E. F. BENSON (continued 4)

"Lord, Lord, how I love life!" he said, "in whatever form it manifests itself. I love these great open and empty places, and the smile of the indolent earth. Great kind Mother, she is getting sleepy, and will soon withdraw all her thoughts back into herself and doze and dream till spring awakens her again. She will make no more birds and beasts and flowers yet awhile, for those are the thoughts she puts out, but collect herself into herself, hibernating in the infinite cave of the heavens. All the spring and the summer she has been so busy, thinking, thinking, and putting forth her thoughts. In the autumn she lies down and just looks at what she has made, and in the winter she sleeps. I love that life of the earth, which is so curiously independent of ours, pagan in its essence, you would think, and taking very little heed of the children of men and the sons of God. How odd she must think our businesses and ambitions, she who only makes, and feeds. What a spendthrift, too, how lavish of life, how indifferent to pain, and death, and all the ills that her nurselings make for themselves. She doesn't care, bless you."

"You called her kind just now," I remarked.

"Yes, she is kind to joy, because joy is productive. She loves health and vitality and love, but she has no use for anything else. It is only one aspect of her, however, the pagan side, which sets Pan a-fluting in the thickets. But what she makes is always greater than she who made it. She gives us and maintains for us till death our physical nature, and yet the moment she has given it us, even before perhaps, it has passed out of her hands, being transfused with God. Then, when she has done with us, she lets death overtake us, and has no more use for us, except in so far that our bodies can enrich her soil. She does not know, the pagan earth, that death is only an incident in our lives. The death of our body, as St. Francis says, is only our sister, for whom we should praise God just as much as for our life, or the sun and moon. Really, I don't know what I should do, how I should behave, if I thought it ever so faintly possible that death was the end of us. Should I take immense care of myself, so as to put off that end as long as possible, and in the interval grab at every pleasure and delight I could find? I don't think so. If I thought that death was the end, I think I should kill myself instantly, out of sheer boredom. All the bubble would have gone out of the champagne. I love all the pleasures and interests of life just because they are part of an infinitely bigger affair. If there wasn't that within them, I don't think I should care about them."

"But if they are only part of the bigger thing," said I, "why don't we kill ourselves at once, in order to get to the bigger thing?"

"Surely for a very good reason, namely, that whatever life lies beyond, it cannot be this life again. And this life is such awful fun: I want lots of it. But it doesn't rank in the same class with the other. I mean that no sensible fellow will want to prolong this at the expense of what comes after. Much as we like it, we are perfectly willing to throw it away if we are shown a sufficiently good cause to throw it away for. It's like a tooth: have it out if it aches. And life would ache abominably if we clung to it unworthily."

Suddenly I felt horribly depressed.

"Oh, Francis, don't die at the Dardanelles," I said.

"I haven't the slightest intention of doing so. I sincerely hope I shall do nothing of the sort. But if I do, mind you remember that I know it is only an incident in life. As we sit here, secure in the sun and the safety, it is easy enough to realize that. But it is harder to realize it when it happens to someone you like, and people are apt to talk rot about the cruel cutting-short of a bright young life. My bright middle-aged life mustn't rouse these silly reflections, please, if it's cut off. They are unreal: there is a touch of cant about them. So promise!"

"If you'll promise not to die, I'll promise not to be vexed at your death. Besides, you aren't middle-aged; you're about fourteen."

"Oh, I hope I'm younger now at thirty-five than I was when I was fourteen. I used to be terribly serious at fourteen, and think about my soul in a way that was positively sickening. I wonder my bright young life wasn't cut short by a spasm of self-edification. I was a prig, and prigs are the oldest people in the world. They are older than the rocks they sit among, as Mr. Pater said, and have been dead many times. You didn't know me then, thank God."

"Were you very beastly?"

"Yes, quite horrible, and so old. Easily old enough to be my own father now, if that's what Wordsworth means when he says the child is father to the man. I thought a lot about my soul, and took great care of it, and wrapped it up. In fact, I set about everything entirely the wrong way. What does Thomas à Kempis say, do you remember? That a man must forsake himself, and go wholly from himself, and retain nothing out of self-love. He must give up his soul too, for it is only by giving it up that he avoids losing it...."

He turned over again on his face, sniffing a sprig of thyme that still lingered into November.

"And yet, oh, how I love all the jolly things in the world!" he said; "but I don't want them to be mine, and I don't think that I am entangled in them. Surely it is right to love them if you don't cling to them. I love the smile of the earth when she wakes in spring, and puts forth her thoughts again. When she thinks about hawthorn, she thinks in little squibs of green leaf, when she thinks about birds she thinks in terms of nightingale-song, or when she thinks about crocuses she sees her thoughts expressed in yellow chalices, with pollen-coated tongues. She thinks she has had enough of the grey winter-withered grass, and, lo, the phalanxes of minute green spears charge and rout it. She thinks in the scent of wall-flowers, and the swift running of lizards on the stone-walls, and pinks of peach-blossom, and foam of orchid-flower. My goodness, what a poet she is!"

"And you aren't attached to all that?" I asked.

"Of course I like it tremendously, but it doesn't entangle me any more. But I took years to disentangle myself, all those years when you thought I was being so lazy and ineffective in Alatri. Ineffective I was, no one ever made less of a splash than I have done; but lazy I wasn't. I thought, and I thought, and unconsciously to myself, while I was sunk, as I imagined, in a stupor of purring content with the world, this war woke me up, and, as you know, I found I wasn't entangled. But I have learned such a lot this year. I always liked people: I liked their funny ridiculous ways, their queernesses and their attractions. But I never got into them before. People are like oranges: the rind smells delicious, you like them first for the rind. Then just inside the rind you find that fluffy white stuff, but inside of all is the substance of them, in which lies their unity with God. There is this, too: when you get down to the fruit, you find that it has the same savour as the rind. I take it that the attraction of people, the thing you love them for, is the first thing you perceive about them, the aromatic rind. It's a hint of what is within, if you get through their fluffy part. You find first of all the emanation of their real selves, next their funny odd ways, and finally themselves. Deep in the heart of everyone you find what seemed at first their most superficial qualities. That's an excursus by the way; think it out for yourself."

The sun was already wheeling westwards, and presently after, as we had half a dozen miles of this high down-land to traverse, we got up and went on our way. Here and there a copse of flaming beech climbed like stealthy fire up from the weald on to this roof of South England, on the ridge of which we walked; but the prevalent wind from the sea had so continuously blown their branches in one direction that now they grew there, brushed back in permanence, as Francis suggested, like the hair of a Knut. Northwards and far below the weald stretched into misty distances, laid out like a map, with here and there a pond, here a group of clustered houses, while a moving plume of steam marked the passage of a train. Mile after mile of springy turf we traversed, empty and yellowing and uniform, save where a patch of brambles lay dark, like the shadow from a cloud. Once or twice we passed a dew-pond dug in the chalk, but otherwise in all those miles we found no sign up here on the heights of the fretful ways and works of man. All was untouched and antique: a thousand years had wrought no more change here than on the liquid plain of the sea. A steady westerly breeze met us all the way, warmed with the leagues of autumn sunshine through which it had travelled all day, and it streamed past us like some quiet flowing river out of the eternal reservoir of the sky. And never, even in children, round whom there still trail the clouds of glory, have I seen such ecstatic and natural enjoyment as was Francis's. Around them, perhaps, linger the lights that play outside the prison-house, but to him, it seemed that into the prison-house itself there streamed in such a jubilation of sunshine that every vestige of shade was banished. Like the petroleum-tins, when first illumination had come to him, the whole world shone with God, and that in no vague and mystical manner, but with a defined and comprehended brightness. Here was no dream-like mysticism, no indifferent contemplation like that of the Quietists, but an active and ecstatic enjoyment, eager and alert, and altogether human. He moved in a fairyland, the magic of which was not imaginary and fabulous; the spell lay in the very fact that it was real. He was convinced by the conviction that comes from personal experience: the glory that enveloped the world was as certain as the streaming wind and the pervasion of the autumn sun.

It was no haphazard intoxication of animal spirits that possessed him, no wild primal delight in health and physical vigour, it was a joy that had had its birth in thought and contemplation, and had passed through dark places and deserts. But, even as the sunlight of ages past sleeps in seams of coal, ready to burst into blaze, so through darknesses and doubts had passed the potential sunlight of his soul, black, you would say, and dormant, but alive and pregnant with flame, when the finger of God touched it into illumination. For him no longer in gloomy recesses sat Pan, the incarnate aspect of the cruelty and the lust of Nature, the sight of whom meant death to the seer, but over all the world shone the face of Christ, Who, by the one oblation of Himself, had transfused His divine nature into all that lived and moved. This was no fact just accepted, and taken for granted: it was the light from which sprang all his joy of life, the one central and experienced truth which made all common things sacred, and opened for him, as for all mystics who have attained the first illumination, the gates of pearl within which shines the Heavenly Kingdom. This was no visionary place: it stood solid about him, an Earthly Paradise no less than a heavenly, and men and women were its citizens, the hills and valleys, the birds and beasts of this actual world were of it, the blaze of the westering sun lit it, and this wind from the West streamed over it. And yet it was the actual kingdom of heaven.

Francis told me that day how he had attained to where he stood. It was by no vague inactive passivity, but by stern and unremitting training of the mind and spirit. He had learned by hard work, first of all, to concentrate his mind on some given concrete object, to the exclusion of all other objects, forcing himself, as he put it, "to flow into this one thing." By slow degrees he had so cultivated this power that he was able at last to be conscious of nothing else than that on which he fixed his attention, making all his faculties of perception concentrate upon it. One of the objects of his meditation had often been the stone-pine in our garden at Alatri, and "opening himself to it," as he said, he saw it not only as it was in shape and form, but into his mind were conveyed its whole nature and formation; not by imagining them, so it seemed to him, for himself, but by receiving suggestions from outside. He felt it growing from the pine-seed of a cone that had dropped there; he felt it as a sapling, and knew how its roots were groping their ways underground, one to the north, another to the south, to anchor it from the stress of winds. He felt the word go forth among the spiders and creeping things that here was a new city a-building for their habitations. Out of the sapling stage it passed into mature life, and stripped itself of its lower branches, concentrating its energy on its crown of foliage. The soft sappy bark hardened itself to resist the rains, the roots spread further and further, and burrowed more deeply: the murmur of sea began to nest in its branches, and its shadow spread like a pool around it. It grew fruitful with cones that opened themselves so that its seed might ripen; it became a town of fertility. All this came, not student-wise, but from eager meditation, a vision evoked not from within, but seen through the open windows of his mind. A new mode of sight dawned on him.

From meditation on concrete and visible things he passed to meditation on abstract qualities, which clothed themselves in images. He saw Mercy, a woman with hands of compassion, touching and remitting the debts of the crowd that brought the penalties they had incurred: he saw Truth, nude and splendid, standing on the beach, fresh from the sea, with a smile for those who ignorantly feared him, and anger blazing from his eyes for those who tried to hide from him, and hands of love for those who came to him. But such visions never came to the scope of his physical sight, only by interior vision did he see Mercy bending to him, and Truth holding out a strong and tender hand. Their presences lived with him, and the gradual realization of them caused a shining company to stand round him.

But they were not what he sought: he sought that which lay behind them, that of which, for all their splendour, they were but the pale symbols and imperfect expressions. They were the heralds of the King, who attended in his presence-chamber, and came forth into the world radiant with his tokens. There were strange presences among them: there came Sorrow with bowed head, and Pain with pierced hands, and that darkness of the soul which still refuses to disbelieve in light. Often he turned his face from these storm-vexed visitants, crying out that they were but phantoms of the pit, and yet not quite endorsing his rejection of them, for their wounded hands shone, and there lurked a secret behind the tragedy of their faces....

We had come to the end of the ridge, and must descend into the plain below us. The sun had just set, and the wind that still blew steadily from the West held its breath for a moment.

"They took their places there," said Francis, "until they became friendly and glorious, and I did not fear them any longer. I knew what they represented, of what they were the symbols. Just as I had contemplated the stone-pine till I saw what was the nature from which it sprang, so I contemplated Sorrow and Doubt, till I saw that they had come from the Garden of Gethsemane. They are as holy as Mercy or Truth, and their touch sanctifies all the pain and sorrow that you and I and the whole world can ever feel. I dwelt within them. I learned to love them. I learned also to do the daily tasks that were mine, no longer with any sense of the triviality of them or with the notion that I might have been better employed on larger things. But for a long time, employed on this common round, nothing more happened: I just went on doing them, believing that they were part of a great whole, but not, I may say, energetically conscious of it. Then one day, as I told you, I saw God shining from the petroleum-tins and the shelves of the store."

There are certain moments in one's life that are imperishably photographed on the mind, and will live there unblurred and unfaded till the end. I think the reason for this (when so much that seemed important at the time, constantly fades from one's memory) is that in some way, great or small, they mark the advent of a new perception, and this sense of enlightenment gives them their everlasting quality. They are thus more commonly associated with childish days, when discoveries are of more frequent occurrence than is the case in later years. Certainly now the smell of lilac is hugely significant to me because of that one moment when, at the exploring age of five, I was first consciously aware of it. It was time to go to bed, though the sunlight still lay level across the garden where we children played, and the nurse who had come to fetch us in, relented, and gave us five minutes' grace, the granting of which at that moment seemed to endow one with all that was really desirable in life. Simultaneously the evening breeze disentangled the web of fragrance from the lilac bush near which I stood, and cast it over me, so that, imperishable to this day, the scent of it is mixed up in my mind with a mood of ecstatic happiness. What went before that, what had been the history of the afternoon, or what was the history of the days that followed, has quite gone, but vignetted for ever for me is the smell of the lilac bush and the rapture of five minutes more play. The first conscious sight of the sea, lying grey and quiet beneath a low sky, is another such picture, and another such, I am sure, will be the sight of Francis's face as he stood there facing westwards, with the glow of molten clouds on it, and with the wind just stirring his hair, as he stood bare-headed, and spoke those last words. The memory of our walk that day may grow dim, much may get blurred and indistinct in my mind, but his face then, alight with joy, not solemn joy at all, but sheer human happiness, will live to me in the manner of the lilac-scent, and the first sight of the sea. It was new; never before had I seen so complete an exuberance, so unshadowed a bliss.

We returned to town next morning. Two days later he rejoined his regiment.

DECEMBER, 1915

Duty under a somewhat threadbare disguise of pleasure has the upper hand just now, in this energetic city, and we spend a large number of our afternoons each week seated in half-guinea and guinea stalls, and watch delightful entertainments at theatres or listen to concerts at private houses, got up for the benefit of some most deserving charity, and for the really opulent there are seats at three or five guineas. These entertainments are as delightful as they are long, and we have an opportunity two or three times a week of seeing the greater part of our prominent actors and actresses, and hearing the most accomplished singers and players on all or more than all of the musical instruments known to Nebuchadnezzar pour forth a practically endless stream of melody. Certainly it is a great pleasure to hear these delightful things, but, as I have said, it is really duty that prompts us to live for pleasure, for the pleasure, by incessant wear, is getting a little thin. We should not dream of spending so much on seats in theatres if we were not contributing to a cause. Often tea of the most elaborate and substantial style is thrown in, and thus our bodies as well as our minds are sumptuously catered for. Soon, I suppose, when we have once freed our minds from the nightmare of Zeppelins, we shall have these entertainments in the evening with dinner thrown in. The only little drawback connected with them is concerned with the matter of tickets. Naturally you do not want to go alone, and in consequence, when you are asked to take tickets you take two guinea ones if you are rich, and if not two half-guinea ones. There is no question of refusing. You have got to. But it is not so easy as you would imagine to get somebody to go with you to these perpetual feasts of histrionic and vocal talent, for everyone else has already taken two tickets, and is eagerly hunting for a companion at these entertainments on behalf of funds for Serbians, Russians, French, Italians, Red Cross, eggs for hospitals, smokes for sailors, soup kitchens, disabled horses, bandages, kit-bags, mine-sweepers, cough lozenges, for aeroplanists, woollen mufflers, and all the multifarious needs of those who are or have been taking a hand in the fight. Indeed, sometimes I think those entertainments are a little overdone, for a responsible admiral told me the other day that if any more woollen mufflers were sent to the fleet it would assuredly sink, which would be a very disastrous consequence of too ardent a spirit of charity. But till the fleet sinks under the woollies that are poured into it, and the kitchens are so flooded with soup as to be untenable, I suppose we shall continue to take two stalls and wildly hunt about for someone to occupy the second, between the hours of two and seven-thirty. But whether there is a theatrical entertainment or not on any particular day, it is sure to be a flag day. You need not buy two flags, though you have been obliged to take two stalls—until you have lost the first one. But it is as essential as breathing to buy one flag, if you propose to go out of doors at all, and on the whole it is wiser to buy your decoration from the first seller that you see. It is your ransom; the payment of this amiable blackmail ensures your unmolested passage through the streets. True, for a time, you can play a very pretty game which consists in crossing the street when you see a flag-seller imminent, and proceeding along the opposite pavement. Soon another flag-seller will be imminent there also, upon the approach of whom you cross back again to your original pavement. But sooner or later you are bound to be caught: a van or an omnibus obstructs the clear view of the other side of the street, and after being heavily splashed with mud from the roadway, you regain the pavement only to find there is another flag-seller who has been in ambush behind the 'bus that has splashed you. If you are urgently in need of exercise you can step back again before encountering the privateer, but you know that sooner or later you will have to buy a flag, and on the whole it is wiser to buy it at once, and take your exercise with an untroubled mind, and a small garish decoration in your buttonhole. The flag-sellers for the most part, are elegant young females, who appear to enjoy this unbridled licence to their pillaging propensities, and as long as they enjoy it, I suppose flag-days will go on. But it would be simpler and fairer to add a penny to the income-tax, and divide it in just proportions between these harpy charities. Or, if that is too involuntary a method of providing funds for admirable objects, I should suggest that every seller of flags, should, in return for the privilege of helping in such good causes, start her own collection-box with the donation of one sovereign from herself. Then the beleaguered foot-passenger would feel that he was giving to one who had the cause for which she worked really at heart.

Just as patriotism has become a feature in the streets, so the same motif has made its appearance in the realms of art, and at these entertainments of which I have spoken, there has sprung up a new form of dramatic and topical representation. Sometimes it takes the form of a skit, and the light side of committees is humorously put before us, but more often the author, with a deadlier and more serious aim, shows us in symbolical form the Sublimity of Patriotism. Somehow these elevating dramas make me blush. I am not ashamed of being patriotic, but I cannot bear to see patriotism set to slow music in front of the footlights, and in the presence of those blue-coated men with crutches or arms in slings. The general audience feel it too, and as the curtain goes up for the patriotic sketch, an uncomfortable fidgety silence invariably settles down on the house. The manner of the drama is usually somewhat in the following style:

Britannia, in scarlet with a gold crown, is seated in the centre of the stage, and on each side of her is a row of typical female figures, whom she addresses collectively as "Sisters" or "Children." In a few rhyming lines she gives vent to some noble sentiments about the war, and calls on each in turn to express her opinion. As these assembled females represent Faith, Hope, Belgium, Mother, Wife, Sweetheart, Serbia, Child, Justice, Mercy, Russia, Victory and Peace, a very pleasant variety of sentiments is expressed. Faith brandishes a sword with an ingenious arrangement by which electric lights spring out along the blade, and expresses complete confidence in the righteousness of the cause for which she unsheathed it. Hope looks forward to a bright dawn, and fixes her eyes dreamily on the Royal Box. Belgium, giving way to very proper emotion when she mentions Namur (rhyming to "poor"), sinks back on her chair, and Britannia, dismounting from her throne, lays a hand on her shoulder and kisses her hair. She then gives Belgium into the care of Faith, and dashing away a tear, resumes her throne, and asks Mother what she has to say. Mother and Wife then stand hand in hand and assure Britannia that they have sent their son and husband to the war because it was their duty to send him and his to go. Mother knows the righteousness of the cause. Faith crosses, presses the electric light, and with illuminated sword in hand, kisses Mother. Mother kisses Faith. Wife knows it too, and looks forward to the bright dawn of which Hope has spoken (Hope crosses and embraces Wife: momentary Tableau, accompanied on the orchestra by "Land of Hope and Glory." Britannia rises and bows to the audience).

When the applause has subsided, they resume, and Britannia calls on Sweetheart. Sweetheart trips out into the front of the stage, and goes through a little pantomime alone, but it is at once apparent that in her imagination there is a male figure there. There are little embracings: she promises the unseen figure not to cry any more, but to write to him (B.E.F.) every day.

Britannia calls her, "Brave girl."

Britannia (pointing to Child, with a voice already beginning to break with emotion): "And you, my little one?"

Long pause.

Child (in a high treble): "Oh, Mrs. Britannia, do let Daddy come home soon!" (Pause.) "Won't he come home soon, Mrs. Britannia?"

Britannia (choking): "My little one!" (Sobs.) "My little one!"

(Faith, Hope, Mother, etc., all turn aside and hide their faces, with convulsive movements of their shoulders. Eventually Hope looks firmly up at the Royal Box, and a loud click is heard as Faith tries to light the electric sword. As it is out of order, she merely holds it up. This is the cue for the play to proceed.)

Justice is rather fierce, and as she speaks about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Britannia rises and with a majestic look sets her teeth and flashes her eyes. Mercy intervenes, telling Justice that they are sisters, Justice acknowledges the soft impeachment, and hides her head on Mercy's shoulder, who reminds her that the quality of Mercy is twice blest, which is very pleasant for her as she is Mercy.

Rolls of drum in the orchestra punctuate what Victory has to say, which is just as easily described as imagined, but is scarcely worth description. Then a soft smile irradiates Britannia's face, and she says:

"And now that Victory's won I call The fairest sister of you all."

On which Peace advances and crowns Britannia with a green wreath, and a small stuffed pigeon descends from above Britannia's head and hovers. The curtain descends slowly to long soft chords on the orchestra. The applause of relief sounds faintly from various quarters of the house. The curtain instantly ascends again and shows the same picture. It goes up and down five or six times. Then it parts, and Britannia comes out and bows to the house. She smiles at someone behind the curtain, and extends her hand. A small man in a frock coat and an expression of abject misery comes out and clutches it. The audience come to the conclusion that he must be the author, and with the amiable idea of putting him out of his misery applaud again. On which Britannia advances a little to the left and again beckons behind the curtain. On which Child runs out, and (as previously instructed) after an alarmed survey of the house, hides its little face in the ample folds of Britannia's gown. Murmurs of sympathy. Britannia (who has a way with her) encourages the infant (who has done this fifty times before, and is really as brazen as brass) and points to the Royal Box. Child drops curtsy, amid more applause. Faith, Hope, Mother, Wife, History, Geography, Belgium, Peace, Mathematics, Victory, Suicide, Phlebotomy, Green Grocery and any other symbolical figures that there may be, join the group one by one. They all bow, the audience continues applauding: Faith (having mastered the unruly mechanism) lights up her sword. Peace holds aloft the Dove. Belgium's hair falls down....

The lights go up in the theatre, and guinea stall turns to guinea stall with a sigh.

"Oh, George Robey next," she says. "I hope he'll play golf."

Now I want to make my position clear. I think it wonderfully kind of all these eminent ladies to spend all this time and trouble in giving us this patriotic sketch. I think it wonderfully clever of the gentleman who wrote it to have made it all up, and thought of all those rhymes. I think every single sentiment expressed in his drama to be absolutely unexceptionable, and, as we hear from the pulpit, "True in the best sense of the word," without even inquiring what that cryptic utterance means. But there seems to me to be two weighty objections to the whole affair: it is all utterly devoid of the sense of humour and of the sense of decency. You may say that when treating of such deeply-felt matters as Faith and Victory and Mother and Child, a sense of humour would be out of place. I do not agree: it is the absence of the sense of humour that causes it to be so ridiculous. As for the propriety of presenting such things on the stage, I can only say that the Lord Chamberlain ought never to have allowed this and fifty other such pieces to appear, on grounds of indecent exposure. To present under such ruthless imagery the secret and holiest feelings of the heart is much worse than allowing people to appear with no clothes on. It is all true, too: there is its crowning horror. It is just because it is so sacredly true that it is totally unfit for public production. There are things you can't even talk about ... and they are just these things that the author of this abomination has put into the mouths of these eminent actresses. And the bowings and the scrapings, and the return of the actors, all smiles to their friends in the audience.... Oh, swiftly come, George Robey, and let us forget about it!

In this blear-eyed December, which, with its stuffy dark days and absence of sunshine, seems like some drowsy dormouse faintly conscious of being awake, and desiring only to be allowed to go to sleep again, there is an immense amount of activity going on. As in those ample entertainments for the sake of something, there is exhibited on the part of actors, authors and audience an intense desire to be doing something, so in the general life of the country there is a sense of being busy, being strenuous, doing work of some sort in order to experience the narcotic influence of occupation. The country is unhappy, and since England is a very practical country, it is stifling its spiritual unhappiness by being busy. It does things to prevent its thinking about things, and though it does very foolish things, it shows its common-sense in doing something rather than encourage its unhappiness by brooding over it. Herein, it shows its inherent vitality: were it less vital it would abandon itself to gloomy reflection. But it does not: it is tremendously busy, and so with set purpose deprives itself of the tendency to think. That is not very difficult, for, as a nation, we cannot be considered good at thinking.

Now considering that all action of whatever kind is the direct result of thought, it would seem at first sight, when we observe the amazing activities of most people, that these same people must think a great deal. But as a matter of fact, most people, so far from thinking a great deal, hardly think at all, and the greater part of their consistent activity is the result of mere habit. The baby, for instance, who is learning to walk, or the girl who is learning to knit, think immensely and absorbedly about these locomotive and involved accomplishments, just because they have not yet formed the habit of them. But a few years later, the baby who has become a man will give no thought at all to the act of walking and, indeed, to walk (the feat which once so engaged his mind), now sets his mind free to think, and he finds that problems which require to be thought out are assisted to their solution by the act that once required so much attention: similarly the grown-up woman often really talks and attends better to other things when she is engaged in knitting. The accomplishment has soaked in through the conscious to the sub-conscious self, and demands no direction from the practical mind.

It is on the lines of this analogy that we must explain the fact that many very active people are almost incapable of sustained or coherent thought. Many of their activities are matters of habit; they order dinner or look at a picture exhibition or argue about the war with no more thought than the man who walks or the woman who knits. They can be voluble about post-impressionism because at one time they acquired the habit of talking about it, and to do so now requires no more exercise of the reflective or critical qualities than does the ordering of a beef-steak pudding. Oh, if they argue about the war, most people have no original ideas of any kind on the subject: they mix round, as in an omelette, certain facts they have seen in the official telegrams, with certain reflections they have read in the leaders of their papers, and serve up, hot or cold, as their fancy dictates. But they do not think about it.

Thought, in fact, not merely abstract thought, but a far less difficult variety, namely, definite coherent thought about concrete things, is an extremely rare accomplishment among grown up people. We are often told that it is infinitely harder to learn anything when we are of mature age than when we are young, and this is quite true, the reason for it being that we now find it more difficult to think since we have so long relied on muddling along under the direction of habit. And even the people who think they think are not in most cases the real owners of their thoughts. They borrow their thoughts, as from a circulating library, and instead of owning them, return them slightly damaged at the end of a week or two, and borrow some more. They do not think for themselves: they stir about the stale thoughts of others and offer their insipid porridge as a home-industry.

This secondhand method of thinking is strangely characteristic of our race, in contradistinction to French and German methods of thought, and is admirably illustrated by the anecdote concerning the camel. An Englishman, a Frenchman and a German were bidden to write an essay on that melancholy beast, deriving their authorities from where they chose. The Englishman studied books of natural history at the British Museum, and when he had written an essay founded on them, went and shot a camel. The Frenchman took his hat and stick and went to the Jardin des Plantes, where he looked at a real camel, and subsequently had a ride or two on its back. But the German did none of these things: he consulted no authority, he looked at no camel, but shutting himself up in his study, he constructed one from his inner consciousness.

Now whether this offspring of mentality was like a real camel or not, history does not tell us. Probably it was not, any more than the new map of Europe planned by Prussian militarism will prove like the map of Europe as it will appear in the atlases published, let us say, in 1918. But even if the German camel was totally unrecognizable as such, its constructor had shown himself capable of entering on a higher plane of thought than is intelligible to the ordinary Englishman. The German, in fact, as we are beginning to learn, is able to sit down and think, and out of pure thought to build up an image. The English are excellent learners, quick to assimilate and apply what others have thought out, the French are vivid and keen observers, but neither have the power of sustained internal thought which characterizes the Teuton, who incidentally is quite the equal of the Englishman at learning and of the Frenchman at observation. The German, for instance, thought out the doctrine of submarine warfare, and to our grievous cost applied it to our shipping. Similarly they thought out the doctrine of trench warfare, supplemented by gas, then the French, with their marvellously quick powers of observation, saw and comprehended and applied. In fact, the two great German inventions conceived by them, and originally used by them, have been adopted and brought to a higher pitch of perfection by their adversaries. But if only any of our allied nations could pick up from them the power of concentrated and imaginative thought, for the root of the matter is imagination! We proverbially muddle through, and when occasion arises, by dint of a certain stubbornness and admirable stolidity, though pommelled and buffeted, eventually learn by experience a successful mode of resistance. But constitutionally, we appear incapable of initiating ideas. We cannot imagine an occasion, but can only meet the occasion when somebody else imagines it.

Of all the disappointments of this year this is the root. We cannot invent: we can only counter. We have not the power of constructive imagination, which is the mother and father of original actions. But when our adversaries indulge in original actions, we can (on occasion) think out an answer to them which is perfectly effective. We can resist and we can hit back when we are hit, but at present we have not shown that we are capable of imagining and dealing the first blow. Perhaps this may come, for it goes without saying that we were notoriously unready at the beginning of the war, and had our hands full and overfull with countering the blows that were rained on us. We were on the defensive and could barely maintain the defence, and could not possibly have collected that coiled force which is necessary for any offensive movement. But if after sixteen months of war we do not begin to show signs of it, it is reasonable to wonder whether the cause of this is not so much that we lack the battering power, but that our statesmen and our generals lack the imagination out of which original plans are made. True, there have been two original schemes, namely, that of forcing the Dardanelles and capturing Bagdad, and if these show the quality of our originality, perhaps we are better without it ...

It is natural that the stress of war should have brought out the deep-rooted, inherent qualities of the nations engaged, and those qualities are just those that strike you first in a man of whatever nationality. When you know him a little better, you think you detect all sorts of other qualities, but when you come really to know him—singly or collectively—he is usually just such as you first thought him to be. Indeed, it is as Francis said about the orange: the rind has the savour of the fruit within, between the two there is a layer of soft, pulpy stuff. But when you get through that, the man, the essential person is like the taste of the rind. This has been immensely true with regard to the war. On the surface the French strike anyone who comes in contact with them as full of admirable fervour: there is the strong, sharp odour about them, there is a savour that penetrates. Then you get to know them just a little better, and you find a woolly and casual touch about them, which you, in your ignorance born out of a little knowledge, take to be the real spirit of the French. But when intimate acquaintance, or the stripping of the surface takes place, how you must alter your estimate again, going back to your first impression. You meet the fervour, the strong sharp odour again, and it goes into the heart of the nation. The Frenchman is apt on first acquaintance to seem too genuine, too patriotically French to be real. But when you get within, when the stress of war has revealed the nation and shown the strong beating of its heart, how the fervour and the intensity of savour persist! What you thought was superficial you find to be the quality that dwells in the innermost. He will easily talk about La France and La gloire when you first get acquainted with him, but when he stands revealed you find that he talks about it easily because it is the spring and source of his being.

The same holds with the German. When first you get speaking-acquaintance with a German, you consider him brutal and beery and coarse and loud-tongued. You penetrate a little further, and find him watching by the Rhine and musical and philosophical, a peaceful, aloof dreamer. Such, at any rate, was the experience of Lord Haldane. But when the pulpy, stringy layer is stripped off, when the stress of war makes penetration into his real self, you find him again to be as you first thought him, coarse and brutal and clamant, the most overweening individual in all creation. Both with the French and the German you revised your first impressions when you thought you began to know him, only to find when the real man is revealed that he is as you first thought him. And though it is the hardest thing in the world for anyone to form even an approximately true estimate of the race to which he belongs, I think that the same holds of the English. They are at heart very much what they appear to be on the surface, blundering but tenacious, slow to move, but difficult when once on the move to stop. But really, when I try to think what the English are like, I find I can form no conclusion about them, simply because I am of them.

I have just had a long letter from Francis, a letter radiant with internal happiness. The exterior facts of life cannot much contribute to that, for the place where he now is consists, so he tells me, entirely of bare hill-side, lined with shallow trenches, bullets and swarms of drowsy flies. He hints in a cryptic manner his belief that he will not remain there very long, leaving me to make any conjecture I please. But in the lines and between them I read, as I said, a radiance of happiness. He knows, with a strength that throttles all qualms of the flesh, that does not, indeed, allow them to exist at all, the bright shining of the light invisible, that diffused illumination in which no shadow can be cast. And as in that walk we had on the downs, the knowledge fills him not only with inward bliss, but with intense physical enjoyment, so that he can be humorous over the horrors of existence on that damned promontory. He is genuinely amused: for nobody was ever such a poor hand at dissimulation as Francis. He finds things to enjoy in that hell; more than that, he finds that hell enjoyable: his letter breathed that serenity of well-being which is the least imitable thing in the world.

Meantime, he wants the news of everyday happenings, "without any serious reflections, or the internal stomach-ache of pessimists." These rather pointed remarks refer, I am afraid, to my last letter to him, to which he does not otherwise allude. He quotes Mr. Longfellow's best-known poem (I am afraid also) in the spirit of mockery, and says:

"'Life is real, life is earnest,' and if you doubt it, come out to Suvla Bay and see. We are damned earnest out here, and I haven't seen anybody who doubts that Life is extremely real: so are the flies. What I want to know is the little rotten jokes and nonsense, the things you talk about when you don't think what you are talking about. Here's one: the other day I was opening a tin of potted meat, and a bit of shrapnel came and took the tin clean out of my hand. It didn't touch me; it simply whisked it neatly away. Another inch and my hand would have gone with it. But I hope you don't think I gave thanks for the lucky escape I had had. Not a bit: I was merely furious at losing the potted meat. It lay outside the trench (a trench out here is a tea-spoonful of earth and pebbles which you pile up in front of you, and then hide yourself behind it), and I spent the whole of the afternoon in casting for it, with a hook on a piece of string. I was much more interested in that than in the military operations. I wanted my potted meat, which I think you sent me. Well, what I should like you to write to me about, is the things that the part of me which wanted the potted meat would like to hear about. Patriotism and principles be blowed, bless them! That's all taken for granted—'granted, I'm sure,' as the kitchen-maid said. "FRANCIS.

"P.S.—You alluded to a grey parrot, in one letter. For God's sake, tell me about the grey parrot. You just mentioned a grey parrot, and then no more. Grey parrot is what I want, and your cat, and all the little, rotten things that are so tremendously important. Write me a grey parrot letter."

Well, the grey parrot is rather interesting ... and her name is Matilda, and if you want to know why she is Matilda, you have only got to look at her. If words have any suggestiveness to your mind, if there is to you any magic about them, or if they, unbidden, conjure up images, I should not be surprised if the word "Matilda" connoted to you a grey parrot. It would be more surprising if, when you become acquainted with my grey parrot, you did not become aware that she was Matilda. I don't see how you can get away from the fact that she must, in the essentials of her nature, be Matilda. Presently you will see what Matilda-ism is: when it is stated, you will know that you knew it all along, but didn't know you knew it. The same sort of thing happened to somebody, when he became aware that all his life he had been writing prose. And very good prose it was.... Here, then, begins the introduction to Matilda-ism, in general terms to be applied later.

MATILDA-ISM

We all of us know (even the most consistent of us) those baffling instincts which lead us to act in manners incompatible with each other, simultaneously. That is not so puzzling as it sounds (nor sounds quite as ungrammatical as it is), and an instance will clarify the principle. For who does not understand and in measure sympathize with the careful housewife who embarks on a two-shilling taxicab expedition in order to purchase some small household commodity at sixpence less than she could have bought it for across the road? The motive of her expedition is economy, and therefore she lashes out into bewildering expenditure in order to achieve it. Economy, in fact, is the direct cause of her indulging in totally unnecessary expenditure. She ties herself to the stake with one hand, ready to be burned for the sake of her faith, and offers incense to the heathen gods with the other.

It is this strain of self-contradictory conduct that I unhesitatingly label Matilda-ism, for, as far as I am aware, there is no other succinct term in the English language which sums up and expresses it. (Besides, it is characteristic of my grey parrot, for as you shall presently see, this is what Matilda does.) You cannot explain this incompatibility of action and principle otherwise: it is not vacillation, it is not infirmity of purpose, for the economical housewife is one mass of purpose and her motive is as pure as Parsifal. Simply in pursuance of her economical design, she rushes into expense. Nor is it the sign of a weak intellect, for Matilda's grasp of a subject is, like Mrs. Micawber's, inferior to none, and yet Matilda is the great example of the quality which takes its name from her. She does not spare thought and industry, perhaps, if anything, she thinks too much, which may account for the inadequacy of her plumage. She has been ill, too, lately, which perhaps makes her plumage worse, for she has been suffering from some obscure affection of the brain. But since her illness her Matilda-ism has been more marked than ever, and I prefer to think that it is Thought which has accounted both for the illness and her abnormal moultings. She had that rare disease, beloved of novelists, called Brain-fever. People's hair, we are told, falls out after brain-fever, and so did Matilda's feathers. But I am sure that Matilda would sooner go naked, than cease to think.

Unlike most women, Matilda does not care about her clothes, and unlike most birds, she does not scoop and preen herself after breakfast. She gives one shake, and then settles down to her studies, which consist in observing, with a scornful wonder, all that goes on round her. When first she came here, she was in no hurry to draw conclusions, or commit herself hastily to irrevocable words, for she sat and waited without speech for some six weeks, until I thought she was either dumb or had nothing to say. Then, unlike Mr. Asquith, she ceased to wait and see, and began calling the kitchen-maid (Mabel) in a voice so like the cook's, that that deluded young lady came running from the scullery into the kitchen, to find no cook there at all, at all, but only a grey parrot, that sat with stony, half-closed eyes on her perch. Then, as she went out again, believing that some discarnate intelligence had spoken to her, Matilda laughed at her in a rude, hoarse voice that was precisely like the milkman's, mewed like the cat, and said "Cuckoo" a number of times. (This she had learned last spring in the country, and was unaware that there were no cuckoos in London ever, or even in the country in November.) Matilda, in fact, with her powerful intellect and her awful memory, had been taking stock of everybody, and not telling anybody about it. Now that it was well within her power to deal with every situation that could possibly arise in a mocking manner, she decided to begin talking and taking an active part, that of the critic, in life. Simultaneously, she began to reveal what Matilda-ism was. At this period, since she was too accomplished to be limited to the kitchen, I took her upstairs. I thought she would meet more people there, and enlarge, if possible, a mind that was already vast.

Her first definite elucidation of Matilda-ism was to make love in the most abandoned manner to the green parrot. She wooed him in the style that the Bishop of L-nd-n so rightly deprecates, with loud Cockney whistles and love-lorn eyes. Of course Joey seemed to like that, and their cages were moved close together, in the hope that eventually they would make a match of it, and that most remarkable babies would chip the shells of their eggs. Matilda continued to encourage him, and one day, when their cages were now quite close to each other, the green gentleman, trembling with excitement, put out a horned claw, and introduced it into Matilda's cage. On which Matilda screamed at the top of her voice and bit it viciously. I thought at the time that this was only an exhibition of the eternal feminine, which encourages a man, and then is offended and indignant when he makes the natural response to her invitations, but in the light of subsequent events, I believe it to have been Matilda-ism. She was not being a flirt, simply, while she adored, she hated also. It was Matilda, you see: all the time it was Matilda waiting to be classified.

Matilda knew perfectly well what a cat says: she knew, too, that a cat is called "Puss," and, putting two and two together, she always said "Meaow" when you went to her cage and said "Puss." This is synthetic reasoning, like that of the best philosophers, and, all the world over, is taken as a mark of the highest intelligence. Similarly, she knew that my dog is called Taffy, and (by a converse process inaccessible to any but the finest minds) if you went to her cage and said "Bow-ow-ow," she responded with the neatness of a versicle, "Taffy, Taffy, Taffy." But—and this is Matilda-ism—when Taffy came near her cage she invariably mewed to him, and when a cat came near her cage, she barked. She did not confuse them; Matilda's brain shines illustriously above the clouds of muddle. She preferred to abandon synthetic reasoning, and create Matilda-ism.

I must insist on this, for all the evidence goes to confirm it. For instance, if you pull a handkerchief from your pocket, she makes rude noises which cannot fail to remind you of the blowing of a nose oppressed by catarrh. Also, when Mabel left, she learned the name of the new kitchen-maid at once, and never made mistakes about it. But as she increased in years and wisdom, her ineradicable leanings towards Matilda-ism increased also.

Then came the crisis in her life, the brain-fever to which I have alluded. She had a fit, and for five or six days was seriously ill in the spare-room, set high above the noises of the street, where no exciting sounds could reach her. But she recovered, and her recovery was held to be complete when from the spare-room where she had undergone her rest-cure, a stream of polyglot noises one morning issued forth. I took her back into my sitting-room again, and reminded her of the European War by saying, "Gott strafe the Kaiser." I thought this would bring her into touch with the world of to-day again, but for a long time she remained perfectly silent. But when I had said, "Gott strafe the Kaiser" two or three hundred times, she burst into speech with a loud preliminary scream.

"Gott strafe Polly's head," she cried. "Gott save the King! Gott save the Kaiser! Gott scratch Polly's head. Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! Cuckoo! Cuckoo. Puss, Puss, Puss! Bow-ow-ow!..." And the poor demented bird laughed in hoarse ecstasy, at having got in touch with synthetic reasoning again!

Matilda-ism took control of all her thoughts. If a tea-cup was presented to her notice, she blew her nose loudly, though I cannot believe that she had ever seen a tea-cup used as a handkerchief. When Joey was put near her cage again she called him Taffy. She barked at the kitchen-maid, and mewed at the cook, and called the cat Mabel. All her correlations had gone wrong in that attack of brain-fever, and though she had shown signs of Matilda-ism before, I never thought it would come to this. She was a voluble mass of contradictory and irreconcilable propositions.

All this I wrote to Francis, since he desired domestic and ridiculous information, but when the letter was sealed and dispatched, I could not help thinking that Matilda, real as she is, is chiefly a parable. It is impossible, in fact, not to recollect that King Constantine of Greece was very ill last spring (like Matilda), and subsequently (i) invited the Allies to land at Salonica, and (ii) turned M. Venizelos out of office. It all looks traitorous, but perhaps it is mere Matilda-ism. But I am not sure that it would not be better for him to have some more brain-fever, and have done with it.

A postscript must be added. I took Matilda into the country, when I went there for a few days last week. One morning she saw a ferret being taken out of a bag, and instantly sang, "Pop goes the Weasel." I think that shows a turn for the better, some slight power of sane synthesis lurks in the melody, for a ferret is a sort of weasel. I am naturally optimistic, and cannot help wondering whether a change of air might not produce a similar amelioration in the case of King Constantine. Russia, for instance....

I had intended to keep these annals of Matilda detached from the war, but it has wound its way in again, as King Charles's head invaded the chronicles of Mr. Dick. There is no getting away from it: if you light a cigarette, you think of Turkey and the expedition to the Dardanelles; if you drink a glass of wine, you think of the trenches dug through the vineyards of France. And yet, how little, actually, has the war entered into the vital parts of the mass of English people. To large numbers, reckoned by thousands, it has made unhealable wounds, but into larger numbers, reckoned by millions, no prick of the sword has really penetrated. I wonder when some kind of awakening will come, when to the endless dormitories of drowsy sleepers, some smell of the burning, some sound of the flaming beams above their heads and below them will pierce their dreams. I pray God that on that day there will be no terrified plucking from sleep into realities vastly more portentous than any nightmare, but an awakening from sloth into an ordered energy.

But up till now, a profound slumber, or at the most a slumber with coloured dreams, has possessed the spirit of the nation. Occasionally some sleeper, roused by the glare that burns sombrely on the placid night of normal human existence, has awoke and has screamed out words of Pythian warning. But his troubled awakening has but annoyed the myriads of other sleepers. One has growled out, "Oh, for God's sake, go to sleep again: there's the Navy;" another has murmured, "It's unpatriotic to be pessimistic;" a third has whispered, "God always permits us to muddle through." Sometimes the yell has startled another into futile whimperings, but then some retired Colonel, who writes for the papers, like a soft-slippered nurse, pads up to his bedside, and says, "Go to sleep again, dearie, I'm here," and the whimpering ceases, and the nurse pulls down the blind to keep the glare out of the eyes of the sleeper. Occasionally one of them makes such a to-do that an attendant hurries downstairs to fetch a member of the Government from the room where they are having such a pleasant chat over their wine, and he is given a glass of port, and asked to come downstairs in his dressing-gown and join the amusing supper-party. Sometimes he goes, sometimes he drinks his wine and prefers to go to sleep again instead. I don't know what would happen if he refused to go downstairs, and said he would go on screaming. But no one at present contemplates such an upsetting contingency. Besides, there is always the Censor, Auntie Censor, who can be stern when sternness is really wanted, and spank any obstreperous screamer with a ruthless blue pencil.

Everyone knows that particular (and disagreeable) climatic condition, when, during a frost, thaw becomes imminent. It may still be freezing, but there is something in the air which tells those who are susceptible to change just a little before change arrives that a thaw is approaching. The sensation cannot be accounted for by the thermometer, which still registers a degree or two of frost, but to those who have this weather prescience, it is quite unmistakable. Similarly in affairs not appealing to the merely physical sense, it sometimes happens that people are aware of a coming event implying change, before there is any real reason to justify their belief. This is so common a phenomenon that it has even been crystallized into an awkwardly-worded proverb which informs us that coming events cast their shadow before (meaning light), but to adopt the current phrase, there has lately been a great deal of shadow projected from the Dardanelles, and it is now a matter of general belief that that ill-planned, ill-executed expedition is about to be recalled, and that all the eager blood shed there will now prove to have been poured out over an enterprise that shall be abandoned as unrealizable. For many months now hearts have been sick with deferred hope, eyes dim with watching for the dawn that never broke, and it seems probable that "Too late" is to be scrawled in red over another abortive adventure, now to be filed away among failures under the appropriate letter D. It is idle to attempt to see any bright lining to the cloud which hangs over that accursed peninsula: all that can be hoped is that the gallant souls who still hold a corner of it, despite the misadventures, the miscalculations, the mismanagement that have for months punctuated heroism with halts and full stops written in crimson, will be bought off without the crowning record of some huge disaster.

Christmas approaches, and the furnaces of the world-war are being stoked up to burn with a more hideous intensity, while village choirs practise their hymns and anthems about peace on earth, good will towards men. Every decent Christian Englishman (pace the pacifists) believes in the prime importance of killing as many Germans as possible, and yet no decent Christian Englishman will somehow fail to endorse with a genuine signature the message of the angelic host, even though his fingers itch for the evening paper, which he hopes contains some news of successful slaughter. That sounds like another instance of Matilda-ism, and mere discussion, as confined to the narrow sphere of rational argument, might easily leave the defender of such an attitude with not a leg to stand upon. But all the time (for argument at best can only prove what is not worth explaining) he will know at heart that his position has not been shaken by the apparent refutation, and he will give you his word (than which there is nothing greater and nothing less) that his contention, logically indefensible, is also unassailable. He can't explain, and it is better not to try. But he knows how it feels, which is more vital than knowing how to account for it. Logic and Euclid are not, after all, irrefutable, though they may be, by human reason, the final guides to human conduct.

Everything cannot be referred to reason as to a supreme arbiter. Reason will lead you a long way across the plain, but beyond the plain there is, like a row of visionary blue mountains, a range of highland which is the abode of the riddles, the questions, the inconsistencies which are quite outside the level lands of reason. No one can tell why the Omnipotent Beneficence (some people hate to see the word God) ever allowed cancer and malarial mosquitoes and Prussian militarism to establish themselves so firmly on the earth which is the Lord's. It is impossible to explain this away, and unless you argue from the fact of their undoubted existence that there is no such thing as the Omnipotent Beneficence, and become that very silly thing called an atheist, the best thing you can do (collectively) is to look for the germs of cancer with a view to their destruction, cover with paraffin the breeding places of the mosquito, and help, if you have the good fortune still to be useful, in the extermination of Prussian militarism. All these three things are, very possibly, manifestations of the devil, and even if they are not (improbable as it sounds), they are so like manifestations of the devil, that we are justified in mistaking them for such. I am quite convinced of that, and am impervious to any argument about it. I "am in love and charity" (in my microscopic degree) "with my neighbours," but that would not prevent me killing a German with all the good will in the world, if I was put in the firing line, any more than it would prevent me squashing a malaria-carrying mosquito with my Prayer Book. And if I could sing (which I can't) I would bellow "Peace on earth, good will towards men," at the top of my voice, even while I was poising the Prayer Book or drawing a bead on the Prussians. "Inconsistent," I daresay, but why be consistent? Besides, deep down, I know it is consistent.

Yet, though we all recognize the essential consistency of this apparent inconsistency, how we long, as with the yearning for morning through the dark hours of pain, for the time when such complication of instinct will have vanished. Twelve leaden months have dropped sullenly, one by one, into the well of time, salt with human tears, and those who were optimistic a year ago, believing that when Christmas next came round, Europe would have recovered from this madness of bloodshed, are less confident in their outlook for another Christmas. But few, I think, if a stroke of the pen could give back to the world that menacing tranquillity which preceded the war, would put their name to so craven a document. Now that we know what those faint and distant flashes of lightning meant in the years that saw us all sunk in the lethargy of opulent prosperity, now that we know what those veiled drowsy murmurs of thunder from Central Europe portended, we would not take in exchange for the days of direst peril, the false security that preceded them. Even as America now is drunk with dollars, so that no massacre of her citizens on the high seas will reduce her from the attitude of being too proud to fight, to the humbler office of resenting crimes that send her defenceless citizens without warning to the bottomless depths of the Atlantic, so we, with our self-sufficiency and our traditional sense of supremacy, could not be bothered to listen to the warnings of the approaching storm till with hail of fire it burst on us. Then, it is true, we ceased to dream, but ever since our kind nurses have done their best to cozen back those inert hours. "I'm sitting up, dearie," they say. "Just wait and see."

And at this point I will again pass over a year, that comprises the war events of 1916. In the spring the great German attack against Verdun opened, and for months the French stood steadfast, until that hail of hammer blows exhausted itself. Early in June was fought the naval battle of Jutland, announced by the German Press as so stupendous a victory, that for the rest of the year their fleet sheltered in Kiel, presumably because they had destroyed the British naval supremacy for ever. In August came the fall of Gorizia, and next month the entry of Rumania into the war, and a disastrous campaign followed. In Greece King Constantine continued his treacherous manoeuvres, but failed to exhaust the patience of the Allies. In December, lastly, came the bombastic announcement that the invincible and victorious Germany was willing from motives of magnanimous humanity, to grant peace to the crushed and trampled Allies, who had dared to dispute the might of her God-given destiny. A suitable reply was returned.

JANUARY, 1917

It is a year since last I wrote anything in this book, and the year has passed with such speed that I can scarcely believe that the ink of December is dry. Nothing makes time slide away so fast as regular monotonous employment, and not only this year, but the year before that, and five months before that, seem pressed into a moment, dried and flattened. But all the things that happened before that, when in August, 1914, the whole of one's consciousness was changed, is incredibly remote.

The war has made a cleavage across the continuity of life, and while the mind and the conscious self get to be at home in the changed existence, the line of cleavage does not become obliterated, but, on the contrary, appears steeper and more sheer-sided. The edges of the chasm have been covered over with the green growth of habit, of the adjustment that alone renders fresh conditions possible; but further and further away becomes the consciousness that there was once a time in which all Europe was not at war. In those golden years people used to discuss, just as they would discuss ghosts or the approach of a comet, the possibility of a German war, that would lead all Europe into the gate of Hell. But it was discussed theoretically as a subject of polite conversation, when topics that were really of interest, like Suffragettes or Home Rule in Ireland, ran dry. You talked about the comet, Halley's comet, that was going to destroy the world, and then you talked about a European war, that was going to destroy the world. And then you played the guessing game.... It was all one: just a matter of remote possibilities, based on an idea that you did not believe in. And then it came, not Halley's comet, or a ghost, but the third incredible happening. All that was before has receded into dim ages. You feel that "once upon a time," as in stories you tell to children, there was somebody else masquerading under your own name, and suppose that as by some conjuring trick he was mysteriously identical with you. If you were closely questioned you would allow that in 1913 you did this or that; you wanted something (and perhaps got it); you lived in a house in a certain street, and were popularly supposed to be the same person who lives in that or another house now. You would have to admit these facts, but deep down in yourself you would cling to the secret belief that it was somebody else who, under your name, did the things and lived the life that is supposed to have been yours. A label was attached to you then, which gave your name and address, and you find the same label round your neck still. For the sake of convenience you continue to answer to your name, and, in a manner of speaking, are responsible for the old lease. But all the time you feel that another person wears the label now. A different identity (that is your private opinion) inhabits your house. He wears the same (or similar) boots and shoes; he comes when he is called; he has a face that is still recognized by his friends. But though his friends recognize him, you scarcely recognize him yourself. He, who was nurtured in peace, has now but a remote memory of those tranquil years, and thinks they must surely belong to someone else. All he knows now is that since the foundation of the world he has lived in the midst of this grim struggle, which, since the foundation of the world, was as inevitable as the succession of night and day. Before the storm broke, somebody (himself probably, since everyone else says so) knew only that life was a pleasant business (or unpleasant, as the case may be), and that it would go on for a certain number of years, and that then an end would come to it. It was all very jolly, and a railway strike or the rise of the income-tax to, say, one and sixpence in the pound was the sum of the inconvenience ahead. In due time he would get pneumonia or cancer, or be run over by a motor-bus; but all those disheartening possibilities seemed quite remote. Then came the war, and it cleaved his former life from his present life as by an impassable chasm. That being so, he adjusted himself to his present life, and, if he was wise, ceased to waste time over thinking of the "jolly days" which preceded the changed conditions. And if he was wiser still, he did not throw the memory of the "jolly days" away, but put them in a box and locked it up. And if he was wisest of all, he said: "I am different, but the eternal things are not different," and went on just as usual.

Indeed, why you do a thing matters far more than what you do. It is easy to conceive of a thoroughly lethargic person who, for mere want of vitality, lives a most respectable life. He has not energy enough—and thereby is less of a man—to commit the usual errors. But the question seriously arises as to whether he had not better be more of a man and commit them. I hasten over this difficult phase, and conceive of him again as more vital than ever, and abstaining from the usual crimes because he is now above them rather than below them. He looks down on them instead of gazing feebly up at them. In actual result, his conduct as regards errors is the same, but who can doubt about the respective values of the respective conducts? The two are poles apart (though in net and tangible result the extremes meet), for no one can say that the man who does not cheat at cards simply from fear of detection has the smallest spiritual affinity with the average person who plays honestly because he is honest.

There is a periodical piece of business in shops and places where they sell things, called stock-taking, and, as its name implies, it consists in the owner going through the goods and seeing what he has got. It is a useful custom, not only in shops, but as applied by ordinary individuals to themselves, and the first day of a New Year is a date commonly in use as the day of internal stock-taking. Very sensible people will tell you that the division of one's life into years is a purely arbitrary arrangement, and that December 31st is not severed from January 1st by any more real division than July 3rd is severed from July 4th. But less superbly-constituted minds fall back on these arbitrary arrangements, and with the sense that they are starting again on January 1st, they often have a look round their cupboards and shelves to see what they have in hand. It is a disagreeable sort of business; you will find that your things have got very dusty and dirty, and that probably there is much that should be thrown away and but little that is worth keeping when you run over your record for the past year. But far more important than your actual conduct (as in the case of the two very different gentlemen, neither of whom cheats at cards) is the motive that inspired your conduct. If you are lucky you will perhaps find that you have done a certain number of good-natured things; you may have done some generous ones, but if you are wise, you will, before you let a faint smile of satisfaction steal over your mobile features, consider why you did them. You may have been good-natured out of kindness of heart; all congratulations if it is so; but you may find you have been good-natured out of laziness, in which case I venture to congratulate you again on having brought that fact home to yourself.... Indeed, this search for motive rather resembles what happens when you turn over a prettily marked piece of rock lying on the grass. It may be all right, but sometimes you discover horrible creepy-crawlies below it, which, when disturbed, scud about in a disconcerting manner. Or again (which is more encouraging), you may come across an object—a piece of conduct, that is to say—which really makes you blush to look at it. But possibly, when you turn it over you may find that you really meant rather well, in spite of your deplorable behaviour. Hoard that encouragement, for you will want as much encouragement as you can possibly find if you intend to do your stock-taking honestly; otherwise, you will assuredly not have the spirit to go through with it. And when the stock-taking is done look at the total, which will certainly be very disappointing, without dismay, but with a sanguine hope that you will find a better show next year. Think it over well, and then dismiss the whole thing from your conscious mind. For to dwell too much on your stock-taking, or to take stock too often, produces a paralysing sort of self-consciousness. The man who sets his past failures continually before him is not likely to be much better in the future; while he who contemplates his past successes gets fat and inert with probably quite ill-founded complacency. One of the shrewdest philosophers who ever lived gives very sage advice on this point when he says: "And when he hath done all that is to be done, as far as he knoweth, let him think that he hath done nothing."... So we, who have not done one tithe of the things that we knew we ought to have done, will certainly have little excuse for thinking we have done something.

Another effect of this last year of tension, besides that of sundering our present lives and consciousness from pre-war days, is that it has made a vast quantity of people very much older. That has advantages and disadvantages, for while there are certainly many very admirable things connected with the sense of youth, there are some which are not so admirable when manifested by those of mature and middle age. It is admirable, for instance, that the middle-aged should have enough vitality to devote themselves to learning the fox-trot, or the bunny-bump, but it is less admirable that they should actually spend their vitality in doing so. The war has taken the wish to bunny-bump out of them, the desire for bunny-bumping has failed, and that has caused them to realize that they are not quite so young as they thought, or as they proposed to be for the next twenty years or so. The sense of middle-age has come upon them as suddenly as the war itself came, and many have found it extremely disconcerting. It is as if they were introduced to a perfect stranger, whom they have to take into their house and live with. They don't like the look of the stranger, nor his manners, nor his habits, and this infernal intruder does not propose, they feel, to make a short visit, but has come to stop with them permanently. He eats and walks and reads with them, and when they wake up at night they see his head on their pillow. He seems to them ungracious and angular and forbidding; they dearly long to get away from him, but that is impossible. What, then, are they to do? There is only one thing to be done, to make friends with him without loss of time, and never to regret the vanishing of the jolly days before he came. If they had been wise (hardly anybody is in this respect), they would have made friends with him long before he came as a permanent guest; they would have asked him to lunch, so to speak, on one day, and gone out a walk with him on another, and have thus got accustomed to his ways by degrees. But as they have not done that, they must resign themselves to a period of discomfort now.

Probably they will find that he is much easier to get on with than they think at first. They fancy that they will never be happy again with that old bore always at their elbows, and it is quite true that they never will be happy again in the old way. They must find a new way, and the first step towards that is not to call this guest, middle-age, an old bore, but discover what he can do, and what his good points are. He really has a good many, if you take the trouble to look for them. He has not got the tearing high spirits which they are accustomed to, but he has a certain serenity which is far from disagreeable if you will be at the pains to draw it out. He is not very quick, he has but little of that quality compounded of wit and activity and nonsense which they were wont to consider the basis of all social enjoyment; but he has a certain rather kindly humour which gives a twinkle to the eye that sparkles no longer. He has boiled down his experiences, sad and joyful alike, into a sort of broth which is nutritive and palatable, though without bubble. But patience is one of its excellent ingredients, a wholesome herb, which, for all its homeliness, has a very pleasant taste. He can be a very good friend, not liable to take offence, and though his affections are not passionate, they are very sincere.

But if you refuse to see his good points, and will not make friends with him (he will always allow you to do that; it is "up to you"), he will prove himself a very cantankerous old person indeed. He will give you the most annoying reminders of his presence, digging you with his skinny elbow, and making all sorts of sarcastic interruptions when you are talking. You will get to hate him more and more, for he will always be spoiling your pleasure until you are cordially inclined towards him. He will trip you up in the bunny-bump; he will give you aches and pains if you persist in behaving as if you were twenty-five still; he will make you feel very unwell if you choose to eat lobster-salad at sunrise. And you can't get rid of him; the more strenuously you deny his existence, the more indefatigably he will remind you of it. He is quite a good friend, in fact, but a perfectly pernicious enemy. But naturally you will do what you choose about him, as you have always done about everything else....

To revert to Francis (a far more exhilarating subject than New Year reflections), he was at home for a few days last week. After the Dardanelles expedition was abandoned, he went out to France (after having condescended to accept a commission), where he proceeded at once to earn the V.C. for a deed of ludicrous valour, under a storm of machine-gun bullets, and while on leave received his decoration.

"Of course I like it awfully," was his comment about it; "but, as a matter of fact, I didn't deserve it, because on that particular morning I didn't happen to be frightened. I usually am frightened, and I've deserved the V.C. millions of times, but just when I got it I didn't deserve it. They ought to give the V.C. to fellows who are in the devil of a fright all the time they are doing their job. But that day I wasn't; I had had a delicious breakfast, and felt as calm as Matilda is looking. I don't believe she can speak a word by the way; you made it all up."

I was very much mortified by Matilda's conduct. Ever since Francis's return she had sat in dead silence, though I had taught her to say "Hurrah for the V.C.," and she had repeated it without stopping for several hours the day before he arrived. But the moment she saw him, she looked at him with a cold grey eye and remained absolutely speechless. Of course I did not tell Francis what I had taught her to say, because she might take it into her head to begin to talk at any time, and her congratulations would not then be a surprise to him. So I held my tongue, and Matilda hers.

Then a most unfortunate incident occurred, for Francis left his decoration in a taxi next day, and though we telephoned to all the taxi-ranks and police-stations in the world, we could hear nothing of it. I don't think I ever saw anyone so furious as he was.

"No one will believe I got it," he shouted. "I meant to wear it day and night, so that even a burglar coming into the house should see it. But now no one will know. I can't go about chanting 'I am a V.C., but I left it in a taxi.' Who would believe such a cock-and-bull story? If you heard a fellow in the street saying 'I am a V.C.,' you wouldn't believe him. Of course there's the riband, but it was the Cross I wanted to wear day and night—nobody looks at an inch of riband. Don't laugh."

Matilda suddenly cleared her throat, and blew her nose, which is often the prologue to conversation. I sincerely hoped she wouldn't say "Hurrah for the V.C." just this moment, for it really seemed possible that the enraged Francis might wring her neck if she mocked at him. I hastened to talk myself, for Matilda usually waits for silence before she scatters her pearls of wisdom.

"Well, apply for another one," I said. "They'll surely give you another one. Or earn another one, but apply first."

"And how many years do you think I should have to wait for it?" he asked. "How many departments do you think I should have to visit? How many papers and affidavits do you think I should have to sign? Apply for another one, indeed, as if the V.C. was only a pound of sugar!"

"Only a pound of sugar!" I said. "Certainly, if it takes as long as it takes to get a pound of sugar——"

Matilda gave a loud shriek.

"Gott strafe the V.C.!" she screamed. "Hurrah for Germany! Gott scratch the Kaiser's head! Bow, wow, wow, wow, wow! Pussy!"

Francis stopped dead and turned his head slowly round to where Matilda was screaming like a Pythian prophetess. She whistled like the milkman, she cuckooed, she called on her Maker's name, and on Taffy's; in a couple of minutes she had said everything she had ever known, and mixed the V.C. up with them all. She laughed at the V.C.; she blew her nose at him, accompanying these awful manifestations of Matilda-ism with dancing a strange Brazilian measure on her perch. Then she stopped as suddenly as if her power of speech had been blown out like a candle, and hermetically sealed her horny beak for all conversational purposes for precisely three weeks.

Francis had stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth, so that his laughter should not interrupt Matilda, and got so red in the face I was afraid he was going to have a fit. But when she definitely stopped, he took the handkerchief out of his mouth, and laughed till exhaustion set in.

"O Lord! I'm so glad Matilda is true!" he said. "I was half afraid you might have invented her, though I was surprised at the impeccable art of your invention."

"Why surprised?" I asked coldly.

"Oh, I don't know. The ordinary reason. But she's really more like the British public than King Tino. They get things more mixed up than anyone I ever came across. For instance, they think that they ought to be very grave and serious, because the war is very grave and serious. Why, there's Matilda-ism for you! The only possible way of meeting a grave situation is to meet it gaily, and they would learn that if they came out to the trenches. Unless you were flippant there you would expire with depression. They are beavers at work, I allow that, but when the day's work is over they ought to be compelled to amuse themselves."

"But they don't feel inclined to," said I.

"No, and I don't feel inclined to get up in the morning, but that is no justification for lying in bed. There ought to be an amusement-board, which should make raids on private houses, if they suspected that unseemly seriousness was practised there. People talk of unseemly mirth, but they don't realize that gloom, as a general rule, is much more unseemly. Besides, you don't arrive at anything like the proper output of work if it is done by depressed people. Also, the quality of it is different."

"Do you mean that a shell made by cheerful munition workers has a greater explosive force than when it has been made by the melancholy?" I asked.

"I daresay that is the case, and it would account for the fact that the Boches' shells haven't been nearly so devastating lately, because beyond doubt the Boches are a good deal depressed. There is a marked sluggishness stealing into their explosives. If you want to do a good day's work on Thursday, by far the best preparation you can make for it is to have a howling, jolly time on Wednesday evening. Pleasure gives you energy, and pleasure is every bit as real as pain, and cheerfulness as depression. I know you will say that it is the fogs that make people depressed, but it is more likely, as someone suggested, that the depressed people make the fogs. If so, I don't wonder at the impenetrable state of affairs outside."

He pointed at the window, which, as far as purposes of illumination went, was about as useful as the wall. Since dawn no light had broken through that opaque cloud of brown vapour; a moonless night was not darker than this beleaguered noonday. It had penetrated into the house and veiled the corners of the room in obscurity, and filled eyes and nose with smarting ill-smelling stuff.

"Yes, decidedly it's the depressed people who make the fog," said he. "They are the same thing on two different planes, for they both refuse to admit the sunshine."

"But, good heavens, aren't you ever depressed?" I asked.

"Not inside. I don't count surface depression, which can be easily produced by an aching tooth, though, indeed, I haven't got much experience of that. But I am never fundamentally depressed; I never doubt that behind the clouds is the sun still shining, as that odious school-marm Longfellow tells us. Often things are immensely tiresome, but tiresome things, painful things, have no root. They don't penetrate down to the central reality. But all happiness springs from it. Even mere pleasure is as real as pain, as I said just now; but joy, happiness, is infinitely more real than either. But somehow—I don't quite understand this, though I know it's true—somehow happiness casts a shadow, like a tree growing in the sunshine. Thomas à Kempis, as usual, is quite right when he says, 'Without sorrow none liveth in love.' But that sorrow is a thing that passes; it wheels with the sun; it is not steadfast; it is not everlasting. But it's the devil to try to describe that which from its very nature is indescribable. Only there are so many excellent folk who think that the shadow is more real than the object which causes it."

He came and sat on the hearth-rug, where presently he stretched himself at length.

"And yet some of the best people who have ever lived," he said, "have experienced what they call the darkness of the soul. The whole of their belief in God and in love, all that has made them far the happiest creatures on the earth, suddenly leaves them. Their naked souls are left in outer darkness; they are convinced in their own minds—minds, I say—that there is nothing in the world except darkness. And their souls must remain perfectly steadfast, clinging in this freezing blindness to the conviction that it can't be so, that all their senses and their reasoning powers are wrong. Nothing can help them except their own unaided faith, from which all support seems withdrawn. Job had it pretty badly. It must be beastly, for you can't guess at the time what is the matter with you. Your mind simply tells you that it has become a reasoned and convinced atheist. It's a sort of possession; the devil, for some inscrutable reason, is allowed to enter into you, and he's an awful sort of tenant. He's so plausible too, so convincing. He gets hold of your mind and says, 'Just chuck overboard all that you once blindly believed, and now clear-sightedly know to be false. You needn't bother yourself to curse God and die, because there isn't such a thing as God. And instead of dying live and thoroughly enjoy yourself.' That sounds ridiculous to you and me, whose minds the devil doesn't entirely possess, but imagine what it would be if your mind had his spell cast on it, if all you had ever believed drifted away from you, and left you in the outer darkness. It would sound excellent advice then. Your mind would tell you that there was nothing beyond the mere material pleasures of the world. It would seem very foolish not to make the most of them, regardless of everything else, if there was nothing else."