ON BEING REMEMBERED
As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the bark – some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.
What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton’s hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of immortality – terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.
If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace’s “Exegi monumentum ære perennius” is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be among the immortals. “I have raised a monument,” he says, “more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.” The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare’s proud declaration —
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had written a song of a sparrow —
And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
Of which I sang one song that will not die.
Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.
Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence. “I’ll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. “Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of me comes but once in centuries.”
Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he said grandly; “I quit the time.” And beside this we may put Victor Hugo’s rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”
But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life? Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true, suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.
Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says: —
For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (Oh, you rogue!) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (”You were drunk last night, you dog“), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.
We may smile at Boswell’s vanity, but most of us share his ambition. Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of Gray’s depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the “dull cold ear of death.” In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of “Alpha of the Plough” an agreeable fancy something like this. In the year two thousand – or it may be three thousand – yes, let us do the thing handsomely and not stint the centuries – in the year three thousand and ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for democracy – at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic to the Patagonian capital – swished, I need hardly remark, being the expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in being discharged in a rocket out of the earth’s atmosphere and made to complete a parabola on any part of the earth’s surface that may be desired – bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous subterranean passages of the ancient British capital – those passages which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers, and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities underground. The trophy is a book by one “Alpha of the Plough.” It creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch, marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha – a gentleman with a flowing beard and a dome-like brow – that overlooks the market-place, and places wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells and a salvo of artillery.
There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you, my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox, who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb, even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the’ brilliant military feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza of the poem in which he poured out his creed —
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small.
That dares not put it to the touch
To win or lose it all.
Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship with Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he befriended a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the name of his benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of Ægina is full of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would like to be remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went to Pindar and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his praise. Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. “Why, for so much money,” said Pytheas, “I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.”
“Very likely.” On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the ode of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer paths to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of the Earl of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of Shakespeare live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their dedication. But one must choose one’s poet carefully. I do not advise you to go and give Mr – £200 and a commission to send your name echoing down the corridors of time.
Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr – (you will fill in the blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them. It would be safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a rose, or an overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can confer a modest immortality. They have done so for many. A certain Maréchal Neil is wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which is as enviable a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr Mackintosh is talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of rain, and even Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his battles. It would not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone will be thought of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just as Archimedes is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike, and we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as if the world babbles about us for ever.
ON DINING
There are people who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can hoard it not for the sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy, for the satisfaction of feeling that they have got something locked up that they could spend if they chose without being any the poorer and that other people would enjoy knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending what they can afford to spend. It is a pleasure akin to the economy of the Scotsman, which, according to a distinguished member of that race, finds its perfect expression in taking the tube when you can afford a cab. But the gift of secrecy is rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the sake of telling them. We spend our secrets as Lamb’s spendthrift spent his money – while they are fresh. The joy of creating an emotion in other people is too much for us. We like to surprise them, or shock them, or please them as the case may be, and we give away the secret with which we have been entrusted with a liberal hand and a solemn request “to say nothing about it.” We relish the luxury of telling the secret, and leave the painful duty of keeping it to the other fellow. We let the horse out and then solemnly demand that the stable door shall be shut so that it shan’t escape, I have done it myself – often. I have no doubt that I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret to reveal, but I shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely selfish reasons, which will appear later. You may conceive me going about choking with mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years have I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can dine wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the atmosphere restful, and the prices moderate – in short, the happy mean between the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the uncompromising cheapness of Lockhart’s. In those extremes I find no satisfaction.
It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to a good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren’t many families that enjoyed their “vittles” more than her’s did, and I can claim the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that I count good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I could join very heartily in Peacock’s chorus:
“How can a man, in his life of a span,
Do anything better than dine.”
Give me a satisfactory’ dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads the landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who insisted that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life. That, I think, is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few things more revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by taking emetics. But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise for enjoying a good dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good dinners. I see no necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and a holy mind. There was a saintly man once in this city – a famous man, too – who was afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out to dinner, he had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to enable him to start even with the other guests. And it is on record that when the ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with Cardinal Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses that hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season of fasting, “I fear,” said one of them, “that there is a lobster salad side to the Cardinal.” I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side too. A hot day and a lobster salad – what happier conjunction can we look for in a plaguey world?
But, in making this confession, I am neither gourmand nor gourmet. Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and the great language of the menu does not stir my pulse. I do not ask for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have for supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as the shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes – eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke approvingly of Sancho’s choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way with him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against his rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart’s desire at the Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel when I enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things. I stroke the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and rises, purring with dignity, under my caress. I say “Good evening” to the landlord who greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once cordial and restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of his hand. No frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a neat-handed Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress and white cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility and aloofness that establishes the perfect relationship – obliging, but not familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The napery makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a mirror, and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced dish of hors d’ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the modest four-course table d’hôte begins, and when at the end you light your cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only dined, but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement, touched with the subtle note of a personality.
And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall not tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It may be in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn, or it may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you because I sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it I shall shatter the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the Mermaid and find its old English note of kindly welcome and decorous moderation gone, and that in its place there will be a noisy, bustling, popular restaurant with a band, from which I shall flee. When it is “discovered” it will be lost, as the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so I shall keep its secret. I only purr it to the cat who arches her back and purrs understanding in response. It is the bond of freemasonry between us.
IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that morning by the ship’s clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver, and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage. And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught yesterday up.
But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us, beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a confusion of all three.
In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom – a parochial illusion of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light and dark – what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark – not many days, but just one day and that always midday.
At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo sky – specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the astronomers tell us that Neptune’s year is equal to 155 of our years? Think of it – our Psalmist’s span of life would not stretch half round a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year’s Day and live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune – if, that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.
And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time: there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of fable.
As I reached this depressing conclusion – not a novel or original one, but always a rather cheerless one – a sort of orphaned feeling stole over me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during yesterday’s storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges before him, was crying something that sounded like “Al-lay! Al-lay!” counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller’s coppers were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold and merry eye.
The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass, not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the Dauphiné coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d’Oison. And that other experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain. We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn “would not go,” as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of the mountains – by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the moorlands into the Vale of St John.
All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor, tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream, in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering consciousness.
Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember that it is what Mr Chesterton calls “a rolling road, a reeling road.” It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of his signature, thus:
Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.
Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere, far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might have been in another state of existence… Ah no, of course, it was this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished, and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I had walked through the shadow into the deeps.
But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread, one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the brown crust reminded me of something… Yes, of course. The bugle had gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal’ by this time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.