I recall one among many of these occasions for my chastening. When I was young I was being driven one day through a woodland country by an old fellow who kept an inn and let out a pony and chaise for hire. As we went along I made some remark about a tree by the wayside and he spoke of it as a poplar. "Not a poplar," said I with the easy a.s.surance of youth, and I described to him for his information the characters of what I conceived to be the poplar. "Ah," he said "you are thinking of the Lombardy poplar. That tree is the Egyptian poplar." And then he went on to tell me of a score of other poplars--their appearance, their habits, and their origins--quite kindly and without any knowledge of the withering blight that had fallen upon my c.o.c.ksure ignorance. I found that he had spent his life in tree culture and had been forester to a Scotch duke. And I had explained to him what a poplar was like! But I think he did me good, and I often recall him to mind when I feel disposed to give other people information that they possibly do not need.
And the books I haven"t read, and the sciences I don"t know, and the languages I don"t speak, and the things I can"t do--young man, if you knew all this you would be amazed. But it does not make me unhappy.
On the contrary I find myself growing cheerful in the contemplation of these vast undeveloped estates. I feel like a fellow who has inherited a continent and, so far, has only had time to cultivate a tiny corner of the inheritance. The rest I just wander through like a boy in wonderland. Some day I will know about all these things. I will develop all these immensities. I will search out all these mysteries.
In my heart I know I shall do nothing of the sort. I know that when the curtain rings down I shall be digging the same tiny plot. But it is pleasant to dream of future conquests that you won"t make.
And, after all, aren"t we all allotment holders of the mind, cultivating our own little patch and surrounded by the wonderland of the unknown? Even the most learned of us is ignorant when his knowledge is measured by the infinite sum of things. And the riches of knowledge themselves are much more widely diffused than we are apt to think. There are few people who are not better informed about something than we are, who have not gathered their own peculiar sheaf of wisdom or knowledge in this vast harvest field of experience. That is at once a comfortable and a humbling thought. It checks a too soaring vanity on the one hand and a too tragic abas.e.m.e.nt on the other.
The fund of knowledge is a collective sum. No one has all the items, nor a fraction of the items, and there are few of us so poor as not to have some. If I were to walk out into the street now I fancy I should not meet a soul, man or woman, who could not fill in some blank of my mind. And I think--for I must not let humility go too far--I think I could fill some blank in theirs. Our carrying capacity varies infinitely, but we all carry something, and it differs from the store of any one else on earth. And, moreover, the mere knowledge of things is not necessary to their enjoyment, nor necessary even to wisdom.
There are things that every ploughboy knows to-day which were hidden from Plato and Caesar and Dante, but the ploughboy is not wiser than they. Sir Thomas Browne, in his book on "Vulgar Errors," declared that the idea that the earth went round the sun was too foolish to be controverted. I know better, but that doesn"t make me a wiser man than Browne. Wisdom does not depend on these things. I suppose that, on the whole, Lincoln was the wisest and most fundamentally sane man who ever took a great part in the affairs of this planet. Yet compared with the average undergraduate he was utterly unlearned.
Do not, my young friend, suppose I am decrying your eagerness to know.
Learn all you can, my boy, about this wonderful caravan on which we make our annual tour round the sun, and on which we quarrel and fight with such crazy ferocity as we go. But at the end of all your learning you will be astonished at how little you know, and will rejoice that the pleasure of living is in healthy feeling rather than in the acc.u.mulation of facts. There was a good deal of truth in that saying of Savonarola that "a little old woman who kept the faith knew more than Plato or Aristotle."
ON A SHINY NIGHT
The pleasantest hour of my day is the hour about midnight. It is then that I leave the throbbing heart of Fleet Street behind me, jump on to the last bus bound for a distant suburb, and commandeer the back corner seat. If the back seat is not vacant I sit as near as I can and watch the enemy who possesses it with a vigilant eye. When he rises I pounce on the quarry like a kestrel on its prey. I love the back seat, not only because it is the most comfortable, but also because it gives you the sense of solitude in the midst of a crowd, which is one of the most enjoyable sensations I know. To see, and not be seen, to watch the human comedy un.o.bserved, save by the friendly stars who look down very searchingly but never blab, to have the advantages of both solitude and society in one breath, as it were--this is my idea of enjoyment.
But most of all I love the back seat on such a night as last night, when the crescent moon is sailing high in a cloudless sky and making all the earth a wonder of romance. The garish day is of the earth, "the huge and thoughtful night" when no moon is seen and the constellations blaze in unimaginable s.p.a.ce is of the eternal; but here in this magic glamour of the moon where night and day are wedded is the realm of romance. You may wander all day in the beech woods and never catch a glimpse of Tristan and Iseult coming down the glades or hear an echo of Robin Hood"s horn; but walk in the beech woods by moonlight and every shadow will have its mystery and will talk to you of the legends of long ago.
That is why Sir Walter Scott had such a pa.s.sion for "c.u.mnor Hall."
"After the labours of the day were over," said Irving, "we often walked in the meadows, especially in the moonlight nights; and he seemed never weary of repeating the first stanza:
The dews of summer night did fall-- The moon, sweet regent of the sky, Silvered the walls of c.u.mnor Hall, And many an oak that stood thereby."
There you have the key to all the world of Sir Walter. He was the King of the Moonlighters. He was a man who would have been my most dreaded rival on the midnight bus. He would have wanted the back seat, I know, and there he would have sat and chanted "c.u.mnor Hall" to himself and watched the moonlight touching the suburban streets to poetry and turning every suburban garden into a twilight mystery.
There are, of course, quite prosaic and even wicked people who love "a shiny night." There is, for example, the gentleman from "famous Lincolnshire" whose refrain is:
Oh, "tis my delight On a shiny night, In the season of the year.
I love his song because it is about the moonlight, and I am not sure that I am much outraged by the fact that he liked the shiny night because he was a poacher. I never could affect any indignation about poachers. I suspect that I rather like them. Anyhow, there is no stanza of that jolly song which I sing with more heartiness than:
Success to every gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire, Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare.
Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer.
Oh, "tis my delight, etc.
And there was d.i.c.k Turpin. He, too, loved the moonlight for very practical reasons. He loved it not because it silvered the oak, but because of that deep shadow of the oak in which he could stand with Black Bess and await the coming of his victim.
And it is that shadow which is the real secret of the magic of moonlight. The shadows of the day have beauty but no secrecy. The sunlight is too strong to be wholly or even very materially denied.
Even its shadows are luminous and full of colour, and the contrast between light and shade is not the contrast between the visible and the invisible, between the light and the dark: it is only a contrast between degrees of brightness. Everything is bright, but some things are more bright than others. But in the moonlight the world is etched in black and white. The shadows are flat and unrevealing. They have none of the colour values produced by the reflected lights in the shadows of the day. They are as secret as the grave; distinct personalities, sharply figured against the encompa.s.sing light, not mere pa.s.sages of colour tuned to a lower key. And the quality of the encompa.s.sing light itself emphasises the contrast. The moon does not bring out the colour of things, but touches them with a glacial pallor:
.... Strange she is, and secret.
Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-sh.e.l.ls.
See the moonlight fall upon your house-front and mark the wonderful effect of black and white that it creates. Under the play of the moonbeams it becomes a house of mysteries. The lights seem lighter than by day, but that is only because the darks are so much darker.
That shadow cast by the gable makes a blackness in which anything may lurk, and it is the secrecy of the shadow in a world of light that is the soul of romance.
Take a walk in the woods in the bright moonlight over the tracks that you think you could follow blindfold, and you will marvel at the tricks which those black shadows of the trees can play with the most familiar scenes. Keats, who was as much of a moonlighter in spirit as Scott, knew those impenetrable shadows well:
.... tender is the night, And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne, Cl.u.s.ter"d around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
In this moonlight world you may skip at will from the known to the unknown, have publicity on one side of the way and secrecy on the other, walk in the light to see Jessica"s face, and in the shadow to escape the prying eyes of Shylock. Hence through all time it has been the elysium of lovers, and "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns," has been the G.o.ddess whom they serve,
To whose bright image nightly by the moon, Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.
Perhaps it is the eternal lover in us that responds so unfailingly to the magic of the moonlight.
ON GIVING UP TOBACCO
This evening I am morally a little unapproachable. I feel too good to be true. Perhaps it would be possible for me to endure the company of Mr. Pecksniff; but that good man is dead, and I am lonely in a world that is not quite up to my moral handicap. For I have given up tobacco. For a whole day not a wreath of smoke has issued from my lips, not a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette has had the victory over me.... For a whole day! I had not realised how long a day could be.
It is as though I have ceased to live in time and have gone into eternity. I once heard a man say: "Dear me! How time flies!" It struck me at the moment as a true and penetrating remark, and I have often repeated it since. But now I know it to be false. I know that that man must have been a slave to tobacco, that subtle narcotic that gives the illusion of the flight of time. If he had the moral courage to follow my example, he would not say "How time flies!" He would say, as I do (with tears in his voice, and with a glance at his pipe on the mantel-piece), "How time stands still!" He would find that a day can seem as long as a year; that he can lengthen his life until he is terrified at the prospect of its endlessness.
I have been contemplating this thing for years. Some day, I have said to myself, I will have a real trial of strength with this Giant Nicotine who has held me thrall to his service. Long have I borne his yoke--ever since that far-off day when I burned a hole in my jacket pocket with a lighted cigar that I hid at the approach of danger. (How well I remember that day: the hot sunshine, the walk in the fields, the sense of forbidden joys, the tragedy of the burnt hole, the miserable feeling of physical nausea.) I have kicked against the tyranny of a habit that I knew had become my master. It was not the tobacco I disliked. Far from it. I liked the tobacco; but disliked the habit of tobacco. The tendency of most of us is to become creatures of habit and to lose our freedom--to cease to be masters of our own actions.
"Take away his habits, and there is nothing of him left," says a character in some play, and the saying has a wide application. I did not possess a pipe: it was the pipe that possessed me. I did not say with easy, masterful a.s.surance, "Come, I have had a hard day (or a good dinner); I will indulge myself with a pipe of tobacco." It was the pipe which said, "Come, slave, to your devotions." And though as the result of one of my spiritual conflicts I threw away my pipe and resolved to break the fall with an occasional cigarette, I found it was the old tyrannous habit in a new disguise. The old dog in a new coat, as Johnson used to say.
There are some people who approach the question frivolously. The young man called John in the "Breakfast Table" is an example. When the lady in bombazine denounced tobacco and said it ought all to be burned, the young man John agreed. Someone had given him a box of cigars, he said, and he was going to burn them all. The lady in bombazine rejoiced.
Let him make a bonfire of them in the backyard, she said. "That ain"t my way," replied the young man called John. "I burn "em one at a time--little end in my mouth, big end outside." Similarly wanting in seriousness was the defence of tobacco set up by the wit who declared that it prolonged life. "Look at the ancient Egyptians," he said.
"None of them smoked, _and they are all dead_." Others again discover virtues to conceal the tyranny. Lord Clarendon, when he was Foreign Minister, excused the fact that his room always reeked with tobacco smoke on the ground that it was necessary to his work. "The art of diplomacy," he said, "is the judicious administration of tobacco." No one knew better how to handle a cigar case than Bismarck, and it is no very extravagant fancy to see in the events of to-day the enormous fruit of an interlude of tobacco between him and Disraeli in the council chamber at Berlin.
There are some who say they smoke because it soothes their nerves, and others who say they smoke because it is an aid to social intercourse.
It is true that you can sit and smoke and say nothing without feeling that the spirit of communion is broken. That was the case of Carlyle and his mother and of Carlyle and Tennyson, brave smokers all and silent to boot. They let their pipes carry on a conversation too deep for words. And lesser people, as Cowper knew, conceal their bankruptcy of words in wreaths of smoke:
The pipe, with solemn, interposing puff, Makes half a sentence at a time enough; The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain, Then pause, and puff, and speak, and puff again.
And, while some say they smoke for company, others claim to smoke for thought and inspiration. "Tobacco is the sister of Literature," says Sir Walter Raleigh, loyal in this to his great namesake who brought the good gift to our sh.o.r.es. Heaven forbid that I should deny the debt we who write owe to tobacco, but I am bound to confess that brother Literature did some handsome things before he found his sister. Homer and Euripides, Virgil and Horace wrote quite tolerably without the help of tobacco, though no one can read Horace without feeling that he had the true spirit of the tobacco cult. Had he been born a couple of thousand years later, what praises of the weed of Havana he would have mingled with his praises of Falernian!
But if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we smoke not for this or that respectable reason--not always even because we enjoy it--but because we have got into the habit and can"t get out of it.
And in this, as in other cases, it is the surrender of the will more than the thing yielded to that is the mischief. All the great systems of religion have provided against the enslavement of the individual to his habits. The ordinances of abstinence are designed, in part at all events, to keep the will master of the appet.i.tes. They are intended--altogether apart from the question of salvation by works--to serve as a breach with habits which, if allowed uninterrupted sway, reduce the soul to a sort of bondage to the body.
It is against that bondage of habit that I have warred to-day. I shall not describe the incidents of the struggle: the allurements of the tobacconists" shops--and what a lot of tobacconists" shops there are!--the insidious temptation of a company of men smoking contentedly after lunch, the heroism of waving away the offered cigarette or cigar as though it were a matter of no importance, the constant act of refusal. For this is no case of one splendid deed of heroism. You do not slay Apollyon with a thrust of your sword and march triumphantly on your way. You have to go on fighting every inch of the journey, deaf to the appeals of Gold Flake and Capstan and Navy Cut and the other syrens that beckon you from the shop windows. And now evening has come and the victory is mine. I have singed the beard of the giant. I am no longer his thrall. To-morrow I shall be able to smoke with a clear conscience--with the feeling that it is an act of my own free choice, and not an act of slavish obedience to an old habit....
How I shall enjoy to-morrow!
THE GREAT G.o.d GUN
A few days ago I saw the Advent of the Great G.o.d Gun. The G.o.ddess Aphrodite, according to ancient mythology, rose out of the foam of the sea, and the Great G.o.d Gun, too, emerged from a bath, but it was a bath of fire--fire so white and intense that the eyes were blinded by it as they are blinded by the light of the unclouded sun at midday.
Our presence had been timed for the moment of his coming. We stood in a great chamber higher than a cathedral nave, and with something even less than the dim religious light of a cathedral nave. The exterior of the temple was plain even to ugliness, a tower of high, windowless walls faced with corrugated iron. Within was a maze of immense mysteries, mighty cylinders towering into the gloom above, great pits descending into the gloom below, gigantic cranes showing against the dim skylight, with here and there a Cyclopean figure clad in oily overalls and with a face grimy and perspiring.
The signal was given. Two shadowy figures that appeared in the darkness above one of the cylinders began their incantations. A giant crane towered above them and one saw its mighty claw descend into the orifice of the cylinder as if to drag some Eurydice out of the h.e.l.l within. Then the word was spoken and somewhere a lever, or perhaps only an electric b.u.t.ton, was touched. But at that touch the whole front of the mighty cylinder from top to bottom opened and swung back slowly and majestically, and one stood before a pillar of flame forty feet high, pure and white, an infinity of intolerable light, from whence a wave of heat came forth like a living thing. And as the door opened the Cyclops above--strange Dantesque figures now swallowed up in the gloom, now caught in the light of the furnace--set the crane in motion, and through the open door of the cylinder came the G.o.d, suspended from the claw of the crane that gripped it like the fingers of a hand.