved won't ask her if she be a flowering rose or invite her
into his garden of love unless she can find an answer which will carry them
both over to the next difficulty fairly successfully. But to live in an eternal
state of love-mush is what young people are brought up to regard as
matrimony. The plain facts of matrimony are carefully hidden from them, as
either being too "prosaic" or too indelicate. The most responsible position in
all life for a man and a woman is entered upon by them with an ignorance
and an irresponsibility which are neither dignified nor likely to be
satisfactory. A woman goes in for several years' training before she can

become a cook; a worker in every grade of life has to go through a long
period of initiation before she can be said to be really fit for her "job." But
any girl thinks she is fit to become a wife, with no other qualification except
that she is a woman, and can return endearment for endearment when
required. She is not expected to know or do anything else. But her husband
expects many and more important things from her if he is not to live to
regret his bargain. He may not know it when he is asking her to live with
him in his garden of love, but he will realise it a few years later, especially
if she has turned that garden of love into a wilderness of expensive weeds.

Wives

The wife of a poor man really can be a helpmate, but the wife of a rich
man is so often only asked to be a mistress who can bear her husband
legitimate children. Everything which a woman can do, a rich woman pays
other women to do for her, while she graces the results of their labour with
a studied charm which receives its triumph in the envy of her husband's
male friends. No wonder there are so many wild and discontented wives
among the middle and upper classes. Where a man or a woman has no
"ideal," where they have nothing to do which is really worth doing, they
always approach the primitive in morals. We may pretend to spurn the
cocotte—but to look as nearly as she looks, to live as nearly as she lives, to
resemble her and yet to place that resemblance on a legal and, consequently,
secure foundation, is becoming more and more the life-work of that
feminine "scum" which the war stirred up and peace has caused to
overflow. Beneath it all I know there is a strata of the Magnificent, but the
surface-ground is weedier than ever. I am not a prude (I think!), but the
eternally amusement-seeking and irresponsible lives led by many of the
rich, and the really appalling looseness of morals now being led by girls

without a qualm, bode very seriously ill for the future of that New World
which we were promised the war would make safe for—well, I believe we
were told it was to be Democracy, but the Government official and the
profiteer still seem the most firmly dug in of us all. I go to the fashionable
West-end haunts, and I see the crowds of wealthy women getting as near the
nude as they and their dressmakers can manage; I go to the poor parts of
London, and I am really shocked by the immense number of girls, some
only children, who are practically and voluntarily on the streets. These may
only be the minority of women and girls, I admit, but they are a minority
which is having, and is going to have, a very sinister influence on the future
—and the peace and beauty of that future. For the out-and-out prostitute one
can feel understanding, and with understanding there is a certain respect;
but these amateur "syrens" are a menace and a disgrace to the "homes"
which breed them so carelessly, and look after them so ill.

Children

I suppose the most absurd fetish of modern so-called democratic politics
is that fetish of the liberty of the subject. In theory it is ideal—let there be
complete liberty of ideas by all means; but when that liberty, as is nearly
always the case, means that the liberty of one man is gained by the sacrifice
of another—then it is the enemy of humanity as well as of nature. I always
consider that, in the really Socialistic state, children will not entirely belong
to their parents, but will also be guarded and looked after as an asset to the
world. This will, of course, give complete liberty to good parents, but it will
prevent bad parents from wrecking the lives of their children, as is the case
to-day, unless the parents' wickedness is so disgracefully bad that they come
under the eye of the N.S.P.C.C. But the law always shields the wrong-doer.
We are far more concerned that mothers and fathers should have complete

control of their children even when they have proved themselves unfit to
bring up children, than that the children themselves should be protected. We
are far more concerned that the drunkard should be given complete freedom
to go out and get drunk than that the misery which his drunkenness causes
to innocent people should be punished, or prevented. The helpless must
always suffer for the selfishness of other people—that is one of the "divine"
laws of civilisation. The liberty of the subject is not only a farce, but a
crime, when the liberty jeopardises the lives of the minority. The liberty to
harm others will be a "liberty" punishable by law in the state which is
anything more than democratic, except as a political catchword.

One of the Minor Tragedies

One of the minor tragedies of life (or is it one of the major?) is the way
we grow out of things—often against our will, sometimes against our better
judgment. I don't mean only that we grow out of clothes—that, after all, is
nothing very serious, unless you have no younger brother to whom to hand
them on; but we also grow out of desires, out of books, out of pictures, out
of places, friendships, even love itself—oh, yes, most often out of love
itself. You never seem to be able to say to yourself and the world: "There!
this is what I yearn for; this is what I desire; this is what I adore; this is
what I shall never tire of—shall always appreciate, to which I shall always
show my devotion." Or rather, you do say this in all sincerity at the
moment. Only the passing of time shows you that you were wrong. You
seem to grow out of everything which is within your reach, and are only
faithful to those things which have just eluded your grasp. It is human
nature, I suppose; but it is a dreadful bore, all the same! It would seem as if
the brain could not stand the same mental impression for very long; it
becomes wearied, eventually seeking to throw off the impression altogether.

They tell us that everything we do, or hear, or say—every thought, in fact—
is photographed, as it were, on the brain as a definite picture. And if this be
true, the same impression must affect the same part of the brain—that part
of the brain which becomes tired of this same impress, until it eventually
seeks to throw it off as the body throws off disease. Take a very simple
instance—that of a popular song. Experience has taught you to realise that,
although the melody haunts you deliciously at first, you will eventually
grow to hate it, and the tune which once sent you swaying to its rhythm will
at last bore you to the point of anaesthesia. I often wonder why that is so?
The answer must be physical, since the melody is just the same always—
and, if it be really physical, then that surely is the answer to the weariness
which always comes with repetition of even the greatest blessings of life in
both people as well as things. If only we understood the psychology of
boredom we might attain the eternal delight of never being bored, and what
we loved once we should always love, until the end of our life's short
chapter. And that would simplify problems exceedingly, wouldn't it?

The "Glorious Dead"

For a long time past people have been—and, I suppose, for a long time
hence people will be—dusting their imaginations in order to discover the
most fitting tribute their and other people's money can erect to the memory
of the sailors and soldiers who died so that they and their children might
live. And yet it seems to me that in most of these tributes the wishes of the
"Glorious Dead," or what might easily be regarded as their wishes, have
rarely been consulted. The wishes of the living have prevailed almost every
time. Thus the "Glorious Dead" have, as it were, paid off church debts,
erected stained-glass windows in places of worship which are beautified
considerably thereby, paid for statues of fallen warriors which have been

placed in the middle of open market-places to attract the passing attention
of pedestrians and the very active attention of small birds. A thousand
awkward debts have been wiped out by the money collected for the
memory of deeds which for ever will be glorious, and yet, it seems to me, in
most of the cases the wishes of the wealthy living—and of a very narrow
circle of the living—were at all times the primary, albeit the unconscious,
object which lay behind the tribute. And the worst of it is that so many of
these memorials to "Our Glorious Dead" are as "dead" as the heroes whom
they wish to commemorate. In ten years' time they will, for all practical
purposes be ignored. Maybe some little corner of the world is more lovely
for their being, but the world, the new and better world, for which the
"Glorious Dead" died, is just as barren as ever it was. Rarely, only rarely,
have these memorials been at all worthy of the memory which they desire
to keep alive. And these rare instances have not been popular among the
wealthy and the Churchmen, whose one cry was that "something must be
done"—something beautiful, but useless, for preference. Mostly, they
constitute some wing added to a hospital; hostels for disabled soldiers;
alms-houses, and other purely practical benefits which afford nothing to
gape at and not very much to talk about. People infinitely prefer some huge
ungainly statue or some indifferently stained glass window, any seven-days'
wonder in the way of marble, granite, or glass. They would like the
Cenotaph to fill St. James's Park, and fondly believe that the "Glorious
Dead" would find pride and pleasure in such a monstrosity. But it seems to
me that any memorial to the dead heroes falls short of its ideal which does
not, at the same time, help the living in some real practical and unsectarian
way. Heroes didn't die so that the parish church should have a new window
or the market place a pump; they died so that the less fortunate of this world
should have a better chance, find a greater health, a greater happiness, a
wider space in the new world which the sacrifice of their fathers, brothers,
and chums helped to found.

Always the Personal Note

The longer I live the more clearly I perceive the extreme difficulty
reformers have to interest people in philanthropic schemes which do not
place their religion, their brand of politics, or they themselves in prominent
positions on the propaganda. It seems to be very much the fashion among
those who desire to help others that they do so in the belief that they will
thereby be themselves saved. So few, so very few, help the less fortunate on
their way without cramming their own religion, or their own politics, or
their own munificence down their throats at the same time. They cannot be
kind for the sake of being kind; they cannot help others up without seeking
to brand them at the same time with their own pet views and beliefs. And
then they wonder why the poor will not be helped; why they are suspicious,
or ungrateful, or allow themselves to be helped only that they may help
themselves at the same time—and to something more than their individual
share. Humility and tolerance—and tolerance is, after all, but one aspect of
humility—are the rarest of all the human virtues. So much philanthropy
merely means the giving of a "bun" on the condition that he who takes the
bun will also stop to pray, to become Conservative, and to give thanks.
Good is so often done for the sake of doing good, not to right a social
wrong—which should be the end of all goodness. Even then, so many
people are content to do good from a distance; or if, perhaps, they do come
among the objects of their unselfishness, they do so with, as it were, the
dividing-line well marked—with them, but not of them, and with the air of
regarding themselves as being extremely kind-hearted to be there at all. It is
their "bit"—not to help on the peace, of course, but to help themselves into
Heaven. The poor are but the means to this end.

Clergymen

I always feel so sorry for clergymen—the clergymen who are inspired to
their calling, not, of course the "professional" variety who are clergymen
because they preferred the Church to the Stock Exchange. They carry with
them wherever they go the mark of the professional servant of God, and it
creates a prejudice, between them and those who really need their succour,
which is almost unsurmountable. Many clergymen, I know, adore the
trimmings of their profession—the pomps and vestments, the admiration of
spinster ladies, and opportunity to shake the friendly finger at Mrs. Gubbins
and regret that she hasn't been seen in church lately—this same Mrs.
Gubbins who works sixteen hours a day to bring up a large family in the
greatest goodness and comfort her mother's heart can supply, and, so it
seems to me, lives her prayers—which is a far finer thing than merely
uttering them in public and respectability. But the clergyman whose heart is
in his work, who lives for the poor and needy, and finds no greater joy than
in bringing joy into the lives of others, has to make those he wishes to
forget first of all that he is a clergyman and not merely a man ready, as it
were, to barter a bun for an attendance at church. Until he does this he
cannot surmount that prejudice, that suspicion, and that atmosphere of
unnaturalness without which no lasting comfort and good is ever done. For
how can he live among the poor as one of the poor when at the same time
he has to keep in the "good books" of the wealthy, who pay the pew rents,
and the evil-minded "do-nothings," who are ever ready to declare that he is
demeaning himself and their Church when he breaks down the barrier of
caste and position in his efforts to live and suffer and work as do the men
and women he wishes to make happier and better? He can do it, if he
possesses the right personality, but it is a fight which, for the most part,
seems so hopeless as not to be worth while. You have only to watch the
restrained jollity of his flock the moment a clergyman enters the room to
realise the crust which he will have to break through in order to bring to

light the jewel of human nature which really shines so brightly in the hearts
of the very poor.

Their Failure

It is so difficult for men and women, as it were, to really help the East-
end while living in West-end comfort. It is so difficult for religious people
to realise that the finest prayer of all is to "play the game." But the poor
understand the wonder of that prayer full well; it is, indeed, I rather fancy,
the only prayer that they really do understand, the only one which really
and truly touches them and helps them on their way. And, when I see
among the very poor the simply magnificent human material which is
allowed to run to waste, misunderstood, unheeded, I sometimes feel that the
only hope of real lasting good will be found by those who work outside the
Church, not among those who work within it. For those who have worked
within it have let so many generations of fine youth run to seed, that the
time has come for practical lay-workers to take on the job. The poor need
more practical schemes for their guidance and their good, and fewer prayer-
meetings and sing-songs from the hymnals. For, to my mind, the very basis
of all real religion is a practical basis. It is useless to live with, as it were,
your head in Heaven if you stand knee-deep in filth. Of what good is your
own personal salvation if you have not done your best to make the world
better and happier for others? To worry about their salvation is less than
useless—if that be possible. Providing they have something to live for,
something to make life worth living, surroundings which bring out all that
is best and bravest and finest in their natures, their heavenly salvation will
take care of itself. The pity is that there is so much magnificent youthful
promise which prejudice and tradition and social wrongs never allow to be
fulfilled. There is only one real religion, and that is the religion of making

life happier and more profitable to others. You may not make them pray in
the process, you may not make them sing hymns—prayers and hymn-
singing are merely beautiful accompaniments—in a practical uplifting of
the human state, the human "soul." "Love"—that is the only thing which
really matters, Love—with Charity, and Self-sacrifice, and Unselfishness,
and Justice—which are, after all, the attributes of this Love.

Work in the East-end

It seems to me that the poor need a friend more urgently than they need a
pastor, or, if they must have a pastor—then the pastor must be completely
disguised as a friend. I always wonder why it is the popular fallacy that the
poor need religion more than the wealthy. My own experience is that you
will find more real Christianity in Shoreditch than you will ever find in
Mayfair—even though the "revealers" of it may drink and swear and
otherwise lead outwardly debased lives. Well, the surroundings, the
"atmosphere" in which they have been forced to live, encourage them in
their blasphemy. I never marvel that they are often profane; I wonder more
greatly that they are not infinitely more so. But it seems to me that you will
"uplift" them far more by pulling down their filthy habitations than by
preaching the "Word of God" at them at every available opportunity. They
are the landlords, the profiteers, the members of Society who do so little to
cleanse and purify the human life among the tenements, who require the
"Word" more urgently than the enforced dwellers therein. Only the other
evening I paid a visit to one of the general committee of the Oxford and
Bermondsey Mission in the little flat which he occupies at the top of a huge
building called "flats." These flats consist of only two rooms, a bedroom
and a kitchen. There are no "conveniences"—except some of an
indescribably filthy nature which are mutually shared by the inhabitants of

several flats, to their own necessary loss of self-respect and decency. And in
these two-roomed flats families ranging from three to twelve members are
forced to live, and for this benefit they must pay six shillings a week. How
can youth reach its full perfection amid such surroundings—surroundings
which can be multiplied hundreds of times in every part of London and our
big cities? And when I know the magnificent "promise" of which this same
youth is capable—the war showed it in one side of its greatness—and see
the surroundings in which it must grow and expand, physically as well as
spiritually, I marvel at its moral achievements and I hate the society which
permits this splendid human material only by a stroke of luck ever to have
its chance. For what has this youth of the slums got to live for? He can have
no home-life amid the pigsties which are called his "home", his strength is
mostly thrust into blind alley occupations which he is forced to take, since
his education has fitted him for nothing better, and he must accept them in
order to live at all; and for his recreation, he is given the life of the streets
and the public-house—nothing else. It is only such groups of unselfish men
as are represented by the Oxford and Bermondsey Mission and by the men
who run the London Working Boys' Clubs in the poorest parts of London,
together with those other men and women, clergymen and laymen, who are
struggling to bring a little happiness and light into the lives of the men and
boys of the East-end by providing them with comfort and warmth in the
club houses and with healthy recreation for their hours of freedom, who are
helping to kill Bolshevism at its roots. For it seems to me that youth is the
supreme charge of those who have grown old. The salvation of the world
will come through the young; the glory of the old is that age and experience
have taught them to perceive this fact. Give the majority of men something
noble to live for, and the vast majority will live up to their "star."

Mysticism and the Practical Man

I wish the Mystics and the Practical Men could meet, fraternise, and still
not yearn to murder one another. It would be of immense benefit to you and
me and the rest of us who make up the "hum-drum" world. For the Practical
Man who is not something of a mystic is at best a commonplace nuisance,
and at his worst a clog on the wheels of progress. And the mystic who is
only mystical is even less good to anyone, since his Ideals and his Theories,
and often his personal example, fade away in the smoke of factory
chimneys belching out the sweat of men and women's labour into the pure
air of heaven. No, the Mystic who is to do any good to his brother men
must be at the same time a practical man, just as the practical man must
possess some Big Idea behind his commerce and his success in order to
escape the ignominy of being a mere money-maker, the inglorious driver of
sweated labourers. If only these two could meet—and agree—there might
possibly be some hope for the Dawn of that New World which the War
surely came to found and the washy kind of Peace which followed seems to
have thrust back again into darkness. True, there are some business men
who perceive behind their business a goal, an ideal, in which there is
something more than their own personal wealth and glory, the be-
diamonding of a fat wife, and the expensive upbringing of a spoilt family.
They make their wealth, but they seek to make it justly, to make it cleanly,
and, having amassed their fortune, strive to benefit the lot of those by
whose labour they amassed it, and whose future, and the future of whose
children, are at once their charge and their most profound interest. But these
men are so few—they are so few that almost everybody knows their names.
The great masses of practical business men possess the "soul" of a lump of
lead, the ideals of little money-grubbing attorneys, the "vision" of a
chimpanzee in a jungle. They are "cute," and, for the end towards which
they strive, they are clever. But they are nothing more. And, because of
them, there is this "eternal unrest" for which the ignorant blame "labour"

and the still more ignorant blame "modern education." (Ye gods—what is
it?)

Abraham Lincoln

Success and fame which are purely personal are always abortive in the
long run. Unless a Big Achievement has some splendid Vision behind it, it
is soon almost as completely forgotten as if it had never been. Or it may
remain in the memory of posterity as a name only, without influencing that
mind in the very slightest degree. A mystic must be a practical man as well,
if his "vision" is not to be lost in the smoke of mere words and theories; just
as a practical man must at the same time be something of a mystic if his
labour is to live and bear fruit a hundredfold. Abraham Lincoln was a
mystic as well as a practical man. That is why the ideal of statesmanship for
which he lived has influenced the world since his time far more than men
equally famous in their day. It was this "invisible power" behind his ideal
which triumphed over all opposition at last, and which continues to triumph
in spite of the pigmy-souled crowd of party politicians who still wrangle in
the political arena. Nothing lasting is ever accomplished without "vision,"
and the spiritual, though long in coming, will yet triumph over ignorance
and prejudice and selfishness, even though it comes through war and the
overthrow of capitalists and autocrats. The life and the ideals of Abraham
Lincoln are yet one more piece of evidence of this.

Reconstruction

And just so far as modern Socialism possesses this "mystical power" just
so far will it go—inevitably. But, personally, I always think that Socialism
(so-called) is far too busy attacking the elderly and decaying, both in men
and traditions. It should attack youth; or, rather, it should fight for youth,
and for youth principally and almost alone. You cannot found the New
World in a day, but if the youthful citizen is taken in hand, educated,
inspired, and given all possible advantages both for intellectual
improvement and bodily health, this New World will come without
resistance, inevitably, and of its own accord and free will. To a certain
extent the ideals of the British Empire succeed only for the socialistic
"vision" which inspires it. But the chief fault of this "vision" is that it is so
busy making black men clean and "Christian" that it has no vigour left to
clean up and "Christianise" the dirt and heathenism at home. It would
rather, metaphorically speaking (I had vowed never to use that expression
again in the New Year, but—well, there it is!), bring the ideals of Western
civilisation into the jungles of Darkest Africa than tackle the problems of
the slums of Manchester. And this, not so much because a "civilised"
Darkest Africa will have money in it, as because in tackling the problem of
the slums it will have to fight drastically the rich and poor heathens at home
—with all the tradition and prejudice, ignorance, and selfishness with which
they are bolstered up and deluded with the cry of "Freedom" and "Liberty,"
and that still greater illusion—Legal "Justice."

Education

Education of the mind, education of the body—to stop at the very
beginning that tragic waste of human material, both physical, mental, and
spiritual, which forces youth into blind-alley occupations or into
occupations unworthy of physically fit men and women—that is the first

stone in the foundation of the New World—a step far more important than
the confiscation of capital, which seems to be the loudest cry of those who,
in their ignorance, claim to be Socialists. Socialism is constructive not
destructive—but the construction must have the vision of the future always
before its eyes, and that future must be prepared for—drastically, if need be.

The Inane and Unimaginative

In every mixed crowd there always seems such a large percentage of the
unimaginative and the inane that I am never surprised that the silliest
superstitions still flourish, "the Thing" is rampant, and that, in every
progress towards real civilisation, the very longest way round is taken with
the very feeblest results. It is not that this percentage is wicked, nor is it
strikingly good, neither is it necessarily feeble-minded, but it shows itself so
entirely unimaginative and inane that it is no wonder that the charlatan in
religion, politics, and education rampages over the world through a perfect
maelstrom of bouquets. Nothing impersonal ever seems to stir the
sluggishness of their "souls." They feel nothing that does not hit them
straight between the eyes. They never perceive the tragedy behind the
smile, the wrong behind the justice of the law, the piteousness and
helplessness of men and women. The price of currants stirs them to revolt
far more rapidly than that disgrace to civilisation which are the slums. Air
raids were the greatest injustice of the war—air raids, when they never
knew from one moonlight night to another if they might not join
unwillingly the army of the heroic dead in heaven. That is why so many of
them secretly believe that they endured far more at home than the ordinary
common soldier did in the front-line trenches. They cannot realise his
tragedy; they can, however, fully realise their own. That is why they talk of
it with so much greater eloquence; that is why, when they listen to his

recitals of dirt and hunger and indescribable pain, they do so with a
suppressed yawn and a secret conviction that they have heard quite enough
about the war. As for tragedy—their apotheosis of the tragic is reached in a
street accident at which they can stand gaping, nursing the details for the
moment when they can retail them with gusto at home; but I verily believe
that, if the dying man cut rather a ridiculous figure, some of them would
have to laugh. But then, this inane and unimaginative percentage among the
crowd is always ready to laugh. Their special genius is that they will always
guffaw in the wrong place. Or, if they do not laugh, they will let fall some
utterly stupid remark—so stupid that one wonders occasionally if nature by
mistake has given them a bird's brain without giving them at the same time
a bird's beautiful plumage. And the worst of it is one is up against this inane
percentage in every walk of life—this unimaginative army of men and
women who can perceive nothing which does not absolutely concern
themselves and their own soul's comfort.

Life's Great Adventure

I hope when I am old that Fate will give me a garden and a view of the
sea. I should hate to decay in a suburban row and be carried away at the end
of all my mostly fruitless longings in a hearse; the seven minutes' wonder of
the small children of the street, who will cry, "Oo-er" when my coffin is
borne out by poor men whose names I can't ever know! Not that it really
matters, I suppose; and yet, we all of us hope to satisfy our artistic sense,
especially when we're helpless to help ourselves. Yes, I should like to pass
the twilight of my life in a garden from which there would be a view of the
sea. A garden is nearly always beautiful, and the sea always, always
promises adventure, even when we have reached that time of life when to
"pass over" is the only chance of adventure left to us. It seems to beckon us

to leave the monotonous in habits, people and things in general, and seek
renewed youthfulness, the thrill of novelty, the promise of romance amid
lands and people far, far away. And we all of us hope that we may not die
before we have had one real adventure. Adventure, I suppose, always
comes to the really adventurous, but so many people are only half-
adventurous; they have all the yearning and the longing, but Nature has
bereft them of the power to act. So they wait for adventure to come to them,
the while they grow older and staler all the time. And sometimes it never
does come to them; or, perhaps, it only comes to them too late. There are
some, of course, who never feel this wild longing to escape. They are the
human turnips; and, so long as they have a plot of ground on which to
expand and grow, they look for nothing else other than to be "mashed" from
time to time by someone of the opposite sex. These people are quite content
to live and die in a row, and to have an impressive funeral is to them a
sufficient argument for having lived at all. But their propinquity is one of
the reasons why I should not like to grow old in a crowd. I know there are
turnips—human turnips, I mean—living amid the Alps. But these don't
depress you, for the simple reason that, besides them, you have the Alps
anyway. And the Alps have something of that spirit of eternity which the
sea possesses.

Travel

Do you know those men and women who, to paraphrase Omar Khayyam,
"come like treacle and like gall they go"? Well, it seems to me that life is
rather like such as they. You may live for something, you may live for
someone, but some time, sooner or later, you will be thrown back upon your
own garden, the "inner plot" of land which you have cultivated in your own
heart, to find what flowers thereon you may. Live for others, yes! but don't

live entirely for them. No. For if you live altogether for someone, it stands
to reason that they cannot well live for you—or, if they can, then they don't
trouble, since you are such a certain asset in their lives. So they will begin
to live for someone else. For this living for people is part of the nature of all
hearts which are not the hearts of "turnips." And then, what becomes of
you? No, the wise man and woman keep a little for themselves, and that
"little" is barred to permanent visitors. You may allow certain people to live
therein for a while, but, as you value your own joy and happiness, your own
independence and peace, do not deliver up to them the key. Keep that for
yourself, so that, when the loneliness of life comes to you, as come it will—
that is part of the tragedy of human life—you may not be utterly desolate,
but possess some little ray of hope and delight and joy to illumine the
shadows of loneliness when they fall across your path. And, for what they
are worth to me for consolation, I thank Heaven now for the long years
which I spent practically alone in the world, so far as congenial
companionship went. Solitude drove me back upon myself, and since all of
us must have some joy, natural or merely manufactured, in order to go on
living, it forced me to cultivate other interests, which, perhaps, had I been
happy, I should have neglected for brighter but more ephemeral joys. So I
am not frightened of my own society, and that, though a rather dreary
achievement, is by no means to be despised. It enables me to wander about
alone and yet be happy; it permits me to travel with no one but my own
company and the chance acquaintances I pick up en route, and yet not be
entirely depressed. It helped me to achieve that philosophy which says: "If I
may not have the ideal companion, then let me walk with no one but
myself"—and that is the philosophy of a man who can never really feel
lonely for a long time, even though he may be quite alone.

The Enthralling Out-of-reach

Everybody knows that they could improve human nature. I don't mean, of
course, that they could necessarily improve their own, nor that of the lady
who lives next door, nor that of Mr. Lloyd George, nor of Miss Marie
Lloyd, nor even of Lenin and Trotsky; but human nature as it is found in all
of us and as it prevents heaven on this earth lasting much longer than five
and twenty minutes! I know—or rather I think—that I could improve it.
And I should begin at that unhappy "kink" in all of us which only realises
those blessings which belong to other people, or those which we ourselves
have lost. Nobody really and truly knows what Youth means until they have
reached the age which only asks of men and women to subside—gracefully,
if possible, and silently as an act of decency. We never love the people who
love us, to quite the same extent anyway, until, either they love us no more,
or love somebody else, or go out and die. We never realise the splendour of
splendid health until the doctor prescribes six months in a nursing home as
the only alternative to demise. We never appreciated butter until profiteers
and the war sent the price up to four-and-sixpence for a pound. The extra
five hundred a year which seems to stand in the way of our complete
happiness—when we receive it, we realise that our happiness really
required a thousand. Fame is a wonderful and beautiful state, until we
become famous and find out how dull it is and what a real blessing it is to
be a person of only the least importance. Life, I can understand, is never so
sweet as it is to those who, as it were, have just been sentenced to be
hanged. Our ideals are always thrilling until one day we wake up to find
them accomplished facts; and the only real passion of our life is the woman
who went off and married somebody else. I exaggerate, perhaps, but
scarcely too much, I believe. For, as I said before, there is a certain "kink"
in human nature which casts a halo of delight over those things which we
have lost, or, by the biggest stretch of dreaming-fancy can we ever hope to
possess. I suppose it means that we could not possibly live up to the
happiness which we believe would be ours were we to possess the blessings

we yearn for with all our hearts. All the same, I wish that human nature
were as fond of the blessings it throws away unheeded, as it would be could
it only regain possession of them once it fully realises they are lost. Half our
troubles spring from our own fault—though they were not really our own
fault, because we did not know what we were doing when we did those
things which might have saved us all our tears. That is where the tragedy of
it all came in. We never realised . . . we never knew! But Fate pays not the
slightest heed to our ignorance. We just have to live out our mistakes as best
we may. And nobody really pities us; we only pity ourselves.

The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy

The other day I received a most extraordinary spirit picture anonymously
through the post. I cannot describe this picture—it is well-nigh
indescribable. The effect is wonderful, though the means are of the
simplest. Apparently the artist had upset a bottle of ink over a large piece of
white cardboard, and then, with the aid of a sharp penknife, cut his way
across it in long narrow slashes until the effect is that of rays of light which,
seen from a distance, have the effect of luminosity in a most extraordinary
degree. In the corner there is the figure of Christ on the Cross, to which this
method has given the most marvellous effect of light and shadow. Indeed,
the whole picture is almost uncanny in its effectiveness and in the simplicity
of the means to this end. You ask me if I believe it to be really and truly a
spirit picture? Well, honestly, I do not know. I realise the beauty of the
picture—everyone must realise this who sees it; but, whether the artist who
designed it and transmitted his idea through a human hand be a spirit I
should not like to declare, for the simple reason that I understand so little of
spiritualism—except that side of spiritualism which I do not believe—that I
should be foolish to be dogmatic when all the time I realise that I am yet in

ignorance. But of the genuineness of the "medium" through whose hand the
spirit picture was transmitted I am certain. He thoroughly believed in the
phenomenon that a spirit from another world was using him to convey
messages to the inhabitants of this. You ask me why I believe in his
conviction—well, my answer would be so mundane that you might perhaps
laugh at my logic. But one at least I can give, and it is this; that, in my
experience of mediums and professional spiritualists, one always, as it
were, hears the rattle of the collection-box behind the "messages" from
another sphere—either that, or the person is so eccentric that "mediumship"
in his case has become merely another form of mental affliction. Well, the
artist who sent me this picture is, except for this fixed idea that he is a
medium between this world and the next, as normal as you or I, and his
belief not only is making him poorer each day—the "spirit" firmly
forbidding him either to sell or exhibit his pictures—but is gently, yet
inevitably, leading him straight towards the workhouse.

Faith

A few days after the receipt of the picture I discovered the artist and went
to "beard him in his den." While I was talking with him, he declared that he
had just received a "message" from this spirit to draw me a picture which, it
was inferred, would convey some "recollection" to me. Sitting at the other
side of an ordinary desk, the artist picked up one piece of chalk after
another, making a series of circular marks over the paper. This went on for
nearly an hour-and-a-half. Occasionally something like a definite design
seemed to come out of all this chaos in chalk, if I may so express it, only to
be rubbed out again immediately, the circular movements still continuing.
Then at last, a few vigorous strokes, and suddenly a definite picture came
out, a picture which was continued until it was finally complete. This

picture represented a tall arch, through which the artist had painted the most
beautiful effect of evening sky—the evening sky when sunset is fading into
blue-green and the first stars are twinkling. And around this arch was
chalked a kind of heavy festoon of drooping ostrich feathers. The picture
when finished was certainly very beautiful, and I have it in my possession
at the present moment. But it conveyed absolutely nothing to me, and
certainly brought back no recollection to my memory of a previous life
whatsoever. But the "medium" so thoroughly believed in his "power to
convey" that I felt quite unhappy about having to confess my unfamiliarity.
In fact, I left the studio—if studio it could be called—convinced by the
beauty of the pictures, but still unconvinced that they were really pictures
painted by a spirit artist. The only belief I did come away with was the
belief that the "medium" thoroughly believed in himself and the reality
behind his belief. And, in a way, I envied him; yes, I envied him, even
though his faith may prove but illusory after all. For I have reached the age
when I realise that I am not at all sure that men and women do really want
truth, and that a faith which gives comfort and happiness is, for the practical
purpose of going through life happily and dying in hope, a far more
comforting philosophy. I, alas! cannot believe what I am not convinced is a
scientifically proved fact; but I am to be pitied far more than envied for my
—temperamental limitation—shall I call it? The man or woman who
possesses a blind faith in something above and beyond this world is the man
and woman to be envied, even though everybody cannot emulate their
implicit trust.

Spiritualism

All the same, I do not think I shall ever dare to become a spiritualist. If
you can understand my meaning, so much, so very much depends upon the

truth and veracity of its tenets that I cannot go blindly forward, as so many
people seem to be able to do, because I realise that disillusion would mean
something so terrible that a kind of instinctive faith in another life, without
reason, without scientific demonstration, seems far safer for the peace of
mind. To believe in spiritualism, and then to be deceived, would be so
unsettling, so devastating to the "soul," that, in my own self-defence, I
prefer to be sceptical unreasonably than to be equally unreasonably
believing. So many people, who have loved and lost, rush towards
spiritualism demanding no real evidence whatsoever, bringing to it a kind of
passionate yearning to find therein some kind of illusion that their loved
ones, who are dead, still live on waiting for reunion in another world. Such
a yearning is very human, very understandable, very forgivable; but these
people are the enemies of true spiritualism as a new branch of scientific
speculation. I would not rob them of the glamour of their faith, since, as I
have just written, I have reached that time of life when I realise that
humanity does not necessarily want truth for the foundation of its
happiness, but a whole-hearted faith, a belief sufficiently sublime to make
the common Everyday significant in the march forward toward the Great
Unknown. But I, alas! am not one of those who can merely believe because
without belief my heart would be broken and my life would be drearier than
the loneliest autumn twilight. I find a greater comfort in uncertain hope and
a more uncertain faith. If I ever really and truly believed in spiritualism and
then found, as so many people have done, alas! that the prophet of it was
himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were, from all my spiritual bearings, to
flounder hopeless and broken-hearted mid the desolate wastes of
agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I am convinced that the sacrifice is
for something which I must believe in spite of all doubt; not entirely what I
want to believe because belief is full of happiness and comfort. I am of
those who demand "all, or not at all." I cannot go on struggling to find
security by just holding on to one false straw after another. I prefer to hope

and to trust, and, although it is a dreary philosophy, I could not, if I would,
exchange it for something which is false, however wonderful and beautiful.

On Reality in People

My one great grievance against people in the mass is that they are so very
seldom real. I don't mean to say, of course, that you can walk through them
like ghosts, or that, if they "gave you one straight from the shoulder," you
wouldn't get a black eye. But what I mean is, that they are so very rarely
their true selves; they so very rarely say what they think—or indeed think
anything at all! They are so very rarely content to be merely human beings,
and not some kind of walking-waxwork figure with a gramophone record
inside them speaking the opinions which do not belong to them, but to some
mysterious "authority" whom it is the correct thing to quote. Have you ever
watched the eyes of friends talking together? I don't mean friends who are
real friends, friends with whom every thought is a thought shared—but the
kind of familiar acquaintance who passes for a friend in polite society, and
passes out of one's life as little missed in reality as an arm-chair which has
gone to be repaired. In their eyes there is rarely any "answering light"—just
a cold, glassy kind of surface, which says nothing and is as unsympathetic
and as unfamiliar as a holland blind. You can tell by their expression that, in
spite of all their apparent air of friendly familiarity, they are merely talking
for talking's sake, merely being friendly for the sake of friendship; that, if
they were never to see each other again, they would do so without one
heartbreak. Perhaps I am unsociable, perhaps I am a bit of a misanthrope;
but those kind of friends, those kind of people, bore me unutterably. I am
only really happy in the society of bosom friends, or in the society of
interesting strangers. The half-and-halves, the people who claim friendship
because circumstances happened to have thrown you together fairly

frequently—and one of us has a beautiful house and the other an excellent
cook—these people press upon my spirit like a strait-waistcoat. I gabble the
conventional small-talk of polite sociability, and I thank God when they are
gone! They are called "friends," but we have absolutely nothing in common
—not even a disease!

So much polite conversation is merely "polite," and can by no stretch of
imagination be rightly called "conversation." It consists for the most part in
exaggerated complimentary remarks—which, it is hoped, will please you—
or in one person waiting impatiently while the other person relates all he
and his family have been doing until he, in his turn, can seize a momentary
pause for breath to begin the whole recent history of his own affairs in
detail. But neither of them is really at all interested in the story of the other's
doings—you can see that in their eyes, in the kind of fixed smile of
simulated interest with which they listen, the while they furtively take note
of the grey hair you are trying to hide, the shirt button which will leave its
moorings if something isn't done for it before long, the stain on your
waistcoat denoting egg-for-breakfast and an early hurry—all the things, in
fact, which really interest them to an extent and are far more thrilling
anyway than the things you are telling them in so much thraldom on your
own part and with so much gusto.

Some people are artificial through and through; it may be said of them
that they are only really real when they are having a tooth pulled. But the
majority of people only hide themselves behind a kind of crust of
artificiality; beneath that crust they were real live men and women. And the
war—thank God! (that is to say, if one ever can thank God for the war)—
cracked that crust until it fell away, and was trampled under the feet of real
men and women living real lives, honestly with themselves and vis-a-vis the
world. That is one of the reasons why the war has made social life a so
much more vital and interesting state. Of course, there are some people who

still strive to revive the social life of "masks," but they are the people whose
crust of artificiality was only cracked—or rather chipped—by the horror
and reality of war. War never really reached them, except through their
stomachs and their motor cars, or perhaps in the excuse it gave them for
flirting half-heartedly with some really useful human labour. They never
went "over the top" in spirit, and their point of view still reeks of the point
of view of the farthest back of the base. These people will be more real
when they are dead than while they are alive—if you can understand my
meaning? But thank Heaven! their ranks are thinned. They belong to the
"back of beyond," to the "frumps," the "washouts," and the "back numbers."

Life

Life is rather like a rocket; it shoots into the sky, flares, fades, and falls to
the ground in dust so unnoticeable that you can hardly find its remnants,
search how you may. Of course, I know that our lives don't really shoot
upwards towards the stars to illumine the heavens by their own resplendent
beams, but we usually think they're going to, sometimes we think they do,
and then, when our dreams settle down to reality, we discover that our fate
has been scarcely different from the crowd, and that our life stands out
about as unique as one house is in a row of houses all built on the same
pattern. But I sometimes think that our dreams are our real life, and that
what we do is a matter of indifference to what we think and suffer and feel.
Some days, when you sit in a railway carriage on the underground railways
and gaze at the rows of stodgy, expressionless, flat kind of faces which the
majority of the travellers possess, you say to yourself, "These people can
have had no history; these people cannot have really lived; they cannot have
suffered and struggled and hoped and dreamed and renounced, renounced
so often with the heart frozen beyond tears." And yet you know they must

have done—perhaps they are living a whole lifetime of mental agony even
as you watch them, who can tell?—because you have been "through the
mill" too, you too have walked to Amaous, sat desolate in the Garden of
Gethsemane, seen all your fondest dreams crucified on the Cross of Reality,
and risen again, lonelier, sadder, wiser maybe, but with a wisdom which is
more desolate than the wilderness. You have been through Hell, and no one
has guessed, no one has seen, no one has ever, ever known. And these
people, so stodgy, so expressionless, so dreary and conventional, must have
been through it too. For it seems to me that we must all go through it some
time or other, and the bigger, the braver your heart the greater the Hell; the
more sensitive, the more susceptible you are to the love which links one
human being with another, the greater your pain, the more desolate your
renunciation. And, as I said before, nobody guesses, nobody believes,
nobody ever, ever knows.

So very, very few people can see beyond the outward and visible signs of
pain. They see the smile, the fretfulness—and yet they think the smile
means happiness and the fretfulness an ugly, tiresome thing. They do not
perceive that often the smile is as a cry to Heaven, and that fretfulness is but
the sign of a soul breaking itself against the jagged rocks of hopelessness
and doubt. I often listen to the people speaking of blindness and the blind.
They only see that the eyes are gone, that the glory which is spring is for
ever dead; they perceive the hesitating walk, the outstretched groping hand
which, to my mind, is more pitiful than the story of the Cross, and inwardly
they murmur, "How awful!" and sometimes they turn away. But they have
never seen the real tragedy which lies behind the visible handicap. Only
their imagination is stirred by the outward and visible side of the tragedy;
never—or rather, very rarely—is it haunted by the realisation of the despair
which is struggling to find peace, some solution of the meaning of it all,
struggling to bring back some reasoned hope and gladness, some tiny ray of
light in the mental and physical darkness, without which we none of us can

believe, we none of us can live. Perhaps they are wise to see so little of the
real sorrow which dogs so many lives, but they, nevertheless, are blind in
their turn. They are wise, because there is a whole wise philosophy of a sort
in being deaf to the song within the song, blind to the tears which no one
sees, to the trembling lip which is the aftermath of—oh, so many smiles.
The philosopher perceives just enough of the heart-beat of the world to
keep the human touch, but not enough to kill the outbursts of unreasoned
joy which make the picture of life so exhilarating and jolly. And yet . . . and
yet . . . oh yes, happiness does lie in remembering little, perceiving less, and
in pinning your love and faith in God—in human love, in human gratitude,
in human unselfishness scarcely at all. Happiness, I say, lies thus—but alas!
not everybody can or ever will be happy. They feel too greatly—and if in
intense feeling there is divine beauty, there is also incalculable pain. When
the "ingrate" is turned out of Heaven they do not send him to Hell, they
send him to Earth and give him imagination and a heart.

Dreams and Reality

So many people imagine that their love is returned, that their innermost
thoughts are appreciated and understood, when lips meet lips in that kiss
which brings oblivion—that kiss which even the lowliest man and woman
receive once in their lives as a benediction from Heaven. So many people
imagine that they have found the Ideal Friend when they meet someone
with an equal admiration for the poems of Robert Browning; or the Russian
Ballet, or one who places the music of Debussy above the music of Wagner.
But, I fear, they are often disappointed. For the longer I live, the more
convinced I become that Love and Friendship are but "day dreams" of the
"soul,"—that all we can ever possess in Life is the second-best of both.
Nobody in Love, or in the first throes of a new friendship, will believe me,

of course. Why should they? There are moments in both love and friendship
when the "dream" does seem to become a blissful reality. But they pass—
they pass . . . leaving us once more lonely in the wilderness of the
Everyday, wondering if, after all, those splendid moments which are over
were ever anything more than merely the figments of our own imagination
and had nothing whatever to do with the love we believed was ours, the
friendship which seemed to come towards us with open arms—that the
Dream and the Hope, and the fulfilment of both, merely lived and died in
our own hearts alone—in our own hearts and nowhere . . . alas! nowhere
else. I often think it must be so. Our love is always the same; only the
loved-one changes. God alone is a permanent Ideal because He lives within
us—we never meet Him as a separate entity. Thus we can never become
disillusioned.

Love of God

Yet, it seems to me sometimes that even our ideal of God changes with
the fleeting years. When we were young, and because He was thus
presented to us by our spiritual pastors and masters, we figured Him as
some tragically revengeful elderly gentleman, who appeared to show His
love for us by always being exceedingly vindictive. Then when Fate, as it
were, thrust us from the confines of our homes into the storm of life alone,
we came to think of the God-Ideal in blind anger. We cried that He was
dead, or deaf; that He was not a God of Love at all, but cruel . . . more cruel
than Mankind. Sometimes we denied that He had ever existed at all; that all
the Church told us about Him was so much "fudge," and that Heaven and
Hell, the punishment of Sin, the reward of Virtue, were all part of the Great
Human Hoax by which Man is cheated and ensnared. "We will be hoaxed

no more!" we cried, little realising that this is invariably the Second Stage
along the road by which thinking men approaches God.

The Third Stage, when it came, found us older, wiser, far less inclined to
cry "Damn" in the face of the Angels. We began to realise that through pain
we had become purified; through hardship we had become kind; through
suffering, and in the silence of our own thoughts we had become wise;
through our inner-loneliness—that inner-loneliness which is part of the
"cross" which each man carries with him through Life, we had found the
blind necessity of God.

And in this fashion he returns to us. He is not the same God as of old (we
listen to the pictures of this Old God as He is so often described from the
pulpit, in contemptuous amazement, tinged by disdain), but a far greater
God than He—greater, for the reason that we have become greater too. We
no longer seek to find Him in our hours of happiness—the only hours when,
long ago, we sought to feel His presence. We know that we shall only find
Him in our hours of loneliness, in our hours of desolation, in our hours of
black despair. Now at last we realise that God is not some Deity apart, but
some spirit within us, within every man and woman whose "vision" is
turned towards the stars. He is the "Dream" which is clearer to us than
reality, none the less clear because it is the "Dream" which never in life
comes true. He belongs to us and to the whole world. He is everywhere, yet
nowhere. He is the "soul" in Man, the silent message in beauty, the miracle
in all Nature. He is not a Divinity, living in some far off bourne we call the
sky. He is just that "spirit" in all men's hearts which is the spirit of their self-
sacrifice, of their charity, of their loving kindness, of their honesty, their
uprightness and their truth. It is the "spirit" which, if men be Immortal, will
surely live on and on for ever. Nothing else is worthy immortality.

The Will to Faith

I wish that the great Shakespeare had not written that "immortal" line:

"The wish is father to the Thought."

It haunts you throughout your life. Like a flaming sign of interrogation it
burns upon the Altar of Faith Unquestioning, before which, in your
perplexity, Fate forces you—at least once in your life—to bow the head. It
makes us wonder if we should believe all the evidences of Immortality we
do—were Immortality really a state of Punishment and not of Happiness
unspeakable. It is so hard, so very hard, to disentangle our own desires from
our own beliefs; so easy to confuse what we ought to believe with what,
beyond all else, we want to believe. It sometimes makes one chary of
believing anything—in questions Human as well as Eternal. The "Personal
Bias"—ever in our heart of hearts can we at all times decide where it ends
and impartiality begins? Even our so-called impartiality is tinged by it—or
what we fondly believe to be our impartial Faith. Doubt strikes at the root
of Justice and of Love—not the doubt that is the half-brother to Disbelief,
but the doubt which wonders always and always if we believe most easily
what we want to believe, and if our firmest conviction against such Belief is
not, more than anything else, yet one more manifestation of what we desire
so earnestly to doubt.

Sometimes I am in despair regarding the whole question of my own
individual Faith.

I am firmly convinced that there ought to be a God and a Life Hereafter.
But my faith in such facts is paralysed by the haunting doubt that they may
both be such stuff as dreams are made of, after all.

On the whole, I believe the best way is not to think about them at all—or
as little as we may. The one question which really and truly concerns us—
and most certainly only concerns God, if there be a God—in His relation to
ourselves, is this life and what we make of it for ourselves and for other
people. Don't ask yourself always and for ever if there be a God? Act as if
He existed! So far as possible, play His part on earth. Then all will surely
be well with your Immortal Soul in the Long Here After!

And, if the reward of it all—if "reward" is what you seek—be but a Sleep
Eternal, do not weep. If you have done your best, you will have left the
world happier and better, and so more beautiful. To those around you, to
those who walked with you a little way along the Road of Life, you will
have brought Hope where before you came there was only resignation and
despair; you will have brought laughter to eyes long dimmed by tears; you
will have brought Love into lives so lonely and so desolate until you came.
God surely can ask of no man more than this.

That, at least—is my Faith. That is also my "religion." Theology is
unimportant: FACTS, concerning the reality of God and a Life Hereafter—
matter little or nothing at all.

What is all-important is that here on Earth—in the world of men and
women around us—there are many less happy than we; many infinitely
lonelier, poorer, more desolate and depressed. To these—even the lowliest
among us can give comfort, bring into their darkness some little ray of
"light"—however small.

Let the "Christian" Churches quarrel as they may. The uproar of their
differences in Faith, each seeking to be justified, is stilled before the Great
Reality of those really and truly in Human NEED. Let us do all the good we
may—nor ask the reason why, nor seek a heavenly reward. At every step we
take along the Road of Life—there is someone we can help, someone we

can succour, someone we can forgive. A truce to violent controversy around
and around the Trivial. True religion is an Act—even more than a Belief,
infinitely more than mere articles of Faith. By the greatness of our sacrifice,
by the unselfishness of our Love; by the way we have tried to live up to "the
best" within us; by our earnest wish at all times, and with all men—to "play
the game"—surely by these things alone shall we be judged?

FINIS.

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