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 I SOMETIMES 
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 ESSAYS FOR THE YOUNG PEOPLE 
 
 BY 
 
 STEPHEN PAGET 
 
 "OUR AFFECTIONS AND BELIEFS ARE WISER THAN WE; 
 THE BEST THAT IS IN US IS BETTER THAN WE CAN 
 UNDERSTAND ; FOR IT IS GROUNDED BEYOND EXPERI- 
 ENCE, AND GUIDES US, BLINDFOLD BUT SAFE, FROM 
 ONE AGE ON TO ANOTHER."— STEVENSON'S VIRGINIBUS 
 PUERISQUE : THE DEDICATION TO HENLEY. 
 
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 COPYRIGHT 
 
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 In the rush of your work this year, for the wounded, the School 
 for Mothers, the Hospital, tne and the children and the grand- 
 children, our Belgian guests, and the many lame dogs whom you 
 help over stiles — and all the housekeeping and letterwriting and 
 backgardening and planning and saving — work which often made 
 me feel not only a lame dog but an idle dog — still you found time 
 to read these essays, and to advise me over them. Here they are, 
 ot " the potty essays," as I used to call them : fruits of idleness, 
 •** slightly soured by ill-health, not ripened and warmed by the 
 
 r-i 
 
 C3 generous sun of hard work. The fruits of your work are 
 ^ sweeter than the fruits of my leisure. But I have got some 
 
 work now, and I shall be away at it, when these essays come out. 
 
 So I have put this half-page here, just to please you : and 
 
 Oh my ! How glad I shall be to see you again. 
 
 3 
 
 I
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Among the titles which youth bestows on age, there 
 is one that I covet and hope to obtain from that 
 fount of honour, the grandchildren. It is the title 
 of Old Fossil. Youth, properly impatient of all 
 specimens which it does not collect, specimens which 
 were old before it began to be young, regards fossils 
 as things altogether silent and indifferent to what is 
 going on round them. As a matter of fact, they are 
 aggressive, contradictious creatures, always spoiling 
 for a fight. It was fossils, in Lyell's days, that set 
 Science and the Bible at odds : they brought down the 
 old Biblical chronology like a house of cards : they 
 re-stated Creation. Fossilized skulls, with foreheads 
 villainous low, grin with pleasure when they hear the 
 anthropologists disputing over them. Fossils love 
 to refute popular beliefs, and to upset comfortable 
 theories : they are what nurses call downright aggra- 
 vating : that is their humour, to prove themselves 
 right : and their formula is / told you so, and you 
 wouldn't believe me. Thus, they are a type of age 
 informing, correcting, and scoring off youth. And
 
 via 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 though I have not yet received my title, I reckon 
 myself Old Fossil designate, and give myself airs, 
 anticipating what I have waited so long to deserve. 
 
 A proud man I shall be, to put O.F. after my name. 
 Not only will I challenge youth to reconsider its 
 theories. I will bear witness to that remote time, 
 before I was fossilized, when I swam free, a little 
 ascidian in a vast ocean. All round me simple but 
 majestical forms of life, now extinct, enjoyed them- 
 selves, each after its kind : we had a grand time, they 
 and I together. From my glass-case, I will not cease 
 to represent that period which already, to youth, is 
 palaeozoic : I will tell of its greatness, and will be 
 thankful that I belong to it. 
 
 That is what I mean to be. What do you mean to 
 be ? You, who now swim free — some folk think that 
 you swim too free — what will you be, when the time 
 comes for you, even you, in your turn, to be fossilized ? 
 The gummed label and the glass-case are waiting for 
 you, and will have you at last. Quod es eram, quod 
 sum eris. We shall be near neighbours, you and I : 
 our adjacent cases will touch : I of the period before 
 the War, you of the period after the War. Between 
 us, the world's upheaval, the deluge. You will bear 
 witness to the changes wrought by that earthquake 
 and flood : to the shattering of old forms of life, the 
 driving of new lines of cleavage deep into the fabric 
 of the world.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 i. The World, Myself, and Thee i 
 
 2. The Beauty of Words - - - - 16 
 
 3. Handwritings - - - - - 33 
 
 4. The Way of Science - - - - 50 
 
 5. Moving Pictures - - - - - 68 
 
 6. London Pride - - - - - 86 
 
 7. Unnatural Selection - - - - 113 
 
 8. Si Monumentum Requiris - - -125 
 
 9. The Next Few Years - - - - 141 
 
 IX
 
 THE WORLD, MYSELF, AND THEE 
 
 These five words have been wandering, hand in 
 hand, ever so long, up and down the paths of my 
 brain : they got in before my brain was out of the 
 nursery. Perhaps that is why they still seem to me 
 young: as if, like Peter Pan, they could not grow 
 up. Some words age quickly and die soon, or 
 become invalids, useless to society : but these have 
 kept their youth, though they are more than two 
 hundred years old, and have walked my mind for 
 fifty, like children in country lanes where no traffic 
 disturbs them. Only, as Peter Pan reveals to the 
 astonished Hook, all of a sudden, the whole kingdom 
 of everlasting youth, so these five words reveal the 
 whole kingdom of all thought and all things : all 
 that we have, all that we believe, and all that we are. 
 Plainly, this is going to be a mighty serious essay. 
 Let me say, first, what bit of the world, at this 
 moment, is just in front of myself. 
 
 I am in a garden, which goes down to the sea. 
 
 I.S.T. A
 
 2 I SOMETIMES THINK i 
 
 By the calendar, May is not yet come : by the sun- 
 shine, June is here. The green of the leaves, the 
 slope of the lawn, the light and shade, outline and 
 colouring, of a near oak, the pattern of its shadow 
 over the grass, the delicate network of branches, now 
 moving, now still — all these, in the quiet and sun- 
 shine, make a foreground too good for words. The 
 garden hides from me a road and a strip of shingle : 
 I look straight through branches at headlands, islands, 
 and sea. No need here for guide-book talk : adjec- 
 tives are of no use at all : Fadjectif^ cest Vennemi 
 du substantif. I will only say that this bit of the 
 world is very beautiful. 
 
 I cannot analyse its beauty : nor could anybody. 
 But the point is, that I cannot fully enjoy its beauty. 
 Nor could anybody. You might roll all the world's 
 artists and poets together, all its prophets and saints 
 and visionaries, roll them all into one ; and that one 
 magnificent creature would still be unable to take-in 
 the full beauty of the view from this garden. In the 
 very act of giving itself to him, it would go on, 
 somehow, holding itself back from him. He would 
 stop somewhere: it would stop nowhere. And, what 
 is more, he would not be ashamed of saying that he 
 could not take it all in. Ordinary mortals might be, 
 but he would not : indeed, he would find pleasure in 
 declaring that it was altogether beyond him. 
 
 Fools, and fools only, think that they see all that 
 there is to be seen, when they are looking at a flower-
 
 i THE WORLD, MYSELF, AND THEE 3 
 
 bed or a wood or a sunset. If you want to pay a 
 compliment to the beauty of Nature, a compliment 
 equal to the occasion, you ought, really, to die of the 
 shock of it : just say Oh my and expire. Nothing 
 less counts for anything. Nature is tired of hearing 
 people say What a fine sunset, What a pretty wood, 
 We mustn't be late for dinner. But if you could 
 manage to fall dead at her feet, struck by her beauty 
 as by lightning, it would be a fine way out of life. 
 But it would puzzle a coroner's jury to have to bring 
 in their verdict, Died by the direct visitation of the 
 beauty of Nature. 
 
 From this end we are saved not by self-control, 
 nor by commonsense, but by our blindness, our 
 impotence to see what is staring us in the face. 
 You know the story of Turner and the old lady. 
 Mr. Turner, says she, I never can see those beautiful 
 colours in things, which you put in your pictures. 
 No, ma am, says he, and dorit you wish to God you 
 could? But Turner himself could neither paint all 
 the beauty that he saw, nor see all the beauty that he 
 desired to see : and when we think that we are most 
 enjoying the beauty of Nature, we are still trying to 
 empty the Atlantic by dipping into it with a teacup. 
 
 Here I am saying again what I have said else- 
 where : but this fact, that the world is beautiful, is 
 for me the fact of all facts. I build my faith on it : 
 not on the bare fact that the world is here, but on the 
 fact that the world is so delightful to look at, now
 
 4 I SOMETIMES THINK i 
 
 that it is here. I can imagine, if I try hard, a world 
 of dull tints and stupid outlines, with no more claim 
 to good looks than a house in Portobello Road might 
 care to make : without fantasy of shapes, without riot 
 of colours ; its mountains all smooth like Primrose 
 Hill, its valleys as flat as pavement and gutter. In 
 this nightmare of a world, all the singing-birds have 
 the same note, all the men and women are plain, and 
 all the flowers smell of nothing. This world not 
 being here, I can say without profanity that, if it 
 were, it would afford us no evidence of God, none 
 whatever. It would be just the sort of world that 
 could and would come of itself. Happily, it did not 
 come. What did come, is a world positively reeling 
 and blind-drunk with beauty. I can imagine some 
 sort of a world coming of itself, spinning itself solid 
 out of gases which had come of themselves : but I 
 cannot imagine such a world adorning itself as a bride 
 for the bridegroom, which is what the real world is 
 always doing : still less can I imagine it getting drunk 
 on its own beauty. 
 
 Some people think of the world in such a poor- 
 spirited way, as a big geological specimen, with a 
 central cavity, and a surface hard and flat for us to 
 live on. It was got ready for us by the slow expendi- 
 ture of physical forces : it was stocked with vegetables 
 and animals, in a very tentative way, by the methods 
 of natural selection and survival of the fittest. So 
 soon as it was fairly prepared for our habitation, a
 
 i THE WORLD, MYSELF, AND THEE 5 
 
 notice was put up, To Let Furnished : and we came 
 and took the premises on a long lease. The accom- 
 modation was ample : and we had the produce from 
 the farm, the dairy, and the kitchen-garden. We 
 have found this arrangement satisfactory : we have 
 got quite fond of the place, and shall be sorry to 
 leave it : and it suits the dear children remarkably well. 
 Of all wrong ways of regarding the world, this 
 surely beats the record, to think of it as if it were 
 lodgings or apartments. The reason why it had to 
 be made for us is that we had to be made for it. 
 The world has something to say to us, and we had 
 to be made, so that the world might have somebody 
 to say it to. The world has something to be done, 
 and we had to be made, so that the world might have 
 somebody to do it. The world has something to be 
 learned, to be suffered, to be won : and we had to 
 be made, so that we might learn, suffer, and win. It 
 bears the marks of its intentions toward us. And 
 one of these marks is its beauty, repeated in a million 
 ways, over and over again, in its colours, outlines, 
 forms, and contrasts. 
 
 Here this essay was hung-up for some days, and I 
 take it down and set it going again, for I have a new 
 text : indeed, I have two. Where I am now, every- 
 thing is so beautiful that I sit and stare, instead of 
 writing. Devonshire, both places : but here is a 
 vision of such beauty that a man just looks and
 
 6 I SOMETIMES THINK i 
 
 looks, and says to himself, To think of being here, 
 while better men are wounded or dying, thousands 
 of them. It is more than drunk with beauty, it is 
 mad with beauty. To define true madness, what is't 
 but to be nothing else but mad ? No man in his 
 senses could say how beautiful this bit of Devonshire 
 is. That is one of my texts : the other is the kind- 
 ness of the friends who have lent me their house 
 here, and the kindness of the doctors, whose care 
 and skill have been given to me with generosity as 
 extravagant as Nature herself. 
 
 Do not be offended by all this talk in the first 
 person. Every library is full of descriptions of the 
 beauty of Nature and the loving-kindness of man : 
 besides, if you want more, you can write them for 
 yourself. But so many of these descriptions are 
 impersonal : they look outside self, not into self. 
 
 Consider the facts of the case. To begin with, 
 mark me down at the lowest possible figure. If 
 there be anything less than a point, let me be that 
 irreducible minimum. Whittle me down as near as 
 you can to nothing : one of the millions of millions 
 of living things which now happen to be here : some- 
 thing which is only just not nothing. That is a 
 true estimate of my importance to the universe — 
 and of yours. Have you done it ? The lower you 
 value me, the better it will suit my argument. Have 
 you got me so small that you cannot get me smaller ? 
 Well now, see what comes of your whittling.
 
 i THE WORLD, MYSELF, AND THEE 7 
 
 Here is one of the least of little things : an atom, 
 a dot, a cipher, a microscopic something : there are 
 millions of them. On this one point, the beauty of 
 the world is concentrated. To me it is addressed and 
 adjusted : in me it is created and maintained. From 
 this verandah at this moment — nobody else here, and 
 no sound but the wind blowing and the birds singing 
 —I receive into myself, and put together in myself, 
 all these random consignments of light and shade, 
 colour and outline and contrast, nearness and mid- 
 distance and horizon, which become, in me, the view 
 from the verandah. It is I, who put them together. 
 They could no more put themselves together than 
 the letters at the General Post Office could sort them- 
 selves and tie themselves in bundles. I must be 
 here, to arrange and unite this chaos into a view. It 
 is nothing, till I make it something. In a field, on 
 my right hand, are three cows. I confess that they 
 seem to imperil the strength of my argument. All 
 animals are an everlasting and impenetrable mystery 
 to all of us. Are they, like me, arranging and uniting 
 in themselves their own view of Devonshire? I 
 believe that they are. But I feel sure that they are 
 not admiring, as I am, the near apple blossom, and 
 the far hills of Dartmoor against the sky. It is all 
 for me : it for me, and I for it. Really and truly, 
 this bit of Devonshire, if it be indeed mad with 
 beauty, has gone mad for love of me : not for love 
 of the cows. Even if I were positive that the cows
 
 8 I SOMETIMES THINK i 
 
 are doing what I am doing, they certainly are not 
 doing it so well. 
 
 Now, if I were the Creator of the Universe, it 
 would be natural enough that Devonshire should 
 wish to please me. But you have been saying, with 
 perfect truth, that I am only just not nothing. And 
 I ask you, Is it likely that any bit of the world would 
 fall madly in love with next to nothing ? You know 
 it is not. Then why is Devonshire behaving in this 
 extraordinary way? 
 
 Please follow me .closely here : you easily can : you 
 and I are equally wise, when it comes to a matter of 
 faith. Catch hold of my argument anywhere, by its 
 head or its tail or its skirts : only, catch hold of it. 
 I say that the popular phrases about God and Nature 
 are shot wide of the mark which they ought to hit. 
 " There must be a God, because the world is beauti- 
 ful." Never use a phrase like that : say always, 
 " There must be a God, for here am I admiring the 
 beauty of the world." Nothing in the world is 
 beautiful, till somebody comes along who is able to 
 admire the beauty of it. When that happens, 
 Nature says to her Maker, Do introduce him to me. 
 As in a ball-room you and your partner are intro- 
 duced to each other, so Nature and Man are intro- 
 duced to each other by the Master of the Ceremonies 
 of the Universe. He so creates and maintains us that 
 it is possible for the beauty of Nature to be created 
 and maintained in us.
 
 i THE WORLD, MYSELF, AND THEE 9 
 
 Dear brother or sister, this is one of my old 
 sermons : I fear that you may have heard it before : 
 and I still have to expound my other text, which is 
 the kindness of my friends. 
 
 There are many people who fail to be surprised at 
 the existence of friendship. They are glad of it on 
 occasions of high intensity — some friend sees them 
 through a difficulty or helps them out of a disgrace, 
 and they say that a friend in need is a friend indeed — 
 but they take for granted the amazing fact that friend- 
 ship does exist. They seem to think that a man is 
 bound to have friends, as he is bound to wear clothes, 
 because he is always meeting other men : there are 
 friends to be had, as there are clothes to be had : it is 
 not a man's way to go naked in London, nor to go 
 friendless through life : there is no mystery about 
 friendship, no more than there is about a lounge suit : 
 they get both when they want them, and go leaping 
 and praising God neither for the one nor for the 
 other. It is possible, though it is not probable, that 
 some of them, at home, keep up the old fashion of 
 grace before meals. What can be in the mind of a 
 man who takes friendship for granted, but formally 
 acknowledges the Hand of Providence over a dish of 
 cutlets for dinner? Not that the existence of the 
 cutlets is not amazing : it is altogether amazing, if 
 you contemplate it in the spirit of philosophy : but 
 a man has no right to give thanks over his food 
 unless he gives them over his friends.
 
 io I SOMETIMES THINK i 
 
 Imagine it possible to set a friendship, as we set 
 a cutlet, under a dish-cover. What form of grace 
 would you say over it ? There it is, in front of you : 
 and of course you must say your grace before you 
 lift the dish-cover. I invented, some years ago, an 
 excellent grace for solitary meals : it was thoroughly 
 pious, without committing me to say more than I 
 was really feeling. You cannot use it at big dinner- 
 parties, nor at breakfast : but you could not have a 
 better grace for lunch all by yourself. Thank 
 Heaven, whatever it is, it's not mince with an egg on 
 the top. Of course, if you like that combination, 
 you must name some other dish, abhorrent to you : 
 the principle remains the same. But we could hardly 
 apply it to our friendships. Of course, we can if it 
 pleases us. Somebody is in the dining-room : would 
 not give his name : said that he wanted to surprise 
 you. Then you say grace. Thank Heaven, who- 
 ever it is, it's not So-and-so : he never comes here now. 
 But how grudging and stupid, to say no more than 
 that. Go down to the dining-room with some form 
 of words more alert and less flat-footed. For what I 
 am going to receive, make me truly thankful. Surely 
 you can say that much without sacrifice of common- 
 sense. Or again, Non nobis, Domine. What is 
 wrong with Non nobis ? Unhappy scrap of Latin, 
 fallen on evil days : I have heard it chanted, at a City 
 dinner, by four singers : they sang the grace, I ate the 
 dinner : therefore, it was not they who were taking
 
 i THE WORLD, MYSELF, AND THEE 1 1 
 
 the Name of the Lord their God in vain, it was I. 
 Read Lamb's essay on Grace before Meat : read it 
 again and again, till you wellnigh have it by heart : 
 
 I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other 
 occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a 
 form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight 
 ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have 
 we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace before Milton — 
 a grace before Shakespeare — a devotional exercise proper to be 
 said before reading the Fairy Oueen ? 
 
 It is here, just here, that Non nobis comes in. All 
 occasions for thankfulness are an occasion for this 
 grace, this bare statement, in so many words, that 
 all our happinesses — all that are worth having — are 
 made not by us, but in us : prepared outside us, and 
 worked-up inside us. They are introduced into us, 
 that they may come to life in us. Even my share 
 of that City dinner, its meats and sweets and wines, 
 was created outside me, and was put inside me, and 
 came to life in my bodily life. But take Lamb's 
 nobler instance. Shakespeare is a repast not bodily 
 but spiritual ; it was created, centuries ago, in the man 
 Shakespeare ; it is put into us, and it becomes part 
 and parcel of our spiritual life. So with the beauty 
 of the view from the verandah : all the chaotic 
 elements of it were put into me, and I arranged them 
 into one beautiful view : but I did not create them. 
 I put them together, but they had to be got into me 
 to begin with. So with the kindness of my friends :
 
 12 I SOMETIMES THINK i 
 
 it was created in them : and I happened to be about : 
 and it was put into me, and lives in my life. Non 
 nob'u^ Domine. For my food, my books, my view, 
 my friends, to Thy Name be the praise. 
 
 And now — I am so sorry : you thought it was the 
 end of the sermon — And now, without fear, weigh 
 the answer to all this talk. There is food that is 
 unwholesome ; and there are people starving for want 
 of food. There are books that are rubbish, or 
 downright vile ; and there are people who are 
 not able to read. There are places and things that 
 are altogether ugly ; and there are people who never 
 get away from them. There are friendships which 
 fail and come to nothing ; and there are people who 
 have been ruined by bad friends. You are living in 
 a Fool's Paradise : you have shut your eyes against 
 all that is unsightly, and your mind against all that 
 is horrible, and your heart against all who are suffer- 
 ing : you dare not look at the world as it is, the real 
 world, full of evil. Do you never read the papers, 
 do you never think of the War ? It is charitable, to 
 say that you are a fool : it would be nearer the truth 
 to say that you are a hypocrite. 
 
 Call that an answer! It is no sort or kind of 
 answer. It challenges faith ; but it does not dispute 
 facts, nor touch the reality of them. The great 
 poets are what they are, and they sit on their thrones, 
 untouched by the flood of rubbishy books. The 
 beauty of the world is what it is, and sits on its
 
 i THE WORLD, MYSELF, AND THEE 13 
 
 throne, untouched by the ugliness which disfigures 
 the world. And the kindness of friends is what it is, 
 and its throne is from everlasting to everlasting, 
 though innumerable friendships break and come to 
 nothing, or worse than nothing. All the trash that 
 has ever been printed cannot interrupt the music of 
 one line of Shakespeare : all the known ugliness of 
 the world, all happening at once, could not take the 
 colour out of a rose-petal : all the cruelties ever 
 perpetrated, from the death of Abel to the ill-treat- 
 ment of British prisoners in Germany, cannot undo 
 one kindly act or thought. Some days ago, in the 
 Tube, a young man, seeing me strap-hanging, and 
 me old enough to be his father, gave me his seat. 
 Not all the sins of the world make any difference to 
 this plain fact, that he did. The Gods themselves 
 cannot turn what has been into what has not been. 
 The young man's courtesy descendit de ccelo : it took 
 upon itself the familiar conditions of time and space : 
 it was put into him, and from him into me : it was 
 and is as real as real can be : no words can say how 
 real it is. Yesterday, on a long journey, I travelled 
 with an ill-bred ass who made everybody uncom- 
 fortable. He also was real, painfully real. Only, 
 thinking it over, I find myself able to believe that his 
 bullying, somehow, was not so real as the young 
 man's courtesy, not so really real. At the time, he 
 was horrid : but in what we call eternity I believe 
 that his behaviour is explained away by some process
 
 i 4 I SOMETIMES THINK i 
 
 which is no concern of mine : and I am sure that the 
 young man's behaviour finds itself at home in 
 eternity, and is not in need of any explanation. 
 
 We do feel, all of us, when we think steadily about 
 it, that there must be some sort of limit to what is 
 bad ; some level of reality where it leaves off, some 
 purpose which it does not prevent. In our common 
 talk, our stock phrases, we admit this feeling. We 
 explain away, as if we were in eternity — where, 
 indeed, we are — the misconduct not only of ourselves 
 but of others. He didnt realise what he was doing, 
 we say : or again, He's never been the same man since that 
 accident : or again, One of his uncles is in a lunatic 
 asylum. We have similar phrases to express our 
 belief that all ugliness is finite : for instance, we say 
 of the Strand entrance to King's College, Nothing 
 could be uglier than that. And what is more, we 
 are ashamed of being unduly sensitive over a man's 
 misconduct or a building's ugliness : we set ourselves 
 not to mind it too much : we console ourselves with 
 something more important. We plod through life 
 refusing to be turned into atheists by any amount of 
 Strand gateways, or even by other people's iniquities. 
 And I say that these feelings are not only sane ; they 
 are as near the truth as we can get them. 
 
 It is not always easy. Now and again, we do have 
 to shut our eyes, or half-shut them, but not for long : 
 and when we open them again, the clouds are gone, 
 as likely as not, and the sun out — oh, this old sermon.
 
 i THE WORLD, MYSELF, AND THEE 1 5 
 
 But here is the end of it. For I am back at my text, 
 The World, Myself, and Thee. What picture did 
 the five words show to me, when my brain was still 
 in the nursery? Why, the usual childish picture, of 
 a lot of land with a lot of people on it, and me in the 
 middle, and Somebody watching me. And what 
 picture do they show to me now? It is not so clear 
 as it ought to be : but that is the fault of the lantern, 
 which is not powerful enough, and the screen, which 
 is not large enough. Still, the picture is there : and 
 if the lantern and the screen were all that they ought 
 to be, I should see it more distinctly. What I do 
 see — of course it is a moving picture — is the world 
 being made for me while I am being made for the 
 world. I see the world and me neither inventing 
 each other, nor meeting each other by chance, but 
 being introduced to each other : and I see the beauty 
 of the world, and the goodness in the world, brought 
 to me, concentrated on me, exercised in me. And 
 that is worth seeing, even with a bad lantern and a 
 very small screen. 
 
 It may be that you would rather have these facts 
 in poetry than in prose. You will find what you 
 want in Browning's " Epilogue " : that short poem, 
 at the end of his "Dramatis Personce," in which he 
 sees the whole thing as it really is.
 
 II 
 
 THE BEAUTY OF WORDS 
 
 We love to draw a hard and fast line between words 
 and deeds : and, in these days, the line seems to be 
 even more clear than it was in the days which are 
 o-one. The War calls us to reverence deeds not 
 words, and to admire not talkers but men on active 
 service and women at work for their country. If 
 you have, or had, one of your own people, father or 
 brother, in the Navy or the Army, you are proud to 
 contrast that life with the talk in Parliament, in the 
 newspapers, in every club and every public-house. 
 Facta non verba surely ought to be our motto : you 
 have no doubt of that : you have no desire that our 
 Imperial /Eneid should begin with Verba virumque. 
 
 But we must not make too much of this difference 
 between words and deeds. For we do something, if 
 we do but open our lips. A man, over some unex- 
 pected pain or clumsiness, may let fly one word, and 
 no more. That word is an act, or deed : it is some- 
 thing done : and so are all words. That is why forms 
 
 16
 
 ii THE BEAUTY OF WORDS 17 
 
 of words, for the transference of property, are called 
 deeds : and when we sign these documents, we call it 
 our act and deed. And what are Acts of Parliament 
 but words agreed on by the two Houses, and signed 
 by the Sovereign? Or take, in the life of any one 
 of us, the words, spoken or written, which have gone 
 to make us what we are : the lies that we have told, 
 the vows that we have kept, the agreements that 
 we have put our names to : all these words are 
 deeds. 
 
 Thoughts, likewise, are deeds : for we do some- 
 thing, if we do but think. For example, you have 
 often thought that So-and-so is a fool. Each of these 
 thoughts was a deed : and, like all deeds done over 
 and over again, they have got you into the habit of 
 thinking him a fool : nor can you break yourself of 
 it, unless you find that you have done him wrong in 
 your thoughts of him. 
 
 Thought, word, and deed are all one : they are all 
 of them that which is done, and cannot be undone. 
 Take the case of a rich man making his will. All 
 that he has thought, for years and years, of his sons 
 and daughters : all that he has said or heard of them : 
 all that he has been told of this or that hospital or 
 charitable institution — all these thoughts and words 
 have brought him, at last, to add the words of his 
 name to a few pages of legal words. That is his 
 will, his final purposes put in writing : it is only 
 words, but these words are a deed which launches a 
 
 I.S.T. B
 
 1 8 I SOMETIMES THINK n 
 
 thousand deeds. The sons and daughters buy motors 
 and other delights, the hospital opens a new out- 
 patient department : the old man, by his death, does 
 what his life did not : he fashions or repairs a whole 
 multitude of lives with a page or two of words. 
 
 Thoughts are unspoken words, silent deeds : and 
 words are spoken deeds. It is all one, whether you 
 think or speak or act : whichever it is, you are doing 
 something. Your thought is you, and your word 
 is you, and your act is you. Even when we try to 
 imagine God, we still acknowledge this unity of 
 thought, word, and deed : we have Plato, and Saint 
 John after him, teaching us that in the beginning 
 was the Word. 
 
 My theme is the beauty of words. We prize and 
 enjoy them as one of the inalienable comforts which 
 attend our life. And, in the later years of life, they 
 strengthen their hold on us. For we find ourselves 
 beginning to stumble and fumble over "practical" 
 affairs, and we set ourselves to be careful of words. 
 Many of this world's pleasures run away when they 
 see an old man coming ; quite right that they should : 
 but the pleasure of words draws closer to him, and 
 puts a hand in his, and trots alongside of him, like 
 one of his grandchildren. The older I am, the more 
 intimately do words belong to me, and I to them : 
 and very good they are to me. For my amusement, 
 in the theatre of the brain — the phrase is Stevenson's 
 — words are my company of players. They are as
 
 ii THE BEAUTY OF WORDS 19 
 
 generous as real actors : they give me their services 
 for nothing, and are never too busy to grant me the 
 kindness of a charity performance. Some of them 
 tread the stage heavily, some dance and flirt, and 
 some are mere figures of fun : there are words as 
 complex as Hamlet, and there are words as careless 
 of appearances as the clown in a pantomime : and they 
 all play, play, in the little private theatre of my brain, 
 whenever I ask them, and whatever I ask for : words 
 majestical, fantastical, plain, or downright ugly ; but 
 all of them with something to say to me, none of 
 them without well-marked character. 
 
 That some words are downright ugly is Nature's 
 fault, not ours. Nature has made some ugly words, 
 as she has made some ugly animals. Mostly, what is 
 made by Nature is beautiful past all telling ; but 
 certain animals at the Zoological Gardens are ugly 
 past all doubting : it is well for them that they do not 
 know how unsightly they are. Even some flowers 
 have a touch of ill-favour, given to them by dropsical 
 petals or sickly colouring or lean hairy stems. 
 
 Of ugly words, we have examples in uncle, straps 
 lobster, mud, scratch, mutton, and plum. I made 
 this list offhand : note, that the sound of u is in four 
 of the seven words. The sound of the long u, in 
 such words as music and acute, is pleasant enough : 
 but the sound of the short u, in such words as mutton 
 and muffin, does not charm the ear. 
 
 All explosive words, intended to imitate ugly
 
 2o I SOMETIMES THINK n 
 
 sounds, are low-caste words, of no account : such are 
 bang, pop, squish, fizz, hoot, sniff. 
 
 Words not pronounced as they are spelt have a way 
 of sounding amiss : the heard note of them jars, I 
 know not how, on the visual image of them. We 
 can best observe this in the case of certain old family 
 names, so pronounced that they are the despair of 
 foreigners. 
 
 The names of our " flesh-foods," mostly, are ugly. 
 Pork, veal, chop, steak, ham, sausage, all are harsh 
 words. But let not the vegetarians attribute impor- 
 tance to this fact : for potato, turnip, and carrot are 
 none of them beautiful words. 
 
 Isolated words from other modern languages, sud- 
 denly introduced in conversation as it were with a 
 pitchfork, never sound well. They do not belong 
 to us ; and they have no desire to belong to us : for 
 they belong, nearly all of them, to France. 
 
 Of the beauty of words in foreign countries, let him 
 speak who can speak from intimate acquaintance : I 
 am quite sure that no country is richer than ours in 
 this form of wealth. Among the many treasures of 
 our language, the four words which I most admire are 
 tragedy, passion, silver, and virgin. It is not only 
 because they afford me noble imagery : nor it is only 
 because the a and i sounds are so pleasant. Merely, 
 they do seem to me words of singular beauty. So 
 are majesty, firmament, mystery, and all words with the 
 Moorish al- in them : alchemy is a very beautiful word.
 
 ii THE BEAUTY OF WORDS 21 
 
 Note, that five of these eight beautiful words are 
 dactyls : that is to say, one long and two short 
 syllables : daktulos is the Greek for a finger or a toe, 
 one long and two short bones. Doubtless, it is the 
 rhythm of the dactyl that helps to make these words 
 beautiful : and passion likewise was born a dactyl, 
 but we pronounce it pashun. Dactyls go with a 
 swing : they animate great lines of poetry : 
 
 This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, 
 This earth of majesty. . . . 
 
 And take upon us the mystery of things, 
 As if we were God's spies. . . . 
 
 O, I'll leap up to my God. Who pulls me down ? 
 
 See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament. . . . 
 
 There is no line in all poetry more memorable 
 than this last, with its firmament^ which thunders like 
 a sledge-hammer. And, as a sledge-hammer can be 
 adjusted either to smash a paving-stone or crack a 
 nut, so this word sounds quite mild, when it comes 
 not in Marlowe's Faustus but in Addison's hymn 
 — " The spacious firmament on high." 
 
 The beauty of words is one of the beauties of 
 Nature. If a man were to say to you that he did not 
 admire roses and honeysuckle, diamonds and opals, 
 butterflies and peacocks, you would know that you 
 were in the presence of a fool. These beauties of 
 Nature are beautiful in themselves : we admire them 
 right away : we do not need to be told that they are
 
 22 I SOMETIMES THINK n 
 
 beautiful. The longer we go without them, the 
 hungrier we are for them : that is why Spring is so 
 beautiful after Winter, and Kensington Gardens after 
 Notting Hill Gate, and a jeweller's shop after a 
 butcher's shop. In a dull setting, one beautiful word 
 catches the light like a diamond. Truly, such words 
 are luxuries. If it were possible to tax them, we 
 should be economical over firmament and silver^ using 
 instead of them sky and argent. And if it were 
 possible to collect words, they would be of more use 
 than dried flowers, or insects with pins through them : 
 for the flowers and the insects are poor dead things, 
 but a collection of words, living and imperishable, 
 would gain not lose by keeping. 
 
 Think thus of words, that they are works of 
 Nature, some beautiful, some strange, some vile : 
 that is the way of Nature's handiwork. The beauty 
 of some words, like the beauty of roses and opals 
 and peacocks, is absolute and authoritative. The 
 measure of beauty, in this or that word, may seem 
 greater to you than to me, or to me than to you : 
 but the feeling that they are beautiful is the same in 
 each of us : and I think that the old lady was more 
 right than wrong, who said that the Bible so com- 
 forted her with the blessed word Mesopotamia. For 
 the beauty of words goes beyond meanings and uses : 
 just as the beauty of roses and opals and peacocks 
 goes beyond their purposes and market values. 
 
 But the pleasure which we receive from the
 
 ii THE BEAUTY OF WORDS 23 
 
 immediate sound of words is fugitive. Some people 
 would call it a sensuous pleasure : but I advise you 
 to be on your guard against that adjective. These 
 people would have us to admire not the sound but 
 the structure of words, their origin, their develop- 
 ment. But here we must mind what we are doing, 
 and where we are going : for we are trespassing on 
 the estates of scholarship. 
 
 Scholars are men and women who apprehend the 
 structure of words as men and women of science 
 apprehend the structure of material objects. To the 
 chemist, the contents of the salt-cellar are sodium 
 chloride, atoms of a poisonous metal combined with 
 atoms of a poisonous gas. To the botanist, a speck 
 of flower-dust is an elaborate, thick-skinned, self- 
 willed creature, highly specialised, parent of next 
 year's flowers. To the anatomist, one persistent 
 design is worked-out alike in the bat's wing, the 
 seal's flapper, the dog's foot, and the monkey's paw. 
 So, to the scholar, words disclose their structure, their 
 place in Nature, and the secrets of their past. At 
 the sound of the word parallel^ he hears in the mind's 
 ear the two Greek words for things which are side by 
 side. No scholar, after that, could spell it paralell. 
 At the sound of psychical, he hears the Greek word 
 for the soul, that word which imitates the earliest of 
 all sounds, God breathing into man's nostrils the 
 breath of life. At the sound of enthusiasm, he hears 
 the Greek word for divine possession, indwelling
 
 24 I SOMETIMES THINK n 
 
 deity. That is why scholars fight shy of this fine 
 word, because it is a word of religion. They do not 
 care to say that Mrs. So-and-so is enthusiastic over 
 Chinese toy dogs : they think that if she were not so 
 taken-up with toy dogs, there would be more room 
 in her for indwelling deity. 
 
 Thus do words, in the scholar's mind, ring-up older 
 words, and keep alive the languages which foolish 
 people call dead. Neither Greek nor Latin is a dead 
 language : we are all of us always talking Greek and 
 Latin. Pupil, master, form, class, corporal punish- 
 ment, term, examination, vacation, college, university, 
 degree — all are Latin. Arithmetic, music, gym- 
 nasium, athletics, and all the -ologies and the 
 -onomies, are Greek. In a thousand uses of daily 
 life, Greek and Latin live. You need not be a 
 scholar, to talk them. But, as you love English, 
 do not be too fond of them in your talk : for they are 
 good servants, but bad masters. Consider how many 
 sentences in the newspapers have been spoiled by the 
 use of it transpired, for // came out. No scholar 
 employs this talk, redolent of Latin as it were of 
 peppermint. There is a right way of using Latin and 
 Greek, and there is a wrong way : you must neither 
 run after them, nor run away from them. I know 
 a man who, when he was a boy, set himself to write 
 " pure English " : he would have nothing to do with 
 any words of Greek or Latin origin : he made all for 
 himself, and worshipped all by himself, a sort of
 
 ii THE BEAUTY OF WORDS 25 
 
 clumsy Anglo-Saxon fetish, and expected us to admire 
 its purity. It was like those idols from Easter Island 
 which are placed outside the British Museum because 
 they are too uncouth to come inside, and are not fit 
 company for the gods and goddesses. That is what 
 happens to us, if we run away from Greek and Latin. 
 But we must not run after them : it is a common 
 fault of young journalists, to be too fond of them. 
 
 The more scholarly you are, and the quicker you 
 are to apprehend the structure of words, the more 
 pleasure you will gain from them. You will not 
 lose your delight in their immediate beauty : you 
 keep that, and you add to it your knowledge of their 
 structure : just as the botanist keeps his delight in 
 the immediate beauty of flowers, and adds to it his 
 knowledge of their structure. 
 
 None but scholars can fully enjoy language. They 
 may not care to talk Greek and Latin : but they have 
 learned them. To be wholly ignorant of these two 
 languages is to be deprived of the relish of our own 
 language. Say that you have a bad cold in your 
 head : you are still able to digest and absorb your 
 food, but you do not taste it : you get the benefit of 
 it, but you get no pleasure from it. The unclassical 
 man does not fully enjoy his language : he does not 
 taste its delicate fragrances and flavours : the classical 
 words supply his needs, but withhold from him their 
 subtle qualities: he uses them heedlessly, as under- 
 graduates, on the towing-path at a boat-race, pro-
 
 26 I SOMETIMES THINK n 
 
 claim, at the top of their voices, the sacred name of 
 this or that college. Reckon as enemies of your 
 native language the men who despise or pretend to 
 despise Greek and Latin. But your language has 
 other enemies. Consider what injury has been done 
 to it by men and women of medical science : the 
 words that they have coined, no, not coined but 
 forged : half-Greek, half-Latin, such as appendic- 
 ectomy and vaccine-therapy and auto-suggestion ; or 
 altogether meaningless, such as endothelium and 
 megalohlasts ; or feeble and clumsy, such as epidemio- 
 logy and specificity ; or dragged naked out of their 
 warm beds in the dictionaries, such as trauma and 
 sequela. The doctor's life is so full of good works 
 that you must forgive him these bad words : none 
 the less it is a pity, that he should be so unkind to 
 our language who is so kind to our lives. But the 
 worst of all enemies are those would-be wreckers, 
 the advocates of " phonetic spelling." We only 
 waste our time, trying to guess what has made them 
 so perverse : for they have no sort of reason or excuse 
 for the evil which they would do if they could. The 
 men who dream of a common language for many 
 nations, to which they give the name of Esperanto — 
 a lingo of their own, which is to language what short- 
 hand is to writing — these few men, though they are 
 on a vain quest, are harmless : but the men who 
 seek to bring about phonetic spelling are worse than 
 enemies of our language, for they are traitors. They
 
 ii THE BEAUTY OF WORDS '27 
 
 would sell their birthright, and ours, for a mess of 
 the very nastiest pottage that ever was stirred. 
 
 I pray you, as you are careful over the weightier 
 matters of your conduct, be careful also over your 
 words. Do not think it priggish, to honour them. 
 And it is so easy to talk good English ; so easy to 
 avoid theatrical and self-conscious tricks. Pay con- 
 stant regard to short words. Half the fun of talking, 
 and of writing too, is in the skilful use of short 
 words. It is good practice, to try how far you can 
 write with nothing but words of one syllable : I once 
 put sixty-eight of them together, and the effect of 
 this quiet little procession was all that I could desire. 
 Tennyson's lyrics, and his In Memoriam, are good 
 models for this purpose : and so is the English 
 version of the Psalms. 
 
 Be fond, but not slavishly fond, of abbreviated 
 words. Give them time to breathe : do not hustle 
 them : say, sometimes, will not and did not, as a 
 change from the incessant won't and didn't. 
 
 There is room, of course, if not in pure English, 
 yet in good English, for slang. Some people despise 
 all slang : they would keep all talk scrupulously tidy. 
 But our words are works of Nature ; and Nature 
 will not let us keep her tidy. Slang is the weeds of 
 language : but weeds are beautiful : besides, they 
 make beautiful contrasts : such as we admire when 
 the croquet-lawn is silvered with daisies, and when 
 poppies add their scarlet, and corn-flowers their blue,
 
 28 I SOMETIMES THINK n 
 
 to a field of wheat. Nobody wants to hear you talk 
 with the preciseness of a Dutch garden : it is far 
 better to talk like a Devonshire lane : best of all, to 
 avoid extremes, and be neither too stiff in your talk, 
 nor too offhand. Superfine English is the orchids 
 and hothouse rarities of our language : good English 
 is its open-air roses, lilies, and carnations : slang is its 
 bindweed and ragged robin, thyme and meadowsweet. 
 Think what a wealth of slang is in Shakespeare. 
 The young men in Romeo and Juliet are quick with 
 it : even Hamlet does not despise it : Falstaff and his 
 satellites are drawn together by it : King Henry V. 
 is less delightful than Prince Hal, because he has left 
 it off. Even ' the women of Shakespeare are not 
 above it — Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind : nor does any 
 tragedy refuse it a place of interlude and relief. 
 Shakespeare without slang would still be poetry, but 
 would not be Shakespeare. 
 
 But I tired long ago of my own slang, and am too 
 old to learn yours, or to judge between them. I 
 prefer my swagger to your swank, and your 
 bounder to my cad. I think that you have no 
 word equivalent to my swell : for my swell was 
 a gentleman, and your nut is not. I congratulate 
 you on your apt use of some and the limit, and on 
 your disuse of hectic and chronic. But slang-words, 
 after all, are fragile stuff: the most that they can 
 expect is a short life and a merry one, and they 
 are born to die.
 
 ii THE BEAUTY OF WORDS 29 
 
 Note here a difference between slang and swearing. 
 The form of slang, the wording of slang, is never the 
 same for two generations together : but the existence 
 of slang, the influences of slang, are constant and 
 persistent from age to age. The children in the 
 Bible-story, who said to Elisha Go up, thou baldhead, 
 were talking slang : indeed, Adam talked slang, when 
 he invented names for the animals : there was nothing 
 else for him to talk. Slang is incessantly changing 
 its form, but never going out : swearing is slow to 
 change its form, but is tending to go out. It is 
 horrible to hear girls or women swearing. He who 
 swears at a collar-stud may be above swearing at a 
 dog, let alone another man : and he who swears at a 
 woman or a child is the limit. It is certain that 
 swearing may add force to a sentence : but there are 
 other ways of producing this effect. The talk of 
 men who habitually swear merely fails to produce 
 any effect : it defeats its own purpose. Swearing, to 
 be tolerable, must be as unpremeditated as any other 
 convulsive seizure : the word ought to be jerked out 
 of the man's mouth at the shock of sudden pain or 
 annoyance inflicted through some senseless thing. 
 He who swears at whole nations, or at far-flung 
 national sins, is wasting his breath : so is he who 
 swears at the Government : he has no sense of his 
 own smallness. The right-sized objects are broken 
 collar-studs, upset ink-pots, or a train just missed : 
 inanimate things, which we swear not at but over.
 
 30 I SOMETIMES THINK n 
 
 But all swearing is a display of nerves, and evidence 
 of a poor supply of adjectives. 
 
 Neither slang, nor swearing, is the chief hindrance 
 to the talking of good English. We lower the 
 standard of talk, not so much by these, but more by 
 the twin faults of slovenliness and volubility. There 
 are people who seem to be unable to stop talking : 
 you may find yourself imprisoned, in train or tram- 
 car, with a couple of them. The flow of words is 
 bewildering: you would think that the two brains 
 had no inhibitory centres, no control over the 
 machinery of speech : that the whole performance 
 was almost involuntary. If the duet flags for one 
 moment, both performers become restless, hunting 
 in their minds for something to say. The talk is 
 without accentuation, without perception of values : 
 no light and shade, no turning of sentences, no care 
 for the right word. It is slovenly perforce, because 
 it is voluble : it has no time to smarten itself in the 
 looking-glass of thought : it is in a hurry all the way 
 from Shepherd's Bush to Selfridge's. 
 
 Be above this idle neglect of the beauty and 
 strength of words. You are attentive to the colour 
 and the set of your clothes : give no less attention to 
 the colour and the set of your sentences. Slovenly 
 words, in you who are well-educated, are as bad as 
 dropped /?'s : and slipshod phrases are as bad as dirty 
 finger-nails. Honour your talk, not fool it away : 
 give it a touch of distinction : that is to say, quiet
 
 ii THE BEAUTY OF WORDS 31 
 
 Tightness and habitual restraint, born into it from 
 within, not imposed on it from without. It came 
 into my head, as I was writing this essay, that our 
 Lord always paid high honour to words, and was 
 sorely vexed by the sound of third-rate talk. He 
 could not bear to hear the disciples swearing, or 
 disputing, or talking for the sake of talking. Again 
 and again He told them to mind what they were 
 saying ; He advised them to make plain Yea and 
 Nay go as far as they could ; He steadily refused to 
 draw any line between thought, word, and deed ; He 
 hated the waste or misuse of words. 
 
 Look up all that He said about words, and write 
 an essay on your gathered handful of texts, in return 
 for this discourse which I have made to you. While 
 you are young, you may think that it does not 
 matter, if words are wasted : they are not like bread 
 or coals : there will always be plenty to go on with. 
 Old folk, nearer to the day when the rest is silence, 
 think otherwise : and it is youth, more than age, 
 which is garrulous. Old folk, unless their brains are 
 beginning to fail, mostly are careful of words. They 
 carry about with them scraps of poetry, which serve 
 them over and over again when they lie awake at 
 night. They bring the same story from some recess 
 of memory, time after time, as they bring the same 
 pair of spectacles out of its leather case. They invent 
 neat little sayings, which they touch up and polish, 
 and leave unspoken. " Where words are scarce, they
 
 32 I SOMETIMES THINK n 
 
 are seldom spent in vain." You can see them turn- 
 ing over their stock of words, picking and choosing 
 just what they require, and with deliberation trim- 
 ming and poising a sentence before they venture to 
 offer it to one of the grandchildren. 
 
 Note. — I have just had the enjoyment of reading Sir Arthur 
 Ouiller-Couch's Lectures on the Art of Writing : and I pray you 
 to read what he says, in Lecture VII., of the beauty of vowel- 
 sounds — "the first, or almost the first, secret of beautiful writing 
 in English, whether in prose or in verse ; I mean that inter-play 
 of vowel-sounds in which no language can match us. . . . I think 
 if you will but open your ears to this beautiful vowel-play which 
 runs through all the best of our prose and poetry, whether you 
 ever learn to master it or not, you will have acquired a new 
 delight, and one various enough to last you though you live to a 
 very old age." Stevenson, likewise, speaking of the beauty of 
 consonant-sounds, says that skilful writers love to make as it were 
 patterns with them, weaving two or three chosen consonant-sounds 
 in and out through the music of a sentence. Certainly, we ought 
 to admire the beauty not only of words, but of vowels and con- 
 sonants. Sir Arthur does well to advise us, over one of Mr. 
 Yeats's lyrics, to " mark how the vowels play and ring and chime 
 and toll." And, of course, good writers are conscious of this " secret 
 of beautiful writing." But I think that Stevenson goes too far with 
 his theory that they deliberately weave musical patterns. For 
 you can find such patterns wherever you look for them. For 
 instance — Pears' s soap is matchless for the complexion — here you have 
 a charming consonant-pattern in p\ and m's and s's. Or again, 
 Evening Standard and St. James's Gazette. Wednesday, September 27. 
 Mark how the a's and e's play and ring and chime and toll. 
 There is no secret, really. The beauty of the sounds of vowels 
 and consonants is one of the beauties of Nature, the same for all 
 of us : not a trick to be mastered, but a pleasure to be enjoyed.
 
 Ill 
 
 HANDWRITINGS 
 
 It is always a matter of surprise to small children, 
 that we are able to write so fast. The pen fascinates 
 them, as it scuds down each line : they wonder alike 
 at our dexterity and at the profusion of what we 
 have to say. Shall you have done soon ? How do 
 you know what you are going to say next? They 
 resent our silence, they are tired of waiting for us to 
 talk to them. Vm telling him what a good girl 
 you were this morning. Silence again, for a moment. 
 What are you telling him now ? They call to mind, 
 as they watch us, their wrestling with pen and ink, 
 when they have to write Thank you for the pretty 
 calendar I like it very much. All our lesser gifts to 
 children ought to bear the inscription, Not to be 
 acknowledged. What business have we, with a six- 
 penny calendar, to condemn the child to fifteen 
 minutes' hard labour? 
 
 As the children are surprised at the speed of our 
 writing, so am I, far more than they. Each letter 
 
 I.S.T. c
 
 34 I SOMETIMES THINK in 
 
 shaped, each word spelt, each line straight : the 
 attendant stops and dashes where they ought to be : 
 and we, all the time, like Mother Carey, not making 
 these things, but sitting still and making them make 
 themselves. For the whole performance is automatic. 
 Bless my soul, what a name for it. This delicate 
 and swift adjustment of touch and sight, this intricate 
 embroidery of the work of the pen, woven with 
 black on white, is only mechanical : we are thinking 
 of what we are saying, not of what we are doing. 
 Thus to explain the act of handwriting exalts, not 
 lessens, my great regard for its excellence. Our 
 handwritings, being automatic, are so much the more 
 express and admirable : though the movement of our 
 hands is immeasurably coarser than the movement of 
 the wings of a midge. Writing is one of those good 
 equable bodily actions which are neither so conscious 
 that they are upset by every whim of the brain, nor 
 so unconscious that they are wholly pleasureless, like 
 the beat of the heart. 
 
 The pity is, that your pride in writing well is 
 defeated by your desire to write quickly. In times 
 less hurried than yours, all writing was slow : and 
 small children, less hurried than you, shape each letter 
 slowly, even following the pen with the tip of the 
 tongue. You, for whom greater affairs are waiting, 
 must be quick : you take no pride in the tracery of 
 letters, the neat joining of syllables, the exact pro- 
 portion between the capital and the shaft of a word.
 
 in HANDWRITINGS 35 
 
 Thus you lose pleasure, when you write to a friend ; 
 and he, when he reads what you have written. 
 
 Looking back over more than fifty years, I am 
 remembering the discipline of the copy-book. At 
 the top of the page was one long word, written with 
 fastidious elegance, in the Italian style, each letter 
 a masterpiece : it was like the engraving on a card 
 of invitation, writ large : there is no such writing 
 nowadays, except for illuminated addresses. If the 
 chosen word were shorter than the line, its initial 
 letter was put after it, or before and after it, thus — 
 though the effect cannot be reproduced in print — 
 A. Authority. A. Or again, Benevolence. B. Down 
 the page, from line to line, my pen crept, ploughing 
 its lonely furrow. With each line, the copy was less 
 like the original. The long-tailed letters trembled 
 and swayed ; the «'s and o's were distorted ; the 
 distinction between thin up-strokes and thick down- 
 strokes could not be maintained. This alone might 
 be hoped for, that Authority would continue to be 
 so spelt, and Benevolence would leave the page with- 
 out a blot on its character. The worst of the o's 
 were punished by the insertion of human features 
 into their vacant faces : and I started next morning 
 with Confidence. C. 
 
 Thus, by effort over each letter, we are taught to 
 write : but the distinctive style of a handwriting is 
 the result of later influences. The chief of them, 
 for many of us, is deliberate imitation of some older
 
 26 I SOMETIMES THINK in 
 
 person's hand, or deliberate invention of a hand of 
 our own. A great surgeon has told me that hand- 
 writings may be inherited : but I am sure that many 
 of us do not inherit, but imitate or invent. It is 
 probable also that the frequent writing of Greek may 
 influence a boy to separate his letters when he is 
 writing his own language. But I pray you not to 
 think that a liberal education ensures a good hand- 
 writing. And be thankful, and you cannot be too 
 thankful, that the advance of national education has 
 increased past all reckoning the number of hands 
 which are easy and pleasant to read. The old 
 phrases, an educated hand, a refined hand, the hand 
 of a gentleman, the hand of a /ady, are falling into 
 disuse : and we have heard the last of that silly 
 phrase, an Oxford hand. Be thankful, also, that our 
 national schools have abandoned the craze for teach- 
 ing the children to slope their writing the wrong 
 way : and above all be thankful, that so few of us in 
 these days have to mark the cross instead of signing 
 the name. 
 
 Consider now certain habits or tricks of hand- 
 writing : and let us begin at the beginning, at the 
 margin. 
 
 They who fail to keep a straight margin to the 
 written page may be nothing worse than careless or 
 tired. The margin may be jagged with lines of 
 different lengths : or it may gradually widen, or 
 gradually narrow, as the page is filled. Of course,
 
 in HANDWRITINGS 37 
 
 this behaviour of the margin sets us thinking of the 
 inequality between the right hand and the left hand : 
 and we argue that a right-handed man would drive 
 his margin to the left, but a left-handed man, with the 
 pen in his right hand, would let his margin drift to 
 the right. But the same man will slope his margin 
 at one time to the right, at another time to the left : 
 which sets us thinking of the inequality between the 
 two sides of the brain. But I doubt whether left- 
 handed people are merely left-handed : I believe that 
 they are left-sided ; that their measurement is larger, 
 and their bodily growth more active, all down the 
 left side. 
 
 A crooked margin may signify nothing, or next 
 to nothing : but the tilting up or down of the ends 
 of the last few lines of a page is a more serious 
 matter. For it sometimes goes with real failure of 
 brain-power. Of course, there are exceptions to this 
 rule. None the less, it may be a danger-signal. 
 
 The underlining of words is a habit which grows 
 apace in us, till we underline not once but twice : I 
 have even seen a word astride of three lines : it had 
 the air of an orator on a Hyde Park platform. 
 Underlining is old-fashioned now. Queen Victoria 
 made frequent use of it ; and it does ease the business 
 of letter-writing. If it be excessive, it tends to 
 become ineffective : with moderate use, it gives a 
 pleasant effect of simplicity. You had better under- 
 line a word and have done with it, than elaborate
 
 38 I SOMETIMES THINK m 
 
 your sentences or be absurdly self-conscious over 
 your words. 
 
 Of that other old fashion of writing, the lavish use 
 of capitals, there is much to be said. He who would 
 understand capitals ought to study a large collection 
 of family-letters written during the first half of the 
 nineteenth century : he ought to watch the slow dis- 
 appearance of capitals out of one and the same 
 bundle of letters. How fond the young man was 
 of them, how free with them. He assures the 
 Object of his Affections that nothing in his Conduct 
 shall ever give her a Moment of Regret : he lays his 
 Heart at her Feet, hoping for Encouragement. How 
 the fine capitals adorn his love-letters to her. But 
 they fade : he loves her still, but in small script only. 
 Now and again, when he is in the mood for it, they 
 begin to venture back. If he be long parted from 
 her, suspense becomes Suspense : and the moon, 
 when he remembers that it is shining alike on her 
 and on him, becomes the Moon. You may even 
 detect his capitals in the very act of vanishing •, 
 shadows of what they were, shrunken, crippled, not 
 animating but haunting the pages of his letters. 
 
 The life and death of capitals is one of those 
 mortal things which touch the mind. When did 
 they come in, and why did they go out ? They have 
 not received from literary men that attention which 
 they deserve : the natural history of capitals needs to 
 be studied as the origin of species was studied by
 
 in HANDWRITINGS 39 
 
 Darwin. We have neglected them, and by our 
 neglect they have become scarce. They were so 
 responsive to the fancy of the moment : there was 
 meaning in the eighth of an inch : they could put on 
 paper the light and shade of words. Take, for 
 an example, the word love. We ought to write it, 
 according to the use which we are making of it, now 
 with a small letter, now with a timid sort of tweeny or 
 small-sized capital, now with a full-sized, now with 
 a super-capital : but we are tied down, alike in script 
 and in type, to choose between a small letter and a 
 capital of stock size. Or take the word king. Are 
 we bound to give to Ferdinand of Bulgaria that 
 capital which is all that we can give to our King? 
 Or take the most bewildering of all examples. 
 Ought we to write of the deities of the ancient world 
 as gods or as Gods ? Do not say that there is no 
 rule ; that it does not matter. Of course there is no 
 rule : that is why it matters. We may start by 
 refusing the capital to all mere idols or fetishes. 
 Mumbo-jumbo, even to them who believe in him, 
 is only a god : indeed, he is nothing more than a 
 native African word ; he ought to be printed in 
 italics, plain mumbo-jumbo. Likewise where Caliban 
 says of Stephano 
 
 What a thrice-double ass 
 Was I, to take this drunkard for a god — 
 
 here is no occasion for a capital. But Zeus, Apollo, 
 Athene — surely we might well give to them the
 
 4 o I SOMETIMES THINK in 
 
 honour which we do not care to give to mumbo- 
 jumbo. But the difficulty is Bacchus. The Romans 
 called him Bacchus whom the Greeks called Diony- 
 sos : and it is a great come-down from Dionysos to 
 Bacchus. Again, the Romans called her Minerva 
 whom the Greeks called Athene : and it is a great 
 come-down from Athene to Minerva. Besides, in 
 Imperial Rome, neither Bacchus nor Minerva was 
 taken seriously by clever people ; they were a fairy- 
 story, a bit of folk-lore. Shall we put it thus, that 
 the Greeks in Homer's time believed in Gods and 
 Goddesses, but the Romans in Juvenal's time had 
 left off believing in gods and goddesses? Can we 
 thus distribute G's, as if they were awards of merit? 
 There is no end of such difficulties, no way out of 
 them. Only, note this living force of capital letters ; 
 how they twist in and out of sentiments, like roses 
 up trellis-work. 
 
 Punctuation, and the use of the dash, follow no 
 strict rule. It has been said that we ought, when 
 we are reading aloud, to count silently one for a 
 comma, two for a semi-colon, three for a colon, and 
 four for a full-stop. This habit might be adopted by 
 writers who are careless of punctuation and prodigal 
 of dashes. Very scrupulous writers despise and 
 avoid all dashes ; but few of us take that much 
 trouble : nor is it easy to see what is wrong with 
 them. And they are a welcome relief : we have 
 such a poor collection of stops, just the quartet, to
 
 in HANDWRITINGS 41 
 
 accompany all that we are saying. But if we had 
 more, we should pay less regard to those which we 
 have. It is our poverty that makes us ingenious 
 with them. 
 
 Notes of exclamation hardly deserve to be called 
 stops : they are a trick of writing which grows on 
 us by indulgence : the writers of serio-comic letters 
 begin with one, and end with a row of them like the 
 kisses in a child's letter. 
 
 Our forms of subscribing our letters, Tours truly 
 and the like, are purposely curt and matter-of-fact. 
 We advance from faithfully to truly, and from truly 
 to sincerely : we hesitate between / am, I remain, and 
 Believe me : we arrive, on the way of friendship, 
 at ever and very. In letters to friends who have 
 children, it is well to say that we are your s and 
 yours 1 . There was a time when letters were not 
 subscribed but superscribed. If you are well, we 
 also are well — that is how Cicero headed his letters 
 to Atticus : it is like our Hoping this finds you as it 
 leaves me. Or they were both superscribed and sub- 
 scribed, as are the Epistles of St. Paul. From his 
 long messages of love and encouragement we have 
 slowly come to Tours truly : the great ways of sub- 
 scribing have been lost, and will never be recovered. 
 Some of us even keep a store of printed postcards, 
 From Mr. So-and-so. 
 
 In the hazardous passage from script into type, 
 some of the faults of writing are corrected, and some
 
 42 I SOMETIMES THINK in 
 
 of its habits are reproduced. The crooked margins 
 are straightened, the underlined words are put in 
 italics, the capitals and the dashes are faithfully 
 rendered. Cold print, the mailed fist brought down 
 on the irresolute hand, imposes a Prussian despotism 
 over all scripts alike ; though some were pleasant to 
 read, and others injured the eyesight of the com- 
 positors. But there are individualities of hand- 
 writing which refuse to submit themselves to this 
 uniform efficiency. The size of a handwriting, and 
 the style of a signature, are beyond the reach of 
 the iron rule of the press. 
 
 The size of handwritings ranges from a loose far- 
 flung scrawl to a hand so small and elfish that it 
 almost needs a magnifying-glass. Women tend to 
 write larger than men : but mere largeness of writing 
 affords no evidence of largeness of heart and of mind, 
 nor of strength of will. These gifts are more likely 
 to belong to the owner of the very small hand : but 
 it must be not only small but exact, sharply clear, as 
 if the strokes of the pen were incised on the paper. 
 I have in mind three writers of this microscopic hand : 
 two of them physicians and men of science, and one 
 a famous theologian. But we must not judge by 
 size alone : for the large impetuous hand may belong 
 to a very generous temperament. Besides, all of us 
 write larger at one time than at another. Mostly, 
 we write small when we are cold : and we write large 
 when we are tired or ill.
 
 „i HANDWRITINGS 43 
 
 The act of signature has no importance, unless the 
 occasion, or the writer, be of great importance. The 
 writing of our names is no more "characteristic" 
 than the rest of our writing : and we must not 
 attempt to make it "bold" or "striking." The 
 rules of signature are plain. We must not write our 
 own names fine, and our friends' names slovenly : 
 and the polite letter-writer will give to the addressing 
 of his envelopes as much care as he gives to the 
 signing of his name. We must write our names 
 legibly : and, if we are Mrs. or Miss or Rev., it is 
 kind of us to say so, in brackets, when we write to 
 strangers. Good signature needs no sort of scroll, 
 flourish, or loop. All elaborate signature is unwise : 
 for we have only one name for all purposes. If it 
 were your constant business to sign treaties, Acts of 
 Parliament, State papers, and cheques, you might 
 need a signature as magnifical as Queen Elizabeth's. 
 But you would have to use it on every postcard. 
 Signature must be proportionate to self. 
 
 Be sure of this much, that we cannot judge a man 
 by his handwriting. Pay no heed to people who say 
 that they can : for they are deceiving themselves. 
 What they call a strong, bold handwriting, for 
 example, is just as likely to come of mere conceit or 
 impudence as of strength and courage. I am not 
 thinking of genuine Scotland-Yard experts in hand- 
 writing : they and their microscopes are able to dis- 
 cover forgeries, and to find evidence in handwritings,
 
 44 I SOMETIMES THINK in 
 
 with amazing accuracy: they know their work. I 
 am thinking of the amateur "delineators of char- 
 acter," the foolish people who set out to estimate the 
 soul by the script. Our handwritings refuse to be 
 thus docketed and pigeon-holed, as if they were our 
 finger-prints: the interest of them does not reveal 
 itself to the methods of Sherlock Holmes. It has its 
 own way of revealing itself : I saw something of it, 
 years ago. I was reading and arranging the collected 
 letters of two men whom I had known well ; the 
 letters of two life-times, from boyhood to death. 
 The like opportunity, sooner or later, will come to 
 you : and, if you loved and honoured your dead — 
 and you hardly ought to read all their letters, if you 
 did not — but if you did, you will learn, as you read, 
 the meaning of handwritings. 
 
 An outsider, looking at half-a-dozen letters, would 
 have said that the two hands were curiously unlike ; 
 that the one was methodical and precise, the other 
 fantastical and self-conscious. Here he would have 
 stopped. He would not have gone far wrong : but 
 he would not have gone far. For the two men were 
 father and son : their lives had been united, in and in, 
 for sixty years. Take first the hand of the older 
 man. In boyhood, it was large, free, and loosely 
 knit : a good hand, but immature : it was fashioned, 
 I think, in imitation of his father's hand. Through 
 many years of incessant work, of decent poverty, of 
 difficulties and anxieties, he set himself to be a man
 
 in HANDWRITINGS 45 
 
 of authority in the science and art of surgery, which 
 is one of the most exacting of all professions. By 
 these years, his handwriting was determined : and it 
 bore the mark of them. It became small, clear-cut, 
 hard, faultless : it had the effect of chains of little 
 crystals. He wrote slowly : he seemed to be engrav- 
 ing, not writing : he gave to each word its proper 
 space and effect. Self-control, strong will, intensity 
 of purpose, made it a hand of the utmost distinction : 
 in the good Latin sense, it was a nervous hand. 
 When he came to signing a letter, his pen, for a 
 moment, was poised : then, like a hawk swooping, it 
 descended in a long initial, perfect, exquisite, which 
 no man could imitate. In old age, he carefully 
 treasured his dexterity : he wrote even more slowly, 
 shaping his words almost as if he were performing 
 a delicate operation. So long as he could resist his 
 infirmities, he would neither accept nor acknowledge 
 defeat. In the end, of course, old age won : it 
 always does : but what of that ? Its winnings were 
 only his leavings. He fought old age to a finish : 
 and the letters of these last years of his life bear 
 witness that he died but never surrendered. 
 
 His son's handwriting is of no less interest, to 
 anybody who knew him well. In early boyhood, it 
 was altogether vague and unformed : it might be 
 going to be anything. At his public school, he was 
 taught to honour and enjoy Greek : and, with that 
 gift added to his life, he took to writing; in a sort of
 
 46 I SOMETIMES THINK m 
 
 Greek style ; the letters curiously separate, angular, 
 stiff, archaistic, and as it were stuck straight on end : 
 a hand so Greek that the words looked as if they ought 
 to have accents over them. At his University, he 
 was fastidious and punctilious over the lesser affairs 
 of his life : and it may be that a certain elaborateness 
 came for these years into his handwriting ; but I am 
 not sure. Only, I know that he, like his father, loved 
 self-restraint and self-control : I can see this in his 
 hand : but it is more variable in size than his father's. 
 Of course, with a hand so Greek, the long-tailed 
 letters were bound to suffer : they could not, like the 
 sheep of Little Bo-Beep, leave their tails behind 
 them : and a strange fate overcame his g's and y's. 
 In boyhood and early manhood, they were straight. 
 Then a very slight kink began to occur among them. 
 It became, very slowly, more pronounced. By the 
 time that he was forty, the tails were convulsed with 
 a swishing zig-zag, as if they had received an electric 
 shock : I have never seen such tails in any other 
 writing, unless it were by way of imitation. It is 
 probable that the strain of his work had something 
 to do with this peculiarity of his hand. It is certain 
 that the zig-zag did not become worse, but rather 
 became less, in the last few years of a life noted for 
 its purity and its beauty. 
 
 That is how we ought to study handwritings, from 
 the beginning to the end of the writer's life. And 
 that is why the mere collecting of autographs may
 
 in HANDWRITINGS 47 
 
 be hardly better than a waste of time and of money. 
 Come now — to finish with — tell me, What is the 
 good of autographs? I am without bias in this 
 matter: it is only twice that I have been asked for 
 my autograph : once by the care-taker of a hall in 
 which I was lecturing ; once by two little boys at a 
 preparatory school where I was lecturing. The care- 
 taker explained to me that he " made a point of it," 
 whoever might be lecturing : the little boys wrecked 
 the pride of my autograph by veering round to the 
 headmaster and asking him for his : as if the pen 
 were the only means of acquaintance with a school- 
 master's hand. 
 
 Autographs are harder to collect than stamps ; and 
 a commonplace collection is hardly worth the trouble 
 of making. The proper enjoyment of them is not 
 to be had till the writers of them are dead. What is 
 the good of the mere signatures of the living, their 
 scribbled envelopes, their thanks for kind enquiries, 
 their regrets that they cannot attend the meeting, and 
 all such drift of ordinary correspondence ? But when 
 they are dead, then the value of these things begins 
 to assert itself : not because there will be no more of 
 them, but because they have become relics. Look at 
 the great autograph-room in the British Museum : it 
 is full of sacred relics : the manuscripts of immortal 
 books, the love-letters of immortal poets, the papers 
 signed by immortal makers of our Empire. Here is 
 Shakespeare's autograph : you hardly care how he
 
 48 I SOMETIMES THINK in 
 
 wrote, or how he spelt his name : you care only to see 
 something that he really made with his own hand ; 
 you covet the actual bit of vellum where his fingers 
 were placed for a minute. Imagine — it is utterly 
 absurd — but imagine that I am permitted to recover, 
 by a miracle, one autograph, out of all the millions 
 of millions of autographs which have gone to dust. 
 I may choose which it shall be : I may only choose 
 one. It goes without saying, that I would recover 
 Pilate's : I would find, in some hiding-place in Egypt, 
 the title which he wrote for the Cross. We should 
 all of us choose that. Board, or strip of parchment, 
 whichever it was, we should say, This for me, out of 
 all the world's lost handwritings, this one relic. 
 
 If an autograph be not a relic, it is nothing more 
 than a rarity. Take one example. I am thinking — 
 who of us is not, in this June, 191 6? — of Lord 
 Kitchener. A week ago, his autograph was prized 
 as a rarity : now, it is a relic. A week ago, the auto- 
 graph-hunter, displaying it pasted into his album, 
 would have been lightly congratulated on his good 
 luck : now, Death has so exalted the casual signature 
 that it will be had in reverence from generation to 
 generation, this relic, this bit of paper which has Lord 
 Kitchener's writing on it. 
 
 Of those sayings of his which have found their way 
 into print in the last few days, one was to somebody 
 who asked him for his autograph. Young man, you 
 had better do something to make your own autograph
 
 in HANDWRITINGS 49 
 
 worth having. It is not so hard as it sounds, to make 
 the sight of our handwriting worth having. May 
 the sight of yours be always welcome to many good 
 friends ; the style of it determined for you by many 
 good influences : and some of your letters treasured 
 as well-beloved relics. 
 
 Here, on the revised proof, comes a blank half- 
 page. Like Nature, I abhor a vacuum : let me fill 
 it with a bit of advice. Do not be content to write 
 a bad hand. People go by appearances r it may be 
 foolish of them, but we cannot stop them. And 
 there is no denying that some hands look vague or 
 mean, and others look sensitive and resolute. A 
 good hand may help you to gain marks at an exami- 
 nation, or to obtain a coveted appointment. Besides, 
 handwriting is an accomplishment, like dancing. An 
 illegible letter, to a busy man, is like a clumsy partner 
 to a skilful dancer. We can avoid having to dance, 
 we cannot avoid having to write : and, if your hand- 
 writing is still unsettled, still in the making, you 
 ought to be careful to make it pleasant to look at and 
 easy to read. 
 
 I.S.T. D
 
 IV 
 
 THE WAY OF SCIENCE 
 
 There is an empty phrase, 77?^ wonders of Science. 
 Everything is wonderful of itself : Science has 
 nothing to do with it. Take, for example, the striking 
 of a match, the whirl and clash of millions of millions 
 of atoms rushing together, which are the flame. 
 Nothing, not the whole earth and all the stars, could 
 be more wonderful : but the wonder of a box of 
 matches does not depend on the science of a box of 
 matches. Another empty phrase is, The wonders of 
 the microscope. You might as well speak of the 
 wonders of the stethoscope, or of the periscope. 
 Science has nothing to do with the everlasting 
 wonderfulness of everything everywhere. In the 
 lane here, last night, I saw a glow-worm. The light- 
 ing-up of the glow-worm's house of life, the lamp 
 set by this diminutive Hero to guide her Leander to 
 her, the innate chemistry whereby she produces and 
 expends, in a Devonshire lane, her private store of 
 Balmain's luminous paint — these are wonders not of 
 
 5°
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE 51 
 
 Science, but of the glow-worm. Let us not talk 
 of the wonders of Science : let me talk of the way 
 of Science. And let me begin, not with men and 
 women of science, but with myself. Time enough 
 to look up to them, when I have done with looking 
 into me. 
 
 Deep down in memory, I find two portraits, old 
 and faded now, but the very image of me when they 
 were taken. One is a picture of a little boy standing, 
 with half-a-dozen of his age and size, at a high 
 mahogany desk, which has a cane in it. Behind the 
 desk sits a most unhappy schoolmaster, sick of the 
 sight of us : I am on his left hand : we are beginning 
 to learn Euclid. It was the first book ; and it was 
 either the first or the second proposition, I forget 
 which : but I am quite sure — though it is fifty years 
 back — that I was feeling the strength of Euclid, and 
 was vaguely conscious of his authority. Other 
 lessons could, and did, go wrong as it were of them- 
 selves. Words could be wrongly spelt, pronounced, 
 or translated : sums could refuse to come right, even 
 when my tongue was aching with the exertion of 
 licking my slate : grammar could go wrong in fifty 
 directions, and was largely a matter of choice. But 
 Euclid was Euclid. No compromise was possible 
 with him, no doubt, no evasion : he left nothing to 
 private judgment, nothing to chance. " Things are 
 what they are, and their consequences will be what 
 they will be." That is what he was saying. And
 
 52 I SOMETIMES THINK iv 
 
 that is the first and last word of Science. The little 
 boy never became familiar with Euclid, and long ago 
 forgot all his lines and angles : but Euclid did once 
 call his attention to the fact that Science was saying 
 something. 
 
 The other picture is of him quite grown-up, when 
 Science next found him and spoke to him. This 
 time, she said that she was not in a hurry ; and she 
 gave him a good talking-to. He had been filling 
 his head with Greek and Latin and other book- 
 learning : and a great deal of it was treasure im- 
 perishable and beautiful : but of course he had not 
 understood all that he read. Then he became a 
 medical student : and I cannot tell you what a change 
 it was for him. He and his young friends had been 
 giving the title of " stinks " to the whole celestial 
 system of the natural sciences : with the one excep- 
 tion of astronomy. The existence of that science 
 was not open to doubt : there was a Professor of it : 
 he lived in a house with a telescope on the top : 
 therefore, astronomy did exist. We could not call it 
 stinks : we made an exception in favour of it : but 
 all the rest of the natural sciences were stinks : and 
 the New Museum, the work of Ruskin and Acland 
 and Rolleston, was the Stinks Museum. Fancy what 
 it must have been, for this young man, to hear the 
 voice of Science. It spoke to him in the quiet and 
 receptive span of time which comes after the taking 
 of a degree. At the sound of that voice, the old
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE 53 
 
 order gave place to new. The Gods and Goddesses 
 of the Ancient World, pale and angry, would not 
 stop to be insulted: they went back to Olympus, 
 and the poets and the philosophers went with them. 
 The Nine Muses — all but Urania, who stayed with 
 the Professor of Astronomy — put their pretty hands 
 over their ears, and ran away as fast as they could ; 
 and the young man hardly missed them. The colour 
 faded out of pictures, the pleasure out of books ; and 
 the values of general ideas wavered and shifted like 
 mists over the hills when the sun gets at them. 
 Have another metaphor. The lines on which his 
 mind had been travelling, first class, in the compart- 
 ment reserved for him and his young friends, took 
 such a sharp curve that he was almost thrown out of 
 his seat. Have another. He had soaked himself 
 in great thoughts, like a small sponge in a large bath : 
 now, at the touch of the voice of Science, the bath 
 was emptied, and all his imbibed learning evaporated, 
 and he lay shrunken and athirst for something else. 
 
 It was chemistry that especially pleased him. He 
 was altogether unscientific : indeed, when he came to 
 study oxalic acid, he began by tasting it, to the dismay 
 of his instructor. What he loved, in chemistry, was 
 the sense that he was up against positive, incisive, 
 measurable facts. As Euclid had spoken to him, so 
 chemistry spoke to him — " Things are what they are, 
 and their consequences will be what they will be." 
 He was doing practical chemistry : he was making
 
 54 I SOMETIMES THINK iv 
 
 gases, fusing metals in borax beads, dissolving things 
 soluble, precipitating things precipitable. Oh, the 
 joy of it ; the relief of making things after trying to 
 make out thoughts. 
 
 His friends said that he had " taken up Science " : 
 they ought to have said that Science had taken up 
 him, had set him to peep over the edge of his imagi- 
 nation at things as they are. He was given the run 
 of all the matter that there is : he played with bits of 
 the universe. Each time that he made a gas or a 
 precipitate, he was repeating the work of Creation : 
 not pretending, but doing it : he made things as they 
 really are made : and, except that he was working on 
 a small scale, there was no difference between him and 
 the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. 
 
 It follows, that he had the universe backing him in 
 all that he did. The forces which in the beginning 
 had been the making of the world came when he 
 called them : he Prospero, they Ariel. The whole 
 universe was bound in honour to ensure the success 
 of his performances with a test-tube. Indeed, the 
 very existence of the universe was involved in them. 
 If his test-tube gave the wrong answer — as it often 
 did — it proved that he had put the wrong question. 
 If the test-tube should ever give the wrong answer 
 to the right question, it would be the end of every- 
 thing : for he would be right and the universe would 
 be wrong : and all the laws of Nature would immedi- 
 ately fold their tents like the Arabs and silently steal
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE $S 
 
 away. It is a grand sensation, after reading thoughts, 
 to be reading things. Book-learning takes so many 
 views : things take one, and no more. 
 
 The antagonism between books and things was 
 well brought home to him by one of his teachers at 
 this time, who pulled a book away from him and 
 threw it across the table, bidding him sharply not to 
 read, but to look at things with his own eyes. That 
 is what Science is. It is the kingdom of things. 
 And they most keenly enjoy the kingdom of things 
 who suddenly, when they are grown up, find their 
 way into it from the kingdom of thoughts, and 
 receive with gladness its authority. 
 
 Not all of them remain there long enough to make 
 themselves true men or women of science. With 
 some of them, the novelty wears off : they go back 
 to the kingdom of thoughts : they were hardly more 
 than trippers in the kingdom of things. They were 
 like children during the first rush of a holiday at the 
 seaside, enjoying the change, the escape from streets 
 and shops and a square to the joyful freedom of the 
 beach, where they can dig and paddle all day, and 
 catch, in their little pails, real shrimps. But even 
 these casual tourists in the kingdom of things, these 
 non-residents, gain happiness from it, while they are 
 there ; happiness not of the intellect only, but of the 
 heart. That is the way of Science : it is not light 
 without heat, it is both light and heat. 
 
 This twofold power of Science, to enlighten and
 
 $6 I SOMETIMES THINK iv 
 
 to warm us, is different from the practical applica- 
 tion of this or that science to our daily affairs. We 
 have got into the habit of expecting men of science 
 to invent material advantages for us : new processes, 
 new apparatus, new drugs, new devices of all sorts to 
 save time and trouble and money. So they do : they 
 are incessantly inventing and devising. But Science 
 would still be Science, even if she sat everlastingly 
 with her hands folded in front of her, and never 
 invented so much as a safety-pin. For example, the 
 love of mathematics is pure science. Mathematics 
 are applied to a thousand practical purposes : but that 
 is not why the mathematician loves them. He finds, 
 in the working out of his problems, excitement such 
 as he might otherwise find in a race or a novel. 
 Archimedes, during the siege of Syracuse, whom the 
 Romans found still pencilling diagrams in the dust 
 of the pavement, and killed him then and there — 
 Archimedes was in love with pure science : as true a 
 lover as Galileo or Newton. And there is, or was, 
 in Cambridge, a society of learned men, who at their 
 festival dinners had this toast — Pure Mathematics. 
 Thank God, they were never of any use to anybody. 
 Science is on her throne high above all our talk of 
 scientific inventions, all our talk of the value of a 
 scientific training for boys and girls. 
 
 To the end of your days, believe in pure science. 
 What is the good of pure science? It stands you 
 in the presence of abstract thought. What is the
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE 57 
 
 good of standing in the presence of abstract thought ? 
 Your question reveals your need of standing there. 
 Science is not bound to be of any practical value to 
 us. She never promised to make inventions, im- 
 provements, and facilities ; nor to enrich men of 
 business ; nor to provide plans for the training of 
 boys and girls. She condescends to us, she flings 
 her gifts right and left among us : and the whole 
 world is one continuous record of what she has done 
 and is doing for us in the kingdom of things. 
 
 What is the constitution, and the fabric, of the 
 kingdom of things? It is founded and built on 
 number and proportion. Things had to come into 
 existence : and that is the only way in which they 
 could come. Without number and proportion, 
 nothing could ever begin to begin. Nothing could 
 be either here or there ; nothing could be either past, 
 present, or future ; nothing could be of any shape, 
 size, weight, quality, or quantity. Things cannot 
 get to us till they are related to each other, and 
 related to us. Number and proportion are condi- 
 tions, under which they are related to each other, 
 and to us. Apart from number and proportion, 
 things have no existence for us. These conditions 
 of their existence are eternal : that is to say, they are 
 the very making of everything, and without them is 
 not anything made that is made. 
 
 Of course, things cannot relate themselves. How 
 could they ? It is we, who relate them to each other ;
 
 58 I SOMETIMES THINK iv 
 
 this one here, that one there ; this one then, that one 
 now. They cannot relate themselves. Relation is a 
 form of thought : and they cannot think. If they 
 could think, they would not be things. We have no 
 acquaintance with " things in themselves," as the 
 philosophers write of them : and I doubt whether the 
 philosophers are much better acquainted with them 
 than we are. But things as we know them, things as 
 we have them, cannot get to us, nor we to them, 
 except they come under the forms of number and 
 proportion : I am quite sure of that. And I am 
 equally sure, that they cannot relate themselves to 
 each other and to us ; we have to do it for them. 
 We are the thinkers, and they are the things. 
 
 This fact, that number and proportion create our 
 universe as we have it, did not escape the notice of 
 those whom we call the Ancients. They paid pro- 
 found regard to numbers, and had strange notions 
 about them. It was the doctrine of Pythagoras, that 
 numbers have their own sacred purposes and mean- 
 ings : that each number is divine, and performs its 
 hidden work in the general plan of things. The like 
 reverence for numbers is in those recurrent sevens 
 and twelves which sound through the Bible as the 
 striking of a clock sounds through the house : and 
 in those measurements which Saint John attributes to 
 the Heavenly City. We have learned to hate all 
 superstition : we properly despise any educated man 
 or woman who believes in " lucky numbers " : but
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE 59 
 
 some superstitions, degenerate and feeble now, hark 
 back to a faith livelier than themselves : and there was 
 nothing amiss in the opinion of the Ancients — 
 though they played fancifully with it — that number 
 and proportion are like the quality of mercy, "an 
 attribute of God Himself." For they are : just as 
 much as mercy. 
 
 Number and proportion, weight and measure, are 
 the law of the kingdom of things. Some of the 
 things are too light or too heavy to be weighed : some 
 are too small or too large to be measured : but they 
 are all under the law. All mechanics and physics, all 
 chemistry, all study of electricity — these come first 
 to mind, when we consider the law of the kingdom : 
 for they are concerned with non-living matter, with 
 number and proportion in the things of inanimate 
 Nature : and we always look at non-life before we 
 look at life. We arrange Nature as a procession. 
 The lesser folk to start with, the police and the local 
 fire brigade ; then the more notable representatives, 
 the magistrates, the aldermen in their furred gowns, 
 the important personages : last, the Great Man, in a 
 carriage drawn by four horses — the last of the proces- 
 sion, for which the first was made. Queen Victoria 
 is said to have said that Mr. Gladstone addressed her 
 as if she were a public meeting. We address Nature 
 as if she were the Lord Mayor's Show. Non-life is 
 just as natural as life ; but we do always put non-life 
 before life, when we are addressing Nature : we lead
 
 60 I SOMETIMES THINK iv 
 
 up from what we call the lowest to what we call the 
 highest : and we begin, as it were below the lowest, 
 with what we call matter. 
 
 Dead, inert, senseless matter — oh, the stupid 
 adjectives. Science has so finely divided and 
 sub-divided and sub-subdivided matter that mole- 
 cules and atoms have ceased to be small. 
 Molecule is the Latin for a little mass : atom is the 
 Greek for an indivisibility. Science has found these 
 little masses and indivisibilities so massive and so 
 divisible that she has taken not particles, but particles 
 of particles, to be her units of matter, her electrons. 
 You and I cannot have any idea of electrons : it is 
 not one of us in fifty thousand who can. I try to 
 imagine them : and the more I try, the more I fail. 
 But this I know, that they are under the law of the 
 kingdom of things : they have number and propor- 
 tion : they are in relation to each other : and they 
 build up, somehow, that which has weight and 
 measure, and is visible and tangible. 
 
 Chemistry, if you compare it with these most 
 subtle researches into the nature of matter, is a whole- 
 sale business, dealing with things in bulk. The law 
 of number and proportion is writ large all over 
 chemistry : never for one moment does the chemist 
 get away from weight and measure. This exactness 
 of study, this insight into the atomic natures of 
 things familiar to us — the metals in our pockets, the 
 paving-stones under our feet, the sugar in our tea —
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE 61 
 
 make chemistry a most excellent training, a most 
 delightful pursuit. Besides, there is a sort of magic 
 in it, an echo of the last enchantments of the Middle 
 Ages. It is a grand science for girls : especially for 
 them who will have to earn their own living. There 
 was Pasteur, a chemist : there is Mme. Curie, a 
 chemist : no pursuit affords us better examples. 
 
 The study of inanimate Nature goes far beyond 
 physics and chemistry. The whole earth is subject 
 to geology : the other heavenly bodies, to astronomy. 
 The kingdom of things is extended beyond all 
 reckoning. Where the law is, there the kingdom is. 
 The law is over all inanimate Nature. What about 
 Life? Is the law over all that has Life? 
 
 Of course, it is impossible for us to say what Life 
 is. None of us can define or describe Life : no, not 
 even if we spell it without a capital letter. Bichat, 
 a great French physiologist, called it " the sum of 
 the functions which resist death." Nail that phrase 
 to your counter, for the false coin that it is. 
 But where he failed, you and I are not likely to 
 have any success. 
 
 But we can observe life without defining it. We 
 can trace it back, almost to its sources : and the men 
 of science are still exploring them, and may some day 
 find them. Fifty years ago, life was regarded as 
 " specially created " : made and put on earth, once 
 and for ever : perpetuated, omne vivum ex vivo, but 
 not generated. No conjunction of non-living forces
 
 62 I SOMETIMES THINK iv 
 
 could make life. Science was all very well : but 
 imagine a man of science making life ! 
 
 In these opinions, there was timidity of religion, 
 and poverty of imagination. It was a mere trick of 
 words, to attach the word specially to the word 
 created. It reminds me of a dear old lady who said 
 to me that a young man of her acquaintance was 
 Such a teetotaller. Nothing is specially created : 
 everything is created. You might as well say that 
 two and two make four when you are playing with 
 cherry-stones : but when two Princes marry two 
 Princesses, two and two specially make four. 
 
 Nothing being more created than everything else, 
 there is no reason why life should not be always being 
 created, just as everything is always being created. 
 We are free to believe in life coming into existence 
 by the conjunction of non-living forces, as flame 
 comes into existence by the conjunction of a safety- 
 match with the component strip of paper on the 
 match-box : life beginning, in a very humble way, 
 but really beginning, here or there, wherever circum- 
 stances are prepared for it. The depths of the sea, 
 for all we know to the contrary, may be employed on 
 munitions of life. Here I am rushing in where Sir 
 Edward Schafer lately feared to tread. But we shall 
 some day be no more surprised at life " coming of 
 itself " than we now are surprised at flame coming of 
 itself. Pasteur proved that germs do not come of 
 themselves, neither germs of putrefaction nor germs
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE 63 
 
 of infection nor any other germs : but he did not 
 forbid us to believe that life, under conditions not 
 yet ascertained, may come of itself. You may live 
 to see men of science making life. 
 
 But the life which they will make, after all, will 
 not be worth the trouble of making, except as a 
 curiosity. We shall have to take their word for it. 
 Perhaps, at the Royal Institution, they will demon- 
 strate some flickering change in a teaspoonful of stuff 
 compounded in a test-tube, some ebb and flow of 
 movement in a film of liquid under the microscope, 
 some oscillation of the needle of a galvanometer, 
 some new band in the field of a spectroscope. Such 
 is life, they will say : and so shall we : and all the 
 newspapers will flare with headlines, Man Makes 
 Life. But this artificial life, this quickening of a 
 prepared fluid in a test-tube, hardly would be what 
 we mean by life. It would not be a living thing : 
 it would be without form, and void. The least of 
 little germs is a creature, a bodily thing, with pro- 
 perties and structure of illimitable complexity — if 
 only our microscopes were stronger. These pro- 
 perties and this structure are individual : each germ 
 has its own. Men of science may succeed in making 
 life : but will they ever make lives ? Will they ever 
 make separate structures, each with its own life? 
 
 Look well at this difference between life and lives. 
 We never ought to let it out of our sight : no, not 
 for a moment. We are so careless, talking and writ-
 
 64 I SOMETIMES THINK iv 
 
 ing, that we sometimes forget it, and arrive at 
 conclusions with no logic to cover them. 
 
 By life, I do not know what I mean. By lives, I 
 mean structures, each with a life of its own. That a 
 germ is a structure, and has properties, none of us 
 can doubt : but you may prefer to look at something 
 larger than a germ. Take, for example, ants' eggs. 
 Plainly, they are individual structures, each with a 
 life of its own. When this life attains its full stature, 
 it is a life of no ordinary merit. The brain of an ant, 
 says Darwin, is perhaps the most wonderful bit of 
 living matter in the world. That is enough for me. 
 Here will I linger, contemplating the ant's egg y shrine 
 of my pilgrimage, birthplace of one of the most 
 wonderful lives ever given to earth. Within this 
 humble dwelling, she was created and made, brain 
 and all, and all in all, as Tennyson puts it, that I 
 might consider her ways and be wise. If this first 
 home of hers were large enough, I would place a 
 mural tablet on it, with an appropriate inscription. 
 Stay, O traveller, and admire this frail tenement, 
 empty now, yet not empty, for it is thronged with 
 sacred memories of an Ant. Her Instincts wellnigh 
 deserved the proud title of Rational Conduct. She 
 displayed throughout her brief Career qualities which 
 earned for Her the praise of a Man of Science. 
 Learn wisdom, O traveller, from Her. 
 
 I cannot see anything extravagant or fulsome in 
 this estimate. But let us look where we are standing
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE 6 s 
 
 now. Are we still in the kingdom of things, under 
 the law of number and proportion? We speak of 
 a life lived by an ant. What do we mean by that? 
 Structures — well, we had formed some idea of them. 
 Lives — well, we had formed some idea of them. But 
 see where we are now. There is the structure of the 
 ant : there is the life of the ant : and there is — the 
 ant. That is what we are saying. Are we prepared 
 to defend our words ? 
 
 Let us try the effect of dressing them up, in the 
 style of the old nursery-rhyme. This is the egg that 
 ant A laid. This is the structure that lay in the egg 
 that ant A laid. This is the life that was in the 
 structure that lay in the egg that ant A laid. This 
 is ant B, that owned the life that was in the structure 
 that lay in the egg that ant A laid. And this — it 
 spoils the metre, but this is we, who have just asserted 
 our belief in the immaterial consciousness, or self, 
 of ant B : and the same with all the other ants in 
 the alphabet. 
 
 It is a tremendous belief. We shall hold it, and 
 drop it, and leave it behind us, and go back for it, 
 like a lady with a reticule, over and over again : we 
 shall come to the end of our own lives before we 
 have made up our minds about the ant's life. But 
 the point is, that we shall get no help from Science. 
 It is idle, to ask Science to teach us Philosophy. 
 You might as well ask one of Euclid's diagrams to 
 give you singing-lessons. Science will not tell us 
 
 I.S.T. E
 
 66 I SOMETIMES THINK iv 
 
 what self is. She would if she could : she tries, but 
 she cannot do it. 
 
 It may be very silly, to fall to guessing whether 
 ants are conscious: very silly, to hesitate, over an 
 ant, between it and her. Well, if it be silly, put 
 aside the problem : call it fantastical, scholastic, 
 pedantic, unpractical : that is what the fox called the 
 grapes, when he could not jump high enough for 
 them. Put the problem aside : be really scientific. 
 Among physiologists and anatomists, the ant is /'/ : 
 among naturalists, who are inclined toward poetry, 
 the ant, now and again, is she. Science does not 
 care which of these pronouns the ant is. And the 
 reason why she does not care is, that she does not 
 know. The answer to the problem — if there be an 
 answer — is not to be found in the kingdom of things, 
 and is not decided by the law of the kingdom of 
 things. 
 
 As we ascend from the lives of ants to the lives of 
 men, women, and children, we seem to be getting 
 away, gradually, from our place in this kingdom, our 
 submission to this law. We find ourselves a bit 
 restless, when Science tells us not to fidget, and not 
 to ask so many questions. We can see that she 
 leaves out of her reckoning the item of consciousness. 
 The higher we go up the scale of lives, the larger 
 this item is. At first, we did not mind if she left it 
 out : at last, we do. When we get up to Man, and 
 find her still leaving out of her reckoning this fact of
 
 iv THE WAY OF SCIENCE 67 
 
 self, we begin to feel cross. She offers us Psychology, 
 as a substitute for Philosophy, to keep us quiet. We 
 resent that. Psychology is no more Philosophy than 
 margarine is butter. Then we begin to cry, and to 
 say that we are tired of the kingdom of things : that 
 we want to go back to the kingdom of thoughts, and 
 play games there. And Science does not care if we 
 do cry. That is the way of Science. When she 
 first speaks to us, in the kingdom of things, we say 
 " It is the voice of a God." And, in that kingdom, 
 it is. In the kingdom of thoughts, it is not. The 
 kingdom of thoughts is full of problems which none 
 of us would ever dream of referring to Science.
 
 V 
 MOVING PICTURES 
 
 I 
 
 We are so accustomed to moving pictures, that we 
 do not trouble ourselves to study their nature, or 
 their place in the general order of things. We take 
 them for granted. Youth, especially, takes them for 
 granted, having no memory of a time when they were 
 not. But some of us were born into a world in 
 which all the pictures stood still : and I challenge 
 youth to defend the cause of moving pictures. Let 
 the lists be set, and the signal given for the assault. 
 On the shield of youth, the motto is Moving Pictures 
 are All Right. On my antiquated shield, the motto 
 is Pictures Ought Not to Move. 
 
 Pictures, of one sort or another, are of immemorial 
 age. Portraits of the mammoth were scratched on 
 gnawed bones, by cave-dwellers, centuries of cen- 
 turies ago : and we look now at their dug-up work, 
 and feel ourselves in touch with them. The nature 
 of pictures was decided at the very beginning of 
 things, as the natures of trees and of metals were
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 69 
 
 decided. It is not the nature of trees to walk, nor 
 of metals to run uphill : it is not the nature of 
 pictures to move. Pictures and statues, by the law 
 of their being, are forbidden to move. That com- 
 mandment is laid on them which Joshua, in the Bible- 
 story, lays on the sun and the moon — Stand thou still. 
 They must be motionless : 'tis their nature to : they 
 exist on that understanding, as you and I exist on the 
 understanding that we are mortal. If I were not to 
 die, I should not be a man. If pictures were to 
 move, they would not be pictures. 
 
 So we come to this difficulty, that moving pictures are 
 not pictures. We cannot evade it by giving another 
 name to them ; for it is a difficulty not of names but 
 of natures. Let us examine it with decent care. 
 
 Moving pictures have got mankind in their 
 enchanted net. They have unfailing power over us. 
 Old and young, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, 
 we are all under their spell. So magical are they, 
 that every owner of a picture-palace would have been 
 burned alive, not very long ago, for diabolical 
 practices. The world is their scenery, life is their 
 repertory, and all things in earth and air and sea are 
 their company. They will give you, like the strol- 
 ling players in Hamlet, what you desire : — 
 
 The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, 
 history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical- 
 historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or 
 poem unlimited.
 
 70 I SOMETIMES THINK v 
 
 Every little country-town is familiar with this vivid 
 and precipitate entertainment. No other invention 
 of our time — neither the electric light, nor telephones, 
 nor aeroplanes, nor all three of them together — can 
 show such a record of change wrought on us. Well 
 then, what is wrong with moving pictures ? Is any- 
 thing wrong with them? Why should not pictures 
 move, now that they can? 
 
 No, they must mind their own business, and do 
 their duty in that state of life unto which it has 
 pleased God to call them. It is not their business to 
 move. If they were to move, the effect would be 
 horrible : it would kill our enjoyment of them. 
 Imagine how we should feel, if sculpture could be 
 made to move : statues of Royalty bowing this way 
 and that, statues of orators waving scrolls, and statues 
 of generals waving swords : the lions in Trafalgar 
 Square shaking their manes, and Miss Nightingale 
 in Pall Mall raising and lowering her lamp. We 
 should be pleased for a day or two, then bored, then 
 disgusted. Imagine our pictures moving : the 
 photographs on the mantelpiece, the advertisements, 
 the big Raphael in the National Gallery. 
 
 The advertisements would matter least, because 
 nobody cares how advertisements behave or mis- 
 behave. I have one in front of me, at this moment, 
 from a religious journal, of a patent medicine which 
 " creates cheerfulness by cleansing the system of its 
 poisonous bye-products." There is a picture of two
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 71 
 
 men, one moping, the other alert. I should not like 
 to see it move. I prefer it as it is. My imagination 
 is free, so long as the picture is motionless ; but 
 would be hindered, if the picture moved. 
 
 The photograph of a friend, on my mantelpiece, 
 gives play to my remembrance of him. Within the 
 limits of photography, it is perfect. But if it moved 
 — if its eyes followed me about the room, and its 
 hands had that little gesture which he had with his 
 hands, and its lips opened and shut — it would be 
 hateful, and I should throw it in the fire. 
 
 The great pictures in the National Gallery — the 
 Rembrandt portraits, the Raphael Madonnas — 
 imagine them moving. Their beauty would vanish, 
 their nature would be destroyed. The Trustees 
 would immediately sell them, to get rid of them. 
 Probably, they would go on tour : admission three- 
 pence, children a penny. Then they would be 
 " filmed," and the films would be " released," and a 
 hundred reproductions would be gibbering all over 
 the country. The originals would finally be bartered, 
 in Central Africa, to impressionable native potentates, 
 in exchange for skins or tusks : and if pictures were 
 able to curse, these certainly would curse the day on 
 which they began to move. 
 
 By these instances, it is evident that pictures ought 
 not to move. The worse they are, the less it would 
 shock us if they did. The better they are, the more 
 it would shock us. Why must they not move?
 
 72 I SOMETIMES THINK v 
 
 Because they are works of art. It follows, that 
 moving pictures are not works of art. 
 
 They are works of science : they are " scientific 
 toys." Science invented them, just for the fun of 
 inventing them : made them out of an old " optical 
 illusion." They are that friend of my childhood, 
 the zoetrope, or wheel of life, adjusted to show the 
 products of instantaneous photography. They are 
 " applied science." You are so familiar with them 
 that you overlook the ingenuity of them. Here I 
 have the advantage of you : for they came so late 
 into my life that I was properly amazed at them. 
 My first sight of a moving picture, like my first sight 
 of an x-ray picture, was a revelation not to be for- 
 gotten. There was a procession of cavalry : and 
 when I saw a photograph whisking its tail, I mar- 
 velled at a new power come into the world, and am 
 still marvelling. But you will never get the full 
 delight of moving pictures till you have lectured 
 with them, been behind the scenes, handled films, and 
 become well acquainted with those hot little fire-proof 
 chambers where the wheels are set spinning, and the 
 great shafts of light are projected, and out of the 
 whirlwind of electrical forces the picture flings itself 
 on the screen. Only, for this invention, give honour 
 where honour is due, to Science. 
 
 But scientific inventions, unlike works of art, have 
 an immeasurable power of growth and development. 
 They can be improved ad libitum : they can be multi-
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 73 
 
 plied ad infinitum. Nothing could be less like a work 
 of art coming from a studio than a scientific invention 
 coming from a laboratory. The work of art is made 
 once and for all : it may be copied, but it cannot be 
 repeated : you cannot have two sets of Elgin Marbles, 
 or two Sistine Madonnas. The scientific invention 
 is like the genie who came out of the fisherman's jar : 
 you cannot tell where it will stop, nor what it will do 
 next. Moving pictures may be nothing more than 
 a scientific toy, but they are the whole world's 
 favourite toy : the whole world is playing with them : 
 and if they were suddenly to be taken away, the 
 whole world would miss them. Think what a 
 colossal enterprise this world's plaything now is : 
 what legions of lives, what millions of money, are 
 spent over the production, multiplication, and exhibi- 
 tion of moving pictures. Famous actors pose for 
 them, thousands of secondary actors make a living 
 out of them, the ends of the earth are ransacked for 
 new scenes and subjects : even politics, and inter- 
 national rivalries, are dragged in the train of this 
 huge industry. I have read of the factions which 
 divided the people of Byzantium over their chariot- 
 races : but these were nothing to the world's submis- 
 sion to moving pictures. Is there any limit to their 
 kingdom, any measure of their influences? These 
 factories and companies and wholesale houses and 
 palaces and flaming advertisements everywhere — 
 what will be the end of it all? Thirty years hence,
 
 74 I SOMETIMES THINK v 
 
 will they have more power over us than they have 
 now, or less? 
 
 I hope they will have less, and will use it more 
 carefully. I should like to see the War bring down 
 the moving-pictures business to one-third of its pre- 
 sent size, bring it down with a rush, and with the 
 prospect of a further reduction. Picture-palaces in 
 London are like public-houses : too many of them, 
 too many of us nipping in them ; too many people 
 making money out of us, whether we be nipping in 
 the palaces or the houses. The more we patronise 
 them, the more they exploit us : and some of us are 
 taking more films than are good for us. Dost thou 
 think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no 
 more cakes and ale? But we can easily get so fond 
 of cakes and ale that we spoil our appetites for our 
 regular meals. Besides, our cakes ought to be whole- 
 some, and our ale ought not to be adulterated. The 
 bill of fare, at the picture-palaces, includes trash : but 
 it pays them to sell it to us : and we behave as if 
 these palaces belonged to us, while they behave as if 
 we belonged to them. Picture-palaces and public- 
 houses, alike, amuse all of us and enrich some of us : 
 they do good, they do harm : they have to be 
 watched, these by censorship, those by the police : 
 and both these and those are backed by wealth, and 
 by interests too powerful to be set aside. The differ- 
 ences between them are accidental : the likenesses 
 between them are essential. The moving-pictures
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 75 
 
 trade is the younger of the two : and the result on us 
 of too many films is different from the result of too 
 much liquor. But these differences are not very pro- 
 found : and the likenesses are plain enough. They 
 would be even more plain to us, if we could have 
 our moving pictures at home, as we have our liquor, 
 out of a bottle. We have to go into the street for 
 them : we have to consume them on the premises. 
 If we could have them at home, as it were in half- 
 pints, all to ourselves, we should more distinctly feel 
 it our duty to draw the line at one or two, for fear of 
 getting into a habit of them. 
 
 II 
 
 What is the nature of moving pictures? What 
 are they " of themselves," and where do they come 
 in the general order of things? Take, for instance, 
 a waterfall. If we look at a waterfall, we see water 
 moving. If we look at a picture of a waterfall, we 
 imagine water moving. If we look at a moving 
 picture of a waterfall, we see a picture moving, a very 
 beautiful object : still, we are looking at an " optical 
 illusion," not at a waterfall. Or take a more critical 
 example : take a moving picture which not merely 
 moves, but acts. What is it, really, that we are 
 looking at, when we see, on the screen, Hamlet, or 
 How She Rescued Him, or Charlie Chaplin? It 
 was my privilege and honour, in the first winter of 
 the War, to give lantern-lectures to soldiers, on the
 
 76 I SOMETIMES THINK v 
 
 protective treatment against typhoid fever : and one 
 happy day, we had Charlie Chaplin, till it was time 
 to have Pasteur and the bacilli of typhoid. Besides, 
 I have met his flat effigy, again and again, outside the 
 palaces : that little hat and moustache, and the look 
 of Shelley about the eyes, and that suit of clothes, 
 and the little cane which, like General Gordon's, is 
 so curiously personal and inseparable from him. So 
 I feel that I know him ; and I know that I envy him : 
 for he makes, they say, a very large income : and the 
 laughter which he gave us that day was as clean and 
 wholesome as the smell of a pinewood : which is 
 more than you can say of all picture-house laughter. 
 But what is it, really, that I was looking at, on the 
 screen ? He is an actor equal to Dan Leno : the 
 same unfaltering originality, the same talent for domi- 
 nating the scene, holding our attention, appealing to 
 us by his diminutive stature, his gentle acceptance 
 of situations as he finds them, his half-unconscious 
 air of doing unnatural things in a natural way. But 
 think what we lose in the transition from Dan Leno 
 on the stage to Charlie Chaplin on the screen. Dan 
 was really there : Charlie is not. Dan talked and 
 sang : Charlie is mute. Dan's performance was 
 human : Charlie's, by the cutting of the film, and by 
 the driving of the machine at great speed, is super- 
 human. In brief, on the Drury Lane stage I saw 
 Dan Leno, and heard him : but on the screen I do 
 not see Charlie Chaplin — let alone hearing him : I
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 77 
 
 see only a moving picture of him : and this picture 
 so cleverly faked that I see him doing what he never 
 did nor ever could. It was delightful, every moment 
 of it : all the same, it is an optical illusion. Nor is 
 it a straightforward illusion, like the old zoetrope : 
 it is rendered grotesque and fantastical by the con- 
 juring-tricks of the people who made the film. 
 
 Still, he was delightful ; for it was pantomime, 
 dumb-show, knockabout farce, with a touch of magic 
 in it. But I could not bring myself to see Macbeth 
 or Hamlet on the screen ; for I have seen Irving's 
 Macbeth and Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet, heard 
 their voices, learned my Shakespeare from them. 
 Shakespeare without the words, Shakespeare without 
 the living presence of the actor, would be intolerable. 
 You can see, or lately could, at the " Old Vic " in 
 the Waterloo Bridge Road, for threepence, Shake- 
 speare acted, nobly acted, with simplicity and with 
 dignity. Let nothing ever induce you to see him 
 « filmed." 
 
 Of the rest of the legion of filmed plays, let him 
 write who can. The output of the London picture- 
 palaces, in farce, comedy, drama, and melodrama, can 
 hardly be less than two thousand plays twice in every 
 twenty-four hours. Many of them are American : 
 and those that I have seen were condensed, pungent, 
 over-acted, and spun too fast. Now and again, a 
 book is filmed as a play : for example, East Lynne, 
 and Les Miserables. The effect of a filmed book
 
 78 I SOMETIMES THINK v 
 
 might be very good : for you might get a pleasant 
 sense that you were reading it with moving illustra- 
 tions. The ordinary theatrical films cannot give you 
 this sense. They are surprisingly clever. Only, the 
 better they are, the more you want to have the real 
 thing : to hear the voices, to see the players them- 
 selves. You cannot be properly thrilled by the best 
 of heroines tied to a stake, nor by the worst of 
 villains with a revolver : she is shrieking at the top 
 of her voice — look at the size of her mouth — but 
 where is the shriek ? He fires — look at the smoke — 
 but where is the bang? You are mildly excited : but 
 you are not so excited as you ought to be : you know, 
 all the time, that you are not at the play : you are at 
 an optical illusion, looking with more or less interest 
 at a scientific toy. 
 
 Give me leave to hammer at this point : for I want 
 to make it clear to you and to myself. First, let us 
 be agreed that a play on the stage is worth a thousand 
 plays on the screen : for it is the real thing : it is real 
 voices, living presences : the interpreters are there, as 
 real as real can be. The artifices and conventions of 
 play-acting do not spoil the reality of the play : it 
 is only unimaginative minds which are baulked by 
 them. A good play, well acted, satisfies and educates 
 something in us which nothing else can reach. Call 
 it the imagination, or the emotions, or whatever you 
 like : the love of a good play is too old and too 
 natural to care what name you give to it. A play
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 79 
 
 on the screen is not real : there are neither voices, 
 nor presences : there is only a moving picture, 
 moving too swiftly to be a good picture of a play. 
 You cannot command, over an optical illusion, the 
 imagination and the emotions which come of them- 
 selves over a real play. They refuse to be fooled. 
 Wrong number ^ they say, and put the receiver back 
 on the hook. 
 
 It follows, that the best plays, on the screen, are 
 those which can best afford to lose the advantage of 
 voices and presences, and to be taken for what they 
 are. Wild farce, with lots of conjuring-tricks in it, 
 is the best of all. In pantomime, with a film so 
 faked and speeded-up that fat men run a mile a 
 minute, and cars whirl through space like shooting 
 stars, and all Nature is convulsed, these picture-plays 
 are at their best, joyfully turning the universe upside- 
 down with the flick of a wheel. In the mad rush 
 of impossibilities, there is no time for words, and no 
 need of them. When Charlie Chaplin, for instance, 
 leaned lightly against a huge stone column, and 
 immediately it fell to bits, I did not want him to say 
 anything : no words of his could sober an event so 
 stupendously drunk. 
 
 But more ambitious films, which pretend to give 
 us comedy and drama, are less successful. You miss 
 the sound of voices : you miss the presence of the 
 living actors. The poorer the play is, the less you 
 miss them. Thus, you can enjoy, for the few
 
 8o I SOMETIMES THINK v 
 
 minutes of its existence, a sensational film, a bit of 
 claptrap and swagger : but Heaven forbid that you 
 should enjoy Shakespeare filmed, with scraps of 
 words thrown on the screen at short intervals. 
 
 Judge the performance of a moving picture as you 
 judge the performance of a gramophone. Each is 
 a scientific toy : each produces an illusion, the one 
 through our eyes and the other through our ears : 
 and each gets its best results by staying inside its 
 natural limits. Comic sounds, comic songs, swing- 
 ing band-music with lots of brass and big drum in it, 
 go well on a gramophone. But do you want to hear 
 high-class music on it? Do you want to hear the 
 voice of a dead friend on it ? Not you : let it stick 
 to being a gramophone : let it not profane either 
 the music of the Immortals, or the voices of the 
 dead. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The answer comes, that all this talk is tainted with 
 self-conceit. That you and I are superior persons, 
 forgetful of " the masses." That the picture-palaces 
 enliven the dullness of thousands of stupid little 
 country-towns, and are a safe refuge of entertainment 
 for legions of young men and young women who 
 would have no other meeting-place but the streets. 
 That moving pictures amuse the whole nation, and 
 quicken the mind and widen the outlook and charm 
 the leisure of countless lives more heavily burdened
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 81 
 
 than yours and mine : lives of the hard-driven ill- 
 educated " masses," who cannot be expected to care 
 for Shakespeare and the National Gallery. 
 
 And there is much truth in this answer. Only, it 
 is a one-sided statement. If you could take the 
 opinions of London working-women, with families 
 of young children, just enough wages coming-in to 
 keep a home over their heads, and a naming picture- 
 palace, with a lot of nasty trash on its programme, 
 just round the corner, you would hear many opinions 
 unfavourable to them rubbishy pictures : many de- 
 scriptions of the children's nerves upset by sham 
 horrors, and the children's pennies wasted on stuff 
 which ought to be labelled Poisonous. The chief 
 business of the palaces is to make money out of us. 
 Where it pays them to give us rubbish, there they 
 give us rubbish : where it pays them to raise a laugh 
 over something disgraceful to us, there they set them- 
 selves to be blackguardly. 
 
 But praise them for that great gift which they, and 
 they alone, can give to us. Moving pictures of real 
 things, moving pictures of real life — we can never 
 be too thankful for these. It is these, which are the 
 new power come into the world. To watch, on the 
 screen, every moment of the swing of waves and 
 the dash of surf, every fleck of light on a river, every 
 leaf stirring in the wind, is a grand experience : you 
 find yourself watching them with more attention than 
 you bestow on real water and real woods. For, on 
 
 I.S.T. F
 
 82 I SOMETIMES THINK v 
 
 the screen, you are looking at pure movement, all 
 by itself : you are not distracted by any thought of 
 bathing in that sea, or of going on it : you just watch 
 it, enjoying the mere sight of it moving. 
 
 In the display of moving pictures of real things, 
 all the way up from elemental movement to human 
 action, the picture-palace is our good friend : it is 
 servant, by divine appointment, to reality. Moving 
 pictures of living germs of disease, colossally magni- 
 fied by the adjustment of micro-photography to the 
 making of a film, are the delight of all doctors : 
 moving pictures of wild creatures are the delight of 
 all naturalists : scenes of human life in diverse parts 
 of the world — the crowds in London streets, the 
 crowds in Eastern bazaars, the work and play and 
 habits and customs of the nations — these are the 
 delight of all of us, and will never cease to delight 
 us. For this wealth of visions, this treasury of 
 knowledge, let us be properly grateful. 
 
 Only, the higher we go, the more careful we must 
 be to exercise restraint and reverence. It is one thing, 
 to film dumbshow, and another thing, to film real 
 life and real death. Of living men, whom shall we 
 film, and under what conditions, that we may pay 
 sixpence to see them without loss of dignity in them, 
 and without loss of reverence in ourselves ? Crowds 
 are not the difficulty : for they are comedy : but we 
 ought to think twice before we film the tragedy of 
 a crowd of people scared or starved. The difficulty
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 83 
 
 is with single figures of great men, or a little group 
 of them, or a multitude of men employed in the 
 business of a great tragedy. Have we any rule, in 
 this matter, to guide us ? 
 
 During the last few weeks — here is mid-September 
 — we have been made to think over these questions, 
 by the proposal to film the Cabinet, and by the 
 exhibition of the Somme pictures. 
 
 The proposal to film the Cabinet was abandoned. 
 The plan was not to film a real Cabinet Council, but 
 to film the Members of the Cabinet, in the Council- 
 room, looking, more or less, as if they were holding 
 a real Council. 
 
 Thus, it would have been a picture of real life, 
 but of real life posing for the camera. His Majesty's 
 Ministers would have put themselves under some of 
 the conditions of acting for a picture-play. This 
 they would have done to please us : they would have 
 shown themselves to us, looking just as they look 
 when they are at work for us. The objection was 
 raised, that the Cabinet would lose dignity : you will 
 find a parallel passage in Shakespeare x : and the point 
 
 1 First Part of King Henry IF., Act III., sc. z : where the King draws out 
 the contrast between himself and King Richard : 
 
 " Had I so lavish of my presence been, 
 So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men, 
 So stale and cheap to vulgar company, 
 Opinion, that did help me to the crown, 
 Had still kept loyal to possession. . . . 
 Thus did I keep my person fresh and new ;
 
 84 I SOMETIMES THINK v 
 
 for us here is, that the value of a moving picture of 
 a great man is lowered, if he is posing for it. There 
 is no man too great to be filmed, if only he be uncon- 
 scious of the process, or absolutely indifferent to it : 
 but it is said that the one King who has posed in a 
 group taken for his political advantage is Ferdinand 
 of Bulgaria. Sic oculos, sic ilk manus, sic ora ferebat. 
 Much comfort will his people have of this moving 
 picture of him, six months hence. 
 
 But the Somme pictures : the official pictures, 
 taken for our Government, of the advance on the 
 Western Front. A moving picture of a little group 
 of great men, behaving as the camera expects them 
 to behave, might deservedly fail to have power over 
 us. But here are legions of men, not under orders 
 from the camera, but employed in a business of 
 
 My presence, like a robe pontifical, 
 Ne'er seen but wondered at : and so my state, 
 Seldom, but sumptuous, showed like a feast, 
 And won, by rareness, such solemnity." 
 Then, the contrasted behaviour of Richard, who 
 
 "... gave his countenance, against his name, 
 To laugh at gibing boys, and stand the push 
 Of every beardless vain comparative ; 
 Grew a companion to the common streets, 
 Enfeoff d himself to popularity ; 
 That, being daily swallowed by men's eyes, 
 They surfeited with honey, and began 
 To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little 
 More than a little is by much too much. 
 So, when he had occasion to be seen, 
 He was but as the cuckoo is in June, 
 Heard, not regarded."
 
 v MOVING PICTURES 85 
 
 tragedy such as the world has never suffered till now : 
 men great, not in the Westminster- Abbey sense of 
 the word, but in the greatness of their purpose, in 
 their unconquerable discipline, their endurance : they 
 go into the presence of Death without looking back, 
 and they come out from it laughing, some of them : 
 you see them treading Fear under their feet, you see 
 Heaven, revealed in their will, flinging itself on the 
 screen. You and I, safe and snug over here, let us 
 receive what they give us, their example. 
 
 Be content to see these pictures once : they are too 
 tragic to be taken lightly : but see them, if it be only 
 to understand what the picture-palaces might achieve 
 for your country. That which began as a scientific 
 toy has become a world-power. Certain firms, pre- 
 ferring money to honour, have turned it to vile uses, 
 and have proved themselves to be enemies of the 
 people. But things will mend : they will mend very 
 slowly, but the War will help them to mend : and 
 the picture-palaces will gradually learn to take us 
 seriously, and to play down to us less, and up to us 
 more.
 
 VI 
 
 LONDON PRIDE 
 
 Old Londoners, as they drift about the streets, find 
 themselves, now and again, in the company of one of 
 the Immortals : but he stays only for a moment : 
 not long enough to be questioned or worshipped. 
 Mostly, it is when they are looking at a new building, 
 a new statue, or a new advertisement : and the old 
 Londoners are just opening their lips to say Now I 
 do like that, when they are aware that Ruskin is close 
 to them, frowning with angry contempt at what they 
 were about to admire. And immediately they begin 
 to see with his eyes, and to judge with his judgment. 
 It is not that they ape him, or pose as critics, or think 
 themselves to be superior people. His spirit is upon 
 them : he does it by just being there. He compels 
 them to look through the art to the artist ; and to 
 detect, in faults of workmanship, faults of workers. 
 In his presence, they begin to discover little telltale 
 signs of vanity in the building, commonplace in the 
 statue, vulgarity in the advertisement. They have
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 87 
 
 a sense that all three are works of trade, not works of 
 art : that they neither give happiness to the people 
 who see them, nor gave happiness to the people who 
 made them : and that there is something wrong with 
 all of them, which is something wrong with all 
 of us. 
 
 Perplexed by this vague sense of something wrong 
 somewhere, these haunted men turn their attention to 
 the life round them : that small percentage of " all of 
 us " which at the moment is in the street. It is an 
 average sample of London life : it appears to be 
 satisfied with itself, and with things as they are : it 
 does not appear to be depressed by the ugliness of 
 anything, nor to be exalted by the beauty of any- 
 thing. Then they look again at the building, statue, 
 advertisement, or whatever it may be : and the faults 
 are still there, and more evident than before. 
 
 At last, a game of battledore and shuttlecock is 
 started. The old Londoners are the shuttlecock. 
 The objects in front of them are one battledore : the 
 life round them is the other battledore. It was 
 Ruskin who invented this heart-searching- game : the 
 master of all of us, the greatest prophet, except 
 Shakespeare, that we ever had : whose judgment of 
 us and our works is of everlasting authority. He 
 saw through and through externalities into the heart 
 of things : and the spirit of his teaching will endure 
 till the world is too cold for us and our works, and 
 London comes to the natural end of its existence.
 
 88 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 Is it possible, to imagine the end of the existence 
 of London ? There are people who pretend that 
 they can tell our futures by the lines on our hands : 
 but the lines on the map of London tell us nothing 
 of the future of London. When I look at the palm of 
 my hand, I am able to foresee one event, and one only, 
 in the days which are still due to me : and that is my 
 death at the end of them. But I cannot imagine the 
 death of London : though Nineveh and Troy and Car- 
 thage are dead and gone, and many cities are dying 
 of old age. They are exhausted, they have gone 
 too far to recover ; they are kept alive by tourists, as 
 a man at the last may be kept alive by stimulants : 
 but nothing more can be done for them. I am think- 
 ing of Ravenna, what is left of an Imperial city that 
 was many miles long. A few great buildings remain, 
 so beautiful that they are among the chief wonders 
 of Italy : and on them Ravenna survives. Theodoric 
 had his palace there, Dante died and is buried there : 
 the Ravenna churches and baptisteries proclaim by 
 their magnificence what the city was. It has had its 
 life : it stays above ground, waiting to die. Cities 
 have no title from the Gods to exist for ever. 
 
 But none of us can think of London dead and 
 gone. At most, we can imagine it, ages hence, 
 invaded, or burned, or changed out of recognition : 
 and our imaginations are not given to us to be wasted
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 89 
 
 like that. Still, we may fairly try to look a little way 
 ahead. But if we are to look ahead, we must look 
 round. That is the method of all prophets : they 
 look ahead by looking round, and they look round by 
 looking ahead. Let us take our London as it is, 
 that we may guess, you and I, at your London as it 
 will be. I hope, if you desire length of days, that 
 you will be here in 1980. What will be your sur- 
 roundings in that year? Consider your present 
 surroundings : and, that we may make a beginning 
 somewhere, consider the present noisiness of London. 
 If it should continue at its present rate of increase, I 
 doubt whether you would greatly desire to continue 
 to live till 1980. 
 
 The wise man, the captain of his soul, refuses to be 
 turned from his course by the din of the streets : he 
 sets himself not to mind it. But some of us have 
 not this masterful self-control, and are hardly able to 
 be indifferent to noises. An old gentleman of my 
 acquaintance, on a visit to London, started to walk 
 from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus. He did not 
 get far : he was quickly stunned by the noise of 
 Oxford Street. This is Hell, he said. Not a few 
 of us in London are thus tormented ; especially 
 invalids and nervous folk. Besides, though you may 
 accustom yourself to incessant noises, it does not 
 follow that they are altogether harmless to you. 
 Rivetters and boiler-makers may accustom themselves 
 to the incessant reverberation of hammered metal :
 
 9 o I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 but some of them become subject to " boiler-makers' 
 deafness." A small bird in a cage might accustom 
 itself to the beating of a tea-tray close to its cage : 
 but probably its nerves would suffer — to say nothing 
 of its offspring. You have almost to shout, in the 
 great thoroughfares, to be heard. The fear is, that 
 the play and subtlety of your mind may be dulled by 
 the weight of the noise. Or you may be driven to 
 the other extreme, and become not insensitive but 
 over-sensitive. 
 
 Judge the noisiness of London with Ruskin's 
 judgment. Every noise that is made is the fault of 
 the person who makes it. If the noisiness of London 
 were inanimate, like the sound of thunder or of a 
 waterfall, we should not be offended by it. We are 
 offended by it because it is animate. It bears wit- 
 ness, that the makers of it are disregarding the rights 
 of pedestrians, shop-assistants, students, tired folk 
 asleep, sick folk awake with pain. That is why the 
 noises made by people whistling for taxis, and by 
 motorists, are so vexatious to us. All these noises 
 are harsh and abrupt : and some of them are down- 
 right imitations of the animal sounds of the body : 
 and every one of them is made by some person or 
 persons unknown. Even the chauffeurs of well- 
 appointed motors, with elegant people inside, make 
 these noises : it is hard to believe that the elegant 
 people care either for us or for music. Likewise, the 
 rougher sort of motor-cyclist makes them, as he tears
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 91 
 
 along, endangering his life and ours, knocking the 
 traffic to right and left of him. We can hardly 
 believe that he is quite unconscious of the effect 
 which he is producing. Surely it gives him some 
 pleasure, that he can force us to hear him far off and 
 to get out of his way. Neither birth, nor education, 
 nor achievement, ever stirred a finger to make him 
 remarkable : but, like most of us, he desires to have 
 power : so he flies at us, hooting. He does not want 
 us to be fond of him : Oderint dum metuant might 
 serve him for a motto : he does seem to want us to be 
 afraid of him. 
 
 Other offenders are the coal-merchants, brewers, 
 furniture-movers, builders, and so forth, who put on 
 the streets huge grinding engines and trucks, because 
 it pays them thus to shift their goods from place to 
 place, and the law is on their side. 
 
 Not London, but Londoners, are the offence : not 
 things, but thinkers who will not take the trouble to 
 think. It follows, that the offensiveness of this or 
 that noise is in inverse proportion to the number of 
 persons who are making it. The noises which attend 
 some public service, useful to all of us, are more 
 tolerable than those which attend the behaviour of 
 one man : the clang and rattle of trams and omnibuses 
 are less offensive than the drumming of a solitary 
 motor-bicycle. For the public vehicles befriend us, 
 not intimidate us : they are faithful goodnatured 
 creatures, obedient to the word of authority : but the
 
 92 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 motor-cyclist, unless he be a soldier, a policeman, or 
 a postman, is of no service to the public. He may 
 be all by himself, or he may whirl at his side a young 
 lady in a receptacle of the shape of a medicine-spoon : 
 either way, he is amusing himself at our expense : 
 and that is why the jabber which he makes with his 
 engine so vexes us, and the blast of his hooter sounds 
 as if he were swearing at us. We are offended not 
 by his machine but by him. Perhaps we ought to 
 transfer our adjectives — brutal, odious, vulgar, and 
 so forth — from noises to their makers : it might serve 
 to remind them of the immorality of noisiness. To 
 make purposeless noises in London is just as bad as 
 to leave a litter of papers and egg-shells after a picnic 
 in the country. It adds insult to injury : the noise 
 is the injury, and the person who makes it is the 
 insult. If noises, like paper and egg-shells, were 
 visible objects, and we could see them lying about, 
 where the maker of them had thrown them, we should 
 say that he or she was not considerate of other 
 people's feelings : we might even say something more 
 uncivil. 
 
 We are bound thus to regard the noisiness of 
 London as an affair of conduct, of London ethics : 
 but we can hardly judge between the rights of the 
 individual and the rights of the community. How 
 much noise has one Londoner any right to make? 
 It is a difficult question. Only, you and I ought to 
 note this sign of the times, that there are so many
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 93 
 
 disturbers of the peace of London. You and I can 
 run away from them : but they represent the power 
 of the people, and we cannot run away from the 
 power of the people. It neither is shocked at its 
 own strength, nor sees why you and I should be, 
 nor cares if we are: — 
 
 O, it is excellent 
 To have a giant's strength ; but it is tyrannous 
 To use it like a giant — 
 
 But things are mending, under the hand of the 
 War. Pleasure makes less of the noise than it made 
 before 19 14: and national service makes more: and 
 that is as it ought to be. Not for many years after 
 the War, if ever, will London relapse to the ways of 
 that merciless individualism which was in fashion 
 before the War. 
 
 Within your life-time, the noisiness of London 
 will be restrained, with some success, in more ways 
 than one. Motor-vehicles of quieter habits will be 
 invented. Main roads will be coated with some 
 silencing compound of asphalt and rubber : already 
 we have a Lethaean moment of it, on the roadway 
 under the Euston Hotel : the world recedes > it dis- 
 appears^ for that one moment. The Government will 
 " do something " : the Home Office, a few months 
 ago, forbade the use of taxi-whistles at night near 
 hospitals for wounded officers in London : there is a 
 thousandfold more waiting and wanting to be done. 
 Best of all, the wilful makers of noises will begin to
 
 94 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 be ashamed of their conduct : that quicker sympathy, 
 which the War has driven-in to our hearts, will not 
 fail us : and the insolence of unnecessary whistling 
 and hooting will be toned down by purely spiritual 
 influences. 
 
 II 
 
 But noise, after all, is a mere incident of traffic. 
 Think what the traffic of London is. Under your 
 feet, in the bowels of the earth, we tear round and 
 round, continuous miles of us, in tubes and tunnels. 
 On the surface of London, the shorn and parcelled 
 traffic thrusts this way and that, crossing and circling 
 and interlacing. You may live to see it overhead, 
 in full swing: vast public air-ships, private aeroplanes, 
 and all the sky policed with little guardian craft, 
 whirring like poised hawk-moths, to keep the flying 
 populace obedient to the rule of the road of the air. 
 
 Probably, the underground traffic will not be 
 greatly increased during your life-time. By looping 
 the loop, not vertically but obliquely, perhaps we 
 might gain one more tube : but London already is so 
 undermined that, if it were to split, water and gas 
 and drainage and electricity and human lives would 
 pour from it in torrents. Surely, not much more 
 traffic can be diverted from the surface to the deep of 
 London. The surface must be made to afford room 
 for it. But what can be done, beyond what has been 
 done, to relieve the congestion of the traffic ? Where
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 95 
 
 streets are rebuilt, they are built of a goodly width. 
 What more can be done ? 
 
 This phrase, the relief of congestion^ is borrowed 
 from Medicine. A congested liver is relieved by 
 abstinence ; a congested brain, by rest and silence : 
 but we cannot ask the traffic to abstain, rest, or be 
 silent. The physician, it seems, must call-in the 
 surgeon : there is need of operative treatment. Some 
 of our surgeons are so skilful that they can join-up 
 a blocked artery to a neighbouring vein : but this 
 operation cannot be performed on London : for where 
 are the veins? Perhaps great roads will be made, 
 running straight from mid-London to all parts of the 
 country : we hear talk of these " arterial roads " : 
 they would be, of course, arterio-venous. Looking 
 at what has been done, of late years, to relieve the 
 traffic, we find that more than one operation has sadly 
 disfigured London. At Marble Arch, the Park has 
 been cut back as it were with a knife : the Arch, 
 which was the entrance to the Park, is now isolated 
 on a refuge, as if it were waiting to get across to 
 Sussex House. At Hyde Park Corner, likewise, the 
 Green Park has been cut back ; and the angles at 
 which our lives may be taken are more numerous 
 than ever. 
 
 You will see other improvements of this kind, 
 before London is many years older. They will be 
 invented to relieve the traffic of London, and to 
 gratify the pride of London. There are two sorts
 
 96 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 of London Pride : one is the most unpretentious 
 plant that ever set itself to console a back-garden : 
 but there is a London Pride which can only flourish 
 on richer soil, such as it has found in Regent Street 
 and the Mall. 
 
 The changes wrought in the Mall are more proud 
 than beautiful. The pleasant side-aisles of small 
 trees have been elbowed away by a Processional Road, 
 very wide and very straight. Where the path from 
 the Mall used to slip quietly through an old-fashioned 
 gate into the country magic of St. James's Park, there 
 now are big stone pillars with big stone balls on 
 them. Where the slope of grass and the lilacs 
 (surely there were lilacs), at the edge of the Orna- 
 mental Water, so pleased the eye and made such a 
 good foreground to the Palace, there now is a heavy 
 wall in the style of the Thames Embankment : as if 
 the Ornamental Water were tidal, and the Palace not 
 safe. We have paid in trees for these improve- 
 ments: and one tree, in mid-London, is worth many 
 tons of masonry. Look at Piccadilly Circus, look at 
 Trafalgar Square, how they are sick for want of green 
 trees. 
 
 Piccadilly Circus — there are ways of avoiding it, 
 back-streets of escape, if you are on foot. But think 
 how different it would look with trees. Imagine that 
 fountain removed, which is no fountain, but a gloomy 
 mass of wet metal. The winged figure is Gilbert's 
 work, and is beautiful : it would add dignity and
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 97 
 
 grace to an old Italian garden, among cypresses and 
 roses : it would be well placed in the National 
 Gallery, as a treasure of noble workmanship : but 
 Piccadilly Circus — see it with your eyes shut, that 
 central deadweight gone, and half-a-dozen big plane- 
 trees there, and in the middle of them a jet of water 
 leaping twenty feet high, turning sunshine to 
 diamonds. 
 
 Trafalgar Square, with a hold on history, which 
 Piccadilly Circus has not, can better afford to be 
 careless of appearances : it does not mind how it 
 looks, so long as it uplifts the image of Nelson — 
 
 Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world, 
 Like a Colossus ; and we petty men 
 Walk under his huge legs — 
 
 In this present year, the unending record of our 
 losses brought us the news, in June, of Lord 
 Kitchener's death. If it were possible to set apart 
 in London, for a memorial to him, a site equal in 
 extent to Trafalgar Square, how would you desire to 
 see it laid out? Consider what has been done to 
 " the finest site in Europe." One hero is in the sky, 
 and three are on the pavement ; Gordon is concealed 
 behind the column ; and King George the Fourth 
 edges himself and his horse into the company of the 
 heroes. The round basins like soap-dishes, now dry, 
 now filled with turbid suds ; the little stone posts, 
 like stumps of teeth ; the featureless parapet, the 
 dismal pavement with a hole in it where the Bakerloo 
 
 I.S.T. G
 
 98 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 tube discharges its contents ; the lions with recruit- 
 ing-appeals round their necks, like blind men's dogs 
 with begging-labels; the plinth of the column handed 
 over as a platform — we have so neglected the whole 
 place that it has become a No Man's Ground, a 
 disgrace to us. Gordon looks down, that he may 
 not see the ugly desert which we have made : and 
 King Charles turns his back on it, preferring to look 
 toward the scene of his death. Surely, after the 
 War, we shall be able to improve Trafalgar Square. 
 Trees, to begin with, lots of little trees, if it were 
 only in tubs, vivid green tubs ; and flower-beds, and 
 rhododendron-clumps, and some tall palm-trees round 
 the column ; and comfortable seats, and a cheerful 
 kiosk or two for the sale of newspapers, and a shelter 
 where the omnibuses pick us up and put us down. 
 Later, when we have the money for it, we could set 
 to work on the stumps and the soap-dishes. Only, 
 let us have some trees, to begin with. May you live 
 to see trees along many London thoroughfares : not 
 miserable saplings in iron petticoats, but real trees, 
 avenues of them. That storm, which last winter 
 destroyed so many elms in Kensington Gardens and 
 elsewhere, was an ill wind that blew nobody any 
 good : it would have done better if it had wrecked 
 some of our buildings and swept away some of our 
 statues. 
 
 It would be a grand thing for London, if either 
 Nature or Germany could follow a selective method
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 99 
 
 of destruction. I am prepared to give valuable 
 information to the enemy : I have long had my eye 
 on the buildings which I want him to smash. After 
 one of the Zeppelin raids over London, I wished, as 
 I looked at a damaged house in a back-street of dire 
 poverty, that the Germans had pounded the whole 
 street to dust and ashes. There are thousands and 
 thousands of houses in London, not all of them in 
 slums, which ought to be destroyed : nothing short 
 of destruction would avail : for basement and area 
 are the curse of them. Take anv street of decent 
 poverty, with houses at a rental of £60 or ^70, 
 and more than one family in each house : walk the 
 length of it, up one side and down the other : and at 
 each house inspect that sink of iniquity, the area. 
 Morris, poet and artist and Socialist, dreamed of 
 London past, London white and small and clean : I 
 dream of London future, without basements. What 
 is it, to live in a "fairly good" basement? You 
 descend into it by dark breakneck steps ; it is damp, 
 ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, stuffy when it ought to be 
 cool, and biting-cold when it ought to be warm. In 
 its cupboards the blackbeetle, blatta orientalis, shares 
 groceries with the mouse. Into the area come fog, 
 rain, dust, soot, and the refuse of the pavement, but 
 little sunshine or fresh air. Across this narrow pit, 
 the kitchen-window stares at a grimy wall and the 
 door of a coal-cellar. I doubt whether vou would 
 retain, under the average conditions of basement-life,
 
 ioo I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 your controlled nerves and your placid temper. And 
 when the spirit moves you to make friends with the 
 poorest of the poor, you will visit slum-basements, 
 where rheumatism and consumption and drink 
 scribble their names on the dirty wallpaper. They 
 say — it is a very stupid saying — that God made the 
 country, and Man made the town : they ought to 
 add, that the Devil made the basements. What will 
 be done, in the next half-century, to abolish the 
 shame of them ? Happily, the very worst are con- 
 demned and closed by our medical officers of health : 
 but that good work does not go far enough. We 
 cannot blow-up or pull-down miles of streets, and 
 rebuild them : the future of London will continue to 
 display this mark of the beast. Only, we ought to 
 spend less money on vain-glorious architecture of 
 questionable beauty, and more on the redemption 
 of London from unquestionable ugliness and 
 unwholesomeness. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Master, said one of the disciples, see what manner 
 of stones and what buildings are here. Doubtless, 
 his first sight of Jerusalem ; he was staring wide- 
 eyed at the Temple, and the fine two-storied houses ; 
 they so impressed him that he could not keep silent : 
 and our Lord's answer came, with a touch of con- 
 tempt for the mere size of these great buildings. 
 
 There is plenty to be said in favour of size, but
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 101 
 
 there is nothing to be said in favour of dispropor- 
 tionate size. No great building is a grand building, 
 unless it has a grand purpose. St. Paul's does well 
 to dwarf the houses in St. Paul's Churchyard : for 
 it is " the house of God,'' and all houses of God 
 have the right to dwarf all houses of men, and their 
 churchyards too : not their memories, but their 
 graves. But there is a big house in Mayfair, and a 
 big house in Oxford Street, which are not, in the 
 ordinary acceptance of the phrase, houses of God : 
 they are a private house and a business house : and 
 we get no pleasure from seeing them dwarf their 
 neighbours. All questions of size are spiritual ques- 
 tions. For shopping, Oxford Street ; for rank and 
 fashion, Mayfair ; for religion, St. Paul's. That bit 
 of Mayfair was one of the best-proportioned streets 
 in London, till that house was put in it, a feature too 
 large for the rest of the face. 
 
 Have no reverence for the mere size of any build- 
 ing, nor for its mere weight and solidity : think first 
 what the building is for. The size of the dome of 
 St. Paul's is delightful, because St. Paul's is St. 
 Paul's : the massiveness of the Tower of London is 
 delightful, because it was built as a fortress and a 
 prison. But weight and solidity without sufficient 
 purpose are not worth looking at. I am thinking 
 of the Gaiety Theatre, and of a business-house in 
 Regent Street. The one provides light amusement ; 
 the other provides gossamer goods, laces, handker-
 
 102 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 chiefs, lawn as white as driven snow. For these 
 uses, very high walls of marble and of granite are 
 excessive. The theatre, being in the Italian style, 
 might do for a castle for Caesar Boro-ia : the linen 
 
 to o 
 
 warehouse, armed in Northern granite, might do for 
 Macbeth : but why should either of them, dealing in 
 such flimsy goods, lay such a heavy weight on earth? 
 And why is there a gold angel, with a trumpet for 
 the Day of Judgment, on the roof of the Gaiety 
 Theatre ? At Chartres, on the roof of the cathedral, 
 I have seen a mighty angel, with a proper sense of 
 the world's tragedies, slowly turning in the wind this 
 way and that, as if it could wake with its trumpet all 
 the quick and the dead in Chartres. But this Gaiety 
 angel is advertising something light, to make us 
 forget anything so like the Day of Judgment as the 
 War. I find it as offensive as its neighbour the 
 Gryphon : I long to see it down, and its place taken 
 by a gold spike or knob. 
 
 Going west from this unlucky angel, you come to 
 the figures on the house of the British Medical 
 Association : which are obscure of meaning, and too 
 large for their niches ; doing justice neither to the 
 beauty and the suffering of the human body, nor to 
 health and disease, nor to the greatness of Medicine 
 and the importance of the Association : you welcome, 
 after them, with a feeling of relief, the neat globe on 
 the top of the Coliseum. Going north from the 
 Coliseum, you reach Whitefield's Tabernacle in the
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 103 
 
 Tottenham Court Road before you see any other 
 building of equal demerit : there is a haberdasher's 
 shop, on the way, with huge stone dummies of quite 
 indescribable hideousness, but I will not tell you 
 where it is. If you do not care to go north, cross 
 the desert of Trafalgar Square, and look at the statue 
 of King Charles. You may chance to see it when 
 the memorial wreaths are round it, with inscriptions 
 on them, from people who believe that our present 
 King is one of a long line of usurpers. Read the 
 strange history of this statue : admire the beauty of 
 the weather-worn carvings on the pedestal : admire 
 to your heart's content the beauty of the statue, the 
 dignity of its pose, the quiet visionary look of the 
 face : it is the King himself. It even has the power 
 to make you see what you think of him. If you are 
 on the side of the Parliament, you see his narrowness, 
 his obstinacy : if you are on the side of the King, 
 you see the purity of his faith, and his invincible 
 belief in the goodness of his cause. 
 
 Go back here — it sounds like that race-game which 
 small children play — to the Palace. Imagine the day 
 come for our King, in solemn state, to visit St. 
 Paul's, there to give thanks for Victory and Peace. 
 He is met, as he leaves the Palace, by the two figures, 
 on the Victoria Memorial, which represent Labour. 
 This place of honour, facing the Palace, was doubt- 
 less conferred on them and their lions by Royal com- 
 mand : and I congratulate them, but with a little
 
 104 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 touch of jealousy, for I belong to a profession as 
 laborious as Labour, and as loyal. But no artist 
 would venture to design a statue to represent the 
 Professional Classes : it would be unsightly, for it 
 would be expected to dress like a gentleman : and it 
 would not have a lion : though the Professional 
 Classes are just as valiant as Labour at shutting the 
 mouths of lions. But Labour — if the phrase may 
 be forgiven — has got its foot in, opposite the Palace : 
 and there they are, this man and this woman, standing 
 before the King for his People : and I wish that the 
 base of the Memorial had been made to turn round 
 by machinery, so that Art and Science, who now look 
 idly down the Mall, could sometimes revolve into the 
 place of honour. I wish also that the frieze of the 
 Memorial were not mermaids and mermen and dol- 
 phins, which have nothing to do with the Victorian 
 Age, but one grand continuous historical pageant of 
 the Navy, from galleons to super-Dreadnoughts, 
 encircling and upholding the Throne for ever and 
 ever. 
 
 From the Memorial, along the barren stretch of 
 the Mall, comes the King, on this day of days, to the 
 Admiralty Arch. It is divided against itself, half 
 Admiralty, half Arch. Two stone ladies watch over 
 it, one of them nursing a little gun. The Arch is 
 not a triumphal arch : it is a right of way under a 
 block of Government offices ; along the top of them, 
 is an ill-omened Latin inscription, which not one in
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 105 
 
 a thousand of us can translate. Real triumphal 
 arches have nothing over them, nor ever had, unless 
 it were some noble and eloquent work of sculpture, 
 some winged figure or chariot-group. Through this 
 archway, under one knows not what, the King passes, 
 he who on this day ought to have nothing overhead 
 but flags and garlands and sunshine, and the whole 
 span of the sky for a triumphal arch. 
 
 Go down Whitehall slowly, dreaming more of the 
 present than of the past. To your left, the War 
 Office ; to your right, the Admiralty, the Horse 
 Guards, Downing Street : War is their beadle, War 
 is their vengeance. Whitehall may be looking much 
 as usual, except for more crowd in it ; but you are 
 in the midst of Imperial affairs so grave and so urgent 
 that the past is hidden by the present. But find and 
 read the little tablet on the Banqueting Hall : so many 
 Londoners miss it. Then, by that drinking-fountain 
 which was very cheerful and bright when it was new, 
 but has become dull and tarnished, to the steps of 
 Westminster Hospital ; and look at the towers of 
 the Abbey. They are nothing to be proud of : the 
 design of them was completed, two hundred years 
 too late, by Wren, whose genius was not for that 
 style of architecture : they bear witness to its death, 
 not to its life. The front of the Abbey has a way 
 of appearing wide and stately on fine days when you 
 are happy, but narrow and blank on wet days when 
 you are miserable : all large buildings have this trick
 
 106 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 of swelling and shrinking with changes in the weather 
 and your temper. 
 
 St. Margaret's Church, close to the Abbey, like a 
 small white kitten lying close to its mother, possesses 
 a window which has no equal in all London for beauty 
 and for history. At present, this window has been 
 taken away and hidden somewhere, until the times do 
 alter. When the War is over, and there is no more 
 fear of Zeppelins, we shall get our treasures back : 
 London is not London, with Queen Elizabeth under 
 sandbags in the Abbey, and St. Margaret's without its 
 window. Time enough to study St. Margaret's, 
 with the help of Hare's Walks in London, when it 
 has recovered its good looks. Meanwhile, note how 
 the Abbey has decided the style of the modern build- 
 ings round it. There is Westminster Hospital, which 
 is stage-castle Gothic : and Broad Sanctuary, which is 
 civic Gothic ; and the Houses of Parliament, bearing 
 witness, by their quiet beauty, to the revival of 
 Northern architecture in England : and the new West- 
 minster Guildhall, delighting Londoners with the 
 excellence of its design and the carefulness of its 
 sculpture. All round you, the power of the Abbey 
 is confessed, and the example of the Abbey is copied, 
 if not with success, yet with decent regard : and the 
 dear little column in memory of the Westminster 
 boys who died in the Crimean and Indian wars 
 divides its allegiance, as do all Westminster boys, 
 between the Abbey and the School.
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 107 
 
 Thus the City of Westminster, just here, is a city 
 that is at unity with itself. I remember a Westmin- 
 ster boy, when somebody praised the beauty of St. 
 Paul's, saying Well, you see, 1 was brought up under 
 the shadow of the Abbey. That is the distinctive 
 mark of this group of buildings : they were brought 
 up under the shadow of the Abbey. 
 
 Now turn round, quickly. Never mind the looks 
 of the Westminster Palace Hotel. It has just ceased 
 to be a hotel, and has become a political club-house. 
 Nobody expects either hotels or club-houses to take 
 after Abbeys. Neither is it a very ugly building. 
 Besides, if it were, it still could answer, as Weir of 
 Hermiston answered when he was told that his 
 behaviour on the bench, at the trial of Duncan Jopp, 
 was a hideous business — 
 
 Heedious ! I never gave twa thoughts to heediousness, I have 
 no call to be bonny. I'm a man that gets through with my day's 
 business, and let that suffice. 
 
 But look well at the Westminster Central Building. 
 It seems to have set itself to disregard the feelings 
 of the Abbey. So did its predecessor on that site, 
 the Westminster Aquarium ; an ill-fated place of 
 entertainment, where fishes in tanks died, it was said, 
 from the vibration of the District Railway. There 
 also a young lady called Zazel was shot, twice a day, 
 out of a dummy cannon : and there, in later years — I 
 went to see her in the interests of medical science —
 
 108 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 was a Spotted Lady. The Westminster Central 
 Building, surely, might have expressed its regret for 
 the architecture of the Aquarium, by exhibiting the 
 utmost purity and restraint in its own style. It 
 might have conceded that much to the offended 
 Abbey. It might at least have refrained from calling 
 itself the Westminster Central Building. There is 
 only one central building in Westminster : and that 
 is the Abbey. 
 
 Let us not misjudge this new building. It is 
 admirably arranged, inside, for its purposes. It 
 includes not only the Central Hall of the Wesleyan 
 Church, and a Branch office of the London City and 
 Midland Bank, but a dozen other offices. The multi- 
 tude of its purposes seems to have affected the general 
 scheme of its decoration. Over the chief entrance, 
 two large figures droop unsupported, neither standing 
 nor sitting, but festooned. They do not tell us what 
 they represent : they can hardly be Religion and 
 Banking. Other ornaments are Roman helmets, 
 Roman cuirasses, modern flags, eagles, lictors' rods 
 with axes, lictors' rods without axes, huge lyres, 
 cymbals, and other musical instruments, huge Roman 
 handlamps, not burning steadily, but seeming to have 
 gone out and to be smoking in a draught, prows of 
 Roman ships, and modern crowns. Examining the 
 huge corbels, you discover that they are the four 
 " mystical creatures " of the Book of Revelations, 
 repeated over and over like the pattern of a wall-
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE 109 
 
 paper, above windows which are labelled London City 
 and Midland Bank. 
 
 What is it all about ? If the vast building were a 
 concert-hall, we could understand the musical instru- 
 ments ; though we might criticise the mixing-up of 
 French horns and flageolets with Roman lyres. If it 
 were a drill-hall, we could understand the armour ; 
 though we might criticise the mixing-up of modern 
 flags with Roman cuirasses. But what of the lictors' 
 rods, the Roman prows, the modern crowns? What 
 of the four mystical beasts, recurring like the pattern 
 of a wall-paper? Why have the lamps gone out? 
 The trail of their smoke is two feet long. Are they 
 an emblem of Architecture as a foolish virgin? 
 
 All this bewildering stone-work is lavished on the 
 two sides of the building which everybody sees. The 
 other two sides are startlingly plain : I could find 
 nothing but two small masks, of the type which 
 Ruskin called the " ignoble grotesque," yawning 
 horribly at each other : and a few bunches of grapes. 
 It is evident, that we are expected to admire and to 
 enjoy the two sides which are dressed up. Well, try : 
 give time to it : make up your mind, if you can, why 
 each ornament is where it is and what it is. Take 
 the building as an illustrated book. What do you 
 learn from these illustrations? What does the book 
 teach you? What is it saying or trying to say to 
 you? Impossible, that it should have no message 
 for you, not a word for you : all these tons of stone
 
 no I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 devices, surely, were not made and affixed to the 
 building for no more use than the two tail-buttons on 
 a morning-coat. 
 
 Yet, try as you will, it will be hard for you to 
 understand this building : harder still, to get any help 
 or teaching or pleasure from it. The mere size and 
 weight of it will not awe you : and the crowd of 
 quarrelling ornaments, all talking at once, will only 
 confuse you. What is it all for? What does it all 
 mean? Truly, if you stand there till you have 
 answered these questions, it is probable that a police- 
 man will tell you to move on. 
 
 If, as in the fairy-story, you were allowed three 
 wishes for London, be content with one. Wish for 
 Ruskin back again. We have no prophet of Lon- 
 don. We have prophets — there is one who might 
 have done anything with us, might have made any- 
 thing of us, if he had not so despised us — but there 
 is no man doing what Ruskin did for us. You must 
 have his spirit in you, before you can be a thoroughly 
 good Londoner. Begin now, right away : teach 
 yourself, so far as you are able, to see with his eyes 
 and to judge with his judgment. Begin with his 
 Edinburgh lectures on Architecture and Painting : 
 they are in Everyman's Library ; price a shilling. 
 Then, the Crown of Wild Olive, which also is in 
 Everyman's Library ; read, especially, the Preface, 
 and the Bradford lecture on Traffic. When you 
 have carefully read these lectures and taken them to
 
 vi LONDON PRIDE in 
 
 heart, examine yourself: not by writing, but by 
 looking. Visit some large work of London architec- 
 ture : not old London, but new London : some 
 brand-new Colossus for public amusement or for 
 shopping or for civic affairs : some building which 
 dwarfs its neighbours, and calls aloud to be admired. 
 First, measure its size and its strength, not as 
 valuable in themselves, but as valuable, or valueless, 
 in proportion to the size and strength of its purposes. 
 Then, estimate the worth of its adornments. If 
 there be any lettering, inscription, or advertisement 
 on it, note every word that it says ; and note, with 
 equal care, what it leaves unsaid. If there be statu- 
 ary on it, make-up your mind over each statue. Is 
 it clearly representative, is it well designed, is it 
 pleasant to look at, is it in the place where it ought 
 to be ? For instance, the figures of athletes, over 
 the house of Gamage, are delightful : they are too 
 high up, but they are delightful. But the nymphs 
 over the public-house in the Tottenham Court Road, 
 and the Duke of York atop of his column, and Athene 
 over the portico of the Athenaeum, are not delightful. 
 You might compose an essay on this question, why 
 Gamage's athletes are right, and the nymphs and the 
 Duke and Athene are wrong. If the building over 
 which you are examining yourself be devoid of 
 statuary, note what other adornments it has : what 
 knobs or spikes or flourishes of cast-iron, swags of 
 fruit and foliage, grinning or scowling masks,
 
 ii2 I SOMETIMES THINK vi 
 
 cherubs, or gargoyle-creatures. Inspect each of them 
 at your leisure. Does it please you, does it please 
 anybody, did it please the men who made it? Never 
 mind the " general idea w of the building : refuse to 
 " take it as a whole " : narrow your judgment to this 
 or that detail, one at a time. Question each separate 
 cherub, What are you there for? and each mask, 
 Why are you pulling that face at me? Judge point 
 by point the evidence of these witnesses : let them 
 tell you their sad story, how they were made like that, 
 and cannot help being what they are : see, in the 
 spirit of Ruskin, through them, to the makers of 
 them. 
 
 Happily, when you have learned, so far as you 
 can, to see things as he saw them, your eyes will be 
 opened not only to the faults but to the everlasting 
 beauty and splendour of London. Any one of us, 
 with average wits, can find fault all day long. You 
 will not stop at fault-finding : you will enter into the 
 imperishable enjoyment of your London, you created 
 for it, and it for you.
 
 VII 
 
 UNNATURAL SELECTION 
 
 Children, said Huxley, cannot be too careful over 
 the choice of their parents. You never knew him, 
 nor heard him talk, nor watched the pale, keen, 
 heavily-lined face, which could look so hard and so 
 gentle, with its gleaming eyes, and its mane of grey 
 hair thrown back : you were not here in those days. 
 If it were possible that you should think any days 
 so great as these in which you are, I would write of 
 the greatness of mine when I was of your age. You 
 cannot have Darwin over again : and, if you could, 
 you might find no Huxley to fight his battles for 
 him. 
 
 It is advice as light as air. Winged chaff, 
 solid grain — you need both kinds of good advice, for 
 your soul's health. Boys and girls, kept on a diet 
 of all grain and no chaff, are in danger of contracting 
 spiritual beri-beri. What is beri-beri ? It is multiple 
 peripheral neuritis, with emaciation and exhaustion. 
 India, China, Japan, the Malay Peninsula, are sadly 
 
 I.S.T. H
 
 ii 4 I SOMETIMES THINK vn 
 
 familiar with this disease. It comes of living on 
 milled rice, polished rice ; that is, rice deprived of its 
 husk by milling. In the husk of rice, there is a 
 special substance, a little trace of wonderful stuff, 
 which preserves the exact balance of health in people 
 who live on rice. For want of a touch of this stuff 
 in their diet, many thousands of unhappy natives 
 have suffered and died. Stanton and Fraser and 
 other men of science worked the whole thing out. 
 They produced the disease in pigeons, by merely 
 keeping them on milled rice : they cured the pigeons 
 by giving them rice-husks : they cured men, women, 
 and children by the same method. So it is with the 
 giving of good advice. Milled advice, polished, 
 deprived of every shred of chaff, is indeed good and 
 wholesome, so far as it goes : there is nothing bad 
 or poisonous in it : only, it has not the saving touch 
 of laughter. You digest it with ease ; but you are 
 in danger of spiritual beri-beri : your unbalanced 
 soul, in the midst of plenty, starving. 
 
 So here is an essay on the choice of parents : and 
 I take for my text this saying of Huxley's. I am 
 able to write with authority : for nobody has ever 
 questioned the wisdom of the choice which I made 
 for myself. 
 
 Before you select your parents, you must decide 
 whether you will be the only child ; and, if not, how 
 many brothers and sisters you will have. The notion 
 of being the only child will powerfully attract you.
 
 vii UNNATURAL SELECTION 115 
 
 To have a room all to yourself, the love of both 
 parents all to yourself, and your exalted place in their 
 affairs, and your enjoyment of their belongings, all 
 to yourself — it is a pleasant programme. You would 
 be only, but not alone : you would live in them, and 
 they in you. 
 
 But home-life is not always so kind to only children 
 as it might be. The only child may be spoiled : and 
 the spoiling of a child may be not remediable, like 
 the spoiling of a clean collar, but wellnigh irremedi- 
 able. Perhaps the irremediable spoiling of children 
 is not very common : but when it does happen it is 
 terrible. Again, the only child finds himself at some 
 disadvantage among the grown-up minds : his con- 
 cepts are not of the same size as theirs : he drifts in 
 his cockle-shell boat from one great liner to another 
 — from Father to Mother, from Mother to Nurse : 
 they have secret understandings, they exchange over- 
 head wireless messages which he cannot intercept. 
 It is better to be one of a family of children. I 
 advise you to choose the happy parents of not less 
 than four. You will thus avoid the loneliness of 
 onliness : besides, you will ensure your parents 
 against the misery of losing all if they should lose 
 you. And, of course, you will learn a thousand 
 lessons from the give-and-take between you and the 
 others. 
 
 When you have decided that you will be in a 
 family, you must make up your mind, where you will
 
 u6 I SOMETIMES THINK vn 
 
 come. If you intend to be a girl, I advise you to 
 come first of all : if you intend to be a boy, I advise 
 you to come somewhere about the middle — medio 
 tutissimus ibis. It is said that the eldest of the 
 children is not likely to be the best of the children. 
 If I were going to be a girl, I would take that risk, 
 for the delight of being first of all. The risk, for 
 girls, cannot be very serious : they are fairly safe, 
 wherever they come. They are less subjected than 
 boys to experimental methods of education : and they 
 can assume the office of the first-born not with 
 arrogance but with mild fervour, these young Vestal 
 Virgins, sworn to keep the home-fires burning till 
 they shall kindle from them home-fires of their own. 
 But if I were going to be a boy, I would come some- 
 where about the middle : for this reason — there are 
 other reasons, but this, like the reason why the seven 
 stars are no more than seven, is a pretty reason — that 
 I should wish to have a sister older than myself, and 
 a sister younger than myself. 
 
 Now for the choice of your parents. You choose 
 them, of course, already wed : they found their way 
 to each other's hearts, and were pronounced to be 
 man and wife together, before you thought of having 
 them. And, unless you are set on being the first- 
 born, I advise you to look out for a home not less 
 than five years old. Give them time to learn each 
 other's ways, and to adjust their two lives into one : 
 so many touches go to the making of a home, and
 
 vii UNNATURAL SELECTION 117 
 
 none of them will be hurried or anticipated. Easy 
 enough, to furnish a house : not so easy, to make a 
 home. Choose therefore parents of approved con- 
 stancy to their marriage-vows, and of tested love, 
 who have waited five years, and been examined at the 
 end of them, and taken honours. They have learned 
 how to go hand in hand through pleasures and pains 
 of all sorts and sizes. Then you slip in, and hold a 
 hand in each of yours, and thus disparting them join 
 them closer. 
 
 Boys must be especially careful in the choice of 
 mothers, and girls in the choice of fathers. 
 
 If Mother be very beautiful, so much the better. 
 It is a grand thing for a child, to have a very beautiful 
 mother. Best of all, if she possesses beauty which 
 endures, so that she is a joy for ever not only to her 
 children but to her children's children : that beauty 
 which is in portraits by Reynolds, persuading us that 
 old age is more worth looking at than youth : and, 
 as often as not, it is. There are mothers who are 
 beautiful while they are young, and there are mothers 
 who are beautiful always. Heaven be praised for 
 both. And if your adopted mother, when you are 
 grown-up, has lost her beauty — if the roses have 
 gone from her cheeks, and the lines have come on her 
 forehead, and the corners of her mouth droop, and 
 she looks tired in the morning — then you must ask 
 yourself, how much of it is your doing. Beauty may 
 die in the course of nature, or may be killed, like
 
 u8 I SOMETIMES THINK vn 
 
 Julius Caesar, with many wounds. Et tu y Brute? 
 Had you no part in the deed? Shall I be Antony, 
 and come down from the pulpit, and show the rents 
 in the mantle, and the very wound that was made by 
 the well-beloved ? Not I : the passing of Mother's 
 beauty is a pity, but not a tragedy : and if you did 
 have something to do with it, probably the time when 
 you were so ill took more out of her than all the 
 times when you were so naughty. 
 
 I will not vex you with endless advice : I will not 
 behave as if you were a small child in a toyshop, with 
 half-a-crown to spend — Would you like this engine? 
 Wouldn't you prefer a box of soldiers ? How about 
 a drawing-slate? Don't you want a horse with real 
 skin, not painted? — till the child, distressed almost 
 to tears, flings away the half-crown on the first golli- 
 wog that speaks to him. But there are two points 
 which especially claim your attention. You are 
 making the choice of a life-time. See to it, that she 
 comes of a good family. And see to it, that she is 
 thoroughly practical. 
 
 By a good family I mean, of course, a family with 
 lots of good in it. These are the only good families 
 that there are. Before you engage her, find out all 
 about her people : make her tell you what she has 
 been doing in her last place. Has she been with a 
 family with lots of good and of go in it : with young 
 olive-branches and old friends round about its table? 
 Has she had experience in mothering her little
 
 vii UNNATURAL SELECTION 119 
 
 brothers and sisters, who will be — if you decide in 
 favour of her — your uncles and aunts? Has she 
 learned any useful accomplishment, in case she should 
 not obtain such an appointment as you are thinking 
 of offering to her? Has she been happy where she 
 was, and worked well with everybody, and played and 
 sung and danced and flirted and said her prayers and 
 been taught to admire the right sort of things ? Has 
 she always said that she would know, if ever she had 
 one, how to give any child of hers a good time ? 
 
 If she answers all these questions in the affirmative, 
 without reserve or affectation, you had better engage 
 her at once, while you can. Indeed, you have found 
 a perfect treasure. But you must see to it, that she 
 is practical. Never have any mother who, in the 
 opinion of other mothers well qualified to judge, is 
 what they call feckless. Up the road, just now, I met 
 a feckless hen with her chickens : she took me for an 
 ogre : she squawked and fled, and half her brood 
 went Exeter way and half went Sidmouth way : you 
 do not want that sort of mother. She would forget, 
 if you were her baby, the hours for your bottle : she 
 would give her life for you, but she would lose her 
 head over you. Good nurses would not stay with 
 her : you would suffer from a succession of them, so 
 swift as to produce the whizzing effect of a moving 
 picture. 
 
 Over the choice of a father, some difference will 
 arise between boys and girls. They will be agreed
 
 120 I SOMETIMES THINK vn 
 
 as to the main lines of his character : they will expect 
 from him every virtue under Heaven. Doubtless, 
 they will be like Israel : they will desire a King : but 
 the boys will want him for one set of uses, and the 
 girls for another. To his daughters, a leader of men 
 is a glory, like their hair : to his sons also, he is a 
 glory ; but one or more of the sons may burn their 
 fingers, playing with that fire : may insist on follow- 
 ing his profession, in the hope of turning his name to 
 their advancement ; may assume that they resemble 
 him in grace because they resemble him in face ; may 
 reckon — no sin in such reckoning, but no security — 
 that his friends will befriend them, his clients employ 
 them, his greatness exalt them. This half-conscious 
 calculating, this half-willingness to play him as if he 
 were a hand of cards, is not unlikely to defeat its own 
 ends. Therefore, if you intend to be a boy, think 
 twice before you choose for your father a leader of 
 men : lest you be tempted to trade where you ought 
 to worship, like the money-changers in the Temple. 
 Other things being equal — but they never are — I 
 advise you to choose a wine-merchant. That is what 
 Ruskin did, and Lister. There must be something 
 in it. Or you might even dare to imitate Pasteur : 
 his father was a tanner, who had been a soldier. But 
 I think that you will make straight for a leader of 
 men, whatever I say. The magnificence of him will 
 draw you, moth to his light ; I cannot help being 
 anxious about you. This much, at least, I beg of
 
 vii UNNATURAL SELECTION 121 
 
 you, that you will look out for a father — if you are 
 determined to have a magnificent one — who has of 
 himself, by spendthrift energy, by austerity of will, 
 by disciplined ambition, made himself magnificent. 
 If you want a Lord for father, have a man who 
 earned and won his peerage — " no tenth transmitter 
 of a foolish face " — have a man who so greatly served 
 his country that a peerage came from the fount of 
 honour as the loosened cork comes from a bottle of 
 champagne. If you want a millionaire, have a man 
 who acquired not inherited his wealth, but never 
 cornered the necessities of life, nor gave himself to 
 increase the attractions of death. Whomever you 
 have, let him be a working-man : that is, a man who 
 works very hard : not a man who fools away his time 
 over meals and clubs. If he has risen from the ranks,, 
 by Heaven's plan for him, so much the better for you : 
 he will be the more diligent to give you those advan- 
 tages which his parents could not give to him. 
 
 Girls think less than boys of magnificence, and 
 more of thought. A girl in search of a father will 
 tend toward a scholar, a writer of words or of music, 
 a man of science, or an artist. She will want an 
 allowance from him : but pocket-money or no pocket- 
 money, she will demand ideals from him. She would 
 not like Father to be a failure : but she measures his 
 success not by what he achieves, but by what he 
 admires. His genius — so she calls it — is the god 
 of her idolatry. If she hesitates, as well she may, to
 
 122 I SOMETIMES THINK vn 
 
 give that name to it, none the less she is loyal to his 
 work, encourages him, honours him, believes in him, 
 always hoping against hope. Some day, she says to 
 herself, he will make his mark on the world : and if 
 he never does, that will not be his fault. Thus fond 
 of him, she is lenient to his vague ways, his forget- 
 fulness, his untidiness : more than lenient, she is 
 indulgent. Only, if he should wrong her faith in 
 him, by posing, or by shamming, or by any scamping 
 or faking tricks of dishonest workmanship, she would 
 be hard on him. What else can you expect of a 
 girl, if her deity shows himself to be an idol, a self- 
 complacent idol, with feet of clay ? 
 
 Happily, such disillusionment is rare. Not once 
 in a thousand times is the bond broken. It is a 
 relationship of especial privilege, and of especial 
 strength. It gives play, free from passion, to all that 
 makes him a man and her a woman. Their life 
 together is one long spiritual flirtation : they share 
 secrets, compare experiences, and exchange wits : they 
 argue, challenge, score, criticise, for the pure fun 
 of it, like Benedick and Beatrice. They understand 
 each other. They are two in one, as in a well-written 
 song the voice and the piano are two in one, each 
 accompanying the other. Boys are hardly able to get 
 so close to their fathers : it requires what we call the 
 feminine intellect. So I will not venture to advise 
 girls over their choice of fathers. For they are by 
 nature well able to decide. They are merciful, but
 
 vii UNNATURAL SELECTION 123 
 
 they are clear-sighted : they see through disguises and 
 pretences, and are bold to attack, single-handed, Giant 
 Solemnity and Giant Platitude, with all the ardour of 
 Pilgrim's Progress. They are not likely to fall into 
 the error of Ophelia, who chose Polonius for her 
 father. Think what she must have gone through 
 with him : how she must have despised his way of 
 talking, his insatiable self-respect, his contempt for 
 her, the prosiness of his sermon to her brother, the 
 sight and the sound of him speaking to her lover — 
 Polonius and Hamlet in the room together. Poor 
 girl, drifting in the swim of that blackguardly Court, 
 with no mother to help her, and with a tedious old 
 fool of a father worrying her into cowardice and 
 lying ; till she was crossed in love, and drifted down 
 one more stream, and got away from everybody. 
 There are students of Shakespeare who say that he 
 designed her in a mood not of tragedy but of 
 comedy : that he intended her madness to raise a 
 laugh. You might do worse than accept this theory : 
 you will at least withhold your admiration from 
 her : keep it for Cordelia, the everlasting heavenly 
 pattern of a daughter not afraid of her father. 
 
 One more bit of advice I give to boys and to girls. 
 I beg and pray them to take a proper interest in their 
 fathers' work. Grave harm is done to home-life by 
 neglect of this rule. What's your father ? say the 
 boys at school — especially at second-rate preparatory 
 schools — to a new boy. If he cannot give them a
 
 i2 4 I SOMETIMES THINK vn 
 
 precise detailed account, with all items duly rendered, 
 more shame to him. I bid him set himself immedi- 
 ately to learn what his father is. If your father be 
 a man of science, read science : if he be an artist, 
 learn the history, the principles, and the methods of 
 his art : if he be in business, get to know your way 
 in that labyrinth : if he be a farmer, learn farming. 
 Perhaps it is his fault, not yours alone, that you are 
 ignorant of the ins-and-outs of his work : he may 
 have said to you, " Oh, it wouldn't interest you, what 
 I'm doing : you wouldn't understand." Never mind 
 whose fault it was : set yourself now to overcome 
 your ignorance. You cannot honour your Father 
 and your Mother, unless you honour with your atten- 
 tion his employment of his life. 
 
 I take pleasure in the Fifth Commandment for this 
 reason, that I have never been tempted to break it : 
 and I wish you no less happiness. There is a promise 
 attached to it, a sort of bribe, which has no meaning 
 for you and me : we cannot thus prolong our days. 
 I find what I want in the half-dozen words, without 
 that after-thought ; and I find it all the more, now 
 that my people have been dead these many years.
 
 VIII 
 
 SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS. 
 
 The War has made us feel the strength of accus- 
 tomed phrases which we used carelessly : it has taught 
 us to look-out their meanings in the dictionary of 
 our hearts, as we look-out the position of frontier- 
 towns on the map. Goodbye, good luck to you : 
 we said it lightly, time after time : we have said it 
 heavily, this time. God Save the King : we sang it 
 to wind-up a dance or a supper-party : now, we 
 pray it. Formal prayers, which we took as incidents 
 of public worship, have become personal remarks 
 addressed to each of us. Before the War, the prayer 
 for the Church Militant was a long general statement, 
 of a rambling disposition, which might or might not 
 come to delay the end of the service : now, the War 
 has so empowered it, that inattention is harder than 
 attention : it knocks at the heart, and requests the 
 favour of an immediate answer. All Christian 
 Kings, Princes, and Governors — you regret that cir- 
 cumstances over which you have no control prevent
 
 126 I SOMETIMES THINK vm 
 
 you from including the German Emperor. Thy 
 Servant George our King — you find yourself praying 
 for your King as you never prayed for him before 
 the War. His whole Council, and all that are put 
 in authority under him — your thoughts fly ofF to 
 Downing Street, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of 
 Munitions, and elsewhere : and from them to all 
 Bishops and Curates, each of them doing his bit for 
 the War, and some in khaki, and more than one 
 with the Victoria Cross, and all working to bring 
 Church and People closer together under the War 
 and after the War. This congregation here present 
 — you look round at them, trying to guess how 
 many are in trouble, sorrow, need — why, in this 
 War, who is not? The legions of us in mourning, 
 the legions of us in hospital, are beyond your imagi- 
 nation of this transitory life. Finally, with consum- 
 mate knowledge of you, the prayer comes right up 
 to your heart and thunders on the knocker, bidding 
 you to commemorate the dead, your own among 
 them, and to follow the example of their lives. 
 Before the War, it was only one or two who came 
 to you for remembrance : now, the whole continent 
 of your mind is crowded with young men killed in 
 action, who show you their hands and their sides : 
 men whom you never thought of, before the War. 
 
 This prayer might help us in our choice of 
 memorials of the War. It commends to us loyalty, 
 obedience, fellowship, compassion, faithful remem-
 
 viii 57 MONUMENTUM RE^UIRIS 127 
 
 brance. Is there any way of working them into a 
 design for a memorial? They are matters of con- 
 duct, not of taste : we could not go wrong over 
 them : it is over matters of taste that we are likely 
 to go wrong. There will be memorials everywhere, 
 after the War: and they ought to be not only in 
 good taste, but of a spirit which will continually do 
 good so long as they stand. If you are wanting a 
 memorial — si monumentum requiris — for your school, 
 or for your town, what shall it be, and what shall 
 it say? 
 
 Imagine yourself at a public meeting, to discuss 
 these questions, in a town of 30,000 inhabitants. 
 Suggestions wheel and call round you like sea-gulls. 
 The desire to have something beautiful clashes with 
 the desire to have something useful. A window, a 
 statue, a clock-tower, a drinking-fountain, each of 
 them has its advocates. Others are in favour not 
 of building anything new, but of restoring some- 
 thing old : they would repair the remnants of a 
 market-cross, or a group of almshouses. Others 
 would neither build nor restore, but would buy a 
 piece of waste ground and lay it out as a public 
 garden, with flower-beds and seats and gravel paths, 
 and a big sand-pit for the children. At the end of 
 the meeting, a Committee is appointed, with power 
 to decide everything. 
 
 The fear is, that the Committee will think too 
 much of what the memorial shall be, and not enough
 
 128 I SOMETIMES THINK vm 
 
 of what it shall say. They will be in danger of 
 studying the interests of the living more than the 
 memories of the dead. They intend to make their 
 town attractive. The improvement of its looks, its 
 treasures, its health, is surely their duty. They can 
 argue that the restoration of the market-cross, or 
 the laying-out of the garden, is what the dead would 
 have desired. The market-cross and the garden 
 will improve the minds and the health of those whom 
 the dead have left in the land of the living. What 
 better use can be made of the town's Memorial 
 Fund ? It will bring pleasure out of pain, it will 
 turn death to the purposes of life. 
 
 To all this talk you assent : yet you hesitate, half- 
 conscious that it does not ring absolutely true. It 
 sounds ungracious, unadventurous. Somewhere a 
 long way off, like distant thunder, you hear the voice 
 of Dr. Johnson — Sir, let us clear our minds of cant. 
 To clear our minds, let us shake them up with a 
 question. Memorials, nine times out of ten, are 
 very large structures with very small inscriptions on 
 them. Is that what you are wanting? Say that the 
 fund has reached the sum of ^300. How much of 
 that money ought the Committee to spend on struc- 
 ture, and how much on inscription ? Shall they 
 spend, on the inscription, less than 1 per cent, of 
 the money, or 5 per cent., or 50 per cent. ? 
 
 It is a common error, in the designing of public 
 memorials, to sacrifice inscription to structure.
 
 viii SI MONUMENTUM RE^UIRIS 129 
 
 Many are so ambitiously constructed and so shabbily 
 inscribed that they look like trunks with labels pasted 
 on them. Still, if the memorial be of one person, 
 or of one event, a very brief inscription will suffice. 
 Structures in memory of one person are of the nature 
 of sepulchral monuments : they are tombstones dis- 
 connected from tombs. They may serve as clock- 
 towers or drinking-fountains, but each of them 
 belongs to a grave somewhere : the inscriptions on 
 them are of the nature of epitaphs : and none of us 
 admires long epitaphs. It is the same with struc- 
 tures which commemorate one event : they need no 
 long inscription. Events die, as we die : they are 
 buried in the past as our bodies are buried in the 
 ground : or, if you prefer it, they are burned in the 
 present as our bodies are cremated in the furnace. 
 One event gone is like one person dead : it may 
 deserve a monument, it cannot want a long epitaph. 
 
 But when we try to think of the War, all these 
 notions about structure and inscription come to 
 nothing. The War is not one person but millions 
 of persons ; not one event but millions of events. 
 There is only one structure large enough to be a 
 memorial of the War: and that structure is the 
 world. There is only one inscription long enough : 
 already it is cut across the world, cut deep, and longer 
 and deeper with every hour of the War. You cannot 
 have a War-memorial on the lines of a Jubilee- 
 memorial. If every town in the kingdom were 
 
 I.S.T. I
 
 i 3 o I SOMETIMES THINK vm 
 
 stuffed thick with clocks and drinking-fountains, 
 every fragment of old architecture rejuvenated, every 
 patch of waste ground made into a garden, the War 
 would still transcend it all. Have you read Mrs. 
 Oliphant's book, " A Beleaguered City " ? Do you 
 remember what the dead, in that old French town, 
 call themselves, in their message to the living? 
 Nous autres morts, they call themselves. What 
 memorial will your old English town offer, kneeling, 
 to ces autres morts ? It cannot commemorate mil- 
 lions of events, millions of persons. All that you 
 can hope for, is to have a memorial of your neigh- 
 bours, fellow-townsmen, who died on active service. 
 Set your heart on this one group of men, not on 
 bricks and mortar. Commemorate your townsmen, 
 praise them, thank them, before you think of decorat- 
 ing your town. Subdue structure to inscription, not 
 inscription to structure. You have their names : 
 begin with their names. Spend the money over the 
 inscription : have structure enough to support and 
 frame it, and no more. 
 
 The poor names, which were printed once in a 
 casualty-list, the type too small to read, the list too 
 long to read, let them now be honoured in well-shaped 
 legible gold letters, on great surfaces of veined and 
 lustrous marble : not paving stone or slate or dull 
 granite, but marble with glowing colours and storm- 
 clouds fused into it while the world was red-hot in 
 the making. Never mind what it costs ; and have
 
 vni 5/ MONUMENTUM RE^UIRIS 131 
 
 enough of it for all the names in full, and sufficient 
 space for each of them. With what money is left, 
 emphasise the natural beauty of the marble ; give it 
 a sculptured border of delicate strong chisel-work, 
 foliage, deeply undercut ; sculpture such as you see, 
 what is left of it, in the porch of the Temple Church : 
 and perhaps a touch of mosaic-work near the border, 
 such as you see on the shrine of Edward the Con- 
 fessor : but perhaps the marble will look better by 
 itself. Keep all this adornment under restraint ; for 
 it is the frame, not the picture. Only, have it the 
 very best of its kind : entrust it to real artists, not 
 to cutters of tombstones. 
 
 What more do you want? Surely, a note of 
 heraldry, and some acknowledgment of the pride of 
 a soldier's calling. Think how many of us, right 
 up to August, 1 9 14, did not properly respect the 
 Army : what rubbish was talked and printed about 
 " the military caste." Let your memorial, so far as 
 it can, confess penitence for that disgrace, and offer 
 some apology. Keep the town's arms and motto off 
 it : put the regiment's arms and motto on it : entrust 
 them to good artists in enamel-work : be extravagant 
 of the money. Heraldry is extravagant : but it 
 never is wrong, and it always is beautiful. What 
 more? A few words of gratitude from the living 
 to the dead ; and a few words of praise from man to 
 his Maker. Have them in English, not in Latin. 
 
 This memorial, probably, will be placed in a
 
 i 3 2 I SOMETIMES THINK vm 
 
 church. But if a wall can be had or built for it in 
 the High Street, or in the Market-Square, so much 
 the better. There, it can have a bed of flowers in 
 front of it. Why should it be in a church? Let it 
 preach to the street : preach beauty to ugliness, 
 thankfulness to thanklessness, and the acceptance of 
 death to the fear of death. 
 
 If it is to preach beauty, it must be free from any 
 taint of stupid conventionality : no emblems, no 
 laurels or palms or crowns of life. Learn to distrust 
 the stock emblems of life and of death. For that 
 lesson, take the top of an omnibus along the Euston 
 Road, and look at the stone-yards there : the jumble 
 of anchors, angels, skulls, cherubs, broken lilies, 
 broken columns, and urns. I say nothing of 
 crosses : they are not emblems, they are heraldry : I 
 am talking of urns. The only urns worth twopence 
 are those which yield tea or coffee. Is it not 
 monstrous, that our stone-masons, because people 
 long ago put bones in urns, should still be putting 
 urns over bones? Also, they put them on parapets 
 and restaurants and railway stations, and wherever 
 our architects cannot think of anything else to put. 
 The total weight of solid stone urns, over all London, 
 must be many hundreds of tons. They look like 
 giants' inkstands. The column in Kensington, near 
 Church Street, supports a most unmistakable ink- 
 stand : not an urn trying to look like an inkstand, 
 but an inkstand trying to look like an urn.
 
 viii SI MONUMENTUM RE^UIRIS 133 
 
 Emblems, nowadays, are works of want of art: let 
 none hinder the simplicity of your memorial. 
 Surely, if you keep it simple, and give it the best of 
 materials and the best of workmanship, it ought to 
 please any town of 30,000 inhabitants. 
 
 But rival plans are up against it. One is for a 
 window : the other is for a statue, or for " something 
 in the nature of a statue." Consider first the argu- 
 ments in favour of a window. 
 
 There is no fear that it will be ugly : the art of 
 working in stained glass is well understood at the 
 present time : you can reckon with confidence on a 
 window of good design and good colour. All of 
 us, by the kindness of Heaven, are able to enjoy 
 colours : and that bit of a child which is in all of us 
 takes especial delight in transparent colours, which 
 live with light, and impart themselves to cold things 
 far away from them. Some of us are fond, and 
 some are too fond, of very quiet colours : like the 
 lady who is said to have said of a flaming sunset 
 that it was rather vulgar. Certainly, quiet colours 
 are beautiful : but a world all of quiet colours would 
 be invalid's fare : we must have loud colours, to 
 please the bit of a child in us : I could play happily, 
 this winter, with one of those little plaster-of-Paris 
 edifices which we used to call " Italian images." 
 They were sold, toward Christmas-time, in the London 
 streets, after dusk, by Italian boys who carried them 
 on trays : diminutive shrines, very white and steeply :
 
 i 34 I SOMETIMES THINK vm 
 
 they had windows of red and green glass, and were 
 lit-up with candle-ends, and I loved them dearly. 
 Pictures are light painted ; but stained-glass win- 
 dows are painted light, which is even more beautiful : 
 and the brighter it is painted, the more beautiful it 
 is. We have come to be afraid of bright colours, 
 because so many people wear them amiss. But 
 stained-glass windows do not wear colours, but create 
 them. Let there be light, they say, and there shall 
 be colours, we promise you. It is true that ill- 
 stained ill-arranged glass looks gaudy and hot: but 
 we have better artists now : and you need not fear 
 that your window, if you decide to have it, will be 
 too bright. 
 
 Besides, a window is not only a display of colours : 
 it is a page out of the world's best picture-book, a 
 note on a great crisis of the world's life, an illustra- 
 tion of the world's dream which came true. There 
 is room in it for fact and poetry and legend, all three 
 of them together, without quarrelling. Year in 
 year out, it radiates not colours only, but thoughts. 
 And of a Sunday evening, during church-time, it 
 reverses its influences, and will have nothing to say 
 to this congregation here present, but gives its 
 colours and its thoughts to the street. 
 
 Besides, a good window is a good work of art. 
 It may happen to be the best work of art in the 
 whole place ; the one treasure of the church, the one 
 gem of the town's collection, in a waste of advertise-
 
 vm 57 MONUMENTUM RE^UIRIS 135 
 
 ments. Every town ought to possess a beautiful 
 picture : none the less beautiful for being not on 
 canvas but in glass. 
 
 Only, it may fail to be a good memorial of the 
 War, and of the dead. The central figure will not 
 fail : but the attendant figures will. The conven- 
 tions of art will tend toward Bible-heroes or saints : 
 for example, St. Michael, St. George : who will 
 represent neither the War, nor the dead. Yet, if 
 you were to have figures which would indeed be 
 representative — if you were to have Lord Roberts 
 and Lord Kitchener — the window would not look 
 well. It would not offend against reverence : but 
 it would offend against art. The same objection 
 would hinder the introduction of men in khaki. It 
 would be beautiful, if it could be done without 
 offence to art : but it cannot. The art of working 
 in stained glass is very strict and very sensitive : its 
 associations and traditions, its limits and restraints, 
 are dear to it, and it cannot forego them. 
 
 The alternative plan, that the memorial shall be a 
 work of sculpture, is beset by difficulties. Sculpture, 
 in the atmosphere of our towns, soon loses its white- 
 ness : bronze, on sunless days, looks grim and 
 unfriendly. Again, though statues are " the right 
 thing to have," they seldom appear to be perfectly 
 at home in our streets : many of them seem not to 
 know us but to be pretending that they know us. 
 Again, the back of a statue is not worth looking at,
 
 136 I SOMETIMES THINK vni 
 
 unless it be naked. These and other difficulties 
 attend sculpture. Above all, there is the difficulty 
 of the choice of a subject. 
 
 A memorial statue may take the form of somebody 
 in particular, or of something in general. Figures 
 of Victory, Peace, Fortitude, and the like, are 
 statues of something in general. Have nothing to 
 do with any plan for a statue of this kind. Our 
 chief cities are heavily burdened with these creatures 
 of imagination. They trespass on roofs where they 
 ought not to be, they huddle in architectural spaces 
 too small for them — Science, Art, Commerce, Agri- 
 culture, Britannia, Justice — commonplace figures, 
 with nothing new or urgent to say to us. It is not 
 possible to have an abstract figure to represent the 
 War and the dead. 
 
 But you might have a statue of somebody in par- 
 ticular : a man in khaki, who shall stand for that 
 group of men who went from the town to the War. 
 Let him not be fighting : the War is over, and the 
 dead are dead, and their names are inscribed below 
 him where he stands : and he must be as quiet as a 
 Greek monument in the British Museum. That 
 mourning figure, in the room beyond the Elgin 
 Marbles, which was looted from Greece and put over 
 a Roman grave, has borne the test of more than two 
 thousand years, because it is quiet. Statues restless 
 or violent please us for a time, but cannot be sure of 
 pleasing for all time.
 
 vin SI MONUMENTUM RE^UIRIS 137 
 
 This memorial, well designed and well placed, 
 cannot fail of its purpose. It will be a good work 
 of art ; strong, passionless, effective ; recording and 
 recalling with perfect accuracy the look of the men 
 who died, and the feel of the days when the War 
 came into the town's life. The man in khaki will 
 guard the pride and the honour of the town : he will 
 consecrate that bit of the pavement : no filthy talk, 
 nor chuck-farthing, nor drunkenness, will come 
 within range of him : and he will plainly speak of 
 the War, and of the dead. But, of course, there are 
 questions about them which he will refuse to answer. 
 We must not ask him to assure us that the War 
 was over-ruled by Providence, and that the dead 
 have gone away but not gone out. These two ques- 
 tions will be in our minds when we see him : but he 
 will not answer them. / have nothing to say about 
 that, he will tell us. Here is the list of the men from 
 here who were killed in action: you can read it for your- 
 self : I have no further information to give you. And 
 we shall admire him all the more for his reticence. 
 Only, if we could by any possibility have something 
 able to give us some sort of answer to such ques- 
 tions, or some sort of help toward answering them 
 for ourselves, we should be glad. For that reason, 
 you will see, as a memorial, in this or that place, the 
 figure of Christ on the cross : not shut in churches, 
 but set in the open air. Some of us will salute it : 
 and will say, as we said of the Daylight Saving Act,
 
 138 I SOMETIMES THINK vm 
 
 Why didnt we have it before the War? It is 
 singularly close to the War and the dead. As a 
 work of art, it affords a good design for a memorial. 
 In all art, there is no solitary figure so effective. It 
 stands for a historical fact : it is quiet, strong, passion- 
 less : it allows no emblems, it needs no explaining, 
 it speaks for itself. It is known to us as we know 
 the look of our own faces : it has been a monument 
 for these many centuries. Bad workmanship cannot 
 spoil it : bad surroundings only heighten its value : 
 a crucifix which would pass unnoticed in a church 
 will reign triumphant over the whole contents of a 
 pawnbroker's shop. It is absolutely simple, ever- 
 lastingly outspoken. Voltaire's saying comes into 
 my head, " If there had not been God, mankind 
 would have had to invent Him." If there had not 
 been the crucifix, mankind, after this War, would 
 have had to invent it. 
 
 We hear talk of what our men will want and 
 expect, after the War, in the matter of public wor- 
 ship. Comparisons are flying round, between French 
 priests and English army-chaplains, between the 
 Mass and the long-drawn English " morning ser- 
 vice." One thing is certain : that our men now in 
 France and Belgium will come back accustomed to 
 the look of the crucifix. They have seen it on 
 French roads, in French cottages and churches ; seen 
 it wrecked, seen it intact with everything round it 
 wrecked ; seen it kissed by the dying and laid on
 
 vin 57 MONUMENTUM RE^UIRIS 139 
 
 the dead. They will not be shocked, when they 
 come back, if they see it again : they will like to 
 see it. The War is its own interpreter. French 
 cookery, millinery, novels, farces — to these we paid 
 attention, in the years that are gone. Lord So-and-so 
 had a French cook, and Mrs. So-and-so got her hats 
 from Paris. Now, out of the dawn, comes France, 
 white to the lips with pain, and gives us, for a keep- 
 sake, a crucifix : in remembrance of our dead and 
 her dead, our misery and her misery, our faith and 
 her faith. All other memorials will be national : but 
 this, she says to us, will be international. 
 
 But would it not be better to wait till the men 
 come home, and consult them, before you decide 
 anything? There is no hurry. It would be dread- 
 ful, if you put-up your memorial, and then they did 
 not like it. Perhaps some of them already have 
 been thinking and talking of it. You and I might 
 amuse ourselves, trying to guess their thoughts. 
 My first guess is, that they would prefer something 
 beautiful to anything useful : they have not been 
 seeing beautiful things, they have been seeing things 
 ugly enough to drive you and me mad. They would 
 not care, when they come back to the town, to be 
 confronted by a clock-tower or a drinking-fountain. 
 They would ask what the devil it had to do with the 
 War. Let them have a voice in the matter : decide 
 nothing, till you have heard from them. 
 
 Here is a tag for the end of this essay. The best
 
 i 4 o I SOMETIMES THINK vm 
 
 of all memorials of the War, and of the dead, is 
 neither good architecture, nor good sculpture, but 
 good conduct. The handsomest offering to be made 
 by you and me is the amendment of our lives. 
 Neither your life nor mine, as a memorial, is likely 
 to attract much attention : but, at any rate, nobody 
 can find fault with the design.
 
 IX 
 
 THE NEXT FEW YEARS 
 
 Lately, matching my wits against one of my juniors, 
 I became of a sudden too unsightly to please him. 
 Something in the quadrupedal attitude, or in the look 
 of a black hearth-rug worn as a fleece, was not to his 
 taste : I had transgressed the line between what is 
 delightful and what is dreadful : and he desired me 
 to resume the likeness of a man. Pax, Pax, he cried. 
 Then, as children will, he spelt the word aloud, to 
 emphasise it. Pax y I tell you : I say P, A, C, K, S — 
 PAX. And it may be that some of us take on our 
 lips the name of Peace, as he did, without careful 
 recognition,, of its meaning. We hope for Peace, 
 pray for it, dream of it. Already, in the impassive 
 streets, we imagine them adorned with flags and gar- 
 lands, and at night illuminated. Next year, we say 
 to each other, there will be Peace : and we say it not 
 as prophets, but as lovers of the mere sound of the 
 word. We have suffered for more than two years 
 the misery of the War : suffered, I say, I who have
 
 142 I SOMETIMES THINK ix 
 
 suffered next to nothing : it is not for me to talk of 
 suffering. We pray for Peace. Yet, if we had to 
 choose between the War and any sham or unstable 
 Peace, we ought to pray for the continuance of the 
 War. None of us doubts that the coming of Peace 
 before its due time might be even worse than the 
 going-on of the War to the end of its due time. 
 
 What image of Peace is in our hopes and prayers 
 and dreams? That which comes first, in the fore- 
 ground of the mind, is the bare thought of the War 
 leaving off. We console and refresh ourselves, antici- 
 pating the happiness which will come to us on that 
 day : the joy of waking, that morning, and saying to 
 ourselves // is all over: it really is: and, with the 
 thought of ourselves, comes the thought of our dead. 
 Then we think of the living, how glad they will be 
 to get back, and what a welcome there will be for 
 them. Our furthest thoughts do not go far enough : 
 the vision is too wonderful to be distinct: but we 
 love to dream over it, how beautiful it will be : how 
 the streets will be full of colour and music and shout- 
 ing and thankfulness for the relief of Europe. But 
 the quiet will be even pleasanter than the noise : we 
 shall enjoy, even more than excitement, the sense of 
 rest: surely, it will be happiness enough, and more 
 than enough, to sit in a garden somewhere, all alone, 
 on the day when Peace is declared. That is how we 
 are dreaming, some of us. 
 
 There is no great harm in dreaming, unless it
 
 ix THE NEXT FEW YEARS 143 
 
 impedes the traffic of our affairs. But if we are 
 minded to dream, let us do it as wisely as we can. 
 To-day, in every capital in Europe, and in every town 
 of any importance, men are looking ahead, trying to 
 think-out the problems of Peace, and to learn how 
 to face and handle the difficulties and perils which 
 will beset the nations. They are thinking their 
 hardest : and it is certain that they are not thinking 
 of shouting and rejoicing, nor of quiet and leisure. 
 For the nations, after the War, will be left confused, 
 impoverished, exhausted : they will be groping in a 
 darkness of perplexities as heavy as that which now 
 oppresses them. Imagine a town shattered by an 
 earthquake, and the people, dazed and hungry, 
 wondering how they will ever get things right again. 
 You do not expect them to rejoice that the earth- 
 quake has left off. Besides, they say, it may come 
 back : there may be another shock, at any moment. 
 That is the fear which cuts across our vision of 
 Peace : the fear that the War may come back, thirty 
 years hence, fifty years hence. We dread, more than 
 the going-on of War, the coming back of War. At 
 the time of the South African War, we caught up the 
 phrase Never Again. So it is with us now : we 
 desire no Peace that will not endure from generation 
 to generation. 
 
 In the strength of that desire we are waiting till 
 the fullness of time shall bring us Peace worth 
 having. The greatest War that the world has ever
 
 i 4 4 I SOMETIMES THINK ix 
 
 seen is for the greatest Peace that the world has ever 
 seen. All Europe has been ploughed-up by War : 
 therefore the harvest of Peace must cover all Europe. 
 For nothing less than that are the Allies fighting. 
 
 But how can Peace, of itself, create or bring forth 
 anything? What do we mean, really mean, by the 
 word ? We are so apt to cheat ourselves with words. 
 For instance, we talk of the blessings of health and 
 of silence. But are these blessings anything more 
 than the absence of sickness and of noise ? Up to 
 August, 1 9 14, we were at Peace. Look back to the 
 earlier months of that year : ask yourself whether 
 there really is such a thing as Peace. It may be only a 
 word for the absence of War : that is to say, a word 
 to denote what sort of life we lead, when we are not 
 thinking of War. 
 
 You and I, we two, in those earlier months of 
 1 9 14, what were we thinking and doing? If Peace 
 be something real, something which makes a real 
 difference for good in our lives, surely we must 
 have been behaving better, in those seven months, 
 than we now are behaving. But 1 am confident 
 that you have behaved better during the War 
 than before the War : and you have no reason 
 to doubt the same of me. Can you Jay your 
 finger on any good in your life, through the seven 
 months, which was the work, in you, of Peace? 
 Which of the ten commandments did Peace ever tell 
 you to keep, or stop you from breaking? You can
 
 ix THE NEXT FEW YEARS 145 
 
 lay your finder on the good that has come to you 
 from experience, example, education, friendship, 
 home : you are signed all over, like an autograph 
 tablecloth, by these and other good influences which 
 have made you what you are : but you will not find 
 anywhere the separate signature of Peace. There is 
 no evidence, either in you or in me, that Peace is 
 anything more than a word to denote what you and 
 I are, so long as War does not enter into our 
 thoughts. 
 
 But we use the word in two senses. There is the 
 leaving-off of War, and there is the absence of War : 
 and we call both of them by the name of Peace. 
 The one is the dawn, the other is the day. With 
 the dawn, all the lost colours of earth and sea and 
 sky are given back to us : the world begins to be 
 warm again : the usual sounds and movements about 
 the house start where they had left off for the night : 
 and we pick-up all the habitual threads which we had 
 let fall when the night came. Everything is just the 
 same as it was yesterday. Only, the sunrise makes 
 everything look fresh and significant : the night is 
 gone : our familiar surroundings are back in their old 
 places, but there is something magical about the way 
 in which they are put back. Then, after breakfast, 
 we think no more of the dawn. We discuss the 
 weather, and the day's plans : so many hours of 
 ordinary daylight for our ordinary work and play and 
 meals. The dawn was poetry, but the day is prose. 
 
 I.S.T. K
 
 146 I SOMETIMES THINK ix 
 
 The coming of the day was an event. The coming 
 of Peace will be an event : we are waiting for it : — 
 
 Out of the East it welled and whitened ; the darkness 
 trembled into light ; and the stars were extinguished like the 
 street-lamps of a human city. The whiteness brightened into 
 silver, the silver warmed into gold, the gold kindled into pure and 
 living fire ; and the face of the East was barred with elemental 
 scarlet. The day drew its first long breath, steady and chill ; and 
 for leagues around the woods sighed and shivered. And then, at 
 one bound, the sun had floated up. On every side, the shadows 
 leaped from their ambush and fell prone. The day was come, 
 plain and garish. 
 
 See how Stevenson contrasts the dawn and the day : 
 how he uses Milton's word, " day's garish eye," and 
 Newman's, " the garish day." All three of them are 
 agreed that the daylight, after the dawn, is common- 
 place. And some people say that Peace will be like 
 that. We shall admire its coming- : then we shall 
 slip back into our old ways, and continue in them. 
 We shall be at Peace, for we shall not be at War : 
 but there will be no evidence in our lives that Peace 
 is anything more than the absence of War. If this 
 be so, there is no such thing as Peace. So soon as it 
 has dawned, it fades into the light of common day, 
 and nothing remains to be said of it : and that is all 
 that Peace is : it is what we are, when War leaves us 
 to ourselves. 
 
 But how long may a nation safely be left to itself? 
 For we know, all of us, that Peace has its evils, no 
 less than War. You might make a collection of what
 
 ix THE NEXT FEW YEARS 147 
 
 has been said, by famous writers, in dispraise of 
 Peace. It would be a strange anthology : a wreath 
 not of flowers but of thorns and brambles : but you 
 might easily make a worse book : and your quest 
 would lead you on a course of good reading, among 
 writings so far apart as the Bible-prophets, Ruskin, 
 Tennyson's Maud, and Kingsley's Water-Babies. 
 They are not so far apart as they sound : begin with 
 them. Anthology-making, with the help of friends, 
 is pleasant work. It may be that you would not find 
 a public, nor a publisher : still, you would be making 
 the only book of its kind. 
 
 This book of yours, this counterblast against 
 Peace, would tell us — right or wrong, it would know 
 its own mind — that Peace is more favourable than 
 War to the love of money, the waste of money, and 
 the parade of all that money can buy : more favour- 
 able to slackness, fads and crazes, restless idleness, 
 slipshod talking and thinking : and, what is worst of 
 all, more favourable to suspicion, ill-will, even down- 
 right hatred between class and class. It is Peace, not 
 War, which entices us into letting things slide. War 
 pulls us up, and pulls us together. Judge for your- 
 self. Take a newspaper two-and-a-half years old, 
 and to-day's paper, and compare them. Judge, so 
 far as you can, the average level, then and now, of 
 the nation's life, in business, politics, arts, and amuse- 
 ments : its output of faith, hope, and charity: the 
 width of its range, the depth of its insight, the 
 
 I.S.T. K2
 
 148 I SOMETIMES THINK ix 
 
 strength of its hold over itself. You will find the 
 level higher now than it was before the War. 
 
 But anybody with a pen in his hand can write 
 pages in this vague style about things in general. 
 What really concerns you and me is not the nation's 
 life but our own lives : you concern you, and I 
 concern me. These next few years will be a very 
 difficult period. You and I ought to be able to say, 
 now, before they begin, how we propose to behave in 
 the absence of War. 
 
 Everything is in the melting-pot. That is a 
 phrase which has lately been in great demand. Of 
 course, you and I are included : you and I are in the 
 melting-pot, we two atoms of the mass of its con- 
 tents. But there are so many sorts of melting-pots, 
 and of meltings : from the witches' cauldron to the 
 refiner's fire. It is vexatious for us, to have to put 
 everything into the melting-pot, without knowing 
 what will come out of it. But we have no choice : 
 things have gone-in of themselves, as Jason's aged 
 father, in the Greek legend, went into the cauldron 
 of Medea, hoping to renew his youth, but was 
 destroyed. What will come out, of all that has gone 
 in since August, 19 14? What novel shapes and 
 compositions of our national life shall we recover, 
 during the next few years, from the War's melting- 
 pot? 
 
 So far as you and I are able to read the signs of 
 the times, they are hopeful. Doubtless, our hopes
 
 ix THE NEXT FEW YEARS 149 
 
 are magnified by our faith, which prepares us to 
 believe that things will on the whole go well ; but it 
 does not encourage us to imagine that they will go 
 well of themselves, as it were by machinery. Only, 
 as we see, in the changes now being wrought by the 
 War in us, not chance but Providence, so we shall 
 see Providence at work in the next few years. And 
 Providence will use, for one of its chief instruments, 
 the men who now are on active service. "The day 
 is coming when the soldiers of England must be her 
 tutors ; and the captains of her army, captains also 
 of her mind." 
 
 But you and I — what use will Providence make of 
 you and me? Take me first. It seems to me, that 
 my best chance of being useful is to rid myself of 
 old prejudices, narrownesses, invented fears, and all 
 such encumbrances of hope. Now take you. More 
 depends on you : it is you, who are the important 
 one, because you will be here longer. You are more 
 likely to be useful if you proceed in the opposite 
 direction. I have got to pull a lot of things up by 
 the roots : you have got to plant a lot of things in 
 by the roots. I have got my garden to weed : you 
 have got yours to stock. 
 
 Of all the powers of the soul, that which will be 
 of most help to you, in the coming years, is the power 
 to understand other people. It sometimes goes by 
 the name of sympathy : but it is less impulsive than 
 sympathy, and more wise. For want of it, we were
 
 150 I SOMETIMES THINK ix 
 
 breeding ill-will between class and class, breeding it 
 in and in, right up to the time of the War. Pray 
 for this gift of understanding. And, that you may 
 be able to receive it, keep your life simple : keep 
 yourself steadily under control, on the old lines of 
 restraint and of patience. People who complicate and 
 elaborate their own lives are the less able to under- 
 stand the lives of other people : they find it so hard 
 to get away from themselves. Be content with old 
 and proven virtues, such as are now commended to 
 us, even thrust toward us, by the War. Through 
 the next few years, scarred with the wounds and 
 stained with the blood of the years before them, let 
 us go carefully ; for we shall be walking over men's 
 graves, having under our feet the wreckage of their 
 homes. If in this world of the next few years, which 
 has cost more than our world ever yet cost, we play 
 the fool, we shall hardly deserve our lives. 
 
 On the chance that these essays may come your 
 way near Christmas-time, I wish you a Happy 
 Christmas and a Happy New Year. Observe Christ- 
 mas, but do not attempt to observe New Year's Day : 
 there is nothing to observe. It is not like Christmas 
 Day : it does not happen, it merely falls, on the first 
 of January : it is not a Day but a date, without gifts, 
 without beauty of its own or beauty of associations. 
 Christmas Day we keep, New Year's Day we cannot 
 keep. The only way to keep the New Year would 
 be to keep it from start to finish. As the use of a
 
 ix THE NEXT FEW YEARS 151 
 
 baby is to become a man, so the use of the New Year 
 is to become a Year. 
 
 But keep New Year's Eve: see 191 6 out, and 
 1 91 7 in. On Christmas Day, you will find that the 
 Old Year rallies, and is bright and cheerful, quite 
 his best self, bearing himself with gentleness and 
 humility very pleasant in one so old, with so much 
 to be sorry for. After that lightening before death, 
 he will sink rapidly : and in common decency we 
 ought to watch at his death-bed. Not a sound in 
 the house, nor outside : he dying silently, and we 
 none of us wishing him to live longer. Let him 
 pass. The wonder is, he hath endured so long. Then 
 there will be the little ceremony, dear to quiet home- 
 loving people, the opening of the front door, to let-in 
 the New Year. Out of the darkness imposed on our 
 streets by the War, out of the darkness which is in 
 every hour of the War, the New Year will come into 
 the house. 
 
 On the stroke of midnight, in this corner of 
 London, four hooters are set going, and call to us 
 through the darkness, from great works a mile or two 
 off, with a fine aerial effect, like that of Beethoven's 
 music for the four trombones. Lights here and there 
 shine through the window-blinds : a murmur of good 
 wishes is on the air : and, on the horizon of the sense 
 of hearing, dinner-bells are rung and teatrays beaten, 
 to imitate " a flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot 
 off." These queer fugitive noises, which on this one
 
 152 I SOMETIMES THINK ix 
 
 midnight come to life, and play at the death of the 
 Old Year as children play at a funeral, are delightful. 
 If the front door were not wide open, and the police- 
 man just outside, I would go down on my knees, as 
 the New Year enters my house. At any rate, this 
 next time, I will kneel devoutly, policeman or no 
 policeman : believing that the New Year will not 
 come alone, but will bring Victory and Peace. 
 
 When at last you see Peace, look into her eyes, 
 touch her hands, kiss her feet, you will be so full 
 of the joy of it that no thought of the next few years 
 will be in your mind. Home will be too narrow for 
 your happiness : you will be out and about the streets, 
 wanting all London to play the accompaniment to 
 your song of thanksgiving. You shall have music 
 wherever you go, every house adorned for you, every 
 lamp lit for you, every crowd catching you in its net 
 and carrying you along. Let yourself be caught : do 
 not think it beneath your dignity. You and I have 
 not earned dignity enough to stand on : we have 
 neither worked harder than other folk, nor endured 
 worse. Besides, you cannot afford to miss the enjoy- 
 ment of all London gone off its head with happiness. 
 Into the crowd with you : lose yourself in it, find 
 yourself in it : that is what youth and crowds are for. 
 
 Only, when the rush of tumultuous days is over, 
 the bonfires burned out, the adornments taken down, 
 the crowds back at work again — when the last of the 
 processions has been through the roaring streets, and
 
 ix THE NEXT FEW YEARS 153 
 
 the captains and the kings have seen what a welcome 
 London can give to her friends, and have departed — 
 then you and I have our own little recessional prayer 
 to say : nothing grand, nothing vague : just a prayer 
 for ourselves, you for you and I for me, that we may 
 try to deserve what has been won for us : that we 
 may try to be useful, for the sake of the men who 
 fought and suffered and were not afraid of death. 
 
 Have pity on all men and women who now are 
 unable to fill their days with work. They would give, 
 many of them, half of the life which is due to them, 
 or more than half, to be useful through the other half, 
 every day and all day long. They try to get work, 
 and there is none for them, none that they can do. 
 They could not know what was going to happen. 
 Right up to August, 1 9 14, they seemed to themselves 
 well adapted to the world, and it to them. Each day 
 was sufficiently occupied. Life was neither hot nor 
 crowded : sometimes it was rather slack, but not 
 often : some of the occupations were silly, but only 
 some, not all. Life was kind to these men and 
 women, to whom now it is so unkind. They were 
 neither like the wise virgins of our Lord's parable, 
 nor like the foolish virgins : they had been careful to 
 take some oil with their lamps, enough, they thought, 
 to last. When they found what was happening, they 
 went to buy more : and while they were gone, the 
 door was shut : and they are still trying to buy, and 
 the door is still shut. How could they know what
 
 154 I SOMETIMES THINK ix 
 
 would happen? They had faithfully served the only 
 world which they had. Then the War came, and 
 took it from them : and not a few of them find the 
 empty hours intolerable, and have tasted the bitter- 
 ness of the saying, He that hath not, from him shall 
 be taken even that which he hath. Pity them, who 
 envy you. This legion of the unemployed does envy 
 you. Some of them knit stockings : some of them 
 knit books : anything, which can be of any use to 
 anybody. 
 
 You, more fortunate than they, have more work on 
 your hands than you can get through. The War 
 broke their world to make yours. By all that has 
 happened since August, 19 14, you are sworn, body 
 and soul, to be of use to your world : and you will 
 not find it easy. Nothing that you can do to fit 
 yourself for that service will be more than you will 
 need for it. Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control 
 — these you will need at every step of your work : 
 and reverence for others, and the divine gift of know- 
 ing what is in man. Your country has been saved 
 for you. Your life may help to uphold your country's 
 life on those heights to which it has risen : or may 
 help to betray it back to that level from which it rose. 
 Think daily of them who saved it for you : remember 
 their loyalty, obedience, endurance. We talk of the 
 darkness of the War : but the people that walked in 
 darkness have seen a great light : for we have seen 
 what our men are.
 
 ix THE NEXT FEW YEARS 155 
 
 Let one of them speak here. This morning, a 
 letter came from an officer on the Western Front. 
 It is dated September 26. " I should like you to 
 write a book with Rudyard Kipling's If as its preface : 
 a book of lessons from the war for boys and girls. 
 There are such fine things to be learnt from our men, 
 and they should be immortalised for future genera- 
 tions, to show what the Nation is capable of, and 
 what our real character is. One could not have 
 guessed it before the war. How often before the 
 war did the subaltern without war experience ask 
 himself the question, What will my men be like on 
 active service ? I could never picture the answer to 
 myself. But I know now, and cannot be thankful 
 enough that we are, what we are." 
 
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