Who’s Who

Works of reference are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil’s Hell in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to escape from. Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain embedded until sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere—things in which normally he does not take the faintest interest. One may take up a volume after lunch in order to discover the parentage of Thomas Nashe; but one does not put it down when one has satisfied one’s curiosity. One turns over a few pages and becomes absorbed in the career of Napoleon. Thence one drifts to the article on Napier, which sends one to that on Logarithms in another volume; and when night closes in and (as we used to construe it) sleep brings rest to weary mortals, one still sits in one’s chair, bending heavy-eyed over the book, with a dozen pressing duties left undone and the last post missed. By that time one has reached, perhaps, the abnormally complex diagrams which illustrate the article on Metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology—of which science, the reader will remember, Voltaire was the father and Herr Doktor Pangloss the first professor.

Who’s Who takes me in the same way. Ordinarily I have no particular thirst for it. I should not dream of carrying it about in my waistcoat pocket for perusal on the Underground Railway. But once I have allowed myself to open it, I am a slave to it for hours. This has just happened to me with the new volume, upon which I have wasted a valuable afternoon. I began by looking up a man’s address; I then read the compressed life-story of the gentleman next above him (a major-general), wondering, somewhat idly, whether they read of each other’s performances and whether either of them resented the possession by the other of a similar, and unusual, surname. Then I was in the thick of it. There was nothing especially exciting about most of the information that met my eye. Generally speaking, the biographies were of people of whom I had never previously heard, and whose doubtlessly reputable achievements had been recorded in spheres as unfamiliar to me as the dark side of the moon. What can it mean to me that Mr. J. Fitztimmins Gubb worked for five years under Schmitt at Magdeburg and is now demonstrator in Comparative Obstetrics at the Robson Institute? Or that the Bishop of the Cocos Islands has been five times married and was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chipping Chester, and Pembroke College, Oxford? Yet I read of some six or seven hundred such, and found it as difficult to refrain from “Just one more” as would a wealthy dipsomaniac just parting from an old friend in a public-house at five minutes before closing time. I cannot easily account for the attraction. Something, I suppose, may be put down to the fact that character comes out in a man’s account, however bald, of himself; and that the Who’s Who autobiographies, in spite of their compression, exhibit many and diverse interesting traits of character. But mainly, I think, it must be that we most of us have collector’s mania in some form or another, and that one cannot resist the temptation of collecting facts even when they are so irrelevant and of so little importance to one that they slip through one’s fingers as soon as one has gathered them. For I am sure that I do not know now whether I have got the number of the Bishop’s wives right, or the sites of his education, or even the name of his diocese.

I suppose that no one ever tells an untruth in Who’s Who. There is not much scope for it, though it is conceivable that there may have been exaggerations of the truth. The compilers are extremely capable; and the contributors seem to be as uniform in their veracity as they are various in their loquacity. Only in rare circumstances could any one hope to impose on Who’s Who without very rapid detection. An opportunity of that nature did once occur to me. There is a compilation called the American Who’s Who, published (if I remember correctly) in Chicago. By some curious accident, which I have never been able to explain, its conductors got hold of my name—I don’t mean “Eagle,” but the other. By some accident more curious still they got the impression that I was an American settled in London; and with admirable enterprise they sent me, for two or three years in succession, yellow forms on which I was requested to inscribe my age, antecedents, and accomplishments. Each year I was dazzled by the idea of a joke which, I felt, would immensely amuse me, and which could (so the Devil argued) hurt nobody. On each occasion I filled the form exhaustively. I put down my name and address correctly; but beyond that not a word of truth did I tell. I invented for myself a career, a career not imposing enough to arouse suspicions, but far more picturesque than my actual career has been. I described my parents as being Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, of St. Louis, Mo. I copied out of an American minor poet’s autobiographical preface a list of academies at which I had been educated; and then I launched out.

I had, I stated, left America for Europe at the age of nineteen. I had written (I was cunning enough to put down the names of one or two of my actual works) such and such books, including a Manual (for Schools) on Political Economy and a small brochure on Polycarp. I had travelled over four continents; my recreations were “all forms of sport, especially big-game hunting”; I had gone through the Balkan War as a volunteer with the Greek Army; and I possessed several decorations, including the Blue Boar of Rumania, the St. Miguel and All Angels of Portugal, and the fourth class of the Turkish Medjidie. Notice the fourth class; no common liar would have thought of so convincingly modest a claim as that. Each year, as I say, I lived laborious days in the delineation of an imaginary pedigree and a supposititious career. Then I broke down. There was no risk of punishment attached, and, I take it, small risk of discovery. But my softer self began telling me that it was a scandalous thing to hoax foreigners; that the trick was unworthy of an Englishman, or, indeed, an adult of any nationality, down to the most backward of Nicobar Islanders; and that the only fitting punishment for a person addicted to such practices would be to have pins put upon his chair by his children or his back chalked by infants in the street. I weakened and broke; sentiment overcame reason; my heart gained the victory over my head. And each year, with reluctant deliberation, I tore up the well-filled sheet and destroyed again my other self, my American self, the romantic self who had done the things I had never done, who had stalked the bear in the snowy fastnesses of the Caucasus and won the gratitude of exotic potentates. The forms have stopped coming now; but the memory of my vision still burns with a melancholy yet tender brightness; and those mythical progenitors, Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, are to me all that his Dream Children were to Charles Lamb.