ON FEAR
I am disposed to agree with Captain Dolbey that the man who knows no fear exists only in the imagination of the lady novelist or those who fight their battles at the base. He is invented because these naïve people suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases to be a hero. But the truth surely is that there would be no merit in being brave if you had no fear. The real victory of the hero is not over outward circumstance, but over himself. One of the bravest men of our time is a man who was born timid and nervous and suffered tortures of apprehension, and who set himself to the deliberate conquest of his fears by challenging every danger that crossed his path and even going out of his way to meet the things he dreaded. By sheer will he beat down the enemy within, and to the external world he seemed like a man who knew no fear. But the very essence of his heroism was that he had fought fear and won.
It is time we got rid of the notion that there is anything discreditable in knowing fear. You might as well say that there is something discreditable in being tempted to tell a falsehood. The virtue is not in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted to lie and yet telling the truth. And the more you are tempted the more splendid is the resistance. Without temptation you may make a plaster saint, but not a human hero. That is why the familiar story of Nelson when a boy – "Fear! grandmother. I never saw fear. What is it?" – is so essentially false. Nelson did some of the bravest things ever done by man. They were brave to the brink of recklessness. The whole episode of the battle of Copenhagen was a breathless challenge to all the dictates of prudence. On the facts one would be compelled to admit that it was an act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one incident which flashes a sudden light on the mind of Nelson and reveals his astonishing command of himself and of circumstance. When the issue was trembling in the balance and every moment lost might mean disaster, he prepared his audacious message of terms to the Crown Prince ashore. It was a magnificent piece of what, in these days, we should call camouflage. When he had written it, a wafer was given him, but he ordered a candle to be brought from the cockpit and sealed the letter with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used. "This," said he, "is no time to appear hurried and informal." With such triumphant self-possession could he trample on fear when he had a great end in view. But when there was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as anybody, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, I think, in Southey's "Life of Nelson."
That incident of young Swinburne's climb of Culver Cliff, in the Isle of Wight, expresses the common-sense of the matter very well. At the age of seventeen he wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to climb Culver Cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, "as a chance of testing my nerve in the face of death which could not be surpassed." He performed the feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother.
"Of course," he said, "she wanted to know why I had done such a thing, and when I told her she laughed a short sweet laugh, most satisfactory to the young ear, and said, 'Nobody ever thought you were a coward, my boy.' I said that was all very well, but how could I tell till I tried? 'But you won't do it again?' she said. I replied, 'Of course not – where would be the fun?'"
It was not that he had no fear: it was that he wanted to convince himself that he was able to master his fear when the emergency came. Having discovered that he had fear under his control there was no sense in taking risks for the mere sake of taking them.
Most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a too vivid mind. I was looking over a deserted house situated in large grounds in the country the other day. It had been empty since the beginning of the war. Up to then it had been occupied by a man in the shipping trade. On the day that war was declared he rushed into the house and cried, "We have declared war on Germany; I am ruined." Then he went out and shot himself. Had his mind been disciplined against panic he would have mastered his fears, and would have discovered that he had the luck to be in a trade which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than any other.
In this case it was the sudden impact of fear that overthrew reason from its balance, but in other cases fear is a maggot in the brain that grows by brooding. There is a story of Maupassant's, which illustrates how a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, by dwelling upon fear. He had resented the conduct of a man in a restaurant, who had stared insolently at a lady who was with him. His action led to a challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to meet next morning. When he got home, instead of going to bed, he began to wonder who his foe was, to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold assurance of his challenge, and to invest him with all sorts of terrors as a marksman. As the night advanced he passed through all the stages from anxious curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at dawn he found a corpse. Like the shipowner, he had shot himself to escape the terrors of his mind.
It is the imaginative people who suffer most from fear. Give them only a hint of peril, and their minds will explore the whole circumference of disastrous consequences. It is not a bad thing in this world to be born a little dull and unimaginative. You will have a much more comfortable time. And if you have not taken that precaution, you will do well to have a prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies. Therein Don Quixote showed his wisdom. In the romantic theatre of his mind perils rose like giants on every horizon; but there was always Sancho Panza on his donkey, ready to prick the bubbles of his master with the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity.
ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON
Among my letters this morning was one which annoyed me, not by its contents, but by its address. My name (for the purposes of this article) is Thomson, but my correspondent addressed me as Thompson. Now I confess I am a little sensitive about that "p." When I see it wedged in the middle of my name I am conscious of an annoyance altogether disproportioned to the fact. I know that taken in the lump the Thompsons are as good as the Thomsons. There is not a pin to choose between us. In the beginning we were all sons of some Thomas or other, and as surnames began to develop this man called himself Thomson and that man called himself Thompson. Why he should have spatchcocked a "p" into his name I don't know. I daresay it was pride on his part, just as it is my pride not to have a "p."
Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist. He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding. When the novelist was asked to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs, he replied: "I suppose they don't know how to spell." That is probably the case of the Thompsons. They don't know how to spell.
But whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own forms with obstinate pride. We feel an outrage on our names as if it were an outrage on our persons. It was such an outrage that led to one of Stevenson's most angry outbursts. Some American publisher had pirated one of his books. But it was not the theft that angered him so much as the misspelling of his name. "I saw my book advertised as the work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, "and I own I boiled. It is so easy to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is full length on the title-page of your booty. But no, damn him, not he! He calls me Stephenson." I am grateful to Stevenson for that word. It expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me Thompson. Thompson, indeed!
I felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that snob, Sir Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of the first Lord Chelmsford. He was addressed one day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers (whoever they may have been) boiled within him. "Do I look like a person of the name of Smith?" he asked scornfully, and passed on. And as the blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, "Do I look like a person of the name of Thompson? Now do I?" And yet I suppose one may fall as much in love with the name of Smith as with the name of Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own. I should like to try the experiment on Sir F. E. Smith. I should like to address him as Sir Frederic Thesiger and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it.
It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity that annoys us when people play tricks with our names. We want to be ourselves and not somebody else. We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and the fathers that begat us. We may not know much about our ancestors, and may not care much about them. Most of us, I suppose, are in the position of Sydney Smith. "I found my neighbours," he said, "were looking up their family tree, and I thought I would do the same, but I only got as far back as my great-grandfather, who disappeared somewhere about the time of the Assizes." If we go far enough back we shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the Assizes, or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't. But, such as they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those fellows, the Thompsons.
And there is another reason for the annoyance. To misspell a man's name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that you need not trouble to find out. It is to offer him the subtlest of all insults – especially if he is a Scotsman. The old prides and hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and I believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, Mr. Macdonald by calling him Mr. M'Donald or vice versa. Indeed, I recall the case of a malignant Scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of Mackintosh because he knew it made him "boil," as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as Thompson makes me boil.
Nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity. I like a man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or steals another. I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that his real name was Piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and went into the Church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house of the Duke of Northumberland. He even put the Percy arms on his monument in Dromore Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own name, altered the maiden name of his wife from Gutteridge to Godriche. I am afraid Bishop Percy was a snob.
There are, of course, cases in which men change their names for reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family association and so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually "something rotten about him," as Johnson would say. He stamps himself as a counterfeit coin, like M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocaste." When he first started business his brass plate ran "Fellaire (de Sisac)." On removing to new premises he dropped the parentheses and put up a plate with "Fellaire, de Sisac." Changing residence again, he dropped the comma and became "Fellaire de Sisac."
It is possible of course to go to the other extreme – to err, as it were, on the side of honesty. I know a lady who began life with the maiden name of Bloomer. She married a Mr. Watlington and became Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington. Her husband died and she married a Mr. Dodd, whereupon she styled herself Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd. She is still fairly young and Mr. Dodd, I regret to say, is in failing health. Already I have to write her name in smallish characters to get it into a single line on the envelope. I see the time approaching when I shall have to turn over and write, let us say,
There is no need to be so aggressively faithful to one's names as all this. It is hard on your children and trying to your friends, who may have difficulty in remembering which husband came before the others. After all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the shorter it is the better.
But the spirit of the thing is right. Let us avoid disguises. Let us stick to our names, be they ever so humble. Let us follow the great example of Cicero. His name originated with an ancestor who had a nick or dent at the tip of his nose which resembled the opening in a vetch —cicer. When he was standing for public office some anxious friends suggested that the young man should assume a nobler name, but he declined, saying that he would make the name of Cicero more glorious than the Scauri or Catuli. And grandly did he redeem the promise. The Scauri and the Catuli live to-day only by the fact that Cicero once mentioned them, while we know Cicero far better than we know our next door neighbour. It is a good precedent for Thomson. I have a mind to make that name outlast the Cecils and Marlboroughs, if not the Pyramids. And cursed be he who desecrates it with a "p."
ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF
A friend of mine, to whom I owe so much of my gossip that I sometimes think that he does the work and I only take the collection, told me the other day of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me as significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to-day. He observed two people in ecstasies before a certain landscape. It was quite a nice picture, but my friend thought their praises were extravagant. Suddenly one of the two turned to the catalogue. "Why, this is not the Leader picture at all," said she. "It is No. So-and-so." And forthwith the two promptly turned away from the picture they had been admiring so strenuously, found No. So-and-So, and fell into raptures before that.
Now I am not going to make fun of these people. I am not going to make fun of them because I am not sure that I don't suffer from their infirmity. If I don't I am certainly an exceptional person, for the people who really think for themselves are almost as scarce as virtuous people were found to be in the Cities of the Plain. We are most of us second-hand thinkers, and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all. Those good people before the picture were not thinking their own thoughts: they were thinking what they thought was the right thing to think. They had the luck to find themselves out. Probably it did not do them any good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs they were, what empty echoes of an echo they had discovered themselves to be. They had been taught – heaven help them! – to admire those vacant prettinesses of Leader and they were so docile that they admired anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't his.
It reminds me of the story of the two Italians who quarrelled so long and so bitterly over the relative merits of Tasso and Ariosto that at last they fought a duel. And as they lay dying on the ground one of them said to the other, "And to think that I have never read a line of them." "Nor I either," said the other. Then they expired. I do not suppose that story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit. Men are always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices they have inherited from somebody else, ideas they have borrowed second-hand. Many of us go through life without ever having had a genuine thought of our own on any subject of the mind. We think in flocks and once in the flock we go wherever the bellwether leads us.
It is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with this servility of mind. Horace Walpole was enraptured with the Rowley Poems when he thought they were the work of a mediæval monk: when he found they were the work of Chatterton himself his interest in them ceased and he behaved to the poet like a cad. Yet the poems were far more wonderful as the productions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they would have been as the productions of a man of sixty. The literary world of the eighteenth century thought Ossian hardly inferior to Homer; but when Macpherson's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture into the deepest pit of oblivion. Yet, as poetry, it was as good or bad – I have never read it – in the one case as in the other.
There is a delicious story told by Anatole France which bears on this subject. In some examination in Paris the Military Board gave the candidates a piece of dictation consisting of an unsigned page. It was printed in the papers as an example of bad French. "Wherever did these military fellows," it was asked, "find such a farrago of uncouth and ridiculous phrases?" In his own literary circles Anatole France himself heard the passage held up to laughter and torn to tatters. The critic who laughed loudest, he says, was an enthusiastic admirer of Michelet. Yet the passage was from Michelet himself, from Michelet at his best, from Michelet in his finest period. How the great sceptic must have enjoyed that evening!
It is not that we cannot think. It is that we are afraid to think. It is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it. Even some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed in thinking independently. We only succeed in getting into other flocks. Think of that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us some years ago, the Cubists and Dottists and Spottists and Futurists and other cranks, who filled London with their shows, and set all the "advanced" people singing their praises. They were not real praises that expressed genuine feeling. They were the artificial enthusiasms of people who wanted to join in the latest fashion. They would rave over any imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion – rather than not be thought clever enough to find a meaning in things that had no meaning.
We are too timid to think alone, too humble to trust our own feeling or our own judgment. We want some authority to lean up against, and when we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little independent thought as children reciting the "twice-times" table. I would rather a man should think ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo. I once heard an Evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, speaking of Shakespeare, gravely remark that he "could never see anything in that writer." I smiled at his naïveté, but I respected his courage. He couldn't see anything in Shakespeare and he was too honest to pretend that he could. That is far better than the affectations with which men conceal the poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility.
In other days the man that dared to think for himself ran the risk of being burned. Giordano Bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a description of the Oxford of his day which shows how tyrannical established thought can be. Aristotle was almost as sacred as the Bible, and the University statutes enacted that "Bachelors and Masters who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five shillings for every point of divergence and for every fault committed against the Logic of the Organon." We have liberated thought from the restraints of the policeman and the executioner since then, but in liberating it we have lost our reverence for its independence and integrity. We are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease to think at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely as we follow the fashions in hats.
The evil, I suppose, lies in our education. We standardise our children. We aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching them to be themselves – new incarnations of the human spirit, new prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world. We are more concerned about putting our thoughts into their heads than in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom. They are not in fear of the stake, but they are in fear of the judgment of the world, which has no more title to respect than those old statutes of Oxford which we laugh at to-day. The truth, I fear, is that thought does not thrive on freedom. It only thrives under suppression. We need to have our liberties taken away from us in order to discover that they are worth dying for.