ON SAWING WOOD
I do not think this article will be much concerned with the great art of sawing wood; but the theme of it came to me while I was engaged in that task. It was raining hard this morning, and it occurred to me that it was a good opportunity to cut some winter logs in the barn. The raw material of the logs lies at the end of the orchard in the shape of sections of trunks and branches of some old apple trees which David cut down for us last autumn, to enable us to extend the potato-patch by digging up a part of the orchard. I carried some of the sections into the barn and began to saw, but I was out of practice and had forgotten the trick. The saw would go askew, the points would dig in, and the whole operation seemed a clumsy failure.
Then I remembered. You are over-doing it, I said. You are making a mess of the job by too much energy – misdirected energy. The trick of sawing wood is to work within your strength. You are starting at it as if you intended to saw through the log at one stroke. It is the mistake the Rumanians have made in Transylvania. They bit off more than they could chew. You are biting off more than you can chew, and you and the log and the saw get at cross purposes, with the results you see. The art of the business is to work easily and with a light hand, to make the incision with a firm stroke that hardly touches the surface, to move the saw forward lightly so that it barely touches the wood, to draw it back at a shade higher elevation, and above all to take your time and to avoid too much energy. "Gently does it," is the motto.
It is a lesson I am always learning and forgetting. I suppose I am one of those people who are afflicted with too eager a spirit. We want a thing done, but we cannot wait to do it. We rush at the task with all our might and expect it to surrender on the spot, and when it doesn't surrender we lose patience, complain of our tools, and feel a grievance against the perversity of things. It reminds me of the remark which a professional made to me at the practice nets long ago. He was watching a fast bowler who was slinging the ball at the batsman like a whirlwind, and with disastrous results for himself. "He would make a good bowler," said the professional, "if he wouldn't try to bowl three balls at once." Recall any really great bowler you have known and you will find that the chief impression he left on the mind was that of ease and reserve power. He was never spending up to the hilt. There was always something left in the bank. I do not speak of the medium-paced bowler, like Lohmann, whose action had a sort of artless grace that masked the most wily and governed strategy; but of the fast bowler, like Tom Richardson or Mold or even Spofforth. With all their physical energy, you felt that their heads were cool and that they had something in hand. There was passion, but it was controlled passion.
And if you have tried mowing a meadow you will know how much the art consists in working within your powers, easily and rhythmically. The temptation to lay on with all your might is overpowering, and you stab the ground and miss your stroke and exhaust yourself in sheer futility. And then you watch John Ruddle at the job and see the whole secret of the art reveal itself. He will mow for three hours on end with never a pause except to sharpen the blade with the whetstone he carries in his hip pocket. What a feeling of reserve there is in the beautiful leisureliness of his action! You could go to sleep watching him, and you feel that he could go to sleep to his own rhythm, as the mother falls asleep to her own swaying and crooning. There is the experience of a lifetime in that masterful technique, but the point is that the secret of the technique is its restraint, its economy of effort, its patience with the task, its avoidance of flurry and hurry, and of the waste and exhaustion of over-emphasis. At the bottom, all that John Ruddle has learned is not to try to bowl three balls at once. He is always master of his job.
And if you chance to be a golfer, haven't you generally found that when you are "off your game" it is because you have pitched the key, as it were, too high? You smite and fail, and smite harder and fail, and go on increasing the effort, and as your effort increases so does your futility. You are playing over your strength. You are screaming at the ball instead of talking to it reasonably and sensibly. Then perhaps you remember, cut down your effort to the scope of your powers, and, behold, the ball sails away on its errand with just the right flight and just the right direction and just the right length. And you purr to yourself and learn once more that the art of doing things is moderation.
It is so in all things. The man who wins is the man who keeps cool, whose effort is always proportioned to his power, who gives the impression that there is more in him than ever comes out. I have seen many a man lose the argument, not because he had the worse case, but because he was too eager, too impatient, too unrestrained in presenting it. What is the secret of the extraordinary influence which Viscount Grey exercises over the mind but the grave moderation and reserve of his style? There are scores of more eloquent speakers, more nimble disputants than he, but there has been no one in our time with the same authority and finality of speech. He conveys the sense of a mind disciplined against passion, austere in its reserve, implacably honest, understating itself with a certain cold aloofness that leaves controversy silent. Take his indictment of Germany as an example. It was as though the verdict of the Day of Judgment had fallen on Germany. Yet it was a mere grave, dispassionate statement of the facts without a word of extravagance or violence. It was the naked truthfulness of it that was so terrible and unanswerable.
And much the most impressive description I have seen of the horrors of war was in the letter of a German artillery officer telling his experiences in the first great battle of the Somme. Yet the characteristic of the letter was its plainness and freedom from any straining after effect. He just left the thing he described to speak for itself in all its bare horror. It was a lesson we people who write would do well to remember. Let us have fewer adjectives, good people, fewer epithets. Remember, the adjective is the enemy of the noun. It is the scream that drowns the sense, the passion that turns the argument red in the face and makes it unbelievable. Was it not Stendhal who used to read the Code Napoléon once a year to teach him its severity of style?
*****
It is still raining. I will return to the barn and practise the philosophy of moderation on those logs.
VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME
I
A soldier, whom I met in the train the other day, said that the most unpleasant thing in his experience of the war was the bodies which got caught in the barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left corrupting in the sun. "It isn't healthy," he said. There was no affectation of bravado in the remark. He made it quite simply, as if he were commenting on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating of the carriage. It was not the tragedy of the thing that affected him, but its insanitariness. Yet he was obviously a kindly and humane man, and he talked of his home with the yearning of an exile. "It makes you think something of your home," he said, speaking of the war. "I shan't never want to leave my home when I get out of this, and I shan't never grumble at the missus again," he added, as though recalling the past.
I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers back from the war has been struck by this attitude of mind towards death. I remember a friend of mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle of the Somme while trying to save one of his men who had been wounded, telling me of the horror of the first days of his experience of war, and of the subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had been his friend blown to pieces by his side. "It is as though war develops another integument," he said. "Your sensibilities are atrophied. Your nerve ends are deadened. Your normal feelings perish, and you become a part of a machine that has no feelings – only functions."
In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent in the minds of most of us. There has not been since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years ago such a harvesting of untimely death as we have witnessed during the last two and a half years. If the ghostly army of the slain were to file before you, passing in a rank of four for every minute that elapsed, you could sit and watch it day and night for five years without pause before the last of the phantom host had gone by. And if behind the dead there followed the maimed, blind, and mentally shattered, you could sit on for twenty years and still the end of the vast procession would not be in sight. If we had been asked three years ago whether the human mind could endure such a deliberate orgy of death in its most terrible form, we should have said the thing was incredible. Yet we live through it without revolt, clamour about the shortage of potatoes, crowd the cinemas to see the latest extravagance of Charlie Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily tale of dead that fills the obscure columns of the newspapers – such of them as trouble any longer to give that tale at all.
It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the facts. That is certainly done. You may go to see the "war pictures" at the cinema and come away without supposing that they represent anything more than a skilfully arranged entertainment – in which one attractive "turn" follows another in swift succession. Once they actually showed a man falling dead, and there was a cry of indignation at such an outrage. Ten millions have fallen dead, but we must not look on one to remind us of the reality behind this pictured imposture. There has never been a lie on the scale of these "war pictures" that leave out the war and all its sprawling ugliness, monotony, mutilation, and death.
But it is not this fact that explains our apparent indifference to the Red Harvest. We are like the dyer's hand. We are subdued to what we work in. Even those who have been directly stricken find that they bear the blow with a calm that astonishes themselves. We have got into a new habit of thought about death – in a sense a truer habit of thought. It used to be screened from the light of day, talked of in hushed voices, surrounded with the mystery and aloofness of a terrible divinity. It has come into the open, brutal, naked, violent. We accept it as the commonplace it is, instead of enveloping it in a cloud of tragic fear and strangeness. The heart seems steeled to the blows of fate, looks death steadily in the face, understands that the individual life is merged in issues more vast than this little tale of years that, at the most, is soon told.
It may be that, like the soldiers, our senses are only numbed by events, and that when we come out of the nightmare the old feelings will resume their sway. But it will be long before they recover their former tyranny over the mind. This generation has companioned Death too closely to see him again quite as the hooded terror of old. And that, I think, is a gain. I have always felt that Johnson's morbid attitude towards death was the weakest trait in a fine character, and that George Selwyn's perpetual absorption in the subject was a form of mental disease. Montaigne, too, lived with the constant thought of the imminence of death, so much so that if, when out walking, he remembered something he wanted done, he wrote down the request at once, lest he should not reach home alive. But he was quite healthy in his thought. It was not that he feared death, but that he did not want to be caught unawares.
In this, as in most things, Cæsar shone with that grand sanity that makes him one of the most illuminated secular minds in history. He neither sought death nor shunned it. When Hirtius and Pansa remonstrated with him for going unprotected by a bodyguard, he answered, "It is better to die once than always to go in fear of death." That is the common-sense attitude – as remote from the spirit of the miser as from that of the spendthrift. And that other comment of his on death is equally deserving of recall. He was dining the night before his murder at the house of Decimus Brutus, who had joined the conspiracy against him. As he sat dispatching his letters, the others talked of death and of that form of death which was preferable. One of the group asked Cæsar what death he would prefer. He looked up from his papers and said, "That which is least expected." This was not an old man's weariness of life such as that which made Lord Holland, the father of Charles James Fox, write to Selwyn: "And yet the man I envy most is the late Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead and he died suddenly." It was just the Roman courage that accepted death as an incident of the journey.
Of that high courage the end of Antoninus Pius is an immortal memory. As the Emperor lay dying in his tent the tribune of the night-watch entered to ask the watchword. "Æquanimitas," said Antoninus Pius, and with that last word he, in the language of the historian, "turned his face to the everlasting shadow."
With that grave calm the philosophy of the ancient world touched its noblest expression. It faced the shadow without illusions and without fear. It met death neither as an enemy, nor as a friend, but as an implacable fact to be faced implacably. Sir Thomas More met it like a bridegroom. In all the literature of death there is nothing comparable with Roper's story of those last days in the Tower. Who can read that moving description of the farewell with his daughter Margaret (Roper's wife) without catching its pity and its glory? "In good faythe, Maister Roper," said stout Sir William Kingstone, the gaoler, "I was ashamed of myself that at my departing from your father I found my harte soe feeble and his soe stronge, that he was fayne to comfort me that should rather have comforted him." And when Sir Thomas Pope comes early on St. Thomas' Even with the news that he is to die at nine o'clock that morning and falls weeping at his own tidings – "Quiet yourselfe, Good Maister Pope," says More, "and be not discomforted; for I trust that we shall once in heaven see eche other full merily, where we shalbe sure to live and love togeather, in joy full blisse eternally." And then, Pope being gone, More "as one that had beene invited to some solempne feaste, chaunged himself into his beste apparrell; which Maister Leiftenante espyinge, advised him to put it off, sayinge that he that should have it was but a javill (a common fellow: the executioner). What, Maister Leiftenante, quothe he, shall I accompte him a javill that shall doe me this day so singular a benefitt? Nay, I assure you, were it clothe of goulde, I would accompte it well bestowed upon him, as St. Ciprian did, who gave his executyoner thirtye peeces of golde… And soe was he by Maister Leiftenante brought out of the Tower and from thence led towardes the place of execution. Wher, goinge up the scaffold, which was so weake that it was readye to fall, he said merilye to Maister Leiftenante, I praye you, Maister Leiftenante, see me safe uppe and for my cominge down let me shift for myselfe. Then desired he all the people there aboute to pray for him, and to bare witnes with him that he should now there suffer deathe, in and for the faith of the Holy Catholicke Churche. Which donne, he kneeled downe; and after his prayers sayed, turned to the executioner, and with a cheerfull countenance spake thus unto him: 'Plucke uppe thy spiritts, manne, and be not affrayde to doe thine office; my necke is very shorte, take heede, therfore, thou strike not awrye for savinge of thine honesty.' So passed Sir Thomas More out of this worlde to God, upon the very same daye (the Ntas. of St. Peter) in which himself had most desired."
The saint of the pagan world and the saint of the Christian world may be left to share the crown of noble dying.
II
I had rather a shock to-day. I was sitting down to write an article on a subject that had still to be found, and had almost reached the point of decision, when a letter which had been addressed to the Editor of The Star, and which he had sent on to me, started another and more attractive hare. It was a letter announcing my lamented demise. There was no doubt about it. There was the date and there was the name (a nice name, too), and there were the circumstances all set out in black and white. And the writer wanted to know, in view of all this, why no obituary notice of me had appeared in the columns of the paper I had adorned.
Now this report, however it arose, is, to use Mark Twain's famous remark in similar circumstances, "greatly exaggerated." I am not dead. I am not half dead. I am not even feeling poorly. I had a tooth out a week or two ago, but otherwise nothing dreadful has happened to me for ever so long. I was once nearly in a shipwreck, but that was so long ago that I had almost forgotten the circumstance. Moreover, as all the people in the ship were saved I could not possibly have died then even if I had been on board. And I wasn't on board, for I had left at the previous port of call. It was a narrow escape, but I can't pretend that I wasn't saved. I was. But though I am most flagrantly and aggressively alive, the announcement of my death has set me thinking of myself as if I were dead. I find it quite an agreeable diversion. Not that I am morbid. I do not share my friend Clerihew's view, expressed in his chapter on Lord Clive in that noble work "Biography for Beginners." You may remember the chapter. If not, it is short enough to repeat:
What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There's something to be said
For being dead.
That is overdoing the thing. What I find agreeable is being alive and thinking I am dead. You have the advantage of both worlds, so to speak. In company with this amiable correspondent, I have shed tears over myself. I have wept at my own grave-side. I have composed my own obituary notice, and I don't think I have ever turned out a more moving piece of work. I have met my friends and condoled with them over my decease, and have heard their comments, and I am proud to say that they were quite nice. Some of them made me think that I might write up the obituary notice in a rather higher key, put the virtues of the late lamented "Alpha of the Plough" in more gaudy colours, tone down the few, the very few, weak points of his austere, saintly, chivalrous, kindly, wise, humorous, generous character – in a word, let myself go a bit more. Old Grumpington at the club, it is true, said that I should be no great loss to the world, and that so far as he was concerned I was one of the people that he could do without. But then Old Grumpington never says a good word for anybody, living or dead. I discounted Grumpington. I took no notice of Grumpington – the beast.
And then I passed from the living world I had left behind to the contemplation of the said Alpha, fallen on sleep, and I found his case no subject for tears. After all, said I, the world is not such a gay place in these days, that I need worry about having quitted it. I have left some dear friends behind, but they will pass the toll-gate, too, in due course, and join me and those who have preceded me. "What dreams may come!" Well, so be it. I have no fear of the dreams of death, having passed through the dream of life, which was so often like a nightmare. If there are dreams for me, I think they will be better dreams. If there are tasks for me, I think they will be better tasks. If there are no dreams and no tasks, then that also is well. "I see no such horror in a dreamless sleep," said Byron in one of his letters, "and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not make tiresome." And so, dreamless or dreaming, I saw nothing in the circumstances of the departed Alpha to lament…
Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you. If you prick me I shall still bleed. If you tickle me I shall still laugh. And with due encouragement I shall still write.