ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
I think, on the whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good display of moral fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen (and admired) I propose to let them off in public. When I awoke in the morning I made a good resolution… At this point, if I am not mistaken, I observe a slight shudder on your part, madam. “How Victorian!” I think I hear you remark. You compel me, madam, to digress.
It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year’s resolutions nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like the scorn of youth for its elders.
I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as it is to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren will be as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of yesterday. The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered poison gas, and have invented submarines and guns that will kill a churchful of people seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding the Nineteenth Century as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good things as well as very bad things about our old Victorian England. It did not go to the Ritz to dance in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz did not exist, and the modern hotel life had not been invented. It used to go instead to the watch-night service, and it was not above making good resolutions, which for the most part, no doubt, it promptly proceeded to break.
Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I had my way I would be as “merry” as Pepys, if in a different fashion. “Merry” is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that merriment is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a mere spasm, whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy of life. But the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other, and an occasional burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for anybody – even for an Archbishop – especially for an Archbishop. The trouble with an Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take himself too seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad for him. He needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally that his virtue is not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary humanity. At least once a year he should indulge in a certain liveliness, wear the cap and bells, dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe, not too publicly, but just publicly enough so that there should be nothing furtive about it. If not done on the village green it might at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and chronicled in the local newspapers. “Last evening His Grace the Archbishop attended the servants’ ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the chief scullery-maid.”
And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” Nowadays the formula is “A Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year.” It is a priggish, sophisticated change – a sort of shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being “merry.” There isn’t. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a Merry Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a Happy New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio’s view that virtue is a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride Victorian England because it went to watch-night services it is not because I think there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is because, in the words of the old song, I think “It is good to be merry and wise.” I like a festival of foolishness and I like good resolutions, too. Why shouldn’t I? Lewis Carrol’s gift for mathematics was not less admirable because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at doing sums in his head.
From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution. The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New Year’s morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is that you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn’t call you an intolerant fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow. Perhaps to put the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous reaction to events is a little too immediate. I don’t want to be unpleasant, but I think you see what I mean. Do not suppose that I am asking you to be a cold-blooded, calculating person. God forbid. But it would do you no harm to wear a snaffle bar and a tightish rein – or, as we used to say in our Victorian England, to “count ten.” I accepted the criticism with approval. For though we do not like to hear of our failings from other people, that does not mean that we are unconscious of them. The more conscious we are of them, the less we like to hear of them from others and the more we hear of them from ourselves. So I said “Agreed. We will adopt ‘Second thoughts’ as our New Year policy and begin the campaign at once.”
And then came my letters – nice letters and nasty letters and indifferent letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say, “raised the waters.” No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters which anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different. As I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I said “Second thoughts,” and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect to dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to have a periodical brush with one’s habits, even if one knows one is pretty sure to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a reminder that we are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of the imperfections of others. And that, I think, is the case for our old Victorian habit of New Year’s Day commandments.
I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite pianissimo and nice.
ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
I see that the ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are desecrating his remains. They have learned from the life of him just published that he did not get on well with his father, or his eldest son, and that he did not attend his first wife’s funeral. Above all, he was a snob. He was ashamed of the tailoring business from which he sprang, concealed the fact that he was bom at Portsmouth, and generally turned his Grecian profile to the world and left it to be assumed that his pedigree was wrapped in mystery and magnificence.
I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we have Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy’s story who always managed to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that the left side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished and, I think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile to the camera – and a beautiful profile it is – for reasons quite obvious and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that disfigures the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to being caught unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that dispose the observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I (or you) be ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in our power. If we pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the meaning of the pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of a coat, or the colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom find pleasure in a photograph of ourselves – so seldom feel that it does justice to that benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we cherish secretly in our hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into the confession box, that I had never seen a photograph of myself that had satisfied me. And I fancy you would do the same if you were honest. We may pretend to ourselves that it is only abstract beauty or absolute truth that we are concerned about, but we know better. We are thinking of our Grecian profile.
It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It gives them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of the lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will remind you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say he made an idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb was not quite the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far too much wine at dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically, afterwards, as you may read in De Quincey. They like to recall that Scott was something of a snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince Regent had used at dinner in his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards in a moment of happy forgetfulness. In short, they go about like Alcibiades mutilating the statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the culprit), and will leave us nothing in human nature that we can entirely reverence.
I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button up ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never been interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one, and I leave it at that. But I once made a calculation – based on the elementary fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents, and so on – and came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman Conquest my ancestors were much more numerous than the population then inhabiting this island. I am aware that this proves rather too much – that it is an example of the fact that you can prove anything by statistics, including the impossible. But the truth remains that I am the temporary embodiment of a very large number of people – of millions of millions of people, if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to sharpen flints some six hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular if in such a crowd there were not some ne’er-do-wells jostling about among the nice, reputable persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my Parliamentary majority. Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken at a moment of public excitement within myself, the ne’er-do-wells get on top. These accidents will happen, and the best I can hope is that the general trend of policy in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under my hat is in the hands of the decent people.
And that is the best we can expect from anybody – the great as well as the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect whole we shall have no supreme man – only a plaster saint. Certainly we shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created. The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre of his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago, the calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert, the perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol, the bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and baseness of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden who walked by Avon’s banks in ancient days and lived again in the Portias and Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in Shakespeare. They were the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the rest of us, not a man, but multitudes of men. He created all these people because he was all these people, contained in a larger measure than any man who ever lived all the attributes, good and bad, of humanity. Each character was a peep into the gallery of his ancestors. Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral source of creative power. When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his insight into the character of women he replied, “It is the spirit of my mother in me.” It was indeed the spirit of many mothers working in and through him.
It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never more difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along the Embankment last evening with a friend – a man known alike for his learning and character – when he turned to me and said, “I will never have a hero again.” We had been speaking of the causes of the catastrophe of Paris, and his remark referred especially to his disappointment with President Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair to the President. He did not make allowance for the devil’s broth of intrigue and ambitions into which the President was plunged on this side of the Atlantic. But, leaving that point aside, his remark expressed a very common feeling. There has been a calamitous slump in heroes. They have fallen into as much disrepute as kings.
And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the fabulous offspring of comfortable times – supermen reigning on Olympus and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the storm and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy and prove that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they are discovered to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind, feeble folk like you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as helpless as any of us. Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and their feet have come down from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of clay.
It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of the Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one.
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.
The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that “no man is a hero to his valet.” To be a hero you must be remote in time or circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities and angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is privileged to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the tricks you have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a faithful secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture he gives of Napoleon’s shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome loathing for that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name thunders down the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his contemporaries. It was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom he had just appointed to the choicest command in his gift, who went to Caesar’s house on that March morning, two thousand years ago, to bring him to the slaughter.
If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men I should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely than anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance in secondary things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and tenderness with resolution and strength, he stands alone in history. But even he was not a hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too near – near enough to note his frailties, for he was human, too near to realise the grand and significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was not until he was dead that the world realised what a leader had fallen in Israel. Motley thanked heaven, as for something unusual, that he had been privileged to appreciate Lincoln’s greatness before death revealed him to men. Stanton fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end, and it was only when life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur of the force that had been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. “There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen,” he said, as he stood with other colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had breathed his last. But the point here is that, sublime though the sum of the man was, his heroic profile had its abundant human warts.
It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have made the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not find them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are these the men – these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards – the demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and then you read the German books and wonder why we didn’t win sooner.
It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is a painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never will be such a being. The best of us is woven of “mingled yarn, good and ill together.” And so I come back to Meredith’s Grecian profile and the ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he “contained multitudes” too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects of that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
I hope the two ladies from the country who have been writing to the newspapers to know what sights they ought to see in London during their Easter holiday will have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube and have fine weather for the Monument, and whisper to each other successfully in the whispering gallery of St Paul’s, and see the dungeons at the Tower and the seats of the mighty at Westminster, and return home with a harvest of joyful memories. But I can promise them that there is one sight they will not see. They will not see me. Their idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a holiday is forgetting there is such a place as London.
Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said, I will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to have lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not much worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the morning bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years – do you, when you are walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight as the dome of St Paul’s and its cross of gold burst on your astonished sight? Do you go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo Bridge to see that wondrous river façade that stretches with its cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul’s? Do you know the spot where Charles was executed, or the church where there are the best Grinling Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into Somerset House to see the will of William Shakespeare, or – in short, did you ever see London? Did you ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut with your mind, with the sense of revelation, of surprise, of discovery? Did you ever see it as those two ladies from the country will see it this Easter as they pass breathlessly from wonder to wonder? Of course not. You need a holiday in London as I do. You need to set out with young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery and see all the sights of this astonishing city as though you had come to it from a far country.
That is how I hope to visit it – some day. But not this Easter, not when I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the cherry blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the chestnut tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long and the April meadows are “smoored wi’ new grass,” as they say in the Yorkshire dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at the magic casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn to the fringe of Dartmoor and let loose – shall it be from Okehampton or Bovey Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we enter the sanctuary? – let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth and sky where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the boulders and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you unawares, and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast egg in the boarding house at Russell Square – heavens, Russell Square! – and discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest lift or up the highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of Buckingham Palace, or see the largest station or the smallest church, I shall be stepping out from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent water, hailing the old familiar mountains as they loom into sight, looking down again – think of it! – into the’ Jaws of Borrowdale, having a snack at Rosthwaite, and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough mountain track, with the buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about the mountain flanks, with glorious Great Gable for my companion on the right hand and no less glorious Scafell for my companion on the left hand, and at the rocky turn in the track – lo! the great amphitheatre of Wasdale, the last Sanctuary of lakeland.
And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the Duke of York at the top of his column – wondering all the while who the deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high – you may, I say, if you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat from my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this fastness of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may come with their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and chase the spirit of the mountains away from us for ever… And then by the screes of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or perchance, I may turn by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale come into view and stumble down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell you where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this moment, for I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and is doubtful how he can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat, ladies, that you will not find me in London. I leave London to you. May you enjoy it.