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Title: Things That Have Interested Me. Third Series.
Author: Bennett, Enoch Arnold (1867-1931)
Date of first publication: 1926
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Chatto & Windus, 1926
Date first posted: 30 March 2009
Date last updated: 30 March 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #288

This ebook was produced by: Jon Ingram, Meghan
& the Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe
at http://dp.rastko.net




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    | Transcriber's Note:                                        |
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    | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in        |
    | this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of   |
    | this document.                                             |
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       *       *       *       *       *

THINGS THAT HAVE
INTERESTED ME

BY

ARNOLD BENNETT


THIRD SERIES


LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1926

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
MORRISON & GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH

ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED




CONTENTS


                                              PAGE

  THE LYRIC, HAMMERSMITH                         1
  AUDIBILITY IN THEATRES                         9
  SHAKSPERE AND THE STAGE                       12
  THE PRODUCER AND THE PRESS                    15
  THE PLAY-SUPPLY                               19
  ACTING                                        26
  THE PLAYGOING PUBLIC                          32
  GAMES                                         38
  IN SPAIN:--
      ENTRY INTO SPAIN                          44
      HOLY WEEK                                 51
      TOLEDO                                    58
      THE SPANIARD                              64
      THE BULL-FIGHT                            70
  THE GREATEST MOMENT                           77
  SPENDING AN INCOME                            82
  BUYING AND READING BOOKS                      90
  THE DECENT EXPOSURE OF GIRLS                 106
  THE MURDERER'S CONFESSION                    110
  CLOTHES AND MEN                              116
  ANDR GIDE'S _DOSTOEVSKY_                    125
  THE RIVIERA                                  129
  JOURNALESE                                   133
  HISTORY IN THE STREETS                       136
  WOMAN TWENTY YEARS HENCE                     142
  BRITISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION               151
  WHAT ARE LIFE'S GREATEST SATISFACTIONS?      157
  TREATISE ON MAKING FRIENDS                   169
  PUBLICITY FOR JOURNALISM                     186
  IS THE NOVEL DECAYING?                       191
  MARCEL PROUST                                196
  SHELLEY, FROM PARIS                          201
  THE SAFEGUARDING OF BRITISH MUSIC ACT        204
  _THE PERFECT FOOL_                           212
  THE BIG SHOP                                 217
  INSOMNIA                                     226
  FRENCH AND ENGLISH                           232
  PASSING OF THE PURITANS                      238
  MIND-WORK                                    246
  MY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE                      252




THINGS THAT HAVE INTERESTED ME




THE LYRIC, HAMMERSMITH


In connection with the history of the Lyric, Hammersmith, I wish very
briefly to discuss three subjects.

The first is the institution known as the "backer." Next to the landlord
the backer is the most abused person in the world of the stage--perhaps
justly, perhaps unjustly. He is said to demand, in return for risking
his capital, a deciding voice in the selection of plays--and of players.
He is even known to force his own plays (which invariably fail) on the
manager for whom he signs cheques. As a rule he loses money. A high
light of the revue world informed me a few months ago that backers never
made profits out of a musical show. The statement was probably
exaggerated, but there is a lot of tragic truth in it. Certainly far
more money is lost than made in the theatre. Certainly, also, backers
would lose less money if they confined themselves to being theatrical
capitalists, without meddling further in matters which they profoundly
misunderstand. Managers are often very stupid, but they are rarely so
stupid as their capitalists.

When, after an interview with Nigel Playfair in his dressing-room at the
Royalty Theatre, I went forth to collect the capital which I had rashly
promised him, I bore these views well in mind. I first mentioned the
Lyric scheme to Sir Harold Snagge, at a club lunch. Before I could ask
him for money he offered me 1000. I said to him:

"You will probably drop every penny of it. And, anyhow, you will have no
control whatever over the use of it."

He maintained his offer. I then went to Lord Beaverbrook, and similarly
addressed him. He furnished 1000. I then said to him:

"Can you support me with Lord Rothermere and Sir Edward Hulton?"

He said he would. He did. And Lord Rothermere and Sir Edward Hulton came
in with 1000 each. After the same fashion I enlisted one or two other
bankers, bill-brokers, and similar people of the kind in whose sight
1000 is no more than fourpence in mine.

I was asked whether I should "come in" myself. I said:

"Positively not, beyond taking shares sufficient to justify me for
directorship! Nothing would induce me to put money into any theatrical
enterprise. Time is money. I risk my time in theatres, and I will not
risk both time and money."

I must say that I thought I had been rather clever, for in addition to
obtaining millionaire-capitalists I had obtained the proprietors of
about 99 per cent. of the London press. The terrible capitalist press,
however, has not broken its neck in trying to serve the interests of the
Lyric, Hammersmith. It has frequently ignored our productions, more
frequently damned them with faint praise, and sometimes abused them. Not
long since we presented the finest play of modern times, and one
illustrious organ, the property of a prominent shareholder, described it
as "fatuous drivel." I was moved to complain seriously about this
outrage. But did I get any redress? I did not.

Still, I willingly admit that the millionaires have never tried to
interfere in the management of the theatre. They have never suggested a
play, nor an artiste. They have never attended a shareholders' meeting.
And I much doubt whether they have ever attended a first night. They
have, indeed, behaved in an ideal manner, and set an example which I
recommend heartily to all backers. I admit also that I buoyed them up
with false promises. I swore to them that they would lose their money,
and they have not lost it--yet.

       *       *       *       *       *

The second subject is the "unlucky theatre." Nigel Playfair took what
might fairly have been described as the unluckiest theatre in London. It
is hidden in a slum; the slum lies off a street that the West End had
never heard of, and the cab-fare to which from the West End is about
four shillings. The trains of the Metropolitan Railway shriek, grind,
and roar within twenty yards of the building. And I imagine that the
theatre had not had a success, or half a success, for about twenty
years. We were laughed at for the madness of leasing such a theatre. We
heard a very great deal about unlucky theatres. But I have never
believed in the existence of the unlucky theatre. I have only believed
in the existence of the theatre where unpopular productions are offered.

Three West End theatres used to be regarded as unlucky by the entire
theatrical profession: the Royalty, the Kingsway, and the Court. The
Royalty came into the hands of the daring firm of Vedrenne & Eadie. I
have had four plays done there. The first ran for about thirty
performances, the second for about a hundred, the third for over six
hundred, and the fourth for nearly three hundred. The Royalty is now
worth at least three times what it was when I started there, and I
reckon that (with Edward Knoblock) I have helped to put about 150,000
unearned increment into the coffers of the landlord and the lessee of
this "unlucky" theatre.

The Kingsway had a terrible name for misfortune. Nobody would look at
it. Kingsway was the theatrical way of spelling the word bankruptcy. It
could be hired for about 3-3/4d. a decade. It came into the hands of
Granville Barker, and, right off, Bernard Shaw and I had, between us,
thirteen hundred performances of two plays there, one of which had been
hawked all over the West End for two years.

As for the Court Theatre, it is sufficient to remark that Eden
Phillpotts's comedy, _The Farmer's Wife_, is now approaching its
thousandth performance therein.

Anyhow, I have given some proof that unlucky theatres do not exist. And
I felt no fear on that score for the Lyric, Hammersmith. Before a baby
could learn to talk, the Lyric, Hammersmith, had begun to beat every
record in the West End, save only _Chu Chin Chow_. I am now unalterably
established in my ancient belief that the public, such is their hunger
for real entertainment, will go anywhere, and submit to any
inconvenience, in order to obtain it.

       *       *       *       *       *

The third subject is popular taste. I submit that the average West End
manager (there is at least one exception) obstinately underrates the
intelligence of the public, and that more and more rapidly the public is
outstripping the managers in this particular. Only a playwright who has
tried to sell plays not exactly like all other plays can measure the
cowardice and the reactionary imbecility of managers. Managers still
continue to produce any kind of worthlessness, provided that it is in
the antique tradition, gives no food for thought, offends none of the
susceptibilities which they suppose the public to possess. They go on
and they go on. Facts beat against the iron doors of their minds, but
they will not open. At the Lyric, Hammersmith, no play or piece has been
given which the Directors (Nigel Playfair, Alistair Tayler, and myself)
did not unanimously believe to have considerable artistic merit. There
is no exception to this. West End managers are fond of referring to the
Lyric Board as amateurs. Nevertheless the Lyric Board, in face of some
unique difficulties, has successfully remained in management for over
seven years, and the Lyric Theatre has made handsome profits, on the
policy of trusting the intelligence of the public.

The public has even taught lessons in faith to the Lyric Board. At the
rehearsals of _The Way of the World_, for instance, I said that the
production was marvellous, but that it was bound to fail. I knew in my
bones that it would fail. It succeeded handsomely, and played to record
houses. Again, when it was decided to ask Bernard Fagan to produce _The
Cherry Orchard_ at the Lyric, I said from the beginning that it could
not possibly succeed. And I was agreed with, though we were determined
whatever happened to present the finest play of modern times. I could
not learn from experience. For a week after the production we were
convinced we had a failure, and we rapidly made unchangeable
arrangements for another production. Then the business leaped up and
showed a profit, and _The Cherry Orchard_--_The Cherry Orchard_, a play
utterly revolutionary, a play outraging every convention and every
imagined susceptibility, a play which no manager would have looked at a
fortnight earlier--_The Cherry Orchard_ marched off to the West End,
where it ran for a hundred and fifty performances. Whatever the fortunes
of _The Cherry Orchard_ in the West End, the mere transfer of it to a
fashionable theatre marked an epoch in the history of the London
stage.[1] It was a final proof of the evolution of public taste. In
another fifty years the average West End manager may just possibly
discern that something progressive has happened in the most conservative
of little worlds.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Since writing the above I have learned that Mr. James Agate very
enthusiastically praised _The Cherry Orchard_ in his weekly broadcast
lecture on current plays. This praise must have had a very
considerable influence in sending playgoers to see _The Cherry
Orchard_.




AUDIBILITY IN THEATRES


I witnessed an English version of von Scholz's _The Race with the
Shadow_ at the Court Theatre, given by the Stage Society. The play was
produced by Theodore Komisarjevsky, formerly Producer and Art Director
of the Moscow State and Imperial Theatre; and special importance was
attached by the Committee of the Stage Society to this fact. I sat in
row K of the stalls and there were seven rows behind me. Mr.
Komisarjevsky had evidently aimed at, among other things, realism in
speech. The characters, for no dramatic reason, would stand for
considerable periods with their backs to the audience; they would
whisper; they would murmur; they would drop syllables and whole words;
they would put their hands over their mouths. All very true to life; but
carrying realism to excess, carrying it much further than the author or
the scene-painter or the stage manager carried it. The slowness of pace
I could get accustomed to, after a few minutes, but I could not get
accustomed to not hearing. Entire speeches were lost in the air between
me and the stage, and various psychological details became
incomprehensible through the vanishing of a key-word.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first thing, on the stage, is to get oneself heard clearly by the
audience without putting a strain on the average ear. This is probably a
platitude, and yet at rehearsals of my own plays I spend half my time in
reiterating it, and once I made a star actress very cross by telling her
that it is useless to act magnificently until one is audible. In the
case of _The Race with the Shadow_ a very interesting night was about 50
per cent. ruined by Mr. Komisarjevsky's anxiety to attain realism of
speech. He seemed to me (who could not produce a play to save my life)
to have forgotten that no stage representation, and no part of it, can
properly be realistic beyond a certain degree. It is and must be one
enormous compromise with realism. Thousands of trifles have to be
sacrificed in order to achieve a broad effect of truth. The West End
stage is notorious for inaudibility, but this night was the most
outrageous illustration of inaudibility that I have ever endured, even
in the West End. I hurried to dressing-rooms and remonstrated with the
admirable chief players. They were rightly alarmed, and promised with
eagerness to reform, but in the next act they went on just as before.
What the people at the nether end of the auditorium made of the piece I
cannot imagine. But the patience of pittites is amazing; it is heroic.
For one reason or another about one-third of the accommodation in most
theatres is merely vile. Either you are asphyxiated, or you are beaten
by arctic winds, or your limbs are martyrised, or you can't hear, or you
can't see; and the implied contract between management and playgoers is
thus nightly broken.

Nevertheless, no theatre has yet been burnt down by furious playgoers.




SHAKSPERE AND THE STAGE


For a number of decades past Shakspere has had an uphill fight in his
own country--indeed ever since he went to live in Germany (where it is
understood the wraith still resides, flitting from State-aided theatre
to municipal-aided theatre)! And even before that; for in the late
seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century his plays were
continuously "improved" by persons who wrote with crowbars and besoms
rather than with pens. But he is not yet beaten.

In my own experience when Shakspere has been given a fair chance he
wins. It was not until I saw _Hamlet_ entire, under the auspices of
Forbes Robertson at the Lyceum many years ago, that I could say to
myself, "After all, _Hamlet_ is the finest play ever written!" The
emotional effect of that affair was terrific. I remember seeing a young
painter burst into tears just before the end; his wife, one of those
practical people who make England what England is, said to him, "Don't
be silly, Fred. You know it's not real." (Only it was real.) It was the
same when _Hamlet_ was done without cuts at the Old Vic a year or two
since. The thing simply overpowered everybody. It was the same when
Antoine did _King Lear_ complete (in two hours and ten minutes!) in
Paris at the beginning of this century. One left the theatre hypnotised.
And the other Sunday the first half of _A Winter's Tale_ (with an
astonishing performance by Lilian Braithwaite) held the audience in a
grip far tighter than the grip of any amount of green goddesses or
Drummonds of the bulldog breed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shakspere has been handicapped in Britain and America by three main
influences. First, the influence of producers who in defiance of history
had convinced themselves that the most dramatic dramatist that ever
lived would prove flaccid unless he was stiffened with vast masses of
grandiose scenery and costumes--which scenery and costumes merely choked
the man. Second, by producers who were determined to read all sorts of
subtleties into the robust and vigorous Shakspere who wrote for, and
delighted, a howling mob. Third, by stars. You don't want, and can't
successfully have, two stars in a single play. Shakspere is one star.

By the time a star has finished producing Shakspere, Shakspere might as
well have been thrown into the middle of the Strand and run over by
thirteen K motor-buses. Stars cut all the parts but their own; they
alter and minimise all the "business" but their own; and they most
disastrously affect the casting. Stars are, to say the least, mature
beings. As surely as a star plays, for example, Viola, so surely you
will see a perfect hag put into the part of Olivia--to save Viola's
face. And so on.

The greatest modern English star was Herbert Tree. His Shaksperean
productions were marvellous circuses; but if Shakspere had witnessed
them he would probably have exclaimed, "Who _was_ the fellow that wrote
this?" Tree's Malvolio was an impersonation of genius--the Malvolio of
all the ages. But I doubt whether Shakspere really intended Malvolio to
be the pivot of _Twelfth Night_.




THE PRODUCER AND THE PRESS


Within recent years the producer has achieved considerable prominence in
the journalism of the theatre. He is now nearly always named by name in
the programme, and he is frequently mentioned--too casually perhaps--by
dramatic critics in their notices of plays. The new state of affairs
sometimes makes old actors resentfully cross. I have heard them refer to
the happy ancient years when there were no producers, and when plays
mysteriously got themselves produced without the aid of this conceited
upstart and autocratic innovation. (I may say that I do not believe a
bit in the tale of the happy ancient years when there were no producers.
A play cannot conceivably be produced unless somebody takes charge of
it, and that somebody is the producer, and ever was and will be.)

In any case, the producer is nowadays very much on the map; and
theatrical journalism has taken note of his existence, though it
persists in putting him and his activity in inverted commas--"producer,"
"produce"--as if he and his work were still enigmatic, undefined, and
not wholly worthy of credence. Nothing surprising in this! Everybody
professionally connected with the stage knows that dramatic criticism
is, as regards 90 per cent. of it, steadily a couple of decades behind
the times--which is human and possibly forgivable.

Nevertheless, I think the moment has come to inform the 90 per cent.
that artistically the person chiefly responsible for a play--after the
author--is the producer, and that up to the hour of going to press
extremely little criticism of producing has been seen in the great
dailies and weeklies of this island. And further, that production does
not, as they seem to suppose, consist solely in arranging the scenery,
lighting, "effects," and incidental music of a play. "As regards the
'production'..." say the 90 per cent., _after_ having criticised the
acting! The producer, among his other responsibilities, is responsible
for the acting, and many criticisms directed against individual artistes
ought to be directed against the producer.

       *       *       *       *       *

Not that I object to criticism of actors and actresses. I love it. I
love anything which distracts attention from the crimes of the author.
In the happy ancient years actors and actresses were seldom adversely
criticised. Dramatic critics represented them as unfortunate beings who
by their charm and their talents saved deplorably bad plays from
complete disaster. The newer criticism has altered that, and I know of
my own knowledge that the outspokenness about acting of such critics as
St. John Ervine, James Agate, and Sidney Carroll has occasionally had an
excellent practical effect on individual performers, startled and
infuriated though these may have been.

At the same time, more often than not, it happens that what critics
rightly or wrongly criticise in individual performers has been imposed
upon the performers by the producer. When I read blame of Mr. A. because
he was too hurried, of Mr. B. because he was too slow, of Mr. C. because
his business was clumsy, of Mr. D. because he was too rugged, of Miss E.
because she simpered, of Miss F. because she was restless, of Mrs. G.
because she was too _grande dame_, and so on down to Mrs. Z. because she
was inaudible, I say to myself, "Yes, all very well! But what was the
producer up to?" Most of these faults, if faults they are, were
unquestionably due to the producer, who would probably put up a pretty
good defence of them. The last fault was of course the fault of Mrs. Z.
herself, but it was the producer's fault too, since he failed to correct
it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dramatic critics ought to take a new avenue of approach to a play. They
ought to remember, first, that the extremely important business of
casting is in the main the function of the producer; and second, that
all points of speed, style, mood, tone, and business are regulated by
the producer. They ought to look upon the entire spectacle as primarily
the artistic creation of the producer. They ought to award both far more
praise and far more blame to the producer than they in fact do. I admit
that the producer is rarely an absolute autocrat. Now and then a "star"
will defy him and he is compelled to submit. Now and then also a
comparatively humble performer, after affecting to yield throughout a
month of rehearsals, will go on the stage on the first night and do as
he chooses, and the producer is helpless. But, broadly speaking, the
producer rules. If he can't, he has mistaken his vocation.




THE PLAY-SUPPLY


One hears that there is something gravely wrong with the British stage.
If so, the dramatist ought to be blamed first and most, for the
foundation of the stage is the play. But is there anything seriously
wrong with the British stage? For my part, I am convinced that the
British stage is in a better condition to-day than it has been within
the memory of living man. I reckon that there were, at the end of a
recent London season, nine modern English plays of genuine interest to
be seen in the West End. I may as well have the courage of my opinion
and name them: _The Farmer's Wife_, _The Mask and the Face_, _The
Devil's Disciple_, _Our Betters_, _Saint Joan_, _White Cargo_, _Storm_,
_Tiger Cats_, and _To Have the Honour_. (The order is that of the
advertisements in the daily papers.) There may be more.

This is surely a very high percentage. I am quite sure that during the
same Paris season there were not nine plays of genuine interest to be
seen at once. Indeed, I think that the British stage compares very
favourably with any foreign stage. (Beyond doubt, the supreme
world-influence in the theatre is Irish.) I think that the fuss made
over George Kaiser, for instance, is ridiculous, and that Pirandello is
overpraised, and that Martinez de Sierra has a very trifling talent. And
it staggers me that the amiable and amorphous confections of Sacha
Guitry should be taken seriously. As for Eugene O'Neill--well, I respect
him just as much as I can respect any sentimentalist, but I hold George
Cohan to be a vastly superior playwright to O'Neill.

Still, the British stage ought to be better than it is. More good plays
ought to be written. Very few good plays are being written, especially
by young or unknown men. The current notion that large numbers of
promising talents are knocking in vain at the doors of managers is
wildly wrong. I know, because I have been intimately and continuously
connected with the management of a very broad-minded theatre for a
number of years. I should say that out of a thousand plays submitted to
that theatre not twenty needed prolonged consideration, and I should
doubt whether ten were in any way possible.

       *       *       *       *       *

The cry of managers is always, "I want a play; tell me where I can get
a play." I have heard that cry, painfully sincere in its agony, dozens
of times.

Yes! But managers are very naughty. Most of them always want something
that is exactly like something else. How often have Edward Knoblock and
I listened to the impassioned and silly appeal, "Give us another
_Milestones_"! And how often have I been begged, yea, with tears of
yearning, to sit down and write another _Great Adventure_!

Again, managers have such funny rules governing acceptance or rejection.
One of them insists on being a collaborator. Another won't take a play
unless he is allowed to design the scenery himself. Another won't give
hospitality to a hero older than thirty-five. Another is the guardian of
our morals. "I like the play," said this gentleman once, "but there is a
seduction in the plot. Seductions are contrary to the policy of my
theatre."

True, few interesting plays are being written, but a few _are_ being
written, and it is precisely those few that, as a rule, managers
unanimously reject. A famine exists; managers are dying of hunger. Offer
them a new loaf, and they turn away from it in fear. "No," they say,
"you mustn't ask me to eat that; it's not stale." And go on bravely
dying.

The Sunday producing societies and the excentric (not eccentric)
theatres have acquired much merit by educating West End managers in this
respect, though West End managers are excessively hard to educate. One
sees these managers spending money on preposterously footling plays
which any one not a manager would set down as not having a
thousand-to-one chance of success, while turning their backs on other
plays which, if admittedly risky, have, at any rate, the probability of
giving some artistic prestige to the producer.

       *       *       *       *       *

Take, for example, _At Mrs. Beam's_. When this brilliant play, by our
most promising younger talent, was originally produced by the Stage
Society I did all I could to boom it, and I talked about it till I was
sick. No result! Then, after a long interval, the Everyman Theatre did
it. And at last Dennis Eadie found courage. It ran. Take _Outward
Bound_. Never would the West End have seen this uneven play, with a
first act original enough to wake the dead, if artistic enthusiasts had
not produced it first. Yet in the West End it survived five flittings
from theatre to theatre.

Similarly with _The Mask and the Face_. When I went to Hampstead to see
_The Mask and the Face_ I found four West End managerial persons in the
audience--or was it five? "Hello!" I said to myself. "The West End is
sitting up." But nothing happened.

Later I met one of the managers at lunch. Had he bought _The Mask and
the Face_? No, he had not. He couldn't decide. He was afraid. I urged
him, with persuasion and taunts and invective, to buy it. But he didn't.
At length somebody else bought it. We know how the West End received it.

Let me here admit, in all seriousness, that the business of being a West
End manager is a very difficult one. It assuredly is. Let me admit that
nobody, not even a playwright, can tell with any certitude in advance
whether or not a play will succeed. Managers have to take risks. My
point is that if they would deign to educate themselves a little, and
let themselves be educated, they might, with advantage to themselves and
the stage, take risks on original plays instead of on unoriginal plays.

And as to the risks! In the first place, it is seldom their own money
that they risk, anyway. And, in the second place, they always talk as if
they alone had to take risks. The playwright takes just as much risk as
the manager. His time is his livelihood. He may lose it--often does. A
playwright may spend three months in writing a play and a month in
attending rehearsals. (I say nothing of the time spent in selling it!)
And if the play fails, he may come out with anything from 200 to zero;
but the manager is drawing a salary throughout.

Which reminds me that people say solemnly that the theatre would be
better if authors of standing outside the theatre did not turn to the
theatre merely as a means of money-making. They don't. The rewards of
the successful play are grossly exaggerated in the public mind. No
novelist of established prestige and good circulation, in search of
_money_, would leave writing novels for a time in order to write
plays--unless he was an ass. With novels there are no risks for authors
of established prestige. Some success is absolutely certain, and the
bulk of the reward comes punctually on the day of publication. Year in,
year out, there is for such authors far more money, far less
humiliation, infinitely less risk in novels than in plays. And if they
_do_ turn to the stage it is because they are driven thereto by a
powerful instinct, even to their financial disadvantage.




ACTING


Some very elementary observations have to be made about West End acting.
An actor's first business is to be clearly heard, not only in the first
row of the stalls, but also in the back row of the pit. The curse of the
West End stage is inaudibility. I have heard hundreds of complaints on
this point, and hundreds of times, even in the stalls, I have failed to
catch the spoken words. My hearing is excellent. Nearly all good actors
are perfectly audible; few bad actors are perfectly audible. A large
proportion of actors, if at rehearsals you tell them that they are not
audible, begin to shout, or, at any rate, to put a strain on their
throats. Audibility has nothing to do with shouting. They simply have
never learnt how to pitch their voices; they don't know the first thing
about voice-production. The men are just as faulty as the women.

As to the more advanced stages of elocution, their ignorance is
apparently complete. They persistently drop important syllables in words
and important words in sentences--especially the last word in sentences.
They do not know when to emphasise, when to run the tone up and when to
run it down; they cannot balance a sentence. All these matters they have
to be taught, detail by detail, at rehearsals, and much time is spent on
tuition which ought to be unnecessary and which the learners ought to be
ashamed to have to accept.

Further, grave errors of pronunciation are rife in the West End. For
example, the horrible interpolated "r" between two vowels. Thus many
actors will pass from the cradle to the grave and never say correctly,
"Soda-and-milk." They will always say, "Soda-rand-milk"! You expostulate
with them. You say to them, "Don't say 'Soda-rand-milk'; say
'Soda-and-milk.'" They look bland and then protest, "But I did say
'Soda-rand-milk.'" You give it up.

       *       *       *       *       *

Worse than this, English is often spoken on the stage with a bad accent,
usually a cockney accent. Women are the worst sinners here. Two of the
very foremost actresses in the West End to-day habitually speak with a
cockney accent; they are incapable of giving the "oo" sound as it ought
to be given. Instead of saying "boon" they say "beoon," with a trace of
the French "u" sound. They are charming women; they are modest women;
they are admirable actresses; they are heard to perfection; but they
cannot talk English. It is very odd. Nobody seems to mind.

As for all the remainder of the technique of acting, I am not an expert,
but by dint of assisting at hundreds of rehearsals I do know just a
little about it. I assert that a considerable percentage of actors know
almost nothing about it. They have to be taught, and taught afresh with
every new play for which they are cast, how to use their legs, how to
make a clean movement, how to convey a mood, how to change their
expression, how to regulate their gestures, how to "put over" the
simplest point. They are willing enough to learn, but some of them are
incapable of learning.

All this may seem harsh and perhaps too downright; yet I don't think I
have ever seen a producer at work who did not complain in terms far, far
more violent. One is told that producers "produce" too much, leaving
naught to the individual initiative of the actors. Well, as a rule, they
have no alternative but to do as they do. All that I have said is a
commonplace of the shop-talk of producers and of expert and experienced
actors. It is notorious that amateurishness abounds. Amateurishness also
flourishes. We have stars to-day, stars who can fill houses but who are
rank amateurs and the scorn of experts. The order of achievement seems
to be: Make a name first and learn to act afterwards. The public is
uncritical. A superficially attractive personality, a pretty face, a
handsome Byronic profile, is worth immensely more in the market than any
amount of genuine talent and technical accomplishment. I do not grumble;
I state.

It is proper to add that amateurishness is mainly confined to the young.
The older generation are not amateurs. They know their job. And what a
relief it is at rehearsals when an old actor steps on the stage for his
scene! Of course, the old ought indeed to know more than the young. But
I am not aware that the superiority of the old over the young is so
marked among, say, writers, painters, or executive musicians. There must
be a reason for it peculiar to the stage. Possibly I am talking like an
old man. I do not know. What I do know is that I am talking sincerely
and with as little prejudice as heaven permits.

       *       *       *       *       *

The stage is said to be overcrowded. I think it is overcrowded with
women, but not with men--and particularly not with young men of talent.
The real test of the talent-supply comes when you cast a play. For any
part women, of sorts, can generally be found who will acquit themselves
creditably--according to West End standards. But if you have an
important young male part, the puzzle is to find the male for it. I have
heard the producer exclaim, "I simply _cannot_ think of anybody who is
free." It is true to say that the supply of young men of fair gifts is
greatly inferior to the demand. And that is one reason why we frequently
see young parts played by men who are obviously too old for them. As for
the young man who can satisfactorily bear on his shoulders the main
weight of a play, I doubt if there are three examples of him in the West
End to-day.

A rather gloomy survey? No; but a realistic survey. Out of a decent
regard for the unavoidable sensitiveness of stage-artists (second only
to the sensitiveness of authors and Cabinet Ministers), realism is
seldom allowed to creep into surveys of the profession. Mine will be
misinterpreted. I regret it, but what would you? I could be equally
realistic in laudation of the marvellous, the unsurpassable acting to be
witnessed in the West End in the year of Wembley and Wimbledon. The
supply of praise, however, is fully adequate to the need.




THE PLAYGOING PUBLIC


The British stage is now supposed to be in the bad graces of the British
public, the theory being that the public has grown tired of it, or at
best indifferent to it. For myself, I should say that the British public
has been somewhat indifferent to the stage for close upon three
centuries. The stage has never recovered from the blow given to it by
that masterful ruffian Oliver Cromwell. Even to-day an organisation such
as the Church and Stage Guild is regarded as a daring business not
altogether creditable to the Church, and millions of people will not go
to the theatre unless they can persuade themselves that the piece they
are to see is "good"--that is, preaches an uplifting lesson. Our chief
playwright is a teacher before he is an amuser. At short intervals some
divine, with an ungovernable passion for godliness or for
self-advertisement, will rise up and denounce the theatre. There is
nothing surprising in this; what is surprising is that he should be
taken seriously--as he is.

Nor do I perceive any strong reason why the public, however enlightened
or benighted, should make a special hobby of the British theatre. After
all, in two hundred years it has produced only three plays that have
stood the practical test of time--_The School for Scandal_, _The
Rivals_, and _She Stoops to Conquer_.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the present day, and for many a day past, the British public is and
has been far more interested in the Turf, games, politics, crimes,
motoring, and co-operative associations for the improvement of society
than in the theatre. If you want to estimate the indifference of the
British public to the theatre, compare its attitude with that of foreign
countries, such as Germany, France, Austria, Russia, and the United
States. In New York you will find sixty regular theatres, mostly full of
a night. Yet the plays of New York are certainly no better than British
plays. Indeed, many of them _are_ British plays, performed by British
actors. And the much-deplored competition of the films and the
broadcasters is quite as severe in New York as in London. Of course, we
have here the iniquitous Entertainment Tax. But we have also here the
iniquitous tax on automobiles; yet the latter has had apparently no
effect on the popularity of motoring. Lastly, we have high theatre
rents. Yes, and we have, too, high house rents and high office rents,
neither of which have diminished the demand for houses and offices. To
match the increase in rents we see an increase in wages and in the price
of manufactured articles. The one thing that has not gone up in price is
the good theatre seat. No manager dares, appreciably, to put up the
price, and the sole reason is the indifference of the British public to
the theatre as an institution. Which indifference is historic, and not a
temporary phenomenon due to economic causes, or competition, or
summer-time, or heat, or rain, or bad plays, or anything else. The
belief that Wembley would bring boom to the stage was just as fond as
the later conviction that Wembley brought disaster to the stage.

Moreover, the indifference of the public is exaggerated in the Press and
in the public mind. Many theatres did well during the alleged summer
slump; a few did magnificent business; Shaftesbury Avenue remains on the
map; and I should imagine that more money can be and is being made in
the theatre to-day than ever before. There used to be a close season for
theatres. There is none now. The stage is not an institution to be
brought low by any kind of rival attraction, and it will assuredly be
flourishing when the films have come to be smiled at as a clumsy and
exhausting diversion for tiny tots.

The artist ought to take the public as an act of God, and public taste
as a climate. The public is never to blame. The public is perfectly
entitled to like what it likes and to dislike what it dislikes. Its
views on things cannot be altered; they can only alter themselves--and
very slowly at that. Shopkeepers don't gird at the public when the
public keeps out of their shops. They bow the head and change their
policy, and blame themselves alone. The theatrical manager is a
shopkeeper. He has something to sell; it may be distinguished or it may
be vulgar--it is merchandise; it is for sale. If he doesn't contrive to
sell it he is a failure, no matter what his ideals may be. A fine play
exists in proportion to the number of occupied seats in the auditorium.
If the auditorium is empty, the play may be a masterpiece, but it does
not exist.

       *       *       *       *       *

The greatest dramatist succeeded in pleasing the public and himself too.
He took public taste into account, and retired at an early age with a
fortune and a unique reputation. You may argue that public taste was
better in Shakspere's time than it is to-day. I agree. But if Shakspere
had lived to-day he would have done the trick equally well. Shakspere,
however, was extremely adroit, in which quality, as in most others, he
far surpassed the Shaksperes of this age. The high-brows of this age
would have called Shakspere a pot-boiling time-server. So he was, and
rightly; but he was a lot more. Anyway, he understood the grand truth
that a man's first duty is to boil the pot, not to flout the public
while living on other people who do not flout the public.

To flout the public is bad manners, and I doubt whether any good end is
served by flouting it. Flick it, give it a dig, smile politely at it, by
all means, but don't smack it in the face. Respect its prejudices just
as far as you self-respectingly can, and if you can't respect them at
all, then cease attempting to cater for the public. All publics are
difficult, callous, and ruthless. But none less so than the tepid
British public. The British public is a faithful monster and a
fundamentally decent monster. It has defects. Heavens! Its hatred of
truth and its crass sentimentalism, which more than anything else impede
the artistic progress of the British stage! But let us remember its
qualities. I am inclined to think that the taste of the monster is
improving--somewhat faster than the taste of the managers.




GAMES


I wish that people, at any rate some people, would be more honest about
the subject of games.

Consider the case of the middle-aged man who has taken to golf. Now golf
is a very great game; but it is also a game demanding much time and an
elaborate apparatus, human and mechanical. My middle-aged man is quite
likely to journey many miles in an automobile driven by a living
chauffeur with a possibly immortal soul; the whole device, with the
golfer inside and a heavy bundle of instruments called for some strange
reason clubs, is functioning that day so that he may play golf. He
arrives at the links, and engages the services of another and younger
human being whose sole purpose in life is to carry the bag of clubs on
his shoulder or arm. He plays golf. He then enters a large building
specially erected so that he may eat and drink in it and have baths in
it on the days when he plays golf. The building and its numerous staff
exist merely in order to sustain him and cleanse him in his hours of
golf. He issues forth and plays again, returns to the building for more
rites and ceremonies, and finally departs in the automobile, which with
its living chauffeur has no doubt been hanging about for several hours.

He reaches home, full of virtue and pride, and meets his middle-aged
wife, whom ten to one he has left solitary all day, and he proclaims to
her that the golf has done him no end of good, and that without it he
really does not know what his health would be like; and she replies that
she is sure that the golf has done him no end of good, and that she is
glad therefor, and that without golf she really does not know what
mightn't happen to his health. And she tells everybody that her
husband's golf is the saving of him. (No mention by either of them of
any similar scheme for the preservation of _her_ health.)

Well, it is all a vast fiction, this touching theory that he plays golf
for his health's sake, and that if his health were not trembling in the
balance he would not dream of giving so much time, trouble, and money to
golf. I do no say that golf is not good for the health. It often is; it
generally is (though it tempts middle-aged men to undue exertion, and
before now middle-aged men have been known to drop down dead on golf
courses through wrongly assuming that they were young).

But I do say that, as a scheme for maintaining health, golf is very
clumsy and very costly, and somewhat inefficient. A man could maintain
his health far more efficiently by doing certain physical exercises
under the stern guidance of an expert, in front of an open window, for
half an hour a day. And if he needed more fresh air he could simply and
modestly go out for a walk. No apparatus! No attendants! A great economy
of money and of time! And if he was genuinely interested in his health
(which as a rule he is not) he could immensely improve it by merely
refraining from doing silly things which he does in fact do six days out
of seven.

Indeed in this respect he has no more sense, nor sense of proportion,
than the smart young woman who spends two hours a day on the care of her
complexion, and much of the remainder of the time in ruining her
complexion by means of cocktails, liqueurs, the stuffiness of shops and
restaurants, and late nights. The said young woman, between the hours of
6 and 8 p.m., will put all her brains into the enterprise of maintaining
her good looks and her youthfulness, and between the hours of 8 p.m.
and 2 a.m. will do five times as much harm to her looks and youthfulness
as she did good in the previous two hours. The golfer acts similarly. If
he was the monument of sagacity he thinks he is, he would eat less,
drink less, smoke less, and keep his health good all the week instead of
damaging it on six days and trying, often too violently, to restore it
on the seventh.

Of course the golfer can give another reason for his game: it relieves
his mind, distracts it, compels it to shift away for a time from
worrying cares. Here is an excellent reason, and it touches one of the
chief justifications of any game. But even this is not the golfer's real
reason for golfing.

The real reason is that he takes pleasure in the game, and in the
companionship and surroundings of the game. It passes the time in a
pleasurable manner. The golfer likes to pit his skill and strength (such
as they are) against the skill and strength of his friends. He enjoys
the rivalry, the emulation, the struggle, the victories.

There is, in fact, no moral or remedial or therapeutic aim in the
golfer's golfing. Golf may be healthful, but even if it were not--and
in some cases it assuredly is not--the golfer would still golf;
bridge-playing cannot be esteemed physically healthful, but
bridge-players will still play bridge--because they like it. The supreme
value of a game lies in the fact that, by giving pleasure to the player,
it increases his vitality, inspires him to live more fully.

It may do other things, but these other things are rather beside the
point. Only people, especially Anglo-Saxons, are so afraid lest
joyfulness may somehow be reprehensible that they will never admit it as
a lawful and laudable end in itself. They must needs wrap it up in
insincere babble about bodily and mental health. Conversely, if a man
plays a game simply because it is "good for him," then be sure that it
is not "good" for him. If he is not pleasurably interested in it, it
lacks, for him, what should be its prime quality. There are, I know, men
to whom their doctors prescribe some medicine and some golf. And they
take the golf as they take the medicine--and hope to derive benefit
therefrom!

       *       *       *       *       *

Many busy men try, and fail, to find time for one of the great outdoor
games, and thus they play no game at all; whereas, if they had been
content with inferior games demanding less time and trouble, they might
have obtained some very agreeable and useful diversion.

Indoor games have innumerable advantages. They need little arranging in
advance. They need little apparatus. They are cheap--unless you gamble
high. They can be played at any time. Sunset stops golf. But bridge,
billiards, and ping-pong are perfectly independent of solar phenomena.
Indoor games can be taken up and dropped. They do not leave you in a
condition unfit for civilised society. There is no necessity to strip
and rub down after a game of chess or Miss Milligan. And perhaps the
supreme advantage of indoor games is that they rarely enslave the
player; though bridge, I admit, cannot claim this advantage. Bridge,
once yielded to, is a worse tyrant than whisky, and has most seriously
damaged the moral worth of millions of its victims--I say nothing of
their pockets. The man who invented bridge should be classed with the
arch-criminals of the ages. But it is a fine game.




IN SPAIN:

ENTRY INTO SPAIN


The Pyrenees and the Catholic Church are still the two defenders of
Spain against the assaults of modernity. I can speak freely of the
Pyrenees, which are under-estimated in the popular mind. Few people
realise that in addition to stretching unbroken from the Atlantic to the
Mediterranean the Pyrenees are in places over a hundred miles deep, and
perhaps never less than eighty.

Not a single railway has either surmounted or tunnelled them. The
international sleeping-cars slide furtively around between them and the
sea at either coast, and there is just room and no more. When at Irun
(the Atlantic frontier station) you have the feeling of having somehow
"got in."

Irun has a romantic sound. Stand in the vast, deserted spaces of the
midnight station and see the high houses about you, lit in their upper
storeys, and wonder if the bedrooms are as romantically primitive as the
Spanish legend. Well, they must be. The bar in the refreshment-room is
directed by a plump, dignified, and mysterious woman copied from Goya.
Notice the pointed nose and the descending nostrils. The bookstall is
directed by her twin-sister in nature.

You buy the Madrid newspapers, thirty-six hours old. And the first thing
you observe is the "Religious Diary," an important daily feature, giving
the names of the numerous saints of the day. And the second thing you
observe is a notice that the paper has been duly passed by the military
censorship. (Yes, and before you get to Madrid you meet military
hospital trains.)

Inside the large refreshment-room, all among the bottles and tumblers,
two men are playing a sort of simplified fives with a child's bouncing
ball. Ah! Basque ball-games! Pelota! Iberia! But hardly have you come to
a profound conclusion about the irrepressibility of national character
when you perceive that one of the players is an Englishman, and that he
is ruling the game. Presently the game is transferred to the platform,
and chairs are installed for cheering spectators.... It ceases. The
train, as unassumingly as a thief in the night, slips away into the high
bosom of Spain.

       *       *       *       *       *

Every one is aware that there are no castles in Spain. Nevertheless, the
first thing I saw by daylight in Spain was a castle with turreted tower
and all--at Medina del Campo, the junction for Lisbon. And the next was
a walled town with about a hundred little castles in its walls--Avila, a
city which seemed to have been flung down on the mountain-side, complete
and perfect, by some god of war, centuries ago. Thus does rumour lie.

The railway runs high among mountains for hundreds of miles, crossing
torrents and penetrating pine forests and avoiding the snowline, until
it descends into Madrid--and Madrid itself is half a mile above
sea-level! Prodigious landscapes, immeasurable distances, deep blues and
greens, the browns of raw earth, masses of tumbled granite, white-headed
sierras painted on the pale sky; savage, grim, and lovely! Scarcely a
town, scarcely a village! The rare human beings match the scene.

       *       *       *       *       *

See a group of powerful workmen on a goods wagon, each with a thick
scarf thrown picturesquely round his barbaric neck against the keen
wind. They watch the international sleeping-cars crawl slowly past
their wagon. Not a movement, not a sound--Spanish phlegm. Then a sudden
ribald roar of laughter: they have glimpsed a woman alone in her
compartment. That marks the stage of civilisation which the populace has
reached in the sheltering arms of the Church behind the Pyrenees.

At any rate, the trifling episode accorded with what one had heard and
read of Spain, and therein it was remarkable. For one was often
surprised at the variation between rumour and the fact. If I had been
sure of anything concerning Spain it was that Madrid lay in a huge,
arid, and infertile plain. But my eyes told me that the plain was
cultivated and fertile and full of wells. A tremendous expanse of
cornland. Through forty miles I saw little but farms stretching away on
both hands and in front endlessly. Enigmatic farming, but farming. A
slatternly village about every ten miles; a vile road sprawled over by
mule teams; a few mules in the hedgeless fields here and there dragging
some primitive implement to tickle the earth's skin; not a farmhouse,
and incredibly few labourers.

But in the solitudes the stuff was growing; the land was yielding
riches, and on a terrific scale. Somebody was acquiring immense wealth,
though nearly every creature seen wore tatters. The spectacle of mighty
productiveness extending unbroken to the far sierras was overwhelming.
Madrid, the restless capital of a great nation, was diminished to a
speck, to an accident, to something transient and absurd, in the midst
of all this ageless and infinite agriculture.

       *       *       *       *       *

Madrid lacks character. It is not even Oriental, as Great Spain is. Like
all the smaller capitals, it imitates Paris; it has boulevards, parks,
vistas, academies, museums (including the Prado--one of the most
dazzling in the whole world), grand hotels, rich apartment houses,
palaces. But it is without character. Its Bond Street is as negative as
a Chippendale and Adam drawing-room in the West End. It looks as if the
municipal authorities had gone to the Army and Navy Stores and said,
"Have you any principal shopping streets in stock--Continental style?"
and the A. and N.S. had replied, "Yes, we have a good line in principal
shopping streets--suitable for the Continent," and the municipal
authorities had purchased one ready made.

The famous Puerta del Sol, the radiating centre of the city, is small,
shapeless, and unimpressive; and none of the streets which come out of
it has any absolute importance. There are no large glittering cafes or
restaurants anywhere, no mighty shops, no dominating banks, no
dominating churches; the post office alone shows architectural
ambition--but it is away on a boulevard.

The narrow thoroughfares, lined with paltry shops, are jammed with
vehicles, and since every chauffeur toots his horn continuously in order
to demonstrate that he belongs to the high caste of chauffeurs, the
entire place is a nerve-racking hell of small squeaks. The narrow
pavements are almost impassable with undirected throngs of thousands
upon thousands of plain persons living simple lives, as to whom it may
be asserted that only the women--and only a trifling portion of the
women--bear the Spanish mark.

Many of the women walk well; many of them combine dignity with grace;
and some (well dressed and with refinement in their dark faces) strike a
piquant Moorish note by wearing a mantilla but no hat. The contents of
the shop windows are unattractive and comparatively expensive, and
arranged without taste. Half of them seem to come from England and the
other half from Germany. The shop windows are indeed a proof that Great
Spain is an agricultural country, and not an industrial one.

       *       *       *       *       *

One building in the centre of the city stands out--the Palacio del
Congreso, the Spanish House of Commons. It is closed, by command of the
military dictatorship, and the singular lamps suspended on its windows
are never lighted. Deputies and former deputies are forbidden to enter
on any pretence; but the stranger can illegally invade it at the cost of
a small bribe, and see the pictures illustrating some of the intense
excitements of modern Spanish history, and the too numerous memorials to
deputies who have met death in the making of that history. The bribe is
symptomatic of the colossal corruption which ruined Russia and is
strangling Spain. And a few patriotic and ardently religious Generals
are naively trying to cure it by suppressing liberty! We passed a huge
barracks. My companion said:

"There is the Government of Spain!"

And there surely it was! But the jostling little people in the little
streets go on naturally living in the persuasion that there is no city
like Madrid. And pristine agriculture with laborious dignity proceeds on
the measureless uplands, ignoring both fussy town-dwellers and earnest,
right-thinking dictators.


HOLY WEEK

Imagine a platform or dray about seven by fourteen feet, supported on
four thick legs about four feet high. Imagine from twenty-five to forty
men crouching in rows beneath this platform and deprived of air and
light by black draperies which hang round the dray. Friends pass
cigarettes and water to these galley-slaves. A sharp rat-a-tat is heard
on the wood of the platform.

A pause. Then a single imperious knock: and the whole dray rises a foot
from the ground. It is being borne on the bent shoulders and heads of
the prisoners. You can see their feet moving in very short steps under
the heavy load. They stagger forward for a hundred yards, two hundred
yards, and then drop the platform. More cigarettes and water. They start
again. And so on.

This is the human foundation of the great processions of the
ecclesiastical lay brotherhoods which are the chief feature of Holy Week
in Seville. For the drays are gilt or silvered or ornamented in solid
silver: they have pillars and canopies and scores of candles, and in the
midst are life-size images of the Virgin, Jesus, or tableaux with as
many as ten figures of scenes in the life of Jesus.

The Virgins are clad and jewelled with dazzling splendour, and the other
images scarcely less so. The cost of everything is advertised, and we
learn that the value of the contents of one dray alone--"The Crowning
with Thorns"--falls just short of a million pesetas (over 30,000).
There are twenty-five brotherhoods, and some of them have more than one
dray. Night after night the men-borne drays of illumined images are
processionally displayed to the public in ever-increasing glory and
profusion. On Holy Thursday the show begins at 6 p.m., and it ends about
6 a.m. on Good Friday.

You have a "box" in one of the grand brocaded stands in Constitution
Square, with the ornate faade of the town hall behind you. The mayor's
box is a mass of red velvet. The mayor wears an ordinary silk hat. All
the windows of all the pale houses are full of sightseers. Half the
width of the street is set with chairs for sightseers, leaving a lane
for the procession. Behind the chairs are packed thousands of
sightseers.

Electric sky-signs are flickering. Everywhere are advertisements of
lamps, lubricating oils, _apritifs_, Ford cars. Hawkers wander about
shouting the virtues of pea-nuts under the dark blue sky. The procession
approaches: black or white or violet-clad men hooded in high conical
hoods like candle-extinguishers, with two holes for eyesight; each man
carrying an enormous flickering candle. Then a band, either on foot or
on horseback--an ordinary band, a band of drums or a band of buglers.
The performance of the mounted buglers excites applause by its
brilliance. A member of the crowd bursts into exotic, ecstatic song.
Incense is soaring into the air.

Then in the distance a radiance, and round the corner comes a gilded
glittering dray. A Virgin shakes solitary behind a hundred tall
candles. Her mantle stretches right from her shoulders over the back of
the dray to the ground, and is worth 30,000 pesetas. The real jewels on
her hands are worth another 20,000 pesetas. As the dray gets nearer all
the spectators rise and the men uncover, and as it moves away all the
spectators sit and the men cover, so that for dray after dray there is a
continuous, very slow, wave-like movement of the crowd.

The dray sinks and stops. The slaves beneath it are drinking and smoking
and taking breath. A sharp knock, and the dray rises and tremblingly
advances. More men in high conical hoods, carrying candles! More bands!
Occasionally a parochial symbol, lifted high! More drays! More
candle-carriers! More bands! The several processions have started from
their several parish churches. Their destination is the cathedral, from
which they will pass back again to their churches.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now you are in the Cathedral, incomparably the greatest monument in the
city: immense, arched as high as heaven, chaste--for the carved and
painted high altar is curtained in sign that Christ is not yet risen.
You sit behind the formidable iron railings of a chapel, opposite the
choir and the orchestra: the vast organ may not be used, but operatic
singers and instrumentalists may bring to Seville the prestige of the
royal opera from Madrid! And the price of your wicker chairs is the
price of stalls at that opera.

Thousands, tens of thousands of people in the Cathedral, and thousands
more entering! It is said fifty thousand, but perhaps twenty. The
brotherhood processions of extinguished men and drays come everlastingly
in, beneath the electric lights as remote as stars in the summits of the
groined arches. Jesus after Jesus, Mary after Mary, pass trembling and
shaking on their drays and amid their innumerable candles across the
front of the sheeted high altar, and are parked away in the distances of
the fane. And these images, ill-designed but gloriously clothed, have
the air of being wearier and more shaken even than the hidden sweating
creatures who bear them along: yet they have many bored miles to travel
before Good Friday dawn will break on the yawning streets and spectators
of Seville.

Singing is heard here and there; babies crying; the hum of chatter. The
clock strikes eleven, and on the very instant the clerical conductor
raises his hand, the _Miserere_ of Enslava (the local composer) begins,
and the admirable tenor voice of the darling of Madrid easily fills and
dominates the echoing spaces. Trivial, old-fashioned music, reducing the
terrible words of the _Miserere_ to almost naught! The trained boys make
a distressing exhibition; the men are a little better, the orchestra is
a little better still; but only the tenor is worthy of the night.

       *       *       *       *       *

Chatter increases, and the few devout try vainly with hisses to suppress
it. Babies cry again. Crowds have not ceased to surge inwards. The press
is terrific. Nevertheless way is made through it for a procession of
distinguished men and of crosses, and for another procession of medalled
military officers. The crush becomes dangerous, and you are glad that
railings two inches thick separate you from it.

Panic hovers near, and death not much farther off. The _Miserere_ goes
steadily on. The noise of the alarmed victims of the crush grows
peculiar. Human beings are on the very verge of being transferred into
raging beasts. A trifle may decide the issue. But the calmness and the
courtesy which apparently distinguish all the citizens of this city
prevail at last. Panic slowly retreats.... The clock strikes twelve, and
in the same instant the _Miserere_ closes.

       *       *       *       *       *

You are out in the thoroughfares, which are beginning to have the aspect
of a _kermess_, in merciless anticipation of the passage of more
Christs, more Marys, more Josephs, more Pontius Pilates, more Roman
soldiers--images suffocating among their inexhaustible and gigantic
candles. You might suppose that the populace would be sick of the
eternal iteration. Not at all. The effect of the processions seems to
grow on these Spaniards, who care neither for the past nor for the
future, and who love chiefly cigarettes, women, and slothful monotony.

So it all continues until Easter morning, when in a final crisis of
ceremonial the rending of the curtain before the high altar and the din
of all the bells in the city announce that Christ is risen and that the
tortured images of wandering Jews are at liberty to rest for a year.


TOLEDO

Toledo is one of the most romantic names in Europe, and one of the
oldest. It was a tremendous city under the Moors, and nearly a thousand
years have passed since the Christians took it from the Moors and put a
new face on it, and nearly five hundred years have passed since the
Moorish language was finally stamped out. During the epoch when Roman
Catholicism ruled the civilisation of Europe and Spain ruled Roman
Catholicism, the headquarters of Spanish Roman Catholicism were at
Toledo, whose archbishops had a habit of being the most powerful persons
of their times. Even the insular and rebellious English are familiar
with the influence and the doings of the great Toledan archbishops, such
as Ximenes, Mendoza, and Rodrigos.

They did what they liked. They took everything to themselves. They
altered the city to suit themselves. They had enormous revenues. They
organised their own armies and Inquisition, and they organised art and
artists, and when they desired to build monasteries and colleges they
pulled down other people's houses and just built them. It was the
golden age of the true faith. But unhappily the prelates went too far.
That arrogant sovereign Philip II. tolerated their clerical swagger
until he could tolerate it no more, whereupon he moved his court to
Madrid.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then Toledo went into a consumption. Its population was 200,000; it is
now 20,000, while Madrid is over half a million. Nevertheless, Toledo in
a way still governs Spain, for Spain is governed by a military
dictatorship, and the dictators are all unimpeachably good Catholics and
subject to their confessors, and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo is
still the Primate of all Spain--the head of its religious politics.

Such was the city that I went forth in an American motor-car to witness.
The mere map of Toledo is intensely romantic. You see on it the River
Tagus (on its journey to Lisbon and the Atlantic) winding deeply almost
right around the city. And the city is on a mountain, and there are
mountains all about, save on the north, where lies the vast Castilian
upland. On every side except one the most influential hill in Christian
Europe slopes impassably down into the Tagus; and the summit of the hill
is dominated by two enormous buildings--the Cathedral and the Alcazar.
The spectacle is so wonderful, so ideally like what your imagination
says it ought to be, that you can scarcely believe it. However, it is
real enough.

Only the disturbing thing is the smallness of the scale. I estimated
that the total area of the city does not exceed half a square mile. In
this absurdly trifling space, not merely was the manufacture of steel
brought to its last perfection, not only did the Inquisition flourish in
its deadliest blossom, but the civilised world was browbeaten and
moulded for centuries.

       *       *       *       *       *

The celebrated Zocodover, nearest approach to a market square in the
city, is a miserable triangle smaller than The World's End, Chelsea. All
the streets curve and rise and fall continuously, according to the
irregular formation of the hilltop, and all of them, without exception,
are narrow.

The principal shopping street cannot hold two vehicles abreast; hence
its two ends are made to communicate by two electric bells and two
policemen. The entry of a vehicle at one end is signalled at once to the
other. Mule teams often comprise six mules, and if six mules and a Ford
car were to meet in the centre of the street they would certainly perish
there together.

Many streets will hold nothing wider than a mule. Many can only be
climbed by mules and natives. All the architecture is picturesque and
much of it is beautiful. All is as it was. And you may even meet a
traditional lovely _seorita_ in charge of a traditional ugly duenna,
and the _seorita_ will traditionally turn to glance at you for the
hundredth of a second as she enters the abode which is her prison.

Lovely _seoritas_, however, do not abound. Black-robed, imperfectly
shaved priests do. Toledo is the city of priests--and of youthful
seminarists. You will not walk a hundred yards without meeting the black
robe--mysterious, sinister emblem of the mighty, tenacious, ruthless,
unscrupulous--yes, and admirable power which has shaped so much history,
and shaped some of it well. The omnipresence of priests and their pupils
incommodes and menaces the mind. All the important buildings (save one)
are either churches or the creations of the Church. Nothing else counts
in Toledo.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the greatest edifice of all is the Cathedral--nearly four hundred
feet over all, and so big and so hemmed in that its bigness cannot be
appreciated at a distance of less than a couple of miles. I was
examining the carvings in the vast twilit choir when whole cohorts of
surpliced men and boys invaded it, some of them running, and set up an
unaccompanied chant so barbaric in tone and yet so complex in musical
structure that I fled afraid. Priests among them, and unnumbered priests
and acolytes and sombre officials everywhere! They seemed to move to and
fro in droves in the eternal dusk of the fane. They were chiefly fat. I
had the idea, doubtless an illusion, that seven services were proceeding
simultaneously.

Nothing lacked (except the congregation) to the splendour of the
incredible organism. Railings of solid silver, statuary worth millions
of pesetas, paintings worth millions of pesetas, every dome peopled with
climbing carved saints, and gorgeously frescoed with others in undimmed
tints. The place took more than two hundred and fifty years to build and
twice that time to embellish; and its improvement is still going on.

The climax of the visitor's sensations occurs in the Treasury, where
incalculable riches are watched over and praised by various grades of
priesthood, who obviously revel in the wealth which is both theirs and
not theirs. There must be a ton and a half of pure gold in that room
blazing with electric light. Rubies, sapphires, emeralds as large as
shillings. Eighteen thousand genuine pearls on the mantle of a single
Madonna! And so on. Never were the principles of the author of the
Sermon on the Mount more grandiosely practised by His avowed disciples!

       *       *       *       *       *

I said that all the important buildings in Toledo save one were churches
or of the Church. The exception is the Alcazar. The Alcazar challenges
the Cathedral itself. It is now a military training-school. I saw
hundreds of the cadets returning to their Alma Mater for lunch. They
were very young and very proud and very smart--far smarter than the
soldiers who come home periodically from Morocco on stretchers in
hospital trains.

Their uniforms had cost a lot of money, and were scarcely dusty after
the morning lesson in the arts of war beyond the boundaries of the
city. Set these embryo soldiers, who were little boys in the
long-forgotten Great War, side by side with the seminarists in the
narrow streets of Toledo, and you have a conspectus of the ideals of the
impassioned men who are for the moment in charge of Great Spain.


THE SPANIARD

In a city like Seville you can walk through scores of narrow streets of
apparently mean houses, and see through locked grilles of lace-like
forged iron picturesque marble-paved court-yards where family life is
carried on during much of the year. You would like to participate in it,
to understand it, but the grille prevents you; and the grille is the
symbol of another less material grille which divides you from the
mentality of the semi-Occidental and semi-Oriental native. Spain is a
riddle, but every country is a riddle: every country is a congeries of
contradictions; and every country is picturesque. In my opinion the
slums of Liverpool and New York Broadway are just as picturesque as a
street in Seville--if you know how to look at them! "Picturesque"
generally means merely the unusual. The court-yards or patios of
Seville are not proofs of taste in the inhabitants. If they abound in
marble it is because marble happens to be plentiful; as for their
furnishing, it is as vulgar and tasteless as the furnishing of the
majority of the churches.

But the riddle! The riddle is that Spain is a country full of potential
riches--which riches are not exploited. The whole country is admittedly
"backward," and it is backward not only in the hard Anglo-Saxon sense,
but in every sense. You cannot attribute this state of affairs to the
climate, because there are quite seven climates in Spain. Also, with the
same climates, Spain was more efficient and productive under the Romans
and under the Moors than it has been since.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the Spaniard has virtues. History shows that he is treacherous and
cruel; but all history overflows with treachery and cruelty, and Spanish
history certainly does not show that the Spaniard is more treacherous
and cruel than the Frenchman or the Italian. Moreover, treachery and
cruelty have never been a bar to efficiency. The Spaniard is proud, he
lives miles above snobbery; but neither has pride ever been a bar to
efficiency. The Spaniard is conspicuously courteous, and courtesy is the
lubricating oil of efficiency. The Spaniard is tenacious and brave. If
Cortes had been an Englishman, his astounding, almost unique, feat of
conquering the mighty Aztec Empire with a few hundred men, despite the
secret opposition and greed of the home authorities, would have blazed a
hundred times more brightly in the panorama of the ages than it in fact
does. We talk disdainfully of the Spanish Armada; but I doubt if any
English national hero was the equal of Cortes in the qualities which we
admire.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Spaniard is superstitious; but is he more superstitious, or more
under the sway of priestcraft, than were the English in the highly
prosperous nineteenth century? That he is religious I doubt. I saw
extremely few signs of devotion during Holy Week in Seville; and none at
all in the Cathedral, where officials had to compel with threats an
unwilling populace to kneel at the passage of a holy relic. It is said
that the Spaniard is idle. I don't know, but I think of the thousands of
Englishmen, who, working at most five days a week, spend on their
working days two hours over lunch, and inveigh against the British--not
the Spanish--plumber.

Lastly, it is said that the Spaniard cannot organise. A ridiculous
statement! For the Roman Catholic Church in Spain, run by Spaniards, is
a marvellous example of thorough and masterly organisation. The Spanish
Church has displayed such psychological expertness in the exploitation
of human nature that even to-day a Spanish widow will pay for half a
page in a newspaper to inform the world about the prospects of the soul
of her departed husband. This is a triumph. I have heard hard things
said of the Spanish Church. As, for example, that for showmanship it has
the late P.T. Barnum and the present Charles B. Cochran beaten. Well, it
has. But are there not Episcopalians and others in New York and Boston
who can match it? The influence of the Church in Spain, as elsewhere, is
and must be in most respects reactionary and in favour of ignorance as
against knowledge. But that, on the other hand, it must in certain ways
exercise a good and a civilising influence could surely not be denied by
the judicious.

       *       *       *       *       *

We come to the Government. The Government of Spain is bad; it is
thoroughly bad, and has been for centuries. And it is particularly bad
at the present time, because it has reverted to autocracy and
militarism, which two ideals are engaged, with the alleged help of the
Church, in a comic sham-fight against a third ideal--corrupt
bureaucracy. There is not the slightest chance of the last being
defeated. But in the meantime Spain is under martial law. Try to book a
good box for the greatest bull-fight of the year four days before it
takes place, and you can't. The military have the first choice of the
good boxes till then! Try to cable an account of a murderous crime in a
railway train to a London daily. The military stop the cable, for the
sake of the fair fame of Spain! See the blank spaces in the newspapers,
from which the military have cut out unpleasant news about the Moroccan
war! Talk about the dictatorship in an ordinary voice in a public place,
and your listener will suggest that you whisper. And so on.

Now the public which in 1924 will stand this kind of thing merits this
kind of thing. The proverb that a nation gets the government it
deserves was never truer than to-day. In Spain there is a nation, but,
in the English sense of the word, is there a public? See the best clubs
in Seville. (And you can see them easily; you can't help seeing them,
for they proudly exhibit their contents to the world, and a proportion
of the members even sit out on the pavement in special arm-chairs.) The
members are obviously well-to-do and of importance in the city. Are any
of them reading any of the four or five Sevillian dailies? Scarcely one.
They chat, but about what? I do not know. But if they dislike the
Governments under which they live, why do they not cut at the roots of
the Governmental inefficiency, which are bribery, nepotism, and general
corruption?

       *       *       *       *       *

They do nothing, or if they do anything they do it in the wrong way,
because the Spaniard is without political sense. The average Spaniard is
simple enough to believe that he can gain more advantage by ministering
for his own ends to official corruption than by refusing to minister to
it. If there were no corrupters there would be no corrupted, and the
Government would become clean, and therefore relatively efficient.
Naturally, the Church might give its weight to a campaign of cleansing;
but the Church is and will be always in favour of the _status quo_.
When, if ever, any genuine reform is accomplished in Spain it will be
accomplished in defiance of the Church, for the reason that the Church
is bound up with existing authority. Perhaps the origin of the existing
mess lies deeper than anything I have suggested. Perhaps it lies in the
fact that the average Spaniard has few and simple wants, and so long as
these are satisfied he will keep quiet. He may have vague desires for
other matters, but such desires in him are too weak and too transitory
to be effective.


THE BULL-FIGHT

The great bull-fight of the year: Seville, Easter Sunday, 5 p.m. I had
never seen a bull-fight, and I attended this one with a mind as open as
many years of conscientiously objective fiction can make a mind.

The bull-ring is a huge and magnificent specimen of eighteenth-century
architecture, with a beautifully tiled and ornamented border of roof,
and awnings lashed to iron girders rising above the roof; also the
Giralda Tower rising above the roof in the distance. The vast ring
itself is smoothly covered with tawny sand. Fourteen thousand spectators
in ascending tiers surround the ring ("house full"), and the best seats
are near the top. The whole of the ring and more than half of the
spectators are exposed to the blazing sunshine, and the flutter of fans
sounds like a flight of countless birds.

       *       *       *       *       *

Despite the sun's extravagant brilliance the scene is not gay. There are
very few women--perhaps not 5 per cent. of the audience. Few of the
women wear mantillas, and fewer still white mantillas (those who do are
chiefly Anglo-Saxon); and exceedingly few shawls are hung over the rails
of the boxes. The spectacle is in itself as sombre as that of a Cup
final and not a quarter as big (but it is more impressive even than the
Stadium).

No time is lost, for at bull-fights the Spaniard has a great notion of
time. At 4.55 the band plays--it is a band worthy of a travelling
circus. At 5 o'clock the pig-tailed procession of toreadors (general
term for all the fighters) marches in--the espadas or matadors (the
killers) in gold vests with broad gold stripe on pants, the picadors
(on horseback with lances), and the banderilleros (dart implanters). The
ceremonial obeisances to the president are over in a moment, and the
next moment the bull rushes bewildered into the ring. The bull is a
superb animal, with every sign of power; he should be five years of age
and should weigh over half a ton.

The scene now coincides with one's prevision of it. The splendour of the
costumes, the dazzle of the sunshine, the terrible grace of the bull,
the cries of the crowd, and the beating of one's heart! But the famous
cloaks are not red; they are a sort of magenta or deep pink. The
toreadors trail these cloaks in front of the bull, whose attentions are
sadly divided. Then a bugle screams and the picadors take a turn. The
turn of the picador consists in simply offering his horse broadside on
to the bull's attack. The bull astonishingly lifts horse and man into
the air. The picador may jump off or he may fall off; sometimes he
rebounds like a ship in a collision, and there is a dreadful mix-up of
bull, horse, rider, and confusing pink cloaks. At 5.4 a horse is killed.
At 5.8 another horse is killed. Then the banderilleros begin. They hold
darts with two-foot coloured handles in either hand, and flaunt them at
the bull, who springs angrily forward; the man swerves, and lo! two
darts are sticking into the bull's back, then two more, and two more.
The bull wears these darts till the end. Then the matador begins. The
matador has a red (not pink) cloth, with one side of it threaded on to a
stick, and a long, narrow sword. He "plays" the bull with the cloth, and
then you see him take aim with the sword just as if the sword were a
gun. He must plunge in the sword at a given spot and in a given
direction, and either the bull falls dead or the matador falls dead.
This is your idea, but it is not borne out by the facts. The matador
aims badly, he misses--more than once: the sword may stick or it may fly
out. There is no death. Another sword is produced, and another. The
thrill is lost. You feel that you are being cheated. At last the matador
aims well, and the dazed and exhausted bull does fall dead. 5.18. At
five he had been a live bull and one of God's creatures. Caparisoned
mules, three abreast, rush in at a gallop and drag out at a gallop first
the dead bull and then the dead horses. At 5.21 the second bull is in
the ring.

At 7.15 the whole of the arena is in shadow. Somewhere out of sight lie
the carcasses of eight bulls and twenty horses. A horse every seven
minutes; a bull every seventeen minutes! The festival is done.

       *       *       *       *       *

What are one's impressions? The first is monotony, even boredom. I would
not go out of my way to see another bull-fight. The second is the
stupidity of the bull. If the bull had the sense to attack the man and
not the cloak, and to stick to one target, he would empty the ring in
five minutes, and revolvers would have to be used to finish him. The
bull may be superb, but he is an ass. The third impression is the
clumsiness of most of the swordsmanship. The fourth is the beauty,
skill, and danger of some of the cloak play at close quarters. That real
danger exists is proved by the fact that four matadors were killed last
year. Most of the cloak play, however, is not dangerous. Indeed, on this
very afternoon a spectator (not young) in grey clothes with a bit of
grey cloth jumped into the arena and played the first bull with success
until the police got him. He was taken to prison.

       *       *       *       *       *

The cruelty? Well, I have not described the blood--and other things. Nor
shall I do so. I had absolutely no feeling of physical nausea; but then
I was probably three hundred feet away from the nearest sanguinary
events, whereas if I described them you would be reading about them at a
distance of one foot. The chief contested point of cruelty relates to
the horses. The horses have no chance. They are deliberately offered to
the bull's horns. They are very old and bound soon to be slaughtered;
they appear to be doped; they do not appear to suffer, though the most
astonishing things happen to them; most of those who die, die in a
moment. Why horses at all? The official answer is that the tossing of
them fatigues the bull. It may be so; but I should say that, in addition
to the horses being offered to the bull, the spectacle of the murder of
the horses is offered to the crowd. The show in its entirety, while in
some aspects beautiful and affording opportunities for high courage and
very fine skill, is disgusting, brutalising, and in large part tedious.
I fully admit that it must be less tedious to experts, but often the
crowd on Easter Sunday was obviously bored.

I share the Spanish view that "sporting" Englishmen have no right to
protest against the cruelty of bull-fights. Horses, and finer horses and
far more sensitive horses, suffer more, both morally and physically, at
a Grand National than at a bull-fight. See the fallen with broken limbs,
waiting--how long?--for death. Consider the little fox pursued by a mob
of dogs, horses, and men. The fox has a "chance"? Hypocritical nonsense!
The conditions are arrayed against the fox, without the approval of the
fox, who objects strongly to the whole business. At least there is
danger in facing a bull. There is none (save from your own clumsiness or
your horse's) in running after a fox. And consider the case of the
sportsman who, after a happy day spent in killing fifty brace of
defenceless birds, specially bred for slaughter, comes home and
announces that a bull-fight is cruel. The attitude would be odious were
it not comic.




THE GREATEST MOMENT


Of course there are sensational moments in life particulars of which
only a very communicative man will communicate to the world. Apart from
such moments, I cannot recall that either before the war or after the
war I experienced any thrills worth mentioning. But during the war a few
thrills came my way.

As representative of the War Office, I had charge of the civil
organisation for moving the entire population in case of need out of a
certain area where the War Office believed the Germans would land--if
they did land. I was talking to a considerable officer one night when he
said to me gloomily:

"Why don't our aeroplanes destroy Essen? I will tell you. Because
Asquith has shares in Krupps, and won't allow it."

It thrilled me to think how easily we should win the war under the
direction of such masterminds as this one.

I had another and a different thrill when I was summoned by a Cabinet
minister to a meeting of distinguished authors who were to help in
putting Britain's case persuasively before the whole world--and
especially America. I there learnt that very distinguished authors had
been patriotically sending gratis articles to America and having them
refused by very distinguished American editors. I thought that this
difficulty might be overcome. I wrote an article stating the British
case, and said:

"The price of this stuff is 300."

It was at once bought and printed. I wrote more and lengthier stuff,
about our armies, and said:

"The price of this stuff is 1800."

It was at once bought and printed. The editors were pleased. The British
Government was pleased. And so was I. A great moment for the last-named!

       *       *       *       *       *

In the last year of the war I was summoned to the Ministry of
Information and asked to sit in it and take charge of all British
propaganda for France. The Minister told me that I understood the
psychology of the French. I did not deny it. He also said:

"Whatever you do, I will back you."

He did.

I had always had a passion for organisation. I now gratified the
passion. Next to running a great hotel, this business seemed to me to be
the most sensational that any human being could indulge in. I could
contradict and withstand ambassadors, and did.

But soon afterwards I had a fright, the most terrible of my life. I was
told:

"The Minister is very ill, and will resign. No new Minister is to be
appointed at present, but you will be put in charge of the Ministry,
with supreme responsibility."

Imagine a wayward novelist, with no experience of bureaucratic methods,
having dominion over hundreds of exalted persons, including Bank
directors, railway directors, historians, K.C.'s, heads of trusts,
poets, and generals! You cannot. At least I could not. I told a Minister
that I could not sleep for responsibility. He said:

"You will get used to it."

The strange thing is that I did.

Great and awful days! What tales I could tell of rival Ministries
fighting one another quite as tenaciously as the Allied armies fought
the German armies--and with far more bitterness. A friend of mine in the
War Office told me that an order had been issued forbidding any member
of his section, under any pretext whatever, to enter my Ministry.

Still, when I visited the War Office, even the mightiest swells had to
see me. Which was something.

I had a few Generals of my own. I remember the first time I rang the
bell and said to one of my secretaries:

"Ask General X if he will be good enough to come and see me at once."

And General X came and was received in audience. A great moment for a
novelist! But if you think that it was the greatest of all, you are
mistaken. My Generals, I ought to say, were charming and unbureaucratic
men, and I had no sort of grievance against them. Nevertheless they were
generals, and in summoning them I felt that I was doing something to
redress the balance on behalf of all privates, and all officers from
Colonels downwards, in all the British armies.

       *       *       *       *       *

The greatest moment of all, the moment when I knew that my life had
touched its climax, was in November 1918, when my principal secretary
came into my room and said:

"Fellows at the War Office are continually ringing me up to know whether
the Armistice has been signed."

"Don't tell them," said I. (Not that we knew.)

Such was the co-ordination of Ministries in the war that I got my first
news of the Armistice from a newsboy in Regent Street at 10.45 a.m. on
11th November. Everybody knew at eleven o'clock. I returned to my
Ministry, the staff of which was highly excited and even hysterical,
particularly the women. I affected nonchalance, and urged the women to
remain calm. But perhaps this moment was the supremely great one for me,
after all. I was free.




SPENDING AN INCOME


Despite the advancing strides of science, a few mysteries remain in this
our earthly life. One of the most remarkable of them lies in the
different results obtained by possessors of the same or similar incomes.
The dustman has the spending of as large an income as the decent clerk
whose refuse he carries away of a morning. Yet the clerk lives in better
surroundings, is dressed better both when at work and when not at work,
brings up his children better, has better furniture and more comfort,
than the dustman.

And the dustman provides by no means an outstanding example of the
curious relative discrepancy between income and the fruits thereof in
well-being. There are a very large number of artisans who handle from
three to five hundred a year. There are some who make a thousand a
year--and spend all of it, or at any rate nearly all of it. A thousand a
year is a good salary for a middle-aged Civil servant, with thirty
years' service behind him. It is a very good salary for the managing
clerk of a big firm of solicitors, who works long hours and has endless
responsibility. It is an astonishing salary for a branch bank manager.

Yet compare the conditions of the family of the star-artisan with those
of the families of the Civil servant, the lawyer, the banker. The latter
send their children to schools of recognised standing, they are well
dressed and their women are well dressed; they keep a servant or
servants; they sit in reserved seats in theatres; they go for a regular
holiday; they belong to clubs; they even buy or hire books. Their
success in the art of daily living is out of sight, immeasurably,
superior to the artisan's. How do they achieve it? How does the artisan
not achieve it? It is the second of these two questions which at the
moment is the most interesting.

Before examining it I must make quite clear that I am not assuming the
artisan class to be wallowing in money and to have the freedom to live
where it likes and how it likes. There is a large amount of real
impecuniosity in the artisan class, and often the restrictions upon its
freedom of action (in the matter of residence, for instance) are very
severe. All I say is that class for class, and speaking broadly, the
artisan class has not been so hard hit as the middle class (especially
the lower stratum of the middle class), and that despite this the middle
class gets better relative results in decency, dignity, and comfort of
material living than the artisan class.

       *       *       *       *       *

In my opinion the British, as a race, have a tendency towards
extravagance and waste which is not usually seen in continental peoples.
The British understand how to make money, but they do not understand
personal and family expenditure. In other words, compared with
continental peoples, they do not properly know how to live. This, to my
mind, is particularly true of the artisan class. Its truth is well shown
whenever the average artisan gets hold of a bit more money than he has
been accustomed to. In the years preceding the great general slump of
1920 it was shown again and again in the extraordinary demand by certain
prosperous sections of the class for ridiculous and perfectly futile
luxuries; and the classic excesses of the miners in the 'seventies,
which I witnessed as a child living in a draper's shop in a colliery
district, were repeated and perhaps surpassed. (I can distinctly recall
a miner coming into the said shop and demanding the most expensive
cloth obtainable to make a coat for his whippet--and my grandfather
angrily refusing to sell it to him!)

The successful artisan too seldom distributes his expenditure with
commonsense, for the reason that he does not appreciate what is really
important and what is not. And further, if an increase of income happens
to him, he does not, as a rule, either save or alter the general curve
of his expenditure. Great blobs or excrescences appear on the curve--in
the shape sometimes of pianos or gross food and drink or gambling--and
the symmetry of the various spending departments of daily existence,
always very imperfect, becomes more imperfect than ever.

This lack of due proportion is of course noticeable in the expenditure
of some members of other classes. An extreme example of it may be seen
in the budget of a rising young actress who has attained the second or
third rank, who lives by herself, and whose total income reaches a
thousand a year. Her home establishment is of the simplest and
modestest, and compares very ill with the home of a fairly prosperous
professional family whose total income is not greater than her own. She
lives little at home, but a great deal in public resorts. She possesses
practically nothing beyond her clothes, a few jewels, and handbags to
match each of her frocks. When she comes into a restaurant she looks
opulent, she carelessly flings down rich objects on to the table, and
you might be excused for thinking her immensely wealthy; but the fact is
that nearly all her possessions are now being displayed. It is a part of
her professional business to be always on show and to make a fine
appearance. Hence there is a valid excuse for the lopsidedness of her
budget, as for many other strange budgets.

But in the family budget of the artisan there can be no excuse for
lopsidedness. The last thing he desires is to cut a figure or to be
abnormal in any way.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have referred to the superiority of the continental artisan in the art
of living. The French peasant farmer is generally cited in Britain as a
model of economical living. But the French of that and similar classes
carry economy to the point of exaggeration. They work too hard and they
pinch too much, with the result that though they live well so far as
they try to live, they do not try to live enough. They are martyrs to
work and to saving, and have developed ferocious instincts of avarice. I
would prefer the example of Austrian or German artisans.

The Englishman is improvident, but my charge against him would be that
in spending he does not get a good return, in health and comfort, for
his money. To begin with, he does not understand food values, nor take
care that his women shall understand food values. It is not merely that
his cookery (though now a little improving) counts among the most
unappetising and execrable in the civilised world; it is that his diet
is restricted, costly, and wasteful. There are plenty of inexpensive
foods that he refuses to touch, simply because he never has touched
them. Ask him to try a salad, and see the face he pulls. His beverages
are on the plane of his food.

Again, he does not understand beds, in which he passes half his life,
nor boots, in which he passes the other half. The French do understand
beds, and take a lot of trouble over them. The average English bed seems
like a survival of the tortures of the Inquisition.

As for furniture in general, the amount of money wasted by the working
classes in gimcrack and inconvenient sideboards, wardrobes, tables, and
uneasy-chairs must be equal to about sixpence of our pleasant
income-tax.

As for clothes, and the moral and physical advantages of becoming and
hygienic clothes, he recks naught of it. Nor does his wife. (But his
daughters are happily teaching him a thing or two.) It is an infinite
pity that we have no "national costume" in this island. Think of the
ravishing effect of a Dutch milk-girl carrying round the milk of a
morning, and consider how a similar phenomenon of dress would add to the
amenities of existence in Britain!

As for the artisan's pleasures, he seems to like sitting in the dark at
a cinema or in carbonic oxide gas in a public-house bar. But the
simpler, healthier, cheaper family joys of the large open caf or the
beer-garden, with gay music therein, have not yet occurred to him.

It may be said that there is no adequate supply of the above-named two
articles. I admit it. But there is no adequate supply because there is
no demand. It may also be said that my criticisms would apply in some
degree to classes above that of the artisan. I admit that too.

One other thing that the artisan might get, if he had a taste for it (as
most of his continental contemporaries have), is instruction in right
deportment, than which few accomplishments contribute more to the
dignity and smoothness of existence and to the best kind of democracy.

The papers are adorned with numberless advertisements of experts who
offer to teach the art or craft of earning incomes. But I doubt if I
have ever seen the advertisement of an expert who was ready to teach how
to spend incomes.




BUYING AND READING BOOKS


The philosopher said that reading makes a full mind. Not always. And
perhaps not even generally. The effect of reading on the mind depends on
the manner and spirit in which you read.

Some of the emptiest minds I ever met belonged to certain women who got
a book out of the lending library every weekday of their lives--and read
it through within the ensuing twenty-four hours. Part of their daily
routine was to visit the library to "change the book." No particular
book of a particular author! No remembered title! But just "the book"! I
have calculated that such regular and tireless readers would read twenty
million words or more in a year. (One might be excused for thinking that
they read for a wager or a penance.) Great scholars probably read less
than they. Walter Savage Landor, whose knowledge was prodigious and
amazing, said that only four years of his life were given up to study,
and that even in those years he never allowed reading to interfere with
his other pleasures.

And yet these one-day one-book maniacs notoriously have vacant heads.

It may be argued that they read the wrong kind of stuff--for instance,
"trashy novels." Well, I am not aware that novels are more trashy than
other forms of literature. And all novels are not trashy. A
considerable proportion of them are rather good--thought-provoking,
sympathy-quickening, intellectually stimulating. It is indeed
impossible that a confirmed reader should read nothing but trash. She
simply could not avoid picking up a good novel now and then. Moreover,
the one-day one-book maniacs do not confine themselves to novels. They
gobble biographies, essays, reminiscences, yea, and historical works
at intervals.

So that the explanation of the perfect vacancy of their minds cannot lie
in what they read. Hence it must lie in how they read. And it does. The
fact is, they read with the minimum of mental effort. They read as they
might absorb coffee or chew gum or play patience. They read to lose
themselves instead of reading to find themselves. They read to dull the
brain and not to vitalise it. They object to being roused. I have heard
them protest indignantly:

"But I couldn't put the book down. I don't want any more of that
man--he's too exciting."

They have a faint desire to know "what happened," but the desire must
not be more than faint. They refuse to yield themselves to their author.
Their scheme is to understand him as little as may be. Their scheme is
to employ him as a drug.

All which behaviour is highly strange, nearly incredible; but that large
numbers of readers really do behave in this way cannot be doubted, and
the phenomenon amounts to a proof that reading does not necessarily make
a full mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

You may say that you are not a student, that when you read you read
purely for recreation and for pleasure, and that in this affair you are
not "out" for a full mind. You may even assert that your mind is already
overburdened.

This seems to me to be quite a permissible attitude. Every man has a
right, if he is so inclined, to read purely for recreation, and the
majority of persons do in truth read purely for recreation. But when you
are in search of recreation you may as well get the best recreation you
can. The game of golf is a recreation and nothing else for ninety-nine
golfers out of a hundred. But golfers do not play golf anyhow. They do
not say:

"I am golfing for fun, and I have no intention of taking trouble over
it. I don't care a fig about stance, or swing, or eye. I mean to play
any old way."

On the contrary, they usually approach the game with much earnestness.
They put their wits into it. They deliberately learn from players better
than themselves. They worry about it. They talk endlessly about it. Some
of them take it at least as seriously as they take their vocation in
life. And they are right, within reason, for the more seriously they
play golf the more efficacious and delightful does golf become as a
recreation. You cannot get proper recreation out of any activity unless
you honestly work at it. If you don't put your back into it you defeat
your own purpose, and are convicted of being absurd. This is just as
true of reading as it is of golf.

       *       *       *       *       *

In reading it is the attitude of the reader that matters more than his
intelligence. A reader with the right attitude but with only moderate
intelligence is likely to get more out of any book than a reader with
better intelligence but with the wrong attitude.

Let me take _Hamlet_, in order to avoid dispute: nobody will deny that
it is something of a work, and that Shakspere was a passable author.
_Hamlet_, to speak fairly, is a vast and extremely complex work, full of
powers and beauties both apparent at first sight and half-hidden, shy,
obscure. It represents a colossal effort of the brain and the spirit. It
has stood for centuries high in esteem, and now perhaps stands higher
than ever. It can be read, mechanically, in half a day.

There are individuals of mature years who have never read Shakspere
(yes, millions of them). Some of these people will approach _Hamlet_ as
though it were the report of a cricket match, with an attitude which
might be expressed in the words, "Well, let's have a look at this fellow
Shakspere that people make such a fuss about"; and they will casually go
through it, and they will at once pass judgment upon it, saying that no
doubt it has points, but that it is diffuse, tedious in places,
formless, sanguinary, and undoubtedly depressing.

It never occurs to them to reflect that they have been in the presence
of a superior to whom they owe a becoming humility, to whom they ought
to submit themselves, and whose achievement deserves all the
brain-power of which they are capable. It never occurs to them that in
lightly approaching an unsurpassed masterpiece, the product of the long
and intense labour of an unsurpassed genius, they are making themselves
ridiculous. The fact is that they should enter _Hamlet_ as they would
enter a cathedral, bareheaded and reverent, and with all their faculties
astir for the comprehending of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Hamlet_, of course, is an extreme case, but proportionately a similar
argument applies to all books worth examining. It needs a rather clever
man to write even a rather ordinary book. Every sincere author has a
purpose and he has a method. He begins with certain assumptions, and he
is entitled to ask the reader's fullest attention to these. It is the
author, not the reader, who chooses the ground upon which the two shall
meet. The reader's business is to accept the ground and the methods, and
to find out the purpose. It is the reader's business to yield himself,
to acquiesce, to open all his pores for the reception of what the author
(any author) has to offer; to be friendly and not inimical, trustful and
not suspicious, attentive and not negligent, respectful and not
condescending. Otherwise he is wasting his time, insulting the author,
and making fair criticism impossible. What shall be said of a reader
who, when an author admittedly sets out to hold him breathless, resents
being held breathless? When the reader has conscientiously done his duty
to the author, then, and not before, he may allow himself to give a
verdict.

       *       *       *       *       *

If a reader's position is that he reads to pass the time, it may be
answered to him that whether he reads wisely or stupidly he will still
pass the time, and that as to read wisely is much more diverting and
recreative than to read stupidly, he may just as well read wisely--that
is to say, he may just as well read with his full brain as with half his
brain.

Of course a given reader, reading with all the honesty of intention of
which he is capable, may discover that a book with a great reputation
means nothing to him, for not all sincere persons can appreciate all
fine books. In that case he should drop the book; he is wasting energy
and goodwill upon it, and the sooner he ceases to do so the better.
Every convinced reader leaves behind him numbers of books unfinished.

The success of a book with a reader is to be measured by its effect upon
the actual daily existence of the reader. If a book excites thought; if
it stimulates the sense of beauty, the sense of pity, the sense of
sympathy; if it helps in any way towards the understanding of one's
fellow-creatures; if it moves to laughter or to tears; if it increases
the general vitality; if it throws light on dark problems; if it
discloses the broad principles which govern the movement of humanity; if
it awakens the conscience and thus directly influences personal
conduct,--if it accomplishes any of these things, then it has succeeded.
If it does none of these things, but rather the opposite of these
things, then it has failed.

The aim of reading as a whole is gradually to create an ideal life, a
sort of secret, precious life, a refuge, a solace, an eternal source of
inspiration, in the soul of the reader. All habitual, impassioned
readers are aware of this secret life within them due to books; it
brings about a feeling of security amid the insecurities of the world;
it is like an insurance policy, a sound balance at the bank, a lifeboat
in a rough sea.

       *       *       *       *       *

Although some principle in the choice of books for reading is
admirable, and is indeed almost certain in the end to establish itself
naturally, even if it is not settled in advance, I am not in favour of
too much rigidity in this matter. In particular, I do not care for
"courses of study." My subject is reading for pleasure, diversion,
relaxation. I object to the very ideas in the word "course" and the
word "study." They have in them the seeds of the ghastliest of mental
afflictions--priggishness. Let the reader read with his whole heart,
and he may safely browse at will in the immense pasture of literature.
He may get only a little in one particular field and only a little in
another, but what he gets will not be a smattering; it will be
thorough within its scope.

Nor am I in favour of taking notes. An eager effort to understand
sympathetically, followed by the rumination which we call reflection, is
better than reams of notes. Nor am I in favour, speaking generally, of
books about books, introductions, prefaces, and other parasitic
growths. Some books about books are magnificent, but I would read them
after, and not before, the books that they are about. Reading
professionally is one thing; reading for pleasure is quite another. In
no circumstances ought reading for pleasure to take on the appearance of
a task. Either it is a lark or it is nothing. A few comprehensive works
of reference are all the apparatus indispensable to a reader for
pleasure.

I would divide reading into three classes--reading for information,
reading for wisdom, reading for emotion. An example of the first is
H.G. Wells's _Outline of History_; of the second, Bacon's _Essays_; of
the third, Hardy's _Mayor of Casterbridge_. No reader is very likely
to indulge equally in all three classes; but no reader will be well
advised to eschew entirely any of the classes, for each class helps
and corrects the others. If the reader sticks exclusively to the first
he may tumble into pedantry; if to the second, into didacticism and
schoolmasterishness; if to the third, into weak gush.

Again, I am opposed to fixed times for reading. Fixed times do
emphatically a prison make and regular hours a cage. In such clumsy and
lumbering diversions as golf one must have fixed times or one will be
condemned to go forth alone and play against bogey. But for reading one
does not have to telephone to thirteen other fellows in order to arrange
a foursome or a pair, nor to take a train to the book, nor to change
one's clothes, nor to employ another human being to carry one's effects,
nor to decide whether one will open the book with a brassy or a cleek,
nor to have a bath, nor to take a train home again after the last
chapter, nor to discuss at endless length somebody else's performance on
the green of the seventeenth chapter. One simply opens the book and
begins to read.

Herein lies the advantage of reading over all other recreations except
possibly patience, which game, however, inclines one to the vile vice of
cheating oneself. Every reader who reads with all his mental and
spiritual faculties will find sufficient leisure for reading without
forcing himself to comply with a time-table.

       *       *       *       *       *

Broadly speaking, people simply do not buy books--at any rate of their
own free will and for their own pleasure. They borrow them. They steal
them. Schoolbooks have very large sales, running in some cases to
millions. A successful schoolbook means a fortune--not usually to the
author, but always to the publisher whose titanic brain has known how to
put it on the market. Parents, however, hate to pay for schoolbooks, and
children hate to read them: hence schoolbooks are popular only in the
sense that taxes are popular. Apart from schoolbooks there is in reality
little demand for literature in volume form. In hundreds of small towns
and in scores of quite important towns, you will not find a single shop
which exists by the sale of books alone.

Fiction has a better chance with the public than other varieties of
literature; and we talk of popular novelists--popular novelists also not
infrequently talk of themselves. But the fact is, there are no popular
novelists. If any novelist is entitled to be described as popular, then
what adjective is left for phenomena like Charlie Chaplin, Harry Lauder,
Mary Pickford, Dr. Crane, Jack Dempsey, Lloyd George, Harold Lloyd,
Donoghue? In Britain, if 5,000 copies of a novel are disposed of, the
novel is a success. If 10,000, the novelist is "popular." If 20,000, the
publisher sings about it in advertisement columns. If 50,000, the event
is said to be unique. If 100,000, the event staggers humanity. If----But
let not the imagination overleap itself.

The greatest publishing miracle of recent years was the triumph of Mr.
Hutchinson's _If Winter Comes_. Now in the first sixteen months of its
life _If Winter Comes_ certainly did not sell more than 200,000 copies
in Britain. Which means that at most out of every hundred adult persons
one person actually bought the book. A considerable number borrowed the
book; but I am talking of purchasers. And I doubt not that there are in
Britain to-day millions and millions of adults, capable of reading, who
have never even heard of _If Winter Comes_. On the other hand, it is
estimated that out of every hundred adult persons in Britain over fifty
buy a Sunday newspaper every Sunday in the year.

Of course books are luxuries! Well, they may or may not be. You may call
soap a luxury if you choose. But if books are luxuries, they are the
cheapest luxuries in the world. For the price of as much soap as will
keep your body clean for a year you could buy as much literature as
would cleanse your soul for half a lifetime. For the price of a
first-rate nail-brush you can buy, fully illustrated and well bound, a
history of the earth since it was a molten ball down to the apotheosis
of Mademoiselle Lenglen. As for the price of an elegant evening-dress,
it is more than the equivalent of the cost in encyclopdic form of the
whole recorded sum of human knowledge.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such extraordinary facts should give rise to some hard thinking in the
minds of those who like to read and who feel that life is not as
interesting as it might be. Why not deliberately set about the formation
of a library? People collect cups and saucers, tankards, snuff-boxes,
fans, models of ships, gramophone records, swords, breast-plates,
pictures, prints, even postage stamps. Why not collect books? With great
respect for the august collectors of postage stamps I would say that
books are almost, if not quite, as interesting as postage stamps. True,
they occupy more space and are less easily moved from one house to
another; but, to compensate, they are not so easily lost, and fraudulent
imitations are less frequent in the book world than in the postage-stamp
world; also the range and choice and scope of the book collector are
immensely greater than those of the postage-stamp collector. Again,
books can be read, and postage stamps generally can't.

The majority of households have a few books, though I question if one
household in a hundred possesses five hundred volumes, and the
exclamation of visitors at the spectacle of even one well-filled
bookcase is: "Oh! What a lot of books you've got!" As a rule people
don't collect books; they let books collect themselves, at haphazard,
and after a time they are entirely at a loss to explain how
such-and-such a book found its way on to their shelves. This is not the
right method of book-collecting.

For myself I would say that the two finest rules for an inexperienced
book-collector are:

1. Never buy a book that you don't believe you want to read.

2. Never read a book that you haven't bought.

The first rule prevents you from committing the follies of a woman at a
January sale, and the second rule--if you are genuinely attached to
literature--forces you to buy, even at the sacrifice of other
pleasures. And when it doesn't force you to buy, the second rule forces
you to wait, which is excellent discipline, besides providing you with
the sensations of the hunter who has glimpsed his prey.




THE DECENT EXPOSURE OF GIRLS[2]


I live in the heart of the West End of London, and in the heart of the
luxury-shopping district. All the streets round about me are mainly
devoted, as regards their ground-floors at any rate, to the great
business of adorning women and furnishing women with elegant trifles,
including sweets and cakes. It is impossible for me to go forth without
seeing all sorts of astonishing social phenomena. Among the things I
have noticed is the increasing tendency to expose young women all day or
most of the day in shop windows.

Now there is going to be in this article no suggestion whatever of
sexual scandal. I am convinced--and it cannot be doubted--that the
establishments which expose young women in their windows do so with no
motive save a strictly commercial motive, and that a charge involving
the subjection of innocence to the lure of vice would justly shock their
owners. I make no such charge.

The young women exposed are sometimes attractive and more often not, and
they are never, so far as I can judge, brought into direct contact with
customers genuine or false. They are paid to ply various handicrafts in
full view of the population passing before the windows. Some of their
handicrafts have a certain mild interest; others have no interest. The
idea of the owners is to explain to the public the processes of the
handicrafts practised. But the girls invite a special attention from the
male part of the population merely because they are girls. And the girls
are utterly defenceless against observation, however persistent and
odious it may be. Of course the girls get hardened to it, which
hardening I deem to be in itself regrettable.

       *       *       *       *       *

Further, the girls live through their day in a very confined space; they
cannot move with any freedom; and whether the weather is hot or cold the
situation must be unpleasant, as anybody can find out for himself by
sitting at a large window for a few hours at a stretch. The inner side
of a big sheet of plate glass is nearly always either too hot or too
cold. Again and again, in inclement months, I have seen girls at work
with hands and arms red and blue from cold, and citizens gazing at them
quite unmoved!

Still further, some establishments of much smartness have the habit of
keeping girls standing outside their doors for no apparent purpose
except advertisement. They are usually dressed smartly in tight, mannish
clothes which I should imagine to be decidedly uncomfortable. They stand
still for hours. I have rarely seen one move. If it be urged that they
are there to open the doors of taxis and the door of the establishment,
my answer is that customers ought to be able to do these mighty jobs for
themselves, and that if they cannot, then a man would be better suited
than a girl to wait on the helpless sloth of the well-to-do.

No girl ought to stand still in the street or in a porch all day and at
all seasons. And what shall be said of the employment of girls to stand
moveless holding a standard or ensign from misty morn to dusky
afternoon? What must be the stunted state of mind induced in such girls
by such stupid tasks--tasks compared to which the watching of a lathe is
all excitement, variety, and brain-work; tasks which a wooden statue
would do much better than a living girl?

These phenomena which I observe contravene no law. Nor do they seem to
afflict the public conscience. But I think they ought to afflict the
public conscience, and I wish they did. For myself, the sight of those
misdirected girls would keep me out of any shop displaying them.


FOOTNOTES:

[2] It is interesting to note that the London tramway authorities
refused to allow this article, on its original appearance, to be
advertised on their cars.




THE MURDERER'S CONFESSION


Some little time since, the Home Secretary startled the public by
stating that if condemned murderers made a confession of guilt the rule
of the Home Office was to suppress the fact. The reasons for this
strange policy, so far as they could be comprehended, seemed to
originate in a desire to spare the feelings of the malefactor's family
and close friends.

Now the state of mind of a human being faced with the certainty of an
immediate violent death to be committed deliberately, ruthlessly, and in
cold blood, may be, and I think generally is, extremely complex. It
always contains some element of the histrionic, and necessarily so. A
man who has been the centre of public attention, and who actually is
till the moment of death the centre of attention in a highly specialised
pathological world such as a prison, can rarely behave with naturalness.
He is bound to feel that he has a part to play; he is bound to feel a
certain vanity, if not pride; he cannot but be obsessed by the
phenomenon of his own unusualness. And he will adopt a pose accordingly.
The pose will probably break down in the final instants, but till then
it may be maintained with astonishing power and completeness; and
sometimes it never breaks down.

The view is a mistaken one that the prospect of dissolution will always
rouse the conscience into full activity. Many men have died with lies on
their lips, and now and then those lies have been mischievous or
malicious. (The explanation perhaps is that the imagination has been too
weak to present to the mind an adequate picture of what was about to
happen.) Sincerity can seldom be the accompaniment of a despair which is
morally supported by strict discipline and which is not heightened by
solitude. An outburst might bring sincerity, but outbursts are not very
apt to occur in the atmosphere of the condemned cell. Hence the absence
of a confession proves nothing; it does not prove innocence, nor afford
even a presumption of innocence.

So that when a man overcomes all the subtle and various impediments to
confession, his confession ought surely to be treated with the utmost
solemnity and given the utmost effectiveness. Of course a murderer's
mentality may be so peculiar that he will say to the Governor or the
Chaplain: "I confess to _you_, but I ask you to treat what I have told
you as strictly confidential." There may be such men; if there are, I
think that their wishes should be granted.

       *       *       *       *       *

But supposing that a man confesses and makes no condition--is
publication of the confession to be withheld because he has not
specifically asked for it? I should say not. A man might hesitate to ask
for publication; he might hesitate from delicacy of mind, lest he should
seem to be craving for advertisement. Also he might merely forget to ask
for publication, or he might assume publication, or he might decide that
in confessing he had done his share. In any case, the reasons in favour
of publication of a confession made without conditions are overwhelming.

One of them is that the moral value of confession _before all men_ is
immense.

Another has to do with the mental situation of the jury. In the jury you
have a body of individuals who have been engaged in a sort of task to
which they are unaccustomed and for which they have received no training
whatever; and their responsibility is simply terrible. It is well known
that jurymen in murder trials take their functions with commendable
seriousness, and that in very many instances their difficulties are much
intensified by the fact that they object in principle to the barbarous
institution of capital punishment. Few jury decisions in a murder trial
can be absolutely free from every qualm of doubt, and the qualms will
certainly increase once the irrevocable verdict has been announced. The
inner life of a man who has helped to send another man to a violent
death may well be poisoned for months and years by irrepressible doubts
concerning the dead man's guilt. Jurymen therefore are entitled to know
if a condemned man has confessed. To deprive them of such knowledge is
wanton, uncivic, ungrateful, and unjust.

       *       *       *       *       *

Again, take the case of the public-spirited citizen who is jealous for
the right administration of justice and for the dignity of the law. This
man also is entitled to some consideration. It is bad for the repute of
the judicial system that this man should continue to entertain doubts
about the righteousness of State justice after those doubts might be set
at rest. After a recent trial the conscience of all the thinking part
of the community was gravely disturbed by a single article printed in a
responsible legal journal and reproduced throughout the country in the
popular press. The arguments there brought forward may or may not have
been cogent; they had their effect, and it is a lasting effect. If they
could have been destroyed by the publication of a confession, then that
confession ought to have been published. That justice shall be public is
an axiom. Surely then the vindication of justice should be public too.

Lastly, let us look at the case of the family and close friends of the
condemned man. The Home Secretary has given his opinion that the
feelings of these persons ought to be spared, if there is a confession.
But which of their feelings? Family pride, self-love, the natural
affectionate bias in favour of a relative or near companion? Why should
such feelings be spared by the suppression of a paramount fact where
publication is so obviously valuable to the commonwealth? Moreover,
suppression, though it may spare certain feelings, does not spare other
and perhaps graver feelings. If a relative has doubts of the prisoner's
guilt, those doubts must make him resentful and antagonistic to the
judiciary. They may implant in him a grievance which turns a better
citizen into a worse citizen, and which may last to the end of his life.
Is it more disadvantageous to him, and to the State, that his pride
should be hurt or that he should live in a permanent dissatisfaction
founded upon error?




CLOTHES AND MEN


A continental reputation is something; and both the English male
creature and the English male creature's clothes have an enormous
prestige on the Continent. At his physical best the Englishman is held
to be without a rival in form, carriage, and distinction; and though
some Scandinavians might well dispute this, not even Scandinavians would
dispute his pre-eminence in the matter of attire. (I say nothing of his
mental qualities, about which the leading continental races have their
own views--to which they are doubtless entitled.)

For men's clothes London is to masculine Europe what Paris is to
feminine Europe. To be dressed in London is the ambition of youthful
dandies from Calais to Bucharest; and the ambition persists, despite the
effect of the singular attire which hundreds of thousands of Englishmen
choose to display every summer in continental capitals.

Bond Street is supposed to be the chosen haunt of the well-dressed man.
Well, I have had perhaps exceptional opportunities of inspecting the
pavements of Bond Street on fine mornings in spring and autumn, when
the latest fashions in suits appear on the most perfect male bodies in
the civilised world. I have often issued out into Bond Street for the
express purpose of regarding those suits on those bodies. And they made
a very pleasing spectacle; and they engendered in myself the mad desire
for perfection in dress, and I agreed that the continental reputation of
the same was well deserved. Britain may not be able to win tennis
championships, but the morning sights of Bond Street are still
unrivalled.

And yet in Britain, just as in other countries, there is almost no
public interest in male attire. The world's greatest dressmakers
advertise themselves freely in the papers (and indeed the papers would
be a poor and a dull thing without their lovely and exciting
proclamations), and they plant their establishments in prominent
thoroughfares. But the world's greatest tailors are generally content to
hide themselves with the modesty of violets in streets known only to
taxi-drivers; the supreme sartorial names, murmured with awe in the
selectest clubs, never imprint themselves in the Press. No more would
they dream of advertising than M.D.'s and K.C.'s would dream of
advertising. The difference is that while K.C.'s and M.D.'s are
forbidden to advertise and some of them privately yearn to advertise,
the highest stars of tailordom are quite free to advertise--but don't.
There is some enigma here, to which the key is probably lost.

Of course some sartorial firms, and some good ones, do advertise; but
their wares as a rule are specialities, such as collars and fur coats.
It is curious that the illustrated wearer of the former is a type of
young man with a strong chin but apparently brainless, and the
illustrated wearer of the latter is a type of old, haughty _rou_ who
looks as if he may have had a considerable past in the matrimonial
courts. At any rate, male attire is not advertised to the one-thousandth
part of the extent to which female attire is advertised.

       *       *       *       *       *

One reason for the lack of public interest in men's attire is of course
the undeniable fact that men dislike to do or be anything
characteristically feminine. Women will imitate men, but men will not
imitate women. Hence men keep quiet about their clothes. The dandies,
or the merely well-dressed among them, will put themselves to an immense
amount of trouble and expense over clothes, and then make their
appearance with a deliberately casual air as though nothing on earth had
happened. Save in the strictest secrecy they will never discuss their
raiment. They are content with a silent appreciation of their wonderful
achievements.

But there is another reason for the lack of public interest in men's
attire. Not merely do we rightly despise the fop--the man who lives for
clothes--but we have a prejudice against the man who shows any sustained
interest in his dress. (Such prejudice may be a remnant of Puritanism--I
believe it is.) And we rather admire the man who will not go to the
tailor's until he is dragged thither by his wife. With this prejudice
and this admiration I have no sympathy, and I hope that both are dying
out.

I would sooner see a fop in the street than a man whose suit ought
obviously to have been sold or burnt last year but one. The fop has at
least achieved something and is not an eyesore. The scarecrow is an
eyesore and has simply left something undone, either from conceit or
from sloth. The fop is not without his use in society. He keeps tailors
alert. He sets the pace. He may often be an ass, but he is also an
idealist, a searcher after perfection; we have none too many searchers
after perfection, and an ass engaged in that quest is entitled to some
of our esteem.

The man who for any reason--affectation, idleness, self-esteem--despises
clothes and the fashions thereof, implies thereby that fashion is absurd
and negligible, and that the sole purpose of clothes is to give a decent
and comfortable protection against climatic conditions. This argument
cannot possibly be maintained. Fashion is neither absurd nor negligible.
It is one of the most powerful influences upon human conduct, an
influence which nobody can escape. Artists, for instance, will flout
fashion, but only some fashion; they are the slaves of their own
fashion. And non-artists who flout fashion in clothes are always the
slaves of fashion in some other article--such as tobacco, politics,
newspapers.

Further, the sole purpose of clothes--whatever it once may have been--is
no longer merely to give protection. An important purpose of clothes is
to make a pleasing visual impression--partly on oneself but chiefly on
other people. This is unquestionable. Why, therefore, should it not be
candidly admitted?

       *       *       *       *       *

The importance of being well dressed, while not being a dandy, is
strongly insisted on in certain professions and callings; and a
carefully dressed man will always have the advantage over a carelessly
dressed man in beginning business relations. The first thought of a
negligent man seeking a situation is invariably to remedy his
negligence; the pity is that sometimes he cannot remedy it.

Platitudes, you will say. They are; but it is astonishing how the most
obvious platitudes are ignored by seemingly sensible persons in daily
life.

The negligent man will object that he cannot afford to dress well. Not
so. Every one can afford to dress well on his own plane of expenditure.
It is a matter not of money but of interest in the subject. He who is
interested in a subject will speedily acquire taste in that subject, and
the skill to get the best effect at the lowest cost. Nine out of every
ten of us could easily produce a better effect on the eye of the
beholder than we actually do without spending a penny more than we
habitually spend.

We are guilty of a number of errors and omissions, the chief of which I
will enumerate.

First.--We won't take trouble. A great living statesman is reported to
have said: "I put on the first things that come to hand, and people
don't seem to mind." This is the practice of many of us, but it is no
way to dress. People do mind.

Second.--We forget that dress comprises much more than a suit of
clothes. If a man went forth in a suit of clothes and nothing else, he
would make a sensation which might seriously incommode him. There is no
sense in procuring a good suit of clothes unless all the rest of the
attire from hat to heels harmonises with it, not merely in colour but in
style and excellence. Clumsy boots will make the finest suit look
ridiculous. How often one has the misfortune to see a man who has used
brains and taste in matching shirt, necktie, and socks with his suit,
but whose exposed handkerchief produces on our teeth the effect of
scratching a coin on a slate. Such men ought to be fined forty
shillings or go to prison.

Third.--We place ourselves like dolls in the hands of our tailors or
other furnishers. We let them work their will upon us. We accept
submissively their often ill-founded assertions that everything is all
right. Tailors, for instance, are human, and want overseeing. The price
of smartness is eternal vigilance. And is there a tailor in the land,
save one or two whom I have personally intimidated, who does not proceed
on the assumption that pockets are ornamental and not intended to hold
things? Suits ought to be finally tried on with everything in the
pockets that the pockets will have to contain. If the suit does not fit
then, the suit is wrong. Here we have the divine male institution of the
pocket--and tailors conspire to render it monstrous!

Fourth.--Having got our clothes, we do not take care of them. We treat
them like step-children. Of course courage as well as true affection is
needed for the just treatment of clothes. It takes a brave man to press
his trousers on a frosty night.

Fifth.--We do not put our clothes on properly. I defy you to walk a
hundred yards along the Strand or Fifth Avenue without seeing a man the
collar of whose coat sticks up above the collar of his overcoat--except
in summer, when his overcoat is left lying huddled in the wrong creases
at home.




ANDR GIDE'S _DOSTOEVSKY_


Andr Gide is now one of the leaders of French literature. The first
book of his to attract wide attention among the lettered was
_L'Immoraliste._ Since then, in some twenty years of productiveness, he
has gradually consolidated his position until at the present day his
admirers are entitled to say that no other living French author stands
so firm and so passionately acknowledged as an influence. His authority
over the schools of young writers who contribute to or are published by
_La Nouvelle Revue Franaise_ (with which he has been intimately
connected from its foundation) is quite unrivalled. And it must be
stated, as a final proof of mastership, that he has powerful and not
despicable opponents.

To my mind his outstanding characteristic is that he is equally
interested in the sthetic and in the moral aspect of literature. Few
imaginative writers have his broad and vivacious curiosity about moral
problems, and scarcely any moralists exhibit even half his preoccupation
with the sthetic. He is a distinguished, if somewhat fragmentary,
literary critic--not merely of French but of Russian, English, and
classical literatures. I shall not forget his excitement when he first
read _Tom Jones_. "Ce livre m'attendait," said he, with grave delight.
His practical interest in the technique of fiction never fades; indeed
it grows. So much so that his latest novel, now appearing serially in
_La Nouvelle Revue Franaise_, really amounts to an essay in a new form;
and with startling modesty he had labelled it, in the dedication, "my
first novel."

       *       *       *       *       *

Of course no novelist can achieve anything permanent without a moral
basis or background. Balzac had it. De Maupassant had it to the point of
savagery. Zola had it, in his degree. Paul Bourget--a writer whom
highbrows, French and English, have still to reckon with--has it. But
Andr Gide writes in the very midst of morals. They are not only his
background but frequently his foreground. Scarcely one of his books (the
exception may be _Les Caves du Vatican_) but poses and attempts to
resolve a moral problem.

It was natural and even necessary that such a writer as Gide should deal
with such a writer as Dostoevsky. They were made for each other--or
rather Dostoevsky was made for Gide. I first met Gide in the immense
field of Dostoevsky. He said, and I agreed, that _The Brothers
Karamazov_ was the greatest novel ever written. This was ages ago, and
years have only confirmed us in the opinion.

"But," said Gide, "everything that Dostoevsky ever wrote is worth
reading and must be read. Nothing can safely be omitted."

At that period there was none but a mutilated French translation of _The
Brothers Karamazov_, and Gide had to read Dostoevsky in German. A
complete translation, I fear, still lacks in French. But Andr Gide can
now read him in full in English; which is to our credit and his. Let us,
however, not be too much uplifted. Dostoevsky's important _Journal d'un
crivain_ exists in French but not in English.

       *       *       *       *       *

Those who read Gide's _Dostoevsky_ will receive light, some of it
dazzling, on both Dostoevsky and Gide. I can recall no other critical
work which so cogently justifies and so securely establishes its
subject. If any one wants to appreciate the progress made by Western
Europe in the appreciation of Russian psychology, let him compare the
late Count Melchior de Vogu's _Le Roman Russe_ with the present work.
It is impossible to read Gide's _Dostoevsky_ without enlarging one's
idea of Dostoevsky and of the functions of the novel. All the
conventional charges against the greatest of the Russians--morbidity,
etc. etc.--fall to pieces during perusal. They are not killed; they
merely expire. And Dostoevsky in the end stands out not simply as a
supreme psychologist and narrator, but also as a publicist of genius
endowed with a prophetic view over the future of the nations as
astounding as his insight into the individual. "There never was," says
Gide, "an author more Russian in the strictest sense of the word and
withal so universally European."

Dostoevsky had various and distressing personal defects, but his
humanity and his wisdom, doubtless derived from the man Jesus who
delivered the Sermon on the Mount, are unique; and Andr Gide's
demonstration of their worth is his invaluable contribution to
Dostoevsky literature.




THE RIVIERA


Amid all the implacable competition of holiday resorts and health
resorts, the Riviera more than maintains its prestige. Indeed, the
supreme rivalries in the world of the organisation of pleasure lie
between certain neighbouring towns on this Mediterranean shore. Immense
campaigns are conducted, with immense capital; the very characters of
whole communities are changed by the will of two or three forceful
individuals possessing imagination; and whatever the results, the
Riviera must gain. People may, and people do, inveigh against the
Riviera. Let them. Let them say, for instance, that you can walk up one
side of a famous avenue and get sun-stroke, and down the other side a
minute later and get a chill. Let them say that when it rains on the
Riviera it does rain, or that the purveying inhabitants are out to empty
your purse, or that you never know what repellent notorieties you won't
meet there, or a hundred other things. No matter. The serpentine string
of pearls continues to glitter more and more brightly. And you continue
to go south--if and when you can obtain seats in the packed Blue train.

The reason for the triumph of the long coast-line is plain. It is
connected with the facts that the Riviera is accessible, and that the
world is richer than it was, and that travel and lodging and catering
have been scientifically organised just as manufacture has been
organised; and it is centrally based on the paramount fact of climate
and geography. The Mediterranean has been the home of pleasure for
centuries simply because of its natural advantages. When you have
variegated and sublime scenery, an equable winter temperature, cataracts
of sunshine, and a sea that is bluer than any artist can paint it, you
have all the raw material, and much of the finished material, of an
unsurpassable winter pleasure resort. Heaven has begun the work, and one
may say that the modern makers of the Riviera have completed it. The
region may not be Paradise; and I agree that it is certainly not the
garden of Eden; but its qualities immeasurably outweigh its defects; it
is the best substitute for Paradise or Eden available for seekers after
such places, and anyhow the real Paradise cannot be reached without a
far longer and more terrifying journey than that which separates Calais
from Nice.

       *       *       *       *       *

The point of the Riviera is this--that there, when other regions sadden
the soul and mortify the body, you can walk out of a morning and feel
that it is an ecstasy merely to be alive. Call it heliotherapy.

And in whatever fashion you prefer to be alive, the Riviera is capable
of suiting your taste. If you desire to burn money, to startle the
righteous, to turn night into day, to exist as you would exist in London
or Paris--only more so, the Riviera gives the facilities. If you have to
look twice at a ten-shilling note before spending it, the Riviera will
eagerly meet you--so much so that within a radius of a couple of hundred
yards in one of the larger pearls you can live just as cheaply or just
as expensively as you wish. Again, if your notion of being alive is to
devote yourself to outdoor games and sports, the Riviera will provide
you with everything to that end--except possibly foxes. Again, if for
you the ideal existence is the prim existence, regular, monotonous,
correct, utterly calm, self-centred, rapt away from the world,
conscientiously repudiating the rough world, the Riviera can offer you
exactly what you need. Again, if you are historically curious you can,
within the limits of a short motor-drive on the Riviera, pass from the
most modern race-course and totalisator right back to an authentic Roman
Coliseum where men fought their fellow-beasts, or from a
twentieth-century water-main to an aqueduct that is nearly as old as
sin. Again, if your caprice is to live in different civilisations on the
same day, you can stroll out of the hotel where you may regulate the
temperature of your bedroom on a dial, climb a hill on your own feet,
and enter a village where in all essentials life is endured as it was
endured five hundred years ago in the dwellings and round about the
keeps of five hundred years ago.

And so, through the abundance of geology, botany, scenic panoramas,
marine displays, sun-risings, sun-settings, carnivals, shrines, I might
continue the catalogue of contrasts in this Alp-enclosed land where
every city has its ancient quarter as picturesque as its new quarter is
geometrically prosaic. The truth is, that nobody could believe the
Riviera who has not seen it.




JOURNALESE


A monthly review has been attending to the question of bad literary
style--otherwise called "journalese." But why in justice it should be
called journalese I do not quite see, for the average newspaper in a
city of any importance is written quite as well as the average book. I
will undertake to find as much bad English in, for example, the recent
translation of Lyeskov's defenceless _The Cathedral Folk_ as can be
found in any ten daily papers on any given day. Here is an example: "And
now, my dear fellow, the schoolmaster, let's you and I have a good
chat." The "you and I" was probably inserted as an afterthought, and the
translator forgot to alter the "let's"; but "you and I" is neither a
misprint nor a slip of haste--it is deliberate. (Translation not by a
heathen, but by Isabel F. Hapgood.) However, there are far worse things
than bad grammar. And I now beg to offer what I hope is the finest
example of "journalese" in the history of the English language:

     AN APPEAL TO INTELLECT

     "At long last, after months of listening to woolly
     futilities in which modern playwrights have sought to tear
     our emotions up by the roots by hectic wallowing in what are
     miscalled the realities, an appeal was made to our
     intellect.

     "Each sentence in this sparkling comedy was crisp, polished,
     and compact as a piston-rod. Listening to these actors
     rolling the slow, stately periods round their mouths was
     like biting into a succession of luscious peaches warm from
     a sunlit wall.

     "Again and again we dipped into the cool, sweet well of
     English undefiled. The effect on us had all the astringency
     of ammonia. Here was the bracing tonic that we have for so
     long wanted."

Conceive the spectacle of playwrights in woolliness employing the device
of flushed wallowings to tear up the roots of emotions! How would they
set about it? Then the piston-rod, polished and compact; but crisp--hard
and brittle! Engineers would love such a piston-rod. And notice the
wonderful lightning transformation of the crisp, polished, and compact
sentences into slow, stately periods. See the actors rolling the said
periods, now crisp, now stately, round their mouths and thereby
producing in the audience the sensation of biting peaches--and peaches
warm from a sunlit wall! Next, the poet has fallen off the wall into
that dear, familiar, excellent cistern--the cool, sweet well of English
undefiled. And in another moment we are taking ammonia for its tonic
astringency. Is ammonia a tonic?

This piece of dramatic criticism did not appear in the _John o' Groats
Advertiser_. It appeared in a London morning paper. Also it was "an
appeal to intellect." Also it was an appreciation of Congreve's _The Way
of the World_, and incidentally it shows the singular influence of
Congreve's prose on a certain type of mind. You may say that I am only
demonstrating that journalists do write "journalese," and that "authors"
would be incapable of such writing. But the criticism was signed
"S.P.B.M." Can this S.P.B.M. be Mr. S.P.B. Mais, Master of Arts, who
took honours in the English Literature Finals at Oxford, who was once
professor of English at the R.A.F. Cadet College, who habitually
lectures on literature, who has composed several novels, and who wrote
_An English Course for Schools_? Well, surely he cannot. And yet if he
is not, who is he?




HISTORY IN THE STREETS


The old gentleman of the family, when in favourable circumstances he
fairly gets going, will say:

"Ah yes! That was before I met your grandmother. There was only a level
crossing in those days, and it was kept by a man with a wooden leg. When
they decided to build a bridge to carry the main road over the railway
he took to drink, and used to go from one public-house to another and
say it was the end of the British Empire, because he couldn't wave a
flag and stop the street traffic. All the best people lived in West
Street then. The shops were away in Furlong Row up the hill. And my
father could remember the time when Furlong Row was a straight furlong
of the original main road, and the market was held round the church.
Your grandmother did all her shopping in Furlong Row for years after our
marriage. Then they made a new main road, to do away with the gradients,
for the sake of the horses, and called it West Street, and it was
shorter too; but a lot of people didn't like that either.

"And a fine to-do there was when Dr. Hart sold his house in West Street
to a grocer who built out the front of it and turned it into a shop.
That wasn't the end of the Empire--it was the end of the world. Half
West Street's been pulled down and rebuilt since I was a lad. What Dr.
Hart would have said if he'd seen tram-lines in West Street I don't
know. Rates were 1s. 9d. in the  then. As for these char--bancs...! I
can't understand why everybody wants to be gadding about, rushing here
and rushing there. In my time we stayed at home and worked. Never
thought of a summer holiday. Now it's all holidays and fal-lals and no
work. England is not what she was, and you can see it everywhere."

And so the old gentleman will wander on, till somebody with a decisive
gesture switches the conversation to a fresh subject, and he closes up
like a flower at night.

       *       *       *       *       *

Doubtless not everything that he relates is quite accurate, for he is
extremely proud of his years and loves to exaggerate the startlingness
of the changes seen in a long life. The aged must have their social
triumphs. He may even deliberately invent. If they are to be believed
there are about a thousand old gentlemen in London to-day who shot
snipe, or saw snipe shot, in Belgrave Square. I myself know a Methuselah
who positively asserts that his father shot the first partridge that
ever was shot in all England. And even stranger matters are recounted by
the senile.

Nevertheless the old gentleman--whose wife shopped in Furlong Row when
Furlong Row _was_ Furlong Row--is probably in the main quite truthful,
and he has at any rate fulfilled one very useful function. He has forced
his younger hearers to realise that their borough was not always what it
is to-day, that the borough has grown, evolved, developed, and that good
and highly interesting reasons exist for the almost incredible changes
which have occurred. Fancy Furlong Row--that procession of shabby
wigwams inhabited by the scum of the earth--having once been the smart
shopping centre of the town! The revelation stimulates the mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

Curious that the impression produced by the old gentleman should fade so
soon, as it usually does, from the minds of the younger persons! Curious
that the otherwise intelligent inhabitants of any given place, the
otherwise enlightened citizens of any given city, should so
persistently ignore the living interest, not of the people in the
streets and squares which surround them, but of the streets and squares
themselves! Curious that they should assume, as they do, that the
environment in which they live is a fixed, changeless, haphazard thing,
instead of being, as it is, a living constantly evolving organism, every
one of whose changes is the result of the slow working-out of human
ideas and a mirror of the qualities and defects of what is called
civilisation!

Talk about history and about the advantages of reading history--you can
if you like read the very stuff of history in the stones and bricks and
roads and lanes around you. The mere Ford car which you drive is a
proof, first, that Columbus discovered America; and second, that America
discovered you.

It is a fact that the great majority of grown-up persons, complaining of
the dullness and flatness of existence, resolutely keep their eyes and
their ears closed to the interestingness which is beating in upon them
on every side. This is especially true of the dweller in big cities such
as London. He takes each morning the shortest cut to his train or his
omnibus or his tram-car, never thinking that the thoroughfares he uses
have a history intrinsically as interesting as any history. He takes the
same shortest cut back again at evening. If he goes forth on Sunday he
takes the shortest cut to green hills or golf-courses. He is glad to be
out of his environment, which he despises because of its alleged tedium
and lack of interest for a man of superior intelligence.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is urged against such as him that he separates himself from the local
government of his parish or borough. Quite true. But he does worse. As a
rule he utterly repudiates his environment. He learns as little as he
possibly can of it. Not only will he refuse to take the trouble to vote
for his civic representatives--he does not know even where his parish or
borough begins or where it ends, and he does not care. He has not the
least clear notion how or why it came into existence, or in which
direction it is tending, or why it is tending in any direction whatever.

I will not argue that among the first duties of every citizen is the
duty to acquire some understanding knowledge about that spot on the
earth's surface where he happens to live. My point is that, for those
with the slightest natural inclination towards the study of mankind an
inquiry into the history of their environment will provide one of the
most absorbing and profitable diversions that can be conceived.
Furthermore, that it will banish ennui and quite cure the common
distressing delusion that one's town, district, or suburb is humanly
less interesting than, say, Canterbury, Warsaw, or Constantinople. Such
an inquiry is also far easier than the ordinary run of historical
inquiries. The principal materials for it lie at hand; they are heaped
up round about in enormous quantities; and indeed you cannot go beyond
your front door without directly or indirectly helping the inquiry.




WOMAN TWENTY YEARS HENCE


To take the exterior first, I see no reason whatever for anticipating
that within the next twenty years there will be any change in woman's
attitude towards personal adornment. If there is to be a change it will
be that in the future she will spend still more of her time and her
brains and still more of her man's money (or her own) in that great and
praiseworthy enterprise than she does even to-day. I say "praiseworthy"
because I agree with woman in this--that one of her first duties is to
look as nice as she can--and nicer if possible. I seriously regard the
spectacle of an attractive woman well turned out as perhaps the finest
sight that life offers to the eye. (Note: all women are attractive.)

That this opinion holds generally is clear from the ever-increasing
public importance of the mighty cult of frocks. Compare the size of the
big shops of twenty years ago with the size of the big shops of
to-day,--and their chief lure is always feminine attire. Compare the
newspapers of twenty years ago with the newspapers of to-day, in the
matter of woman's outstanding interest. Frocks and what is beneath them
and below them and above them and on them, are not merely an important
item in popular dailies; they are the main item, occupying more space
than anything else, and illustrated with more drawings.

Take away feminine attire from the newspapers, and from the shop windows
of the principal streets, and you would scarcely recognise either the
press or the thoroughfares without it. Brightness would fall from the
air and gloom descend upon our cities. And in this statement there is no
poetic licence. The ageless institution of woman's clothes becomes more
impressive, extensive, and complex with every new "season." I would not
assert that the best-dressed women are better dressed to-day than the
best-dressed women of the past. But more women, and far more women, are
well dressed than in the past. An intelligent interest in personal
appearance is penetrating deeper and deeper into the lower strata of
society. Also the interest in it is more openly acknowledged than it
used to be. Twenty years ago did anybody ever see a woman examine
herself in a tiny mirror and dab her perilous nose with powder at table
in the middle of a repast? I have observed no sign of a reaction
anywhere. On the contrary, the upward curve steadily continues.

       *       *       *       *       *

It has been said, and particularly by women-feminists, that woman's
interest in love and marriage is declining. I have never noticed it, and
I do not believe it. Interest in love and marriage has probably not
increased, but it certainly has not diminished. People marry later than
they did; that, however, is because they are more prudent than
aforetime, and because the ability of women to keep themselves or partly
keep themselves, combined with the growth of personal freedom, has
abolished the old, urgent, economic, utterly unromantic motive for
marrying. Once it was marriage or nothing for a woman. Now, happily,
there are alternatives. But these alternatives do not permanently weigh
in the scale against marriage.

To-day, of course, there are women obviously born for spinsterhood, but,
in the past too, there were women obviously born for spinsterhood. There
will always be such women; the difference in regard to them between
to-day and yesterday is that to-day they need not be as frustrate as
they were yesterday; they need not be frustrate at all: which is a very
considerable improvement in the organisation of the social structure.

       *       *       *       *       *

The woman's cult of personal appearance is in itself a proof of her
unabated interest in love and marriage, and the modern growth of the
cult is a proof that she has become more efficient in the service of a
profound instinct. That instinct is the primary instinct--chief agent
for the furtherance of nature's mysterious plan--to attract and please
men.

In this matter a heresy has sprung up during recent years, to the effect
that women do not dress and adorn themselves to impress men but to
impress their fellow-women, and therefore the cult of clothes has little
or no bearing on the relations of the sexes.

I venture to dismiss this heresy as ridiculous. True, that few men
understand the art of dress as women do (though a few understand it
better)! True, that woman does desire to impress other women by her
appearance! But why? The reason is that woman sees in other women both
competitors and expert judges. She wants to impress them because their
approval and envy constitute the proof that she has succeeded in her
effort to be attractive--to men. Women who from any cause are deprived
of the regular companionship of men do not trouble to make themselves
attractive to each other. And the advent of a male among them, even one
poor solitary male, instantly arouses them to emulation in feats of
self-improvement. This is notorious. It has always been so; it is as
much so to-day as it ever was; and it will be the same in 1946 and at
all future dates until nature fundamentally alters the grand scheme of
things.

       *       *       *       *       *

To-day woman is less "domestic" than she was at the beginning of the
century, and twenty years hence she will certainly be still less
"domestic" than she is to-day. In old times a household had to be
self-sufficient; women span and wove; not so very many years ago
housewives took pride in making their own bread, and rearing domestic
animals for food, and much of the laundry work was done at home. The
household day in my youth began with the laborious lighting of a coal
fire; patent firelighters were esteemed the last word in labour-saving
devices! And heating is still largely a home-enterprise; the same for
cleaning; the same for cooking.

But the great principle of co-operation is spreading more and more. One
sees it to-day at its most advanced in service-flats where there is a
common dining-room, and where heating and lighting and cleaning are all
electric. Domestic dirt in particular is slowly disappearing. The age
must and will come, and come soon, when the house-mistress will be freed
from all the hard physical work, nine-tenths of the work of every kind,
and nine-tenths of the petty worries which weary her to-day.

The "servant-question" will be practically solved by the practical
disappearance of domestic servants. From tens of thousands of households
domestic servants have already vanished; and yet, thanks to the
extension of co-operative services and the application of science to
household tasks, house-mistresses have less to do, and less to worry
about, than when they kept servants; and very many of them, even if they
could get servants, would not return to the ancient rgime of servants.

The tendency towards arrangements whose object is to lessen and simplify
housekeeping is observable everywhere. Look at the cooked food in the
shops. Look at the crowded restaurants. Every meal taken in a restaurant
means less housework for house-mistresses.

And the movement as a whole means increased freedom for women. It means
that they will go out more into the world and enlarge their ideas. It
means that they will be more interesting to themselves and to men. It
means that their lives will be brighter. It means that the nervous
strain upon them which is especially evident in small households, and
which is responsible for so much of the semi-hysteria supposed to be
peculiarly feminine, will be greatly saved. Hence I anticipate that the
woman of 1946 will be appreciably more "normal" than her forerunners.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the matter of the everlasting sex-controversy I foresee a troubled
period. Woman is in a transition stage; which implies that man also is
in a transition stage. Woman has won the "franchise" in a sense very
much wider than the mere political sense of the word. All manner of
things are permitted to her which in the immediate past were not
permitted to her. Add to this that she is falling more and more into
the useful habit of earning her own living, and you must admit that she
has something to be justly proud of in the way of achievement, and you
cannot deny that in efficiency, knowledge, breadth of mind and general
interestingness she is the superior of her predecessors. The Oriental
ideal of womanhood, still rife even towards the end of the nineteenth
century in Britain, has apparently passed; the change is doubtless for
the better, and we ought all to rejoice mightily in it.

A large number of decent men, however, are not quite happy about it.
They are privately of opinion that woman of late has been getting a bit
above herself. I have had men say to me: "Young women are impossible in
these days." What my answer was to this terrible statement I shall not
disclose.

The argument is that the Oriental idea has not wholly passed, and that
woman herself clings to just as much of it as is to her advantage. That
is to say, she demands perfect freedom, but at the same time she demands
the old protection. Wherein she is asking too much, and fighting against
immutable laws.

The situation can be symbolised thus: A man earns money and takes a
woman out for the evening. He pays. She is fetched from home; she
receives constant deference; she is restored to her home (after which
the man has to go home himself). If she insists on ordering the dinner
or supper, so deciding how much the man shall spend, and on staying as
late as she thinks she will, so endangering the man's earning capacity
for the next day, she is getting a bit above herself. Many men hold that
many women are more inclined to treat their entire relations with men on
the lines of an evening out.

Such is the argument. Dissatisfaction exists, and patience is needed.
Anyhow, three things can be prophesied with assurance about the next
twenty years. First, woman will then still be the weaker, and will be in
need of protection and compassion, which man will give. Second, there
can be no responsibility without power, and in cases of difference of
opinion the person who is responsible (which really means financially
responsible) will decide the issue, other things, such as common sense
and force of individuality, being approximately equal. Third, men and
women, given time, will adjust themselves fairly accurately to the new
conditions.




BRITISH AND AMERICAN EDUCATION


In Britain some prejudice was created against American education by
rumours that in certain big, opulent, gorgeous universities certain
professors had to clear out because their teaching did not accord with
the views held by the millionaires who had founded or endowed the said
universities. These rumours are important if true, though I have not yet
heard of any University which gave its professors an entirely free hand!
And numerous progressive Britons have said with pain: "There! You see
how capitalist wealth is deliberately poisoning the very wells of
knowledge!"

For myself, assuming for the sake of argument that the rumours are
substantial, I doubt whether there was any "deliberation" about the
affair. The human mind does not work like that. I do not believe that
any American millionaire ever said to himself: "I will found a
university, or I will pour riches on a university already existing, so
that I may help to educate the youth of America in a manner calculated
to strengthen the rgime which enables me and people like me to amass
the most prodigious wealth known to history." No! The worst motive that
could be properly attributed to a university-making millionaire would be
the desire to do the proper thing and acquire prestige. The notion of
influencing education in favour of the flourishing of his own caste must
have come later, if it came--as probably sometimes it did. It was a
natural human notion, but anti-social.

Anyhow, in America millionaires do found or magnificently help
universities. In Britain they don't. American universities and schools
may be conspicuously, even ostentatiously, wealthy. In Britain they are
conspicuously poor. In America they may get more money than is good for
them. In Britain they are always pleading for money, and a donation of
25,000 to an educational cause is a front-page story in any newspaper.

       *       *       *       *       *

I should say that the broad difference between America and Britain in
regard to education is that America is passionately interested in
education, while Britain is not. During the recent cry for economy in
Britain one of the wealthiest and most influential of millionaires
distinguished himself by very violently urging the cutting down of
education as a prime necessity. Nobody shot him. Nobody ostracised him.

I am not qualified to compare American with British education in detail,
but one may roughly compare the results, immediate and ultimate. A
European has only to watch American children going into school and
coming out of school in order to realise that in America children count
as they do not count in Europe. American children on these occasions
seem to own the earth. They are, comparatively, exultant. They enjoy,
eagerly. This pleasing phenomenon may be due to the fact that in America
the air of schools is changed every ten minutes, whereas in Europe it is
changed about once a day or a week. But it exists, and it is fine; it is
enheartening; for it shows that one ideal of education, and by no means
the least, is achieved in America.

On the other hand, let us take the ultimate result. In my view the chief
aim of education should be to enable citizens, not to collect and
co-ordinate knowledge--though that is highly important--but to think for
themselves, to think straight, and so to pass into mental freedom,
which is the best of all freedoms. Nonconformity may be a great present
nuisance, but it is the mother of freedom, and in the land of the free
it ought to get a fair show. Now, right or wrong, European opinion holds
that in America nonconformity does not get a fair show. "Movements" are
not encouraged; indeed, they are discouraged. The politics of America
are a mystery to Europeans, who have never been able to see the
difference between Republicans and Democrats. Everybody seems to think
alike on fundamentals. And if there are two parties in America, one is
the Republican-Democrat and the other is the party whose heads go in
danger of prison and whose literature is not smiled upon by the
Postmaster-General.

This, of course, is an exaggeration, but exaggeration is the legitimate
ornament of controversy and the spot-light on truth. I am a great
exaggerator before Heaven, and shall be. Anyhow, conscientious objectors
to war are still lying incarcerated in America, which seems to me to
imply, somehow, that American educational methods are conceivably
capable of improvement.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is undeniable that a wave of nonconformity is washing over
considerable parts of the world. In France the newspapers of Paris are
banded together with miraculous efficiency to produce conformity, and
France is paying the price thereof. In Italy if you think aloud you have
to think according to ukase or run the risk of assassination. Spain is
under the dominion of a junta whose censorship forbids even the news of
civil crimes to cross the frontier. And so on. Europe is surely entitled
to look to America for the antidote to this tendency. And Europe does
not see the antidote in America. Rather the reverse.

I learn with genuine satisfaction that the number of students in the
University of Texas is equal to the number of the total population of
Texas a century ago. But I should like to know further, about the
University of Texas, that the students are there taught to think for
themselves and permitted to think aloud. You can prevent people from
thinking aloud, but you cannot prevent them from thinking. You cannot
compel people to think as you think; you can only persuade them to do
so. Force is a sound argument everywhere--except in the kingdom of
thought.

       *       *       *       *       *

As for Britain, though education is a bit better than it was, though
primary school teachers now enjoy salaries sufficient to keep body and
soul together, and only professors are sweated, nevertheless I sit in
sackcloth for the British educational system, some of whose details
render me almost homicidal. At the same time I do think that British
education does, better than most other systems, successfully teach
freedom combined with respect for law. Britain is full of astounding
human oddities; you can see them anywhere in the streets; it is the home
of cranks and visionaries and public nuisances. But one can think aloud
freely in this strange island, and people can combine freely together to
further any gospel whatsoever. It is something.




WHAT ARE LIFE'S GREATEST SATISFACTIONS?


Certain answers to this question leap instantly into the mind. For
example, to a very beautiful woman her beauty must be an intense,
continuous, and supreme satisfaction, not surpassed by any satisfaction
experienced by anybody. Feminine beauty is an agreeably common
phenomenon, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. Hence I do not say
merely a "beautiful woman," but a "very beautiful woman"; if the
satisfaction is to be supreme the beauty must be extraordinary. You may
argue that beauty is a gift of heaven; there is no merit about it;
therefore it ought not to be a source of satisfaction. My subject,
however, is not what ought to be but what is. Moreover, I doubt whether
moral excellence is any less a gift than beauty. People are born good,
as people are born beautiful. Good people watch over, cherish, and
enhance their goodness, and beautiful people must carefully tend their
beauty. It is just about as difficult to keep beautiful as to keep good.

Admiration, love, adoration, luxury, wealth, and real power are the
rewards of extraordinary feminine beauty--always have been and probably
always will be. Take a very beautiful woman to whom heaven has
vouchsafed a great operatic soprano voice. Think of her in her triumph
receiving frantic ovations from the elite of the world at the end of an
evening's song. She is lovely; she is a great artist; she is a richly
paid worker. Life cannot offer a satisfaction more thrilling than hers.
She reaches the apex of human glory. You retort that beauty fades. I
agree. But while it lasts....

       *       *       *       *       *

Then great wealth. Perhaps no attribute is more criticised, more
contemned, than great wealth. Millionaires themselves deplore their
millions and enlarge copiously upon the worry thereof. But they take no
steps to get rid of their millions. On the contrary, they do all they
can to increase them. And almost no scorner of millions would reject the
opportunity of becoming a millionaire if it came to him. The inevitable
conclusion is that great wealth brings immense satisfactions--of power,
of influence, of self-indulgence, satisfactions which the majority of
mankind reckon, in practice, as among the greatest. We say that there
are things that money can't buy. True. But there are also things that
virtue can't buy, and that beauty can't buy. And virtue may not last;
beauty never lasts. Whereas nearly always great wealth lasts, because
the men who have the wonderful wit to acquire it have the equally
wonderful wit to keep it. Further, millionaires are invariably realists;
they see things and people as things and people actually are. This alone
is a towering satisfaction, for it is based on an extreme and rare
appreciation of truth.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then the satisfaction of superlative special faculties exercised to the
full with high conscientiousness and skill, as, for instance, by the
great lawyer, the great doctor, the great statesman, the great preacher,
the great artist, the great writer, the great philosopher, the great
scientist! All these men work because an imperious instinct compels them
to work. They are by nature specially fitted for their work; they do it
supremely well; they enjoy doing it, and they would be miserable if they
were prevented from doing it. Their existences may be laborious, but
never dull, and for the most part they are very exciting. As a rule
such beings acquire sooner or later terrific prestige. When they die
they die in the conviction that they have favourably affected not only
the lives of individuals, but the thoughts, habits, and destinies of
nations, perhaps even of the whole human race, and that their names are
thenceforward and for ever incorporated in history. Conceive the
profound satisfaction hidden beneath the modesty of such a
world-benefactor as Pasteur. Well, we simply cannot conceive it! Pasteur
and his infrequent equals alone could conceive it.

However, we need not occupy ourselves unduly with the supreme
satisfactions, for they are confined to the supreme people, and very few
of us are called to be supreme. Fortunately few of us want to be
supreme. We are instinctively aware that being supreme is no light
business (indeed, it is a terrible business), and that though the
supreme satisfactions may be glorious the price paid for them in
emotional and intellectual stress and general sacrifice is far heavier
than we ourselves could bear. Let us therefore consider the
satisfactions that may be common to us all.

       *       *       *       *       *

I hear at once the word "love"--requited love.

But I must pause here to point out that the human race is broadly
divided into two sorts of temperaments--the active (often ambitious),
and the passive (contemplative, brooding). It is the latter which is
passionate, and to which love means the most. To point out also that the
human race is divided into two sexes, and that love means much more to
women than to men. Also that satisfactions are divided into two
kinds--those which have a time-value and are lasting, and those which
have an intensity-value and are brief but thrilling.

Now love, in our sense, is a modern development of sexual relationship;
the ancients apparently knew little or nothing of it. Anglo-Saxons have
certainly conspired to be sentimental about love. If they sing they sing
about it, and if they spin yarns they spin yarns about it. Assuredly it
is a wondrous development; but whether it is a development which makes
on the whole for happiness or for unhappiness, for satisfaction or for
dissatisfaction, has not yet been decided. That it brings a little acute
happiness is undeniable; that it brings a lot of unhappiness is equally
undeniable. Few persons passionately in love are happy for long; the
major part of their days is passed in torment. Protest against this as
much as you please, it is a fact.

When passionate love cools into a steady, mild affection, and the
affection is mutual, then satisfaction ensues, and such satisfaction is
great. But quite as often passionate love cools into indifference and
sometimes it freezes into detestation. Then it causes either boredom or
misery. Speaking as impartially as a man can, and courageously braving
the anathemas of Anglo-Saxondom, I would say that love ought not to be
counted, in itself, among the major sources of satisfaction. Positively
successful love, continuing to produce happiness, throughout the years,
is in my opinion at least as rare as very great wealth or surpassing
genius. Not that I would cut out modern love from human existence and go
back to the sex-ideas of the Greeks--even if I could! No! Love is very
valuable; for most of us it is inevitable; but I would call it a
disciplinary experience rather than a trustworthy source of
satisfaction.

       *       *       *       *       *

Work, as a source of satisfaction, is not quite so unreliable as love.
Happy are those who find congenial work, for the very act of work gives
a satisfaction at once profound and pure--safe from remorse or regret.
But vast numbers of people, perhaps the majority, never find congenial
work. They regard all work as a necessary evil, as an immediate
nuisance, and as merely a means to an end. And generally the end is
modest enough, for they are not even ambitious--except in day-dreams.
They hate to begin the day's work, and they are relieved when the day's
work is done. Nevertheless, taking the rough with the smooth, I would
count work as directly or indirectly a major source of enduring
satisfaction.

For the few, to work is satisfying. For everybody _to have worked_ is
satisfying, and the more so if the labour has been carried through
conscientiously and honestly. The sensation of fatigue after a good
day's work is accompanied by a satisfaction than which this world can
scarcely offer better. It may be a mild satisfaction, but it wears well.
It has a moral quality which is aseptic, preserving it from any decay.
To embark on a job, to do it, and then to say, "I have done it,"--here
indeed is a satisfying experience which, however often repeated, will
not grow stale! The accomplishment may not have all the secondary
results hoped for; it may have none of the secondary results hoped for;
it may end in ambitions frustrated; but it cannot fail to have the
primary result of moral satisfaction in finished endeavour.

       *       *       *       *       *

The acquirement of knowledge has been for centuries advocated as a means
to great satisfaction. But, though I favour and desire knowledge and am
always searching after it so far as a natural indolence permits, I think
that too much importance may be given to it. In the first place, the
average person is so situated that he has neither the leisure nor the
opportunity nor the will to get knowledge sufficient to produce in him a
great satisfaction. And in the second place, men of learning seem too
often to be unable to relate their knowledge to their lives. Nor do
their faces appear to be illuminated by some secret ecstasy. They are
often mighty grumblers before Heaven. They rarely, with all their
learning, have learnt enough to keep themselves in health or to bring
up their children in a manner fair to the children. They are apt to take
to knowledge as the wicked take to vice. Their learning is neither more
nor less useful than the miser's money in a safe. They lose the sense of
relative values.

It is better for a man to maintain himself in good health than to load
himself with learning. Indeed, I would rank good health very high in the
major satisfactions of life. I would almost say: "Be healthy and you
will be happy." The common phrase, "_enjoy_ good health," is a just
phrase. When one has good health one enjoys it all the time, and the
healthy man needs little else for his satisfaction. Like many deep
truths this sounds cynical, but is not.

       *       *       *       *       *

As for children, children, considered as sources of satisfaction, have
drawbacks. They may have poor constitutions; they may be naughty; they
may be ungrateful, neglectful, cruel. They may turn out badly. They may
even die too soon. They are indeed full of terrible risks. Yet as a
source of satisfaction they cannot be beaten--speaking generally! They
are a continual fund of interest and of pride; and they arouse in their
parents all the finest unselfish emotions. They are exciting, day and
night, when they are infants; and every baby is the most wondrous baby
in the universe; they are exciting during the years of school; and they
are exciting when they grow up. The feelings of a parent as he or she
contemplates the spectacle of a young man or girl healthily reared,
educated, and launched with a good prospect of success upon the
world--these feelings are perhaps the most completely satisfying that a
human being can have.

But not everybody can have this experience, or can look forward to it.
And the drawback of any attempt to answer the question, "What are life's
greatest satisfactions?" is that one can scarcely mention a single major
satisfaction from which a considerable number of readers are not
debarred, either by circumstances nature, or age.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is, however, one major satisfaction--and it may well be the
greatest of all--which is equally open to all. I mean the exercise of
benevolence. I do not necessarily mean what are called "good works,"
which by the way are often bad works, regrettable in their subtly
sinister influence on the doer as well as on the receiver, and which in
any case many people have neither the time nor the ability to perform.

Let those who can, do good works; the best cure for worry, depression,
melancholy brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with
one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else. And let both those who can
and those who can't do good works make a practice of benevolent
_thought_. Let all think kindly of others; never criticise them, never
condemn, never judge; on the contrary, let all condone, excuse, justify,
seek to comprehend, seek to put themselves in the place of others. The
mental attitude has to be perseveringly cultivated. It cannot be adopted
by a mere good resolution. (Some--exceedingly few--are born with it, and
all I have to say of them is, that they do not know their luck, for
something within them is always mysteriously manufacturing happiness for
them.) We must ask ourselves about a thousand times a day, "Who am I to
sit in judgment?" We must learn to perceive the absurdity, the
impudence, and the preposterousness of sitting in judgment. To err is
human, to forgive ought to be. Here is the finest form of benevolence,
and it will produce the finest form of satisfaction--a satisfaction
which increases from year to year and only reaches its maximum when life
ends.




TREATISE ON MAKING FRIENDS


Probably it has occurred to few people that next-door neighbours are
always peculiar, or mysterious, or quite unaccountable, or disagreeable,
or unbearable, or criminal. This is extremely true of next-door
neighbours in large cities.

Take a long street of similar houses, each with little front-garden and
long back-garden, and a high fence between back-gardens. The character
of the houses and the gardens and all the appurtenances thereof would
seem to indicate that the tenants are just nice, orderly persons with
normal ideas and habits and a strong tendency towards propriety and
correctness,--in fact, that their notions about the right way to live,
love, eat, drink, and dress are very much alike.

Yet every household has two next-door neighbours (except the end
households, which have only one apiece), and every household will tell
you that its neighbours are most odd and surely not quite what they
ought to be. Nothing is known about them for certain, because it is
difficult to see from one window into another and because the garden
fence is high. As a rule, not even the name of the oddities is known,
though it may have been ascertained that they have a little girl called
Elsie who is rude and rowdy and shockingly brought up. But the household
can join one bit of evidence to another, add two and two together (and
make either four or fourteen)! The neighbours neglect their garden, or
they waste their whole lives in cultivating their absurd garden; they
play the wrong tunes at the wrong times on the piano; their gramophone
is dreadful (cheap, or the wrong needles); they rise at such weird
hours; they never go to bed, or they are always in bed; the husband
takes strange trains to business, and he has to run to his train, or,
being ridiculously methodical, he reaches the station leisurely and too
early; or he has no apparent business or means of livelihood. The wife
shops at the wrong shops; or she goes to the right shops, in which case
it is said: "_She_ knows how to get value for her money, she does! Hard
as nails!" Then the window curtains--you never saw such window curtains;
and the funny parcels that are delivered at the house! And the servants
... why do they stay, or why does the mistress tolerate them? And what
can be the explanation of that singular noise which is heard every night
at eleven o'clock? And so on and so on. There never were such persons,
such an inexplicable family!

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus speaks No. 10 of No. 9 and No. 11. (But No. 10 does not realise, or
cannot believe, that No. 9 is speaking in precisely the same manner of
No. 10 and No. 8.)

The whole street from end to end is populated by nice, normal people who
are also odd, dubious people! Suspicion reigns in the street. There are
no definite accusations. Oh no! One must be just, and it is unfair to
jump to conclusions. But one has to be careful. One prudently looks the
other way when one meets the enigmatic neighbour. One says that it is
wiser not to make an acquaintance which might lead to undesirable
sequels; and that one never knows, and that one has heard tell of
frightful things, and that--in short--it is more safe to keep oneself to
oneself. And so each household develops more and more the character of
an island of rectitude surrounded by water of the doubtful and the
despicable.

You will say that the above picture is a gross exaggeration. It is not a
gross exaggeration; but I admit that it is an exaggeration. I have
exaggerated purposely, in order to emphasise and make the point clear.
Nobody acquainted with the life of streets of houses--far more
interesting and baffling than the life of bees or beavers, to whose
study so much brain-power has been devoted--will fail to recognise the
essential truth hiding amid my exaggerations.

       *       *       *       *       *

The complementary picture is a picture of a series of homes occupied by
little groups of related people who, although continually getting on
each other's nerves, are obstinately engaged in keeping themselves to
themselves. They have at least two rooms which are never full or even
half full, and at least a dozen chairs which never bear the weight of a
human being, and which are not interesting to look at and cannot be
employed as beds, cupboards, or bookcases. They have indeed all the
apparatus for comfortable human companionship with other homes--and they
do not use it. They have the need of intercourse with other homes--and
by the pride of their souls and the wilfulness of their minds they do
all they can to discourage intercourse. From lack of enterprise and
faith in mankind they deprive themselves of the greatest and most
beneficial and the cheapest of all social distractions, thus for ever
narrowing their lives and nourishing the sinister and insidious plant of
boredom. And there they all are (existing, not living) in rows and rows
of little solitudes, equivalent to desert isles, up and down all sorts
of streets!

And this picture also is exaggerated, and this picture also is
essentially true. I do not mean that no families have friends, nor that
no threshold is ever crossed by visitors. But it is within my own
knowledge that some thresholds are never crossed by visitors, and that
some families have no friends whatever. And further, I maintain that the
large majority of families have not nearly enough friends--in other
words, that the marvellous institution of friendship is very
inadequately exploited by the generality of citizens.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nevertheless, I am not about to suggest that No. 10, for example, should
some Sunday afternoon put on its best clothes and present itself at the
threshold of No. 11, for example, and say:

"We desire to extend our acquaintance with the world, and therefore,
while we are convinced that you are very odd people, we are convinced
also that you must have some good points of interest to us, and
accordingly we have arrived to pay a call and take a more intimate look
at you, to the end that later on you may pay a call and take a more
intimate look at ourselves. But we beg to reserve judgment."

Sometimes that is just what visitors do say with their eyes, even if
their lips say something else.

In practice you cannot thus invade your next-door neighbour's house in a
large town, and indeed I would not have you offer any direct advance to
your next-door neighbour. I would only have you abstain from
deliberately avoiding the casual opportunities which come at intervals
for an amiable encounter. I mentioned the next-door neighbour simply to
illustrate more dramatically my point about homes being desert isles
when they ought to be centres of social interchange. It is seldom that
the actual next-door neighbour happens to have in him the raw material
of a bosom crony. But he is a type and index of other individuals who
do have in them that raw material.

       *       *       *       *       *

You may ask:

"Why should I be bothered to make acquaintances? I have enough to do to
look after my own affairs without looking into other people's."

To which question there are two answers. First, unless you are unusually
situated you haven't enough to do in looking after your own affairs. A
vast number of mature and respectable persons, if not the majority, go
to bed too early simply because they find the evening tedious from lack
of occupation. They can think of nothing else to do, and so they go to
bed. A doctor in large general practice once told me that his experience
had taught him that people slept too much. Indeed, he said more. His
phrase was: "They sleep themselves stupid." And I am convinced that this
is the fact.

And the second answer is that there is no suggestion of being "bothered"
with acquaintances. You don't make acquaintances with a view to
improving their eternal welfare, but with a view to improving your own.
Your scheme is, very properly, to get something out of them, not to
give them something. It is true that you do give them something--no
doubt as much as you get. It is true that when acquaintance has
developed into friendship you may have the rare and precious opportunity
to render help in misfortune without receiving anything back at
all,--than which there can be no more satisfactory experience. But all
that is by the way. You make acquaintances in order to keep yourself
alive. Millions of dead individuals go to and fro in the world, and do
not suspect that they are dead. Nevertheless they are dead--because they
are not alive. And you make acquaintances in order that they may pull
you out of yourself, out of your self-complacency, out of your certainty
that your views are the only right views.

Nearly all friendless people--I mean those who might have friends but
won't--are opinionated, narrow-minded, disdainful, in addition to being
half-blind and half-deaf. Contact, the friction of contact, is needed to
stimulate life and to sharpen sensations. It is as beneficial as massage
to the body.

Again, if you happen to be the head of a household with an uprising
family, and you do not cultivate friendships because you don't want to
be disturbed in your everlasting doze, how do you expect the boys, and
especially the girls, to meet the mates whom they are entitled to meet
and ought to meet? I have known heads of families who, having
steadfastly discouraged acquaintance-making for a quarter of a century,
have had the nerve superiorly to twit their daughters with being old
maids! Whereas those heads of families ought for their wicked negligence
to have worn sackcloth publicly in their city trains.

But none of the above reasons is the real reason for creating a circle
of friends. The real reason is that it is amusing, distracting,
interesting to do so. The real reason is seldom a moral one--and why
should it be? To be "interested in people," curiously and benevolently
interested, not censoriously interested, is one of the finest resources
that a man possesses against ennui and the disappointingness of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are those who say that they cannot find suitable people to make
friends of. These persons remind me of the persons who cannot earn a
living, who are chronically out of a situation. Both sorts lack the
necessary desire. What you sufficiently desire to do, you will do. I do
not believe that desire creates that which it wants. Nor do I believe in
what is called by mysterious professors of mind "the power of thought."
When somebody tells me he wished so powerfully overnight for a
five-pound note that he found one miraculously lying on his window-sill
the next morning, I would not address him as a liar, but I would say
that he had been strangely favoured by coincidence.

For me the practical value of desire lies in the fact that it keeps your
eyes open to opportunities, and, the opportunities seen, it forces you
to explore them; and the practical value of desire lies in nothing else.

If, by thoroughly convincing yourself of the general advisability of
making friends, you have developed the desire for friends, friends you
will assuredly procure. How? Well, it is impossible to say. One's
friends arrive by the most surprising roads, as the history of
friendship shows. "I never imagined, when I first met you, that we
should become such friends." A common phrase! And the more frank and
intimate will even say sometimes: "At first I couldn't see such a great
deal _in_ you"--meaning that they hadn't been able to see anything in
him at all. A not unusual occurrence!

Of course some people are handicapped. For example, those who have to
tear up their roots and go to live among strangers in a strange place.
Yet have I known people go into a strange place, and friends for them
would seem to spring up out of the ground--not because they were wealthy
or generous, but because they were obviously interested in their
fellow-creatures.

Another handicap is the secret conviction of one's own dullness and
unattractiveness. Now I will not say that there are no dull persons on
earth; but I will say that I have never known one. Some people are more
interesting, some people are less interesting, but all people are
interesting; and the man who is convinced that he can interest nobody
ought to try hard to get rid of this absurd and disastrous delusion.
Every spirit has its fellow, and most spirits have hundreds and
thousands of fellows. Your town is full of your fellow-spirits. But to
get at them you must have faith in yourself. It is a terrible scourge
to think, as too many of us do, that in some mysterious way we are
unique and cut off from mankind. Nobody is unique. Everybody has points
of sympathy with everybody else. All social existence proves this.

       *       *       *       *       *

An acquaintance is a fish hooked; a friend is a fish landed. Landing a
fish is an art by itself. Having made use of the metaphor, I will drop
it and employ another one for a moment. Friendships are not like
mushrooms--they cannot healthily grow in a night. "Easy come, easy go,"
is a maxim that applies as well to friendships as to money.

The tendency is often to rush into a friendship, to take the
acquaintance by storm and then to invest him, in one's fancy, with all
the fine qualities known to exist in humanity.

Some people fall into friendship as some other people fall in love. The
chosen friend is for them the pearl of created beings. His good
characteristics are superlatively good, and even his bad characteristics
are somehow good. There never was another like him. In short, he is
perfection.

The whole process of this delusion is very dangerous. For the delusion
never lasts and cannot last. Just as the lover at length sees his love
as she actually is, so will the hasty friend-maker see the friend as he
actually is. And then the process of disillusion is as painful as the
process of delusion was glorious--nay, more painful.

Move towards friendship slowly; move cautiously, for the sake both of
your own dignity and of your place in the friend's esteem. It is not
well that he should look down on you for over-eagerness, or that he
should infer from your demeanour that you are starving for friends, or
that he should despise your judgment. In your enthusiasm do not burn
your boats. Keep open a line of retreat. For you may discover that you
are in an impossible position in regard to him. He may develop into a
nuisance, an affliction, a plague, an incubus, a nightmare, a perfect
poison. And if this comes to pass, and you have set him on a throne and
flung bouquets at him and chanted pans to him, what are you going to do
about it? You are helpless. He has acquired dominion over you.

Of course you might throw him out of the house, or bolt the front door
in his face, or send him a note to say that he was the greatest
disappointment of your life; but pride would prevent you from any of
these acts, for to dismiss him would be to admit that you were a bad
judge of men, and you would die in agony sooner than admit such a thing.
How many such tragedies as I have sketched have happened! The annals of
social life are strewn with them.

Remember that if the budding friend frequents your society he does so
because he finds you attractive. Do not cheapen your attractiveness. Do
not give it away. Set a price on it. Friendship is a bargain. All which
sounds material, calculating, gross; but is in truth merely prudent and
a safeguard against calamity. Friend-making is always a great adventure,
with vast possibilities of good and also of evil. Therefore guard as
carefully as you can against the possibilities of evil.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another axiom for friend-makers. Do not criticise the fellow-spirit. Do
not take advantage of a growing intimacy to try to improve that
particular specimen of humanity. (Except, of course, by the force of
silent example.)

Some people have a marked and exasperating tendency to "take in hand"
their friends and do them good. It is as if they said to their friends:

"Now you are splendid; but if you follow my advice you will be still
more splendid. I want you to be perfect because you are my friend. Let
us round off this corner. Let us fill out that hollow; let us stiffen up
that weak spot; and all will be well. I am treating you as a true
friend. I am treating you for your own good. You ought really to be
pleased that you have fallen into my kind, helpful hands."

Women especially are inclined to affect this attitude. It is, as a rule,
nothing but impudence; and it discloses a horrid lack of humour. In
friend-making you are not "out" to uplift the human race. You are out to
appreciate and find pleasure in the human race. Your "lay" is not the
moral lay. Hence what you have to do is to take the friend as he is, to
select the best parts of him, to give him the best parts of yourself,
not to disturb the rest, and to leave well alone.

If you absolutely must strive to bring humanity to perfection, you had
better join one of the ten thousand societies which exist for that
laudable and unattainable purpose, instead of practising informally
upon the defenceless creature on your own hearth. Friendship is not an
occasion for mutual improvement; it is an occasion for mutual enjoyment.
The enjoyment itself, without conscious aid from either of the parties,
will work all the good, the improvement, and the uplift of which any
friendship is capable. Judge not. Delight in. Luxuriate in. Any other
course is only too liable to take the bloom off an exquisite fruit.

       *       *       *       *       *

And another axiom for friend-makers. Friendship is more than intimacy,
for enemies can be intimate, and in fact the deadliest enemies are often
intimate enemies. But, though friendship is more than intimacy, it does
involve intimacy. Intimacy involves confidences, self-revelations. You
must, if you are to derive the full benefit from friendship, give as
much confidence as you receive, and reveal as much as is revealed to
you.

And yet there are a number of over-canny or cowardly persons who will
ingeniously draw forth confidences and self-revelations without
rendering anything of the sort in return. No friendship can yield the
maximum results in these conditions, which inevitably more or less
stultify the relationship by producing secret resentments on one side
and accumulating undue reserves on the other. Both the resentments and
the reserves are toxic in their effect.

And yet another maxim. Do not present any one with a monopoly of your
friendship. There may be a friend-in-chief, but if there is, let him
have a few rivals. It is not unknown that households exist which have
only one friend. The householders have got him and, content with the
feat of getting him, have closed down the enterprise of collecting
friends. They will in all probability suffer. The chances are a hundred
to one that the sole friend will abuse his exalted position. Freed from
competition, he will go the way of all monopolists. He will become a
tyrant; he will ruthlessly impose himself (though his exterior may be
mild and his manners unexceptionable). He will intimidate. His
preferences and his dislikes will govern the policy of the household.
The members of the household will think twice about wiping their noses
without previously consulting him, and nothing will overthrow him save
death or a regular earthquake of a quarrel.




PUBLICITY FOR JOURNALISM


Are journalists appreciated at their true value by the public whom they
serve? The answer is that they are not. The daily paper is a daily
miracle; and the public takes it up with no more awe than it takes up a
slice of bacon.

This indifference is due to ignorance and nothing else, for the public
is always ready, even anxious, to wonder and admire. When a paper has
accomplished some great stunt, such as chartering a fleet of aeroplanes
to bring Londonwards pictures of a prize fight in Peru at an average
speed of ninety miles an hour, the public is amazed and full of
worship--for about ten minutes. But show it a sub-editor and it will see
merely a tired man in that marvellous person. Indeed, the public doesn't
know what a sub-editor is, and generally thinks he is the
assistant-editor, a sort of grand vizier to the sultan, the editor; a
notion to make any sub-editor smile in the sardonic way in which
sub-editors do smile.

Does the simple public realise the immense power over its
thought-perspective of the anonymous gentleman who nightly decides what
item is to have the place of honour on the principal news page, what
adjectives are to be applied to the said item, what other items are to
be compressed into obscure corners, what items are to be shut out
entirely? Does it realise the subtle, secret influence upon them of the
genius who has to cut three inches out of a ten-inch story? Does it
realise what a thorn in the flesh to the news-editor is the
advertisement-manager, and _vice versa_? Does it realise that the
contents of a paper have to be compelled to dovetail into each other
like the parts of a Chinese puzzle, and that it is not by chance and the
benevolence of heaven that a story ends exactly where it does end--not a
line sooner nor a line later?

Does it realise that the contents of a paper must fit the acreage of the
pages far more accurately than a boot fits a foot? Does it realise that
an editor always has more matter than he can find room for? Does it
realise that when the way of the world has been inexcusably eventless
for twenty-four hours the newspaper men have to set to work to paint it
and dress it and adorn it till it has the air of positively vibrating
with vast happenings?

Does it realise that time is of the very essence of the whole business,
that even if a comet hits the earth the parcelled papers must be in the
motors and carts at a given instant without fail? Does it realise that a
celebrity who has the bad taste to die unexpectedly at 10 p.m. may upset
the carefully co-ordinated labours of a hundred human beings and cast a
huge building into dismay and confusion? Does it realise that the
phrasing of a headline or a contents-bill often depends on the number of
letters in the words? Does it realise....

       *       *       *       *       *

But I must not continue the catalogue, of which, indeed, I have yet
mentioned only a few details, and those by no means the most important
and the most fundamental.

Anyhow, the answer in every case is: "No, the public does not realise."

My point is, that the ignorance of the public in these high matters is
the fault of journalists themselves. An editor will send a man a hundred
and fifty miles to get the first-hand story of some ridiculous crime or
accident, while within his own walls he has a living, thrilling,
sensational organism, an account of which the public would read with
eagerness and delight. Every newspaper ought to give at intervals an
account of this or that branch of its organisation, mechanical and
otherwise, of its development and progress, of its difficulties and its
achievements. No feature could be more popular. If, instead of offering
money prizes for the correctest prophecies of football results, the
paper would give to the winning prophets an order of admission to make
an "accompanied tour" of the paper's premises while its football edition
was actually being prepared and sent to press and whisked out into the
streets, the ensuing mouth-to-mouth publicity would be enormous, and the
ultimate gain in circulation very enheartening. And at no cost! (The
proprietors of a big department store would give five hundred pounds for
similar publicity--and jump at it!)

There need be no fear about uncovering mysteries. The more such
mysteries are uncovered, the more wondrous will they appear, the more
prestige will they acquire in the lay mind. After a few such doses
administered to the public, it would no longer be true to say of the man
in the street that:

    A journalist by Thames's brim,
    A yellow journalist was to him,
    And it was nothing more.

No! Journalists would be followed by gaping crowds down Fleet Street.
The trouble with journalism--and I have always said it--is that
journalists are too modest and retiring. The remedy is with themselves.




IS THE NOVEL DECAYING?


If I have heard it once I have heard it fifty times during the past
year, the complaint that no young novelists with promise of first-rate
importance are rising up to take the place of the important middle-aged.
Upon this matter I have two lines of thought:

What makes a novel important enough to impress itself upon both the
discriminating few and the less discriminating many? (For first-class
prestige is not obtained unless both sorts of readers are in the end
impressed.) The first thing is, that the novel should seem to be true.
It cannot seem true if the characters do not seem to be real. Style
counts; plot counts; invention counts; originality of outlook counts;
wide information counts; wide sympathy counts; but none of these counts
anything like so much as the convincingness of the characters. If the
characters are real, the novel will have a chance; if they are not,
oblivion will be its portion.

The Sherlock Holmes stories have still a certain slight prestige.
Because of the ingenuity of the plots? No. Because of the convincingness
of the principal character? No. The man is a conventional figure. The
reason is in the convincingness of the ass Watson. Watson has real life.
His authenticity convinces every one, and the books in which he appears
survive by reason of him. Why are _The Three Musketeers_ and _Twenty
Years After_ the most celebrated of Dumas' thousand volumes? Many other
novels of Dumas have very marvellous and brilliant plots. For instance,
_Monte Cristo_. But the Musketeer volumes outshine them easily, because
of the superior convincingness of the characters. Why is Sinclair
Lewis's _Babbitt_ a better book than his _Main Street_? Because in the
latter the chief character (heroine) is a sentimental stick, while in
the former the chief character, Babbitt himself, is a genuine individual
that all can recognise for reality.

       *       *       *       *       *

To render secure the importance of a novel it is necessary that the
characters should clash one with another, so as to produce strong
emotion, first in the author himself and second in the reader. This
strong emotion cannot be produced unless the characters are _kept_ true
throughout. You cannot get strength out of falsity. The moment the still
small voice whispers to the reader about a character, "He wouldn't have
acted like that," the book is imperilled. The reader may say: "This is
charming. This is amusing. This is original. This is clever. This is
exciting." But if he also has to say, "It's not true," the success of
the book cannot be permanent.

The foundation of good fiction is character-creating, and nothing else.
The characters must be so fully true that they possess their own
creator. Every deviation from truth, every omission of truth,
necessarily impairs the emotional power and therefore weakens the
interest.

I think that we have to-day a number of young novelists who display all
manner of good qualities--originality of view, ingenuity of presentment,
sound commonsense, and even style. But they appear to me to be
interested more in details than in the full creation of their individual
characters. They are so busy with states of society as to half-forget
that any society consists of individuals; and they attach too much
weight to cleverness, which is perhaps the lowest of all artistic
qualities. I have seldom read a cleverer book than Virginia Woolf's
_Jacob's Room_, a novel which has made a great stir in a small world.
It is packed and bursting with originality, and it is exquisitely
written. But the characters do not vitally survive in the mind, because
the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness. I
regard this book as characteristic of the new novelists who have
recently gained the attention of the alert and the curious; and I admit
that for myself I cannot yet descry any coming big novelists.

But nevertheless--and here is my second line of thought--I am fairly
sure that big novelists are sprouting up. Only we do not know where to
look for them. Or we cannot recognise them when we see them. It is
almost certain that the majority of the great names of 1950 are writing
to-day without any general appreciation. They have not been spotted as
winners by the sporting prophets, and publicity paragraphs are not
published about them. Few or none recognised the spring of greatness in
the early Hardy, or in the early Butler, or in the early George Moore,
or in the early Meredith. And there is scarcely a permanently great name
in the whole history of fiction who was not when he first wrote
overshadowed in the popular and even in the semi-expert esteem by much
inferior novelists. The great did not at first abound in glitter and
cleverness. As a rule they began by being rather clumsy, poor dears!
Hence I am not pessimistic about the future of the novel.




MARCEL PROUST


Two of the contributors to the recent Proust memorial number of _La
Nouvelle Revue Franaise_ remind me that I met Marcel Proust many years
ago at a Christmas Eve party given by Madame Edwards (now Madame Jos
Sert) in her remarkable flat on the Quai Voltaire, Paris. (Not that I
needed reminding.) With some eagerness I turned up the year, 1910, in my
journal. What I read there was this: "Doran came on Sunday night for
dinner. We went on to Misia Edwards' 'Rveillon' and got home at 4 a.m."
Not a word more! And I cannot now remember a single thing that Proust
said.

I have, however, a fairly clear recollection of his appearance and
style: a dark, pale man, of somewhat less than forty, with black hair
and moustache; peculiar; urbane; one would have said, an sthete; an
ideal figure, physically, for Bunthorne; he continually twisted his
body, arms, and legs into strange curves, in the style of Lord Balfour
as I have observed Lord Balfour in the restaurants of foreign hotels. I
would not describe him as self-conscious; I would say rather that he
was well aware of himself. Although he had then published only one
book, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_--and that fourteen years before--and
although the book had had no popular success, Proust was undoubtedly in
1910 a considerable lion. He sat at the hostess's own table and
dominated it, and everybody at the party showed interest in him. Even I
was somehow familiar with his name. As for _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_,
I have not read it to this day.

A few weeks before his death, while searching for something else in an
overcrowded bookcase, I came across my first edition of _Du Ct de chez
Swann_, and decided to read the book again. I cared for it less, and I
also cared for it more, than in 1913. The _longueurs_ of it seemed to me
to be insupportable, the clumsy centipedalian crawling of the
interminable sentences inexcusable. The lack of form or construction may
disclose artlessness, but it signifies effrontery too. Why should not
Proust have given himself the trouble of learning to "write," in the
large sense? Further, the monotony of subject and treatment becomes
wearisome. (I admit that it is never so distressing in _Swann_ as in the
later volumes of _Guermantes_ and _Sodome et Gomorrhe_.) On the other
hand, at the second reading, I was absolutely enchanted by some of the
detail.

       *       *       *       *       *

About two-thirds of Proust's work must be devoted to the minuti of
social manners, the rendering ridiculous of a million varieties of snob.
At this game Proust is a master. (Happily he does not conceal that, with
the rest of mankind, he loves ancient blood and distinguished
connections.) He will write you a hundred pages about a fashionable
dinner at which nothing is exhibited except the littleness and the
navet of human nature. His interest in human nature, if intense and
clairvoyant, is exceedingly limited. Foreign critics generally agree
that the English novelist has an advantage over the French in that he
walks all round his characters and displays them to you from every side.
I have heard this over and over again in conversation in Paris, and I
think it is fairly true, though certainly Balzac was the greatest
exponent of complete display. Proust never "presents" a character; he
never presents a situation; he fastens on one or two aspects of a
character or a situation, and strictly ignores all the others. And he is
scarcely ever heroical, as Balzac was always; he rarely exalts, and he
nearly always depreciates in a tolerant way.

Again, he cannot control his movements; he sees a winding path off the
main avenue, and scampers away further and further and still further,
merely because at the moment it amuses him to do so. You ask yourself:
He is lost--will he ever come back? The answer is, that often he never
comes back, and when he does come back he employs a magic but illicit
carpet, to the outrage of principles of composition which cannot be
outraged in a work of the first order. This animadversion applies not
only to any particular work, but to his work as a whole. The later books
are orgies of self-indulgence; the work has ruined the _moral_ of the
author: phenomenon common enough.

Two achievements in Proust's output I should rank as great. The first is
the section of _Swann_ entitled "Un amour de Swann." He had a large
theme here--love and jealousy. The love is physical and the object of it
contemptible; the jealousy is fantastic. But the affair is handled with
tremendous, grave, bitter, impressive power. The one fault of it is that
he lets Swann go to a _soire musicale_ and cannot, despite several
efforts, get him away from it in time to save the interest of the
situation entire. Yet in the _soire musicale_ divagation there are
marvellous, inimitable things.

The second achievement, at the opening of _Sodome et Gomorrhe_, is the
psychological picture of the type-pederast. An unpromising subject,
according to British notions! Proust evolves from it beauty, and a
heart-rending pathos. Nobody with any perception of tragedy can read
these wonderful pages and afterwards regard the pervert as he had
regarded the pervert before reading them. I reckon them as the
high-water of Proust.

Speaking generally, Proust's work declined steadily from _Swann_. _A
l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs_ was a fearful fall, and as volume
followed volume the pearls were strung more and more sparsely on the
winding string. That Proust was a genius is not to be doubted; and I
agree that he made some original discoveries in the byways of
psychological fiction. But that he was a supreme genius, as many
critics, both French and English, would have us believe, I cannot
admit.




SHELLEY, FROM PARIS


M. Andr Maurois (justifiably admired in Britain as the author of _Les
Silences du Colonel Bramble_) has written a book called _Ariel ou la vie
de Shelley_. It is a most diverting and instructive work. It is also
quite short, probably not over 70,000 words, probably the shortest
biography of Shelley ever written for persons of taste. All English
written biographies are too long, even those by Boswell and Lockhart.
Some of them are so long that they never end. The French are not as a
race very interested in literature, but at any rate they have had the
sense not to tolerate long biographies in several tomes weighing ten
pounds a tome.

M. Maurois' book takes nearly the form of a novel. In his preface he
implies that it somehow is a novel, though factually (and of course
spiritually) true to life. He guarantees its truth by the statement that
he has given to Shelley no phrase and no thought not to be found in
Shelley's letters, his poems, or the memoirs of his friends. The
guarantee is insufficient. Any journalist who knows his business can
stick to facts, and, by omitting facts, produce a totally false
impression. M. Maurois has omitted facts. He has omitted almost all the
facts relating to Shelley the poet. His main interest is Shelley's
domesticity, and he has handled the subject with gleeful, cruel, and
tender irony. His style has not quite the polish of Voltaire's or
Anatole France's, but it is elegant enough and urbane without mercy.

       *       *       *       *       *

For myself, I know nothing except what one picks up from encyclopdias
and reviews about the life of Shelley. I always suspected that the
Shelley circle must be a queer lot, but I had no idea that they were so
queer as M. Maurois beautifully shows them to have been. What a crew of
fanatics, zealots, conscienceless idealists, simpletons, sex-ridden
women, maladroit and pretentious dabblers in the great art of existing
on earth! And the Godwins! My God! The Godwins! Byron perhaps comes out
best. He was capable of behaving infamously, but in life he had a sense
of style. Shelley had not, though according to Byron he could walk
through a drawing-room with more style than anybody. He must have been
fantastically terrible to live with. Some of his far-famed generosity
strikes me as being worse than silly; it approaches the criminal. His
death was the direct consequence of inexcusable folly; and instead of
weeping for Adonais one is inclined to exclaim curtly: "The fellow asked
for it."

Considered as a study in the essential frivolity of self-complacent
theorists, M. Maurois' book is masterly, ruthless, side-splitting,
absorbing. Naturally, as a novelist, he has simplified, and so
sharpened, his major effects; but not, I think, unfairly. I count his
book as an antidote to Dowden. (Not that I have read Dowden, or ever
shall, but one has one's notions of Dowden.) It is a pity that he has
not handled Shelley the poet. The more I read Shelley the more I am
convinced of his immense greatness, which to my mind exceeds the
greatness of, for example, Keats. And I should have liked the chance of
seeing my Anglo-Saxon estimate of it corrected by the sardonic Latin
judgment of an ironist such as M. Maurois is.




THE SAFEGUARDING OF BRITISH MUSIC ACT


The great international problem raised by the project for bringing the
Vienna Opera Company (complete with orchestra) to London had not been
settled when I made inquiries in high quarters just before sitting down
to write at the end of January 1924. The one thing then certain was that
amateurs of grand opera were very disturbed by the trade-union
opposition to the visit. And they doubtless still are. I know that I
shall be passionately aggrieved if the Vienna Opera Company does not
ultimately appear in London. I have never heard it. It may disappoint
me. Most continental opera companies have disappointed me; and I state
solemnly that, though I must have seen opera in at least twenty theatres
outside Britain, I have seen as good performances in London as anywhere.
Still, I want the Vienna Company to appear in London. In particular I
want to see the _Rosenkavalier_ conducted by Strauss and played and sung
by Austrian artists, including a Viennese orchestra.

I say further that I shall be extremely resentful against the Musicians'
Union and the Ministry of Labour if between them they for ever prevent
the Viennese invasion; and my resentment will be shared by large numbers
of opera-goers. How startling, novel, and delightful it would be to hear
grand opera in London that had been adequately rehearsed!

The Musicians' Union assert that their members can play as well as any
orchestral players in the world. I believe it; and I believe further
that they play on better instruments. But this seems to me to be beside
the point. The point here is, that even if all British players performed
on their instruments as divinely as the late Dsir Lalande performed on
the oboe and the cor anglais, the Viennese conductors could not possibly
get as Viennese a performance out of them as they get out of their
Austrian horde. And a stabilised orchestra (not a floating population
with a proportion of gifted persons who pay deputies to attend
rehearsals for them), under its habitual conductors, constitutes an
artistic entity which is just as individual as a Chaliapine and ought to
have the same right of entry into a free country as a Chaliapine has.

       *       *       *       *       *

The economic factor should, if at all possible, be kept out of an
artistic problem, and in the present case the economic factor cannot
indeed count, for there is, I am told and the Musicians' Union admit,
practically no unemployment among the Union members. Employers of
orchestral players have assured me that the supply of them is not equal
to the demand. Which cannot be said of conductors.

No trade union of British conductors exists--why not?--but if a union
did exist it would assuredly declare that unemployment among its members
was acute and that the matter urgently demanded attention. Similarly no
trade union of British solo instrumentalists exists, but if a union did
exist it would assuredly declare that unemployment among its members was
acute and that the matter urgently demanded attention.

The Musicians' Union, however, bears the misfortunes of conductors and
solo artists with admirable fortitude. It does not make common cause
with the conductors and the solo artists to exclude the job-filching
foreigner from these musical shores. A recent Philharmonic season, for
example, comprised six concerts, three of which were conducted by
foreigners, while at least a dozen good, sound, British conductors have
to spend their evenings at home reading scores. Has the Musicians' Union
revolted against this monstrous infraction of the Safeguarding of
British Music Act? Has it given an ultimatum to Sir Hugh Allen? Has it
announced that it will not permit British conductors to starve? Has it
struck?

But the Musicians' Union may argue that the Philharmonic is ruled by an
oligarchy, and that it really cannot be responsible for the shocking
anti-British policy of the Philharmonic, etc. etc. True. Then let us
take the London Symphony Orchestra, which I understand to be a
democratic enterprise run by orchestral players themselves. A recent
season of the L.S.O. season comprised ten concerts. Seven out of these
ten concerts were conducted by foreigners, and _all_ the solo
instrumentalists were foreigners. Further, only two British composers
were represented in the whole prospectus.

The protest of the Musicians' Union against the importation of foreign
players ought not to induce resentment in the breast of the musical
public. It ought to induce contempt. It does.

       *       *       *       *       *

The protest of the British National Opera Company is on a different
plane. I am not sure that the B.N.O.C. has had justice in its brief
career. I do not mean from the Press, which too often has printed about
it that most futile of all forms of criticism, the patriotic-laudatory.
I mean from the "keen" musical public in private talk--such talk being
probably more influential in the long run than any other propaganda. I
dare say that I have inveighed as bitterly as anybody against the
defects of the B.N.O.C. performances--and I cannot guarantee that I will
not inveigh again. The best parts of these representations are some of
the conducting, some of the individual singing, and some of the
orchestral playing. The worst are the entire staging, which is appalling
and seems to get more and more reactionary and stupid; the chorus work,
which for woodenness, thinness of tone, and comprehensive inefficiency
rivals that of a fashionable West End musical comedy; and some of the
orchestral playing. But the general level is not lower than the
continental, certainly not lower than that of Paris and Milan. The
B.N.O.C. has some positive artistic achievements to its credit, and if
it has done nothing whatever for the artistic renaissance of opera,
being content apparently to deepen the old ruts at a period when
opera-production is crying out for reform, we can scarcely blame the
managers.

For the managers have initiated a truly enormous enterprise, in face of
colossal difficulties. The enterprise, as such enterprises go, is still
in its infancy. Our expectations concerning it should be modest. On the
whole it is entitled to say that it is coming through. Of course it
cannot hope to count very seriously in the mundane movement of music
until it appoints to itself a supreme artistic director.[3] The absence
of such an official is the chief flaw in its constitution; when this is
remedied, and not before, we may be able honestly to apply to its
results some adjective other than "respectable." In the meantime we must
be sympathetic and patient, taking the good and leaving the bad. So much
for the artistic side.

       *       *       *       *       *

The protest of the B.N.O.C. against Viennese importations is purely
economic. It is said that a Viennese season would ruin the British
season. Now here we have to bear in mind that the B.N.O.C. has set out
to do what no organisation has ever yet succeeded in doing anywhere in
the world--to wit, make grand opera pay. Grand opera never has in the
long run paid. For example, before the war the Paris Opera gave about
200 performances a year and lost about 400 per performance. The State
made the taxpayer provide this deficit on the pleasures of the
enlightened--and rightly! Whether it frequents the opera or not, a
nation ought to pay for opera. Heaven knows what the New York
Metropolitan annually costs its backers!

There are people of great expert knowledge who affirm that to make grand
opera pay is impossible. The B.N.O.C. has not yet made grand opera pay;
nevertheless, it has come nearer to making it pay than we could
reasonably have anticipated. It may or may not succeed in its endeavour,
but if it succeeds it must succeed in natural conditions. To succeed
only in artificial conditions would be to fail.

The B.N.O.C. cannot fairly say to the nation:

"Look here, we lost 1, 17s. 6d. last season, and hence we ordain that
you shall have no opera but ours."

It might as well have said to engine-drivers:

"We forbid you to strike because in doing so you injure our nightly
receipts, and we are most laudably engaged in the furtherance of British
art."

The argument is human; but it is specious and absurd. If the Viennese
visit would have killed the B.N.O.C., then either the B.N.O.C. is not
worth keeping alive or the British public is not worthy of the B.N.O.C.
For myself I do not believe for a moment that the Viennese visit would
have killed the B.N.O.C. The B.N.O.C. might have lost some income for a
while, but all public entertainers must be prepared sometimes to drop
money. It is their privilege. On the other hand, the Viennese visit
would unquestionably have stimulated the taste for opera in this
country. The B.N.O.C. might have learned something from it, and quite
conceivably the B.N.O.C. might have emerged brilliantly from the
comparison and so have gained _kudos_, which ultimately means a bank
balance.


FOOTNOTES:

[3] This has since been done.




_THE PERFECT FOOL_


A classic theatre, a beautiful auditorium, crowded in every part with
people of whom quite a fair proportion know what they are about when
they listen to an opera. Royalty in the royal box, with luscious flowers
offered by a management conscious of the occasion. The first night of
the British operatic season, and the first performance of a new opera by
Gustav Holst, a mature British composer whom we all admire very much,
some of us enthusiastically, religiously. Apparition of Eugene Goossens,
young, pale (not from fright but from habit), knowing the whole job,
expert, highly gifted, comprehending, self-reliant, inspiring
confidence, in a word--our pet. We stand up. _God Save the King_--with
some of the instruments decidedly off the beat at first. We sit down. A
"Fugal Overture"--not that the fugality of the thing was very plain to
me. A pause. It is nearly as exciting as the start of Beckett _v._
Carpentier. The curtain rises....

Less than an hour and a half later the matter is over and the auditorium
empty. And in the dingy foyer and on the grand staircase of the vast
and historic shanty, to be kept lighted for an hour so that the
initiated may discourse at length to one another upon what they have
just witnessed, the quidnuncs, journalistic and others, are pacing up
and down chattering tentatively and wondering what in God's name they
ought to say; and the knowledgeable, possessing taste, standards,
convictions, are moodily silent. For the applause at the end, though
generous and prolonged, lacked passion.

       *       *       *       *       *

However, there was no mystery at all about the affair, except for the
quidnuncs, most of whom, playing for safety, rushed off to Fleet Street
and wrote high-falutin' laudation as hard as they could for thirty
minutes. Holst had had an idea for a musical skit, which skit was to
take off all current opera from perhaps Donizetti to perhaps Stravinsky.
Yes, it was a most excellent idea, in which around the magic-potion
theme circled magicians, troubadours, parsifals, wanderers, erdas,
princesses, and spirits. And he had laid out the plan of it pretty well
for the stage, displaying a certain scenic sense, which only failed him
in one or two not unimportant details of construction. Nobody, for
instance, in the whole auditorium believed for a moment that the
magician would really have been such an ass as to recount the powers of
his potion to a talkative old woman, or, having done so, to leave the
colossal beaker unguarded for about a quarter of an hour. And Holst was
not well served by his producers. The high moments of the
potion-drinking, with superb opportunities for ridiculing the first act
of _Tristan_, were ruined by ineffective handling; ditto the nascent
love of the princess for the parsifal. The scenery had nothing skittish,
and displayed that exasperating admixture of black curtains and crude,
chromographic realism which so gravely impaired the production of
_Tristan_ the previous year. The costumes were acutely Covent Gardenish,
and not a bit skittish. The ballet was conventional and vapid (to
adorable music). The lighting, I admit, was skittish--and I hope
intentionally so.

       *       *       *       *       *

The evening might have safely survived these drawbacks, if Holst had
been well served by himself. He was not. I should be buried for ever in
ridicule if I announced: "I shall write the libretto of an opera, and as
I have my notions about music I may as well write the music too." Yet
this, _mutatis mutandis_, is almost what Holst did. He has, of course,
the general intelligence of a fine, creative artist, but when it comes
to the point, he is a mere amateur at libretto writing. (He is worse
even than the Wagner who committed the libretto of _The Twilight of the
Gods_.) He simply does not possess the sense of words. He knows what is
funny in life, but he does not know what is funny on the stage. He
doubtless feels humorous and means to be humorous, but he cannot "get it
over."

Further, all the performers seemed to be puzzled, seemed not quite to
know what they were expected to aim at. They were rarely humorous, and
never humorous with distinction. I would not blame them. They had an
impossible task. If the joke as a whole fell flat, as it did, the reason
was that it was bound to fall flat, because it was conceived on the
wrong scale. Successful skits should not have the scale and apparatus of
epics. You cannot in a skit effectively break a leviathan on a titanic,
slow-revolving wheel. What you have to do is to make him squirm with a
lively hat-pin. The _tempo_ was too deliberate, the machinery too
enormous, the pother too grandiose. The mountain was there all right,
but the mouse was not even ridiculous. Nevertheless, the British
National Opera Company did well to produce _The Perfect Fool_, and has
thereby acquired merit. And nevertheless _The Perfect Fool_ is
incomparably the best modern British opera. So there you are, and you
are requested to make what you can of the situation.




THE BIG SHOP


When I was young my grandparents, uncle, and aunt kept a draper's shop,
and I lived with them for years. So that I know something about
shopkeeping from the inside. Perhaps this fact partly explains my keen
and admiring interest in the activities of the modern big stores; but
not wholly, for I have just the same interest in the big hotels, and as
a child I certainly never lived in a hotel, nor did any of my relatives
ever keep a hotel.

To my mind the big shops and the big hotels are among the most
wonderful, picturesque, and characteristic social phenomena of this
epoch, and I could not say which attracts me the more.

The arch-director of one of the largest London stores once took me into
his secret bower, and briefly explained to me, with documentary aids,
the working of his organisation. It did not amaze me, because I pretty
well knew, from experience and observation, what to expect; but
nevertheless it was miraculous.

I wished that some of the young or old ladies who, with all flags
flying, sail through a big shop as nonchalantly as if they were cutting
bread-and-butter, could be initiated into the mysterious creative
activities that lie behind what their eyes devour.

       *       *       *       *       *

Most customers take the big shop for granted. They see a huge building,
full of various stock, and a staff of human beings (chiefly feminine)
all ready to minister to their desires, and they do simply take the
whole affair for granted--as if it had grown there the night before,
like a mushroom.

They do not, for instance, reflect humbly upon even the acres of charing
which must be daily accomplished by numerous persons (never seen), ere
the place can decently unbar its doors to the public; probably they
assume that the difference between the disordered and littered shop at
six o'clock in the evening and the spick-and-span shop at nine o'clock
in the morning is brought about by magic.

They put a question to an assistant, and never ask themselves how she
gets into the shop, where she eats, where she sleeps, who taught her
where everything in her department is, and the qualities of everything
and the reasons for everything; who taught her how to phrase her
replies with a view to lucrative business, and especially who taught her
to smile amiably when a customer has turned an entire department upside
down and bought nothing.

Again, they are apt to think of a big store as manned mainly by
assistants behind counters. It does not occur to them that on the
innumerable staff are people who live for nothing but the care of
horses, people who live for nothing but electricity, people who live for
nothing but cooking, people who live for nothing but motors, people who
live for nothing but paper and string, people who live for nothing but
tapping typewriters, people who live for nothing but rows and columns of
figures, people who live for nothing but a post office, people who live
for nothing but the dressing of windows, and people who live for nothing
but the maintenance of discipline and mutual goodwill among people in
somewhat trying conditions.

They see a full-page advertisement with a score or two of illustrations
in a daily paper, and they do not reflect that every illustration has
had to be carefully drawn according to minute instructions, and all the
letterpress ingeniously composed by professional writers, and then the
whole page fitted together like a Chinese puzzle and everything checked
and the proof corrected,--I say nothing of the field-marshal who fights
the battle of the price of advertisements with the newspaper owners!

They buy some object, and do not reflect that that object has to be
replaced as quickly as possible, and that wishing will not replace it.

This brings me to the buyers, never seen, or if seen not recognised for
the terribly important and brainy and highly-paid individuals they in
fact are--the watchers of the markets of the world, the watchers of the
changes in public taste, the courted of the wholesale houses, the
supreme bargainers, the very keys of success or failure!

       *       *       *       *       *

I will not continue in this strain. But I must mention what in my
opinion is the greatest feat of these establishments: namely, the
changing of the tone and spirit of shopkeeping.

In former days when you went into a British shop the demeanour of the
persons in charge thereof plainly expressed the following idea:

"Look here! This is really rather annoying. Here's another of these
customers coming in to bother us again! Why can't they leave us alone?"

Or:

"Now you will please understand, you customer, that we have certain
things to sell, and only certain things, and if you don't like them you
can leave them and clear out."

Such a demeanour still lingers in a few small "select" West End shops,
but the big stores have practically killed it. The demeanour of the big
stores says:

"Our scheme is to make all the money we can, but we know we can only do
it by selling you what you want to buy, not what we want to sell. We may
lose on some transactions, but we don't care. Our aim is to serve you,
and nothing is too much trouble for us."

The finest illustration of the new method is shown in an incident which
so far as I know is now related for the first time in print. The waggish
son of a famous sporting peer entered a very big stores and said to the
first floor-walker he met:

"I want to see some elephants, please."

"Certainly, sir," replied the floor-walker, imperturbably. "I will just
telephone and find out if the manager of the wild animal department is
in his office."

Presently the wag was ushered into an office.

"You wish to see some elephants, sir. African or Asiatic?"

"Asiatic," murmured the wag, somewhat frightened.

"Of course, we don't keep them here, sir, but I shall be happy to drive
you down to the elephant stables at once if you can spare the time."

The wag was driven in a handsome car to a town some twenty miles out of
London. A circus had encamped there, and the telegraph had been set to
work. The wag inspected two elephants and inquired the prices--and
looked foolish.

"I'll think it over," said he apologetically.

"Certainly, sir," said the official of the store. "We should not expect
an immediate decision. It is one o'clock. May I offer you lunch at The
Peacock before we start back?"

The wag had a free lunch and was delivered free at his own door. Much
paying business of a more commonplace nature than elephants resulted
from this episode, which breathed the very spirit of the modern store.

The charm of the big store springs from the fact that it is more than a
universal shop--it is a universal exhibition, always open and always
free. In material matters it keeps you up to date with the progress of
the world, and in so far as it does so it is an education for everybody
who enters. It is also a tonic and a stirrer of imagination and of
ambition in the too sluggish breast.

You may, and generally do, go into a store to buy, but that is only a
part of your aim. You go in order to watch human nature, to see what
other people are buying, to compare your taste with other people's
tastes, and to criticise both yours and theirs. You go, further, to see
what you would like or would not like to buy, and what you would buy if
you could afford to buy it. And if you emerge from the store disgusted
with your own clothes or your own furniture, or your own gadgets and
dodges for getting the most out of your daily home at the lowest
possible cost--so much the better, for laudable ambition is then born in
you.

There are individuals who assert that they hate shopping. Of them it is
to be said, either they do not know what shopping is, or they have not
acquired the technique of shopping, or they are blind and deaf to the
great spectacle of the world, or they are paupers, or they are liars.

Fortunately the number of haters of shopping has creditably diminished
within the last quarter of a century. The big stores by their insidious
arts have seen to that. The big stores have transformed shopping into a
pastime--perhaps dangerous, but a pastime.

We may wonder sometimes how if you buy a shilling's worth of firewood
from them they can afford, besides delivering the sticks at your door in
a five-ton motor-lorry, to offer you gratis a clubroom, an information
bureau, a writing-room, notepaper, and a sort of permanent Wembley. But
that aspect of the transaction need not trouble us. The big stores have
thought it carefully out. The thing does indeed pay, and their dividends
prove it.

We read of the marts of old--Tyre, Sidon, Rome, Venice--and we regret
the departed picturesqueness of times past. But we need not regret it,
and we ought to be ashamed to regret it. No mart of old could ever have
rivalled in picturesqueness, in colour, in riches, in variety, and in
fascination the big stores of the great cities of the world to-day.

No mart of old was ever fed by so many ships from such distant ports as
the big stores of our era.

It is as certain as anything in the future can ever be that when this
civilisation has fallen into ruins and ashes--as, of course, it must do
sooner or later--the big stores, which we now take for granted, will be
presented to the historical students of a few thousand years hence as
incredible marvels of romance and vitality and enterprise, and those
students will sigh because for them the age of miracles is long past.




INSOMNIA


This subject should not be handled lightly, nor without a kindly regard
for the sensibility of the great fellowship of non-sleepers, who as a
class or caste appointed to suffer receive far less sympathy than they
deserve.

The victim of insomnia, having seen the slowness of dawn, arises with
every nerve tattered and the capacity for happiness ruined. His morning
is a desolation. After lunch nature is somewhat restored. After tea,
though still weak, he is quite gay--as one delivered out of hell. And
then comes the evening paper with the news that a very eminent medical
authority refuses credence to the assertions of wakeful patients about
their wakefulness. The resentment of the non-sleeper leaps up at such
wantonness, and, relapsing, he is thrown back into the pit.

No eminent medical authority ought to express his total incredulity,
and, even if he does, no reputable newspaper ought to publish it.
Moreover, I suspect that this particular authority was misreported. Is
the whole class to be counted as liars or self-deceivers because a man
who said that he didn't sleep a wink all night is obliged to admit that
he did not hear an express traction engine pass under his window at 5.0
a.m.? Suppose that the eminent authority remarked superiorly to a
sufferer, "How do _I_ know that you were awake for hours?" and the
sufferer replied that he had read a hundred pages of a novel during the
night, or had got up and smoked six cigarettes, or had got up and had a
meal or walked five hundred times round his bedroom! The eminent
authority would surely have to change his tune.

Nevertheless, I admit that in all probability most bad sleepers are
better sleepers than they think they are, and that in particular most
bad sleepers who say they have not slept a wink all night are mistaken.
Bad sleepers driven to despair will say nearly anything. I know a bad
sleeper (otherwise sane) who is seriously convinced that for a whole
year he never slept at all. It is extraordinarily difficult to be quite
sure that one has not been to sleep. When there is any doubt on the
point, one has slept; this is certain.

       *       *       *       *       *

If you have a quarters-chiming clock far enough away not to disturb you
and near enough to be heard if you are awake, and if you hear every
hour and every quarter strike throughout the night, then you may be
fairly sure that you have not slept a wink; but not quite sure; you may
have dozed half a dozen times.

It needs a practised judgment, unusual objectivity, an extraordinary
freedom from bias, and a timepiece with illuminated hands, to gauge even
approximately the quantity of sleep one has enjoyed in a given night.
The intensity of the sense of fatigue and of irritability on rising from
the rack is the surest test of the extent of wakefulness. And even this
test is dangerously fallible. For fatigue is toxic in origin and toxic
in effect. You may feel less tired after a four-hour night if the
umbilical region is behaving itself than after a six-hour night if it is
not. In fact, the solution of the problem of determining with any
precision the amount of sleep enjoyed is as impossible as the definition
of political honesty.

Still, I would maintain as axiomatic that people who believe themselves
to be chronically bad sleepers are bad sleepers. Beyond doubt they have
broken nights. And the notion that, the amount of sleep being equal, a
broken night is as good as an unbroken night is merely silly.

Sound sleepers, though they may otherwise have poor health, are as
odious as perfectly healthy persons. Their sympathetic imagination has
been weakened by nocturnal prosperity. They do not understand, and in
their arrogance and self-complacency they do not want to understand.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the most dreadful ordeals known to mankind, an ordeal calling for
the highest qualities of fortitude and composure, is to wake up
suddenly, night upon night, after an hour or two's sleep. One o'clock!
Two o'clock! Three o'clock! "God! Another bad night! Another ruined
morning!" Powerful is the mind that can keep control of itself in such
crises!

The disorder may, and often does, become acute to the point of
morbidity. As the sufferer at last feels sleep to be approaching he will
develop a fatal and asinine curiosity concerning the mysterious process
of going to sleep. His thoughts will run: "I am going off. In a moment
or a minute I ought to be asleep. How horridly fascinating to watch the
change, to try to follow it further than it can be followed!" ... He is
undone. Sleep has fled. The curiosity becomes an obsession. Madness is
at the other end of that street. Again, the sufferer may get into such a
condition of hopelessness and exhaustion that he cannot even attempt any
of the sleep-inducing devices known to bad sleepers. He simply lies
there, beaten.

I doubt if there is any remedy for insomnia considered as insomnia.
Sleeplessness is a symptom of disease, not the disease itself. It can
only be cured indirectly and by specialised professional skill. Few bad
sleepers realise this. Just as a man with a weak heart will marvellously
abstain from learning anything about that organ, so will the bad sleeper
continue to sleep badly for decades without seriously inquiring into the
root of the evil or causing it to be inquired into.

Palliatives of the symptom exist: monotonous repetitions, keeping the
mind empty, food, warm drink, cold drink, warm bath, cold bath, physical
exercises to restore the circulation of the blood, etc., etc. And some
of them are sometimes temporarily effective. But none of them will cure
the ailment of which insomnia is a symptom. All of them are in
conception unscientific, empiric, quack, and come under the sinister
classification of "muddling through." The idea of "inducing" sleep is
absurd. Sleep ought not to have to be enticed like a frightened fawn. It
should pounce on you like a tiger.




FRENCH AND ENGLISH


It is always great fun to compare the virtues, faults, and oddities of
two neighbouring races. It always will be. One of the foremost French
authorities on English character and habits, M. Andr Chevrillon, has
recently been enjoying this fun.

M. Chevrillon calls his article "Our English," because he has selected
for examination a typical English community in a hotel on the Riviera.
He says, and rightly, that national characteristics are more easily
judged in such surroundings than on the native soil of the specimens
judged.

But, having chosen such a colony and having observed that the English
remain English therein, he draws the conclusion that the English are
English to a greater degree than the French, for example, are French,
and that in the Englishman especially the national type prevails over
the individual. Which seems to me a strange way of arguing. At any rate,
I disagree with the conclusions.

       *       *       *       *       *

The French quarter of London is far more French than the English
quarters of Paris are English. You might walk a mile in the
Montparnasse quarter and see nothing English except a few Britishers.
You cannot walk a hundred yards in Soho without feeling that you are in
a foreign city, much more foreign than the Chinese quarter in Limehouse.
Then, in the matter of conforming to type, the French are to my mind the
greatest conformers to type in civilised Europe.

Eccentricity is not tolerated in France. If a Frenchman wants to condemn
a thing, he says first, "It isn't like anything else." This is a
proverbial French phrase. Whereas the English are notoriously tolerant
of the eccentric, and not half so socially critical as the French.

There are, of course, exceptions. M. Chevrillon says that before the war
a few Germans would drive the English out of any Riviera hotel, not
because they were Germans, but because at table they used a knife where
the English use a fork. This is both true and amusing. The Englishman's
ritual at table is the finest in the world, and he is a stickler for it.

An English Tory would stand the presence of a Bolshevik who ate
correctly, but he would never stand the presence of another Tory who
outraged him by inserting a potato into the cavity on the end of a
knife. No! You could not expect him to stand it. Nevertheless, the
Englishman is rarely in himself so unalterably English as all Frenchmen,
in no matter what environment, are French.

       *       *       *       *       *

M. Chevrillon is more profound when he says that the Englishman is a
"political animal." In no country, and certainly not in France, are
politics loved and understood as in Britain. Frenchmen have always been
hoodwinked by political adventurers. And they always imagine that every
individual can "make a bit" out of the State. Only the Englishman
understands that the State is himself. The Frenchman cannot comprehend
that if he does not pay taxes he will have to pay in some other way
rather more than he would have paid in taxes.

The French National Debt has been increasing steadily since 1870. I
doubt whether any French Budget in fifty years has been genuinely
balanced. Even the Great War did not cure the Frenchman of the
extraordinary delusion that, _via_ the State, you can get something for
nothing.

At present the Frenchman can still boast that no Government is going to
make him pay adequate taxes; but somehow he does not perceive that his
investments in national stock are worth only about a fifth of what they
would be worth if he had paid adequate taxes.

As for the French failure to understand the fundamentals of foreign
politics, I will merely remark, on this great and delicate subject, that
when a Frenchman really wants to do something, or wants not to do
something, he is quite incapable of conceiving any valid reason why he
should not or should.

Finance is at the bottom of politics, and the Frenchman understands
finance in one aspect only. He knows how to save money, but he is not
very interested in making money. He is not very ambitious, nor
adventurous. What he wants is security; and just as this is always the
cry of the individual, so it is the cry of the nation.

The Frenchman's skill in achieving individual security and family
security is amazing; it inspires awe. But its beneficent results are
often much damaged by his failure to understand the principles of
investment.

Financiers can, or could, unload wild-cat schemes on Paris that would
have no chance whatever in London. After the Franco-Russian alliance
French citizens, with astounding simplicity, put ten thousand million
francs (when a franc _was_ a franc) into Russia. Nearly all the money
had vanished before the war; it has now all vanished.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fact is that the Frenchman is so absorbed in the individual or the
family unit that he does not bring his brilliant wits to bear on
anything beyond his own front door. And this, in another connection, is
what prevents him from occupying himself intelligently with public
charities and "movements." Imagine French hospitals being seriously
supported by voluntary contributions!

But the intense individualism of the Frenchman has an important
advantage in that it discourages him from forming those intolerable
societies for meddling with other people's beliefs and conduct which are
perhaps the second greatest curse of existence in Great Britain.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Frenchman knows how to live.

He is a master of the art of social intercourse. When we say that
English table manners are better than French, we ought to define what we
mean by table manners. If we limit the definition of table manners to
the manipulation of mouths, fingers, and metal instruments, we are right
to feel superior. But I would hold that the most important part of table
manners is conversation, and there the French are finished artists while
we are fumbling amateurs.

Further, the French can be urbane without cultivating make-believe.
Except when they want something very badly, they do not deny that things
are what they are. They admit and discuss the facts of life. They have a
proper intellectual contempt for hypocrisy, which is the first and
greatest curse of existence in Great Britain.




PASSING OF THE PURITANS


The adjective "Puritanical" is now a term of reproach, even of scorn. If
you want the right to drink a glass of beer up to 11 p.m. and the
licensing authorities forbid you to drink after 10 p.m., you call the
authorities all sorts of bad names, including "puritanical." The noun
"puritan," however, still retains its dignity among us--no doubt on
account of the heroic history of the Puritans, whose greatest hero was
Oliver Cromwell, and who, when Cromwell was no more, sailed off to
America in search of religious freedom, and, without knowing it, began
to create what is now the United States. There is a connection between
sky-scrapers, prohibition, and puritanism.

The original Puritans were far less concerned with moral conduct than
with the nature of Church ceremonies and Church discipline, but in men's
characters one thing goes with another, and those who were sticklers
about the liturgy were soon sticklers about conduct, and accordingly
soon got themselves well hated by such free-living fellows as the
Elizabethan dramatists. The puritan spirit had a bad time in the
eighteenth century, but flourished powerfully under Queen Victoria. In
my childhood, in the Midlands, I encountered the last glories of
puritanism. I remember reading aloud to my grandmother a chapter from
the Bible concerning the Pharaohs. By a slip of the tongue I said
"Egpyt" instead of "Egypt." There was something funny about the sound of
"Egpyt." I laughed and said it again. Whereupon considerable trouble
arose with my grandmother. I was accused of lightness, of making mock of
Holy Writ, and other crimes, and no doubt I was sent to bed so that I
might by reflection reform myself. The incident well illustrates the
decadence of puritanism.

       *       *       *       *       *

At that period, as always, puritanism had two sides to it. On the one
side, it undoubtedly did help to form and stiffen the character, to give
strength of mind and the ability cheerfully to "do without." On the
other side, it discouraged pleasure for the sake of discouraging
pleasure. It was the enemy of pleasure. If anybody desired to do
anything purely for his own joy, puritanism's first impulse was to find
reasons why he should not. It stood out for the full rigour of its
particular forms and ceremonies, and was extremely intolerant of other
people's forms and ceremonies. Naturally it developed narrow-mindedness,
bigotry, hypocrisy, and spiritual conceit. And it was by no means free
from singular inconsistencies.

Thus it chastised bodily love with scorpions. One scarcely dared mention
bodily love. And as to referring openly to the statistics of
illegitimacy in puritan districts--you simply couldn't do it. But gross
over-eating was permitted, indulged in, and frequently encouraged. The
same with the heaping up of earthly treasure by wiliness and an excess
of frugality. One of the endearing qualities of the puritans was that
they were very human in their grimness and curiously elastic in their
rigidity.

The puritans have fought hard to maintain the power of their ideals over
a society which had grown restive under them. With one or two
exceptions, they have failed. Puritan ideals may now be said to be
confined to a small, if still active, minority. The change, to those who
have lived through it, has been immense.

Hypocrisy has by no means vanished, but it is much diminished. There is
far more liberty to say what you think; which, after all, is one of the
most precious privileges a man may enjoy. Far fewer topics are
"forbidden." Indeed, scarcely any topic is forbidden. Colour and
brightness have increased, though frocks have diminished nearly as much
as hypocrisy. Daily repose has increased. Holidays have increased.
Travel has increased. Boredom, once the scourge of the nation, and
especially of the provinces, has decreased. Reading has increased.
Pleasures have increased. I do not positively assert that all these
things are the direct consequence of the decline of puritanism; but they
have, at any rate, accompanied it. The transformation of existence, even
in the small villages, is wonderful, scarcely credible. As for the big
towns, the big towns of the 'seventies and 'eighties would not recognise
themselves to-day.

       *       *       *       *       *

One may say that formerly the day was too long; it is now too short.
People are more alive; their curiosity and their appetites have been
broadened. Everywhere there is a refuge from tedium. Not so very long
ago the sole refuge from tedium, for the great majority of men, was the
bar and the bar-parlour, and for the great majority of women--nothing,
nothing at all. Nor have these changes towards freedom and variety
brought with them certain other changes which we should all regret.
Crime has not increased; it has decreased. Brutality has most notably
and spectacularly decreased. We hear much talk about sexual laxity, but
the increase of talk is probably due to the increased freedom of speech,
and not to an increase of laxity. Anyhow, the ratio of illegitimate
births has strikingly decreased over a considerable period. That is not
everything, but it is something. I imagine that morality is influenced
less by high resolutions than by physical conditions--such as
overcrowding or the reverse. Natural impulses, and the will to control
them, remain fairly constant throughout the ages.

Again, health has improved. You will say that this is largely a
consequence of the progress of science and common sense. I agree; but at
the same time improved health is a presumption that the decline of
puritanism has not deleteriously affected health. Change, variety, new
interests, and the abolishing of ennui have perhaps been responsible in
some degree for improved health and greater longevity. There are other
factors than the physical in this mysterious matter.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the position of women has improved;
and I would assuredly attribute this chiefly to the spread of the
general idea of freedom. Puritanism had something of the Oriental in its
attitude towards women. In puritanism, next after theological strictness
came strictness in regard to the relations of the sexes, and, of course,
purity was imposed more severely on women than on men. Any actions,
however innocent in themselves, which might bring even a suspicion on
the immaculateness of women, were tabooed. The craze for propriety
became merely ridiculous.

I can remember the years when ladies might ride inside an omnibus, but
not outside, and when a woman who rode by herself in a hansom cab was
thereby morally besmirched. And I have bicycled with a lady who was
stoned by the populace of a suburb of London because she had so
seriously unsexed herself as to dare to move from one part of the
earth's surface to another on a pair of steel wheels. Here was a symptom
of the effects of puritanism at its most malignant and most misguided.
Any change from it must of necessity have been for the better. Withal,
the increase of freedom has undoubtedly involved changes for the worse.
Comfort has mightily increased, and this is a matter for congratulation,
but luxury in some circles of society has assumed the proportions of the
grotesque, the silly, and the insane. Individuals have said to
themselves: "What can we do to be more luxurious?" And they have racked
their brains and done things that were fatuous; things that were an
affront to the decency of the commonwealth.

       *       *       *       *       *

Industry has decreased. This is true of all classes--employers as well
as employed. It is conceivable that formerly people worked too hard,
worked for the sake of the labour itself, devastated their lives with
work. But now it is conceivable that people do not work hard enough.
Efficiency in machinery and in organisation has provided some remedy for
decrease of industry--if we worked as hard to-day as we did forty years
ago our prosperity might surpass the most wondrous dreams--but no
material efficiency can provide a remedy against the moral disadvantages
of undue idleness, slackness, and shirking.

The fundamental difference between the past epoch and the present seems
to me to be as follows. In the (comparatively recent) past we thought
less of enjoyment than of security. Not only did we frown upon pleasure
as a sin of wickedness and licence,--we sacrificed it deliberately in
our youth and our middle age in order that we might enjoy it in our old
age. And of course we never did properly enjoy it in our old age,
because the capacity to enjoy is always impaired by age. We were always
preparing to enjoy and never enjoying. Nay more, we not infrequently
killed ourselves in the effort to obtain security, and if we survived
the effort we had a habit of dying immediately the period of secure
enjoyment had begun. To-day we say: "I want to enjoy now. Why should I
sacrifice the certainty of enjoyment to-day for the uncertainty of
enjoyment to-morrow?" We favour the present at the expense of the
future. We say: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and
certainly worth more than one in the bush." Here are two opposing
schools of philosophy, each of them as old as civilisation, and perhaps
older. Both schools have their dangers.




MIND-WORK


I am not a believer in the goodness of the "good old times," which many
people begin to get mournfully enthusiastic about when they are past
fifty. Indeed, I feel sure that every single one of those people, if
they were suddenly thrust back into the alleged-to-be-good old times,
would very soon be moving heaven and earth to return at the earliest
possible instant to the despised present.

Still, most periods have their defects, as compared with other periods;
and I think that if our own period has defects, one of the principal of
them is its inability to practise the important art of sustained
thinking. We seem to be unable to concentrate our minds for long--even
on our pleasures or distractions.

Only sixty or eighty years ago epic poems, for instance, were quite
common, as anybody can discover by rummaging over second-hand
bookstalls. Also they had good sales. To-day epics are as rare as fine
summers, and when one appears it usually dies like a midge on the day of
its birth, and literary critics read as little of it as they must in
order to dispraise it.

Take novels. One hundred thousand words is more than the average length
of a modern novel. And a novel of 200,000 words is regarded as
prodigious. But some of the greatest novels of the past comprise not far
short of a million words; and the classic Victorian novels ran to
400,000. Take the theatre. Of old, an evening's entertainment consisted
of a four or five-act tragedy, plus a three-act farce, plus an oddment
or so, the whole lasting for five hours. To-day if a dramatist writes a
play taking three and a quarter hours the manager will stand up to him
with a revolver and force him to cut it; three hours is over long; and
the ideal length is two and a half hours.

And even so, the effort of watching the performance must be eased. The
most popular form of theatrical entertainment is the revue, where no
scene may exceed twenty minutes, and where there is no connection
between scenes. I remember some years ago saying to a manager:

"But you've forgotten the plot in this revue. The thing has no
sequence."

He replied:

"You're wrong. I've not forgotten the plot. I've had the plot left out
on purpose, and I don't want any sequence, and the public doesn't want
any either. Saves thinking, you see." And I perceived that he spoke the
truth.

In the cinema no scene must continue for longer than about two minutes.
And it is well known that some cinema stars, brilliant folk, are so
affected by their occupation that after a few years of it they become
incapable of even the sustained concentration needed for reading a
complete scenario; in fact, they do and can read nothing but their press
notices.

I do not wish to exaggerate. The art of sustained thinking has not
wholly disappeared. When I see acres of buildings torn down, and the
bowels of the earth torn up, and a vast new erection ascending to heaven
on the site, I always remember, and not without awe, that somewhere
behind the enormous and apparently higgledy-piggledy affair there is a
supreme planning, co-ordinating, controlling mind, and perhaps two,
which have been concentrating on it continuously for months and
sometimes for years. Similarly with big businesses, manufacturing or
mercantile.

No! Sustained concentration of mind is still practised, possibly in
some instances more strenuously than ever. But I suspect there is less
of it among average persons--readers, playgoers, sightseers, and
workers--than aforetime.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sustained thinking is the root of all success. (And I am not using the
word "success" in the ordinary narrow sense of achieving money or fame,
or both. I am using it in the sense of making the best of oneself,
making one's life coherent, and making oneself and other people happy.
Many humble people are far more successful, in the wide significance of
the term, than some millionaires, princes of industry, and celebrities.)

And sustained thinking is an instrument which can be applied to almost
any problem. Now and then a few problems of existence may be
satisfactorily solved by a fluke or by a powerful instinct, but it may
be said broadly that without sustained thinking the chances are twenty
to one against any such problem reaching a correct solution. Only by
real concentration of thought can all the factors of a difficulty be
viewed, first one after another and then together, and the relative
importance of the different factors accurately estimated.

       *       *       *       *       *

Multitudes of individuals never think consecutively at all, and few
think consecutively for more than a few minutes at a time. The majority
of us go through life from one end to the other without once properly
exercising the most important and the most interesting of human
faculties. It is very odd. It ought to strike us as excessively odd, but
unfortunately for ourselves it does not so strike us.

A young man chooses a career by accident. Some opening happens to
present itself and he jumps at it without consideration--rather like a
bird picking up a worm. Later he may perceive the drawbacks of what he
has chosen, and he says: "If I'd only thought!" A less young man chooses
a wife (or the woman chooses him) by the same facile method. Later, they
both perceive the horrors of the situation. In a similar way they choose
and buy their furniture.

And--what is worse perhaps in the long-run--citizens choose their
Members of Parliament on this simple but silly principle of deciding at
random, at a glance, in a moment. And of course afterwards they pass
many moments in cursing the follies of the legislature, forgetting that
the follies of the legislature are first of all the follies of the
electorate and the direct result of the neglect of the electorate to
think long and to think hard and to think straight.

It is inevitable that the failure to think must sooner or later land the
thoughtless man in some dreadful hole. He then says to himself, aghast:
"_I must think._" But he can't think; for he has never learnt to think.
He has always put off thinking. In the crisis he thinks he thinks--and
the spectacle is pathetic--but he is only regretting and complaining and
blaming anything in the universe except himself, and he will assuredly
go ahead and make just the same mistake again. People who don't
think--and they are the majority--do indeed make the same mistake again
and again. They do not learn, for the reason that there is only one way
of learning, and they will not take it, because it involves real
thinking.




MY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE


In my native town there were four principal churches of the Church of
England and five principal chapels of Nonconformity. We Nonconformists
had a double attitude towards the churches. Socially we admired and
envied them. So much so that we often preferred to go to them for the
religious ceremony of marriage, whereas we might have been just as
securely married elsewhere. Religiously we despised Church of
Englanders. They were not in our eyes so ineffably wicked or inexcusably
misguided as Roman Catholics; but they were pretty far gone in error,
wilful or stupid. Indeed, it was impossible to trust certain
Nonconformist preachers, and especially lay preachers, without being
convinced that all Church of Englanders were on the sure way to
everlasting damnation.

For Nonconformists of whatever sect were generally agreed on this: that
to keep out of hell it was absolutely necessary to be "converted." Good
morals, good works, were futile without conversion. It was no use being
born in the belief that Christ died on the cross to save sinners; you
had to be "born again," you had suddenly to see a mystic light, under
the influence of which you believed with a new and immeasurably intenser
belief. Church of Englanders contemned this experience as being allied
to hysteria. Nonconformists pitied them for their blindness.

The double attitude of Nonconformity towards the Established Church
puzzled, and offended, such unsubtle minds as my own. Further,
considering that comparatively few persons were converted, it followed
that the vast majority of the citizens were damned. And whenever as a
child I thought about the matter at all I smiled malevolently to think
that at least 90 per cent. of the wayfarers on pavements and in
tram-cars would in due course join me in Hades, in spite of the fact
that all of them had some religion. For in the 'seventies and 'eighties
of the last century there were almost no "atheists" in our town. And if
anybody did by chance ostentatiously deny the God of the Bible, sure
enough he--I say "he" because female atheists were utterly unknown--he
would one day, and soon rather than late, get himself converted in a
manner equally ostentatious.

I will not say that I flouted the dogma of the Wesleyan Methodist sect.
I suppose that I passively accepted it. But my acceptance of it had no
emotional quality. The notion of being converted was very repugnant to
me. I preferred damnation to conversion, as being less humiliating. The
arguments in favour of the dogma did not make much appeal to me; nor was
I impressed by the mentality of the individuals who marshalled those
arguments before my attention. My counter-arguments (brought forward
only in strictly private boy-to-boy debates) were painfully crude but
rather effective. As for example: "If God is omniscient He knows whether
I am going to heaven or hell. If He knows, the question is already
decided. If it is already decided, what does it matter what I do?"
Although the answer to this argument is quite simple and plausible,
nobody ever suggested it to me. True, I did not dare to submit the point
to the mighty.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing happened in my childhood to foster in me any religious faith.
And there were many things calculated to destroy faith. One of these was
the fact that some of the pillars of the chapel had a rather dubious
reputation for commercial integrity. Dishonest myself, and unsaved, I
was cruelly uncompromising in my verdicts on the conduct of the saved.
But the thing that most damaged in me the chances of a secure religious
belief was the religious misbehaviour of my father. So far as I can
remember I never had any religious instruction at home. My father
compelled us to go to chapel and Sunday school, but for many years he
did not go to Sunday school himself, and he very seldom went to chapel.
On the rare occasions when he did decide to go to evening chapel the
awed word ran round the house: "Pa is going to chapel." And it was as
though chapel ought to be grateful for his condescension.

Such a state of affairs was bound to give unreality to all professions
of religious faith. We children felt that religious observance was
imposed upon us, not for religious but for disciplinary reasons. And
this suspicion, or certainty, made Sunday all the more odious to us.
Sunday was the worst day of the week, anticipated with horror, and
finished with an exquisite relief. Two attendances at Sunday school and
two religious services in a day! About six hours in durance, while my
father either lay in bed or read magazines in the bow window! It was
inevitable that religion should come to be unalterably connected in my
mind with the ideas of boredom, injustice, and insincerity.

       *       *       *       *       *

And sometimes the offence was outrageous. As when a minister had the
monstrous and callous effrontery to institute a Bible class for boys on
the Saturday half-holiday. The resentment which I felt at this
innovation, and at my father's upholding of it, burns in my mind to-day.
It was surpassed only by my resentment against a sudden capricious
paternal command that we children should say our prayers at our mother's
knee. There was, for me, something revolting in the sentimentality, the
story-bookishness, of this injunction! Anyhow we loathed the act, which
filled us with shame. Nobody could possibly in the history of the world
have been in a mood more fatal to prayer than I was in the moments when
I obeyed the command. I used to say bitterly to myself: "He likes to see
us doing it." This did not, however, affect my general attitude towards
prayer. Neither before nor since did I ever say a prayer with the
slightest hope of it being answered.

When at the age of twenty-one I left home for London, one of the leading
thoughts in my head was that I should be free of chapels and Sunday
schools, and the desolation of Sabbaths. Such was the main result of my
father's education of me in ceremonial religion, acting on my mocking
and sceptical temperament. I had no religious beliefs and I was
profoundly inimical to all manifestations of religion. In various other
ways my father's influence on me was admirable, and I owe a great deal
to it. I regret that I should have to lay stress on that part of his
training in which he failed.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I came to London and was free to direct my own existence according
to my own ideas, I did, partly in a spirit of discovery and partly from
habit, visit a few chapels and churches, but I very soon became
indifferent to all the forms and rites of dogmatic religion; and
religion, in the accepted sense of the word, ceased entirely to enter
into my life. This was not the result of mental sloth. My conscience was
not in the least disturbed. I did not feel that I was leaving undone
things that I ought to do. I shared of course the widespread objection
to dying, but I had no qualms about the unpleasant possibilities of a
life beyond the grave for a man who was failing to perform an act of
belief. Heaven and hell meant nothing to me. The wrath of God meant
nothing to me. No variety of dogma could hold my attention. I was not
actively concerned about the divine purpose or the nature of God.

One cause of my indifference was the cautious, agnostic, and
self-sufficient bent of my mind. But the main cause of it undoubtedly
lay in a profound conviction that the riddle of the universe was
insoluble by human reason and that therefore the wise course for me was
to leave it alone. I was told that religion was beyond reason.
Nevertheless, all dogmatists were continually appealing to my reason--as
indeed all dogmatists are bound to do. In any case, they appealed quite
in vain. My difficulty was, and is, absolutely fundamental.

My reason was incapable of conceiving the act of creation. Others may be
able to conceive an act of creation. I cannot. I can conceive something
being made out of something else. I can conceive men developing from
the amoeba. But I cannot conceive something being made out of nothing.
Suppose that I have the power of a divine creator. I stretch out my hand
with open palm, in nothingness. I exercise the power to create, and lo!
something is lying in the palm of my hand that was not there before!
Well, I can suppose it, but I cannot conceive it as actually happening.
I cannot see how it could happen. My mind has not the capacity for this
feat. (Similarly with the conception of destruction.)

Hence I am forced to conclude that the universe, in some material form
or other, was always in existence. But the word "always" involves
infinity, and I cannot conceive infinity--either of time or anything
else. I can carry my imagination backward through countless ons and
still further and further backward, but not infinitely backward, so that
at last I have to say: "Everything must have had a beginning." Which is
equivalent to saying: "At some time something must have been created--or
made out of nothing." And I am thrown down again into my original
difficulty. I see plainly that there must be some Life-Force--call it
God; but my mind has not the power even to conceive the nature of God
at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have never been able to overcome this incapacity of mine. It has long
since ceased to worry me. A religious need must presuppose a God, and it
must be based in convictions about the nature of God. I marvel at the
minds of unquestionably great men who have come to definite decisions as
to what God is, what He thinks, how He acts. The daring of the doctrine
of the Trinity staggers me. The subtlety of the altercations connected
with, for example, the Athanasian and the Nicene creeds makes me dizzy.
But I can feel no practical interest in these exercises of finite reason
upon the infinite. I am, quite honestly and without any false modesty,
too humble for them.

We all of us have to divide phenomena into the knowable and the
unknowable. Dogmatists of every creed apparently know things which by me
are unknowable. What can I do to remedy the imperfection of my mind? I
should not object to having a religious creed. I should rather like to
have one. A genuine creed must be a very convenient and comfortable
thing. But how can I get it? I am told that I ought to try to believe.
But why should I _try_ to believe? Trying to believe, for me, means
bullying or forcing or dethroning my reason; it means pretending that my
mind can accomplish what I am convinced that it is incapable of
accomplishing. I cannot do this, and I have no desire to attempt it. I
am speaking only for myself; nevertheless I am well acquainted with many
people who are in precisely my case.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have often read, and sometimes I have been told by word of mouth, that
it is impossible for a normal man to gaze upon certain of this world's
spectacles without being intimately convinced of the existence and the
goodness of a Creator, and that therefore such spectacles alone must
give a man religious faith--whether in his pride he acknowledges it or
not. I agree that spectacles like a starlit night, a fine sunset (but
more especially a fine sunrise), or a venerable cathedral full of
stained glass, architectural style, incense, music, and the tradition of
centuries of worship--I agree that these and kindred spectacles do
arouse in my mind emotions which are vaguely uplifting, ennobling, and
lovely. I say further that these emotions urge me, vaguely and
temporarily, towards daily well-doing. But I do not agree that such
spectacles help me in the slightest degree to form ideas about God clear
and concrete enough to serve as a basis for religious belief. They do
not even persuade me that there is any such being as a God existing
entirely separate from myself. What they produce in me is awe, wonder,
moral and artistic stimulation, and a grateful, contemplative pleasure
in the simple fact that I am alive.

Moreover, I obtain just such emotions from all the phenomena of the
universe. I cannot walk along a common street, while attentively
examining in it all the astonishing and curious minute evidences of
man's unconquerable determination to fulfil himself, without being
imbued with a deep sense of the majesty and beauty of the whole
inexplicable affair. The older I grow the more keenly I delight in the
marvel of life. My reason stands apart, suspending its judgment
indefinitely.... Nor does this suspension of judgment incommode me the
least in the world. I do not long to look up to anything in sure faith.
I can exist quite well without. I should not mind having something
exterior to myself to cling to, to lean upon, to appeal to for help in
moments of difficulty; but I can manage unaided. I rather exult in the
necessity of carrying on without help. I do not feel dwarfed nor humbled
by the vastness and sublimity of my environment, for I am rooted in the
private assurance that there is nothing more wondrous, or possessing
greater ultimate potentialities, than the individual man.

       *       *       *       *       *

Many years ago I had a dream, and in the dream I stood by my own dead
body and saw the pennies upon my eyes. I cannot remember at this
distance of time what the rest of the dream was, but it had to do with
the adventures of the soul after death. This dream, while it convinced
me of nothing and gave me no faith in a future life, made a considerable
impression upon me as an artist, and I expanded the idea and the mood
into a novel, which I called _The Glimpse_, the glimpse being of what
lies beyond death. For the purpose of the novel I read a little in
Oriental theology and philosophy, and out of that and out of such
notions as I had previously met with I constructed a theory of the
future and put it into a more or less realistic form.

I was amazed, almost frightened, by the quantity and the quality of the
letters which reached me from various parts of the world, about the book
(which nevertheless never had any sensational sale). The letters were
not brilliant nor in any way striking, except in this: they revealed an
intense and passionate curiosity about the future life. I saw that for
very many people the nature of the future life was the question of all
questions--a problem continually, perhaps continuously, at the back of
their minds. The letters were such as one was obliged, in mere decency,
to reply to--so poignant were they, so appealing. (Later, these letters
began to affect my nerves, and I destroyed the bulk of them, and felt
lightened of a load of human disquietude.)

At first I answered simply that the supernatural parts of my novel were
inventions of mine or the result of appropriations from other
speculators, that I had originally no interest in the problem other than
an artistic interest, and that the book being finished and published I
had no genuine interest in the problem at all and must therefore decline
to join any of their societies for supernatural study or even to enter
into arguments by correspondence. These earlier letters hurt or offended
the recipients, and I perceived that I had not been tender enough
towards the deepest feelings of my correspondents. Henceforward I
modified the curt, uncompromising tone of my replies. So far as my
memory goes there was not a correspondent who did not tremendously
desire to believe in the immortality of the soul, and there were few who
had failed to believe in it. (Not many of them were orthodox
Christians.)

       *       *       *       *       *

I saw then, as in a revelation, how different was the bent of my mind
from that of the minds of all my unknown correspondents. As regards the
theory set forth in my novel, I had naturally made it as plausible as I
could to my own reason. But I never had the slightest belief in it, nor
instinctive tendency to believe in it, nor wish to believe in it. I
could discover no proof or presumption satisfactory to myself, that my
soul had or had not existed before earthly birth, or that it would or
would not survive after earthly death. Mathematical difficulties alone
(as to the numbers of souls existing at any given moment) might well, I
thought, render all the rival theories of immortality equally untenable.

Further, I could not even conceive my soul save in terms of matter.

And to-day I remain in the same unspeculative mood. I do not speculate,
because I cannot discern any possibility of a positive result to my
speculations. But my state is not therefore gloomy or hopeless or
listless. Not a bit. For whether my soul has existed from everlasting or
was born at the birth of my body, and whether my soul will cease with my
body or continue in being for ever, I have in any case the certain
assurance that it exists now and that my duty is to develop it in the
best way according to my lights. If it survives as an entity, well and
good--my efforts toward the improvement of it cannot be lost. If it does
not survive as an entity, and at death is separated into its original
particles, still well and good--my efforts must have had their effect on
the undying particles. It is scientifically incredible that any effort
should not have its due consequence--and an eternal consequence. And so
it comes to pass that in living this present life without worrying
myself about any other life, I can find scope for all my longings--and
yet live in eternity too. Unhesitatingly I dismiss the singular notion
that any other life can be more "divine" in essence than this present
life.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of course, after all, I have a dogma. Nor have I yet talked intimately
with any man who had not. I doubt if life would be possible without one.
If it is convenient to call my dogma my religion, let my dogma be so
called. The theory of evolution has been scientifically proved to the
satisfaction of the great majority of intelligent and thinking persons.
We see illustrations of evolution everywhere and all the time. Evolution
is the development of organisms in themselves and in their relations to
other organisms. Now my dogma is that, in its broadest aspect, the
movement of evolution is from something worse to something better. It is
that human nature, with all its ups and downs, does improve--however
slowly.

This assertion rests on no scientific basis. Its truth cannot be
demonstrated. Indeed, many weighty and honest minds refuse to accept it,
and I cannot by any process of rational argument show that they are
wrong. Far from that, I am bound to admit that comparisons between
present civilisation and past, between present philosophy and past, seem
often to favour the past rather than the present. Nevertheless, I feel
intensely that we are travelling from imperfection to perfection, and
that here is the sole immediate answer to the enigma of the universe. If
I did not feel this, if the consciousness of it did not permeate the
whole of my existence, then I should become indifferent to life and
would just as soon be dead, in the completest final sense, for ever and
ever.

Fortified by my dogma, I find in life a divine savour that never
satiates, and I live eagerly.

The famous theory about the principle of evil warring against the
principle of good has no significance for me. To me evil is a purely
negative conception. Evil is the lack, or the insufficiency, of good.
There is no devil; there is only a growing good. Not that I have any
expectation of perfection being attained, either in this life or in any
future life, either by myself or by any other component parts of the
universe. I strive after perfection. But I do not want actually to get
it. Perfection is static. It destroys every motive for endeavour, and
therefore renders the universe meaningless and futile--for me.
Salvation--no! Salvation would be death. If I am to live I must not be
saved; I must never be sure of salvation. Danger, struggle,
conflict--these things alone constitute life, and more than aught else
it is life that I desire.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have spoken of self-sufficiency, and thereby have perhaps exposed
myself to the charge of spiritual pride--an attribute which I detest
almost as much as I detest anything. But I do not think that a refusal,
or an inability, to trust blindly in that which I am incapable of
comprehending, can properly be denounced as spiritual pride. Nor do I
think, either, that to count myself as actually part of the divine force
which makes my heart beat can be so treated. For as a fact I myself am
just as incomprehensible and marvellous as anything exterior to me in
the universe. I cannot fathom God, and I cannot fathom myself.

Again, my self-sufficiency is directed solely towards an unknown
supposed Creator alleged to be exterior to myself--if such there be. It
certainly does not extend to my fellow-men. For in the first place, I
regard them all as equally divine with myself in their essence. And in
the second place, I feel constantly the need of their companionship and
support.

In a book so full of terrible pictures of the deity as the Bible, the
phrase "God is love" may appear strange, even out of place.
Nevertheless, this phrase, for me, contains all divine wisdom and is the
key to the conduct of life. If we are all part of God, we must all love.
Love means charity, humility, forgiveness, self-forgetfulness,
kindliness. To think kind thoughts of others, and never to think unkind
thoughts, is, for me, the summit of righteousness, the secret of
happiness, and the only gateway to any success worth calling success.
The oftener I read the Sermon on the Mount the more deeply am I
convinced that here is the final practical wisdom. I disagree with the
view that Christ's moral teaching will not stand the test of modern
conditions. I think it will. But immense courage is needed to follow it,
and exceedingly few of us have the necessary courage. It may be, and
ought rightly to be, a counsel of perfection. Yet what other counsels
should we seek?

In no field of human thought has the teaching of Christ been more
disastrously ignored than in theology. Millions of people have killed
and been killed, tortured and been tortured, ostracised and been
ostracised, because of differences about the proper attitude towards the
Unknowable. Dogma may be necessary to humanity, but it has been the
occasion of nearly every sin. The original reason for all this fury and
pride was probably the violence and sincerity of the belief in the
supreme, vital importance of particular dogmas.

To-day the face of things is changed. The fury has abated, and pride is
a little bowed down. Dogma has become less dogmatic. And partly on this
account, and partly owing to an increase of reasonableness, we no longer
murder, or curse to everlasting hell, those who do not think as we do in
the domain of theological speculation. I for one would not dream of
going forth with a hatchet to destroy anybody who declined to subscribe
to my dogma that the movement of evolution is from something worse to
something better. And most people are now like me in respect to their
dogmas. We have in some degree actually educated ourselves to perceive
that there never was a dogma which did not contain some hint of the
truth, and that there never will be one which contains the whole truth!
This new breadth of mind is in itself an advance towards the religion of
kindliness. For many years I was full of hatred, resentment, and scorn
for the fierce upholders of the cult which clouded my youth. Now I am
humbler. Those religionists had terrific ideals, even though kindliness
in thought and broad tolerance were not among them. And if they
arrogated to themselves the authority of God they were unconsciously
demonstrating the divinity of man.

       *       *       *       *       *

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  | Transcriber's Notes:                                       |
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  |     paragraph starting "I think that...."                  |
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  | Italicisation and hyphenation have been standardised.      |
  | However, where there is an equal number of instances of    |
  | a hyphenated and unhyphenated word, both have been         |
  | retained: highbrows/high-brows.                            |
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[End of _Things That Have Interested Me (third series)_
by Arnold Bennett]
