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Title: The Pleasures of Ignorance

Author: Robert Lynd

Release Date: September 12, 2004 [EBook #13448]

Language: English

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THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE


BY ROBERT LYND



LONDON

GRANT RICHARDS LTD.

ST MARTIN'S STREET

1921

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED

EDINBURGH



TO JAMES WINDER GOOD



CHAPTER                                         PAGE

    I. THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE                 11

   II. THE HERRING FLEET                          19

  III. THE BETTING MAN                            29

   IV. THE HUM OF INSECTS                         40

    V. CATS                                       51

   VI. MAY                                        61

  VII. NEW YEAR PROPHECIES                        70

 VIII. ON KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE                  82

   IX. THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING      91

    X. WHY WE HATE INSECTS                       102

   XI. VIRTUE                                    114

  XII. JUNE                                      123

 XIII. ON FEELING GAY                            132

  XIV. IN THE TRAIN                              141

   XV. THE MOST CURIOUS ANIMAL                   149

  XVI. THE OLD INDIFFERENCE                      158

 XVII. EGGS: AN EASTER HOMILY                    167

XVIII. ENTER THE SPRING                          176

  XIX. THE DAREDEVIL BARBER                      186

   XX. WEEDS: AN APPRECIATION                    195

  XXI. A JUROR IN WAITING                        205

 XXII. THE THREE-HALFPENNY BIT                   215

XXIII. THE MORALS OF BEANS                       224

 XXIV. ON SEEING A JOKE                          233

  XXV. GOING TO THE DERBY                        243

 XXVI. THIS BLASTED WORLD                        253



_Acknowledgments are due to "The New Statesman," in which all but one
of these essays appeared. "Going to the Derby" appeared in "The Daily
News."--R.L._




I



THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE

It is impossible to take a walk in the country with an average
townsman--especially, perhaps, in April or May--without being amazed
at the vast continent of his ignorance. It is impossible to take a
walk in the country oneself without being amazed at the vast continent
of one's own ignorance. Thousands of men and women live and die
without knowing the difference between a beech and an elm, between the
song of a thrush and the song of a blackbird. Probably in a modern
city the man who can distinguish between a thrush's and a blackbird's
song is the exception. It is not that we have not seen the birds. It
is simply that we have not noticed them. We have been surrounded by
birds all our lives, yet so feeble is our observation that many of us
could not tell whether or not the chaffinch sings, or the colour of
the cuckoo. We argue like small boys as to whether the cuckoo always
sings as he flies or sometimes in the branches of a tree--whether
Chapman drew on his fancy or his knowledge of nature in the lines:

     When in the oak's green arms the cuckoo sings,
     And first delights men in the lovely springs.

This ignorance, however, is not altogether miserable. Out of it we get
the constant pleasure of discovery. Every fact of nature comes to us
each spring, if only we are sufficiently ignorant, with the dew still
on it. If we have lived half a lifetime without having ever even seen
a cuckoo, and know it only as a wandering voice, we are all the more
delighted at the spectacle of its runaway flight as it hurries from
wood to wood conscious of its crimes, and at the way in which it halts
hawk-like in the wind, its long tail quivering, before it dares
descend on a hill-side of fir-trees where avenging presences may lurk.
It would be absurd to pretend that the naturalist does not also find
pleasure in observing the life of the birds, but his is a steady
pleasure, almost a sober and plodding occupation, compared to the
morning enthusiasm of the man who sees a cuckoo for the first time,
and, behold, the world is made new.

And, as to that, the happiness even of the naturalist depends in some
measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this
kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the
books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each
bright particular with his eyes. He wishes with his own eyes to see
the female cuckoo--rare spectacle!--as she lays her egg on the ground
and takes it in her bill to the nest in which it is destined to breed
infanticide. He would sit day after day with a field-glass against his
eyes in order personally to endorse or refute the evidence suggesting
that the cuckoo _does_ lay on the ground and not in a nest. And, if he
is so far fortunate as to discover this most secretive of birds in the
very act of laying, there still remain for him other fields to conquer
in a multitude of such disputed questions as whether the cuckoo's egg
is always of the same colour as the other eggs in the nest in which
she abandons it. Assuredly the men of science have no reason as yet to
weep over their lost ignorance. If they seem to know everything, it is
only because you and I know almost nothing. There will always be a
fortune of ignorance waiting for them under every fact they turn up.
They will never know what song the Sirens sang to Ulysses any more
than Sir Thomas Browne did.

If I have called in the cuckoo to illustrate the ordinary man's
ignorance, it is not because I can speak with authority on that bird.
It is simply because, passing the spring in a parish that seemed to
have been invaded by all the cuckoos of Africa, I realised how
exceedingly little I, or anybody else I met, knew about them. But your
and my ignorance is not confined to cuckoos. It dabbles in all created
things, from the sun and moon down to the names of the flowers. I once
heard a clever lady asking whether the new moon always appears on the
same day of the week. She added that perhaps it is better not to know,
because, if one does not know when or in what part of the sky to
expect it, its appearance is always a pleasant surprise. I fancy,
however, the new moon always comes as a surprise even to those who are
familiar with her time-tables. And it is the same with the coming in
of spring and the waves of the flowers. We are not the less delighted
to find an early primrose because we are sufficiently learned in the
services of the year to look for it in March or April rather than in
October. We know, again, that the blossom precedes and not succeeds
the fruit of the apple-tree, but this does not lessen our amazement at
the beautiful holiday of a May orchard.

At the same time there is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning
the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a
book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so
bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had
never read it before. I have myself a capricious and leaking memory. I
can read _Hamlet_ itself and _The Pickwick Papers_ as though they were
the work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much of
them fades between one reading and another. There are occasions on
which a memory of this kind is an affliction, especially if one has a
passion for accuracy. But this is only when life has an object beyond
entertainment. In respect of mere luxury, it may be doubted whether
there is not as much to be said for a bad memory as for a good one.
With a bad memory one can go on reading Plutarch and _The Arabian
Nights_ all one's life. Little shreds and tags, it is probable, will
stick even in the worst memory, just as a succession of sheep cannot
leap through a gap in a hedge without leaving a few wisps of wool on
the thorns. But the sheep themselves escape, and the great authors
leap in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little enough
behind.

And, if we can forget books, it is as easy to forget the months and
what they showed us, when once they are gone. Just for the moment I
tell myself that I know May like the multiplication table and could
pass an examination on its flowers, their appearance and their order.
To-day I can affirm confidently that the buttercup has five petals.
(Or is it six? I knew for certain last week.) But next year I shall
probably have forgotten my arithmetic, and may have to learn once more
not to confuse the buttercup with the celandine. Once more I shall see
the world as a garden through the eyes of a stranger, my breath taken
away with surprise by the painted fields. I shall find myself
wondering whether it is science or ignorance which affirms that the
swift (that black exaggeration of the swallow and yet a kinsman of the
humming-bird) never settles even on a nest, but disappears at night
into the heights of the air. I shall learn with fresh astonishment
that it is the male, and not the female, cuckoo that sings. I may have
to learn again not to call the campion a wild geranium, and to
rediscover whether the ash comes early or late in the etiquette of the
trees. A contemporary English novelist was once asked by a foreigner
what was the most important crop in England. He answered without a
moment's hesitation: "Rye." Ignorance so complete as this seems to me
to be touched with magnificence; but the ignorance even of illiterate
persons is enormous. The average man who uses a telephone could not
explain how a telephone works. He takes for granted the telephone, the
railway train, the linotype, the aeroplane, as our grandfathers took
for granted the miracles of the gospels. He neither questions nor
understands them. It is as though each of us investigated and made his
own only a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work is
regarded by most men as a gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reaction
against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate.
We revel in speculations about anything at all--about life after death
or about such questions as that which is said to have puzzled
Aristotle, "why sneezing from noon to midnight was good, but from
night to noon unlucky." One of the greatest joys known to man is to
take such a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge. The great
pleasure of ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions.
The man who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure of
dogma, which is the pleasure of answering, is already beginning to
stiffen. One envies so inquisitive a man as Jowett, who sat down to
the study of physiology in his sixties. Most of us have lost the sense
of our ignorance long before that age. We even become vain of our
squirrel's hoard of knowledge and regard increasing age itself as a
school of omniscience. We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom
not because he was omniscient but because he realised at the age of
seventy that he still knew nothing.




II



THE HERRING FLEET

The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is
a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the
stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard
a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm.
Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not
with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth. This, more
than the entrance to a wood or the source of a river or the top of a
bald hill, is the beginning of infinity. Even the dirtiest coal-boat
that lies beached in the harbour, a mere hulk of utilities that are
taken away by dirty men in dirty carts, will in a day or two lift
itself from the mud on a full tide and float away like a spirit into
the sunset or curtsy to the image of the North Star. Mystery lies over
the sea. Every ship is bound for Thule. That, perhaps, is why men are
content day after day to stand on the pier-head and to gaze at the
water and the ships and sailors running up and down the decks and
pulling the ropes of sails.

We may have no reason for pretending to ourselves that the
fishing-boats are ships of dreams setting out on infinite voyages.
But, none the less, even in a fishing village there is always a
congregation of watching men and women on the pier. Every day the
crowd collects to see the harbour awake into life with the bustle of
men about to set out among the nations of the fishes. By day the boats
lie side by side in the harbour--stand side by side, rather, like
horses in a stable. There are two rows of them, making a camp of masts
on the shallow water. In other parts of the harbour white gigs are
bottomed on the sand in companies of two and three. As the tide slowly
rises, the masts which have been lying over on one side in a sleepy
stillness begin to stir, then to sway, until with each new impulse of
the sea all the boats are dancing, and soon the whole harbour is awake
and merry as if every mast were a steeple with a peal of bells. It is
not long till the fishermen arrive. One meets them in every cobbled
lane. How magnificent the noise made by a man in sea-boots on the
stones! Surely, he strikes sparks from the road. He thumps the ground
as with a hammer. The earth rings. One has seen those boots in the
morning hanging outside the door of his house while he slept. They
have been oiled, and left there to dry. They have kept the shape of
his limb and the crook of his knee in an uncanny way. They look as
though he had taken off his legs before going into the house and hung
them on the wall. But the fisherman is a hero not only in his boots.
His sea-coat is no less magnificent. This may be of oil-skin yellow or
of maroon or of stained white or of blue, with a blue jersey showing
under it, and, perhaps, a red woollen muffler or a scarf with green
spots on a red ground round his throat. He has not learned to be timid
of colour. Even out of the mouths of his boots you may see the ends of
red knitted leggings protruding. His yellow or black sou'-wester
roofing the back of his neck, he comes down to harbour, as splendid as
a figure at a fair. And always, when he arrives, he is smoking a pipe.
As one watches him, one wonders if anybody except a fisherman, as he
looks out over the harbour, knows how to smoke. He has made tobacco
part of himself, like breathing.

If the tide is already full the fishermen are taken off in small
rowing-boats, most of them standing, and the place is busy with a
criss-cross of travelling crews till the fishing-boats are all manned.
If the water is not yet deep, however, most of the men walk to their
boats, lumbering through the waves, and occasionally jumping like a
wading girl as a larger wave threatens the tops of their boots. Many
of them carry their supper in a basket or a handkerchief. The first of
the boats begins to move out of its stall. It is tugged into the clear
water, and the fishermen put out long oars and row it laboriously to
the mouth of the harbour and the wind. It is followed by a motor-boat,
and another, and another. There are forty putting up their sails like
one. The harbour moves. One has a sense as of things liberated. It is
as though a flock of birds were being loosed into the air--as though
pigeon after pigeon were being set free out of a basket for home.
Lug-sail after lugsail, brown as the underside of a mushroom, hurries
out among the waves. A green little tub of a steamboat follows with
insolent smoke. The motor-boats hasten out like scenting dogs. Every
sort of craft--motor-boat, gig, lugger and steamboat--makes for sea,
higgledy-piggledy in a long line, an irregular procession of black and
blue and green and white and brown. Here, as in the men's clothes, the
paint-pots have been spilled.

There is nothing more sociable than a fishing-fleet. The boats
overtake each other, like horses in a race. They gallop in rivalry.
But for the most part they keep together, and move like a travelling
town over the sea. As likely as not they will have to come back out of
the storm into the shelter of the bay, and they will ride there till
nightfall, when every boat becomes a lamp and every sail a shadow. In
the darkness they hang like a constellation on the oily water. They
become a company of dancing stars. Every now and then a boat moves off
on a quest of its own. It is as though the firmament were shaken. One
hears the kick-kick-kick of the motor, and a star has become a
will-o'-the-wisp. These lights can no more keep still than a
playground of children. They always make a pattern on the water, but
they never make the same pattern. Sometimes they lengthen themselves
against the sandy shore on the far side of the bay into a golden
river. Sometimes they huddle together into a little procession of
monks carrying tapers....

One goes down to the harbour after breakfast the next morning to see
what has been the result of the night's fishing. One does not really
need to go down. One can see it afar off. There is movement as at the
building of a city. On every boat men are busy emptying the nets,
disentangling the fish that have been caught by the gills, tumbling
them in a liquid mass into the bottom of the boat. One can hardly see
the fish separately. They flow into one another. They are a pool of
quick-silver. One is amazed, as the disciples must have been amazed at
the miraculous draught. Everything is covered with their scales. The
fishermen are spotted as if with confetti. Their hands, their brown
coats, their boots are a mass of white-and-blue spots. The labourers
with the gurries--great blue boxes that are carried like Sedan-chairs
between two pairs of handles--come up alongside, and the fish are
ladled into the gurries from tin pans. As each gurry is filled the men
hasten off with it to where the auctioneer is standing. With the help
of a small notebook and a lead pencil he auctions it before an
outsider can wink, and the gurry is taken a few yards further, where
women are pouring herrings into barrels. They, too, are covered with
fish-scales from head to foot. They are dabbled like a painter's
palette. So great is the haul that every cart in the country-side has
come down to lend a hand. The fish are poured into the carts over the
sides of the boats like water. Old fishermen stand aside and look on
with a sense of having wasted their youth. They recall the time when
they went fishing in the North Sea and had to be content to sell their
catch at a shilling and sixpence a cran--a cran being equal to four
gurries, or about a thousand herrings. Who is there now who would sell
even a hundred herrings for one and sixpence? Who is there who would
sell a hundred herrings for ten and sixpence? Yet one gig alone this
morning has brought in fourteen thousand herrings. No wonder that
there is an atmosphere of excitement in the harbour. No wonder that
the carts almost run over you as they make journey after journey
between boat and barrel. No wonder that three different sorts of
sea-gulls--the herring gull, the lesser black-headed gull, and the
black-backed gull--have gathered about us in screaming multitudes and
fill the air like a snowstorm. Every child in the town seems to be
making for home with its finger in a fish's mouth, or in two fishes'
mouths, or in three fishes' mouths. Artists have hurried down to the
harbour, and have set up their easels on every spot that is not
already occupied by a fish barrel or an auctioneer or a man with a
knife in his teeth preparing to gut a dogfish. The town has lost its
head. It has become Midas for the day. Every time it opens its mouth a
herring comes out. A doom of herrings has come upon us. The smell
rises to heaven. It is as though we were breathing fish-scales. Even
the pretty blue overalls of the children have become spotted.
Everywhere barrels and boxes have been piled high. We are hoisting
them on to carts--farm carts, grocers' carts, coal carts, any sort of
carts. We must get rid of the stuff at all costs. Anything to get it
up the hill to the railway station. The very horses are frenzied. They
stick their toes into the hill and groan. The drivers, excited with
cupidity as they think of all the journeys they will be able to make
before evening, bully them and beat them with the end of the reins.
Their eyes are excited, their gestures impatient. They fill the town
with clamour and smell. It is an occasion on which, as the vulgar say,
they wouldn't call the Queen their aunt....

This, I fancy, is where all the romance of the sea began--in the story
of a greedy man and a fresh herring. The ship was a symbol of man's
questing stomach long before it was a symbol of his questing soul. He
was a hungry man, not a poet, when he built the first harbour.
Luckily, the harbour made a poet of him. Sails gave him wings. He
learned to traffic for wonders. He became a traveller. He told tales.
He discovered the illusion of horizons. Perhaps, however, it is less
the sailor than the ship that attracts our imagination. The ship seems
to convey to us more than anything else a sense at once of perfect
freedom and perfect adventure.

That is why we are content to stand on the harbour stones all day and
watch anything with sails. We ourselves want to live in some such
freedom and adventure as this. We are feeding our appetite for liberty
as we gaze hungrily after the ships making their way out of harbour
into the sea.




III



THE BETTING MAN

If The Panther wins the Derby,[He didn't] as most people apparently
expect him to do, his victory will carry more weight among frequenters
of race-courses as an argument for Socialism than any that has yet
been invented. For The Panther is a Government-bred horse, born and
brought up in defiance of the _laissez-faire_ principles of Mr Harold
Cox. He will therefore carry the colours of a great principle at Epsom
as well as those of his present lessee. Who would have thought five
years ago that the Derby favourite of 1919 would start under so grave
a responsibility?

Not that racing men have much time to spare for thoughts about social
problems, even when these are related to a horse. Theirs is a busy
life. They enjoy little of the leisure that falls to the lot of
statesmen and haberdashers.

Their anxieties are a serial story continued from one edition of the
day's papers to another Nor does the last edition of the evening paper
make an end of their anxieties. It is not an epilogue to one day so
much as a prologue to the next. The programme of races for the
following day suggests more problems than the Peace Conference itself
could settle in a month. The racing man, having studied the names of
the horses entered, goes out to buy some tobacco. As he takes his
change from the tobacconist, he asks: "Have you heard anything for
to-morrow?" The tobacconist says: "I heard Green Cloak for the first
race," The racing man nods. "You didn't hear anything for the big
race?" he asks. "No. Somebody was saying Holy Saint." "I heard Oily
Hair," says the racing man gravely. "Good-night." And he goes out. His
brow becomes knitted with thought as he moves off along the pavement.
He tells himself that Holy Saint certainly does offer difficulties.
Holy Saint is a notoriously bad starter. If he could be trusted to get
away, he would be one of the finest horses of his year in
long-distance races. But he is continually being left at the post. To
back him would be pure gambling. He could win if he liked, but would
he like? On the whole, Oily Hair is a safer horse to back. He has
already beaten Holy Saint in the Chiswick Cup, and only lost the
Scotch Plate to Disaster by a neck. As the racing man allows his
memory to dwell on the achievements of Oily Hair his confidence rises.
"I see nothing to beat him," he says to himself. He has just decided
to put "a fiver" on him when he meets an acquaintance, who suggests a
drink. As they drink, the talk turns on horses. "What are you backing
in the big race to-morrow?" "Have you heard anything?" "I heard Oily
Hair." "I think not. I'll tell you why. Tommy Fitzgibbon's youngest
sister is at school with two sisters of Willie Soames, who's going to
ride Peace on Earth to-morrow, and one of them told her that Willie
had written to her to put every halfpenny she has on Peace on Earth."
"I'm sick, sore and tired of backing Peace on Earth. He's a
cantankerous beast that seems to take a positive pleasure in losing
races." "Well, remember what I told you...."

On arriving home our sportsman goes to his shelves and takes down the
last annual volume of _M'Call's Racing Chronicle and Pocket Turf
Calendar_, and looks up Peace on Earth in the index. He turns up the
record of one race after another, and finds that the horse has a
better past than he had remembered. He cannot make up his mind what to
do. He looks over several weekly papers to see if any of them can
throw light on his difficulties. Each of them names a different winner
for the big race. When he puts on his pyjamas that night, all he knows
is that he has decided to decide nothing till the next day.

Next day he once more reads the names of the horses entered for the
various races, and glances down the list of winners selected by the
racing prophet in the morning paper. Having breakfasted late, he finds
he has only about an hour to waste before catching a train for the
races, and he resolves to pay a call at the "Bird of Paradise," where
a friend of his who has an unusual gift for picking up information is
usually to be found about noon. He learns from the landlord that his
friend has been in and gone away, but the landlord tells him that he
hears Pudding is a certainty.

"Have you any reason for thinking so?"

"Well, there was a man in here who has a son a policeman close by
Jobson's stables, and he tells me that everybody in the neighbourhood
has been backing Pudding down to their last spoon. That looks as if
word had been passed round that it was going to win." The racing man
passes out and looks in at the "Pink Elephant" to see if his friend is
there. He is seated at a little table in an upstairs parlour with four
others, all drinking whisky and exchanging tips. They belong to the
most credulous race of men alive. They are all believers in what is
called information, and information is simply the betting man's name
for gossip. The friend is speaking in a low but excited voice to his
companions, who crouch over towards him in order to catch information
not meant for the rest of the room. He tells how he had just been in
to buy a paper at his newsagent's, and how his newsagent had been
calling on his solicitor that morning, and the solicitor told him that
the caller who had just left as he came in was Gordon, the owner of
Cutandrun, and Gordon said that Cutandrun was the biggest thing that
had ever come into his hands. The buzz-buzz of talk in the
smoke-filled room and the clatter of passing carts makes it difficult
to hear him, but the others lean over the table with red, intent
faces, like men among whom an apostle has come. They do not stay long
over their drinks, as they have not much time for social pleasures.
They swallow their whisky with a quick gesture look at their watches,
stand up hurriedly and part with handshakes.

Then comes a drive to the railway station where race-cards are being
sold. The racing-man buys a "card" and several papers. He looks down
the lists of the horses again in the train, and tries to make up his
mind whether to take the tobacconist's tip and back Green Cloak for
the first race. He believes greatly in breeding, and by far the
best-bred horse in the race is Liberal, who has three Derby winners in
his pedigree. Then there is Red Rose, who created a sensation a month
ago by winning two races in a day. He decides to do nothing till he
sees the horses themselves. He pays thirty shillings at the turnstile
of the race-course and is admitted to the grand stand. Already one or
two bookmakers are shouting from their stands, and some of them have
chalked up on blackboards the odds they are willing to give in the big
race. He looks at the board and sees that he can get twenties against
Cutandrun. A five-pound note might bring him a hundred pounds. On the
other hand, if Oily Hair was going to win, he wouldn't like to miss
it. The bookmakers are offering fives against it. Holy Saint is hot
favourite at two to one. That alone makes him impatient of it, for he
dislikes backing favourites. He prefers the big risks, with great
scoops if he wins. However, he will make up his mind later. Meanwhile,
he will go to the paddock and have a look at the horses for the first
race. Half-a-dozen horses are already out, and men with numbers on
their arms are walking them round and round in a ring. He consults his
card and sees that No. 7 is Brighton Beauty, and No. 2 (a slender,
glossy, black beast with a white star in his forehead) Green Cloak.
Liberal has not appeared. The numbers of the starters, with the names
of the jockeys, are now being hoisted. He makes a pencil-mark opposite
the name of each starter on his racing-card, and jots down the name of
the jockey. Raff, he sees, is riding Green Cloak. That is in its
favour.

When he gets back to the betting-ring, the bookmakers are shouting
hoarsely against each other. Liberal is a very hot favourite. They are
shouting: "I'll take two to one. I'll take two to one. Five to one bar
one. A hundred to eight Green Cloak." He feels almost sure Liberal
will win, but Green Cloak--he wishes he had asked the tobacconist
where he got his information from. Anyhow, half-a-sovereign doesn't
matter much. He goes up to a bookmaker, and says: "Ten shillings Green
Cloak." The bookmaker turns to his clerk and says: "Six pound five to
ten shillings Green Cloak," gives a red-white-and-blue card with his
name and a number on it; the other takes the card, writes on the back
of it the name of the horse and the amount of the bet, and makes for
the stand to see the race. The horses have now come out, and are off
one after another to the starting-post. Green Cloak would be hard to
miss because of his jockey's colours--old gold, scarlet sleeves, and
green and black quartered cap. The bell has hardly rung to announce
that the race has begun when men in the crowd begin to dogmatise about
the result. One man keeps saying: "Green Cloak wins this race. Green
Cloak wins this race." Another says: "Liberal leads." Another says:
"No; that's Jumping Frog." To the unaccustomed eye the horses seem as
close to each other as a swarm of bees. Suddenly, however, a bay horse
springs forward and seems to put a length between itself and the
others at every stride. The people in the stand shout: "Liberal!
Liberal!" It wins by about ten lengths. Green Cloak is second, but a
bad second. The crowd begins to pour down from the stand again. Those
who have won wait near the bookmakers till the winner has been to the
unsaddling enclosure and the announcement "All right" is made. Then
the bookmakers begin to pay out, and the crowd moves off to the
paddock again to see the horses for the next race.

Friends stop each other and exchange information in low voices. Others
do their best to listen in the hope of overhearing information: "I
hear Tomsk," "Johnnie says lay your last penny on Glasgow Pet," "I'm
going to back Submarine." And the parade of the horses, the hoisting
of the names of the starters and jockeys, the laying of the bets, and
the climbing of the grand stand are all gone through over and over
again. The betting man has no time even for a drink. To the casual
onlooker a day's horse-racing has the appearance of a day's holiday.
But the racing man knows better. He is collecting information, coming
to decisions, wandering among the bookies in the hope of getting a
good price, climbing into the grand stand and descending from it,
studying the points of the horses all the time with as little chance
of leisure as though he were a stockbroker during a financial crisis
or a sailor on a sinking ship.

Perhaps, in the train on the way home from the races, he may relax a
little. Certainly, if he has backed Cutandrun, he will. For Cutandrun
won at ten to one, and his pocket is full of five-pound notes. He
feels quite jocular now that the strain is over. He makes puns on the
names of the defeated horses. "Lie Low lay low all right," he
announces to the compartment, indifferent to the scowls of the man in
the corner who had backed it. "Hopscotch didn't hop quite fast
enough." Were he tipsy, he could not jest more fluently. His jokes are
small, but be not too severe on him. The man has had a hard day. Wait
but an hour, and care will descend on him again. He will not have sat
down to dinner in his hotel for three minutes till someone will be
saying to him: "Have you heard anything for the Cup to-morrow?" There
is no six-hours day for the betting man. He is the drudge of chance
for every waking hour. He is enviable only for one thing. He knows
what to talk about to barbers.




IV



THE HUM OF INSECTS


It makes all the difference whether you hear an insect in the bedroom
or in the garden. In the garden the voice of the insect soothes; in
the bedroom it irritates. In the garden it is the hum of spring; in
the bedroom it seems to belong to the same school of music as the bizz
of the dentist's drill or the saw-mill. It may be that it is not the
right sort of insect that invades the bedroom. Even in the garden we
wave away a mosquito. Either its note is in itself offensive or we
dislike it as the voice of an unscrupulous enemy. By an unscrupulous
enemy I mean an enemy that attacks without waiting to be attacked. The
mosquito is a beast of prey; it is out for blood, whether one is as
gentle as Tom Pinch or uses violence. The bee and the wasp are in
comparison noble creatures. They will, so it is said, never injure a
human being unless a human being has injured them. The worst of it is
they do not discriminate between one human being and another, and the
bee that floats over the wall into our garden may turn out to have
been exasperated by the behaviour of a retired policeman five miles
away who struck at it with a spade and roused in it a blind passion
for reprisals. That or something like it is, probably, the explanation
of the stings perfectly innocent persons receive from an insect that
is said never to touch you if you leave it alone. As a matter of fact,
when a bee loses its head, it does not even wait for a human being in
order to relieve its feelings, I have seen a dog racing round a field
in terror as a result of a sting from an angry bee. I have seen a
turkey racing round a farmyard in terror as a result of the same
thing. All the trouble arose from a human being's having very properly
removed a large quantity of honey from a row of hives. I do not admit
that the bee would have been justified in stinging even the human
being--who, after all, is master on this partially civilised planet.
It had certainly no right to sting the dog or the turkey, which had as
little to do with stealing the honey as the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford
University. Yet in spite of such things, and of the fact that some
breeds of bees are notorious for their crossness, especially when
there is thunder in the air, the bee is morally far higher in the
scale than the mosquito. Not only does it give you honey instead of
malaria, and help your apples and strawberries to multiply, but it
aims at living a quiet, inoffensive life, at peace with everybody,
except when it is annoyed. The mosquito does what it does in cold
blood. That is why it is so unwelcome a bedroom visitor.

But even a bee or a wasp, I fancy, would seem tedious company at two
in the morning, especially if it came and buzzed near the pillow. It
is not so much that you would be frightened: if the wasp alighted on
your cheek, you could always lie still and hold your breath till it
had finished trying to sting--that is an infallible preventive. But
there is a limit to the amount of your night's rest that you are
willing to sacrifice in this way. You cannot hold your breath while
you are asleep, and yet you dare not cease holding your breath while a
wasp is walking over your face. Besides, it might crawl into your ear,
and what would you do then? Luckily, the question does not often arise
in practice owing to the fact that the wasp and the bee are more like
human beings than mosquitoes and have more or less the same habits of
nocturnal rest. As we sit in the garden, however, the mind is bound to
speculate, and to revolve such questions as whether this hum of
insects that delights us is in itself delightful, whether its
delightfulness depends on its surroundings, or whether it depends on
its associations with past springs.

Certainly in a garden the noise of insects seems as essentially
beautiful a thing as the noise of birds or the noise of the sea. Even
these have been criticised, especially by persons who suffer from
sleeplessness, but their beauty is affirmed by the general voice of
mankind. These three noises appear to have an infinite capacity for
giving us pleasure--a capacity, probably, beyond that of any music of
instruments. It may be that on hearing them we become a part of some
universal music, and that the rhythm of wave, bird and insect echoes
in some way the rhythm of our own breath and blood. Man is in love
with life and these are the millionfold chorus of life--the magnified
echo of his own pleasure in being alive. At the same time, our
pleasure in the hum of insects is also, I think, a pleasure of
reminiscence. It reminds us of other springs and summers in other
gardens. It reminds us of the infinite peace of childhood when on a
fine day the world hardly existed beyond the garden-gate. We can smell
moss-roses--how we loved them as children!--as a bee swings by. Insect
after insect dances through the air, each dying away like a note of
music, and we see again the border of pinks and the strawberries, and
the garden paths edged with box, and the old dilapidated wooden seat
under the tree, and an apple-tree in the long grass, and a stream
beyond the apple-tree, and all those things that made us infinitely
happy as children when we were in the country--happier than we were
ever made by toys, for we do not remember any toys so intensely as we
remember the garden and the farm. We had the illusion in those days
that it was going to last for ever. There was no past or future. There
was nothing real except the present in which we lived--a present in
which all the human beings were kind, in which a dim-sighted
grandfather sang songs (especially a song in which the chorus began
"Free and easy"), in which aunts brought us animal biscuits out of
town, in which there was neither man-servant nor maid-servant, neither
ox nor ass, that did not seem to go about with a bright face. It was a
present that overflowed with kindness, though everybody except the ox
and the ass believed that it was only by the skin of our teeth that
any of us would escape being burnt alive for eternity. Perhaps we
thought little enough about it except on Sundays or at prayers.
Certainly no one was gloomy about it before children. William John
McNabb, the huge labourer who looked after the horses, greeted us all
as cheerfully as if we had been saved and ready for paradise.

It would be unfair to human beings, however, to suggest that they are
less lavish with their smiles than they were thirty years or so ago.
Everybody--or almost everybody--still smiles. We can hardly stop to
talk to a man in the street without a duet of smiles. The Prince of
Wales smiles across the world from left to right, and the Crown Prince
of Japan smiles across the world from right to left. We cannot open an
illustrated paper without seeing smiling statesmen, cricketers,
jockeys, oarsmen, bridegrooms, clergymen, actresses and
undergraduates. Yet somehow we are no longer made happy by a smile. We
no longer take it, as we used to take it, as evidence that the person
smiling is either happy or kind. It then seemed to come from the
heart. It now seems a formula. It is, we may admit, a pleasant and
useful formula. But a man might easily be a burglar or a murderer or a
Cabinet Minister and smile. Some people are supposed to smile merely
in order to show what good teeth they have. William John McNabb, I am
sure, never did that.

We need not grumble at our contemporaries, however, for not being so
fine as William John McNabb. To children, for all we know, the world
may still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happy
and smile because they are kind. The world will always remain to a
child the chief of toys, and the hum of insects as enchanting as the
hum of a musical top. Even those of us who are grown up can recover
this enchantment, not only through the pleasures of memory but through
the endless pleasures of watching the things that inhabit the earth.
The world is always waiting to be discovered in full, and yet no life
is long enough to discover the whole of a single county, or even the
whole of a single parish. Who alive, for instance, knows all the moles
of Sussex? I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and,
though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had read
descriptions of moles, the living creature was as unexpected as if one
had come on it silent upon a peak in Darien. I had never expected it
to look so black and glossy in the midday sun or to have that little
pink snout that made me think of it as a small underground pig. I had
always been told, too, that the sound of a footstep would frighten a
mole, but this mole only began to show fright at the sound of voices.
Then it began to tear its way into the undergrowth with paws and snout
ever trying to overtake each other. Mr Blunden has described how

     The lost mole tries to pierce the mattocked clay
     In agony and terror of the sun.

I got much the same impression of agony and terror as this poor
creature dug its way into the grass and ferns and, coming out at the
far end of the clump, bolted under a tree like a frightened pig. And
yet, they say, this poor little coward is a fierce animal enough. He
is, we are told, impelled by so cruel a hunger that he would die of it
were it to go unsatisfied for even twenty-four hours. If he can find
nothing else to eat, he will kill and eat a fellow-mole. So the
authorities tell us, but I wonder how many of the authorities have
even seen a mole in the very act of cannibalism. How many of them have
followed him on his long journeys through the bowels of the earth? He
certainly looked no South Sea monster on the Sunday morning on which
for a few seconds I watched him. Nor would John Clare have written
affectionately about him had he been entirely bloody-minded.

Then there was the hedgehog. The charm of hedgehogs is that we do not
see them every day--that their appearance is a secret and an accident.
They are a part of the busy life that goes on all about us as
mysteriously as the movements of spirits. Consequently, when I was
looking over a sloping field the other evening and, hearing a
crackling as of sticks being trodden on, turned my eyes and saw a
living creature making its way out of a wood into the grass, I was
delighted to find that it was a hedgehog and not a man or a rat. I
could see it only dimly in the twilight, and it was difficult to
believe that so small an animal had made so great a noise. The
pleasure of recognition, unfortunately, was not mutual. No sooner did
the hedgehog hear a foot pressing on the road than it gave up all
thoughts of its supper of insects and hobbled back into the thicket. I
regretted only that I had not made a greater noise, and scared it into
rolling itself into a ball, as everybody says it does when alarmed.
But it is perhaps just as well that the hedgehog did not merely repeat
itself in this way. We like a certain variety of behaviour in
animals--some element of the unexpected that always keeps our
curiosity alive and looking forward.

But we must not exaggerate the pleasure to be got from moles and
hedgehogs. They make a part of our being happy, but they do not
delight the whole of our being, as a child is delighted by the world
every spring. It is probably the child in us that responds most
wholeheartedly to such pleasures. They, like the hum of insects, help
to restore the illusion of a world that is perfectly happy because it
is such a Noah's Ark of a spectacle and everybody is kind. But, even
as we submit to the illusion in the garden, we become restive in our
deck-chairs and remember the telephone or the daily paper or a letter
that has to be written. And reality weighs on us, like a hand laid on
a top, making an end of the spinning, making an end of the music. The
world is no longer a toy dancing round and round. It is a problem, a
run-down machine, a stuffy room full of little stabbing creatures that
make an irritating noise.




V



CATS


The Champion Cat Show has been held at the Crystal Palace, but the
champion cat was not there. One could not possibly allow him to appear
in public. He is for show, but not in a cage. He does not compete,
because he is above competition. You know this as well as I. Probably
you possess him. I certainly do. That is the supreme test of a cat's
excellence--the test of possession. One does not say: "You should see
Brailsford's cat" or "You should see Adcock's cat" or "You should see
Sharp's cat," but "You should see our cat." There is nothing we are
more egoistic about--not even children--than about cats. I have heard
a man, for lack of anything better to boast about, boasting that his
cat eats cheese. In anyone else's cat it would have seemed an inferior
habit and only worth mentioning to the servant as a warning. But
because the cat happens to be his cat, this man talks about its vice
excitedly among women as though it were an accomplishment. It is
seldom that we hear a cat publicly reproached with guilt by anyone
above a cook. He is not permitted to steal from our own larder. But if
he visits the next-door house by stealth and returns over the wall
with a Dover sole in his jaws, we really cannot help laughing. We are
a little nervous at first, and our mirth is tinged with pity at the
thought of the probably elderly and dyspeptic gentleman who has had
his luncheon filched away almost from under his nose. If we were quite
sure that it was from No. 14, and not from No. 9 or No. 11, that the
fish had been stolen, we might--conceivably--call round and offer to
pay for it. But with a cat one is never quite sure. And we cannot call
round on all the neighbours and make a general announcement that our
cat is a thief. In any case the next move lies with the wronged
neighbour. As day follows day, and there is no sign of his irate and
murder-bent figure advancing up the path, we recover our mental
balance and begin to see the cat's exploit in a new light. We do not
yet extol it on moral grounds, but undoubtedly, the more we think of
it, the deeper becomes our admiration. Of the two great heroes of the
Greeks we admire one for his valour and one for his cunning. The epic
of the cat is the epic of Odysseus. The old gentleman with the Dover
sole gradually assumes the aspect of a Polyphemus outwitted--outwitted
and humiliated to the point of not even being able to throw things
after his tormentor. Clever cat! Nobody else's cat could have done
such a thing. We should like to celebrate the Rape of the Dover Sole
in Latin verse.

As for the Achillean sort of prowess, we do not demand it of a cat,
but we are proud of it when it exists. There is a pleasure in seeing
strange cats fly at his approach, either in single file over the wall
or in the scattered aimlessness of a bursting bomb. Theoretically, we
hate him to fight, but, if he does fight and comes home with a torn
ear, we have to summon up all the resources of our finer nature in
order not to rejoice on noticing that the cat next door looks as
though it had been through a railway accident. I am sorry for the cat
next door. I hate him so, and it must be horrible to be hated. But he
should not sit on my wall and look at me with yellow eyes. If his eyes
were any other colour--even the blue that is now said to be the mark
of the runaway husband--I feel certain I could just manage to endure
him. But they are the sort of yellow eyes that you expect to see
looking out at you from a hole in the panelling in a novel by Mr Sax
Rohmer. The only reason why I am not frightened of them is that the
cat is so obviously frightened of me. I never did him any injury
unless to hate is to injure. But he lowers his head when I appear as
though he expected to be guillotined. He does not run away: he merely
crouches like a guilty thing. Perhaps he remembers how often he has
stepped delicately over my seed-beds, but not so delicately as to
leave no mark of ruin among the infant lettuces and the
less-than-infant autumn-sprouting broccoli. These things I could
forgive him, but it is not easy to forgive him the look in his eyes
when he watches a bird at its song. They are ablaze with evil. He
becomes a sort of Jack the Ripper at the opera. People tell us that we
should not blame cats for this sort of thing--that it is their nature
and so forth. They even suggest that a cat is no more cruel in eating
robin than we are cruel ourselves in eating chicken. This seems to me
to be quibbling. In the first place, there is an immense difference
between a robin and a chicken. In the second place, we are willing to
share our chicken with the cat--at least, we are willing to share the
skin and such of the bones as are not required for soup. Besides, a
cat has not the same need of delicacies as a human being. It can eat,
and even digest, anything. It can eat the black skin of filleted
plaice. It can eat the bits of gristle that people leave on the side
of their plates. It can eat boiled cod. It can eat New Zealand mutton.
There is no reason why an animal with so undiscriminating a palate
should demand song-birds for its food, when even human beings, who are
fairly unscrupulous eaters, have agreed in some measure to abstain
from them. On reflection, however, I doubt if it is his appetite for
birds that makes the cat with the yellow eyes feel guilty. If you were
able to talk to him in his own language, and formulate your
accusations against him as a bird-eater, he would probably be merely
puzzled and look on you as a crank. If you pursued the argument and
compelled him to moralise his position, he would, I fancy, explain
that the birds were very wicked creatures and that their cruelties to
the worms and the insects were more than flesh and blood could stand.
He would work himself up into a generous idealisation of himself as
the guardian of law and order amid the bloody strife of the
cabbage-patch--the preserver of the balance of nature. If cats were as
clever as we, they would compile an atrocities blue-book about worms.
Alas, poor thrush, with how bedraggled a reputation you would come
through such an exposure! With how Hunnish a tread you would be
depicted treading the lawn, sparing neither age nor sex, seizing the
infant worm as it puts out its head to take its first bewildered peep
at the rolling sun! Cats could write sonnets on such a theme.... Then
there is that other beautiful potential poem, _The Cry of the
Snail_.... How tender-hearted cats are! Their sympathy seems to be all
but universal, always on the look out for an object, ready to extend
itself anywhere where it is needed, except, as is but human, to their
victims. Yellow eyes or not, I begin to be persuaded that the cat next
door is a noble fellow. It may well be that his look as I pass is a
look not of fear but of repulsion. He has seen me going out among the
worms with a sharp--no, not a very sharp--spade, and regards me as no
better than an ogre. If I could only explain to him! But I shall never
be able to do so. He could no more appreciate my point of view about
worms than I can appreciate his about robins. Luckily, we both eat
chicken. This may ultimately help us to understand one another.

On the other hand, part of the fascination of cats may be due to the
fact that it is so difficult to come to an understanding with them. A
man talks to a horse or a dog as to an equal. To a cat he has to be
deferential as though it had some Sphinx-like quality that baffled
him. He cannot order a cat about with the certainty of being obeyed.
He cannot be sure that, if he speaks to it, it will even raise its
eyes. If it is perfectly comfortable, it will not. A cat is obedient
only when it is hungry or when it takes the fancy. It may be a
parasite, but it is never a servant. The dog does your bidding, but
you do the cat's. At the same time, the contrast between the cat and
the dog has often been exaggerated by dog-lovers. They tell you
stories of dogs that remained with their dead masters, as though there
were no fidelity in cats. It was only the other day, however, that the
newspapers gave an account of a cat that remained with the body of its
murdered mistress in the most faithful tradition of the dogs. I know,
again, of cats that will go out for a walk with a human
fellow-creature, as dogs do. I have frequently seen a lady walking
across Hampstead Heath with a cat in train. When you go for a walk
with a dog, however, the dog protects you: when you go for a walk with
a cat, you feel that you are protecting the cat. It is strange that
the cat should have imposed the myth of its helplessness on us. It is
an animal with an almost boundless capacity for self-help. It can jump
up walls. It can climb trees. It can run, as the proverb says, like
"greased lightning." It is armed like an African chief. Yet it has
contrived to make itself a pampered pet, so that we are alarmed if it
attempts to follow us out of the gate into a world of dogs, and only
feel happy when it is purring--rolling on its back and purring as we
rub its Adam's apple--by the fireside. There is nothing that gives a
greater sense of comfort than the purring of a cat. It is the most
flattering music in nature. One feels, as one listens, like a humble
lover in a bad novel, who says: "You do, then, like me--a
little--after all?" The fact that a cat is not utterly miserable in
our presence always comes with the freshness and delight of a
surprise. The happiness of a crowing baby, newly introduced to us, may
be still more flattering, but a cat will get round people who cannot
tolerate babies.

It is all the more to be wondered at that a cat, which is such a
master of this conversational sort of music, should ever attempt any
other. There never was an animal less fit to be a singer. Someone--was
it Cowper?---has said that there are no really ugly voices in nature,
and that he could imagine that there was something to be said even for
the donkey's bray. I should have thought that the beautiful voices in
nature were few, and that most of them could be defended only on the
ground of some pleasant association. Humanity, at least, has been
unanimous in its condemnation of the cat as part of nature's chorus.
Poems have been written in praise of the corncrake as a singer, but
never of the cat. All the associations we have with cats have not
accustomed us to that discordant howl. It converts love itself into a
torment such as can be found only in the pages of a twentieth-century
novel. In it we hear the jungle decadent--the beast in dissolution,
but not yet civilised. When it rises at night outside the window, we
always explain to visitors: "No; that's not Peter. That's the cat next
door with the yellow eyes." The man who will not defend the honour of
his cat cannot be trusted to defend anything.




VI



MAY


May is chiefly remarkable for being the only month in which one does
not like cats. June, too, perhaps; but, after that, one does not mind
if the garden is full of cats. One likes to have a wild beast whose
movements, lazy as those of Satan, will terrify the childish birds out
of the gooseberry bushes and the raspberries and strawberries. He will
not, we know, have much chance of catching them as late as that. They
will be as cunning as he, and the robin will wind his alarum-clock,
the starling in the plum-tree will cry out like a hysterical drake,
and the blackbird will make as much noise as a farmyard. The cat can
but blink at the clamour of such a host of cunning sentinels and,
pretending that he had come out only to take the air, return
majestically to his dinner of leavings in the kitchen. In May and
June, however, one does not wish the birds to be frightened. One would
like one's garden to be an Alsatia for all their wings and all their
songs. There is no hope of this in a garden full of cats. Even a
Tetrazzini would cease to be able to produce her best trills if every
time she opened her mouth, a tiger padded in her direction down a path
of currant bushes. There are, it may be admitted, heroic exceptions.
The chaffinch sits in the plum and blusters out his music, cat or no
cat. To be sure, he only sings, a flush of all the colours, in order
to distract our attention. He is not an artist but a watchman. If you
look into the buddleia-tree beside him, you will see his hen moving
about in silence, creeping, dancing, fluttering, as she gorges herself
with insects. She is a fly-catcher at this season, leaping into the
air and pirouetting as she seizes her prey and returns to the bough.
She is restless and is not content with the spoil of a single tree.
She flings herself gracefully, like a ballet-dancer, into the plum,
and takes up a caterpillar in her beak. She does not eat it at once,
but stands still, eyeing you as though awaiting your applause. Her
husband, sitting on the topmost spray, goes on singing his version of
_The Roast Beef of Old England_. She does not even now eat the
caterpillar, but hurries along the paths of the branches with the
obvious purpose of finding a tasty insect to eat long with it. It may
be that there are insects that play the part of mustard or
Worcestershire sauce in the chaffinch world. What a meal she is making
in any case before she hurries back to her nest! It seems that among
the chaffinches the male is the more spiritual of the sexes. But then
he has so little to do compared with the female. He is still in that
state of savagery in which the male dresses finely and idles.

The thrush cannot carry on with the same indifference to cats. He is
the most nervous of parents, and spends half his time calling on his
children to be careful. The young thrush hopping about on the lawn
knows nothing of cats and refuses to believe that they are dangerous.
He is not afraid even of human beings. His parent becomes
argumentative to the point of tears, but the young one stays where he
is and looks at you with a sideways jerk of his head as much as to
say: "Listen to the old 'un." You, too, begin to be alarmed at such
boldness. You know, like the pitiful parent, that the world is a very
dangerous place, and that your neighbour's cat goes about like a
roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. It has been contended by some
men of science that all birds are born fearless after the manner of
the young thrush, and that fear is a lesson that has to be taught to
each new generation by the more experienced parents. Fear, they say,
is not an inherited instinct, but a racial tradition that has to be
communicated like the morality of civilised people. The young thrush
on the lawn is certainly a witness on behalf of this theory. He hops
towards you instead of away from you. He moves his gaping beak as
though he were trying to say something. If there were no cats in the
world, you would encourage his confidences, but you feel that, much as
you would like to make friends with him, you must, for his own sake,
give him his first lesson in fear. You try to give yourself the
appearance of a grim giant: it has no effect on him. You make a quick
movement to chase him away: he runs a few yards and then stops and
looks round at you as though you were playing a game. It is too much
to expect of you that you will actually throw stones at a bird for its
good, and so you give up his education as a bad job. Alas, in two
days, your worst fears are justified. His dead body is found, torn and
ruffled, among the bushes. Some cat has murdered him--murdered him,
evidently, not in hunger, but just for fun. Two indignant children,
one gold, one brown, discover the dead body and bring in the tale.
They prepare the funeral rites of one whose only sin was his
innocence. This is not the first burial in the garden. There is
already a cemetery marked with half-a-dozen crosses and heaped with
flowers under the pear-tree on the south wall. Here is where the mouse
was buried; here where the starling; and here the rabbit's skull. They
all lie there under the earth in boxes, as you and I will lie,
expecting the Last Trump. The robins are not kinder to the "friendless
bodies of unburied men" than are children to the bodies of mice and
birds. Here the ghost of no creature haunts reproaching us with the
absence of a tomb, as the dead sailor washed up on an alien shore
reproaches us so often in the pages of _The Greek Anthology_. There is
a procession to the grave and all due ceremony. There is even a
funeral service. Over the starling, perhaps, it lacked something in
appropriateness. The buriers meant well however. Their favourite in
verse at the time was _Lars Porsena of Clusium_, and they gave the
starling the best they knew--gave it to him from beginning to end.
What he made of it, there is no telling: he is, it is said an
impressionable bird, though something of a satirist. Someone,
overhearing them, recommended a briefer and more fitting service for
the future. The young thrush had the benefit of the advice. He was
laid to his last rest with the recitation of that noblest of
valedictories: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun," over his tomb. He
is now gone where there is no cat or parent to disturb. The priests
who buried him declare that he has been turned into a golden
nightingale, and that there must be no noise or romping in the garden
for three days, as not till then will he have arrived safely at the
Appleiades. That is the name they give to the Pleiades--the seven
golden islands whither pass the souls of dead mice and birds and dolls
and where Scarlatti lives and where you, too, may expect to go if you
please them. Even the black cat will probably go there--one's own
black cat. But not the neighbour's cat--the reddish-brown one--thief,
murderer and beast. It is the neighbour's cat that makes one believe
there is a hell.

Short is the memory of man, however. Shorter the memory of children.
There is no gloom that can withstand May pouring itself out in the
deep blue of anchusa and the paler blue of lupin, gushing out in the
yellow of laburnum, tossing like the tides in the wind. One is gloomy,
perhaps, when one looks at the lettuces and sees how slow is their
growth. Watching a plant grow is like watching a kettle boil. It seems
to take æons. The patience of gardeners always astonishes me. Were
gardening my profession, I should spend half my time inventing schemes
for making plants grow up in a night like Jonah's gourd. I should not
mind about parsnips. A parsnip might mature as slowly as an oak and
live as long for all I care. There is something, it may be, to be said
for parsnips, as there is something, it may be, to be said for Mr
Bonar Law. But I do not know it. They do not even tempt the slugs and
the leather-jackets away from the lettuces. There is nothing that
puzzles one more in a friend than if he confesses to a taste for
parsnips. Immediately, a gulf yawns deeper than could be caused by any
confession of religious or moral eccentricity. One's sympathies
instinctively close up like a sea-anemone touched by a child's finger.
Yet people eat them. All that you and I know about them is that kind
words do not butter them; but, if you go to Covent Garden at the right
time of the year, you will undoubtedly find them being sold for food.
Why should they make one gloomy, however, seeing that one has
successfully excluded them from one's garden? Perhaps one is gloomy
because of the reflection that there must be many other gardens in
which they are growing. Gloom of this kind, however, is mere
philanthropy. Turn your eyes, instead, to the strawberry-flowers and
think of June. Consider the broad beans and the young peas safe amid
their tall stakes. Consider even the spring onions. Is it any wonder
that the chaffinch sings and the wren is operatic on the thither side
of the garden wall? High in the air the swifts scream, as they rush
here and there after their prey, like polo teams galloping, pulling
up, scrimmaging, turning, and off on the gallop again. The swift is an
evil-looking bird, but playful. He has none of the grace of the
swallow, for he cannot fold his wings, and he is black as a
devil-worshipper. Still, he knows more of sport than most of the
birds. I suspect that those rushing companions are not merely bent on
food but have chosen out one individual insect for their pursuit like
a ball in a game. Otherwise, why such excitement? There are billions
of insects to be had for the mere asking. The fly-catcher knows this.
He can spend an hour at a meal without ever flying more than ten yards
from his bough. Still, one rejoices in the energy of the swift. One
wishes the greenfinch had a little of it. The yellow splashes on his
wings are undoubtedly delightful, but why will he perch so long in the
acacia wailing like a sick cricket? And why did Wordsworth write a
poem in praise of him? Probably he mistook some other bird for him.
Poets are like that. Or perhaps he liked a noise like the voice of a
sick cricket. One can never tell with Wordsworth. He had a
cuckoo-clock.




VII



NEW YEAR PROPHECIES


Some people are surprised at the daring with which compilers of
prophetic almanacs forecast the details of the future. The most
astonishing thing of all is that nearly everybody still regards the
future as a mystery. As a matter of fact, we know a great deal about
the future. We know that next year will contain 365 days. We know--and
this is rather a tribute to our cleverness--that the year 1924 will
contain 366 days, and even the exact point at which the extra day will
slip in. Ask a savage to point you out the extra day in Leap Year, and
he will be more hopelessly at a loss than a man looking for a needle
in a haystack, but even the most ignorant Christian will pick it out
at the right end of February as neatly and inevitably as a love-bird
on a barrel-organ picking out a fortune. The art of prophecy has grown
with civilisation. Prophets were regarded as almost divine persons in
the old days, but now every man is his own Isaiah. I am the most
modest of the prophets, but even I venture to foretell that there will
be an annular eclipse of the sun in the coming year on the 8th of
April, that it will begin at twenty-two minutes to 8 A.M. at
Liverpool, and that it will be visible at Greenwich. What clairvoyant
could go further? Test my mantic gifts at any other point and I doubt
not I can satisfy you. Do you want to know at what time there will be
high water at Aberdeen on the afternoon of the 21th January? The
answer is: "Thirteen minutes past one." Do you want to know when
partridge shooting will begin? I do not even need to reflect before
giving the answer: "The 1st of September." And so I could go on,
almost _ad infinitum_, filling in the details of the year in advance.
On the 1st of March, for instance, being St David's Day, there will be
a banquet at which Mr Lloyd George will make a reference to hills,
mists, God, and a country called Wales. On the 28th of March, being
Easter Monday, there will be a Bank Holiday. On the 24th of May, being
Empire Day, the majority of shops in Regent Street will hang out Union
Jacks, and school children will salute the flag at Abinger Hammer,
Communists in various parts of London gnashing their teeth the while.
On the 15th of June the anniversary of Magna Charta will fall and will
pass without any disturbance. On the 12th of July Orangemen will dress
im in sashes and listen to orators whose speeches will prove the
hollowness of the old adage that you cannot serve both God and Mammon.
On the same day, Lord Birkenhead will celebrate his forty-ninth
birthday, showing that Gallopers are born not made. Need I continue,
however? The year is obviously going to be a crowded one. It will, as
I have said, contain 365 days and will come to an end at 12 P.M. on St
Silvester's Day at the time of the new moon.

I have said enough, I think, to prove that one knows a great deal more
about the future than is generally realised. There may be sceptics who
doubt the virtue of my prophecies. If there be such, all I ask is that
they should mark them well and verify each of them as its fulfilment
falls due. The expense will be small. The most serious item will be
the journey to Aberdeen to see the tide coming in on the 24th of
January; but, by taking up a collection in Aberdeen, it should be
possible to reduce one's net outlay by the better part of a shilling.
On the whole, there never were prophecies easier to verify. I
confidently challenge comparison between them and any prophecy made by
any Cabinet Minister during the last five years. I even challenge
comparison with the much more respectable prophecies contained in
_Raphael's Prophetic Messenger_. Raphael at times strains our
credulity. When he tells us, for instance, that on the 27th of April
it is going to be "cold and frosty" and that on the 29th of April we
shall see "high winds, storms and thunder," we feel that he is giving
a free rein to his imagination and treating prophecy not as a science
but as an art. That the 30th of April will be "showery" I agree, but
how does he know that there will be "high wind and lightning" on the
21st of December? I am also somewhat puzzled as to the means by which
he arrives at the conclusions set forth in his "every-day" guide for
each day in the year. I can myself prophesy what you will do on each
day, but I cannot, as he does, prophesy what you ought to do. This
introduces an ethical element which is beyond my scope or horoscope.
We need not quarrel with him when he dismisses the 1st of January as
"an unimportant day," but when he bids us on the 2nd of January
"court, marry, and deal with females," we may reasonably ask: "Why?"
His advice for the 3rd is more acceptable. "Be careful," he says,
"until 1 P.M. then seek work and push thy business." That is about the
time of day one prefers to begin to "seek work"; would there were more
days in the calendar like the 3rd of January. Some saint must have it
in his keeping. On the 7th, however, it will be safer to abstain from
work altogether. Raphael says: "A very unfortunate P.M. and evening
for most purposes. Court and deal with females." Sunday, the 9th, is
better. "Ask favours," he says, "in the P.M., and court." Though
January is less than half gone, I confess I am getting a little
breathless with so much courting. Raphael probably recognises this,
and a note of caution creeps into his advice on the 13th, on which he
bids us "court and marry in the morning, then be careful." By the
18th, however, he is his old self again. "Court," he says cheerfully,
"marry and ask favours and push ahead." Then come one rather careful
day and two unfortunate ones, till on the 22nd, in a burst of
exuberance, he offers us the day of our lives. "Deal with others," he
exhorts us, "and push thy business, seek work, travel, court, marry,
buy and speculate." I doubt if all this can be crowded into
twenty-four hours outside _The Arabian Nights_. Besides, as a result
of following Raphael's advice, we are already bigamists several times
over, and have become sick of the sight of a Registry Office. By the
end of the month even Raphael shows signs of being a little weary of
his scarcely veiled incitements to Bluebeardism. For the 29th he
advises: "Avoid females and be very careful," and for the 30th, which
is a Sunday: "Avoid females and superiors." I should just about think
so.

We need not follow Raphael through the rest of the year. It is enough
to say that he keeps us busy courting, marrying, seeking work, being
careful, travelling, speculating, pushing ahead, and avoiding females
right down till the end of December. He occasionally varies his
formula, as when on the 6th of April he bids us: "Do not quarrel. Be
quiet," and when, on the 23rd of June, he advises: "Ask favours of
females, and travel." On the whole however, his recommendations leave
us with a sense of the desperate monotony of human existence. It is no
wonder the novelists find it so difficult to invent an original plot.
Nothing seems to happen--even in the future--except the same old
thing. It is all as monotonous as North, South, East and West. We turn
with relief to the page on which Raphael tells us what are the best
days on which to hire maidservants and to set turkeys. Our interest
redoubles when we come on his advice to those about to kill pigs. "Do
this," he says, "between eight and ten in the morning, and between the
first quarter and full of the Moon; the pigs will weigh more, and the
flavour of the pork be improved." Then there are "Legal and Commercial
Notes," one of which--"A bailiff must not break into a house, but he
may enter by the chimney "--suggests a subject for a drawing by Mr
George Morrow. The medical notes are equally worthy of consideration.
On one page we are given a list of herbal remedies, and we are told
how one disease can be cured by pouring boiling water on hay (upland
hay being better than meadow hay) and applying it to the stomach. But
Raphael is no crank, as we see in his suggestion for the treatment of
influenza:

     "If you think you have got an attack of influenza slip off
     to bed at once and take the whisky or brandy bottle with
     you, and don't be afraid of it, for alcohol is the best
     medicine you can take as it kills the germs in the blood. Do
     not wait until you are half dead--remember that a stitch in
     time saves nine, even with health."

Even on the subject of the care of children's teeth he makes it clear
that, whoever may have come under the blight of Pussyfoot, it is not
he:

     "I believe a Committee is to be appointed to inquire into
     the failing eyesight and decaying teeth in children. I think
     I have already stated that these troubles were due to the
     excessive amount of sugar or sweetstuffs consumed. All sweet
     things cause an excessive exudation of saliva from the gums,
     which affect and impair both the teeth and the eyesight for,
     despite of what dentist and doctor may say, there is an
     intimate relation between the two. Dr Sims Wallace, the
     eminent lecturer on Dental Surgery, recommends _Beer_ or dry
     _Champagne_ as an excellent mouth wash. They are also
     pleasant to the throat and stomach!"

The reader is now in a position to estimate for himself the extent to
which he can rely on Raphael's judgment, and to decide how far he will
accept the horoscope Raphael has cast for Mr Lloyd George. On this he
writes:

     "This gentleman has figured so prominently in our national
     affairs for the last few years, that it may not be out of
     place if I give a few remarks on his horoscope. The time of
     his birth is stated to have been January 17th, 1863, 8h.
     55m. A.M., but neither myself, nor other Astrologers, are
     satisfied with this hour. I think he was born some minutes
     sooner. At his birth the Sun was in exact Square to Jupiter,
     and also in Square to Mars, and Mars was in Opposition to
     Jupiter. These are very ominous and important aspects. The
     former denotes great extravagance, and waste of money, and
     the latter gives impetuosity, and danger to the person."

He then proceeds to give a "brief analysis" of Mr Lloyd George's
horoscope:

     "The Sun near Ascendant--self-praise, egotism,
     self-satisfaction, fondness for publicity and notoriety.

     "Venus and Mercury on Ascendant--fluency in speech,
     agreeableness, desire to please, fondness for Music, Arts,
     and Sciences.

     "Mars in 2nd, in Opposition to Jupiter, unfavourable for
     financial undertakings, extravagance, carelessness, and
     losses in speculation.

     "Uranus in 4th, trouble at end of life.

     "Jupiter in the 8th, benefit or help from marriage partner.

     "Moon near cusp of the 11th, many friends, especially females.

     "The Aspects denote--Sun Square Jupiter and Mars,
     recklessness in expenditure, public disapprobation, and an
     unfavourable and sudden ending to life.

     "Venus in Trine to Saturn, and Moon in Sextile to
     Jupiter--domestic relations of the happiest description, and
     the wife a great help."

I frankly doubt if any man can foretell the future of Mr Lloyd George.
No one knows what he will say or do to-morrow. We know what phrases he
will use, but we do not know on what side he will use them, or what he
will mean by them. All we know is that Sir William Sutherland will say
ditto.

Let us, then, return to safer fields of prophecy. What, really, is
going to happen in 1921? I think I know. Human beings will behave like
bewildered sheep. They will be chiefly notable for their lack of moral
courage. Good men will apologise for the deeds of bad men, and bad men
will do very much as they please. Cruel and selfish faces will be seen
in every railway carriage and in every omnibus, but readers of the
respectable Press will refuse to believe that there are any cruel
people outside Germany and Russia. Not one but all the Ten
Commandments will be broken, and turkeys will be eaten on Christmas
Day. Men will die of disease, violence, famine and old age, and others
will be born to take their place. Intellectuals will be
pretentious--mules solemnly trying to look like Derby winners. There
will be a considerable amount of lying, injustice, and
self-righteousness. Dogs will be fairly decent, but some of them will
bite. Above all, the human conscience will survive. It will survive.
It will continue to be the old still, small voice we know--as still
and as small as it is possible to be without disappearing into silence
and nothingness. And some of us will get a certain amusement out of it
all, and will prefer life rather than death. We shall also go on
puzzling ourselves as to what under the sun it all means. Not even a
murderer will be without a friend or a pet dog or cat or bird. That is
what 1921 will be like. That, at least, is as certain as the time of
the high tide at Aberdeen on the 24th of January.




VIII



ON KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE


It was only the other day that I came upon a full-grown man reading
with something like rapture a little book--_Ships and Seafaring Shown
to Children_. His rapture was modified however, by the bitter
reflection that he had already passed so great a part of his life
without knowing the difference between a ship and a barque; and, as
for sloops, yawls, cutters, ketches, and brigantines, they were simply
the Russian alphabet to him. I sympathise with his regret. It was a
noble day in one's childhood when one had learned the names of
sailing-vessels, and, walking to the point of the harbour beyond the
bathing-boxes, could correct the ignorance of a friend: "That's not a
ship. That's a brig." To the boy from an inland town every vessel that
sails is a ship. He feels he is being shown a new and bewildering
world when he is told that the only ship that has the right to be
called a ship is a vessel with three masts (at least), all of them
square-rigged. When once he has learned his lesson, he finds an
unaccustomed delight in wandering along the dirtiest coal-quay, and
recognising the barques by the fact that only two of their three masts
are square-rigged, and the brigs by the fact that they are
square-rigged throughout--a sort of two-masted ships. Vessels have
suddenly become as real to him in their differences as the different
sorts of common birds. As for his feelings on the day on which he can
tell for certain the upper fore topsail from the upper fore
top-gallant sail, and either of these from the fore skysail, the
crossjack, or the mizzen-royal, they are those of a man who has
mastered a language and discovers himself, to his surprise, talking it
fluently. The world of shipping has become articulate poetry to him
instead of a monotonous abracadabra.

It is as though we can know nothing of a thing until we know its name.
Can we be said to know what a pigeon is unless we know that it is a
pigeon? We may have seen it again and again, with its bottle-shoulders
and shining neck, sitting on the edge of a chimney-pot, and noted it
as a bird with a full bosom and swift wings. But if we are not able to
name it except vaguely as a "bird," we seem to be separated from it by
an immense distance of ignorance. Learn that it is a pigeon however,
and immediately it rushes towards us across the distance, like
something seen through a telescope. No doubt to the pigeon-fancier
this would seem but the first lisping of knowledge, and he would not
think much of our acquaintance with pigeons if we could not tell a
carrier from a pouter. That is the charm of knowledge--it is merely a
door into another sort of ignorance. There are always new differences
to be discovered, new names to be learned, new individualities to be
known, new classifications to be made. The world is so full of a
number of things that no man with a grain of either poetry or the
scientific spirit in him has any right to be bored, though he lived
for a thousand years. Terror or tragedy may overwhelm him, but boredom
never. The infinity of things forbids it. I once heard of a tipsy
young artist who, on his way home on a beautiful night, had his
attention called by a maudlin friend to the stars, where they twinkled
like a million larks. He raised his eyes to the heavens, then shook
his head. "There are too many of them," he complained wearily. It
should be remembered, however, that he was drunk, and that he did not
know astronomy. There could be too many stars only if they were all
turned out on the same pattern, and made the same pattern on the sky.
Fortunately, the universe is the creation not of a manufacturer but of
an artist.

There is scarcely a subject that does not contain sufficient Asias of
differences to keep an explorer happy for a lifetime. It would be easy
to do nothing but chase butterflies all one's days. It is said that
thirteen thousand species of butterflies have been already discovered,
and it is suggested that there may be nearly twice as many that have
so far escaped the naturalists. After so monstrous a figure, we are
not surprised to learn that there are sixty-eight species of
butterflies in Great Britain and Ireland. We should be astonished,
however, had we not already expended our astonishment on the larger
number. How many of us are there who could name even half-a-dozen
varieties? We all know the tortoiseshell and the white and the
blue--the little blue butterflies that flutter over the gold and red
of the cornfields. But the average man does not even know by name such
varieties as the Camberwell Beauty, the Dingy Skipper, the
Pearl-bordered Fritillary, and the White-letter Hairstreak. As for the
moth, are there not as many sorts of moths as there are words in a
dictionary? Many men give all the pleasant hours of their lives to
learning how to know the difference between one of them and another.
One used to see these moth-hunters on windless nights in a Hampstead
lane pursuing their quarry fantastically with nets in the light of the
lamps. In pursuing moths, they pursue knowledge. This, they feel, is
life at its most exciting, its most intense. They regard a man who
does not know and is not interested in the difference between one moth
and another as a man not yet thoroughly awakened from his pre-natal
sleep. And, indeed, one could not conceive a more appalling sort of
blank idiocy than the condition of a man who could not tell one thing
from another in any department of life whatever. We would rather
change lives with a jelly-fish than with such a man. This luxury of
variety was not meant to be ignored. We throw ourselves into it with
exhilaration as a swimmer plunges into the sea. There are few forms of
happiness I know which are more enviable than that of those who have
eyes for birds and flowers. How they rejoice on learning that,
according to one theory, there are a hundred and three different
species of brambles to be found in these islands! They would not have
them fewer by a single one. It is extraordinarily pleasant even for
one who is mainly ignorant of the flowers and their families to come
on two or three varieties of one flower in the course of a country
walk. As a boy, he is excited by the difference between the pin-headed
and the thrum-headed primrose. As he grows older, he scans the
roadside for little peeping things that to a lazy eye seem as like
each other as two peas--the dove's foot geranium, the round-leaved
geranium and the lesser wild geranium. "As like each other as two
peas," we have said: but _are_ two peas like each other? Who knows
whether the peas have not the same differences of feature among
themselves that Englishmen have? Half the similarities we notice are
only the results of our ignorance and idleness. The townsman passing a
field of sheep finds it difficult to believe that the shepherd can
distinguish between one and another of them with as much certainty as
if they were his children. And do not most of us think of foreigners
as beings who are all turned out as if on a pattern, like sheep? The
further removed the foreigners are from us in race the more they seem
to us to be like each other. When we speak of negroes, we think of
millions of people most of whom look exactly alike. We feel much the
same about Chinamen and even Turks. Probably to a Chinaman all English
children look exactly alike, and it may be that all Europeans seem to
him to be as indistinguishable as sticks of barley-sugar. How many
people think of Jews in this way! I have heard an Englishman
expressing his wonder that Jewish parents should be able to pick out
their own children in a crowd of Jewish boys and girls.

Thus our first generalisations spring from ignorance rather than from
knowledge. They are true, so long as we know that they are not
entirely true. As soon as we begin to accept them as absolute truths,
they become lies. One of the perils of a great war is that it revives
the passionate faith of the common man in generalisations. He begins
to think that all Germans are much the same, or that all Americans are
much the same, or that all Conscientious Objectors are much the same.
In each case he imagines a lay figure rather than a human being. He
may hate his lay figure or he may like it; but, if he is in search of
truth, he had better throw the thing out of the window and try to
think about a human being instead. I do not wish to deny the
importance of generalisations. It is not possible to think or even to
act without them. The generalisation that is founded on a knowledge of
and a delight in the variety of things is the end of all science and
poetry. Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in all
things, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations.
They subject the unclassified and chaotic facts of life to the order
of beauty. The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also in
pursuit of a generalisation--the perfect generalisation of the
universe. And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a series
of generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough to call the
known world? To know the resemblances of things is even more important
than to know the differences of things. Indeed, if we are not
interested in the former, our pleasure in the latter is a mere
scrap-book pleasure. If we are not interested in the latter, on the
other hand, our sense of the former is apt to degenerate into
guesswork and assertion and empty phrases. Shakespeare is greater than
all the other poets because he, more than anybody else, knew how very
like human beings are to each other and because he, more than anybody
else, knew how very unlike human beings are to each other. He was
master of the particular as well as of the universal. How much poorer
the world would have been if he had not been so in regard not only to
human beings but to the very flowers--if he had not been able to tell
the difference between fennel and fumitory, between the violet and the
gillyflower!




IX



THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING


Horse-racing--or, at least, betting--is one of the few crafts that are
looked down on by practically everybody who does not take part in it.
"It's a mug's game," people say. Even betting men talk like this.
There is a street called Mug's Row in a north of England town: it is
so called because the houses in it were built by a bookmaker. Whether
it was the bookmaker or his victims that gave the street its name I do
not know. To call a bookmaker a mug would seem to most people an abuse
of language. Yet the only bookmaker I have ever really known used to
confess himself a mug in the most penitent fashion. He was a mug,
however, not because he could not make money, but because he could not
keep it. The poor of his suburb, when in difficulties, he declared,
used always to come to him instead of going to the clergy, and he was
unable to refuse them. But then he was bitter against the clergy. As a
young man, he had been a Sunday school teacher, and so far as I could
gather, he might have gone on being a Sunday school teacher till the
present day if he had not suddenly been assailed with doubts one
Sabbath afternoon as he expounded the story of David and Goliath.
Whether it was that he looked on David as having taken an
unsportsmanlike advantage of the giant or whether he doubted that so
much could be done with such little stones, he did not make quite
clear. Anyhow, from that day on, he never believed in revealed
religion. He quarrelled with his clergyman. He broke the Sabbath. He
began to drink beer and to go to race-meetings. He rapidly rose from
the position of carpenter to that of bookmaker, and, were it not for
his infernal gift of charity, he would probably now be driving his own
car and be hall-marked with a Coalition title. Even as it was, he was
much more prosperous than any carpenter. Whenever he produced money,
it was in pocketfuls and handfuls. Strange that a bookmaker, who by
his trade must be accustomed to miracles, should find it difficult to
believe in David and Goliath. He was possibly a man who betted on
form, and on form Goliath should undoubtedly have won. David was an
outsider. He had no breeding. He would have been surprised if he could
have foreseen how his victory would rankle some thousands of years
later in the soul of an honest English bookmaker.

It is, however, just these matters of form and breeding that raise
horse-racing and betting above the intellectual level of a game of
nap. Betting men who ignore these things are as unintellectual as the
average novelist. There are some, for instance, who shut their eyes
and bring down a pin or a pencil on a list of names of the horses, in
the hope that in this way they may discover a winner. No doubt they
may. It is perhaps as good a way as any other. But there is something
trivial in such methods. This is mere gambling for the sake of
excitement. There is no more fundamental brainwork in it than in a
game I saw being played in a railway carriage the other day, when a
man drew a handful of coins from his pocket and bet his friend
half-a-sovereign that there would be more heads than tails lying
uppermost. This is a game at which it is possible to lose five pounds
in two minutes. It is the sort of game to which a betting man will
resort when _in extremis_, but only then. The ruling passion is
strong, however. I have a friend who on one occasion went into retreat
in a Catholic monastery. Two well-known bookmakers had also gone into
temporary retreat for the good of their souls. My friend told me that
even during the religious services the bookmakers used to bet as to
which of the monks would stand up first at the conclusion of a prayer,
and that in the solemn hush of the worship he would suddenly hear a
hoarse whisper: "Two to one on Brownie"--a brother with hair of that
colour--and the answer: "I take you, Joe." I have even heard of men
betting as to which of two raindrops on a window-pane will reach the
bottom first. It is possible to bet on cats, rats or flies. Calvinists
do not bet, because they believe that everything that happens is a
certainty. The extreme betting man is no Calvinist, however. He
believes that most things are accidents, and the rest catastrophes.
Hence his philosophy is almost always that of Epicurus. To him every
day is a new day, at the end of which it is his aim to be able to say,
like Horace, _Vixi_, or, as the text ought perhaps to read, _Vici_.

The intellectual betting man, on the other hand, has a position
somewhere between the extremes of Calvinism and Epicureanism. He
worships neither certainty nor chance. He reckons up probabilities.
When Mr Asquith picked out Spion Kop as the winner of the Derby, he
did so because he went about the business of selection not with a pin
or a pencil, but with one of the best brains in England. In the course
of his long conflicts with the House of Lords he had probably
interested himself somewhat profoundly in questions of heredity and
pedigree, and he was thus well equipped for an investigation into the
records of the parentage and grandparentage of the various Derby
horses. All that the ordinary casual better knows about Spion Kop is
that he is the son of Spearmint, which won the Derby in 1906. This,
however, would not alone make him an obviously better horse than
Orpheus, whose sire, Orby, won the Derby in 1907. The student of
breeding must be a feminist, who pays as much attention to the female
as to the male line. It was by the study of the female line that the
most cunning of the sporting journalists were able to eliminate
Tetratema from the list of probable winners. Tetratema, as son of the
Tetrarch, was excellently fathered for staying the mile-and-a-half
course at Epsom. More than this, as a writer in _The Sportsman_
pointed out: "The Tetrarch himself is by Roi Herode, a fine stayer,
and his maternal grand-dam was by Hagioscope, who rarely failed to
transmit stamina." It is when we turn to Tetratema's mother, Scotch
Gift--or is it his grandmother something else?--apparently, that we
discover his hereditary vice. This mare our journalist exposed to
scathing and searching criticism, and concluded that "there can be
nothing unreasonable in the inference, based on the records of this
family, that the chances are against a Derby winner having descended
from the least distinguished of ... four sisters." Even so, however,
the writer a few sentences later abjures Calvinism, and denies that
there is anything certain in what he calls breeding problems. "It
seemed," he writes, "wildly improbable at one time that Flying Duchess
would produce a Derby winner, for I believe it is correct that two of
Galopin's elder brothers ran in a bus, and there were two others quite
useless So, on the face of it, the chances were against Galopin, the
youngest brother." I quote these passages as evidence of the immense
demand the serious pursuit of horse-racing puts on the intellect. The
betting man must be as well versed in precedents as a lawyer and in
genealogical trees as a historian. At school, I always found the
genealogical trees the most difficult and bewildering part of history.
Yet the genealogical tree of a king is a simple matter compared to
that of a horse. All you have to learn about a king is the names of
his relations: regarding a horse, however, you must know not only the
names but the character, staying power and domestic virtues of every
male and female with whom he is connected during several generations.
If a man spent as much labour in disentangling the cousinship of the
royal families of ancient Egypt, he would be venerated as a scholar in
five continents. Oxford and Cambridge would shower degrees on him. Sir
William Sutherland would get him a place on the Civil List. Hence it
seems to me that tipping the winners is not, as is too often regarded,
"anybody's job": it is work that should be undertaken only by men of
powerful mind. No man should be allowed to qualify as a tipster unless
he has taken a degree at one of the Universities. The ideal tipster
would at once be a great historian a great antiquary, a great
zoologist, a great mathematician, and a man of profound common-sense.
It is no accident that an ex-Prime Minister was one of the few
Englishmen to spot the winner of the Derby of 1920. Mr Asquith must
have gone patiently through all Spion Kop's relations, weighing up the
chances whether it was an accident or owing to the weather that such
an one fifteen years ago was beaten by a neck in a six-furlong race,
studying incidents in every one of their careers, seeing that none of
them had ever had a great-uncle a bus-horse, bringing out a table of
logarithms to decide difficult points.... We need not be surprised
that there are fewer great tipsters than great poets. Shakespeare
alone has given us a portrait of the perfect tipster--"looking before
and after ... in apprehension how like a god!"

It is perhaps, however, when we leave questions of breeding and come
to those of form, that we realise most fully the amazing
intellectualism of the betting life. In the study of form we are faced
by problems that can be solved only by the higher algebra. Thus, if
Jehoshaphat, carrying 7 st., ran third to Jezebel, carrying 8 st. 4
lb., in a mile race, and Jezebel, carrying 8 st. 4 lb., was beaten by
a neck by Woman and Wine, carrying 7 st. 9 lb., over a mile and a
quarter, and Woman and Wine, carrying 8 st. 1 lb., was beaten by Tom
Thumb, carrying 9 st. in a mile 120 yds., and Tom Thumb, carrying 9
st. 7 lb., was beaten by Jehoshaphat over seven furlongs, we have to
calculate what chance Tom Thumb has of beating Jezebel in a race of a
mile and a half on a wet day. There are men to whom such calculations
may come easy. To Mr Asquith they are probably child's play. For
myself, I shrink from them and, if I were a betting man, would no
doubt in sheer desperation be driven back on the method of pin and
pencil. But it is obvious that the sincere betting man has to make
such calculations daily. Every morning the student of form finds his
sporting page full of such lists as the following:--

     0 0 0 CONCLUSIVE (7-5), Kroonstad-Conclusion. 8th of 9 to
     Poltava (gave 17lb.) Gatwick May (6f) and 7th of 19 to
     Orby's Pride (rec 4lb) Kempton May (5f).

     3 3 3 RAPIERE (7-4), Sunder--Gourouli. Lost 3-4 length and 3
     lengths to Bantry (gave 2lb) and Marcia (rec 7lb) Newmarket
     May (1m), GOLDEN GUINEA (gave 20lb) not in first 9. See
     BLACK JESS.

     0 0 4 ROYAL BLUE (7-0), Prince Palatine--China Blue. See
     NORTHERN LIGHT.

     0 2 0 BLACK JESS (6-11), Black Jester--Diving Bell. Not in
     first 4 to St Corentin (gave 121b) Lingfield last week (7f).
     Here Ap. (7f) lost 3 lengths to Victory Speech (rec 1lb),
     RAPIERE (gave 13lb, favourite) ½ length off.

     0 LLAMA (6-11), Isard II.--Laughing Mirror. Nowhere to
     Silver Jug (gave 15lb) Newbury Ap. (7f).

Is not a page of Thucydides simpler? Is Persius himself more succinct
or obscure? Our teachers used to apologise for teaching us Latin
grammar and mathematics by telling us that they were good mental
gymnastics. If education is only a matter of mental gymnastics,
however, I should recommend horse-racing as an ideal study for young
boys and girls. The sole objection to it is that it is so engrossing;
it might absorb the whole energies of the child. The safety of Latin
grammar lies in its dullness. No child is tempted by it into
forgetting that there are other duties in life besides mental
gymnastics. Horse-racing, on the other hand, comes into our lives with
the effect of a religious conversion. It is the greatest monopolist
among the pleasures. It affects men's conversation. It affects their
entire outlook. The betting man's is a dedicated life. Even books have
a new meaning for him. _The Ring and the Book_--it is his one and only
epic. And it is the most intellectual of epics. That is my point.




X



WHY WE HATE INSECTS


It has been said that the characteristic sound of summer is the hum of
insects, as the characteristic sound of spring is the singing of
birds. It is all the more curious that the word "insect" conveys to us
an implication of ugliness. We think of spiders, of which many people
are more afraid than of Germans. We think of bugs and fleas, which
seem so indecent in their lives that they are made a jest by the
vulgar and the nice people do their best to avoid mentioning them. We
think of blackbeetles scurrying into safety as the kitchen light is
suddenly turned on--blackbeetles which (so we are told) in the first
place are not beetles, and in the second place are not black. There
are some women who will make a face at the mere name of any of these
creatures. Those of us who have never felt this repulsion--at least,
against spiders and blackbeetles--cannot but wonder how far it is
natural. Is it born in certain people, or is it acquired like the
old-fashioned habit of swooning and the fear of mice? The nearest I
have come to it is a feeling of disgust when I have seen a cat
retrieving a blackbeetle just about to escape under a wall and making
a dish of it. There are also certain crawling creatures which are so
notoriously the children of filth and so threatening in their touch
that we naturally shrink from them. Burns may make merry over a louse
crawling in a lady's hair, but few of us can regard its kind with
equanimity even on the backs of swine. Men of science deny that the
louse is actually engendered by dirt, but it undoubtedly thrives on
it. Our anger against the flea also arises from the fact that we
associate it with dirt. Donne once wrote a poem to a lady who had been
bitten by the same flea as himself, arguing that this was a good
reason why she should allow him to make love to her. It is, and was
bound to be, a dirty poem. Love, even of the wandering and polygynous
kind, does not express itself in such images. Only while under the
dominion of the youthful heresy of ugliness could a poet pretend that
it did. The flea, according to the authorities, is "remarkable for its
powers of leaping, and nearly cosmopolitan." Even so, it has found no
place in the heart or fancy of man. There have been men who were
indifferent to fleas, but there have been none who loved them, though
if my memory does not betray me there was a famous French prisoner
some years ago who beguiled the tedium of his cell by making a pet and
a performer of a flea. For the world at large, the flea represents
merely hateful irritation. Mr W.B. Yeats has introduced it into poetry
in this sense in an epigram addressed "to a poet who would have me
praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and of mine":

     You say as I have often given tongue
     In praise of what another's said or sung,
     'Twere politic to do the like by these,
     But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

When we think of the sufferings of human beings and animals at the
hands--if that is the right word--of insects, we feel that it is
pardonable enough to make faces at creatures so inconsiderate. But
what strikes one as remarkable is that the insects that do man most
harm are not those that horrify him most. A lady who will sit bravely
while a wasp hangs in the air and inspects first her right and then
her left temple will run a mile from a harmless spider. Another will
remain collected (though murderous) in presence of a horse-fly, but
will shudder at sight of a moth that is innocent of blood. Our fears,
it is evident, do not march in all respects with our sense of physical
danger. There are insects that make us feel that we are in presence of
the uncanny. Many of us have this feeling about moths. Moths are the
ghosts of the insect world. It may be the manner in which they flutter
in unheralded out of the night that terrifies us. They seem to tap
against our lighted windows as though the outer darkness had a message
for us. And their persistence helps to terrify. They are more
troublesome than a subject nation. They are more importunate than the
importunate widow. But they are most terrifying of all if one suddenly
sees their eyes blazing crimson as they catch the light. One thinks of
nocturnal rites in an African forest temple and of terrible jewels
blazing in the head of an evil goddess--jewels to be stolen, we
realise, by a foolish white man, thereafter to be the object of a
vendetta in a sensational novel. One feels that one's hair would be
justified in standing on end, only that hair does not do such things.
The sight of a moth's eye is, I fancy, a rare one for most people. It
is a sight one can no more forget than a house on fire. Our feelings
towards moths being what they are, it is all the more surprising that
superstition should connect the moth so much less than the butterfly
with the world of the dead. Who save a cabbage-grower has any feeling
against butterflies? And yet in folk-lore it is to the butterfly
rather than to the moth that is assigned the ghostly part. In Ireland
they have a legend about a priest who had not believed that men had
souls, but, on being converted, announced that a living thing would be
seen soaring up from his body when he died--in proof that his earlier
scepticism had been wrong. Sure enough, when he lay dead, a beautiful
creature "with four snow-white wings" rose from his body and fluttered
round his head. "And this," we are told, "was the first butterfly that
was ever seen in Ireland; and now all men know that the butterflies
are the souls of the dead waiting for the moment when they may enter
Purgatory." In the Solomon Islands, they say, it used to be the
custom, when a man was about to die, for him to announce that he was
about to transmigrate into a butterfly or some other creature. The
members of his family, on meeting a butterfly afterwards, would
exclaim: "This is papa," and offer him a coco-nut. The members of an
English family in like circumstances would probably say: "Have a
banana." In certain tribes of Assam the dead are believed to return in
the shape of butterflies or house-flies, and for this reason no one
will kill them. On the other hand, in Westphalia the butterfly plays
the part given to the scapegoat in other countries, and on St Peter's
Day, in February, it is publicly expelled with rhyme and ritual.
Elsewhere, as in Samoa--I do not know where I found all these
facts--probably in _The Golden Bough_--the butterfly has been feared
as a god, and to catch a butterfly was to run the risk of being struck
dead. The moth, for all I know, may be the centre of as many legends
but I have not met them. It may be, however, that in many of the
legends the moth and the butterfly are not very clearly distinguished.
To most of us it seems easy enough to distinguish between them; the
English butterfly can always be known, for instance, by his clubbed
horns. But this distinction does not hold with regard to the entire
world of butterflies--a world so populous and varied that thirteen
thousand species have already been discovered, and entomologists hope
one day to classify twice as many more. Even in these islands, indeed,
most of us do not judge a moth chiefly by its lack of clubbed horns.
It is for us the thing that flies by night and eats holes in our
clothes. We are not even afraid of it in all circumstances. Our terror
is an indoors terror. We are on good terms with it in poetry, and play
with the thought of

     The desire of the moth for the star.

We remember that it is for the moths that the pallid jasmine smells so
sweetly by night. There is no shudder in our minds when we read:

     And when white moths were on the wing,
       And moth-like stars were flickering out,
     I dropped the berry in a stream,
       And caught a little silver trout.

No man has ever sung of spiders or earwigs or any other of our pet
antipathies among the insects like that. The moth is the only one of
the insects that fascinates us with both its beauty and its terror.

I doubt if there have ever been greater hordes of insects in this
country than during the past spring. It is the only complaint one has
to make against the sun. He is a desperate breeder of insects. And he
breeds them not in families like a Christian but in plagues. The
thought of the insects alone keeps us from envying the tropics their
blue skies and hot suns. Better the North Pole than a plague of
locusts. We fear the tarantula and have no love for the tse-tse fly.
The insects of our own climate are bad enough in all conscience. The
grasshopper, they say, is a murderer, and, though the earwig is a
perfect mother, other insects, such as the burying-beetle, have the
reputation of parricides, But, dangerous or not, the insects are for
the most part teasers and destroyers. The greenfly makes its colonies
in the rose, a purple fellow swarms under the leaves of the apples,
and another scoundrel, black as the night, swarms over the beans.
There are scarcely more diseases in the human body than there are
kinds of insects in a single fruit tree. The apple that is rotten
before it is ripe is an insect's victim, and, if the plums fall green
and untimely in scores upon the ground, once more it is an insect that
has been at work among them. Talk about German spies! Had German spies
gone to the insect world for a lesson, they might not have been the
inefficient bunglers they showed themselves to be. At the same time,
most of us hate spies and insects for the same reason. We regard them
as noxious creatures intruding where they have no right to be, preying
upon us and giving us nothing but evil in return. Hence our
ruthlessness. We say: "Vermin," and destroy them. To regard a human
being as an insect is always the first step in treating him without
remorse. It is a perilous attitude and in general is more likely to
beget crime than justice. There has never, I believe, been an empire
built in which, at some stage or other, a massacre of children among a
revolting population has not been excused on the ground that "nits
make lice." "Swat that Bolshevik," no doubt, seems to many
reactionaries as sanitary a counsel as "Swat that fly." Even in regard
to flies, however, most of us can only swat with scruple. Hate flies
as we may, and wish them in perdition as we may, we could not slowly
pull them to pieces, wing after wing and leg after leg, as thoughtless
children are said to do. Many of us cannot endure to see them slowly
done to death on those long strips of sticky paper on which the flies
drag their legs and their lives out--as it seems to me, a vile
cruelty. A distinguished novelist has said that to watch flies trying
to tug their legs off the paper one after another till they are twice
their natural length is one of his favourite amusements. I have never
found any difficulty in believing it of him. It is an odd fact that
considerateness, if not actually kindness, to flies has been made one
of the tests of gentleness in popular speech. How often has one heard
it said in praise of a dead man: "He wouldn't have hurt a fly!" As for
those who do hurt flies, we pillory them in history. We have never
forgotten the cruelty of Domitian. "At the beginning of his reign,"
Suetonius tells us "he used to spend hours in seclusion every day,
doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly sharpened
stylus. Consequently, when someone once asked whether anyone was in
there with Cæsar, Vibius Crispus made the witty reply: 'Not even a
fly.'" And just as most of us are on the side of the fly against
Domitian, so are most of us on the side of the fly against the spider.
We pity the fly as (if the image is permissible) the underdog. One of
the most agonising of the minor dilemmas in which a too sensitive
humanitarian ever finds himself is whether he should destroy a
spider's web, and so, perhaps, starve the spider to death, or whether
he should leave the web, and so connive at the death of a multitude of
flies. I have long been content to leave Nature to her own ways in
such matters. I cannot say that I like her in all her processes, but I
am content to believe that this may be owing to my ignorance of some
of the facts of the case. There are, on the other hand, two acts of
destruction in Nature which leave me unprotesting and pleased. One of
these occurs when a thrush eats a snail, banging the shell repeatedly
against a stone. I have never thought of the incident from the snail's
point of view. I find myself listening to the tap-tap of the shell on
the stone as though it were music. I felt the same sort of mild thrill
of pleasure the other day when I found a beautiful spotted ladybird
squeezing itself between two apples and settling down to feed on some
kind of aphides that were eating into the fruit. The ladybird, the
butterfly, and the bee--who would put chains upon such creatures?
These are insects that must have been in Eden before the snake.
Beelzebub, the god of the other insects, had not yet any engendering
power on the earth in those days, when all the flowers were as strange
as insects and all the insects were as beautiful as flowers.




XI



VIRTUE


There is grave danger of a revival of virtue in this country. There
are, I know, two kinds of virtue, and only one of them is a vice
Unfortunately, it is the latter a revival of which is threatened
to-day. This is the virtue of the virtuously indignant. It is virtue
that is not content merely to be virtuous to the glory of God. It has
no patience with the simple beauty and goodness of the saints. Virtue,
in the eyes of the virtuously indignant, is hardly worthy to be called
virtue unless it goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom it may
devour. Virtue, according to this view, is a detective, inquisitor,
and flagellator of the vices--especially of the vices that are so
unpopular that the mob may be easily persuaded to attack them. One of
the chief differences between the two kinds of virtue, I fancy, is
that while true virtue regards the mob-spirit as an enemy, simular
virtue (if we may adopt the Shakespearean phrase) looks to the mob as
its cousin and its ally. To be virtuous in the latter sense is
obviously as easy as hunting rats or cats. Virtue of this kind is
simply the eternal huntsman in man's breast with eyes aglint for a
victim. It is Mr Murdstone's virtue--the persecutor's virtue. It is
the virtue that warms the bosom of every man who is more furious with
his neighbour's sins than with his own. If virtue is merely an
inflammation against our neighbour's sins, what man on earth is so
mean as to be incapable of it? To be virtuous in this fashion is as
easy as lying. Those who abstain from it do so not out of lack of
heart, but from choice. We have read of the popularity of the
ducking-stool in former days for women taken in adultery. Savage mobs
may have thought that by putting their hearts into this amusement they
were making up to virtue for the long years of neglect to which, as
individuals, they had subjected her. They might not have been virtue's
lovers, but at least they could be virtue's bullies. After all, virtue
itself is no bad sport, when chasing, kicking, thumping, and yelling
are made the chief part of the game. Sending dogs coursing after a
hare is nothing to it. Man's enjoyment of the chase never rises to the
finest point of ecstasy save when his victim is a human being. Man's
inhumanity to man, says the poet, makes countless thousands mourn. But
think also of the countless thousands that it makes rejoice! We should
always remember that the Crucifixion was an exceedingly popular event,
and in no quarter more so than among the virtuously indignant. It
would probably never have taken place had it not been for the close
alliance between the virtuously indignant and the mob.

To be fair to the virtuously indignant and the mob, they do not insist
beyond reason that their victim shall be a bad man. Good hunting may
be had even among the saints, and who does not enjoy the spectacle of
a citizen distinguished mainly for his unblemished character being
dragged down into the dust? We have no reason to believe that the
people who were burned during the Inquisition were worse than their
neighbours, yet the mob, we are told, used to gather enthusiastically
and dance round the flames. The destructive instincts of the mob are
such that in certain moods it is ready to destroy any kind of man,
just as the destructive instincts of a puppy are such that in certain
moods it is ready to destroy any sort of book--whether Smiles's
_Self-Help_ or _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ is a matter of perfect
indifference. The virtuously indignant maintain their power by
constantly inciting and feeding this appetite for destruction. Hence,
when we feel virtuously indignant, we would do well to inquire of
ourselves if that is the limit and Z of our virtue. Have we no sins of
our own to amend that we have all this time for barking and biting at
the vices of our neighbours? And if we must attack the sins of our
fellows, would it not be the more heroic course to begin with those we
are most tempted by, instead of those to which we have no mind? Do not
let the drunkard feel virtuous because he is able with an undivided
heart to denounce simony, and do not let the forger, who happens to be
a teetotaller because of the weakness of his stomach, be too
virtuously indignant at the red-nosed patron of the four-ale bar. Any
of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of
the vices that do not attract us. Most of us can boast than we have
never been cruel to a hippopotamus or had dealings with a succubus or
taken a bribe of a million pounds to betray a friend. On these points
we can look forward with perfect confidence to the scrutiny of the Day
of Judgment. I fear, however, the Recording Angel is likely to devote
such little space as he can afford to each of us to the vices we have
rather than to the vices we have not. Even Charles Peace would have
been acquitted if he had been accused of brawling in church instead of
murder. Hence it is to be hoped that passengers in railway trains will
not remain content with gloating down upon the unappetising sins of
which the forty-seven thousand are accused by Mr Pemberton Billing.
Steep and perilous is the ascent of virtue, and the British public may
well be grateful to Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley if they help it with
voice or outstretched hand to climb to the snowy summits. So far as
can be seen, however, all that Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley do is to
interrupt the British public in its upward climb and orate to it on
the monstrous vices of the Cities of the Plain. This may be an
agreeable diversion for weary men, but it obviously involves the
neglect of virtue, not the pursuit of it. Most people imagine that to
pursue vice is to pursue virtue. But the wisdom of the ages tells us
that the only thing to do to vice is to fly from it. Lot's wife was a
lady who looked round once too often to see what was happening to the
forty-seven thousand. Let Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley beware. Their
interest in the Cities of the Plain will turn them into pillars of
salt a thousand years before it turns them into pillars of society.

As for virtue, then, how is it to be achieved? Merely by blackening
the rest of the world, we cannot hope to make ourselves white. Modern
writers tell us that we cannot make ourselves white even by blackening
ourselves. They denounce the sense of sin as a sin, and tell us that
there is nothing of which we should repent except repentance. We need
not stay to discuss this point. We know well enough that, so long as
the human intellect (to leave the human conscience out of the
question) survives, men will be burdened with the sense of
imperfection and think enviously of the nobility of Epaminondas or
Julius Cæsar or St Francis of Assisi. For we have to count even Julius
Cæsar among the virtuous, though the scandalmongers would not have it
so. His vices may have made him bald and brought about his
assassination. But he had the heroic virtues--courage and generosity
and freedom from vindictiveness. When we read how he wept at the death
of his great enemy, and how "from the man who brought him Pompey's
head he turned away with loathing, as from an assassin," we bow before
the nobility of his character and realise that he was something more
than a stern man and an adulterer. Pompey, too, had this gift of
virtue--this capacity for turning away from foul means of besting his
enemies. When he had captured Perpenna in Spain, the latter offered
him a magnificent story of a plot, the knowledge of which would have
put the lives of many leading Romans in his power. "Perpenna, who had
come into possession of the papers of Sertorius, offered," says
Plutarch, "to produce letters from the chief men of Rome, who had
desired to subvert the existing order and change the form of
government, and had therefore invited Sertorius into Italy. Pompey,
therefore, fearing that this might stir up greater wars than those now
ended, put Perpenna to death and burned the letters without even
reading them." It was hard on Perpenna, but in burning the letters at
least Pompey gave us an example of virtue. It is Plutarch's feeling
for the beauty of such noble actions that has made his biographies a
primer of virtue for all time. None of his heroes are primarily "good"
men. There is scarcely one of them who could have been canonised by
any Church. They have enough of the weaknesses of flesh and blood to
satisfy even the most exacting novelist of these days. On the other
hand, they nearly all had that capacity for grandeur of conduct which
distinguishes the noble man from the base. Plutarch never pretends
that mean and filthy motives and generous motives do not jostle one
another strangely in the same breast, but his portraits of great men
give us the feeling that we are in presence of men redeemed by their
virtues rather than utterly destroyed by their vices. Suetonius, on
the other hand, is the historian of the forty-seven thousand. His book
may be recommended as scandalmongering--hardly as an aid to virtue.
Here we have the servants' evidence of Roman history, the plots and
the secret vices. Suetonius, fortunately, has the grace not to write
as though in narrating his story of vice he were performing a virtuous
act. If we are to have stories of fashionable sinners, let us at least
have them naked and not dressed up in the language of outraged virtue.
Scandal is sufficiently entertaining by itself. There is no need to
lace it with self-righteousness.




XII



JUNE


There is always a cuckoo that stays out later than the other
cuckoos....

Two goldfinches came and sang in the catalpa-tree in the garden....

It is difficult to decide with which sentence to begin. There are so
many pleasures. The goldfinches have not come back again, however.
They and the faint blue flowers of the catalpa turned a sinister
growth for an interval into a small Paradise of colour and song. Then
the flowers fell. They had no more life than snow in May. Coming as
they did at the end of years of barrenness, they astonished one like
the blossoming of the Rose of Sharon. But now the bough is dark and
sinister and melancholy again. Sparrows squabble over their love
affairs in it. The, cuckoo that stays out later than the other cuckoos
is the triumphant survivor.

Not that there is much to be said even for him as a model of
continuance. His note will soon change. He will become hoarse and only
half-articulate. He will cease to be the flying echo of the mystery of
skies and wood at dawn and in the still evening. The disreputable bat,
whose little wings flutter half visibly like waves of heat rising
above a stove, will outlast him.

There is no getting beyond the old image of things in general as a
stream that disappears. The flowers and the birds come in tides that
sweep over the world and in a moment are lost like a broken wave. The
lilacs filled with purple; laburnum followed, and in a few days all
the gold ebbed, and nothing was left but a drift of withered blossoms
on the ground; then came the acacia-flowers, white as the morning
among the cool green plumage of the tree, and now they, too, have been
turned into dirtiness and deserted foam. And in the hedges change has
been as swift, as merciless--change so imperceptible in what it is
doing, so manifest in what it has done. The white blossoms of the sloe
gave place to the foam of the hawthorn and the flat clusters of the
wayfaring-tree; now in its turn has come the flood of the
elder-flowers, a flood of commonness, and June on the roads would
hardly be beautiful were it not for the roses that settle, delicate
and fleeting as butterflies, on the long and crooked briers. Perhaps
one has not the right to say of any flower or any bird that it is not
beautiful Even elder-flowers, seen at a distance, can give
cheerfulness to a roadside. But, if we have to pick and choose among
flowers, there are many who will give the lowest prize to the flowers
that have been compared to umbrellas--elder-flowers, cow's parsley,
hemlock, and the rest. These are the plebeians of the hedges and
ditches. They have the air of something useful. One would imagine they
were intended to be cooked and eaten in cheap restaurants. We
experience no lifting of the heart at sight of them. We should be
surprised to hear the abrupt ecstasy of a wren issuing from among
their leaves. And yet it is hardly a week since, walking in a Sussex
lane, I saw a long procession of cow's parsley on the top of a high
bank silhouetted against the twilight sky. There seemed never to have
been more exquisite flowers. They had captured the silver of evening
as in a net.

There are many flowers that seem ugly to an indifferent eye. Even the
red valerian, that sprouts so boldly in bushes of coral from the top
of the wall, is regarded by some people as a weed and an impudent
intruder. For myself, I love the spectacle of stone walls breaking out
into flower with red valerian and ivy-leaved toad-flax. The country
people have greeted these flowers with comic and friendly names.
Valerian they call "drunken sailor," and the ivy-leaved toad-flax that
blossoms in a thousand tiny blue butterflies from the stones has (so
prolific it is) been given the nickname of "mother of thousands." I
doubt, however, whether the country people have as many fanciful names
for the flowers as they are represented as having in the books. When
Mr W.H. Hudson first came on winter heliotrope in Cornwall, and was
attracted by its meadow-sweet smell at a season when there were few
other flowers, he was told by a countryman that it was called simply
"weed." Countrymen, if they are asked the name of a flower, will often
say that they do not know, but that they call it so-and-so. A small
boy who was gathering green-stuffs for his rabbits came up and walked
beside me the other day, and, on being shown some goose-grass, and
asked what name he knew it by, said: "I don't know its name; we calls
it 'cleavers.'" In my childhood, I never heard it called by any other
name than "robin-run-the-hedge," and under that name alone am I
attracted by it. "Cleavers" is to