TWO DRINKS OF MILK
The cabin lay a hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between Sneam and Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and out to the open Atlantic.
A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down the rocks.
We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to the cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received us.
Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade of the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother of the girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and having done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen floor out into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and on a bench by the ingle sat the third member of the family.
She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and untroubled as a child’s. She paused in her knitting to make room for me on the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she played the hostess.
If you have travelled in Kerry you don’t need to be told of the charm of the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the look of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a spring morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and to know them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of Kerry, O’Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always warm with the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted with wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving pleasure to others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every peasant you meet is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted if you will stop to talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be your guide. It is like being back in the childhood of the world, among elemental things and an ancient, unhasting people.
The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess in disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that a duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of Sneam, five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin and among these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she had caught something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out there through the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of exiles had gone to far lands. Some few had returned and some had been for ever silent. As I sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle accents all the tale of a stricken people and of a deserted land. There was no word of complaint – only a cheerful acceptance of the decrees of Fate. There is the secret of the fascination of the Kérry temperament – the happy sunlight playing across the sorrow of things.
The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to pay.
“Sure, there’s nothing to pay,” said the old lady with just a touch of pride in her sweet voice. “There’s not a cabin in Kerry where you’ll not be welcome to a drink of milk.”
The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane, and as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they added a benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague M’Carty’s hotel – Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker, whose rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits among the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with many-coloured flies – we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville and heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take the northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much better made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before the coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a day of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the lake we dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage – neat and well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense of plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark of a dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt that we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver affairs than thirsty travelers to attend to.
Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back to the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed suddenly less friendly.
In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two glasses – a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of feature. While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the doorstep, looking away across the lake to where the noble form of Schiehallion dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time was money and talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty haste.
“What have we to pay, please?”
“Sixpence.”
And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant memory.
ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt independently is entirely harmful.
“Take the egg, for example,” he said. “It contains in it all the elements necessary for the growth of a chicken – salt among the rest. That is sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article of food. Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise its delicate flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.” And he concluded, as we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example of the Japanese in this matter. “They,” he said laughingly, “only take salt when they want to die.”
At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty, and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with great energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we eat contain the salt required by the human body. “Not even the egg?” I asked. “No, not even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our foods, and even if the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw state they tend to lose their character cooked.” He admitted that that was an argument for eating things au naturel more than is the practice. But he was firm in his conviction that the separate use of salt is essential. “And as for flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw, with or without salt. What comparison is there?”
“But,” said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about the Japanese), “are there not races who do not use salt?” “My dear sir,” said he, “the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of salt is supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of the prime essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause or another, is seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute exactness in the mortality returns. If they don’t get a sufficiency of salt to eat with their food they die.”
After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening in examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt I should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the face of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have quoted, especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians. Yet I daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the facts. For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice, the Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the world, and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat their fish in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would go far to explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about which there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be a commonplace thing like the use of salt.
Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random – men whose whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its requirements – whose views on the subject were in violent antagonism. They approached their subject from contrary angles and with contrary sets of facts, and the truth they were in search of took a wholly different form for each.
It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by judicious manipulation.
A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our air service. He was very confident that we were “simply out of it – that was all, simply out of it.” And he was full of facts on the subject. I don’t like people who brim over with facts – who lead facts about, as Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few people so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts. His conclusions are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot sort them out and add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès called “loose, unstitched minds.”
Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her husband had told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so bad as that, but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact away in the chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not infrequently, that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something chipped off, and I can never trust it until I have verified my references.
But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was that, so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell you how many English machines had failed to return on each day of the week, and how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to descend. And judging from his figures he was quite right. “We were out of it – simply out of it.” Yet the truth is that while his facts were right, his deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken account of some facts, but had left other equally important facts out of consideration. For example, through all this time the German airmen had been on the defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen had taken great risks for a great object. They had gone miles over the enemy’s lines – as much as fifty miles over – and had come back with priceless information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but the whole truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this time the most victorious element of our Army.
I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is often composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to contradict each other. Take the handkerchief incident in “Othello.” Poor Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that the Moor saw. Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello believed she had given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the catastrophe.
But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them in real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the knife discovered – also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker’s. The waist of the trousers was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches came on, and when he had got his “take” he left to transcribe it, having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated. The pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the suit.
You remember that Browning in “The Ring and the Book,” tells the story of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only different aspects of one truth. “Mostly,” he says, “matters of any consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal… For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself three times.” I fancy it is this discovery of the falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that “a lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”; but he is wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter) which is the most dangerous lie – for a fact seems so absolute, so incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts, their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by a famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to in another connection. He was being examined about the visit of Government experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager. And this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and witness:
“Did you tell him to tell them the facts?”
“Yes.”
“The whole facts?”
“No.”
“What facts?”
“Selected facts.”
It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody bearing his name.
If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things, we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by “works” is displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by justification by “service” which is “works” in new terms. Which is truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth. In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and the fact that Indians die because they don’t take it.
ON GREAT MEN
I was reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of him expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be “the greatest man since Milton.” I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally enough to ask myself who were the great Englishmen in history – for the sake of argument, the six greatest. I found the question so exciting that I had reached the end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time) almost before I had reached the end of my list. I began by laying down my premises or principles. I would not restrict the choice to men of action. The only grievance I have against Plutarch is that he followed that course. His incomparable “Lives,” would be still more satisfying, a still more priceless treasury of the ancient world, if, among his crowd of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with Socrates and Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work survived them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected the blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind, but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. “Greatness,” he said, “consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind, and goodness in removing it from them.” And it was to satirise the traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire “The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,” probably having in mind the Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad man. I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that he was a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless, ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent, merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought of nature.
Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was a great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about Cæsar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension of the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of living. Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen? For our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of the world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to a lower plane, and we are left, in Iago’s phrase, “poor indeed.” There is nothing English for which we would exchange him. “Indian Empire or no Indian Empire,” we say with Carlyle, “we cannot do without our Shakespeare.”
For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes indisputably to him who had
“… a voice whose sound was like the sea.”
Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare’s sun. He breathed his mighty harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive, intangible, indestructible. With him stands his “chief of men” – the “great bad man” of Burke – the one man of action in our annals capable of measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing Bismarck in the realm of the spirit – the man at whose name the cheek of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda) first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well all statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of this amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery of life, and Wordsworth giving “to weary feet the gift of rest,” and Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only less wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of others aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all the legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is still one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic, enlightened man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first great Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be Roger – there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.
I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a woman, Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic “lady of the lamp,” but as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the adventurer into a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by a will of iron, a terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful and creative woman this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not because she is unworthy, but because she must head a companion fist of great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two candidates from among our English saints – Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so diabolically at the martyrdom of the “heretic,” Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if greatness be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield place to the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a deeper mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our history.
There is my list – Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger Bacon, John Wesley – and anybody can make out another who cares and a better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is not a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher. If the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness cannot be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left out of any list of the world’s great men. But, matchless in literature, we are poor in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see the great name of Turner.