SOLOMON IN ALL HIS 
 GLORY
 
 OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME 
 AUTHOR 
 
 THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE 
 THE SPORTING LIFE AND 
 
 OTHER TRIFLES 
 BOOKS AND AUTHORS 
 IRELAND A NATION 
 THE ART OF LETTERS 
 OLD AND NEW MASTERS 
 THE PASSION OF LABOUR 
 IF THE GERMANS CONQUERED 
 
 ENGLAND 
 THE BOOK OF THIS AND THAT 
 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND 
 IRISH AND ENGLISH
 
 SOLOMON IN ALL 
 HIS GLORY 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT LYND 
 
 author of 
 "the pleasures of ignorance" 
 
 'b 
 
 LONDON 
 GRANT RICHARDS LTD. 
 
 ST MARTINS STREET 
 1922 
 
 ^V'Ac
 
 Printed in Great Britain by the Riverside Press Limited 
 Edinburgh
 
 TO 
 SYLVIA LYND
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 Solomon in All His Glory . 
 
 9 
 
 II. 
 
 Changing Houses . . . . 
 
 18 
 
 III. 
 
 A Rabbit, a Rainbow, and a Little 
 
 
 
 Striped Owl . . . . 
 
 28 
 
 IV. 
 
 On Keeping the Sabbath 
 
 37 
 
 V. 
 
 Conversation . . . . . 
 
 47 
 
 VI. 
 
 Odd Volumes . . . . 
 
 57 
 
 VII. 
 
 Londoners . . . . . 
 
 66 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Good Luck . . . . . 
 
 75 
 
 IX. 
 
 February .... 
 
 84 
 
 X. 
 
 Beaver ...... 
 
 93 
 
 XI. 
 
 Knee-Deep in June 
 
 102 
 
 XII. 
 
 Dresses ..... 
 
 111 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Crime of J. Lyons & Co. 
 
 120 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The Old Game 
 
 129 
 
 XV. 
 
 The Unexpected . 
 
 138 
 
 XVI. 
 
 The Student .... 
 7 
 
 148
 
 8 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XVII 
 
 A Defence of Superstition 
 
 156 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 The Chocolate Bus . 
 
 164 
 
 XIX. 
 
 Riding on a Charabanc 
 
 173 
 
 XX. 
 
 Travel Talk 
 
 181 
 
 XXI. 
 
 Peering into the Future . 
 
 190 
 
 XXII. 
 
 The Sorrows of Free Love 
 
 199 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 Youth .... 
 
 207 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 Things that Interest 
 
 215 
 
 XXV. 
 
 Beggars . . . . . 
 
 223 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 The Last of the Street Cries 
 
 231 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 Wild Life in London 
 
 238
 
 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 Not to have seen a kingfisher leaves the world 
 full of a mysterious beauty. There is still some- 
 thing to be sought for — something prettier than 
 the North Pole, before it was discovei-ed, and 
 less impossible as an object of search than 
 the Holy Grail. Every river bank along which 
 one wanders is rich with its unseen colours. 
 Not a willow grows aslant a brook but might 
 be the perch of this winged rainbow. Hence, 
 I was not melancholy that I had never 
 seen a kingfisher save in a glass case. I felt 
 that I was saving it up — that it decorated 
 to-morrow, and that to-day, meanwhile, was 
 pleasant enough with other things. When I 
 heard, however, that a kingfisher had come to 
 live within two hundred yards of me I am 
 not a boor that I could remain indifferent. A 
 visitor mentioned casually that he had seen it. 
 He had seen in a few hours what I had been 
 looking for for years. I went out in the 
 evening with him past the mill, past the duck- 
 pond with its barbed wire, through a chained 
 gate into a field, and along the bank of a 
 
 9
 
 10 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 little muddy stream overgrown with duckweed 
 and white crowfoot. All the birds of the 
 country-side seemed to be congregated here in 
 search of moisture. Martins swept down in 
 scores over the face of the brook, chattering 
 like bathing girls and gathering up insects on 
 their flight. Some of them would rest every 
 now and then on telegraph wires that crossed 
 the field, carefully preening every feather, a 
 family party preparing to move. They will 
 soon, we may take it, be making in a mob for 
 Africa, though it is less than a fortnight since 
 I saw the heads of their latest brood gaping 
 anxiously out of the nests under the eaves and 
 opening their orange gullets to the parents who 
 brought food in response to their clamour. One 
 remembers that in one's childhood there were 
 two excitements of summer — the excitement 
 of going to the seaside and the excitement of 
 going home. Similarly, among the birds, there 
 seems to be an excitement of autumn that re- 
 sponds to the excitement of spring. The spotted 
 flycatchers, indeed — ridiculously named, for there 
 are no spots that the naked eye can see — are 
 rioting in the hedges as they never rioted in 
 spring. They perch in the thorn bushes over 
 the river, sylphs of the air and models of silence. 
 Then, at sight of a fly, comes the dive as from 
 a spring-board. They can leap upward like a 
 flame or outward like an arrow. They have all
 
 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 11 
 
 the graces and the tricks of acrobats. You 
 seldom see the fly they are after, but their course 
 is as clever as though the Wandering Rocks were 
 threatening their tails in vain. Each of them 
 after its flight returns to its perch to meditate, 
 casting its wise, grandmotherly eyes dovi^n its 
 slender beak and sitting so still that no insect 
 could doubt its innocence. More beautiful are 
 the grey wagtails — also ridiculously named, for it 
 is their yellow that strikes the eye — that haunt 
 the hedges of the stream, with tails that seem 
 to pant with their heart-beats. This is one of 
 the most beautiful of English birds — beautiful in 
 colour and beautiful in flight. As it flies, its long 
 tail gives it something of the grace of the magpie. 
 Its tail both hampers it and adds to our admira- 
 tion. It is as though we were watching a beauti- 
 ful creature performing on the tight-rope. Its 
 flight, as it climbs into the air and at each step 
 folds its wings, is part of an exquisite ballet. 
 
 Yet there is little music to accompany it. The 
 wren, brown as a withering leaf, pauses and re- 
 attempts the ancient vehemence of its song as 
 it hops among the lower branches of the confused 
 hedge of thorn, sloe and bramble. But for the 
 most part it is content to chatter — to scold no 
 one in particular with its grating churr but the 
 universe or the young moon. The robins are 
 more generous, and recognise that there are 
 other themes for song than love. That, I think.
 
 12 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 is what has endeared the robin to man. Most of 
 the other birds are amorists in their music. The 
 robins declare that life is good even after the 
 honeymoon^ and that there are twelve months in 
 the year, all of them good. They are birds with 
 all the human vices — greedy, quarrelsome and 
 domineering — but at least they sing songs of 
 experience that echo our own — songs in which 
 joy and sorrow, memory and hope, are inter- 
 mingled beyond extrication. Theirs, indeed, is 
 the only certain music at this season. You would 
 not call the noise that the nuthatches make^ 
 invisibly clicking like typewriters along the 
 branches of the tall elms, music. You would not 
 call the hysterical whinny of the green wood- 
 pecker, as he escapes from one patch of trees to 
 another, music. Here, but for the robin, is the 
 silence and the songlessness of autumn. The 
 linnets' voices, as they break out of the thorn 
 and escape into the wide air, are hardly more 
 than laboured breathing. The willow-wren and 
 the white-throat scour the hearts of the bushes 
 for their insect prey in the timid silence of mice. 
 All is still as the surface of the dull stream. The 
 caw of a rook half-a-mile away would disturb the 
 silence. 
 
 In order to see birds it is necessary to become 
 a part of the silence. One has to sit still like a 
 mystic and wait. One soon learns that fussing, 
 instead of achieving things, merely prevents
 
 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 13 
 
 things from happening. To be passive is in some 
 circumstances the most efficient form of activity. 
 You cannot command events : you can only put 
 yourself in the place where events will happen 
 to you. No impatient man has ever seen Nature. 
 It is no use bustling after a kingfisher, I knew 
 this and, though I have no great taste for 
 patience, I sat down on the bank of the stream, 
 idly watching flycatcher and wagtail, the yellow 
 fleabane, the mauve peppermint, and the fresh 
 green of the iris leaves. I did not hope for too 
 much. I was content to lie at the edge of a 
 stream that a kingfisher inhabited. The unseen 
 kingfisher made the mud of the stream as pretty 
 as though it were sitting there on a bough as in 
 an illustration. So at least I thought, and I knew 
 that I was going to return again and again to 
 the shores of that stagnant streamlet until I 
 had set my eyes on Solomon in all his glory 
 or whatever a kingfisher most resembled. Then, 
 suddenly, out of a turn of the stream under a 
 thicket of bushes, the blue flame appeared and 
 fled past me along the water, perching for a 
 moment on the lower branch of a willow and 
 taking to flight again as soon as it saw the cat- 
 like eyes of a human being watching it from a 
 few yards' distance. Was I disappointed in the 
 spectacle .'' No. I am disappointed only because 
 I am unable to describe it. Can you imagine a 
 blue that is more beautiful than any green, and
 
 14 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 a green that is more beautiful than any blue, and 
 both of them blended as though into a magical 
 light ? Perhaps there are waters of as wonderful a 
 blue lying about the shores of some undiscovered 
 island. Perhaps there are waters of as wonderful 
 a green visiting the white caves on the shore of 
 that island. 
 
 There is surely no other bird that provides us 
 in the same degree with an Arabian afternoon's 
 entertainment. Even in the swiftness with 
 which it melts from the view, it seems to be a 
 piece of a story-teller's world, a visionary figment. 
 The mere gleam of its flashing feathers, when it 
 is past, transforms the muddiest waters into a 
 stream of legend. To have seen it gives one 
 the vanity of a larger experience. But one is not 
 content. One must see it again — see it in such 
 a way that the eye can seize it in shape and in 
 detail and not as a mere fugitive splendour. 
 One returns the next evening again and lies down 
 above the fleabane and the peppermint. After a 
 time a shadow perches under the shadow of an 
 arch of bushes — takes up its stand on a pole in 
 mid-stream, like Patience on a monument, and 
 meditates on minnows. There are no colours to 
 be seen : it might as well, save for its size, be a 
 cormorant or the devil. Nor does it wait to be 
 seen through the field-glasses. Two lovers pass, 
 and the pole is birdless. I had almost given up 
 hope of seeing it again when a shape appeared
 
 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 15 
 above the hedge and a little beyond it— a shape 
 that rose into the light of the sunset and reflected 
 it in an orange glow, like a winged goldfish. As 
 it passed, the orange of the under parts melted 
 into the green and blue of the upper, and it 
 disappeared, a tiny comet of orange and green, 
 lovely (said I to myself) as the unity of Ireland, 
 It is possible that the kingfisher has no politics, 
 but in legend at least it has always been the 
 bird of peace. Is it not the halcyon for whose 
 ark-like nest the waters of the sea were calm .'' 
 The ark-like nest, they say, is romance, and the 
 real nest is but a mess of old bones at the end 
 of a hole. Humanity was surely justified in 
 providing it with a house better suited to its 
 fine robes — in giving this legend among birds a 
 legendary setting. It was the only point, indeed, 
 on which humanity was kind to the kingfisher. 
 Its fine feathers have brought it not honour, 
 but persecution — or, perhaps it would be more 
 accurate to say, the honour of pei'secution. Yet 
 it seems I'easonable to believe that the world 
 would be poorer if no one could ever see, or hope 
 to see, a kingfisher, just as it would be poorer if 
 no one could ever see a rainbow. It may be that 
 there would be no more rainbows if the milliners 
 could get hold of them and persuade women to 
 wear them. Luckily, men have begun to see 
 that it is necessary to defend the graces of life 
 against the demands of millinery, and there is a
 
 16 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 chance that the kingfisher may survive to amuse 
 us, as the whirling colours of a humniing-top 
 amuse children. 
 
 Many sorts of birds, indeed, have already begun 
 to be more plentiful since it has become less of 
 a fashion to possess them, living or dead. If 
 there are fewer swallows, on account of the 
 slaughter on their passage through France, there 
 are more goldfinches. The birds, however, have 
 not yet learned to trust man, as you may see 
 by the behaviour of the green woodpecker, who 
 fills the wood with mocking noises, but who will 
 not trust himself within range of a human eye 
 if he can help it. As I lay among the heather 
 and gorse on the top of a hill on Sunday a green 
 woodpecker flew over my head, with a yellow 
 flash of tail, and dropped with a scream to the 
 stem of a hawthorn-tree a few yards away. He 
 clung to it, as if listening, and the sun gleamed 
 on his green cloak and on the ruby in his crown. 
 But he no sooner saw me than he screamed again 
 and fled behind a thicket, beautiful in his un- 
 gainliness. The hill was also full of redstarts in 
 their Joseph's coats, flying from covert to covert, 
 and showing little of their beauty but the tail, 
 that seemed to be on fire as they disappeared. 
 They were, for the most part, but a melancholy 
 voice crying " Coo-ee ! " behind the leaves. 
 Occasionally, however, cock and hen would settle 
 on the tips of the branches and carry on their
 
 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 17 
 
 dialogue of alarm, he blue, black and red, 
 exquisite as a Japanese painting, she more 
 domestic in her brown dress. But at the 
 slightest movement of one's head they became 
 aware of the presence of man, the enemy, and 
 were once more crying fugitives with tails of 
 fire. Here, too, there is no way to see the world 
 but by sitting still. On these terms alone will 
 the procession of bright things go by. If you 
 want an excuse for doing nothing, here is one 
 ready to your hand.
 
 II 
 
 CHANGING HOUSES 
 
 There is much to be said for moving in winter. 
 If you like the house you are leaving, it is best 
 of all to choose a week that would make Paradise 
 itself look dismal. There should be cold without 
 sunshine, a cold wind the colour of dirty water — 
 a wind that withers and benumbs to a point at 
 which you cease to notice or to care whether it 
 is wet or dry. But even ordinary wet weather is 
 better than no bad weather at all. The rain 
 makes you nervous for the piano and the other 
 precious things that are left standing on the road 
 till the men feel strong enough to hoist them 
 into the vans. But better a wet piano than a 
 sad heart. Luckily, the longer the piano is left 
 standing in the rain, the more desperate becomes 
 your impatience to leave the place and to cast off 
 its mud from your boots for ever. 
 
 Not that I was ever the sort of person to fall in 
 love with a house in the best of circumstances. 
 I like places, and I like people, but neither the 
 outside nor the inside of any house matters 
 enough to me to cause me an ache at leaving. 
 I had rather have a house with a view than a 
 
 l8
 
 CHANGING HOUSES 19 
 
 house that is itself a view. Mr Lucas, or someone 
 else, has said that it is not the house in which 
 one lives, but the liouse opposite the house in 
 which one lives, that matters. There are, I 
 admit, houses so ugly, so ostentatiously ugly, 
 that I should be reluctant to live in them. 
 Some of them were built at a time when there 
 was rivalry as to who should invent a brick of the 
 most repulsive colour, and one man invented a 
 brick of soapy yellow and another a brick ot 
 contusion blue. Every time you look at the 
 I'ront of one of these houses, you feel that the 
 sun has gone out. There is nothing that can 
 bring the cheerfulness of life into their long and 
 dismal faces, from the sharp-angled attic-window 
 down to the bay-windows below, chill with a 
 Miss Murdstoneish self-satisfaction. Were house- 
 fronts designed in imitation of tombstones, you 
 could scarcely get a more depressing effect. 
 There is nothing that persuades one more 
 strongly that civilisation has come to stay than 
 the fact that it survived, not only the war, but 
 later nineteenth-century architecture. Looking 
 at one of these houses, you would say that no 
 family that entered it, with however rosy and 
 smiling faces, could ever come out of it except 
 as lean and dismal ghosts. They look like 
 seminaries for the production of killjoys. Yet, 
 as a matter of fact, we know that happy men, 
 women and children have lived in them who
 
 20 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 played games with apples hanging from the 
 ceiling on Hallow-e'en, and graduated summer 
 after summer at the seaside fi*om wooden spades 
 to iron spades and from iron spades to no spades 
 at all. Young men in love have walked past 
 house-fronts such as these and reverenced them 
 in fear and trembling as though angels were 
 watching fi'om the windows. There may be men 
 so fastidious in their architectural tastes that, 
 having fallen in love and discovering later that 
 the lady dwelt in a house built of whitish-yellow 
 brick, would hurriedly withdraw. But, as a rule, 
 love laughs at architects, and, at any rate, no 
 unmarried woman is held responsible for the 
 house she lives in. She may glorify yellow 
 brick : yellow brick cannot dishonour her. 
 
 As for the insides of houses, anyone who has 
 lived much in lodgings will, as likely as not, have 
 lost that keen sense of personal possession of the 
 very walls and arrangement of a room that is felt 
 by many people, especially by women. I am not 
 indifferent to the furniture, the curtains, the 
 walls and the arrangement of a room, but I enjoy 
 these things as a spectator. I could no more 
 arrange a room either neatly or beautifully myself 
 than I could play the mouth-organ. I care more 
 for the comfortableness of a chair than for its 
 design, and I should not feel acutely miserable 
 even if coloured Christmas supplements were 
 hanging in frames above the mantelpiece. While
 
 CHANGING HOUSES 21 
 
 1 lived in a Pimlico lodging-house, I asked only 
 two things — a lamp that would not smoke and a 
 wicker arm-chair that would not turn a somer- 
 sault when you sat down in it. My landlady had 
 two lamjis. When I complained that one of 
 them smoked, she brought the other. When 1 
 complained that the second one smoked too, 
 she brought back the first with a triumphant 
 beaming " There you are, sir ! " that made a 
 fresh complaint impossible for at least forty-eight 
 hours. Month after month, year after year, those 
 two foul and reeking lamps marched in procession 
 up and down the stairs, each of them always 
 ready to take the other's place at a moment's 
 notice. You who have never lived in lodgings 
 may wonder that I did not indict both of the 
 lamps at once and so get rid of them at a blow. 
 But it is a very different thing to say to your 
 landlady, "This lamp smokes," from saying, '^ All 
 your lamps smoke." This last verges on insult 
 and would seem like a criticism of her as a 
 landlady. If you want to live happily in lodgings, 
 it is essential that, on the one hand, there should 
 be no criticism of the landlady by you and that, 
 on the other, there should be no criticism of you 
 by the landlady. There are generally faults on 
 both sides, and the less said of them the better. 
 Hence, though the oil-lamps smoked, and not 
 only smoked but were wet with spilt oil so that 
 they left rings and daubs of oil on the tablecloth.
 
 22 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 on the booksj on the papers — whatever they 
 were set down on — I endured it like a philosopher. 
 You could not touch one of those lamps without 
 becoming odorous of low-flash-point oil. When 
 the lamp began to smoke as well and the smuts 
 to fall on your manuscript, it was at times 
 infuriating. But youth is greatly enduring, and 
 a man who is not a Sybarite can live in a bed- 
 sitting-room with a smelling lamp well enough. 
 
 As for the chair, that was a different matter. 
 It was a dark brown basket-work chair, and it 
 leaned over a little sideways and a little back- 
 ways, like a tree that has been out in many 
 storms. It was probably nearing the end of its 
 life by the time I got to know it. It was bowed 
 to such a degree that it needed only a touch for 
 it to topple over. If anyone, sitting down on it, 
 leaned back, this shifted the centre of gravity 
 outside the base, and over both sitter and chair 
 would go, heels in air and crashing into the 
 washstand. By sitting very carefully and re- 
 membering the insecurity of your position, you 
 could read a book in the chair in tolerable 
 comfort. But it did not do to get too deeply 
 absorbed. If you ventured to forget yourself 
 while reading Othello, it was on the cards that, 
 just as the excitement reached its height, at the 
 words " And smote him thus," you would find 
 yourself before you could wink rolling under the 
 washstand or into the fireplace. It was indeed
 
 CHANGING HOUSES 23 
 
 a chair so tricky as to be wicked. To ask a 
 visitor to sit down in it was like offering an 
 unsuspecting person a mount on a savage horse. 
 And yet, when visitors called, one always auto- 
 matically offered them the most comfortable- 
 looking chair in the room. The habit of courtesy, 
 when once acquired, is almost impossible to get 
 rid of Again and again I remembered too late. 
 I began to know most of my friends by the soles 
 of their boots. Never can there have been a 
 horse that flung so many human beings. In the 
 end the thing became almost absurd. Luckily, 
 the chair was taken away as the result of an 
 accident. An acquaintance of mine, rather 
 Bohemian in his ways, called on me one night to 
 borrow money or on some equally hopeless quest. 
 I happened to be out of London at the time and, 
 on hearing this, he decided to make the best of 
 things and persuaded the landlord to let him 
 borrow my room for the night. The landlord 
 weakly admitted him, as he looked tired and had 
 clearly been drinking too much Scotch whisky. 
 On his going upstairs and into my room, the 
 spectacle of a cosy basket-work arm-chair must 
 have been a i-efreshment to exhausted eyes. The 
 visitor seems to have thrown himself into it whole- 
 heartedly. But he did not throw himself into the 
 chair more whole-heartedly than the chair threw 
 him out again. On gathering himself and the chair 
 up from the floor, he naturally felt that anyone
 
 24 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 who did not know him well might be led to 
 suspect that he had been drinking, and, believing 
 that the chair was an ordinary chair that only 
 needed to be sat down in by a sober man, he 
 resolved to prove that he was sober by once 
 more sitting down in it. He sat down heavily, 
 determinedly. The chair threw him again with 
 all the greater violence. He set it upright again 
 and, approaching it circumspectly, sat down with 
 cautious slowness. It felt all right, and he 
 leaned back with a smile of relief, and, as he 
 leaned, the chair reared and sent him flying into 
 the washstand again. Meanwhile my landlord 
 sat on the stairs, trembling with apprehension, 
 a candle by his side, ready to run for the fire 
 brigade if the lamp should be knocked over. A 
 lady who lodged on the same floor declared the 
 next morning that an awful fight had taken place 
 during the night in the next room. She said 
 it had gone on for hours, and wanted to know 
 if anyone had been killed ; she had been too 
 terrified to cry out. As a matter of fact, there 
 had been no fight, unless you can describe the 
 attempt of a tipsy art student to sit down in an 
 arra-chair as a fight. Apparently the chair won, 
 but it was a Pyrrhic victory. The landlord and 
 landlady, having passed a night of terror and 
 wakefulness, agreed that, as a piece of furniture, 
 the chair had seen its best days, and brought 
 me in its place a spring-bottomed chair which.
 
 CHANGING HOUSES 25 
 
 though perfectly safe, was a little more up-and- 
 downish in the surface than I care for on account 
 of its having some of the springs broken and 
 some not. Still, the experience was a useful one 
 in making me easily contented ever afterwards 
 in the matter of furniture. I do not ask if a 
 chair is Louis-Quatorze or Chippendale. I ask 
 only whether it is possible to sit in it without 
 pain or peril. 
 
 Still, I understand the feelings of those who, 
 having made a house or a room beautiful, suffer 
 at the spectacle of all this grace (which is almost 
 a piece of their own personalities) being torn 
 down and destroyed beyond all possibility of 
 reconstruction. For no new house can exactly 
 reproduce the conditions of the old. The new 
 room may be more beautiful than the old, but 
 the beauty of the old is gone like a flower. 
 Sitting among the ruins the other day, and 
 having nothing to do, I looked for something to 
 read and found that all the books had been 
 packed except Paradise Lost. It is not the most 
 cheering book to read on the day on which one 
 is leaving a house where one has been happy, 
 but, for those who love houses, it is peculiarly 
 appropriate. Not that I could read it just then. 
 There was a deaf carpenter in the room taking 
 down the bookshelves and breaking them up 
 with a hammer, and to read Milton to the ac- 
 companiment of a hammer is to lose his music.
 
 26 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 It makes him too regular — too jumpily regular. 
 I had just got to the words " Rose out of chaos" 
 when one of the furniture-removers, going round 
 the walls in boots that made almost more noise 
 than hammers on the bare boards, and taking 
 the pictures down, let one fall with a crash of 
 broken glass on the floor. " That," said he 
 unemotionally, "is the first to-day." I longed to 
 be able to smile and to say, " It doesn't matter," 
 or "It's only a little one." Theoretically, I 
 always behave like that. But, in fact, I had a 
 strong impulse to tell the man what I thought of 
 him. I was restrained only by the nervousness 
 that keeps me from telling any man what I think 
 of him. I felt that at least he ought to have 
 shown a little contrition. I muttered, " It can't 
 be helped," but I muttered it in a tone that was 
 sulky, even biting, and meant that it could easily 
 have been helped by anybody except a clumsy 
 fool. If it had not been so cold, I should have 
 gone out and walked up and down beside the 
 sprouting broccoli. But to go out would have 
 merely been to be miserable in a different way. 
 Seldom have I endured a day of emptier misery. 
 After such sufferings, anyone would have been 
 glad to get away from any house. One would 
 have been glad even to go back to lodgings and 
 the savageries of the arm-chair. All one asked 
 was to be allowed to fly. . . . And now the 
 hammers have begun in the new house. But
 
 CHANGING HOUSES 27 
 
 every day new curtains go up^ new fires are lit, 
 new shelves are made secure. Soon 1 shall have 
 my books in rows again, not arranged in order 
 as in a library, but untidily as in the house of a 
 human being. Then I shall take down Paradise 
 licgained and read it (or try to), and feel perfectly 
 content till the next flitting.
 
 Ill 
 
 A RABBIT, A RAINBOW, AND 
 A LITTLE STRIPED OWL 
 
 A RABBIT, a rainbow, and a little striped owl, all 
 seen within five minutes, did undoubtedly brighten 
 a cold and rain-soaked Easter afternoon. The 
 world is going to the devil, as anybody may 
 discover in the morning papers, and, apart from 
 that, the rain has been falling in a deluge. Yet 
 here comes a rabbit scampering out of a thicket 
 over the wet grass ; here comes a rainbow, leaving 
 its mark on a brown tumult of rain and with its 
 arch lost among clouds of a ghastly whitish-grey 
 like the skin of dead fishes ; here comes a little 
 striped oavI to its perch amid the ruins of an 
 ancient pear-tree, and the devil and all his works 
 are forgotten. One thinks less of what the 
 French will do next than of whether the little 
 owl, as he turns his head with the mechanical 
 precision of Punch in the show, will see that he 
 is being watched by a human being and will fly 
 away. Alas ! it is impossible not to move a little 
 nearer to him — to try for a closer glimpse of his 
 cruel eyes, of his dignified and cruel face. He 
 sees better than his reputation, though it is 
 
 28
 
 A RABBIT, A RAINBOW, ETC. 29 
 
 still daylight, and immediately dives, quiet as a 
 feather, and flies swiftly in the shadow of a hedge, 
 mounts over it as if it were a wave, and passes 
 swiftly down the road beyond a grove of larches, 
 after which there is no sign of him but the voices 
 of frightened birds in the distance. 
 
 He is gone, and the day is emptier for his going. 
 He leaves behind him an empty world of wet 
 fields — fields sprinkled with young wheat and 
 fields that are brown and level after the harrow 
 — fields of all shapes and sizes lying down the 
 slope and climbing up the slope beyond, with 
 elms black in the rain and holly-trees with scarcely 
 more colour set irregularly on their borders. 
 There is hardly a sign of spring except in the 
 calendar. The earth is still mud awaiting the 
 word of creation. If creation has begun, it has 
 not got far beyond the dog's mercury. There 
 has not been such a dog's-mercury April known 
 for years. The roadside is full of its green 
 flowers, if flowers they can be called. They are 
 a sort of green porridge, and no reasonable sub- 
 stitute for the feast men call Spring. Ladybirds 
 in their red cloaks with the seven black spots are 
 hiding, it is true, in the folds of their common- 
 place leaves. But ladybirds cannot dominate a 
 landscape as dog's mercury can. They are specks 
 of scarlet lost in a wilderness. . . . 
 
 That morning, as I was walking along the edge 
 of a ploughed field before the sun had been
 
 30 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 drowned in the wet sky, I saw an insect that 
 did dominate the landscape. It was a peacock 
 butterfly, with its large brown wings beating 
 their way along the briars and exposing eyes of 
 an Eastern splendour. For a moment it seemed 
 as though the word of creation had been spoken 
 and the mud had vanished. But immediately 
 afterwards the butterfly had vanished and the 
 mud remained. Then something perfectly won- 
 derful happened. I did not believe it at first. I 
 am by nature incredulous and always suspect the 
 first cuckoo of being a small boy. But, a moment 
 later, the bird itself came into view, a cross-bow 
 above a wood, hurrying as ever to another hiding- 
 place, with its crescent-moon of wings and its 
 long tail. Theoretically, I am profoundly excited 
 on first hearing the cuckoo. Here is the speech 
 of Spring itself straight from the Equator. In 
 anticipation, it is like a gift of good weather — 
 like the gift even of a good world. There are 
 prettier songs, but none with a more magical 
 influence. The cuckoo is the advance-courier of 
 Spring, and, at a word from him, all the soilure 
 and darkness of winter are hurried out of sight. 
 Everywhere is hurry and preparation for the 
 coming of a million guests. Soon we shall have 
 all the birds and all the butterflies and all the 
 beetles, all the fruits and all the flowers, a 
 pleasant congregation. 
 
 The great moments, hoAvever, have a way of
 
 A RABBIT, A RAINBOW, ETC. 31 
 
 being disappointing. At the voice of the first 
 cuckoo, the windows of heaven are not really 
 opened. Or, if they are opened, it is only to let 
 out the rain. In the general blankness of the 
 world, the bird seems an intruder. Its voice 
 sounds like the voice of a cuckoo-clock — mechani- 
 cal, unmysterious, conjuring up nothing outside 
 itself If one has a thrill of pleasure, it is not 
 because the gaudy procession of Spring has 
 begun to march with a cuckoo bugling at its 
 head : it is merely because one has heard the 
 cuckoo before anybody else of one's acquaintance. 
 Men and women are scarcely beyond children in 
 their pleasure at being able to say : " I saw it 
 first," or " I heard it first." I met a man the 
 other day who said he had seen a swallow this 
 year. He was as modest as it is possible to be 
 in the circumstances, but he could not entirely 
 hide his sense of his achievement. There was 
 no use telling him that one swallow does not 
 make a summer. It does at least make a summer 
 of excitement, especially when one talks about it 
 afterwards. True, it is an excitement that does 
 not last very long. In a fortnight everybody will 
 have seen swallows, and in June if the man 
 persists in telling people that he saw a swallow 
 before anybody else this Spring, we shall look at 
 him askance as we now look at him with interest. 
 For the moment, he is as important as a man who 
 has seen something that we should all like to
 
 32 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 have seen — the North Pole or the first days of 
 the Russian Revolution. He is the focus of a 
 great event. He is a go-between between us 
 and wonderland. " And did you once see Shelley 
 plain ? " cried the enthusiastic Browning. In 
 our enthusiasm^ we see through other men's eyes 
 and hear through other men's ears almost more 
 keenly than through our own. Most of our enjoy- 
 ments are at second or third hand. That is as 
 near as we shall ever get to the Battle of Marathon 
 or the acting of David Garrick. Thus we become 
 Argus-eyed by proxy, and hear through as many 
 ears as Argus had eyes. There is nothing that 
 proves more effectively the unity of life than the 
 fact that in this way each of us becomes the 
 all but universal spectator, the all but universal 
 auditor. It may be that we can become this only 
 if we desire to see things and hear things for 
 ourselves. But, given the desire, we gain this 
 power of seeing through the eyes and hearing 
 through the ears of the human race. Nature is 
 infinitely obliging. She cannot give us every- 
 thing, but she can give us a substitute and a 
 compensation for everything. 
 
 Even the backward Spring is not without its 
 compensations. It contains all the more surprises. 
 The cuckoo should not come before the chiffchaff. 
 But this year the calendar has been turned upside 
 down. It may be that the chiffchaffs have actually 
 come, but have not yet begun to clip the air with
 
 A RABBIT, A RAINBOW, ETC. 33 
 
 their notes. Naturalists declare that they are 
 here. It is merely that they await the rising of 
 the curtain to sing. Spring has never learned 
 the virtue of punctuality — if indeed it is a virtue, 
 seeing that it is not in nature. There is, no 
 doubt, a sort of regularity in nature which may 
 seem to excuse the deification of punctuality, but 
 it is a regularity that allows of an infinite variety. 
 The sun does not rise at the same hour on three 
 successive days. Spring seldom begins on the 
 day officially given in Letts's diaries. It is an 
 example of our gross human impudence that we 
 should attempt to bind it down to a fixed time 
 like a music-hall performance. Nature is neither 
 a music-hall performer nor a business man, but a 
 poet. It works by inspiration, not by the clock. 
 The year is a circle, but it is never the same circle. 
 That, perhaps, is why it is one of the few circles 
 that are eternally interesting. Its variety makes 
 us interested in seeing things not happening as 
 well as in seeing things happening — in seeing 
 spring weather that intimidates even chaffinches 
 into silence, save for their tinny winter hiccough. 
 Amid the drearness of dell and thornbush, the 
 song of the wren hidden in the wet branches 
 seems all the more ti'iumphant. It is a song 
 brilliant as a rainbow in a wet sky — brilliant as 
 a dance of rainbows. There is a shameless 
 optimism in it that clothes the bare hedges with 
 something better than leaves. There is no other 
 c
 
 34 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 resident bird so incapable of melancholy. The 
 robin is often pensive, and sings to us and looks 
 down at us from the apple-tree as though he 
 sympathised with us. But the wren never sings 
 except to say that it is the best of all possible 
 worlds. His must have been the voice that first 
 sounded immediately after God saw that it was 
 all very good. The wren is the incarnate Amen 
 of creation. He has moods of anger, it is true, 
 when his grating voice can be heard in the hedge, 
 and he has moments of mild fear, when his little 
 brown form scurries ahead of one, five yards at a 
 time, among the thorns of the lane. But, when 
 the danger is past, he recovers his spirits and 
 raises his song with an exaggerated boastfulness. 
 "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds," an 
 old country rhyme begins. He certainly swells 
 into a king in his song. If Noah had put his 
 cock wren out on the roof of the Ark, the flood 
 would no longer have seemed a barren waste, 
 but would have scintillated for him as the thing 
 his imagination had desired. 
 
 Every charming thing, indeed, gains in a 
 measure from a background of barrenness. The 
 stitchwort opening out of its green sheath into a 
 white star on the roadside attracts us all the more 
 because it is in a solitude of weeds. Child calls 
 to child and points to the half-hidden purple 
 glow of the ground ivy all the more eagerly 
 because of its rarity. And how delightful to
 
 A RABBIT, A RAINBOW, ETC. 35 
 
 come on the periwinkle creeping over a bank in 
 a blue cloud ! The earth is still winter's, but 
 these are spring's. Spring's, too, is the gentle 
 oscillating voice of the hedge-sparrow, and the 
 red flowers mixed with the cones of the larch. 
 Even the belated marsh-tit, with its exquisite 
 mushroom-brown wings, that rocks and taps in 
 the coco-nut, is an embodied anticipation of 
 spring. As for the blue-tit, seen from below, he 
 is a Chinese curiosity with his parti-coloured face. 
 But when he alights on the ground beside the 
 bacon-rind that has been thrown out for him and 
 we see his back, we begin to wonder whether 
 there was ever such a painted thing in nature. 
 We do not know how beautiful birds are till we 
 have seen them from above. If one has never 
 seen a swallow's blue back, one cannot be said 
 ever to have seen a swallow. The blue-tit is 
 not so rich in colour — the deep colour of summer 
 seas. He is prettiness compared to beauty, but 
 of what a dazzling prettiness ! 
 
 And so the day passed — an interval of reading, 
 an interval of eating, an interval of conversation, 
 and an interval of walking, with a peewit flying 
 so close above my head that I heard the creak of 
 its wings, and two wild ducks hurrying with their 
 long necks high above the trees in the lonely sky. 
 Nor did I enjoy the walk the less because I was 
 within half-a-mile of the " Cupid " — the " Cupid " 
 that is so remote from the speech of town that,
 
 36 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 if you ask fox* beer, the landlady inquires : " Ale 
 or stout?" The bottle of beer she brought me 
 was the last in the small house, so that I had 
 perforce to drink stout — black as the wet trees 
 and more comforting. Then I went home, and 
 saw the rabbit, the rainbow and the little striped 
 owl. Then I went in and read Schopenhauer. 
 "Life," I read, "oscillates between pain and 
 boredom." And again : "All nations speak ill of 
 each other, and all are right." There is some- 
 thing to be said for Schopenhauer. There is 
 something to be said for the song of the wren. 
 And assuredly there is something to be said for 
 bottled stout.
 
 IV 
 
 ON KEEPING THE SABBATH 
 
 Nothing could be more paradoxical than the 
 English attitude to Sunday. England has now 
 for a generation or so kept the Sabbath in public 
 and broken it in private. As a consequence, 
 strict Sabbatarians, though they have deplored 
 a certain laxity in the English observance of the 
 Sabbath, have been able to delude themselves 
 into believing that in this matter Protestant 
 England was at least not nearly so bad as 
 Catholic Ireland. Orange writers, indeed, in 
 comparing Ireland with England, have constantly 
 attributed the woes of the Irish to the fact that 
 they are a nation of Sabbath-breakers. As a 
 matter of fact, Ireland is almost as much addicted 
 to Sabbath observance as Scotland — infinitely 
 more so than England — but in a different way. 
 In Ireland, everybody goes to church once on 
 Sunday ; in Scotland, everybody goes twice, or 
 ought to ; in England, hardly anybody goes at 
 all. The Irishman may attend a political meeting 
 or a hurling match on Sunday afternoon, but 
 his conscience would prick him if in the morning 
 he had not been to say his '^ mouthful of prayers " 
 
 37
 
 S8 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 in the chapel. Thus the Irish may be described 
 as a nation of church-going Sabbath-breakers, 
 while the English break the Sabbath without 
 troubling to go to church. As I have said, 
 however, they have hitherto broken it in private 
 without breaking it too badly in public. The 
 theatres, the cricket grounds and the football 
 fields have slept in a Sabbath peace, even if young 
 men and maidens have crept unobtrusively 
 to the tennis lawns or gone for picnics on the 
 river where there are no clergymen, or bathed 
 or fished from the piers on the Sussex coast. 
 Citizens have done this, as it were, at their own 
 risk. Sabbath-breaking has not yet been organ- 
 ised as on the Continent, but merely connived 
 at. And yet the thin end of the wedge has 
 during the past thirty or forty years been ever 
 advancing from thickness to thickness. Sunday 
 concerts and Sunday excursions have been be- 
 coming more and more numerous. Sunday bands 
 in the parks were succeeded by the Sunday 
 opening of museums and art galleries, and this 
 in turn was followed by Sunday cinemas. It is 
 scarcely a generation since public opinion was so 
 profoundly shocked by the decision of The Daily 
 Telegraph and The Daily Mail to publish Sun- 
 day newspapers that the attempt was hurriedly 
 abandoned. Yet to-day even the clergyman 
 reads his Sunday paper before going off to 
 conduct the morning service. He probably
 
 ON KEEPING THE SABBATH 39 
 
 learned to do so during the war. After all, if it 
 was right to blow human beings to pieces with 
 high-explosive shells on Sunday, the Recording 
 Angel was hardly going to waste ink in writing 
 reports about people who merely sat at home 
 and read about it in a Sunday newspaper. It 
 is probable, however, that even without the war 
 public opinion in favour of Sunday observance was 
 ceasing to have any effective existence. Society 
 was indifferent to the Sabbath ; the working 
 classes were indifferent to it ; the younger 
 generation was indifferent. As the habit of 
 church-going declined, more and more people 
 were bound to demand some form of activity 
 to take its place. Even the clergy have begun 
 to see in large numbers that the alternative ways 
 of spending Sunday are no longer church- 
 going minus recreation and recreation minus 
 church-going, but are church-going plus re- 
 creation and recreation minus church-going. 
 They have ceased to expect to save the Sabbath 
 as a whole, in the old sense. The most they can 
 hope for is to save a piece of it, as in Catholic 
 countries. In another fifty years, I fancy, most 
 of the Christian Churches will have accepted the 
 theory that the Sabbath is a Jewish rather than 
 a Christian institution, and Sabbatarianism will 
 be as rare as the objection to instrumental music 
 in the house of God. 
 
 The decision of the London County Council to
 
 40 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 allow cricket and football and other games in 
 the public places under its control on Sunday 
 merely translates public opinion into action. 
 And if there is to be a religious revival in the 
 future, it must be a revival that will save the 
 souls of people who play games on Sunday as 
 well as people who work in factories and offices 
 on weekdays. Even so, many of us will be unable 
 to bid the old-fashioned Sabbath farewell without 
 a mild sentiment of regret. We did not wish it 
 to stay, but we cannot see it go without a note 
 almost of tenderness in our leave-taking. It was 
 not, now that we can think of it without bitter- 
 ness, entirely a tyrant and a kill-joy. How 
 hideous it was in town with those tinny church 
 bells making a noise as musical as an orchestra 
 of buckets, dinning into us that we must hurry 
 and put our boots on and leave our breakfast 
 half finished, or we should be late for the 
 church from which we would gladly have stayed 
 away ! The very pavements seemed dull under 
 our hasting feet. Every shop we passed had 
 its shutters up as if its eyes were closed in a 
 pretence of prayer. Houses frowned, solemn as 
 elders. The streets were empty of the pleasant 
 hum of people going hither and thither on their 
 natural activities. Men in unnatural silk hats, 
 boys in unnatural bowlers, everybody wearing 
 gloves or carrying them, everybody dressed as if 
 wishing to prove that it was possible to be a
 
 ON KEEPING THE SABBATH 41 
 
 Christian and yet to look like a lady or gentle- 
 man, many with Bibles, Prayer Books, and bags 
 with scent bottles — was there ever so dreary a 
 procession to join for a boy who would rather 
 have been lying in bed or going for a walk into 
 the country ? It is true that the people were 
 a great deal more cheerful coming from church 
 than going to it. After the Benediction they 
 became almost merry. They did not do more 
 than twinkle at each other as they shook hands 
 and whispered their "How are you's " within 
 the sacred building. But, as they passed out 
 of the porch and down the wide steps, their 
 whispers rose into speech, they made jokes 
 and laughed, and they went out of the gates 
 and along the street in the jollity of universal 
 benevolence. No one who has ever gone to 
 church will easily forget the thrill of coming 
 out of it — the hat hastily seized, the fresh 
 air already breathed in anticipation as one 
 joined the slow procession down the aisle, the 
 men holding their hats high, everybody walk- 
 ing at half-a-mile an hour on his legs and yet 
 hurrying, hurrying, into the outside world in 
 his spirit. 
 
 But it would be false to suggest that onfc never 
 enjoyed being in church except when one was 
 leaving it. It was the theory of going to church 
 rather than the practice of it that came like 
 a darkness over the morninff. To hear the
 
 42 SOLOMON IN ALL HLS GLORY 
 
 Scriptures beautifully read — " Arise, my love, my 
 fair one, and come away," or " O my son Absalom, 
 my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died 
 for thee. Absalom, my son, my son," or " Con- 
 sider the lilies of the field " — was to be thrilled 
 as one has never been thrilled since, except by 
 great actors speaking great words on the stage. 
 And there were sermons, too, that were works 
 of art — sermons that seemed to be spoken, as 
 Isaak Walton said of Donne's, by an angel out 
 of a cloud. The best of them, perhaps, were 
 sermons about death — sermons that touched us 
 with the universal sorrow and made each of us 
 feel a sojourner and stranger among the games 
 and the landscapes of earth. How insecure we 
 felt — like a tiny group, helplessly huddled on a 
 raft, and with the threat of storms and savage 
 seas that would engulf us ! But the very hope- 
 lessness of our plight made the reassuring words 
 at the end come with a sweetness that stilled the 
 air into an extraordinary silence : " Fear not, 
 little flock. Lo, I am with you alway, even unto 
 the end of the world. . . ." It may be that one 
 looked on as at a spectacle — that one sympathised 
 with the little flock, not as one of them, but as 
 with characters on the stage. Still, one envied 
 them, if not in their lives, in their salvation. 
 One stood apart, like the young man with great 
 possessions, hesitating between two worlds, stirred 
 by the beauty of the one and bound fast by the
 
 ON KEEPING THE SABBATH 43 
 
 beauty of the other. There is something to be 
 said for the view that, as church-going declines, 
 children will be the poorer both in experience 
 and education. They may be released from a 
 tyranny, but they will also be deprived of an 
 early initiation into the arts and much that the 
 arts stand for. Church-going has narrowed many 
 a mind, but it has also brought many a mind into 
 touch with the great tradition that took over 
 the civilisation of Europe from the Greeks and 
 the Romans. Besides this, even the leaping 
 tongues of Hell-fire gave some kind of a cosmic 
 background to the imagination. And for most 
 of us these were not nearly so terrifying as is 
 sometimes made out. We had a Micawberish 
 hope that something would turn up to save us 
 from the worst on the Last Day. After all, one 
 could repent in middle age, when life would have 
 so few pleasures that one would lose very little 
 by becoming a Christian. 
 
 But Sunday was a complete day of delight 
 only in the country, and only in some places in 
 the country. There was a peace in the morning 
 air that seemed to affect even the birds in the 
 trees — even the leaves on the trees. The bees 
 flew about the hedges in a still air that intensified 
 each individual humming so that it passed, like a 
 melody suddenly swept out of the silence and on 
 into the silence again. The happiest days were 
 those on which there was not enough room in the
 
 44 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 trap for everybody to go to churchy and somebody 
 had to stay at home and it was one's own turn 
 to do so. How pleasant it was to help to yoke 
 the horse, to hold up the shafts, to fix the trace, 
 to find the right hole for the bvitchen-strap ! 
 How pleasant to stand in the yai'd and see the 
 packed churchgoers turn out of the gate, smiling 
 farewells ! One would almost have liked to be 
 with them ; but the theory of staying away from 
 church was too overwhelmingly attractive. Then 
 there was the walk with a cousin through the 
 fields, each of them with its memorable name — 
 the Causeway Field, the Whin Field, the Swine's 
 Knowe, Lime-kiln Land. There is no idleness 
 to compare with such a Sunday-morning saunter. 
 There is not a sign of man's energy or labour 
 in all the miles of prospect. To-day the vei'y 
 horses rest from their labours and shake their 
 incompetent tails as they munch the grass in 
 the fields. To-day the lamb is safe from the 
 butcher's eye, and the crops grow in a world of 
 idle and harmless men. If one meets a man 
 walking along beside the hedge, he is a country- 
 man chewing a grass and ambling more slowly 
 than a cow, letting his large feet fall lazily on 
 the ground rather than using them for any 
 purpose of progression. There are mutual jests 
 about not being at church, a secret twinkle of 
 self-congratulation in the eyes of each, a reference 
 to an old dying man — " He was very bad last
 
 ON KEEPING THE SABBATH 45 
 
 night " — and a new version of what Sarah had 
 said to Johnnie when he came home without 
 the wages. If politics were talked^ it would 
 be about Gladstone and Home Rule and Roman 
 Catholics, who were superstitious people who 
 broke the Sabbath. But the man chewing the 
 grass migb.t himself be a Catholic, and then there 
 would be no politics talked, but only friendly 
 gossip about people and cattle and cricket and 
 what happened at the wake the night before 
 last. It was a perfectly animal existence, but 
 how perfectly satisfying ! And in the afternoon 
 one would walk down to the sandy river-mouth 
 and play shoulder-stone with the foreign gipsies, 
 whose very children just out of the cradle smoked 
 pipes and cigarettes. It was not, perhaps, without 
 a sense of sin that one allowed the gipsies to 
 perform their star turn of muzzling a bear they 
 had with them and setting a dog to fight it. 
 This was breaking the Sabbath in good earnest, 
 and the memory of the story of Elisha and of 
 the capacity of bears for destroying wicked 
 children was not reassuring. The gipsies roared 
 with delight every time the monster roared, but 
 there was one boy who looked on a little anxiously. 
 Then there was the walk home in time for the 
 evening prayers, everybody reading a verse in 
 sequence, if it were only, " And Abraham begat 
 Isaac," and an illiterate servant spelling the 
 words out in a loud sing-song. . . . Yes, one feels
 
 46 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 tenderly towards the Sabbath, now that it is 
 gone. One would not like to have missed it. 
 One feels rather sorry for the coming generation 
 that it will know nothing of the joys either of 
 keeping or of breaking the holy day.
 
 CONVERSATION 
 
 It is said that the art of conversation is dead, but 
 if you are staying at an hotel and go into the bar 
 after returning from the pictures you will find 
 that there are still places where men carry on 
 quite wonderful conversations till midnight. I 
 spent a night at a town not far from Cowes during 
 Regatta week, and I heard a conversation that 
 left no doubt in my mind that Swift and Pope 
 and Gay have their successors in modern England. 
 I do not know how the talk drifted from Bottomley, 
 whom a little lean-faced commercial traveller 
 drinking bitter in the corner refused to " 'it 
 when 'e's down," to King George, but for about 
 ten minutes a chorus of male voices discussed the 
 King and the hard life he leads — Goodwood one 
 week, Cowes the laext, and never a day idle. " I 
 was watcheen him at Goodwood," said a young 
 Jew in blue trousers and fawn-coloured socks, 
 "and saw him shakeen hands, shakeen hands, 
 with about thirty people in five minutes, toucheen 
 his hat and boween — greeteens, I suppose you 
 would call it. I thought to myself I'd rather 
 be dead. Greeteens, greeteens all the time." 
 
 47
 
 48 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 " VV'y does 'e do it ? " the lean little man asked ; 
 "it's all 'umbug." "Of course it's humbug," 
 replied the Jew warmly ; " and nobody knows it 
 better than the King. That's what makes it such 
 hard work." "That's what I mean," interrupted 
 the landlord, a large, fat man with a moustache, 
 a bowler on the back of his head, and a booming 
 voice, "when I call him a harassed man. I don't 
 suppose there's a man what's more harassed in 
 the whole of England than King George. I 
 wouldn't take his job, not if you paid me for it." 
 "Give me the Prince of Wales," a spectacled 
 Scotsman in a mackintosh mumbled into his 
 moustache, without taking his pipe out of his 
 mouth. " Ah, the Prince," said the landlord, 
 wagging his head ; " he's hot — hot as mustard. 
 A naval officer what was with him in India was 
 telling me the other night how he routed that 
 fellow Gandhi." " Who's he ? " asked the Jew. 
 "Gandhi?" said the landlord; "you know, the 
 agitator. Well, as I was saying, the Prince of 
 Wales, as soon as he got to India, said, ' Look 
 here, I'm going to interview that fellow.' Of 
 course, everybody was scared blue. ' You can't,' 
 they told him. ' You'll only be shot if you try.' 
 ' I don't give a damn,' says the Prince of Wales ; 
 'go and fix up an appointment.' And they had 
 to. Well, the result was the appointment was 
 made, and the Prince drove off as bold as a lion 
 to keep it. Well, when he got there, there was
 
 CONVERSATION 43 
 
 no Gandhi." " What hapj)ened ? " mumbled the 
 Scotsman. "What happened.''" repeated the 
 landlord in a voice of exasperation. "He'd 
 bunked, run away, took to his heels. I reckon 
 there isn't another man living who could have 
 done what the Prince of Wales done. By gosh ! 
 he's hot — hot as mustard." 
 
 A genial little man in a brown bowler hat who 
 had not been saying much looked up from the 
 sofa on which he was sitting at the clock. 
 " Coming on to midnight, gentlemen," he said ; 
 " I hope everybody here will remember to say 
 ' Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit ' first thing in the morning. 
 Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit," he repeated the words 
 as if to impress them on our memory. " Rabbit, 
 rabbit, rabbit," the lean ti'aveller tried the words 
 over as if testing them to see if they had any 
 meaning ; " I don't get the 'ang of it." " Why," 
 the man in the brown hat laughed at him, " I 
 thought everybody knew ' Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.' 
 If you say ' Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit ' — three times, 
 just like that — first thing in the morning on the 
 first of the month, even before you say your 
 prayers, you'll get a present before the end of 
 the month." " Supposin' you don't say any 
 prayers," the lean traveller objected. "Well, 
 it's all the same," the other assured him; "say 
 ' Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit ' before you say anything 
 else, and I guarantee you'll get a present before 
 the end of the month." " Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit,"
 
 50 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 said the Jew in the fawn-coloured socks. " Well, 
 I'm damned ! " " Supposin' we sit 'ere till twelve 
 o'clock^does that count ? " asked the lean traveller. 
 " Yes/' replied the brown hat, " that counts. 
 Say ' Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit ' — three times — first 
 thing after twelve o'clock, and you'll get a 
 present as sure as I'm drinking this glass of 
 bitter." " Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit," the Scotsman 
 repeated the words in a sepulchral voice ; " I 
 never heard that before." "Well," the spokes- 
 man for the superstition told him, " try it. 
 To-morrow's the first of August. When you're 
 called in the morning, you mustn't even answer 
 till you've said ' Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.' If you 
 remember to do that, you'll find that what I'm 
 telling you is true." " Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit," 
 the Scotsman once more repeated solemnly, and, 
 having done so, raised his glass of whisky solemnly 
 to his lips. " Supposin' you said ' Chicken, 
 chicken, chicken,' " inquired the lean man. " It's 
 no good," the other assured him ; '*^ there's nothing 
 any good, only ' Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.' " " Did 
 you ever try this yourself.'' " a black-moustached 
 man with drink-weary eyes inquired. " Often," 
 said the other, "and always got a present." 
 " Always got a present, " the Scotsman echoed 
 him, and took another drink of whisky. " What 
 d'you mean by a present .'' " the lean man asked. 
 " If a man stood you a whisky-and-soda, would 
 that be a present.''" "No," said the other after
 
 CONVERSATION 51 
 
 a moment's reflection, " I think the present has 
 to be a real present. It might be a hundred 
 pounds, or it might be a box of chocolates. Don't 
 forget it. 'Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.' Never been 
 known to fail." "There are some curious super- 
 stitions," said the man with the black moustache. 
 " Are you one of the people who object to seeing 
 the new moon through glass .^ " "God!" said 
 the other, " I wouldn't like to see the new moon 
 through glass." "/ believe," said the Jew, 
 " that it's unlucky to fall downstairs on a Friday 
 — or any other day " ; and he sniggered at his wit. 
 " Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit," said the man in the 
 brown hat, yawning ; " that's the best of them. 
 You can't go wrong with it." " Rabbit, rabbit, 
 rabbit," the Scotsman meditated, blinking his 
 eyes, and the faint shadow of a smile stealing into 
 his features. " You've got it," the other nodded 
 approval ; " rabbit, rabbit, rabbit." " Rabbit, 
 rabbit, rabbit," the Scotsman smiled outright ; 
 " and you get a present .'' That's very good." 
 
 I cannot remember how the talk found its way 
 to the subject of village life ; but I remember the 
 Jew telling a long story of how, when he was 
 passing the night in a Sussex village, he made 
 the villagers so drunk that, after closing time, 
 they gathered outside the hotel and sang a bawdy 
 version of In Sussex by the Sea. He sang the 
 chorus over in a sort of whisper for our delectation, 
 laughed heartily, and said that it struck him as
 
 52 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 being " damned funny." " Funny things you see 
 in some villages/' said the landlord^ with a dreamy 
 look. " A friend of mine — he's dead now, poor 
 chap — got a stoppage of the bowels — bought a 
 little pub in a village like the one you mention. 
 It lay just off the main road, but those few yards 
 made all the difference. All the motor cars and 
 traffic passed the end of the road without knowing 
 the pub even existed, and my friend was doing 
 no business, absolutely. ' Look here, Bill,' I said 
 to him, ' I'll tell you what to do. Go down to the 
 cross-roads, and, whenever you see a motor car, 
 put up your hand, and, when it stops, say, " Come 
 along, gents, to the Pink Horse, and have a drink 
 for nothing." They'll think you're balmy, of 
 course, but some of 'em will come, and anyhow 
 people will get to know about you.' Poor Bill 
 stood at the cross-roads for hours, but he could 
 get only one man to come along to the pub, and 
 he wasn't looking half scared." The landlord 
 laughed at the memory. "Then," he went on, 
 " I thought I'd better go out myself and see if 
 I couldn't get a move on. Well, I made up my 
 mind to offer a drink to every Tom, Dick and 
 Harry I could see. If I saw a motor car I stopped 
 it and said : ' Come along, gents ; be sports. I'm 
 having a little house-warming, and I want you 
 to be my guests for the day.' The funniest thing 
 was an old tramp who was carrying his dinner 
 in a handkerchief. When I told him to go up
 
 CONVERSATION 53 
 
 to the Pink Horse and he could have as much 
 drink as he wanted for nothing, he looked as if 
 he wanted to escape. * I'm not balmy,' I told 
 him ; 'it's true. Here' — and I pulled out a two- 
 shilling piece from my pocket — ' take that, if you 
 don't believe me, and go and spend it in the Pink 
 Horse if you can.' Oh ! it was a rare day. We 
 even got the village policeman in. He was a 
 teetotaller, the beast. But he said he didn't 
 mind a bottle of stone ginger. Well, I was 
 drinking ginger beer myself, with a drop of gin 
 in it. So what did I do but slip a drop of gin 
 into his too. Well, it was a hot day, and he had 
 another one, and another one, and another one. 
 He liked it, the brute, like a cat likes milk. Oh ! 
 he was proper oiled before the night was through. 
 I tell you, by the time we had to put the lights out 
 we had that village painted as tight as a drum. 
 Absolutely. Tight ? They were singing God 
 save the King backways." " I like about the 
 policeman," said the Jew with the socks ; " swine 
 most of them are." " Well," said the landlord 
 broad-mindedly, " there's policemen are swine, 
 and there's policemen isn't. I once had a place 
 in a little Australian village where the policeman 
 was a brick. Do you know, he was there for 
 twenty-five years, and there were only two con- 
 victions .'' And I was responsible for one of them. 
 I saw a man slashing a horse about with a stick, 
 tearing the poor beast in a most horrible manner.
 
 54 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 and I took him by the throat and ran him into 
 the station myself. The old policeman didn't 
 want me to charge him. He said there'd only 
 be trouble. But I said, ' He's a cruel brute. I 
 want to see him taught a lesson.' Well, next 
 day he was had up, and the magistrate fined him 
 five dollars. And do you know what happened } 
 The old policeman I'm telling you about paid the 
 fine out of his own pocket. ' You oughtn't to do 
 it/ I told him; 'the man's a dirty devil.' 'I 
 know he is,' said the policeman ; ' it's not out of 
 any sympathy with him I paid the fine. It was 
 the principle of the thing. You see, there has 
 only been one conviction in the village for twenty- 
 five years, and that was a poor devil I felt sorry 
 for, so I paid his fine to keep him from being sent 
 to prison. And, now that I'm just going to retire, 
 here comes the second conviction, and, thinking 
 of the old time, I says to myself, " It's not worth 
 breaking a rule just when you're going to retire. 
 You paid the only other fine : you should pay 
 this one." You see what I mean, sir ; it's the 
 principle of the thing.' I thought that funny, 
 him feeling, just because lie had once done a 
 thing, he had to go on doing it." " Rabbit, 
 rabbit, rabbit,'' the Scotsman was chuckling to 
 himself, practising for the morning. The landlord 
 took no notice of him. " Well, when he retired," 
 he went on, " the new policeman was a holy 
 terror. He was another brute of a teetotaller.
 
 CONVERSATION 55 
 
 and it came to this, you could hardly light your 
 pipe without being arrested. He used to stand 
 in the shadow under a balcony at night to watch 
 what people were doing. One night, just before 
 going to bed, I was leaning out of the window, 
 and saw where he was standing in the darkness. 
 I couldn't resist it. I got an egg and flung it 
 hard as I could — click! — right at his eye, and 
 smashed it all over his face. A minute later he 
 was knocking ivat-a-tat-tat at the door, and I 
 went down to see what he wanted. * Well ? ' I 
 said to him. ' Somebody threw an egg at me,' 
 he said, 'and I think it was from your house.' 
 ' How dare you ? ' said I ; Mo you accuse me of 
 doing it ? How dare you come knocking me 
 up and me dressed for bed, merely because you 
 happen to have a mean, suspicious mind ! I only 
 wish it had been me threw the egg. And hit 
 you. Nothing would have pleased me better.' 
 And I slammed the door in his face. Of coui'se, 
 he could do nothing. He had no evidence. 
 Soon alter that he had to leave the village. 
 Things were made too hot for him, and he got 
 his face cut about most horrible by a man wearing 
 a stirrup like a knuckle-duster. Oh ! he was a 
 proper drop of poison ! " . . . 
 
 It was now getting near midnight, and the 
 Scotsman was obviously getting anxious to retire 
 into the seclusion of his own room in order to 
 qualify for his present when the clock struck.
 
 56 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 Everybody made a move bedwards. "Don't 
 forget/' the man in the brown hat gave us the 
 parting injunction, "'Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit,' 
 three times. Good-night, gentlemen." "Good- 
 night." " Good-night." " Good-night." " Good- 
 night."
 
 VI 
 
 ODD VOLUMES 
 
 It is a curious habit, the habit of collecting books. 
 It is not by any means the same thing as the habit 
 oi" reading. Most of us who have bookshelves 
 collect scores — perhaps hundreds — of volumes 
 that we shall never read. We keep them as a 
 kind of store of knowledge. They are to us 
 what money at the bank is to a financier. They 
 are a second brain, and we feel that, if our own 
 brain fails, we can call in the aid of these reserves 
 on our shelves. To possess the Encyclopccdia 
 Britannica alone gives many men this confidence. 
 Even the Encyclopcedia Britannica, however, cannot 
 allay the appetite of a man who has once become 
 generally acquisitive of books. If anything, it 
 sharpens his appetite. It teaches him of the 
 existence of subjects of which he had probably 
 never before heard, leading him from palaeo- 
 botany to stereoisomerism. I am, I suspect, a 
 person with unusually small powers of resistance, 
 and am more easily tempted by a subject of 
 which I shall never know anything than most 
 men would be in the same circumstances. How 
 else can I explain the pi-esence on my shelves of 
 
 57
 
 58 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 such books as The Naga Tribes of Ma7iipur, The 
 Mafidu Mountain People of New Guinea, and Man 
 and Beast in Eastern Ethiopia ? It may be 
 thought that I suffer from a suppressed wish to 
 travel in wild places and, perhaps, to hunt tigers 
 and rhinoceroses. I should be more inclined to 
 consider this explanation if it were not that I can 
 see, not far from these volumes, other volumes of 
 such an entirely different character as The ABC 
 of Collecting Old Eriglish Pottery, Heraldry for 
 Amateurs, and The Child Welfare Movemefit. Then 
 there are books about Greek sculpture, about 
 ancient Egyptian religion, about socialism, about 
 birds, about gardening, about the French Revolu- 
 tion, about Shakespeare, about auction bridge, 
 about poetry, about asti'onomy, about Ireland, 
 about butterflies, about ideals, about Japanese 
 prints, about the Bible, about books, about numis- 
 matics, about Bergson. There is no more reason 
 in the collection than in the alphabet. I cannot 
 explain how I came to make such a collection, 
 unless it is that somewhere there is hidden in me 
 a Faust with the desire for universal knowledge. 
 It is as though I had said to myself: "Some day 
 — though not just now — I shall take down and 
 read Astrologij and Religion among the Greeks and 
 Romans." And so on, through a thousand volumes. 
 To have a shelf of such books is to enjoy a gi-eat 
 deal of potential reading. It is for the pleasures 
 of potential reading that I keep a copy of The
 
 ODD VOLUMES 59 
 
 Confessions of St Augiisline in the original Latin. 
 It is still uncut save for the first eight pages, and 
 I have no doubt I shall put off cutting the rest of 
 it till some fine, idle, sunny afternoon in eternity. 
 To possess a book of this kind is its own reward. 
 Perhaps the book means even more to me on 
 account of my not having read it. At present it 
 is not an achievement, but a hope, a perpetual 
 promise. After all, to have read a book is to 
 have vulgarised it. It is to have exchanged 
 Samarcand for Southend —the unknown for the 
 known. 
 
 It is a strange fact that unread books go on 
 accumulating for years, unchallenged and almost 
 unnoticed, until one moves into another house. 
 At such a crisis, one is amazed to find what very 
 queer fish have contrived to squeeze themselves 
 into places on the shelves. I was not surprised 
 last week to see on my shelves a large book 
 of nearly six hundred pages called Hermeneuiic 
 Interpretation of the Origin of the Social State of 
 Man and of the Destiny of the Adamic Race. Any- 
 one might take home a book like that to find out 
 what the title meant. Besides, who, if he opened 
 the book, could resist such a chapter heading as 
 " Orpheus, Moses, and Fo-hi ; Who They Were." 
 Who could resist, I mean, putting it on their 
 shelves ? It is perfectly easy to resist reading it. 
 But the books that it has surprised me most to 
 find on my shelves are the books on health and
 
 60 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 medicine. I am all the more surprised because 
 I never read books on medicine. I do not mind 
 confessing to an occasional dip into a reference 
 book which gives all the diseases in alphabetical 
 order with a description of their symptoms. I 
 have been spared many an anxious night through 
 taking it down and discovering that an occipital 
 headache does not necessarily mean what I 
 thought it meant. The sort of medical books, 
 however, of which I find to my astonishment that 
 my shelves are full are books with names like 
 What Shall I Eat ? and Ho)v to Live Long. I got 
 rid of Self-Help Jar N^ervous JVomeri some years 
 ago. I gave it and With a Dog-Sleigh in Canada 
 to a woman's suffrage bazaar. The lady who ran 
 the stall told me afterwards that she sold both 
 books to the same person, who said, as she took 
 up With a Dog-Sleigh in Canada : " This will do 
 for the spare room." Possibly it was for the 
 haunted room that she bought Self-Help for 
 Nervous Women. Now I had been keeping that 
 book for years ; I do not know why, I do not 
 know any nervous women — -at least I never met 
 a woman who was half so nervous as I am myself. 
 As for What Shall I Eat ? it can be said in its 
 favour that the subject is a good one. Probably, 
 when I took it home, I thought it was full of 
 descriptions of the sort of delicacies that you 
 see in Fortnum & Mason's windows. Alas, on 
 looking through the book lately, when owing
 
 ODD VOLUMES 6l 
 
 to a flitting I had to make a clearance of some 
 hundreds of volumes, I found that it might as 
 well have been called What Shall I Not Eat ? 
 Pages are wasted on such subjects as bread and 
 potatoes. Thus, when the appetite craves for 
 something like a llitz dinner, the author solemnly 
 harps on such things as this : 
 
 " Bread is for all, hale or ailing, the fundamental 
 element of alimentation. From the physiological 
 standpoint the man who performs manual labour 
 requires a large quantity of it. So far as patho- 
 logical conditions are concerned, we know of no 
 disease in which the use of bread is especially 
 indicated ; but there are such in which, by 
 retaliation, as it were, it is badly tolerated and 
 may even prove harmful." 
 
 No doubt it is a good book for those who wish 
 to read that sort of thing. I confess I prefer 
 Plutarch or Wordsworth or Edgar Wallace. I do 
 not wish to be told that " the action of eggs on 
 the liver has given rise to endless discussion," or 
 that: 
 
 " If large quantities are eaten, eggs may become 
 injurious, as the liver becomes surcharged not 
 only with nitrogenous bodies, but also with fat 
 and lecithin. Chemical analysis ofjoies gras shows 
 how quickly lecithin is accumulated in the liver," 
 
 It makes me melancholy to think that I have 
 for years been giving house-room to this sort of 
 stuff under a misapprehension. The last man in
 
 62 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 the world whose opinion I would take on what to 
 eat would be a doctor. It is far safer to consult 
 a waiter, and not a bit more expensive. 
 
 There are other books of a medical kind, 
 however, which I have been delighted to discover 
 lately on my shelves. I have thrown away many 
 books in the last fortnight, but I have not thrown 
 away A Stitch in Time. .Just as I was about to 
 throw it away, I opened it by chance at the cure 
 for hiccough, which runs : 
 
 " Draw in deep breaths, holding them as long 
 as possible. If this fails, pull tongue out with 
 handkerchief and place a piece of salt or soda 
 bicarbonate on the back of it. Continue to hold 
 the tongue out for a few minutes. Put mustard 
 plaster on stomach." 
 
 I am not sui'e that, in certain cases, treatment 
 so drastic would not be resented. It is not 
 everyone — even in the genial afterglow of a City 
 banquet — who would allow you to pull out his 
 tongue with a handkei'chief and to place a piece 
 of salt or soda bicarbonate on the back of it. 
 It is not even everyone who would allow you 
 without protest to put a mustard plaster on his 
 stomach. Thus, this volume of " Simple and 
 Practical Remedies and Suggestions for Use 
 when a Physician cannot be Immediately Secured 
 and in Cases Considered too Trivial for Profes- 
 sional Care" may well fail at the first impact of 
 its advice on real life.
 
 ODD VOLUMES 6S 
 
 The first chapter of this admirable book is 
 called " Miscellaneous Casualties/' and it covers 
 a number of the more terrifying things that may 
 happen to us, from dog and snake bites to " nose 
 bleed." One of the most useful paragraphs is 
 headed " Swallowing Buttons, Coins, etc." It 
 begins : 
 
 " If lodged in throat remove with forceps, 
 piece of wire, crochet needle, or by a sharp slap 
 on the back with patient's head and arms hanging 
 down. Infants can easily be inverted, holding 
 by legs." 
 
 What seems odd to an ordinary reader is that 
 Avriters of books of this kind take it for granted 
 that a piece of wire can be got hold of in less 
 time than a doctor. I confess, if at a crisis I 
 were suddenly told to go and fetch a piece of 
 wire, I should not know how to set about it. I 
 could, no doubt, if given time enough, discover 
 a hardware merchant's, but even then I should 
 not care to order less than a yard, as a smaller 
 quantity would look mean, and a yard of wire 
 would be far too long to put down a child's throat 
 unless it had actually digested the button. On 
 the whole, I prefer the alternative mode of 
 treatment, for, as the author of A Stitch in Time 
 reminds us, " infants can easily be inverted, 
 holding by legs." 
 
 Dipping into the book, I came on a number of 
 other curious pieces of information in the chapter
 
 64 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 called " Everyday Troubles/' among which, I re- 
 gret to find, are included cracked toes, lumbago 
 and boils, but the succeeding chapter of "General 
 Information and Hints " pleased me still more on 
 account of the kindly spirit in which the reader 
 is told how to take care of a hot-water bottle. 
 There is too much thoughtlessness in the common 
 attitude to hot-water bottles. The author of 
 A Stitch in Time would have us treat them as 
 considerately as a little girl treats her doll. 
 Thus: 
 
 " Fill bottle only a third full. Lay bottle length- 
 wise on flat surface, holding neck up, allowing 
 water to fill neck. Expel all air by gently 
 patting the bottle. Screw on cork and invert. 
 Dry off and make sure of no leakage. Put cover 
 on or wrap in towel." 
 
 Could anything be more sympathethic, more 
 humane ? And, indeed, there is nothing responds 
 more quickh' to humane treatment than a hot- 
 water bottle. Treat it roughly, flood it with 
 boiling water, and it will struggle, kick, and give 
 great gasping sobs, and, as likely as not, scald 
 the hand that feeds it. Treat it tenderly, and 
 pat it gently while filling it with water of exactly 
 the right heat, and it will purr like a kitten. I 
 once knew a man who called his hot- water bottle 
 " Willie," and who used to talk to it, as he filled 
 it, as if it had been a pet. 
 
 The worst of it is, however, if one begins to
 
 ODD VOLUMES 65 
 
 read the books one finds on one's shelves, one has 
 no time to get I'id of them. And, delightful as 
 it is to hurl books on a heap to be thrown away, 
 how much more delightful it is to open one of 
 them casually and to come on such a passage as 
 1 have just discovered in Man's Best Food : 
 
 " Chrysippos, a Stoic (282-209 b.c), considered 
 that animals had reasoning powers. Democritus, 
 and after him Pliny, asciibed moral characteristics 
 and religious feeling to elephants." 
 
 The discovery of such a passage confirms me 
 in the belief that there is probably a sentence in 
 every book that makes it worth preserving. I 
 have to exert my will to keep from peeping 
 between the covers of some of these monsters 
 in two volumes for fear I should find something 
 interesting in them, and not have the heart to 
 add them to the sacrificial pile. You may think 
 it impossible to find anything interesting in a 
 book in two volumes, but I have done so on at 
 least half-a-dozen occasions.
 
 yii 
 
 LONDONERS 
 
 It is the mark of a toAvnsman to feed birds. No 
 one in the country would think of feeding birds, 
 except caged birds, or tits, or pigeons, or fowl, or 
 during a frost. There is food, indeed, in every 
 tree and in evei*y garden and in every field. To 
 throw breadcrumbs to birds in such circumstances 
 would be merely a rather ridiculous hobby, like 
 flinging pennies to be scrambled for by peers 
 on their way to the House of Lords. In London 
 conditions are changed. Here the birds are 
 beggars and dependent on our charit)'. The 
 black-headed gulls swoop down in procession by 
 Blackfriars Bridge, each with a beggar's whine. 
 The ducks in the parks stand on their heads for 
 halfpence. The sparrows, if you have so much 
 as a crust of bread on you, will gather round you 
 like guttersnipes demanding " mouldies. " Many 
 people speak ill of sparrows. I can understand 
 dislike of them in the country, but I cannot 
 understand it in the town. In the country they 
 are invaders, driving out of the neighbourhood 
 better birds than themselves. Other birds 
 apparently regard them as low, and will not 
 
 66
 
 LONDONERS 67 
 
 consort in the same garden with them. They 
 will not, at least, make friends, and they have 
 a happier air when the sparrows are gone. In 
 town, on the other hand, the sparrow is at home. 
 He does not keep the other birds away, for they 
 would not come in any case. He has no music 
 for the traffic to drown — no bright plumage for 
 the smoke to blacken. He is a little parasite, 
 who can pick uj) a living where a more sensitive 
 bird would starve. He is cheeky. Cockney, in- 
 suppressible. He is, in a sense, vicious. He 
 will go through a bed of crocuses and break 
 their necks with as little compunction as a fox 
 destroying geese. It would not be so bad if he 
 really wanted to eat the crocuses, but it is as 
 though he actually enjoyed wasting them. He 
 leaves them lying, yellow and j)urple and white, 
 like a battle-field of flowers. No cat was ever 
 more cruel. But, apart from this, I do not see 
 what can be said against him by the townsman. 
 How charming a little dancer he is as he hops 
 in scores and in fifties round a Londoner who 
 has bread — hops backwards and forwards like a 
 marionette or like someone whose feet have 
 been tied together for fun, or like a small child 
 hopping up and down in sheer excitement. He 
 may not, as an individual, be so confiding as the 
 robin. But the robins do not come dancing 
 round a human being in families like the family 
 of the old woman who lived in a shoe. They
 
 68 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 are selfish birds, and no robin will share a human 
 being with another robin. Sparrows are sociable, 
 like a crowd of children begging from a tourist. 
 They may be greedy ; they may fight over the 
 spoils ; but their vices are the vices of creatures 
 that love the company of their kind. 
 
 The seagull, hoAvever, seems to me to be a 
 more interesting London bird than the sparrow. 
 The seagull is a bird that can spy a piece of 
 bread almost as far as a vulture can spy a corpse. 
 It is impossible to enter one of the London parks 
 with a piece of dry bread in your pocket without 
 every seagull knowing it for a mile around. I 
 was standing by the Round Pond the other day, 
 when a small girl came up with a paper bag full 
 of bread to feed the ducks. She opened the 
 bag and, taking out a slice that had seen better 
 days, said to me gravely, " Would ^o« like a bit .'' " 
 I felt it would be ungracious to refuse, and no 
 sooner had she passed me the slice of bread 
 than a cloud of gulls came falling down out of 
 the sky, each gull with a different- sized brown 
 patch on its head. They whirled about us with 
 such clamour that there was nothing to be done 
 but begin to feed them. I have never before 
 thrown bread at seagulls, but I found it extra- 
 ordinarily satisfying. It was like watching the 
 most brilliant possible fielding at cricket. 
 
 It may be that in time one learns to distinguish 
 between the cleverness of one bird and the clever-
 
 LONDONERS 69 
 
 ness of another in catching fragments of bread on 
 the wing. Sometimes a catch is missed, and the 
 bread has to be retrieved from among the ducks 
 in the water. But as a rule one of the birds 
 proves its genius by breaking out of the crowd 
 and intercepting the bread at the beginning of 
 its fall with open beak. There is certainly 
 enough variety of catching and missing to prevent 
 feeding the seagulls from ever becoming tedious. 
 It would, I fancy, be rather monotonous if it 
 were not for this constant element of doubt. 
 Every time one throws bread into the air, 
 however, one has a sort of gambler's interest in 
 what is going to happen. One is playing Avith 
 the unknown. The permutations and com- 
 binations of chance are as numerous, perhaps, 
 in the feeding of seagulls as in anything else. 
 To the outsider it may seem a foolish and in- 
 fantile hobby, but it is clear that it must be a 
 more prolific field of experience than the outsider 
 realises. I am only a beginner at it, but it seems 
 to me already as though I had discovered an 
 occupation that will leave me little time for 
 anything else on Saturday and Sunday mornings. 
 It is one of the few amusements that seem 
 always to come to an end before one is tired- 
 As you throw the last corner of the last slice 
 of bread you have brought into the scramble of 
 birds, you regret with a pang that you did not 
 bring twice as much. You feel that you had
 
 70 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 only begun to enjoy yourself; besides, you feel 
 that the birds are still as hungry as ever, if in 
 fact they have not become even hungrier as a 
 result of being fed. At least that is what I 
 imagine you feel. I felt it by proxy as I watched 
 the little girl searching for the ultimate crumb 
 in the two corners of her paper bag. This may 
 only have been the enthusiasm of an initiate : 
 once I felt as enthusiastic about philology, about 
 postage stamps, about hens. What child that 
 has ever lived much on a farm believes that tlie 
 interest of hens can ever come to an end ? It is 
 not merely that he can name the breed of every 
 hen in the yard — Spanish, Leghorn, Dorking, 
 Cochin China, Brahmaputra, Game, Bantam, Buff 
 Orpington, and all the rest — but he knows the 
 life, the habits and the appetites of each. He 
 knows them as mothers ; he knows which of them 
 lays the most charming eggs ; he knows which 
 of them is the greediest and always arrives first 
 with long, foolish strides beside the scattered 
 banquet of mash. He knows the very chickens 
 all but by name. He remembers the first effort 
 of the young Dorking cockerel to crow like his 
 father — a noise as though a gramophone gargled. 
 He notices the ungainly, feathery legs of another 
 overgrown cockerel, and, being reminded of a 
 figure in the Scriptures, names him " Lazarus 
 rising from the dead." He also knows every 
 loose-liver in the yard — immoral hens that do
 
 LONDONERS 71 
 
 not lay in the orthodox nests, but make nests of 
 their own in the plantation across the road, or 
 under a haystack or in a dark corner of the barn. 
 Hens, indeed, are to him a crowded world, as 
 some tribe of savages who would bore you and 
 me are to an eager anthropologist. We may 
 take it as certain that there is this infinite variety 
 in any corner of life into which we peer with 
 sufficient intensity of vision. The man of science 
 looking through a microscope at a drop of water 
 sees a world of living creatures of which the rest 
 of us know nothing but by hearsay. If his 
 microscope were strong enough, no doubt he 
 would learn to distinguish each of these in- 
 finitesimal creatures from each other, and give 
 each of them a separate name, as a farmer gives 
 separate names to his cows. If his microscope 
 were stronger still, he might discover within 
 one of these infinitesimal creatures an apparently 
 infinite number of still tinier living creatures, 
 and so on, worlds without end. 
 
 Hence it seems reasonable to suppose that 
 the study of seagulls alone might keep a man 
 interested and still making new discoveries for 
 a lifetime. At present I know nothing about 
 them, except that they have an endless appetite 
 for bread that even a restaurant proprietor would 
 shrink from putting into a cabinet pudding. 
 But I know enough to make me understand and 
 envy the people who stand on the Embankment
 
 72 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 and on the bridges and bring a world of white 
 birds down about their heads to share their poor 
 luncheons. Some people love throwing things 
 to a dog — biscuits^ lumps of sugar^ etc. — but to 
 feed the seagulls is as good as throwing things 
 to a wilderness of dogs. 
 
 Then there are ducks. The countryman may 
 boast of his nightingales, his larks, his wood- 
 peckers, his kingfishers, his jays. But, after 
 all, the ducks on the Serpentine have points of 
 superiority to any of these birds. They, too, 
 will repay you if you take your courage in both 
 hands and go out boldly with bread in a paper 
 bag. How nobly they ride the ripples of the 
 stormy pond, awaiting the bread-giver ! How, 
 on catching a distant sight of him, they hasten 
 like a fleet of small motor boats to his neighbour- 
 hood ! How exquisitely the blue feather shines 
 out of the drab in the wing even of the dullest 
 duck ! How gorgeously the drake's head gleams 
 with shifting blue and green lights ! How lordlily 
 his tail curls! Was ever pig's tail prettier.-* 
 Then there are the tufted ducks, each with its 
 straight back hair blowing about in the wind 
 like the sti'aight back hair of a quack dentist, 
 or a piano-tuner, or an elocution master. Each 
 of them, too, has a little round eye as yellow as 
 bright sunshine, and each of them has the gift 
 of standing on its head and performing feats as 
 dexterous as the cart-wheels of a street arab. I
 
 LONDONERS 73 
 
 saw a small ragged boy in Hyde Park last week 
 amusing a baby in a perambulator extemporised 
 out of a sugar-box by throwing small stones 
 among the tufted ducks. I dislike the habit of 
 throwing stones at ducks, and, though none of 
 them seemed to be hitting the birds, I felt 
 nervous for their little daffodil eyes. I spoke 
 my mind about it — not to the small boy, for I 
 am always afraid that if I reprove people my 
 pulpit blood may assert itself — but in an aside 
 to a lady. She went across to him, and instead 
 of treating him as a brand to be plucked from 
 the burning, as I should have done, she spoke 
 to him almost as a fellow-sinner. " You're tak- 
 ing care not to hit any of them, aren't you .'' " 
 she said, smiling. He turned up an enthusiastic 
 face on which there was a large smudge on each 
 cheek and a large smudge on his small nose. 
 He was just big enough to be able to walk and 
 talk without accident. He beamed good nature 
 and said in a series of gasps of excitement : 
 "You throws things at 'em, and they stands on 
 their 'eads." It was certainly true. The tufted 
 ducks were standing on their heads, peering 
 after the sunk pebbles in the hope that they 
 were bread, till they must have been giddy. As 
 I watched them my attitude to the youngster 
 changed. I, too, had rather see a duck standing 
 on its head than almost any other sort of acrobat. 
 I love to see the uneasy equilibrium, and the
 
 74 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 kicking legs with the joints going up and down 
 like piston-rods. Besides, it amused the baby. 
 Was it virtuous ? I do not know. If one of 
 the ducks had been hit, my attitude would 
 probably have changed back again to the normal, 
 and I should have spoken my mind angrily — to 
 the lady. But no harm was done beyond giving 
 the ducks headaches. . . . 
 
 But the subject of ducks is endless. Have 
 you ever seen a teal } Why, a teal alone is the 
 beginning of a story as long as The Arabian 
 Xigkti:
 
 VIII 
 
 GOOD LUCK 
 
 Many people are complaining of a deluge of 
 post cards that has lately fallen on England, 
 Half the population seems already to have 
 received them. They come to the just and the 
 unjust, and no one can tell from whom, for they 
 are all anonymous. 
 
 They are on an old pattern. When the world 
 was more pious, post cards containing chain prayers 
 used to be popular. Every one who received one 
 of these post cards was expected to copy out the 
 prayer on nine other post cards, and each of his 
 victims was expected to copy the prayer out on 
 nine other post cards in the hope that the prayer 
 might ultimately make its way round the world. 
 There was a theory that the repetition of a form 
 of words would produce magical results. Most of 
 the people who received these post cai'ds were 
 extremely annoyed by them. Many of them, 
 however, would sit down and write out their nine 
 copies lest something worse might befall them. 
 It was usually suggested that, if they did not do 
 so, they would be punished by some kind of ill 
 luck, and it is a poor spirit that will not purchase 
 
 75
 
 76 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 immunity from ill luck at the cost of a few pence 
 and a little penmanship. Certainly, to break the 
 chain without consulting a clergyman would have 
 been to incur a grave responsibility. 
 
 The post card that is now going the rounds 
 of the world does not pretend to any religious 
 sanction. It simply expresses a wish for the 
 recipient's good luck. It runs as follows : — 
 
 " Good Luck I Copy this out and send it to nine 
 people to whom you wish good luck. The chain 
 was started by an American officer and should go 
 around the world eight times. Do not break the 
 chain, as whoever does will have bad luck. Do 
 it within twenty-four hours and count nine days 
 and you will have great good luck." 
 
 Now that on the surface is a very pretty kind 
 of wish. The prospect of having " great good 
 luck " as a result of merely writing nine post cards 
 and counting nine days is a far, far better prospect 
 than most of us have ever known. Yet it is 
 a curious fact that hardly anyone is grateful. 
 Good-tempered people may do little more than 
 shrug their shoulders, but the plethoric and the 
 peppery become unreasonably violent and talk as 
 if they would be satisfied with nothing less than 
 the American officer's blood. That American 
 officer is just now the most unpopular man in 
 England. He has committed the unpardonable 
 sin of inventing a circular that cannot, unless you
 
 GOOD LUCK 77 
 
 are inhumanly free from superstition, be thrown 
 into the waste-paper basket without a second 
 thought. How gentle in approach is the money- 
 lender compared to him ! Never a week passes 
 but a money-lender offers to lend me from ^5 to 
 ;^5000 — without security, God bless his trusting 
 heart I — and never a threat does he utter, even 
 by implication, if I do not respond in the same 
 spirit. Yet, if he chose to employ threats, he 
 could undoubtedly increase his business. If he 
 wound up his circular with a hint that, if I did 
 not borrow ^5000, 1 should catch elephantiasis, 
 I, for one, would be tempted to take his money 
 and say no more about it. It is appalling to 
 think of the vast sums one could be forced to 
 borrow by these means. One would gradually 
 find that one had become a millionaire through 
 sheer timidity, and one would not like the re- 
 sponsibility of being a millionaire. A hundred 
 thousand or so — one could at least spend that. 
 But it is difficult to see how one could spend a 
 million pounds without impairing one's health. 
 One would have to put it in a bank, and, if one 
 put it in a bank, one might as well not have 
 borrowed it. Luckily, the money-lender realises 
 that he must not thrust his money on people who 
 do not want it. If he did, he would become a 
 social pest, and we should find a means of putting 
 an end to his activities. As it is, one can throw 
 his cards and his circulars into the waste-paper
 
 78 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 basket without a qualm. One even begins to 
 think kindly of him as a possible friend in need. 
 
 It is otherwise with the sender of '^ good luck " 
 post cards. If you receive one of them, your first 
 thought is, " What enemy has done this t" You 
 look for the signature, and find none. You look 
 at the handwriting, and it is disguised. All that 
 you know is that some wretched victim of 
 superstition has attempted to ward off bad luck 
 from himself by a cheap display of benevolence 
 towards you. Sometimes it is cheap beyond 
 forgiveness. I met a poet last week to whom 
 someone had sent the "good luck" formula in an 
 unstamped letter and who had to pay fourpence 
 for the excess postage. It has had an extremely 
 bad effect on him. He can think of nothing but 
 revenge. Every day he decides on a different 
 person as the one most likely to have wronged 
 him, and no sooner does he do so than he dis- 
 patches his best wishes to them in an envelope 
 without a stamp. Meanwhile the Post Office sur- 
 plus mounts up. It is said that the Postmaster- 
 General regards the American officer as the 
 noblest figure that has appeared in America since 
 Lincoln. 
 
 As for the rest of us, there is nothing to be 
 gained from abusing the man. He has been 
 loosed upon the world for some unknown reason, 
 and we may as well make the best of him. 
 After all, there have been worse plagues in the
 
 GOOD LUCK 79 
 
 past. There were the ten plagues of Egyptj and 
 there was the Sphinx of Thebes, Any single 
 one of the labours of Hercules was infinitely 
 more exhausting than the filling up of nine 
 post cards with a pretty little wish. The chief 
 difficulty about the post cards is that one is 
 reluctant to send them to the people to whom 
 one really wishes good luck. It is not the sort 
 of thing that one does to a friend. It is^ I think, 
 legitimate if the friend is an American, for, after 
 all, America cannot get out of its responsibility 
 for having produced the American officer. But 
 it is not everyone who possesses nine American 
 friends. In these circumstances, it is obvious 
 that thousands of men and women must at 
 present be gravely perplexed as to what they 
 ought to do. I met a publisher who had received 
 the post card and who was in a state of great 
 anxiety because he felt that, if he did not send 
 his nine post cards, he would be taking risks that 
 in the uncertain state of the publishing world he 
 could not afford to take. I met a lady who was 
 equally perturbed as a result of receiving the 
 post card, because she wishes shortly to go to 
 Paris by aeroplane. These are but two repre- 
 sentative figures in a world of men and women 
 who wish to behave honourably and yet to 
 behave in a way consistent with safety. They 
 cannot send post cards to their friends — partly 
 because, not being adept forgers, they cannot
 
 80 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 disguise their handwriting to a point at which a 
 friend would not recognise it — but they must 
 send them to somebody. Another lady with 
 whom I discussed the problem told me that she 
 had got out of the difficulty in a way which 
 seems to me scarcely justifiable. At first she 
 had thought of sending all the nine post cards to 
 dignitaries of the Church. She had just decided 
 to address one to Dean Inge when suddenly 
 there appeared in her mind a pathetic vision of 
 that austere preacher sitting down, wrapped in 
 deeper gloom than ever, and more in sorrow than 
 in anger, to copy out his toll of post cards. Not 
 only this, but she felt sure that scores of his 
 admirers had sent the Dean the post card already. 
 Every morning's post must bring at least a dozen, 
 and, as each of them has to be copied out nine 
 times, she saw him in her mind's eye toiling in 
 secret and without intermission at his endless 
 stream of post cards, stretching his thumb at 
 intervals to keep off writer's cramp, with groanings 
 unutterable. Who in the circumstances could 
 have added to his burden .'' Not, at least, this 
 lady, of all ladies the most charitable. 
 
 She consequently turned for help to the 
 London Telephone Directory and picked out 
 nine names from it more or less at random. She 
 chose them, she said, for their beauty. She 
 thought at first of sending some of the cards to 
 limited liability companies the names of which
 
 GOOD LUCK 81 
 
 specially attracted her. There was the Jiffy 
 Prepared Firewood Co., for instance, and there was 
 Jigs, Ltd., Engineering Tools Designers. Then 
 there was another curious company that had 
 only initials and was entered in the Directory as 
 J. M., Shock Absorbers Works. It is a question 
 that calls for the subtlety of a mediaeval school- 
 man, however — whether to wish good luck to a 
 limited liability company is the same thing as to 
 wish good luck to a person. The lady wisely de- 
 cided not to risk it. She accordingly confined 
 her choice to the names of individual men and 
 women. She sent the first card to a fish salesman 
 with a delightful name who had an address in 
 Billingsgate Buildings. She was tempted at first 
 to send the whole nine to fish salesmen. It was 
 pleasant to imagine the sort of things a fish 
 salesman belonging to Billingsgate Buildings 
 would say on looking through his morning post 
 and discovering the peccant post card. It is 
 doubtful whether anybody but a fish salesman, 
 indeed, could do justice to the situation. It 
 seemed unfair, however, to upset the fish market 
 on the eve of Holy Week — especially unfair to 
 provoke it to speech scarcely congruous with the 
 Lenten season. She therefore resolved not to 
 send more than one card to men who had the 
 same profession. She addressed the second card 
 to an umbrella manufacturer at Hornsey, the 
 third to a toy-dog breeder, the fourth to a hatter 
 
 F
 
 82 SOLOMON IK ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 in order to make him madder still, the fifth to 
 a man who was described as a " Whsle Frntre 
 Mnfr/' and who is therefore probably Welsh, the 
 sixth to a Scottish humorist in order to give him 
 something to make him laugh on the wrong side 
 of his mouth, the seventh to a Presbyterian 
 minister, the eighth to a turf accountant, and the 
 ninth to a potato merchant with what she called 
 a ''perfectly heavenly name." By this time she 
 had begun thoroughly to enjoy herself, and, 
 when she had written the ninth address, she felt 
 something akin to the deep regret with which 
 Gibbon laid down his pen as he finished The 
 Decline arid Fall of the Roman Empire. One has 
 only to turn to the Telephone Directory and dip 
 casually among the names and professions that 
 are mentioned in it in order to realise how much 
 she must have enjoyed herself. No novelist dare 
 invent such names as appear in profusion in that 
 admirable volume. The names in Dickens and 
 Meredith are tame compared to some of them. 
 At the same time, it is a question whether it is 
 not malicious to wish a man good luck merely 
 because he has a beautiful name. The lady is 
 now counting the nine days carefully to see 
 whether the spell works in such unusual circum- 
 stances. As the ninth day approaches, she is 
 beginning to wish that, after all, she had sent the 
 post cards to her friends. She declares that she 
 does honestly wish the best of luck to the fish
 
 GOOD LUCK 85 
 
 salesman and the toy-dog breeder and the turf 
 accountant and the Presbyterian minister. But 
 can one be said to wish good luck to a person of 
 whom one knows nothing but his profession and 
 his name ? It is to be hoped that one can, as 
 one is glad to think of what the Scottish humorist 
 said about the American officer when he went out 
 to buy a packet of post cards. I do not believe 
 he said a word in excess of what the situation 
 required. I received one of the post cards myself, 
 and I have no doubt he expressed my feelings 
 exactly.
 
 IX 
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 If tradition is to be relied on, all the birds that 
 are not already married choose their mates on 
 St Valentine's Day. Some recent ornithologists 
 dispute this old country belief, but there is 
 evidence for it in the poets, who, after all, know 
 as much about nature as most people. Donne 
 wrote more than three hundred years ago : 
 
 Hail, Bishop Valentine, whose day this is ; 
 
 All the air is thy diocese, 
 
 And all the chirping choristers 
 
 And other birds are thy parishioners : 
 
 Thou marriest every year 
 
 The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove, 
 
 The sparrow that neglects his life for love. 
 
 The household bird with the red stomacher ; 
 
 Thou mak'st the blackbird speed as soon 
 
 As doth the goldfinch or the halcyon. 
 
 If anything, the birds have anticipated St 
 Valentine's Day this year. The hedge-sparrows 
 have been singing their quick little stumbling 
 line for some days past and have been eyeing 
 one another critically with lowered heads in the 
 branches. It has been an early year for many 
 
 84
 
 FEBRUARY 85 
 
 things. The larks at the foot of the hills were 
 springing into the air, jerkily as little boys that 
 are leai-ning to swim, a fortnight ago, and singing 
 above ash-buds black in the front of January. 
 On a wet Sunday afternoon — wet enough to 
 frighten cats from coming out and so to make 
 the world safe for thrushes — hill-sides, valleys 
 and gardens were all busy with choirs shouting 
 against each other in rehearsal for the spring. 
 The thrush, the robin and the wren all seemed 
 to rejoice in the wetness, as though their very 
 songs were sweeter for the rain. Crows, too, 
 have been practising their seven caws in the 
 fields in preparation for family life in the tree- 
 tops. What it is that the crows talk about is a 
 secret from most of us. One fancies that many 
 of them are jokers much given to pulling other 
 crows' legs. Seldom are they settled in a field 
 for long when one of them suddenly gives 
 warning, like a boy crying " Cave ! " and startles 
 the whole crowd of them into circles of flight. 
 They settle down again, a whirl of them coming 
 to rest, and again a rook gives the alarm. Off 
 they are, the more nervous of them, on short 
 circling flights, and, if you watch them for an 
 hour, you will not often see them at rest for more 
 than a few seconds at a time. It may be that 
 you can fool all the crows some of the time 
 and some of the crows all the time, but that 
 you cannot fool all the crows all the time. One
 
 86 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 cannot tell. What seems probable^ however^ is 
 that many of the crows enjoy being jostled into 
 fear. They want an excuse for movement : that 
 is apparently the origin of most games. To keep 
 perpetually moving is a Law of Nature with 
 them as it is with flies and planets. The ability 
 to move at will is the chief thing that distin- 
 guishes a living creature from a stone. Hence 
 living creatures abhor stillness and stagnation as 
 properties of the dead. Children, birds and fish 
 are seldom still. They must circulate at all costs 
 — not for any purpose, save that circulation is a 
 good thing in itself The mystics tell us that, 
 though the life of the animal is to be found in 
 movement, the life of the spirit is to be found 
 in stillness. Luckily for themselves, the rooks 
 are not faced with the difficulty of choosing 
 between the life of the animal and the life of 
 the spirit. Luckily for us, we are. But even 
 we, whatever our choice, must spend a con- 
 siderable part of our lives going into town and 
 coming out again, going to the post and coming 
 back again, going upstairs and coming down again. 
 While we do these things for the sake of making 
 a living, we persuade ourselves that we are use- 
 fully employed. But, even if we had not to 
 make a living, we should spend a great part of 
 our lives in comings and goings, in unsettlings 
 and settlings, very much like the crows. A man 
 must live, and life consists in hurrying from one
 
 FEBRUARY 87 
 
 place to another, from one person to another, 
 from one thing to another. 
 
 There are times when we could wish it were 
 otherwise — when we would welcome an enchanter 
 who with a touch of his wand would bid every- 
 thing stand still and remain as it is, as in the 
 palace of the Sleeping Beauty. Even the palace 
 of the Sleeping Beauty, however, would hardly 
 satisfy us. We wish to have the stillness of 
 perfect life, not the stillness of death or of death- 
 like sleep. We long for a world that shall reach 
 perfection and remain perfect and unchangeable 
 for ever, like a lyric of Shakespeare. Our sense 
 of fact may forbid us actually to picture such a 
 world as something to be desired, but our longing 
 for it is shown in the regret with which a child 
 bids good-bye to a summer holiday — a regret 
 that repeats itself all through our lives. Looking 
 back, we may find it difficult to say : " There — 
 or there — life should have stood still and remained 
 unchanged for ever." We may wish present 
 happiness to last for ever : we seldom wish that 
 past happiness had lasted for ever. If we feel 
 the wish that we could live our lives over again, 
 we do not wish merely for the return of one 
 experience, but for the return of a whole 
 series of experiences. Even when we long 
 for the extension of present happiness, it 
 may be that we should feel alarmed if we 
 were suddenly told that it was going to last,
 
 88 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 immutable, for ever. We desire a prolonged 
 time, rather than an eternity, of most kinds of 
 happiness. 
 
 Would that I 
 Might see three springs without a break go by. 
 
 More than this might well prove a surfeit. As a 
 matter of fact, we like the months to circulate 
 like the planets and the crows. A spi'ing that 
 lasted too long would set most of us dreaming of 
 the fruits of summer and the colours of autumn, 
 as a summer that lasted too long would set us 
 dreaming of the snows of winter. Things are 
 much better as they are. This is not Heaven 
 that it can do without the procession of day and 
 night, of heat and cold, and of the four seasons. 
 And even in the Heaven that men have pictured, 
 the angels do not stand still, but circulate like 
 the stars or like birds. Perfect stillness and 
 perfect silence would not be Paradise. In any 
 case, if we were miraculously given the power 
 to pick out any one season of the year, and to 
 command it, " Remain like this for ever," it is 
 unlikely that one human being in a million would 
 choose February for thje experiment. February 
 is, at best, only a beginning — the first stammer- 
 ing of spring. Even the thrushes' songs are not 
 what they will be in April. Every voice in the 
 trees is a prophecy of something still more 
 delightful. It is a promise, like the brown or
 
 FEBRUARY 89 
 
 red or green or black buds. Is there anything 
 in Nature that is lovelier in February than in 
 any other month of the year? I doubt if a single 
 thing could be named of which this could be 
 said. The hazels, perhaps, with their green 
 catkins hanging, like a suspended shower, in 
 their bare branches ; but there is nothing else 
 that will not be better in March. 
 
 There is one thing, however, that most of us 
 wish might circulate less in February. We do 
 not complain if the air is still. Winter air is 
 one of the things that can be still without being 
 stagnant. As a matter of fact, the stiller it is 
 the more it seems to tingle with life. It is not 
 the leaden-coloured wind from the east that 
 makes the island seem to spring to life in 
 February. The whole planet lies numb under its 
 baleful breath. Every tree grows skeleton-like, 
 and every bird silent at its approach ; the pulse 
 beats feebly, the brain retreats as into a cave. 
 Compare with it a brisk, still morning. The 
 beech, with its long, lean buds seems to spring 
 from the ground like a fire. It is a fire with the 
 play of countless tiny fires among its branches. 
 The elm, which is a plume in shape, is flushed in 
 its highest branches with the first tide of blossom. 
 Everywhere the spring seems like a runner 
 stooping in readiness for the signal to start. For 
 weeks past little pink tips have been catching 
 the sunlight for the earliest buds. Most of the
 
 90 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 birds, it is true, still move about in congregations. 
 A troupe of long-tailed tits crosses from plantation 
 to plantation, swimming through the air like a 
 shoal of fishes, or rather like a procession of 
 fishes, one waiting to start until the other has 
 arrived ; each of them i-ising and falling in a 
 flight like the curve of a wave. Having arrived 
 in the tops of the beeches, they become acrobats, 
 flinging themselves from peril to peril in an 
 endless trapeze act, encouraging each other in 
 voices as tiny as the voice of a coal-tit, as tiny 
 almost as the voice of the goldcrest. They are 
 colourless, except when they cross the sun ; all 
 small birds are mice in the chill February light. 
 In the bright sun they may become dyed in 
 colour, just as a crow wheeling in the light may 
 momentarily become a flash of gold or a gleam of 
 purple. A chaffinch in the sunlight may bring the 
 colours of Arabia into a cart-wheel track in a lane. 
 But February is nothing to what March will 
 be — less than nothing to what April will be. If 
 one had to hibernate for a month in the year, 
 this is the month one would choose. We say of 
 any unpleasant period in public affairs that it is 
 a period of transition. It is a phrase we never 
 use of a time we wish to praise. Every year in 
 history was a year of transition, but we never 
 say so unless there is nothing good to say about 
 it. It is the excuse we make for bad times — a 
 hopeful excuse, for it implies that something
 
 FEBRUARY 91 
 
 better must follow. February might justly be 
 described as a month of transition. 
 
 And yet to call February a month of transition 
 seems a grudging way in which to speak of the 
 first month of lovers. After all, St Valentine's 
 Day must once have had a meaning, and even 
 to-day it survives as an occasion for jest among 
 boys and girls in the less haughty classes. They 
 say that, though Valentine was a saint, no church 
 was ever dedicated to him, yet to most of us he 
 is a more familiar figure than, say, St Botolph. 
 Is it not in his honour that servant-girls post 
 the tails of salted herrings to their lovers — good 
 sport that puts no strain on the intellect ? St 
 Valentine's Day is, or used to be, the great day 
 for anonymous letters. It was almost the only 
 occasion on which a human being could write 
 an anonymous letter without being a half-wit or 
 a scoundrel. It was the day of the comedy of 
 love — of Cupid the leg-puller. The youth who 
 opens a Valentine on St Valentine's morning is 
 less likely to receive a confession of love than a 
 portrait of a blinking idiot. It is said that the 
 day was once taken more seriously, but after all, 
 who could take even love seriously in February .'' 
 Valentines are but a playful anticipation, as the 
 whole month at its best is a playful anticipation 
 of a real spring. The truth is, St Valentine 
 was the patron saint, not of the lover, but of 
 the tlirt. It is possible that chaffinches I'egard
 
 92 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 him as the god of love, but among human 
 beings his altar has long been cold. He should 
 have chosen a different day. Had his feast 
 day been the first of April he would have l)een 
 immortal.
 
 BEAVER 
 
 Nothing could more effectively demonstrate the 
 confused state of the civilised world than the fact 
 that while the inhabitants of England are playing 
 (or supposed to be playing) Beaver, the male 
 inhabitants of Sacramento were ordered a few 
 months ago to grow beards on pain of being fined 
 half-a-dollar a day. Thus are beards turned into 
 sport in one patch of the planet while they are 
 publicly reverenced in another. In this respect 
 the people of Sacramento rather than the people 
 of England are followers of the ancient tradition. 
 To play Beaver is to put oneself on a level with 
 the children who cried " Go up, thou baldhead ! " 
 to Elisha, for to laugh at a superfluity of hairs on 
 the chin is as bad as to laugh at the want of 
 them on the top of the head. Apart from this, 
 a nation that owes so much to the Old Testament 
 as the English should treat beards with respect. 
 The Jew has always put beards in their right 
 place, which is on human chins. Right through 
 the centuries eminent Jews have held that to 
 remove the beard was a sin, seeing that God 
 originally gave man a beard in order to distinguish 
 
 93
 
 94 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 him from woman ; and to neglect one's beard in 
 Old Testament times was regarded as a sign of 
 madness. Heretics again and again revolted in 
 favour of the clip or the clean shave, but the 
 Cabalists returned to sanity with the proclamation 
 that even to shorten the beard with scissors was 
 a great sin, and it was said of their master, Isaac 
 Luria, that so scrupulous was his guardianship of 
 his beard that he would not touch it with his 
 hands " lest the contact should cause any hairs 
 to drop from it." Judaism was again and again 
 cloven asunder by the dispute about beards. 
 One ribald anti-Beaver summed up the case 
 against beards in the epigram : 
 
 If men be judged wise by their beards and their 
 
 girth. 
 Then goats were the wisest of creatures on earth. 
 
 Which is not even true. 
 
 The Jewish Encyclopcedia tells us that in the 
 seventeenth century the Jews in Gennany and 
 Italy began to circumvent the prohibition of 
 shaving by " removing the beard by means of 
 pumice-stone or chemical agents, which left the 
 face smooth as if shaven." Since that time the 
 Jewish laity seem to have become more and more 
 lax in regard to the growing of beards. We can 
 hardly blame them if the Talmudical saying 
 which suggests that a man's character is given 
 away by his beard is true. " A thin-bearded man
 
 BEAVER 9'^ 
 
 is cunning," says the proverb, "a thick-bearded 
 one is a fool ; but nobody can do any harm to a 
 man with a parted beard." It is better to shave 
 than to risk not having a parted beard. 
 
 Christians, unfortunately, have been divided 
 even more bitterly than the Jews on the question 
 of beai-ds. It was " one of the great subjects of 
 reproach " on the part of the Greek Church, we 
 are told, that the Romish clergy did not let their 
 beards grow, though a leading theologian pointed 
 out that it was absurd to get excited over a 
 matter that had so little to do with salvation as 
 barbae detonsio aut conservatio. Rome, however, 
 was so vehemently opposed to the wearing of 
 beards that in 1 119 clergy who let their hair and 
 beards grow were threatened with excommuni- 
 cation, while the mystically minded Durandus 
 explained, according to The Catholic Encyclopcedia, 
 that " length of hair is symbolical of the multitude 
 of sins. Hence clerics are directed to shave their 
 beards ; for the cutting of the hair of the beard, 
 which is said to be noui'ished by the superfluous 
 humours of the stomach, denotes that we ought 
 to cut away the vices of sins which are a super- 
 fluous growth in us. Hence we shave our beards 
 that we may seem purified by innocence and 
 humility, and that we may be like the angels 
 who remain always in the bloom of youth." At 
 the same time, the instinct for growing beards 
 remained so strong that several of the Popes
 
 96 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 themselves succumbed to it, and even as recently 
 as 186'5 the Pope was forced to reprimand certain 
 of the clergy of Bavaria for attempting to re- 
 introduce the fashion of wearing beards. He is 
 said to have rebuked them in the words, " Non 
 Beaveria sed Bavaria," but this may not be true. 
 
 England, above all other nations, should be 
 slow to speak disrespectfully of beards. The 
 greatest age of English history was an age of 
 beards. In the spacious days of Elizabeth the 
 beards were as spacious as the days. Shakespeare 
 wore a beard, and, if he were alive to-day, under- 
 graduates on holiday would be looking over his 
 garden wall at Stratford and shouting " Beaver ! " 
 Had not one of the Queen's agents abroad a 
 beard five feet long ? Yet so degenerate had 
 England become by the end of the eighteenth 
 century that Lord Rokeby's growing a beard was 
 regarded as evidence that he was mad, and it was 
 said that he was the only peer in the country 
 who did not shave. In the nineteenth century 
 a revival of literature was followed by a revival 
 of beards, and the reign of Queen Victoria was 
 as prolific of bearded men of letters and bearded 
 artists as the reign of Queen Elizabeth had been. 
 It is strange that queens and beards should thus 
 go together. Queen Anne alone seems to have 
 ruled over men of genius who grew no beards. 
 It would be worth some statistician's while to go 
 through the great names of English literature
 
 BEAVER 97 
 
 and compare the amount of genius that has gone 
 bearded with the amount of genius that has been 
 clean-shaven. The beardless, I fancy, would be 
 in a numerical majority, but we can estimate 
 the weight of genius on the other side when we 
 remember that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, 
 Spenser, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, 
 Tennyson, Swinburne, Meredith, Morris and 
 Mr Shaw have all worn beards, while Matthew 
 Arnold wore whiskers. The great ages of prose 
 are the ages in which men shave. The great ages 
 of poetry are those in which they allow their beards 
 to gi'ow. Thus, as we should have expected, the 
 lawyers, who are of all men the most prosaic, are 
 the least given to wearing beards. It was even 
 a rule of the society of Lincoln's Inn for a time 
 in the sixteenth century that anyone who ap- 
 peared at their mess wearing a beard should be 
 fined and expelled. How many barristers are 
 there to-day who would dare to assume either 
 the prophet's or the poet's beard .'' 
 
 One is amazed at the vanity of human beings 
 who will thus expose their features to the general 
 view when nature has provided so easy a means 
 of disguising them. It is not even that they 
 get any pleasure from shaving. There is no 
 operation more tedious, quite apait from the 
 danger of being infected with anthrax from the 
 shaving-brush. As for being shaved by a barber, 
 that, too, has its perils. I remember being 
 G
 
 98 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 shaved during a thunderstorm by a little French 
 barber who leaped into the air at every flash of 
 lightning, and brought the razor back to my 
 throat like a guillotine in his unsteady hand. 
 On another occasion the barber was tipsy, and by 
 the time he had covered all one side of my face 
 with duelling-marks I had to beg him to desist, 
 and went out into the world shaven (more or 
 less) on the right side of the face, and with a 
 stubble of beard on the left. It is strange what 
 perils men will face merely in order not to look 
 different from their neighbours. It may be that 
 most men do not care how they look, so long as 
 they do not look ridiculous, and their conception 
 of looking ridiculous is that they should look 
 different from everybody else. It is less than a 
 century since an English painter was driven into 
 writing a pamphlet in defence of his beard. The 
 convention of one age is the laughing-stock of 
 the next. In regard to shaving, the view of the 
 conventionalists is that it does not much matter 
 whether we shave or grow beards provided we 
 all shave or grow beards at the same time, 
 and ninety-nine men out of a hundred are 
 conventionalists. 
 
 Despite all the perils of the shaving-brush, and 
 the still greater perils of the barber's shop, it 
 seems to me likely that Englishmen will continue 
 to shave till a queen sits on the throne again. 
 They will shave in greater numbers than ever, as
 
 BEAVER 99 
 
 soon as the game of Beaver passes out of the 
 comparatively narrow circle of university men 
 and spreads to taxi-drivers^ bus-conductors and 
 newsboys. Life will become intolerable for a 
 bearded man when children rise up out of the 
 pavement at every step and surround him with 
 loud shouts of " Beaver ! " Anyone who has 
 ever worn his hair half-an-inch longer than a 
 Christian should must remember how even the 
 emptiest street could echo, as with the horns of 
 elHand faintly blowing, with the silver whistled 
 notes that represent " Get your hair cut ! '' The 
 English are supposed to be individualists, but 
 they are not individualists when it comes to 
 growing long hair or a beard. The universal 
 whistling of " Get your hair cut ! " was one of 
 the minor persecutions of the nineteenth century. 
 You could enjoy being whistled at only if you 
 had a taste for being a minor martyr. As a good 
 many young men had, as a matter of fact, grown 
 their hair long in a spirit of challenge, they got a 
 certain amount of amusement from the whistlings 
 of draymen and bus-drivers. Men do not, how- 
 ever, grow beards as a challenge. They grow 
 them, as a rule, for purposes of concealment, 
 and, when their efforts at concealment only serve 
 to bring them into the limelight, they will be 
 compelled either to emigrate to a free country or 
 to retire into the obscurity of a clean shave. 
 It is to be hoped that some expert will leave
 
 100 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 for future generations a record of the rules of 
 the game of Beaver. It is played, I understand, 
 by two persons, and the points are scored as 
 in tennis. Whichever of the two first cries 
 " Beaver ! " as a beard comes into sight, scores. 
 At sight of a white beard, one cries, " Polar 
 beaver!" which counts a game. At sight of a 
 royal beard, the correct call is " Royal beaver ! " 
 which counts not only as game, but as sett and 
 match. There is a story of a Cambridge function 
 at which, on the entrance of King George V., 
 the audience of undergraduates rose to their feet 
 with a universal shout of " Ro^al beaver ! Game, 
 sett, match ! " It is possibly untrue. There are, 
 I believe, still other variations of the game, and, 
 no doubt, in time it will become as elaborate in 
 its niceties as poker. Whatever its future, how- 
 ever, I feel sure that it will remain a purely 
 English game. It is a game that could only be 
 played by a race of men who can keep their faces 
 straight. Foreigners are too excitable. They 
 would come to blows. Beards would be plucked, 
 and hair pulled in revenge. Englishmen can 
 play the game, however, with calm faces and 
 without moving a muscle even in a smile. The 
 bearded man knows that he is under observation, 
 but so guileless, so impassive, are the faces of 
 those whom he meets that he never knows by 
 whom he is being observed. He feels as if he 
 were being shadowed by a secret society, so
 
 BEAVER 101 
 
 polite, so grave, is every face he sees, Beaver, 
 indeed, is the most secret of games. So quietly 
 is it played that thousands of Londoners have 
 never once heard the cry of "Beaver!" in a 
 public place, though the game may be in progress 
 all round them. It is said to be in full swing at 
 Church Parade on Sundays, but if you mix in the 
 crowd at Church Parade you will Hsten for even 
 a whisper of the word in vain. 
 
 Elderly people say that is a silly game, and 
 that is true enough. On the other hand, it is 
 a silly game in the English tradition of silliness. 
 Swift and Harley, when driving out together, 
 used to play a similar game with cats. The 
 first of them who saw a cat and cried, " There's 
 a cat ! " scored. It may be that all games are 
 silly. But, then, so are human beings. This 
 does not happen to be the planet into which the 
 wiser spirits choose to be born.
 
 XI 
 
 KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE 
 
 Officially, there is a drought. A drought is 
 what you and I would call a spell of fine weather. 
 The Meteorological Office apparently defines it as 
 a spell of fine weather that lasts without a break 
 for a fortnight. 
 
 But the farmers, as well as the Meteorological 
 Office, are saying that there is a drought. " I 
 have had that field ploughed four times," declared 
 Mr Finch, nodding over the hedge at three acres 
 of broken soil ; " I want to get on with my swedeS;^ 
 but it's no use till it rains." Happy are we to 
 whom swedes mean less than sunshine. We have 
 no more complaint to make of the warm air than 
 has the Painted Lady that spreads her dappled 
 fans to the sun on the broad green hazel-leaf. 
 We have no more complaint to make than has 
 the happy ash - tree in the paddock, swaying 
 the burden of its leaves in the bright wind as 
 though it too had some impulse of wings. There 
 is a plenitude of satisfaction in the world at this 
 season — a lushness of life that more than com- 
 pensates for the lost blossom of the apple-tree 
 and the fading of the chestnut blossom into the 
 
 102
 
 KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE 103 
 
 unsightliness of a thaw. The very grass is full of 
 colours. As you lie in it, a neglected book in 
 your pocket, it seems to tremble with a dust of 
 blue flowers in the summer light. Only one 
 sort of gi'ass, perhaps, and the flowers, when you 
 look at them closer, are slate-grey. And what a 
 tribe of insects is flying and flitting and creeping 
 among the blades ! There is one creature, who 
 looks like a flying earwig, his head and tail of 
 the colour of raw bacon, and who hastens from 
 blade to blade on an interminable quest. He 
 begins near the ground and creeps up the grass 
 till, when he has reached the top, it bends under 
 his weight and suspends him perilously over the 
 abyss. At times he struggles to right himself, 
 and wrestles with the blade as with an enemy. 
 But in the end he opens his wing-cases and flies 
 off hopefully, his tail low like a weight carried by 
 a pulley, to climb another blade. He does this 
 an infinite number of times. He never tires ; 
 he never despairs ; perhaps he never thinks. Is 
 he a beast of prey, sating his appetite all the 
 while on an innocent and frightened population ? 
 Is he in pursuit of infinitesimal creatures to whom 
 the grass is a branching forest and whose sky is 
 no higher than the hedge of the field ? It may 
 be that he is not half so monstrous in his appetites 
 as that small, quiet moth on a grass-stem near 
 him, with folded wings that are shaped liked the 
 roof of a Noah's Ark and brocaded like a teal.
 
 104 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 The moth is watchful and still. He does not fuss 
 upon his errand. He is quiet as a flower. Even 
 when he flies, he flies on soft wings, dodging the 
 grasses as a bird dodges the stems of trees. 
 
 Towards evening a little grey moth, its wings 
 grained like a shell, comes in its scores and 
 flutters through the nettles and the grasses. But 
 in the sunlight the congregation of the flies and 
 the butterflies is more noticeable. The Orange- 
 Tip is everywhere, with an island mapped on his 
 white wing. The Cabbage-White lurches over 
 the hedge, and bolts up the paddock as though 
 tumbling over itself in its haste. We are accus- 
 tomed to think of the butterfly as a wayward 
 creature of indeterminate flight, but never did 
 fugitive make greater haste with firmer purpose 
 than the Cabbage - White as it fled along the 
 hedge from its imaginary pursuer. I do not 
 know whether there are any statistics in regard 
 to the speed of butterflies, but here, at least, was 
 one that would have left a pursuing entomologist 
 breathless. Then there was a smaller Avhite 
 butterfly — a charming marbled creature with 
 black veins and a hint of green. But he, alas ! 
 could not fly. He could but flutter a few yards, 
 and then sink on the ground, and roll over, like 
 a fishing-smack when the tide has retreated. It 
 may be that he was a baby, learning to crawl in 
 the air. Or it may be that he was crippled, and 
 would flop uneasily about the earth till a sparrow
 
 KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE 105 
 
 made a meal of him. A more humane man than 
 I might have given him the benefit of the doubt 
 and put him out of his misery. I left him, 
 however, to his share of a world that vibrated 
 with the wings of Orange-Tips and Fritillaries. 
 Let the sparrows be his executioners if they 
 would. 
 
 In the hedge round the paddock a whitethroat 
 is noisy all day. He is a delightful little creature, 
 with a song like a signature scribbled with a quill 
 pen. He keeps out of sight most of the time, 
 but he cannot resist the temptation of an oc- 
 casional upward dive into the air, as though he 
 were playing at being a lark. He even attempts 
 to imitate the lark's profuseness of speech when 
 on the wing, as he jerks and scrambles and 
 sideslips among the air above the trees. Then 
 suddenly he becomes frightened and precipitates 
 himself downwards in a series of desperate dives 
 till he has reached the safety of the hedge or 
 his post in an ash-tree again. This, I think, is 
 a whitethroat year. Or perhaps Mr Finch's farm 
 is a specially favoured haunt of whitethi-oats. 
 Every lane and every field is full of them. They 
 are more conspicuous than the chaffinches. No 
 wonder that the wren, sitting on the barn, has to 
 sing like a Wagnerian tenor pitting himself against 
 the orchestra. He would not be heard otherwise. 
 No wonder that when I awoke in the darkness 
 before the dawn I heard the lark singing — filling
 
 106 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 the night with music that, at that hour, seemed 
 ghostly, unearthly, like the voices of adoring 
 spirits. He, too, had no other chance of being 
 heard. Shortly after him came the cuckoo, his 
 voice already becoming a stammer. Or he may 
 have been a young bird, having his first lessons 
 from a terrifying singing-master. But there was 
 a long silence between the lark's first silvering of 
 the darkness and the full chorus of the trees and 
 hedges, with blackbirds dominating the world 
 with their grave recitations. There ai-e in this 
 part of the country twenty blackbirds or more 
 to every thrush. The first hour of morning is a 
 blackbirds' service. There is one blackbird who 
 intones, and all the other blackbirds make the 
 responses. As things work out, it is a little more 
 confused than that. The blackbirds interrupt 
 one another, and, if you listen closely, you will 
 perceive that each of them is asking questions. 
 The first blackbird asks a question, and, before 
 he has finished, a blackbird in a neighbouring tree 
 is replying to him by asking another question. 
 And so the interrogation passes from tree to tree, 
 from parish to parish, from county to county, to 
 the extreme limit of the world at which a black- 
 bird can be found. So far as I know, the question 
 has never been answered. I do not even know 
 what the question is. But it begins afresh every 
 morning, as though it were something radiantly 
 novel and undebated, like the "Why?" and the
 
 KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE 107 
 
 "Whence?" and the " Whither ? " that we poor 
 creatures who haven't even wings have been 
 putting for ten thousand years to the perfectly 
 charming and perfectly silent stars. The black- 
 birds do not quarrel about it. With what suavity, 
 with what dulcet dignity, they continue the 
 eternal discussion ! 
 
 The blackcap is another matter. I did not see 
 him, but I heard him in a nettle-grown dell fifty 
 yards from the house, singing in an ash-tree from 
 which I had seen dead stoats hanging two months 
 before. He puts no questions. His sole business 
 is to escape from harshness into music. The 
 blackcap begins his song as though he were 
 utterly incapable of music. He is harsh, husky, 
 scratchy. He, too, writes with a quill pen. 
 Gradually all this changes. A note that begins 
 as a creak ends as pure music. It is as though 
 a freed spirit sang above the prison of the body 
 — as though the sun had been released, round and 
 gold, from its birth among ragged clouds. Notes 
 scarcely less lovely than a nightingale's fill the 
 wood — note hastily on the heels of note, as 
 though the bird were aware that its music could 
 not last but might at any moment sink back again 
 behind the ragged clouds. Perhaps the very 
 insecurity of the song makes the sweetness all 
 the more penetrating. 
 
 But the most fascinating of the birds in the 
 neighbourhood is not a song-bird but the little
 
 108 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 owl — that small wild cat of the air that has been 
 spreading so disastrously through England since 
 its introduction by a well-meaning peer a genera- 
 tion or so ago. There are two little owls' nests 
 in the paddock. One of them is in a hollow 
 pear-tree to the east ; and the other is in a hollow 
 apple-tree to the west. The little owl is not a 
 nightbird to anything like the same extent as the 
 other owls. It flies furtively from tree to tree, 
 wicked in the full blaze of the sun. It has a 
 guilty conscience and glides down in the shadow 
 of the trees on noiseless wings at the slightest 
 movement. Before dipping into the hole of the 
 tree that is its house, it takes up a position in the 
 crook of a low branch and looks round to see if 
 it is being observed. It sits infamously still, and, 
 standing in the darkness of a barn door, you can 
 see the yellow of its eyes twenty yards away. At 
 intervals it jerks nervously round, like a criminal 
 expecting the hand of a detective on his shoulder. 
 Should it see you, and should you not move, it 
 begins to bol) its body up and down at you, as 
 though to say, " If you are alive, go away ! " 
 There is a scene in The Kid in which Charlie 
 Chaplin bobs his body up and down in the same 
 threatening way every time his runaway enemy 
 looks round. His every gesture was an intima- 
 tion that he would be after the fellow if he did 
 not clear off in double-quick time. But every- 
 body knew that Charlie himself would have run
 
 KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE 109 
 
 for his life if the mnn had but turned and come 
 towards him. The owl was like that. A little 
 girl in a blue overall said to me : " Let us bob at 
 him and see what he will do." She bobbed in 
 imitation of him. He bobbed again. She bobbed 
 in answer. He did not wait for any more of it, 
 but fled like a guilty soul right out of the paddock. 
 We v/ent over to look into his nest where three 
 little white downy creatures slept, with their 
 beaks over each other's necks, blissful and 
 innocent as tiny pigs. You could see them either 
 by looking down into the hollow stem of the tree 
 from above, or by looking through the small hole 
 in the side out of which the owl swept the gar- 
 bage of beetles' wing-cases and other uneatable 
 things, as down a rubbish-chute. There were no 
 other comforts or conveniences in the home. 
 Near the three little pigs lay the dried skin of a 
 mouse, eaten long before the nestlings were out 
 of the shell. As for the nestlings themselves, 
 innocent though they at first appeared, each had 
 already the Roman nose of its father and mother ; 
 and one wondered whether, in fairness to the 
 other birds, they ought ever to have been allowed 
 to leave the shell. One egg still lay in the nest 
 unhatched. It was a nice case of conscience 
 whether to take it away or leave it to its small 
 chance of bursting into a bird of prey. If you 
 have heard the other birds clamouring over the 
 safety of their infants when an owl is watching
 
 no SOLOMON IN ALL HLS GLORY 
 
 them from a tree, you do not want to see too 
 many owls — not, at least, too many little owls, 
 who are but predatory aliens — in the world. The 
 worst of it was, when we had taken the egg, we 
 ceased to be certain that it was an owl's egg. An 
 owl's egg, I believe, is perfectly white : this was 
 spotted with brown. An owl's egg, I believe, is 
 perfectly round : this, though almost round, was 
 inclined to oval. It raised problems for the 
 intellect as well as for the conscience. 
 
 In order to keep from thinking about it we 
 went down the road and gathered hardheads and 
 sat down on a bank of vetches and played the 
 first three rounds of the hardhead championship 
 of Hertfordshire. I was accused of cheating 
 because I made rules, as anyone would have 
 done, which enabled me to win handsomely. But 
 I am rather good at hardheads. It is an excel- 
 lent game, and I have only one fault to find with 
 it : it is too violent for a summer day. The 
 muscles of my right arm are still a little stiff from 
 it. But I won the championship. If I had gone 
 to Oxford or Cambridge, I should most certainly 
 have got a Blue for hardheads.
 
 XII 
 
 DRESSES 
 
 Thousands of the most earnest minds in the 
 kingdom, all of them female, look to Ascot every 
 year for guidance. This year they looked to it 
 finally to confirm their faith in the triumph of 
 the long skirt and the large hat. This is not 
 the unimportant matter it seems to grave persons. 
 The fate of kingdoms has depended on more 
 trifling things. A large hat may make all the 
 difference to a modern Cleopatra in ensnaring 
 a modern Mark Antony (in a white topper), and 
 the course of civilisation may be diverted as a 
 result. There is no doubt that it is easier to 
 fall in love in some years than in others, and 
 this is almost entirely due to the fashions of 
 the day. It is at least twice as easy to fall in 
 love in a year of long skirts as in a year of 
 short, and in a year of large hats as in a year 
 of small. Love with the ordinary human being 
 is a perfectly superficial emotion, and, if the 
 novelists were true to life, they would wx-ite 
 less about hearts and more about dresses. There 
 is a great deal of nonsense written in the 
 tradition of King Cophetua and the beggar maid. 
 Ill
 
 112 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 That irregular love affairs of the kind have 
 occurred is true, but they are rare. Generally 
 speaking, we may say that whether King Cophetua 
 falls in love or not depends on how the lady is 
 dressed. I do not say this flippantly : I believe 
 it to be partly true. I doubt if women would 
 go to all this trouble of dressing up if they, too, 
 did not believe that a perfect woman nobly 
 planned is the result of a collaboration between 
 the Almighty and a dressmaker. Joan of Arc 
 may be different ; St Catherine of Siena may be 
 different ; I am speaking merely of the perfect 
 heroine of the average monarch or the average 
 man. 
 
 Women sometimes indignantly deny that they 
 dress for the eyes of men. They dress, they say, 
 to please themselves, and are more interested 
 in what women think than in what men think 
 about their clothes. We must not dismiss this 
 too summarily as a feminine falsehood. New 
 pleasures have undoubtedly arisen in the course 
 of the evolution of women's dress, and these 
 derivative pleasures have probably become the 
 chief pleasures of many well-dressed women. 
 Dress, like poetry, began as an art with a pur- 
 pose. It has evolved into an art for art's sake. 
 Hence modern women will discuss each other's 
 dresses in much the same spirit in which Georgian 
 poets discuss each other's poems. They are artists, 
 and they know, like all artists, that their most
 
 DRESSES 113 
 
 sympathetic audience is one of women. They 
 are no more concerned with the origins of dress 
 than a poet is with the origins of verse. They 
 have reached a point at which they enjoy be- 
 ing beautiful — at which^ indeed^ they could not 
 help being beautiful — for its own sake. As a 
 matter of fact, the modern woman who has not 
 at least the air of dressing like a disinterested 
 artist is not well dressed. Almost any woman 
 can dress well enough to attract the admiration 
 of a man ; it is the test of a well-dressed woman 
 that she can attract the admii-ation of other 
 women. 
 
 Certainly, women would have a poor time of 
 it if they had to depend on men for intelligent 
 appreciation of their clothes. Men are influenced 
 by women's clothes as they are influenced by the 
 architecture of churches, but the influence in both 
 cases is hypnotic : it does not awaken the ob- 
 servation and intelligence, but overwhelms them. 
 Only a man of the worst sort, on returning from 
 a party, could tell you how the women to whom 
 he talked were dressed. Men get little more 
 than a vague impression of colour, if they get as 
 much as that. I remember hearing of a young 
 reporter who was once sent to describe an im- 
 portant wedding in a small provincial town. His 
 brain swam as he looked round him, reflecting 
 that it was part of his duty to take back a detailed 
 account of the women's dresses. In despair he 
 H
 
 114 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 appealed to a lady, who was describing the wedding 
 for the rival local journal. She was an extremely 
 wicked lady who saw an opportunity for an un- 
 pardonable joke. She knew all about cookery 
 in the original French, and she poured into the 
 boy's eager ear the most extraordinary list of 
 words it had ever been his lot to hear. She 
 robed all the guests in sonffiees and sahnis and 
 vol-au-vents. She trimmed the bride's mother's 
 dress with peiits fours and the bride's aunt's hat 
 with epmards. She made everybody present 
 perfectly eatable, whether as a soup, an entree 
 or a sweet. She made the bridegroom wear 
 some kind of jam in his buttonhole, and she 
 shod the bridesmaids in vegetables. There has, I 
 believe, never been quite so wonderful a descrip- 
 tion of a wedding anywhere else in English 
 journalism. And it got into print simply because 
 there was nobody but men in the office of the 
 paper. The sub-editors were men; the printers 
 were men ; and both were content to pass any 
 description of women's dress as something so 
 remote from the masculine intelligence that 
 they did not even think of asking whether it 
 meant anything. They knew that clothes, like 
 music, were talked about in a jargon, and they 
 were humble men who regarded such things as 
 beyond their comprehension. We may fancy 
 that, had we been in control, we should never 
 have allowed such a hoax to pass. But let us
 
 DRESSES 115 
 
 not be too sure. We are not sufficiently in- 
 terested in these things to see when a writer 
 on them is mistaken. We appreciate to some 
 extent the ultimate effect of dress, but we are 
 utterly bored by the technique of dress. A man 
 may cast his eye lightly down a column about 
 women's fashions, but, if he has a sound mind 
 in a sound body, he cannot read it with the close 
 attention and understanding with which he reads 
 a column about finance or racing. His own art of 
 dress and woman's art of dress are poles asunder. 
 Man aims at protective colouring in his clothes, 
 woman at attractive colouring. Man wears a 
 costume in order to hide, woman in order to 
 shine. "Man," somebody has said, "is a poem 
 pretending to be a formula ; woman is a formula 
 pretending to be a poem," This, of course, is 
 nonsense, as are most of the things we say about 
 the sexes. But we may concede that there is 
 a grain of sense in it, in so far as man dresses 
 in order to be inconspicuous while this can hardly 
 be said of woman. This, we may admit, is only 
 natural. Men are unpleasant-looking creatures. 
 They have hairy chins and long feet. The aver- 
 age male European is not a person with whom 
 even a dressmaker of genius could do anything. 
 Hence his scorn of dress. Hence his attempt 
 to conceal his identity in a dark suit and a bowler 
 hat. Artists are constantly resurrecting the theory 
 that the male form is more beautiful than the
 
 n6 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 female. There is no arbiter for such an argu- 
 ment. Women may at least claim that the 
 picture papers are on their side. There is little 
 to be said for photographs of either sex on the 
 score of beauty, but it can hardly be questioned 
 that the portraits of men who get into the public 
 eye are much more repulsive than the portraits 
 of the women. 
 
 On the whole, the world has never done justice 
 to women's clothes. When they are mentioned 
 in literature, it is usually with sarcasm or de- 
 nunciation. The prophets and satirists have said 
 more about them than have the lyric poets. True, 
 there are charming poems in praise of dress, such 
 as Herrick's : "Whenas in silks my Julia goes." 
 But in the higher sort of poetry little is made 
 of silks and satins. Shakespeare replies to the 
 question, " Who is Silvia ? what is she that all 
 our swains commend her.''" by telling us that 
 she is holy, fair and wise, but he does not tell 
 us that she is exquisitely dressed. It is almost 
 impossible to imagine Wordsworth addressing a 
 serious poem to a well-dressed woman. Perhaps, 
 if the dressmakers would get rid of their intoler- 
 able jargon, which alarms poets by suggesting 
 that clothes are a mystery for experts, men of 
 letters would feel less shy of approaching the 
 subject. It is certainly extraordinary that a 
 theme which moves a far greater number of 
 human beings to the passionate depths of their
 
 DRESSES 117 
 
 nature than philosophy should be made so little 
 of in literature. There is, it seems to me, a 
 great Ode to a Dressmaker to be written, putting 
 into immortal verse the whirl of emotions that 
 a woman feels in choosing a new frock. For her 
 the silkworms, the little silkworms, labour out 
 their lives. For her the seal perishes in its 
 ocean cave. For her the murex is fished up 
 and plants yield their dyes. For her the ostrich 
 is tracked down in the sandy desert and resigns 
 his feathers to one who can wear them with a 
 better grace. The corn falling to the scythe in 
 the field provides her with the simplest of her 
 hats. She has borrowed from the fields and the 
 forests, and "walks about clad, not merely in her 
 proper beauty, but in the general beauty of the 
 earth. Strange that she is never content with 
 the result for long. She turns from the beauty 
 of yesterday as though it were a faded bouquet, 
 and she moves on towards the beauty of to-morrow, 
 as restless as Alexander seeking new worlds to 
 conquer. If she has a fault, it is that she is 
 satisfied to conquer almost any world, if only it 
 is new. There is, so far as can be seen, no 
 principle in the changes of her fashions. She 
 does not care whether she has a high waist or 
 a low waist, or no waist at all ; she cares only 
 for the swift passage from one to another. She 
 has been compared, in her spring fashions, to 
 the year in efflorescence. But, after all, the
 
 118 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 flowers, if left to themselves, do not change. It 
 is only when human beings take them over and 
 cultivate them in gardens that they too become 
 subject to the fashion of the hour. It is strange 
 that the ancient poets looked on the flower of 
 the field as the perfect symbol of impermanence. 
 Here, at least, is promise of return. The flower 
 fadeth, but either in seed or root it is already 
 preparing to be born again. No such fate awaits 
 a discarded frock. It may fade into a shabby 
 second existence, but its glory is brief almost 
 as a bubble's, and has as complete an end. 
 Hence those who have spoken of the body as 
 the garment of the soul have chosen an appro- 
 priate image. There are even religions accord- 
 ing to which the soul, like a woman, changes from 
 one garment to another through aeon after aeon. 
 It is to be hoped that it does so on some more 
 settled principle — that it is not mere love of 
 change that leads it to dress up in the body 
 of Julius Caesar in one century, and in the body 
 of John Smith in another. The soul, it must 
 be admitted, has extraordinary, even freakish, 
 taste in bodies. It regards the human body, 
 perhaps, as fancy dress rather than as a costume 
 for serious use. On any other supposition it 
 would be extremely difficult in some instances 
 to congratulate the soul on its taste. But that 
 leads one into even greater mysteries than the 
 mysteries of dress. And so, having just touched
 
 DRESSES 119 
 
 on the relationship between pretty frocks and 
 immortal souls, we may postpone further treat- 
 ment of the subject till Ascot week returns, 
 bringing other problems and — who can doubt 
 it? — other hats.
 
 XIII 
 
 THE CRIME OF J. LYONS & CO. 
 
 If Dr Johnson or Charles Lamb or, indeed, 
 anybody who lived a hundred or two hundred 
 or even three hundred years ago were to re- 
 turn to earth, he would find many changes in 
 the appearance of London. It is doubtful if 
 he would find any other quite so striking as 
 the change that has been brought about by the 
 multiplication of Lyons's tea-shops. There are 
 no other tea-shops that make the same im- 
 pression on the eye. Their white-and-gold faces 
 and their polished windows are as noticeable as 
 the painted signs of inns. They have a nice 
 suggestion that luxury has been democratised 
 and brought within the reach of anybody who 
 has threepence in his pocket. They announce 
 entertainment. They seem to say that there is 
 no need to go to White Cities in order to be 
 happy while toasted scones may be eaten within 
 from marble tables. Could Sardanapalus himself 
 ask for anything better than to be allowed to 
 sit at a marble table and eat steak-and-kidney 
 pudding from a silver fork } It is no wonder 
 that Londoners flock every day in thousands 
 
 120
 
 THE CRIME OF J. LYONS & CO. 121 
 
 into these white palaces of poached eggs on 
 toast. They look infinitely more inviting than 
 the theatres and the picture houses. The Lyons- 
 going population of London is probably now 
 greater than the church-going population. There 
 are Londoners who have never visited the Tower 
 or been inside Westminster Abbey, but there 
 are few who have never been in a Lyons's tea- 
 shop. Even between ten and eleven in the 
 morning you will find some of these shops full. 
 It is apparently the habit of many people to 
 follow their cup of bedroom tea and their break- 
 fast coffee with a cup of coffee on their arrival 
 in the City as a restorative after the fatigue of 
 the journey on the Underground. Men, it seems, 
 must drink something, if only as an alternative 
 to work. And there is this to be said for coffee 
 as a drink in the early part of the day, that it 
 does not fuddle the brain like beer or milk. 
 Victims of the milk habit, unfortunately, are 
 also to be seen at Lyons's. You can tell them by 
 the furtive way in which they creep down side 
 streets and slip in at the inconspicuous doors 
 specially provided for them. They have dark 
 rings under their eyes and never look happy 
 except when actually drinking the " white stuff," 
 as they call it among themselves. There is no 
 habit that gets a stronger grip on a man, and 
 the women are, if anything, worse than the men. 
 I speak from hearsay, but I understand that
 
 122 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 the first effect produced by a draught of milk is 
 extraordinarily pleasant. Beginners sometimes 
 find the taste nauseating^ but the habitual drinker 
 finds even this delightful. The milk, having 
 passed into the stomach, at once sets up a glow 
 through the system and gives the victim a feeling 
 of enormous energy. He feels fit for anything 
 — even for the work that he has been neglecting 
 in order to indulge his craving. He tells himself 
 that, after another glass, he will be able to do it 
 twice as well and twice as fast as he would have 
 done if he had contented himself with drinking 
 a glass of water in the office. His capacity 
 for self-deception increases. He feels amazingly 
 good as well as amazingly buoyant. He achieves 
 wonders in day-dreams. He has, indeed, almost 
 all the characteristics of the alcoholist. He 
 differs from him chiefly through having none of 
 the superficial sociableness and generosity of the 
 spirit - drinker. No milk - drinker ever stands 
 another a glass of milk. The milk-drinker is 
 essentially a solitary — taciturn and forbidding. 
 He prefers to have a table to himself, and, if you 
 did not watch him closely, you might even think 
 that he was unhappy. But, as soon as his lips 
 touch the glass, you can see a look of gratification 
 stealing over his face — a look that he does his 
 best to conceal, lest it should give away his 
 secret. If you attempt to reason with him, he 
 becomes sullen, hostile. He seeks refuge in
 
 THE CRIME OF J. LYONS & CO. 123 
 
 lying excuses. " Milk is a food," he declares 
 stolidly. " My dear man," you reply to him, 
 " a beer-drinker says the same thing about beer, 
 but, if you read the report of the recent inquiry 
 into alcohol, you will find that beer has no 
 food-value whatever." That exasperates him. 
 " I was not talking about beer. I was talking 
 about milk. I say it's a food. Children live on 
 it." " Yes, the poor little creatures," you reply ; 
 " twenty years ago, when children used to be 
 allowed into public-houses, I have seen a mother 
 giving a sip of beer to an infant in ai*ms. She 
 took your view. If you had reproached her, she 
 would have said, ' Beer is a food.' The law 
 has fortunately put a stop to that sort of thing. 
 Why not be frank and admit that you drink milk 
 because you like it ? " " I do admit it," he 
 answers, " but I also maintain that it is a food. 
 It is nature's attempt to provide a complete food 
 for calves." " For calves, yes," you take him up, 
 " just as grass is nature's attempt to provide a 
 complete food for cows. Grass and milk are a 
 natural food for the beasts of the field. But man 
 is higher in the scale than a beast of the field 
 and should have nobler tastes." . . . But it is 
 no use trying to convince him. Under the in- 
 fluence of his stimulant, he will say anything. 
 He merely laughs when you remind him that 
 Landru was a milk-drinker and that, on the eve 
 of his execution, when he was offered a half-bottle
 
 124 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 of wine, he asked for a glass of milk instead. 
 He becomes openly derisive when a'ou remind 
 him that Homer made the odious Polyphemus a 
 milk-drinker in contrast to Ulysses, who drank 
 wine. When the milk has mounted to the brain, 
 men cease to be capable of reasoning. 
 
 Lyons's shops must unquestionably be held 
 responsible for a great part of the increase in the 
 habit of milk-drinking during the past twenty 
 years. For some extraordinary reason, the 
 Government, while shutting the public-houses 
 during several hours of the day, permits the sale 
 of milk at all hours. The early morning glass 
 of milk has in consequence become a habit with 
 thousands of people and especially, it is to be 
 feared, with young people. There is no legal 
 age-limit for buying milk as there is for buying 
 alcohol or tobacco. One result of this is that 
 enough money is spent on milk every year to 
 pay for the upkeep of the Army and Navy and 
 even, it is said, to make England a country fit 
 for heroes to live in. 
 
 It was not, however, in order to discuss or to 
 deplore the ravages of the milk habit that I sat 
 down to inveigh against the crime of J. Lyons 
 & Co. Nothing could have been further from 
 my thoughts than milk. Deplorable though the 
 excessive consumption of it is, it would none the 
 less be ridiculous to describe the sale of it as a 
 crime. Most of us are far too ready to expend
 
 THE CRIME OF J. LYONS & CO. 125 
 
 our moral indignation on things for which we 
 have no fancy. We are apt to forget that there 
 are good men and women on both sides of the 
 argument and that, where this is so, it may be 
 infinitely more harmful to suppress a habit than 
 to tolerate it, even if it does a considerable 
 amount of harm. Hence I should be reluctant 
 to see any but moral pressure brought to bear 
 on milk-drinkers. They should be dealt with 
 by the clergy ratlier than by the police. 
 
 The crime of which I accuse Messrs Lyons is 
 a much moi'e serious affair than the sale of milk. 
 It is that they have connived at the destruction 
 of the charm of London. They have sinned 
 against good ai'chitecture in pulling down a 
 delightful old shop in Coventry Street in order to 
 make room for an extension of their Corner House 
 in that region. Before the war this shop, with 
 its little low windows and its little square panes, 
 attracted the eye every time one passed along 
 the sti'eet. It belonged to a jeweller, and its 
 old-fashioned and unostentatious front made one 
 feel that here the tradition of the silversmith 
 must have been handed down from father to son 
 during several generations. This may have been 
 an illusion, but at least the shop was one of the 
 few West End shops that stood like a reminder 
 of the quiet beauty of the town life of a past 
 world. There are not many shops in London 
 that have the air of historical pieces. This was
 
 126 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 one of them. How the eye brightens at the 
 sight even of the lettering above a shop window 
 or the number on a door that gives one the 
 impression that it has been wrought by an 
 artificer who loved his work ! There is some- 
 thing in our nature that craves for design even 
 in the printing of an advertisement. It is not 
 only in painting and in poetry that we long 
 for the presence of the sense of pattern. It is 
 as though we were everywhere in search of de- 
 light, and as though the delight of the humblest 
 artificer communicated itself to us in even the 
 least conspicuous pattern it creates. For delight 
 always creates patterns, and patterns in their 
 turn create delight. One of the worst effects of 
 the invention of machinery is that, not only did 
 it make the work in factories mechanical, but it 
 spread the idea of the mechanical even among 
 men who were engaged in the arts and crafts. 
 It would be absurd to deplore the invention of 
 machinery as an absolute evil, but it did produce 
 one notoriously evil effect in lowering the taste 
 for good craftsmanship and in the general 
 subordination of the creative human being to 
 the manufacturing machine. The chief vice of 
 Victorian architecture was that it was for the 
 most part not created but manufactured. There 
 are few shops in London that do not seem to 
 have been turned out with as little creative 
 pleasure as the hardware and earthenware for
 
 THE CRIME OF J. LYONS & CO. 127 
 sale within. London streets^ as a consequence, 
 ai-e, so far as the buildings are concerned, among 
 the dullest in the world to walk in. There are 
 signs of a change for the better, but it will be some 
 time yet before it is generally recognised that a 
 shop-front should reveal a personality and enable 
 us to shai-e in the artist's delight in designing it 
 no less than a picture or a poem. If buildings 
 were taken as seriously as pictures or poems, it 
 would not be possible to destroy a charming 
 building without interference. Several countries 
 forbid the export of masterpieces of painting. 
 It is questionable whether it is not even more 
 important to preserve good buildings than good 
 paintings for the mass of the people. It is 
 melancholy to see a new London that is manu- 
 factured taking the place of a London that was 
 built. Nine hundred and ninety-nine buildings 
 in a thousand could easily be spared, but the 
 thousandth, like every work of art, should be 
 regarded as a public possession. Messrs Lyons 
 have been public benefactors in many respects. 
 Nothing comparable to their genius for catering 
 has ever been known in England before. Genius 
 should recognise genius, however, and the genius 
 that resides in an old shop-front should not be 
 ruthlessly destroyed by the genius of the caterer. 
 The shop in question, indeed, had ceased to be 
 a jeweller's shop before it passed into the hands 
 of Messrs Lyons. During the war it was taken
 
 128 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 over by the Air Ministry, who preserved it in 
 its old condition. But now it is gone, and the 
 ghost of a past age has quitted Coventry Street 
 for ever. It will be impossible henceforth to 
 walk down the street without being haunted by 
 the feeling that one is passing the scene of a 
 crime.
 
 XIV 
 
 THE OLD GAME 
 
 As I was passing Westminster Abbey on the top 
 of a bus, a stream of men and women dressed 
 in black was coming out of the porch of St 
 Margaret's. The bus-conductor paused as he 
 punched my ticket and, jerking his head in the 
 direction of the mourners, nodded and said to 
 me : " A marriage yesterdye, a memorial service 
 to-dye, and so the old gyme goes on ! " You 
 could not have told whether he was very, very 
 sad or very, very disgusted— whether it was the 
 comedy or the tragedy of human existence that 
 had struck him the more forcibly between punch- 
 ing one ticket and another. He looked too grim 
 for comedy, too cynical for tragedy, but at least 
 he recognised that he was punching small holes 
 in tickets in an extraordinary universe. It gave 
 me a curious pleasure to find so admirable a 
 philosopher on a bus-top. For philosophers are 
 rare. The average man passes through life with 
 scarcely a generalisation to his credit. He makes 
 a living, and plays games till he is too old for 
 them, and reads about murders and divorces, but 
 he is seldom aware of any underlying unity in all 
 1 129
 
 130 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 the things he sees, and experiences, and reads 
 about. It is true that he frequently quotes other 
 people's generalisations. But these are not his 
 means of thinking, but his means of avoiding 
 thought. If he says " East is East and West is 
 West" it is because this is the easiest way of 
 dismissing a great problem from his consciousness. 
 He does not wish to disturb his brain or his soul, 
 and so he goes into hiding behind the smoke- 
 screen of a platitude. Of two lay preachers who 
 enter the house of the dead, the one who observes 
 solemnly " In the midst of life we are in death " 
 is probably he who has been the less profoundly 
 moved by the spectacle of men who perish like 
 the flowers. Any man who is insensitive enough 
 can produce a platitude for every occasion. The 
 difference between a platitude and a generalisa- 
 tion is that in the one case a man is quoting 
 somebody else's experience and that in the other 
 he is quoting his own. The objection to most 
 platitudes is not that they are obvious but that 
 they are dishonest — that they pretend to be the 
 expression of far deeper thought and experience 
 than they are. The fact that a thing is obvious 
 is nothing against it. Nothing could be more 
 obvious than that man is mortal ; but see what 
 the Psalmist has made of this commonplace. See 
 what Shakespeare made of it when he wrote : 
 Golden lads and girls all must, 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
 
 THE OLD GAME 131 
 
 See what Meredith made of it in " A wind 
 sways the pines." Great poetry is for the most 
 part a reinforcement of the obvious. It is the 
 little men who are most afraid of the obvious, 
 and who would rather tell a falsehood than tell 
 something that everybody else knows. As a 
 matter of fact, among artists it is a great deal 
 easier to tell a falsehood than to tell an obvious 
 truth. For, in order to tell a falsehood, you have 
 only to contradict a platitude ; Avhile, in order to 
 tell an obvious truth, you have to give life to a 
 platitude. " Any fool can tell the truth," said 
 Samuel Butler, "but it requires a man of some 
 sense to know how to lie well." Little literature 
 is full of such sayings ; in great literature they 
 do not exist. And, indeed, the saying is merely 
 a jest the point of which lies in its purpose of 
 deceiving the unwary. Butler does not even in 
 jest attempt to persuade us that it is more 
 difficult to lie well than to tell the truth well, 
 for if there is one thing that is plain to every 
 artist, it is that more imagination is requii'ed for 
 telling the truth than for lying. The permanent 
 difficulty of telling the truth for the ordinary 
 writer is that it is almost impossible to see the 
 truth for the truisms. The truth has been told 
 so often before that it has in many instances 
 almost ceased to be effectively true. It has 
 become familiar and meaningless, whereas truth, 
 in order to be really truth, must be as fresh and
 
 132 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 as full of meaning as though it had never been 
 discovered before — as bright as a new (pre-war) 
 sixpence. 
 
 The bus-conductor, it seemed to me, was 
 speaking the truth when he made his, in a sense, 
 commonplace comment on the crowd coming out 
 from the memorial service. He did not say 
 anything that was not perfectly obvious. But 
 he said it in a way that convinced one that a 
 perfectly obvious fact had struck a light in his 
 mind. His " And so the old gyme goes on " was 
 uttered with a rhythm that suggested that some- 
 thing in him had vibrated to a universal truth. 
 He had put two and two together and had been 
 amazed to find that the answer was four. It was 
 his amazement, not his answer, that raised the 
 latter ever so little above a platitude. Most of 
 us reserve our amazement for phenomena rather 
 than for general truths. We are amazed more 
 often that a batsman should score two hundred 
 than that a batsman should be mortal. We take 
 the latter for granted, indeed, and yet it is the 
 more startling fact of the two. Poetry at least 
 seems to rise to its greatest heights when the 
 poet remembers the doom of man. It is a fact 
 from which most of us take refuge in platitudes 
 when we do not entirely ignore it. Yet literature 
 as well as religion would lose half its force if it 
 did not see men against the background of the 
 universal doom. How unaccustomed we are to
 
 THE OLD GAME 133 
 
 the thought of it is shown by the way in which 
 we are moved, as if by some absolutely new 
 revelation, when a great writer comments on it. 
 Hamlet has but to take up Yoriek's skull and 
 say to it, " Now get you to my lady's chamber, 
 and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this 
 favour she must come ; make her laugh at that," 
 and we are thrilled as though we had made a 
 great discovery about human life. The truth is, 
 we are for the most j)art indifferent to life as a 
 whole, and live within a small section of it so 
 absorbedly that we have no interest in relating 
 this to life in general. We do not, it may be, live 
 quite incoherently. We string our days together 
 on a thread of money-making or ambition, or 
 amusement or love, or mere avoidance of starva- 
 tion. But this is the only unity we seek in life, 
 and we make little effort to see if there is any 
 connection between our own experience and the 
 experience of the human race. W^e are content 
 to be rich men or lovers or nobodies without 
 looking at ourselves as figures in the eternal 
 procession of rich men and lovers and nobodies. 
 That is why there are so few poets and 
 philosophers. The poet and the philosopher are 
 those who are aware that there is a procession 
 in things, and who are always looking for the 
 connection between one thing and another. 
 They may find the wrong meaning in life, but 
 they are not content till they have found some
 
 134 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 meaning, even if it is only that it means nothing. 
 It is surely a very remarkable instance of the 
 power of generalisation that such a saying as 
 " Vanity of vanities ! All is vanity " has survived 
 as one of the vital sayings of the human race 
 for more than two thousand years. Even a bus- 
 conductor, you would think, could say something 
 as profound as that, and yet it required a man 
 of genius to say something that is as clear as 
 noonday to anyone inclined to pessimism. In 
 point of fact, however, the saying becomes 
 obvious only when we believe it. There is not 
 one life in a million that is not lived on the 
 assumption that it is not true. And those of 
 us about whom its truth is most obvious are the 
 last people of all to recognise it. We would 
 strenuously deny that those magnificent appetites 
 of ours for wealth, power or excitement are 
 vanity. We are content to enjoy them as things 
 in themselves, not as things related to human 
 experience in general or to any theory of the 
 meaning of the " old gyme." 
 
 Philosophic critics have sometimes gone too 
 far in saying that the greatest poems and the 
 greatest novels are those which contain the 
 greatest aphorisms. Vet there is something to 
 be said for the view. The aphorism affords at 
 least one test by which you can judge a writer. 
 The Greeks loved to embed gnomic wisdom of 
 this kind in their literature, and there are few
 
 THE OLD GAME 135 
 
 great writers who have not contributed to the 
 small stock of the great aphorisms in their 
 language. Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth 
 have probably bequeathed a greater number of 
 immortal aphorisms than any other English 
 writers. Pope was also in his way a master of 
 the aphorism, and, if he was not a great poet, it 
 was not because he was an aphorist but because 
 he was the aphorist of other men's thoughts. 
 Besides, he had a way of leaving in the aphorisms 
 and leaving out the poetry. But it is almost 
 impossible to think of a poet of the first rank 
 who did not repeatedly put a general view of 
 life in a brief phrase. There have been people 
 who declared that Keats's " Beauty is Truth, 
 Truth Beauty " is meaningless, but it was only 
 the identification of truth with beauty that 
 brought meaning into life for Keats and prevented 
 him from seeing it as an incoherent waste of 
 phenomena. Every writer has to compose life 
 into the unity of a picture, and, if he cannot 
 do so, he is a mere scribbler of things that do 
 not matter. Not that we can ask a novelist 
 to explain his view of life in long passages of 
 philosophy. His view of life as a rule underlies 
 what he writes rather than interrupts or over- 
 runs it. His briefest anecdote may be a perfect 
 generalisation about life, even though it does 
 not contain a single general statement. It is the 
 artist's method to express his general view of life
 
 136 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 in terms of delightfully particular things. He 
 is a philosopher only in disguise or when an 
 aphorism flashes out almost in spite of him. But 
 the novelist^ like the philosopher, differs from the 
 rest of us in being able to see a path of meaning 
 through the wilderness of phenomena — a path as 
 invisible to most of us as the track left by a bird in 
 the air. Even the simplest of us, it is true, hanker 
 after the discovery of some meaning in life, and 
 when a writer helps to discover one for us in a 
 phrase, we quote him for a generation. Matthew 
 Arnold said, " Conduct is three-fourths of life,'' 
 and it was as if a new horizon had been disclosed 
 to the Victorians. It is a phrase that, when we 
 examine it, looks as if anybody might have said 
 it. It is almost inconceivable that the Avorld 
 should have had to wait thousands of years for 
 this commonplace arithmetical formula about 
 human behaviour. You would have thought that 
 there were at least a dozen men in every English 
 village — in every English street, indeed — who 
 could say something as remarkable. And yet, if 
 you were to go f^om door to door through all the 
 streets of London, in the hope of finding a man 
 who could put his view of life in a sentence as 
 memorable, you would end your mission a con- 
 firmed pessimist in regard to the philosophic 
 nature of the human mind. You would meet 
 few people who could do more than quote 
 Longfellow or Adam Lindsay Gordon or Ella
 
 THE OLD GAME 137 
 
 Wheeler Wilcox as having expressed their largest 
 thoughts. Plenty of people would be able to 
 tell you that "life is real, life is earnest/' but 
 scarcely one of them would be able to convince 
 you that he had thought even this out philo- 
 sophically for himself. Man is a parrot, and he 
 does not even get outside himself and look at 
 himself as a parrot. If he did, he would thereby 
 become a philosopher, and make perhaps a 
 commonplace remark that would be remembered 
 for centuries. For most remarks that are worth 
 making are commonplace remarks. The thing 
 that makes them worth saying is that we really 
 mean them — that they have been mellowed in 
 our profoundest experience and are the "Eureka" 
 of the depths of our nature on discovering that 
 things mean something after all.
 
 XV 
 
 THE UNEXPECTED 
 
 There is no use denying it. Life is extra- 
 ordinarily interesting. Things go on happening, 
 and they are quite often not the things we ex- 
 pected to happen. We can see clearly enough 
 as far as the turn of the road, but beyond that 
 we do not know what surprise may be in store 
 for us. So long as this possibility of surprise 
 remains, there is small chance of our suffering 
 from boredom. We love surprise for its own 
 sake. We like either giving a surprise or getting 
 one. One of the sentences that have lingered in 
 my memory since childhood is a sentence from a 
 nigger minstrel sketch called The Surprise Parti/ 
 to which I was taken in a country village, and 
 I fancy I treasure it because it is more crowded 
 with surprise than any other sentence in English 
 literature. It runs: "But the surprise of the 
 party that the surprise party surprised was nothing 
 to the surprise of the surprise party that surprised 
 them." I have forgotten many sentences wiser 
 and more beautiful than this, but I cannot grudge 
 a corner of my memory to a sentence so redundant 
 with the element that keeps life interesting. 
 
 138
 
 THE UNEXPECTED 139 
 
 Even a Sunday morning at the seaside holds 
 possibilities of surprise. I went down to spend 
 the week-end with some friends at a boarding- 
 house kept by some charming people at Worthing. 
 On Sunday morning I heard a noise of shootings but, 
 as I knew there was a war going on somewhere 
 in the Near East, I did not pay any particular 
 attention to it. On leaving my room, however^ 
 I found the landlady's daughter hurrying up the 
 stairs. " Oh, did you hear that shot ? " she cried, 
 breathless with agitation. I said that I did. 
 " It shot Mrs ," she said, naming the land- 
 lady, and ti'embling in hand and voice. I can 
 assure you that to hear that your landlady has 
 just been shot on a quiet Sunday morning is as 
 surprising a thing as you could wish to happen 
 to you. You ask : " Where ? Hoav ? Who did it ? 
 Have you sent for a doctor } " And you are a- 
 quiver with excitement till you hear that, after 
 all, the landlady is not dangerously wounded. 
 The shot had come from nowhere, and had caught 
 her in the back of the neck where she was 
 washing potatoes beside an open window. It 
 had drawn blood and raised a swelling, but even 
 by now she had so far recovered that, if you 
 listened acutely, you could hear the swish of 
 the water where she was back at work among 
 the potatoes again. That was the second sur- 
 prise — and a happy one. But then the Sunday 
 dinner has to be prepared, no matter who shoots
 
 140 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 whom. After a time the villain who fired the 
 shot was discovered. He was out ratting with 
 a gun on an allotment on the other side of the 
 garden wall. One rat, in its effort to escape, 
 had got up on the top of the wall and was 
 running along it, when the man fired, missed 
 the rat, and hit a very estimable lady instead- 
 This, we may' take it, caused a treble surprise 
 It surprised the man, it surprised the rat, and 
 it surprised the lady. Later in the day, when 
 the landlord was describing the incident, telling 
 how his wife was standing at the scullery window 
 when the shot struck her, he added, as though 
 the worst had not yet been told : " If the window 
 hadn't been open at the time, it would have been 
 broken." That, too, was a saying that charmed 
 by its unexpectedness. Luckily, in real life, 
 people very seldom say the inevitable thing. 
 You never know what people will say. That 
 is what makes their conversation always worth 
 listening to. 
 
 If you go to a strange town, however, even to 
 Worthing, you will come on other unexpected 
 things besides such, on the whole, melodramatic 
 incidents as the shooting of a landlady. Going 
 out into the country on Saturday afternoon, for 
 instance, I was surprised to find myself standing 
 on a field-path and eagerly taking sides as a 
 spectator in a football match between two teams 
 of which I did not even know the names. One
 
 THE UNEXPECTED 141 
 
 of the teams wore blue-and-white jerseys, the 
 other wore chocolate and black ; and, as I am 
 in favour of almost anything blue except Govern- 
 ment reports, I felt waves of partisan energy 
 passing from me into the blue-and-white players 
 every time they made a concerted rush towards 
 the others' goal. The centre-forward of the 
 team, I gathered, was called Jerry-Jack— a name 
 somewhat unexpected — and whenever the ball 
 was kicked across within reach of his expert 
 toes there were excited, laughing shouts of " Go 
 on, Jerry-Jack ! " in which I silently joined. At 
 last, after rush upon rush, with players tumbling 
 all over the field and jumping quickly to their 
 feet again, Jerry-Jack sent the ball like a bomb 
 past the goal-keeper, and by all the rules I ought 
 to have been more enthusiastic for the blue-and- 
 whites than ever. What was my astonishment, 
 however, to find that I was now filled with an 
 aching desire to see the chocolate-and-blacks 
 scoring a goal and making things equal again. 
 My sympathies went out especially to one little 
 chocolate-and-brown man with a very red face 
 and a sweat-soaked mop of very red hair who 
 always threw the ball in when it was kicked 
 into touch. He worked so hard that it was a 
 sin he should go unrewarded. I had scarcely 
 begun to sympathise with him when he leaped 
 into the air with his head aimed at the ball at 
 the same time as an enemy player, and fell
 
 142 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 back on the field like a dead man. He was 
 surrounded and rubbed by players on both sides, 
 but, in spite of all their rubbing, he seemed un- 
 conscious when at length they carried him over the 
 touch-line and laid him on the grass among the 
 spectators and went on with their game. A foot- 
 ball match, I suppose, is like a Sunday dinner: it 
 must be gone on with, whatever happens. But I 
 confess I felt aggrieved on behalf of the little red 
 man, as I saw his wounded body lying neglected 
 and forgotten on the grass while the blue-and- 
 whites stormed more furiously than ever round 
 the chocolate-and-black goal. After a few minutes 
 he was, fortunately, able to sit up, and a minute 
 or two later he was limping back to his place on 
 the field, and hurrying his dancing mop of red 
 up and down in search of the hottest forefront of 
 the battle. He was chasing after the ball near 
 the blue-and-white lines when an enemy player 
 charged into him in a way he obviously thought 
 illegitimate. He left the match to look after 
 itself, and rushed up to the player, with out- 
 stretched arm and finger wagging in fierce ex- 
 postulation, his red face flaming. The referee^ 
 seeing the excitement, ran across, seized the 
 player by the right hand, seized the little red 
 man by his, fitted the two right hands together, 
 and, surrounding them with his own, shook them 
 warmly. Smiling and nodding, as much as to 
 say that that was all right, he skipped off" again
 
 THE UNEXPECTED 143 
 
 to his work with his whistle. The little red 
 man hesitated. Then he, too, though he did 
 not go so far as to smile, nodded till his mop 
 jumped, and ran off side by side with his enemy 
 towards the thick of the play. O holy spirit 
 of sport, thou that dost lay the evil passions of 
 men and teach them to behave according to the 
 rules even amid the tumult and the shouting of 
 the football field, without thee there could be no 
 civilisation, but only a long contention without 
 law, without honour, without happiness ! It is 
 a strange fact that, accustomed though we are 
 to what is called sportsmanlike behaviour, each 
 new instance of it delights us as though it were 
 something that surpassed expectation. It is, no 
 doubt, absurd ; but to see such an incident as 
 the little red man shaking hands in reluctant 
 but unquestioning obedience to the referee in- 
 creases one's confidence in the future of the 
 white races. 
 
 Even the accidents and incidents of the foot- 
 ball field, however, do not bring the surprises of 
 Worthing to an end. You have only to dip into 
 a local guide-book to come on plenty of others. 
 You will find, for instance, that a little way back 
 from the sea is a village with a church and 
 cottage associated with Thomas a Becket. Now, 
 I am not particularly interested in Thomas k 
 Becket, but it gives me the surprise of the un- 
 expected to discover that he lived near Worthing.
 
 144 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 Local associations always produce a thrill in many 
 of us, even if they are associations with people 
 who are scarcely more to us than a name in a 
 school-book. We begin, indeed, almost to like 
 any famous man who has lived in a town or village 
 in which we happen to be spending an idle day. 
 He belongs henceforth to the circle of our associa- 
 tions, if not to the circle of our friends. I shall 
 always like Tom Paine better because he once 
 lived in Lewes and because I once read the 
 medallion saying so in the wall of a house when 
 I was wandering about the streets with nothing 
 to do but wait for a train. I shall always like 
 Sir John Suckling better because he was once 
 Member of Parliament for Bramber. And now 
 I suppose I shall always like Thomas a Becket 
 better because he once lived near Worthing, 
 where I myself have in all my life spent only 
 one brief week-end. And, indeed, if you read 
 the guide-book, you will discover some surpi'is- 
 ingly interesting things about him. You will 
 discover that he was connected with the Abbey 
 of Fecamp in Normandy, and that, probably or 
 possibly, he was the first man to introduce his 
 favourite flower, the lily of the valley, from 
 France into England. You will also discover, 
 as further evidence of the ancient connection 
 between the hinterland of Worthing and the 
 Abbey of Fecamp, that there is a little Continental 
 bird that migrates every year to this part of
 
 THE UNEXPECTED 145 
 
 England alone in order to eat the figs in 
 Thomas h. Becket's garden. It is called the 
 beccafico, or fig-eater. I confess this discovery 
 gave me almost as great a surprise as the shooting 
 of the landlady. It is a delightful notion that 
 a little foreign bird should cross the sea every 
 year for hundreds of years and select the figs 
 in one tiny neighbourhood as though they were 
 the best of all possible figs. Were there not figs 
 at Steyning.? How I should have made any little 
 foreign bird welcome to the plumpest of them ! 
 Why^ this hereditary taste for the Archbishop's 
 figs is little short of a miracle. " It can't be 
 true/' I said, as I read it, hoping that it was. 
 On returning to London, I took down from the 
 shelves an entirely cold-blooded work, The Hand- 
 book of British Birds, and turned up " Fig-eater " 
 in the index. The index, alas ! referred me to 
 "Garden Warbler," and under "Garden Warbler" 
 I read : 
 
 "This is the pettychaps, heccafigo, or Jig-eater of 
 Willughby and Ray {Orn., pp. 21 6, 217). Jesse 
 was assured by a resident at Worthing, 'that 
 the beccqfico annually visits the fig orchard near 
 that place,' and he supposed (erroneously) that 
 it was found in no other part of England 
 {Gleanings, iii., p. 78)." 
 
 That, I am afraid, is law-court evidence, and, 
 when a man is able to quote things in brackets, 
 the finest story in the world vanishes — for me, 
 
 K
 
 146 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 at least — into thin air. Luckily, the birds of 
 real life are so differently distributed in different 
 places that their appearance always produces as 
 delightful a surprise as any story of the birds of 
 the imagination. And so a London dweller, 
 walking along by the sea at Worthing, will be 
 charmed by the wheatear in its white skirt, 
 that flies away in a semicircle over the rust- 
 coloured shingle and hides in the tamarisk, its 
 tail jerking nervously. The little ringed plovers^ 
 too, come when the tide is out and run over the 
 wet sand with the speed of insects. As they fly 
 off in a cloud with a silver lining at one's approach, 
 they utter that mournful, appealing whistle that 
 is like a cry of small, frightened bird-ghosts, and 
 that makes even the sands of a watering-place 
 seem desolate as the shores of an uninhabited 
 island. And then there are the sandpipers, 
 marching from side to side, with their long, pry- 
 ing bills and devouring the helpless inhabitants 
 of the sands that sometimes dance around their 
 feet and set the sandpipers dancing round after 
 them. They are unexpectedly tame little birds 
 that do not run away from a human being more 
 than is necessary. Indeed, they are too busy 
 looking for things to eat to notice a human 
 being. Thus life, as we have agreed, is full of 
 surprises. And I shall have another surprise if 
 some ornithologist does not tell me that the 
 bird I saw was not a sandpiper at all, but a
 
 THE UNEXPECTED 14? 
 
 dunlin. If he does^ I shall be surprised that a 
 dunlin's bill should be so much longer than it 
 is in the pictures in the bird-books. It is clear, 
 in any case, that the unexpected may happen 
 at Worthing as anywhere else. It is a good 
 argument in favour of going away for the 
 week-end.
 
 XVI 
 
 THE STUDENT 
 
 It is in the autumn that one used to puff 
 oneself out with good resolutions about learning. 
 One prepared to receive professors. With what 
 pleasure one bought new books ! One felt as if 
 one were setting out on a journey. It is one of 
 the great pleasures of a student's life to buy a 
 heap of books at the beginning of the autumn. 
 Hei'Cj he fancies, are all the secrets. An annotated 
 Euripides, a text-book on natural philosophy, a 
 book of logarithms, Morris's Philology, Maine's 
 Ancient Law, the fii'st book of The Faery Qtieene, 
 Rasselas with notes, Professor Gilbert Murray's 
 Greek Literature, Mommsen, Cruttwell, the 
 Histories of Tacitus in a red binding — he opens 
 each of them impartially with pleasure ; he enjoys 
 the very " feel " of the paper, the smoothness or 
 roughness of the covers, the look of the title- 
 page. He could hardly relish them more if they 
 were things with a sweet smell or taste. That at 
 least is the experience of one who always loved 
 his books to be new and shrank from getting 
 them second-hand as one would shrink from a 
 sweetmeat that had first been in somebody else's 
 
 148
 
 THE STUDENT 149 
 
 mouth. The fresh, white pages that no thumb 
 had sullied attracted me possibly as a symbol of a 
 new beginning, a dawn, a spring. Now I would 
 rise from my past as from sleep, put on " the new 
 man," as the preachers say, and set out on a 
 career of tireless discovery. I would plunge into 
 the beautiful waters of learning and emerge a 
 scholar. I would study even sound in the physics 
 room, for sound was in some way related to 
 Schubert, and to master all that dull prose about 
 vibrations and the length of organ-pipes might 
 be an initiation into the deeper mysteries of 
 music. The truth is, every subject was a hill to 
 climb, and any hill was better than no hill. I 
 felt a certain excitement as I read The University 
 Calendar and came on the courses even in strange 
 subj ects such as engineering and political economy, 
 I could fancy myself with the greatest of ease 
 a civil engineer and an architect, even though 
 algebraic formulae meant less to me than the 
 marks left by the feet of seagulls on the sand, 
 and though I could hardly draw a house correctly 
 enough to distinguish it from a beehive. The 
 sense of my ignorance and incapacity did not 
 daunt me in those days. I regarded these as 
 remediable weaknesses. I accepted the world 
 as a great lucky-tub into which, did I but dip 
 earnestly enough, I could find whatever talent I 
 desired. How often did I seriously consider the 
 possibility of becoming a sculptor or a composer !
 
 150 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 I felt that if I began to handle the clay with 
 all my might it would take shape from some 
 of those restless dreams and cravings that made 
 it so delightful to be idle to-day and promised to 
 come to birth in something real and beautiful 
 to-morrow. As for turning composer, my in- 
 ability to play any musical instrument did not 
 chill my hopes on an evening on which I had 
 heard Adelaide or the " Prize Song " in the Meister- 
 singers sung. Here was a world into which to 
 break through — why not break through into it } 
 I read somewhere that Schumann did not learn 
 to play the piano till he was in his twenties. He 
 even had some sort of operation on his fingers, 
 did he not } in order to rid them of the stiffness 
 of maturity. Could I not do the same .'' Alas, 
 three consecutive evenings of five-finger exercises 
 cured me of my dream of becoming a second 
 Schumann. Not beauty, but tedium, lay that 
 way. For knowledge of music, I had to content 
 myself with Grove's Dictionary. 
 
 There are some students who, fortunately or 
 unfortunately for themselves, have none of these 
 illicit longings for impossible careers. They have 
 not a single feather in their heads. They seem 
 to decide what they are going to be on the day 
 on which they leave school, and to take nothing 
 seriously that does not lead them straight to the 
 Church, the Bar or the Civil Service. There are 
 others who for the moment do not decide upon
 
 THE STUDENT 151 
 
 any career save the career of examinations. They 
 take upon themselves the routine of the year's 
 work and would regard any mental effort made 
 outside the beaten track as wasted energy. They 
 would regard it as frivolous to read Gibbon if 
 Dr William Smith falls in more aptly with their 
 course of studies. Literature is to them a subject, 
 not a delight. They regard Aristophanes not as 
 amusing, but as a collection of answers to examina- 
 tion questions. jEschylus is not a poet, but a 
 huge pudding of variant readings. Everything is 
 of value, not in so far as it answers questions put 
 by one's own nature, but in so far as it can 
 answer questions likely to be put by an examiner's 
 ingenuity. This type of student is, I believe, 
 disappearing; the modern theory of education 
 discourages him. It is not very long, however, 
 since he was the ideal of the professors and 
 schoolmasters. They loved him because his 
 virtues were so measurable. He was told to 
 collect a certain number of facts, and the success 
 with which he did his work could be appraised 
 at a glance. At the same time, we must not 
 think that the professors and schoolmasters 
 were only consulting their ease in idealising 
 this kind of student. His success did involve 
 certain necessary virtues — obedience, thorough- 
 ness, self-discipline, the cultivation of the organis- 
 ing faculty. On the other hand, it implied such 
 an economy of curiosity and imagination that
 
 152 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 these were frequently atrophied from disuse. He 
 was more likely to achieve a successful career than 
 a successful life. I knew a student of this kind 
 who never read a single book — either as a school- 
 boy or as an undergraduate — that did not bear 
 directly on an examination. He shunned Pater 
 as he did Tit-Bits. Wordsworth, like Comic Cuts, 
 was, for him, reading for idlers. He had a 
 brilliant career, and ended in a high position in 
 the Civil Service, and I cannot deny that he 
 always seemed perfectly happy. But it is a 
 question worth debating whether, if he had been 
 less successfully educated, he might not have 
 been a better educated man. He had a good 
 mechanism for learning rather than a mind. 
 Were all men educated on the same pattern as 
 he, we should have a fine race of officials so far 
 as the routine of officialism is concerned, but no 
 inventors, no statesmen of imagination, no poets, 
 no leaders. It was probably of the over-disciplined, 
 over-routined student that Professor Laurie was 
 thinking when he pleaded with the richer sort 
 of parents to throw their children sufficiently on 
 their own resources, to give them " some of the 
 advantages of the gutter." Many people, on the 
 other hand, are nowadays almost too devotedly in 
 love with the gutter as the school of originality. 
 They imagine you have only to set an infant or 
 a young man carefully in the gutter in order to 
 release a wealth of fine impulses that will save
 
 THE STUDENT 153 
 
 him both in this world and the next. The truth 
 is, education should be neither all formalism and 
 routine, nor all an affair of desultory impulses. 
 Here, as elsewhere, discipline and indiscipline 
 must balance one another, and the result will 
 be better than a monopoly of either. Reading 
 Professor John Adams's admirable book. The 
 Student's Guide, I cannot help thinking with envy 
 of the student who can subject himself to system 
 even to the point of beginning his work with the 
 subject he likes least and of knowing to within 
 five minutes how long he will spend each evening 
 on each subject. The picture of the ideal student 
 rises in my mind as I read : I see him trampling 
 on irrelevant day-dreams, and submitting him- 
 self to obedience through the impulse towards 
 mastery. I remember how, for myself, I studied 
 as an Epicurean. But I always regarded the 
 ideal student as an ascetic, and I never luxuriated 
 more blissfully in Epicureanism than when I was 
 dreaming I was an ascetic myself. 
 
 Thus, as a student, one had two dreams. One 
 had the dream of getting knowledge, and one had 
 the dream of getting character. The night- 
 watches were pleasant with the thought of making 
 oneself a master of both. One went to sleep in a 
 cloud of ambition. But in the morning Epicurus 
 pi'evailed again. There would be someone in the 
 porch of the college who would meet me in an 
 idle mood and insist on a walk along the tow-path
 
 154 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 of a canal or who had been reading a book and 
 wanted to argue that no one existed except him- 
 self, or who believed that Thoreau was a better 
 writer than Emerson, or that The Shop Girl was 
 a better musical comedy than The Geisha. There 
 was always some good reason for ignoring Latin 
 and for passing by logic on the other side. Those 
 were still the days of the aesthetic period, and one 
 could, with a good conscience, prefer the shadows 
 of the willow-trees in the olive-green waters of 
 the canal to the dreary humour of Plautus — at 
 least, of Plautus studied, like a corpse, in small 
 sections, and with an eye to his grammar rather 
 than to his jokes. . . . One certainly would not 
 for anything have missed one's student days. To 
 mix with other students is an education in itself. 
 It is to come into touch with ideas that are 
 "living creatures having hands and feet." One 
 may leave their society, ignorant of " why 
 peninsulas more frequently turn southward than 
 northward, why the jute industry settled down in 
 Dundee"; but one becomes in their company a 
 citizen of a larger world, a sharer in the world's 
 interests, one who is liberated at least into the 
 atmosphere of great traditions. Thus does every 
 man attempt to find arguments in favour of the 
 education he himself has had. The man who has 
 had a LTniversity education believes it is the only 
 education worth having. The man who is self- 
 educated believes in self-education as the secret
 
 THE STUDENT 155 
 
 of success. The man who idled at college explains 
 what a blessing his idleness has been to him. 
 The man who has read his eyes out praises God 
 for his labours. Thus, when we look back, we 
 all turn out to have been model students. . . . 
 At the same time, if one had it all to do over 
 again, how eagerly one would consult the pages 
 of Professor Adams for good advice ! How one 
 would plunge into an enthusiasm for work I And 
 — how one would find oneself the next morning 
 far from the droning lecture-room, smoking a 
 pipe of Navy Cut and discussing the innmortality 
 of the soul under the blackening elms of the 
 Botanic Gardens !
 
 XVII 
 
 A DEFENCE OF SUPERSTITION 
 
 It was announced shortly before the production 
 of The Golden Moth that the name of the play 
 was to be changed because the company believed 
 that the presence of the word "golden" in a 
 title is unlucky. A little later the management 
 of the theatre decided to defy superstition and 
 the play was produced with the original title 
 after all. The stage is perhaps the most 
 superstitious institution in England, after the 
 racecourse. The latter is so superstitious that 
 to wish a man luck when on his way to a race- 
 meeting is considered unlucky. Instead of say- 
 ing " Good luck ! " you should say something 
 insulting, such as, "May you break your leg!" 
 Actors and actresses have not only all the ordinary 
 superstitions about the picking up of pins, break- 
 ing looking-glasses, and the unluckiness of certain 
 numbers. They have also a number of pro- 
 fessional superstitions. It is unlucky, they say, 
 for instance, to quote Macbeth. Actors dare not 
 say to each other at parting : " When shall we 
 three meet again .^ " No good actress would 
 advise a nervous fellow-artist to " screw her 
 
 156
 
 A DEFENCE OF SUPERSTITION 157 
 
 courage to the sticking-place." It is unlucky 
 during rehearsals to quote the catchword of a 
 forthcoming play in casual conversation. It is 
 unlucky to carry a make-up box, like an amateur 
 actress. Then there are certain theatres that 
 are regarded as unlucky, and the superstitious 
 actor is depressed at the prospect of having to 
 appear at one of them. The luck may turn, we 
 are told, if the name of the theatre is changed ; 
 this was probably the cause of the change of the 
 name of one London theatre which has since 
 been successful. 
 
 Most of us are accustomed to regard super- 
 stitious people as unenlightened, and there is 
 no one who feels more eminently wise than 
 the man who rises first from a table at which 
 thirteen guests have sat down. So far as I have 
 discovered, however, the dividing line between 
 those who are superstitious and those who are 
 not is not at all the same as the line that divides 
 enlightenment from unenlightenment. Some of 
 the world's wisest men have been superstitious. 
 Some of the world's greatest dunderheads have 
 been free from superstition. Plutarch was a 
 wise man, not only for his own age, but for any 
 age, yet he believed in superstitions that a 
 modern bus-conductor would laugh at. Many 
 of those who laugh at superstitions do so from 
 narrowness of mind. They are incredulous of 
 everything that their eyes have not seen. They
 
 158 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 cannot imagine anything outside the day's work 
 and the football results. Their unbelief in black 
 cats is simply a form of dull materialism. I do 
 not, I may say, contend that the superstitious 
 man is wiser than the unsuperstitious. All I 
 contend is that freedom from superstition is not 
 necessarily a form of wisdom, but that it fre- 
 quently results from thoughtlessness. Perfect 
 wisdom, I believe, gives perfect freedom from 
 superstition, but it probably involves belief in a 
 good many things that will seem superstitious 
 to a thoughtless man. 
 
 Consider, for a moment, how the first super- 
 stition came into the world. Man found himself 
 cast into a chaos of drifting phenomena without 
 the slightest notion of what they meant or 
 whether they meant anything. He could not 
 distinguish between things and their shadows. 
 He was as ignorant as a child as to how children 
 were born. He did not know what was happening 
 to his friends when they died. He was frightened 
 of many things, because some things hurt him, 
 and he did not know which did and which did not. 
 All that he knew was that queer things were 
 constantly happening, but they happened, not 
 according to any rule that he could see, but in 
 a confused and terrifying jumble. One day, in 
 the forest, however, he casually picked up a pin 
 — or, let us say, a sharp pine-needle — and 
 immediately afterwards he came on the most
 
 A DEFENCE OF SUPERSTITION 159 
 
 delightful bunch of bananas he had ever tasted. 
 This did not at the moment strike him as being 
 remarkable. But the next day he noticed the 
 same sort of pine-needle lying on the ground 
 and picked it up. Immediately afterwards he 
 discovered another bunch of bananas even more 
 delightful than the first. His brain swam with 
 the sense of discovery. He beat his forehead 
 with his hands — hairy, prehensile hands — for the 
 birth of something absolutely new in his mind 
 was making his head ache. He muttered : " I 
 pick up pine-needles and find sweet bananas ! 
 I pick up pine-needles and find sweet bananas ! " 
 It was some time before even this conveyed a 
 clear message to a brain unaccustomed to act. 
 But as he repeated the words in a sort of trance, 
 the truth suddenly flashed on him. When he 
 uncovered his face, he was looking ten years 
 older, but he was wearing a smile that was almost 
 human. He did not exactly say to himself, "I 
 have found a pattern in the universe," but he 
 had made the first move towards the happiest of 
 all Eurekas. He was never quite simian again. 
 He was like a child who, after long contemplation 
 of the stars in the night sky, that seem to lie 
 about haphazard like fallen apples, suddenly 
 picks out the certain pattern of a constellation. 
 He, too, has seen a pattern : the stars are no 
 longer an abracadabra to him, but reveal mean- 
 ing after meaning to him in a speech that he
 
 160 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 continually learns to understand better. In the 
 same way, primitive man in his superstitions was 
 slowly learning to put two and two together. 
 What matter if they often came to five ? It is 
 better to put two and two together wrong than 
 to believe that they cannot be put together 
 at all. 
 
 This, it may be said, may account for the 
 reign of superstition, but it does not therefore 
 justify the superstitions of civilised men and 
 women. We have surer means nowadays of 
 discovering the pattern in life. We cannot be 
 content with apparent cause and effect, but we 
 employ intelligent tests for the discovery of the 
 real cause. The child in arms may believe that 
 the watch flies open because it blows hard on 
 its back, but a grown-up man would be an 
 imbecile to imagine that this is the real reason 
 why the watch flies open. This is true enough. 
 When the real pattern of cause and effect is 
 known, there is no room for fantastic explanations. 
 We have not the right to believe that the crowing 
 of cocks causes the sun to rise, or that railway 
 trains are propelled, not by steam, but by the 
 waving of a green flag, or a green light. One 
 might as well doubt the pattern of the Seven 
 Stars. Such patterns are established once for 
 all. On the other hand, the greater part of the 
 universe is undiscovered and uncharted, as the 
 greater part of the sky is. Our lives are still a
 
 A DEFENCE OF SUPERSTITION l6l 
 
 voyage amid chance and confusion, and there are 
 many things of which we know as little as the 
 first monkey. While this continues, men will 
 go on being superstitious — casting their fancies 
 into the unknown in search of signs. For 
 superstition is mainly a belief in signs. The 
 superstitious man does not believe that bring- 
 ing blackthorn in flower into a house actually 
 causes a death in the house ; what he believes 
 is that it announces a death. It is the same 
 with fortunes told by the cards. The cards 
 are not supposed to control events but only to 
 prophesy them. I know that the superstitious 
 do not always adopt this comparatively philo- 
 sophical attitude. Some of them will put the 
 blame of their misfortunes on a friend, for 
 instance, who has sent them a gift of white 
 flowers without a mixture of other colours. But 
 this is unreasonable. The only reasonable de- 
 fence of modern superstition I have ever heard 
 was that certain signs show the direction of 
 events as a weathercock shows the direction in 
 which the wind is blowing. 
 
 Even so, in pi'actice, it is at times almost 
 impossible to distinguish between the prophet of 
 bad news and the causer of bad events. In the 
 old days the prophets were stoned because they 
 were hated like men guilty of witchcraft. I 
 have heard superstitious people arguing gravely 
 as to whether President Wilson's downfall was
 
 162 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 caused by his association with the number 
 thirteen, or whether his association with the 
 number was merely a prophecy of his downfall. 
 It will be remembered that on his arrival in 
 France he was entertained at a dinner at which 
 thirteen persons sat down, because he had an- 
 nounced that he regarded thirteen as a lucky 
 number. It will also be remembered that, 
 though he originally published his Fourteen 
 Points, they were afterwards reduced to thirteen, 
 owing to the objections of the Allies to the 
 " Freedom of the Seas." The superstitious find 
 it difficult to think that this was only an omen. 
 They half believe at the back of their minds that 
 another guest and another point might have 
 made the world safe for democrac3\ 
 
 The ordinary man's reply to superstitions of 
 the kind is seldom based on reason. He is 
 content to say " Rot ! " and will no more argue 
 about it than if you told him that a runner duck 
 in your back-yard had been heard quoting 
 Paradise Lost. As a matter of fact, neither the 
 attack on superstition nor the defence of it has 
 very much to do with reason. We believe or 
 disbelieve according to our temperaments. Two 
 men, equal in brain and courage, will behave 
 quite differently when it comes to walking under 
 a ladder or lighting a cigarette from a match 
 from which two cigarettes have been already lit. 
 Parnell was eminent for moral courage, but he
 
 A DEFENCE OF SUPERSTITION l63 
 
 believed that green was an unlucky colour, and 
 was horror-stricken — and not on aesthetic grounds 
 — when he was presented with a green smoking- 
 cap by a too patriotic lady. During the war the 
 men who carried mascots were not noticeably 
 inferior to the men who did not. By a curious 
 irony, it was in the country which instituted the 
 worship of reason that mascots were most popular. 
 An interesting essay could be written on the 
 theme that an increase of rationalism leads 
 automatically to an increase of superstition. I 
 doubt whether the religious Victorians, who 
 sneered at ghosts and picked up pins only on 
 grounds of economy, were quite so superstitious 
 as their irreligious successors. After all, the 
 human mind cannot be content to accept the 
 unknown as unknowable. Life is a mystery, but 
 most of us feel that, like a jigsaw puzzle, it 
 may yield a solution if only we keep trying to 
 put the apparently incoherent pieces together. 
 Superstition will never give us the whole pattern, 
 but it is a pardonable attempt to unite two or 
 three of the pieces in a sub-pattern. All science 
 and art are but the piecing together of a sub- 
 pattern out of chaos. Be not censorious if an 
 inhabitant of chaos finds a meaning you do not 
 in two magpies or a dog's howl or a slice of 
 bread-and-butter that falls with its face in the 
 dust.
 
 XVIII 
 
 THE CHOCOLATE BUS 
 
 I CANNOT help regretting the appearance of the 
 chocolate bus in the streets of London. Not 
 that I object to a bus of a new colour. On the 
 contrary, I have long held that the motor bus 
 is an unworthy successor to the old horse bus 
 chiefly because the horse buses used to pour 
 down Piccadilly in as many colours as you will 
 find in a box of paints, while the motor buses 
 scuttle along after one another in a wearisome 
 monotony of red, as empty of personality as 
 strings of mechanical lobsters (boiled ones). 
 But, if it was necessary to introduce a new colour 
 into the streets, the last of all the colours I 
 would wish to see there is chocolate-brown. The 
 one drawback to chocolate is its colour. Charming 
 to the taste, it is dull to the eye. One would 
 never eat it if one did not know from experience 
 that it tastes better than it looks. It is, no 
 doubt, in accordance with the great principle of 
 compensation that runs through life that the 
 birds of least brilliant colour sing the most 
 brilliant songs, and that the sweetmeats of poorest 
 favour should have the richest flavour. But a 
 
 164
 
 THE CHOCOLATE BUS l65 
 
 bus is neither a bird nor a sweetmeat, and should 
 be painted red, yellow, orange, blue, green, 
 indigo or violet. 
 
 Even so, it was not chiefly on account of its 
 colour that I had a sense of grievance when I saw 
 a chocolate bus the other day stealing for the 
 first time along a route that takes me within a 
 hundred yards of my door. I should have objected 
 equally to a bus of any other colour in the 
 circumstances. I have for some time past been 
 doing my best not to ride in buses, and I have 
 often succeeded by the simple process of being 
 excluded from their overcrowded and malodorous 
 maws. I have said, with the other patient 
 inhabitants of at least one suburb of London, 
 " This is disgraceful," and have vowed a lifelong 
 abstinence from bus-riding. But no sooner do I 
 see a bus drawing up with a seat empty — or 
 with a piece of floor-space empty — than my hand 
 reaches out for it as a dipsomaniac's for a 
 forbidden bottle, and, the next minute, I find 
 myself as ever imprisoned in the Black Hole 
 of the vehicle, rocking through the streets in 
 an unnatural attitude, with vibrations beyond 
 endurance entering my heels and jigging their 
 way upwards through every bone till they reach 
 my skull, which is only protected by my hat from 
 the roof that bangs it sideways at every jolt. 
 "This," I say to myself, as the bag I am carry- 
 ing in my free hand lurches into the paper an
 
 166 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 ill-natured old gentleman is trying to readj "is 
 life. This/' I meditate, " is the civilisation we 
 Europeans are trying to spread over the world. 
 This is the fulfilment of the dreams of the Greeks 
 and the Romans and all the great civilising races. 
 To be bumped about in a bus — how unfortunate 
 is the South Sea Islander, lolling lazily by his 
 lagoon, to have missed so uplifting an experience ! 
 How melancholy is the lot of the Fijian, who 
 walks from place to place, like a beast, instead of 
 riding in the belly of a mechanical rhinoceros, 
 like a man !" Thus I reflect, not without bitter- 
 ness, as I actually pay money to the conductor 
 for being allowed to squeeze myself into a place 
 in which if a murderer or a bigamist were confined 
 he would justly complain that prison life was 
 being made intolerable. If gaol were anything 
 like the inside of a motor bus with " standing- 
 room for five only," no man, who was not either 
 mad or a born criminal, would risk committing 
 any offence likely to send him there. I can 
 think of no more effective kind of prison reform 
 than to abolish the prisons and commit criminals 
 to the insides of motor buses instead. Imagine 
 what a sentence of " a month " would be in those 
 circumstances. Hour after hour, day after day, 
 to hang on to a rail and bump and sway and 
 stagger and vibrate through one street that is 
 duller than another, and another that is even 
 duller than that — to be able to read nothing but
 
 THE CHOCOLATE BUS l67 
 
 advertisements of soaps and gas mantles and 
 boot polish — never to feel the wind of heaven 
 except in the form of a draught that is half dust 
 and half other people's breathing— to be crowded 
 with other human beings into a space into which 
 one could not endure being crowded even with 
 one's most admired friends— Uante might have 
 included such a punishment among the torments 
 of the hiferiio. There is no advantage in it that 
 I can think of, except that it takes you faster than 
 you would otherwise go to some place or other 
 that is not worth going to. That is why I would 
 limit the use of the insides of motor buses to 
 convicts. Did not the ancients punish criminals 
 in a similar way by putting them in barrels filled 
 with spikes and rolling them down a hill .'' 
 
 Having reached this point in my quarrel with 
 motor buses, I may seem illogical in greeting so 
 testily a new line of buses that should help to 
 relieve the congestion. If I do so, however, I 
 have a good enough reason. At the moment when 
 the first chocolate bus appeared on my home route, 
 I had just become so impatient of all motor buses 
 that I had determined to learn to walk again — 
 an art that I had almost forgotten. One day I 
 actually did walk. I found it an exceedingly 
 pleasant form of movement. There was a sort of 
 natural rhythm in it. I no longer felt that I was 
 being thrown about by some force infinitely more 
 powerful than myself from one London borough
 
 168 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 to another. I could pad along as gently as an 
 old dog. I could amble at my ease like a hen 
 picking up her dinner. I could stop whenever 
 I liked at a shop-window and look at a case of 
 eighteenth-century spoons^ or at an array of 
 Dundee cakes, or at a travelling-trunk that I 
 would like to buy if I had the money to travel, 
 or at the picture on the wrapper of Miss Ethel 
 Dell's new novel, or at a necklace of pearls that 
 I would sell if somebody gave it to me, or at the 
 price-tickets on the plums and the celery at a 
 greengrocer's. Even this, however, is only a 
 small part of the pleasure of walking when one 
 might be riding on a motor bus. The greatest 
 pleasure of all is to realise that there is no hurry, 
 and to escape from this universal folly of rushing 
 at full speed to a place that is no better than the 
 place one is at already. It is a law of nature 
 that we must keep moving. The sheep in the 
 field does it, the fly on the window-pane, the 
 sparrow on the road. Everywhere living things 
 are doomed to hop or dance or saunter in order 
 that they may keep alive. But the movement 
 that is necessary to live is not movement from 
 one place to another ; it is merely rhythmical 
 exercise of wing or limb, with no vulgar object of 
 arriving anywhere in particular. The gnats that 
 swing up and down in an elastic cloud are not 
 bent upon going anywhere. I doubt if they are 
 even looking for something to eat. It is merely
 
 THE CHOCOLATE BUS 169 
 
 that they know by instinct that it is more 
 pleasant to keep eternally moving like the 
 planets than to sit still like a heap of stones. 
 Man is the only one of the animals that has 
 attempted to escape from this perpetual round 
 of motion, and to stiffen into stillness while he 
 is yet neither a cripple nor dead. He desires to 
 go somewhere else than where he is, but he does 
 not desire to move. Hence, in his cunning, he 
 has invented means after means of being moved. 
 He has abandoned activity for passivity till he 
 has almost achieved his ideal of being hurried to 
 some unimportant destination like one of a heap 
 of paving-stones rattled along in a truck in the 
 wake of a traction-engine. 
 
 He reached this extreme of passivity only by 
 slow stages. He began by mastering the more 
 pliable anim.als and compelling them to carry 
 him. While he rode on horseback, however, he 
 may be said to have exchanged one kind of 
 motion for another. The rider is still active in 
 his movements ; his muscles tighten and loosen 
 in as musical a rhythm as the rhythm of walking. 
 He has become a centaur instead of a man. 
 Similarly, in the invention of the rowing-boat, 
 man simply increased the range of his rhythms. 
 He came nearer his ideal of being moved instead 
 of moving with the invention of wheels and sails. 
 He rejoiced as he freed his muscles from the 
 delights of effort, but even then he experienced
 
 170 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 exquisite and subtle pleasures of movement in 
 slackening and tightening reins, and in the 
 skilful use of helm and sail. His temptation to 
 idleness increased as vehicles and ships grew in 
 size. He no longer wished to drive or to manage 
 the boat. He was content to be driven by a 
 horse that he himself did not know how to di*ive, 
 and to use a ship as a travelling bed-sitting-i'oom. 
 This indolence of his gave men of mechanical 
 minds their chance. Seeing what a lazy creature 
 was man, they invented railways and ocean liners 
 and charabancs and motor buses and under- 
 ground tubes in which they could transport the 
 poor creature in bulk endlessly from place to 
 place, without the slightest effort on his part, 
 except that of putting his hand in his pocket 
 and bringing out money to pay for his ticket. 
 So that at the present day the human race is 
 becoming in ever a greater and greater degree 
 a race of passengers. Could anything look less 
 like a happy flock of jackdaws or an ecstatic 
 dance of gnats than the mob of human beings 
 that we see jumbled together to-day in an under- 
 ground train ? They are shaken as you might 
 jingle the money in your pocket, but they do not 
 move. They are in a hurry, but the beauty of 
 swiftness does not course through their beings. 
 Set on the loveliest of the planets, with streams 
 flowing, with a pearly moon rolling across the 
 daylight sky, with birds singing in the trees, with
 
 THE CHOCOLATE BUS 171 
 
 children romping under them, they neglect all 
 this noble spectacle amid which they were meant 
 to loll or to labour in order to shut themselves 
 inside a lighted box on wheels, and to be borne 
 at top speed through the dull viewlessness of 
 the underworld. And the motor bus, though 
 it remains above ground, is a box on wheels that 
 hurries the inside passenger through a world 
 almost as unrefreshing to the eye. One has no 
 more life, as one sits in it, than a posted letter. 
 One's destination has become evei-ything ; one's 
 journey to one's destination nothing — nothing, 
 at any rate, but a necessary evil. This is against 
 all wisdom, which bids us enjoy the journey no 
 less than the end of the journey — which bids us 
 keep moving, even if we are moving nowhere in 
 particular. 
 
 If the human race, in abandoning the pleasures 
 of physical movement, were finding compensa- 
 tion in new pleasures of the movement of mind 
 or spirit, there would be more to be said in 
 behalf of motor buses. But look at the map of 
 the world, and you will search in vain for even a 
 village in which there is evidence of any move- 
 ment of mind or spirit such as filled all Italy 
 with beauty four hundred years before the first 
 motor bus had rattled human flesh and bones 
 through the streets of London. Things being 
 what they are, I wish the new chocolate bus 
 every success. I shall most certainly use it.
 
 172 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 But I shall use it regretfully, thinking of all 
 those fine walks I have been robbed of under 
 the plane-trees with their spiky green balls of 
 fruit — past booksellers' and jewellers' and 
 fruiterers' and tobacconists' shops and pawn- 
 brokers' with their honourable and ancient sign.
 
 XIX 
 
 RIDING ON A CHARABANC 
 
 The country, they say, is being ruined. Some 
 people blame the Government ; others lay the 
 chief blame on the charabanc. There is no 
 English institution more intensely hated than 
 the charabanc. Everybody who is not sitting 
 in it loathes the very sight of it. It is, in their 
 view, a means by which English cities empty 
 their most objectionable inhabitants into the 
 country on Sundays. It is a monster with a taste 
 for beauty-spots, and the more delightful is the 
 Eden you have chosen out of all the world to 
 live in, the more certain is it to be invaded by 
 this mechanical wild beast, with its horn roaring 
 like a wounded alligator and its forefeet pound- 
 ing the dust into the air till it chokes the very 
 birds in the middle of their songs and leaves a 
 mantle of filth on every flower. If the people 
 sitting in the charabanc were enjoying them- 
 selves we might forgive this outrage on the 
 Sabbath peace. But a mere glance tells us that 
 they are incapable of enjoying themselves. For 
 one thing, they are packed so tight that their sole 
 emotion must be a deep and growing mutual
 
 174 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 hatred. Then they can see nothing, because 
 they are enveloped in the moving cloud of dust 
 raised by the other charabanc just ahead. They 
 also live in constant fear of losing their lives, for 
 the chauffeurs of charabancs are, as a rule, men 
 who drove tanks in France and who regard all 
 manner of obstacles as things best taken with a 
 rush. These men will tear down a steep hill, 
 with a sudden curve at the end of it leading to 
 a giddy bridge with a low parapet, as though the 
 chief aim of their lives were hairbreadth escapes. 
 Like the Lord Chancellor, they would rather be 
 feared than despised as they dash through the 
 villages and country lanes, scattering cyclists and 
 hens to both sides of the road. Last year the 
 passengers tried in these circumstances to keep 
 up their courage by singing. But the police 
 authorities objected, and even this dismal substi- 
 tute for happiness is no longer permitted. Occa- 
 sionally the charabanc stops in a village — always 
 at a public-house — and the occupants get out and 
 make a pretence of dancing. When they have 
 had a quarter of an hour's beer they often form 
 in a ring in the middle of the road and sing 
 Juld Lang Syne. They are, many of them, queer- 
 looking people with fat in the wrong places. 
 They are mostly red, and they laugh at nothing, 
 as when they make such remarks as, " Just 
 needed that drop of beer, Geordie ! " or " 'Oo 
 said the ashes were lost.'' I've got 'em in my
 
 RIDING ON A CHARABANC 175 
 
 eye." Worse than this, they behave as if the 
 village belonged to them and not to the inhabit- 
 ants. They twit the local sergeant. They would 
 twit the rector if he came along. They have lost 
 all that self-consciousness — that dread of appear- 
 ing foolish to other people — which is so charming 
 an element in the behaviour of Englishmen. 
 They are sober, but they behave as if they were 
 tipsy. Meanwhile they have turned our village 
 from a rural retreat into an imitation of the Mile 
 End Road on Jubilee night. Yes, there is a great 
 deal to be said against them, I have said only a 
 small part of it. 
 
 Circumstances change most things, however, 
 and, if you go for a ride in a charabanc, you 
 do not see yourself as a red, rude person — a 
 destroyer of the haunts of ancient peace. I 
 found myself in a strange city on Sunday after- 
 noon, and, if ever you have been in a strange 
 English city on Sunday, you will know how it 
 seems as though you realised for the first time 
 that the world is the dullest possible planet that 
 anybody could have made. Every house seems 
 to be dead. Even the summer sun is able to 
 reveal nothing but a monotony of death. The 
 passers-by are going nowhere in particular. 
 They have neither work nor play, but are just 
 putting in time. They are neither asleep nor 
 awake. They have as little apparent vitality as 
 empty salmon tins scattered on a piece of waste
 
 176 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 land. Coming on such a scene of desolation, a 
 long yellow charabanc seems a thing of beauty 
 and an emissary of hope. It carries in front a 
 board with the name of somewhere in the country 
 printed on it, and the offer to take you there and 
 back for five shillings. You rejoice at the possi- 
 bility of escaping so cheaply. You do not think 
 of the feelings of the people who have bought 
 houses in the place you are going to invade. 
 You are not aware of harbouring any evil inten- 
 tions against them. You are thinking only of 
 the beauty of spread-out fields and the swift 
 passage of scene after scene and the chance of 
 seeing a hill or a wood or a river. You get into 
 the charabanc, which seems the most innocent 
 of wild beasts. You look round at the other 
 passengers, and you see that they bear no resem- 
 blance whatever to the rubicund male and female 
 villains whom you had always seen on charabancs 
 from the road. An old man with a yellow face, 
 a yellow dewlap and grey hair at the base of his 
 bowler hat sits and smokes a huge pipe medi- 
 tatively by the side of his little granddaughter, 
 whom he is taking out for a day's jaunt. A 
 middle-aged father of a family has brought his 
 wife and small son, for whom he tries to get a 
 seat beside the driver. There are several pairs 
 of lovers — some of the kind that will marry, 
 some of the kind that won't. Two women have 
 come together ; two youths have come together.
 
 RIDING ON A CHARABANC 177 
 
 There are also men who, like yourself, have come 
 alone and are content to sit and smoke and say 
 nothing. You could not have a quieter crowd ; 
 you could not have a quieter chauffeur. He 
 certainly does raise a dust and make a noise, but 
 you leave the dust behind you, and the noise is 
 at least better than running into people round 
 the corner. He does not even stop at the 
 public-houses. He passes " The Chained Bull " 
 at twenty miles an hour. There is a good deal 
 of bumping as he tears over the ground, but it 
 is not much worse than being knocked about by 
 a boxer. As you approach the beauty-spot you 
 find other charabancs converging on it from all 
 quarters. The dust is certainly becoming a little 
 thick, but if you cough, you don't swallow very 
 much of it. Then your charabanc takes its place 
 in the procession. You grind and grunt slowly 
 over a bridge and up a corkscrew hill, and work 
 your way into the market square of the town, 
 where you find that all the other charabancs in 
 England have got there before you. There are 
 rows and rows of them packed as tightly as 
 herring-boats in a harbour. The tea-shops in 
 the square are all crowded, and, if you are wise, 
 you stroll away in the hope of finding some idler 
 spot. You make your way past a ruined castle 
 and walk down a path that takes you to the 
 bottom of a steep cliff, and a rather well-dressed 
 little boy begins to run by your side and talk to 
 M
 
 178 SOLOMON IN ALL KIS GLORY 
 
 you in a whining voice. You think he is trying 
 to tell you that his father is ill^ or that one of 
 his companions has had an accident, till suddenly 
 you catch something about " the last battle of 
 the Civil War," and you realise that he is telling 
 you the history of the place for gain. You prob- 
 ably did not know it had a history ; but it 
 knows. It announces it on boards — every place 
 where a wall has fallen in — and offers to let you 
 see dungeons and such pleasant sights for six- 
 pence. You wander on in search of a tea-shop, 
 and another little whining boy trots alongside 
 you and laments over the " last battle of the 
 Civil War." You see people approaching in the 
 opposite direction, and beside each of them is 
 a little running boy pouring out his sing-song 
 about this extremely lugubrious but lucrative 
 battle. In the end you buy a guide-book to 
 find out what it is that all the little boys have 
 been trying to tell you. You discover that you 
 have arrived in one of the most famous places 
 in England, though you did net know about it 
 twenty-four hours ago. You learn that there 
 are enough wonderful things to see to keep you 
 busy for a week. After tea you go off to see the 
 petrifying well and the hermit's cave and the 
 wishing well, into which woman after woman 
 thrusts her arm while her friends remind her, 
 ''You mustn't tell what you wish." You are 
 quite exhausted by the time you have gone the
 
 RIDING ON A CHARABANC 179 
 
 round of these things and begin to feel as learned 
 as the keeper of Egyptian antiquities in the 
 British Museum. 
 
 The public-houses open just before you start 
 home, and barmen are kept busy supplying beer 
 for the gentlemen and stout for the ladies. 
 After a humane interval, we are all collected, 
 and the return journey begins. The road is now 
 packed with charabancs. Dust flies in simoons, 
 and the charabancs fly too. By this time we 
 are beginning to feel arrogant and to resent the 
 presence of any other ti'affic on the road. One 
 charabanc knocks down a girl cyclist, and the 
 procession is brought to a halt, while all the 
 charabancs behind blow their horns and im- 
 patient passengers call out "Hurry up!" "Oh, 
 get on ! " " What does a bicycle matter ? " The 
 girl is luckily not dead, but the incident has 
 jarred our nerves, and we draw up at the next 
 public-house to discuss the matter. The evening 
 air is cold, and, as the charabanc seems inclined 
 to stay there for ever, the passengers dismount 
 one by one and go inside. The old yellow man 
 comes out again, waits a while in the cold, and 
 then reflects that there is just time for another 
 one and goes back. He comes out again, takes 
 his seat, feels cold, realises that there is probably 
 time for a final one, and again goes back. After 
 a while we get started, but at the end of another 
 few miles another public-house requires us to
 
 180 SOLOMON IN ALL tilS GLORY 
 
 pull up. . . . There is a little man inside sing- 
 ing — or, rather, groaning — about "that little 
 cottage in the winding lane." When we get 
 going again the stout has made the ladies laugh 
 easily. The lovers have boldly put their arms 
 round each other, and the father of the family 
 looks round on them all knowingly and benignly. 
 We do not sing, but we could do so on slight 
 provocation. When we almost run down a cyclist 
 we jeer, and the father of the family leans over 
 the side of the charabanc and shouts at him 
 scornfully, " Get out of it ! " as we fly past, . . . 
 
 And that is how we destroyed the peace of 
 rural England.
 
 XX 
 
 TRAVEL TALK 
 
 One of the dangers of the League of Nations is 
 that it may help to make the world one place 
 and so make travel an easy and commonplace 
 thing. The war had at least one good effect in 
 making travel difficult again. It is no longer 
 possible to go about the world unchallenged- 
 You set out as a suspect, and, if you are not 
 a habitual criminal already, the lady who takes 
 your photograph for the passport transforms you 
 into one. In the circumstances, you are a little 
 surprised that George Nathaniel, Marquess Cur- 
 zon of Kedleston, Earl of Kedleston, Viscount 
 Scarsdale, Baron Ravensdale, Knight of the Most 
 Holy Order of the Garter — who is not six persons, 
 but one person — consents to make out your 
 passport without demanding a personal interview. 
 There is a good deal to be said for the old 
 aristocracy, however. A marquess does not inquire 
 too carefully into the print of your thumb. Even 
 the Swiss Consul does not ask to see your thumb- 
 print, though he is extremely inquisitive about 
 other things. He is not content to give you the 
 run of Switzerland, as the Italian Consul gives 
 l8l
 
 182 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 you the run of Italy, on the word of a marquess. 
 He will visa your passport only if you tell him 
 the exact spot in Switzerland at which you mean 
 to get out of the train first, and he gives you 
 but three months' right of travel compared to 
 the Italian twelve. Considering the photograph, 
 however, it is impossible to blame him. He is 
 obviously taking a risk in admitting so criminal- 
 looking an alien into the country at all. 
 
 But even now your trials are not at an end. 
 As you show your ticket at Victoria, you are 
 given a post card to fill in, containing all sorts of 
 questions comparable to " Who is your favourite 
 female character in fiction?" and "Which is the 
 virtue you most generally detest.''" You are 
 warned that you will not even be allowed to go 
 on to the boat at Newhaven till you have 
 answered these, and you settle down to write out 
 the answers, when a little middle-aged man with 
 a thick neck opens the door of your compartment 
 and asks if there is room. He ought to know 
 that a railway compartment is a place in which 
 there is never any room, even when there is 
 only one person in it. The person or persons in 
 possession justly resent the intrusion of all new- 
 comers. He is probably aware of this, for he 
 mutters something about " men who have fought 
 in the war" in a truculent manner. It is im- 
 possible to tell whether he is boasting of having 
 fought in the war himself or blaming the rest of
 
 TRAVEL TALK 183 
 
 us for having done so. He sits down, brings 
 out a morning paper of an inferior kind, folds 
 and slaps it in halves, folds and slaps it again 
 in quarters, folds and slaps it in eighths, and 
 begins to read it. He has not read a paragraph 
 when he begins to feel the heat, takes off his 
 bowler hat, stands up and carefully puts it in 
 the rack. He resumes his reading, but he has 
 not reached the end of the second paragraph 
 when he becomes aware of a trickle of cold air 
 on his thinning temples, lays down the paper, 
 stands up, reaches for his bowler and puts it on 
 again with an air of defiance. He then takes 
 out a notebook, turns over the pages, and jots 
 down a figure here and there till his head 
 becomes hot again, when he rises and puts his 
 hat carefully back in the rack. In short, he 
 behaves exactly like a madman or a foreigner. 
 Englishmen often do when they are in a railway 
 train. The traveller can no longer expect to see 
 men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, 
 but he still sees queer creatures enough — men, 
 for instance, who take off their boots in railway 
 carriages and change without a blush into carpet- 
 slippers. 
 
 Seeing that persons of this type are so much 
 given to travelling, we can hardly be surprised 
 that travellers are passed through a sieve at the 
 frontier of every civilised country before being 
 allowed to pass. It is rather annoying to be
 
 184 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 passed slowly through the sieve, and to have to 
 submit one's case in a queue to the tired little 
 man at the counter who examines the passports. 
 Luckily, he seems to have a due reverence for 
 the Marquess of Curzon, and he scarcely takes 
 the trouble to examine the photograph of one 
 who has so majestic a sponsor. He studies more 
 closely the passports given by the lowlier Foreign 
 Offices of Europe. He compares the photograph 
 with the person whom it is alleged to represent, 
 darting a suspicious eye in search of a false beard. 
 One is not surprised, seeing that most foreigners 
 look more or less like Bolshevists. One knows 
 from experience that there are many foreigners 
 of irreproachable character, but it is beyond 
 dispute that many of them have the air of being 
 capable of anything from motor-banditry to a 
 revolution. That is probably why an Englishman 
 on his travels regards it as perfectly natural that 
 the examination of his passport should be a mere 
 formality, while the examination of the passports 
 of foreigners should be conducted in the spirit 
 of the prosecution of Landru. He does not 
 trust these foreigners any more than the passport- 
 officer does. His only cause of worry is that he 
 should even formally have to take his place in 
 a line of such suspects, and that he should be 
 continually having to write out a short Who's Who 
 account of himself, merely because aliens have 
 to be kept under observation. He does resent
 
 TRAVEL TALK 185 
 
 this, indeed : he I'esents having to show his 
 passport and to wait for his luggage to be 
 examined. He hates a frontier as a lion hates 
 a cage, and all these barriers of dull-looking and 
 omnipotent officials exasperate him as though 
 he were being subjected to wrongful arrest. He 
 behaves very well in the circumstances : luckily, 
 he is not eloquent in proportion to his feelings 
 about a woi*ld largely populated by aliens. 
 
 That there are still Britons who look on a 
 journey to France or Italy as a rather risky 
 venture among aliens of doubtful character I 
 discovered the other day in Paris, where I had 
 taken a seat in the night train for Modane. 
 Suddenly a tall young Scotsman, as lean as a 
 pole, with a scraggy red beard, put his head 
 round the corner and said : " Is there room 
 here.''" He threw a tremendously heavy bag 
 into the rack, and sat down exhausted. " I 
 tipped the guard to put me into an empty 
 carriage," he explained, ''and I had hardly sat 
 down when he let in three of the fattest women 
 that ever lived. I daren't stay in the same 
 carriage with them," he laughed nervously, " I 
 simply daren't." He became talkative, and 
 described how he had arrived in Paris that day 
 for the first time in his life. He wanted to 
 know how we — there were three of us — had 
 reached the Gare de Lyons. He himself had 
 come on the Underground from the Gare du
 
 186 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 Nord. We told him that we had come in a 
 taxi. He opened his eyes in surprise, then shook 
 his head knowingly. " Catch me trusting myself 
 in a taxi in Paris!" he said. He has evidently 
 a vision of himself being carried off to the Bois 
 de Boulogne and stripped of his last sixpence. 
 He was very inquisitive as to the ways of 
 foreigners, and brought out of his pocket two 
 little paper-backed volumes, one of them called 
 All You Need to Know in France, and the other 
 All You Need to Know in Italy. He dipped into 
 them every now and then in the intervals of talk- 
 ing, and would then look up and tell us about 
 his sister in Scotland, who appeared to have 
 been a stricter Sabbatarian than he altogether 
 liked. 
 
 By good fortune, nervous though he was, he 
 turned out to be a consummate liar. As the 
 train was not due to leave for another half-hour, 
 my two friends went off to get something to eat, 
 enjoining us to let no one else into the carriage 
 while they were away. I am ashamed to confess 
 that I bear a slight resemblance to George 
 Washington, and when tired men and women 
 stumble up the steps of a half-empty railway 
 carriage in an overcrowded train and ask if all 
 the seats are taken, I can hardly help letting 
 out the truth. The Scotsman, though he scarcely 
 knew the French for twopence, told as many 
 lies during the next fifteen minutes as if it had
 
 TRAVEL TALK 187 
 
 been his language from birth. He did it partly 
 by signs and partly by making sounds that no 
 one could possibly understand. He pointed at 
 empty seats, counting imaginary occupants. He 
 held up his fingers and proved mathematically 
 that there were already at least ten places 
 reserved in the carriage. An excited, stout 
 woman would cross-question him in Italian ; he 
 would smile wistfully and count his fingers for 
 her one by one. An angry Frenchman would 
 point to one of the empty places as though to 
 prove that it must be empty ; the Scotsman 
 would point to it with twice the Frenchman's 
 energy in proof that it was full. Every time he 
 had got rid of a group of foreigners in this 
 way he would whinny with delight and tell me 
 of something similar that had once happened to 
 his Sabbatai'ian sister. At last I could endure 
 it no longer. I acquiesced in the man's wicked- 
 ness and hoped to benefit by it later on, but 
 I was heartily ashamed to be even a silent 
 partner in such an orgy of lying. I told him 
 to be sure to keep my place, and slipped out 
 on to the platform. I walked up and down, 
 looking in at the window occasionally to see 
 him still counting his fingers to suspicious ladies, 
 still pointing to empty seats, still moving his 
 lips in sounds that he thought he had learned 
 out of All You Need to K7iotv in France. I never 
 realised before that it is possible to tell lies so
 
 188 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 efficiently in a language one does not understand. 
 It was all very deplorable, but no one else got 
 into the carriage. Each of us had a corner seat 
 through the night all the way to Modane. It 
 is an ill wind that blows nobody good. 
 
 How little French he knew I discovered at 
 Modane, when we changed into the train for 
 Italy. He made a really magnificent effort not 
 to tip the porter who brought his bag from the 
 Customs examination to the train. The porter 
 tried him both in French and in Italian, and at 
 last, with a groan, begged someone to interpret 
 him. " I didn't ask him to carry my bag," 
 protested the Scotsman, when he heard what 
 was expected of him; "it's quite a light bag. 
 I could have carried it myself." People of all 
 nationalities urged him to pay up, but he de- 
 clared in a high voice : " It's ridiculous. I tell 
 you it's a light bag that anybody could carry." 
 At last he asked the porter how much he wanted, 
 and somebody said that a franc would do. He 
 brought out some copper coins and fingered two 
 of them hopefully. The porter made a face. 
 We explained that the value of the two coins 
 together was an English halfpenny. Slowly he 
 counted out some more amid a Babel of advice 
 from the rest of the passengers, and the porter, 
 with a look of disgust, grabbed a handful of them 
 and hurried away. " How much did I give 
 him } " asked the Scotsman. " About fourpence,"
 
 TRAVEL TALK 189 
 
 I told him. He cackled aloud. " The man's a 
 fool," he said; "if he hadn't been in such a 
 hurry, I meant to give him sixpence. Serves 
 him right for being such a fool!" Though he 
 laughed, however, he was still hectic with excite- 
 ment after his long tussle with the Customs and 
 his struggle with the porter. He began to tell 
 an uncomprehending Italian how stupid it all 
 was. " There are far too few — troh poo — men 
 to examine all that luggage — that bagage," he 
 said. " There were only dooze hommz — two men, 
 you know — looking after the whole lot. There 
 ought to have been at least sayze, or even weet. 
 It's far too much for dooze. The whole arrange- 
 ment seems to me stupid — trai/ stupid. Pongsey- 
 voo?" He talked like that for about an hour. 
 The Italian, coming of a polite race, nodded at 
 intervals, and said, "Ah!" or ^' Oui, oui." At 
 last, tired of getting no response in kind, the 
 Scotsman took out his little book, All You Need 
 to Know in Italy, and settled down to the mastery 
 of yet another language. 
 
 As I watched his lips moving over his lesson, 
 I realised that, after all, the world is still as 
 full of curious figures as it was in the days of 
 Sir John Mandeville, and that the world of the 
 traveller is still as incredibly fantastic as it was 
 a thousand years ago.
 
 XXI 
 
 PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 
 
 Man is a pathetic creature who does not know 
 what is going to happen even in the next five 
 minutes. If you had been at the Goodwood 
 races you would have seen thousands of people 
 who would have given anything to know what 
 was going to happen in the next two minutes. 
 But the future is dark to them, even when they 
 are so close to it that they seem almost to be 
 touching it. To read the future, a man would 
 need to have an eye in the back of his head. For 
 the Greeks were right in calling the future the 
 time behind us and the past the time before us. 
 We who are less logical talk as if the future were 
 something that lay stretched before us like a 
 landscape — something into which we are march- 
 ing with keen and comprehending eyes. Alas, 
 we can march into it only backwards, and all that 
 confronts our eyes is the long winding road of 
 the past. If statesmen could see the future with 
 anything but the backs of their heads, does any- 
 one think that history would have been such a 
 record of bumps and misdirections and fallings 
 into the ditch? "Look where you are going," 
 
 1 90
 
 PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 191 
 
 people are constantly saying to each other. But 
 that is the very direction in which it is impossible 
 to look. The eyeless condition of the back of 
 the head is an eternal fact which governs all the 
 activities of statesmen. It may be that in time 
 we shall evolve a new eye where it is most needed, 
 or be able to invent a substitute for an eye. Till 
 this happens, the human race must inevitably go 
 on in the old ludicrous fashion, making the old 
 mistakes in politics, in love, and in backing horses. 
 If human beings do ever succeed in developing 
 this third eye, it will, I think, be due most of all 
 to the exertions of betting men. No other class 
 of the community makes anything like the same 
 effort to see out of the back of the head. The 
 betting man fixes his occiput on the future with 
 a persistent optimism that would do credit to an 
 idealist. He feels that if only he concentrates 
 the back of his head sufficiently he may yet be 
 able to read the future clearly enough to make 
 himself a fortune. He also loves reading the 
 sporting Press in which journalists tell what 
 they, for their part, have been able to read with 
 the backs of their heads. Experience should 
 have told him that it is a little difficult to read 
 in that situation. But, like the climbers of 
 Mount Everest, he does not allow the word 
 "impossible" a place in his vocabulary. And 
 so when he reads that " Pharmacie should about 
 win" or that " Strathleven is now at her best
 
 192 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 and can race out every yard of the distance," 
 or that " Morning Light holds a palpably sound 
 chance," or that " we cannot ignore the chances 
 of Black Gown," or that " whatever beats 
 Weathervane will win," or that "Tete-a-Tete 
 is a distinct danger," or that " Blackland is 
 greatly fancied by those in the know," or that 
 "Stingo at 6 st. 10 lb. is so lightly weighted 
 that his chances cannot be lightly dismissed," 
 or that " the shadow of Proconsul looms up all 
 the while," he feels as profoundly impressed as 
 though he were consulting the Delphic oracle. 
 He will never admit that the problem of reading 
 the future is an insoluble one. He feels that 
 somehow it could be done, and, if a clairvoyante 
 foretold three winners in succession, she would 
 rapidly make her fortune out of people who back 
 horses. But apparently the clairvoyantes seldom 
 commit themselves to anything so exact as a 
 racing tip. They prefer to give their clients 
 vague hints about meeting a dark man or getting 
 a letter or crossing the water, and their prophecies, 
 being vague, quite frequently come true. But 
 the clairvoyante can give us none of the hard 
 facts that we most wish to know. Even the 
 people who tell our fortunes with cards have no 
 magic by which they can tell us in advance what 
 will win the Goodwood Stewards' Cup. They can 
 prophesy an illness, but they cannot say whether 
 it is going to be elephantiasis or a toothache.
 
 PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 193 
 
 They map out the future in amazing detail, but 
 they always leave out the really essential detail. 
 It is all very well to tell a woman that she is 
 going to marry a dark man, but what she wants 
 to know is which dark man. It is as though 
 what the fortune-tellers told us were written in 
 a foreign language of which the most important 
 words were unintelligible. 
 
 Yet the belief that the future can be read is 
 no mere passing whim of the superstitious. It 
 is one of the ancient beliefs of the world. Even 
 those who objected to the soothsayers for peering 
 into the future, objected to them most vehemently 
 because they regarded them as capable of doing 
 it effectively. They punished the soothsayer 
 because they believed that he got his news of 
 the future from the Devil and would probably 
 use it for devilish ends. They did not laugh 
 at him, as many people laugh at him nowadays ; 
 they were heartily afi-aid of him — so afraid of 
 him that they sometimes killed him. The general 
 public, on the other hand, usually preferred a 
 soothsayer to a genuine prophet, and, if they 
 had to stone either of them to death, it was more 
 likely to be the prophet. The prophet could 
 not be trusted to make to-morrow pleasant, and 
 the only reason for wishing to know anything 
 about to-morrow is that we wish to hear how 
 pleasant it is going to be. If we want to be 
 gloomy, we can always read history or look 
 N
 
 194 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 around us. There is no need to call in the special 
 genius of the prophet in order to hear depressing 
 things. That is why, if you are a public man, it 
 is always well to talk about the future with a 
 rosy optimism. Do not tell Englishmen that 
 England is going to the dogs. They will only 
 dislike you for it. Tell them that, though there 
 are clouds on the horizon, you can already see the 
 sun bursting its way through them and flushing 
 the peaks of your native mountains. Tell them, 
 in other words, that " it will all be right on the 
 night." If you do, you will be a far greater 
 success than Elijah ever was, and, instead of 
 being fed sparingly by ravens, you will be fed 
 lavishly by gulls. There have been few great 
 successes among men who took a gloomy view 
 of the future. An occasional gloomy prophecy 
 does no harm ; it even increases the pleasure 
 with which people hear the cheerful things you 
 prophesy afterwards. But no one could tolerate 
 a Mrs Gummidge who, instead of thinking of the 
 old 'un, moaned and groaned all the time about 
 somebody who was not even born yet. Even the 
 most skilled prophet will make himself unpopular 
 if he persists in telling people about misfortunes 
 about which they would otherwise not have 
 needed to trouble till they actually happened. 
 It is a good rule to look on the bright side of 
 things, especially if you do not know what the 
 things are going to be.
 
 PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 195 
 
 That is why one respects the tipsters who are 
 to be found on the race-courses haranguing the 
 crowds of simple people who have come to make 
 money on horses. The tipster always tells you 
 that he has a perfectly delightful future in his 
 hand, and that you can have it for a shilling. He 
 tells you that, if you have sense, you will go home 
 a rich man. And that is about all that most 
 people want to know about the future. There 
 are crises in life when other thoughts are upper- 
 most, but, as a general rule, the most comfortable 
 thing you could tell a human being is that he 
 will in a short time have plenty of money. 
 *' Listen to me," says the tipster, " and I'll 
 make you more money on this one race than 
 you could make by working for a week." It is 
 so pleasant a future he foretells that you begin 
 to think that he may be able to read the future 
 after all. That is how he makes his money. He 
 has to persuade you by some means or other that he 
 has an eye in the back of his head, while you have 
 not, and he does this by conjuring up a beautiful 
 mirage of to-morrow and persuading you that it is 
 the real thing. It is a form of witchcraft, but the 
 witchcraft consists in putting a spell on you, not 
 in wringing its secrets from the morrow. For a 
 tipster on the race-course knows as little about 
 the future as Dean Inge. He succeeds because 
 he gives you the future you want, but he gives it 
 to you in the present, when it is of no use to you.
 
 196 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 It would be absurd, of course, to pretend that 
 we can know nothing at all about the future. 
 We can make inferences from the past and 
 present, and arrive at many a shrewd guess even 
 about the winner of a horse-race. But can we 
 ever be quite so sure about the future as the 
 tipsters would like us to believe it is possible to 
 be ? In Monday's sporting papers, for instance, 
 a tipster had an advertisement, part of which 
 ran : 
 
 AT GOODWOOD, TO-MORROW, 
 
 I have news of 
 
 A SURE WINNER, 
 
 and I want every reader of these lines to be on 
 what I Know to be a really Safe Investment. 
 
 Only One, remember, for I do not delude you 
 by sending two or three or four horses, or two 
 for one race, or any such business — 
 
 JUST ONE, AND A WINNER ! 
 
 And that is what you want, is it not ? 
 
 You can make Certain of a glorious Goodwood 
 if you secure this winnei", for, whatever you may 
 be doing, or thinking of doing, you simply Must 
 be on this wonderful winner, for you can collect 
 enough on this One to cover all your operations 
 for the week, for it will be at a very fine pi-ice.
 
 PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 197 
 
 " What I know/' the tipster added, " convinces 
 me that this horse is a CERTAINTY." That, 
 it seems to me, is a strong statement to make 
 about anything so subject to chance as the 
 ordinary horse-race. Many a man has ruined 
 himself by backing certainties, and bookmak- 
 ing survives as a prosperous business largely 
 because so many people persuade themselves 
 that they are backing certainties when they are 
 only backing horses. Betting, which is an 
 amusing pastime, becomes an occupation for 
 fools when it involves the assumption that we 
 can know the result of a race in advance. The 
 Greek word for prophet was "mantis," meaning 
 "one who raved." Listening to the tipsters on 
 a race-course, we realise how excellent a descrip- 
 tion it is. For a tipster is only a prophet in 
 little, and his ravings are as frenzied as those of 
 any prophet who ever foretold the end of the 
 world. And they are about as accurate. It is 
 more economical and as sensible, when backing 
 horses, to consult the stars. It may be that the 
 news of the winners of the next Cambridgeshii-e 
 and Cesarewitch are written somewhere in the 
 night sky, but, if so, they are written in a 
 language that none of us can read. Hence it 
 is well to be a little careless in your betting — 
 to engage in it in the spirit of a game of guesses 
 instead of bursting the back of your head in the 
 frenzied attempt to see out of it. After all, if
 
 198 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 we could all see into the future, it would put an 
 end to betting, and then what would there be 
 left in the papers to read ? So, perhaps, we are 
 none the worse for the absence of that third 
 eye.
 
 XXII 
 
 THE SORROWS OF FREE LOVE 
 
 Jezebel has never been a popular character. 
 Not even that last great scene in which Jehu is 
 coming to kill her, "and she painted her face, 
 and tired her head, and looked out of the 
 window," has won the affections of anybody 
 outside those circles which are enthusiastic for 
 all kinds of sinners from Absalom to the foolish 
 virgins. It is true, as the Encyclopaedia reminds 
 us, that " what is told of her comes from sources 
 under the influence of a strong religious bias." 
 Even so, it is told so well that for most of us she 
 remains immortally the incarnation of wickedness. 
 Churchgoers for centuries have listened to the 
 story of her murder without compunction. Jehu, 
 they have little doubt, did well. " And he lifted 
 up his face to the window and said, ' Who is on 
 my side .'' Who .'' ' And there looked out to him 
 two or three eunuchs. And he said, ' Throw her 
 down.' So they threw her down ; and some of 
 her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the 
 horses ; and he trod her under foot." And no 
 clergyman has ever reproved him. To the ultra- 
 Protestant mob Jezebel remained for generations 
 
 199
 
 200 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 a prophetic figure of the Catholicism they hated. 
 They saw in Mary Queen of Scots simply the 
 repetition of her infamy, and in Esmond it was 
 '' Jezebel" that the crowd shouted at the painted 
 old Catholic lady. We may one of these days 
 have a book written to prove that Jezebel was 
 as domestic as Queen Anne, but we shall no more 
 believe in a whitewashed Jezebel than in a white- 
 washed Richard III. The condition of the world 
 can be explained only on the assumption that a 
 great many devils have lived in it. He-devils 
 and she-devils — people even worse than ourselves. 
 An odd thing about Jezebel is that, though 
 her main wickedness was not at all sexual, she 
 holds her place in the Puritan imagination as the 
 most scarlet of scarlet women. It is an interest- 
 ing example of the Puritan habit of reducing all 
 sins to terms of the flesh. Jezebel's chief sin, 
 like that of Catherine the Great, was ruthless 
 Imperialism. As a character in the popular im- 
 agination, however, she is first and foremost a 
 painted lady. Faustina is another lady who has 
 come down to us with an inexplicably bad repu- 
 tation. Scholars in vain protest that she bore 
 Marcus Aurelius eleven children, that he mourned 
 and honoured her after her death, that schools 
 for orphan gii'ls were piously founded in her 
 memory, and that there is no evidence against 
 her but gossip. The world will not lightly give 
 up its painted ladies. Is it not the painted ladies
 
 THE SORROWS OF FREE LOVE 201 
 
 who have brought about half the tragedies of 
 history ? And the poets are as determined as 
 the public in this matter. In vain will scholars 
 protest that the Trojan War was fought for 
 economic reasons. To the common man it will 
 always be a war about Helen. Helen, however, 
 has been fortunate beyond most women of the 
 past with a past. She was sufficiently wise to 
 repent. As she calls herself a " dog " and heaps 
 reproaches on herself, she disarms the criticism 
 of the moralists as she did that of the Trojans. 
 Nothing could be more magnificent than the 
 charity of the Trojan old men when, seeing her 
 beauty as she came to them on the tower, they 
 declared that it was small blame that the Trojans 
 and the Greeks should make war for a woman of 
 such marvellous beauty. And even Priam said 
 to her in noble gentleness : " I hold thee not to 
 blame." In the stories of Helen, Cleopatra, 
 Iseult and Francesca, it is as though all censure 
 were burnt up in the fires of tragedy. Apart from 
 this, none of these women, except Cleopatra, 
 could, save by a stretch of the imagination, be 
 described as a painted lady. The other three 
 might be described as monogamists at heart, 
 who happened to be married to the wrong men. 
 They were fastidious, not promiscuous in their 
 passion. They were faithful in their infidelity. 
 
 At present, as anyone who reads the papers 
 can see, the world is enjoying a surfeit of painted
 
 202 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 ladies. In the Divorce Court there have been 
 a number of sensational cases in which the chief 
 actors seem to have no distinguishing character- 
 istic beyond a general infidelity. We get the im- 
 pression of a riot of sex, a drunken orgy. There 
 is no fastidiousness, no choice, no continuity. 
 There is nothing but greed and confusion. Even 
 Jezebel had a purpose in life, but some of these 
 lovers have no purpose. Their very love is the 
 result, not of the urgency of a great passion, but 
 of indolent drift. They lust without imagination, 
 without taste. Many defences have been written 
 of Don Juan, but they have all been based on 
 the fact that he had imagination. Don Juan, 
 we are told, is the lover seeking the perfect 
 woman. He passes from one imperfect woman 
 to another in quest of his ideal. There is a sort 
 of noble fidelity in his pursuit, as in that of a 
 theologian who passes from creed to creed in 
 pursuit of the truth. Even if we accept this 
 romantic interpretation of Don Juan, however — 
 and we must be exceedingly innocent mystics if 
 we can do so — it does not constitute a defence, 
 but an indictment. There is no more foolish 
 heresy than the chase after perfection among 
 human beings. Belief in the perfectibility of 
 man or the perfection of woman is, for all 
 practical purposes, as wild an illusion as that 
 of the man who climbed an apple-tree in order 
 to lay hands on the moon. Men can live sanely
 
 THE SORROWS OF FREE LOVE 203 
 
 only on the understanding that they cannot 
 pluck the moon like an apple. They have to 
 come to terms with their limitations and im- 
 perfections. The quest of the moon has to be 
 condemned because it is unworkable. Most of 
 the advocates of free love have been hunters 
 of the moon. They have been youths, Rous- 
 seauists and Utopians. There is a period of 
 youth in which the marriage tie seems an offence. 
 The picture it conjures up of human beings tied 
 to each other against their will, the idealistic 
 boy regards as a parody of love. He holds — 
 and in this he is reasonable enough — that it is 
 the love and not the ceremony that is sacred. 
 His chivalry is especially insistent that no woman 
 should be bound for life to a man against her 
 will. He dreams of perfect liberty for women. 
 His theory of free love is at this time unselfish. 
 In his enthusiasm, he is inclined to see in every 
 woman who leaves a husband for a lover a human 
 being rightly struggling to be free. When the 
 wife in the play defends herself with the sentence, 
 " All the purity that God has made cannot be 
 bounded in a ring of gold," he applauds with 
 flushed cheeks. He is violently Shelleyan and 
 anti-husband. It is true that, on such occasions 
 as he happens to be in love himself, he is entirely 
 monogamous in his faith. He believes that he 
 loves for eternity — that neither Heaven nor 
 Hell could separate him from his love. He
 
 204 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 is a Bayard in his devotion, and lives in a state, 
 not of theory, but of ecstasy. So soon as he 
 ceases to be in love, however, he begins to 
 theorise again. He becomes a philosopher in 
 the intervals of love. He may be either a phil- 
 osopher of enthusiasm or a philosopher of regret 
 — possibly he may be both. If enthusiasm pre- 
 dominates, he will once more set to spinning 
 Utopias in which men and women innocent as 
 angels live in obedience to love. Having himself 
 ceased to love, he realises that love may pass. 
 Hence his angels have liberty to leave one 
 another when they will. He does not like to 
 think of them as growing into elderly or common- 
 place householders. He almost persuades himself 
 that in an ideal world all life could be lived in 
 the mood of the balcony scene in Romeo and 
 Juliet, save that, when love grows cold, another 
 balcony must be found. The philosopher of 
 regret is more of a realist. He sentimentalises 
 over the brevity of beautiful things, and falls 
 back sympathetically on Horace's carpe diem. 
 He believes in taking what pleasures one can. 
 He resigns himself to a life in which beauty is 
 rare but prettiness is abundant. He believes 
 that a temporary refuge from dullness and drab- 
 ness can be found in the garden of Epicurus. 
 He sees the wise man as a connoisseur of flowers. 
 Those who theorise about free love may be 
 for the most part Utopians. Those who practise
 
 THE SORROWS OF FREE LOVE 205 
 
 it are almost without exception Epicureans. 
 There are a number of mystical free lovers who 
 stand half-way between these positions, such as 
 George Sand, of whom it was said : " In George 
 Sand, when a woman wishes to change her lover, 
 God is always there to facilitate the transfer." 
 Women are probably given to a greater extent 
 than men to calling down a divine blessing on 
 concupiscence. The majority of practising free 
 lovers are less theoretical in their experiments. 
 They ai-e simply restless people seeking rest in 
 change. They try to satisfy themselves with 
 love without affection, with pleasure without 
 fidelity. It is because aifection and fidelity play 
 so small a part in their lives that they are for 
 the most part unhappy. One seldom reads the 
 report of a case in the Divorce Court that sug- 
 gests that any of the participants have ever 
 enjoyed themselves. Love in them seems to be 
 merely an expensive form of gloom. They are 
 as unenviable as Madame Bovary. To compare 
 them to the moth in the flame of the candle 
 would be to flatter them. They have not even 
 the instinct of ecstatic self-destruction. They 
 live rather as the beetles on the floor. This is 
 obviously not true of all the men and women 
 who go through the Divorce Court. In the 
 Divorce Court are also to be found averagely 
 good men and women and more than averagely 
 good men and women. But there have been
 
 206 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 various cases in recent months in which the 
 men and women seem to have tasted nothing 
 of pleasure but the dregs and heel-taps. They 
 apparently know as little of happiness as stray 
 cats. They find love only in the refuse-buckets. 
 Puritanism, no doubt, has its faults, but it at 
 least gives love a home. It realises that without 
 continuity and fidelity there is neither depth 
 nor dignity in love. We need not pretend that 
 there have not been exceptions to this as to all 
 other rules. But it is a remarkable fact that all 
 the great stories of illicit love are stories dignified 
 either by great suffering or by great fidelity. 
 They are not stories of gloomy pleasure-seeking, 
 but of ruinous destiny. In all of them the lovers 
 are bound by chains as unbreakable as the chains 
 of marriage. There is no love without chains. 
 Free love is a contradiction in terms. If it is 
 free, it is not love ; if it is love, it is not free. I 
 fancy this has already been said by somebody 
 else. He was ricrht.
 
 XXIII 
 
 YOUTH 
 
 Men used to wish to be immortal. They do so 
 in some countries still. When Professor Stein- 
 bach, of Vienna, announced that he had discovered 
 a means of making old men young again with 
 the help of monkey glands, he had five thousand 
 telegrams of inquiry from Berlin alone within 
 twenty-four hours. The depths of pessimism 
 to which people have descended in England 
 may be estimated by the fact that, when Mr 
 Albert Wilson announced that he had taken the 
 gland treatment and become twenty years younger 
 in consequence, and that he would lecture about 
 it in the Albert Hall, only half-a-dozen people 
 arrived outside the hall to hear the lecture. It 
 must have been a pathetic spectacle. It would 
 be interesting to know what their ages were and 
 what they looked like. Were they six bald, 
 toothless old men, helping along their ossified 
 old bodies with the aid of sticks, squeaking, 
 doddering, rheumy-eyed ? And did they gather 
 there with a vision of the youth that had been 
 buried in each of them gloriously resurrected, 
 and sending the thrill of young blood rolling 
 207
 
 208 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 through the pipes of their arteries and the hair 
 sprouting from their long-barren skulls like 
 young corn ? Whoever they were, they were 
 doomed not to learn the secret of growing young 
 again, for it appeared that Mr Wilson, having 
 grown young too suddenly, had straightway died 
 of the effort. What was their mood when they 
 read the announcement on the door ? Did they 
 begin to reflect once more that if only they had 
 their lives to live over again they would make 
 a better thing of them ? Before reading the 
 announcement of Mr Wilson's death each of 
 them was possibly dreaming of living the old 
 life over again — of becoming once more " one 
 of the bo-hoys " — of seeing the West End of 
 London by night, of wine and paint and pleasure 
 and police courts. But, so soon as the prospect 
 of becoming young again began to recede, I have 
 no doubt they began to imagine that they had 
 intended to live their second youth more wisely 
 than the fii'st — to be a little more faithful and 
 a little less vain, to be a little more kind and a 
 little less self-indulgent — in short, to be good 
 sons, good brothers, good friends, good lovers, 
 good husbands and all the rest of it. There is 
 nothing more agreeable than to live an ideal 
 youth in retrospect. One's uncle always tells 
 one, as he pulls at his pipe : " Never smoke ; 
 
 if I had to begin all over again " He tells 
 
 one the same thing about alcohol as he drinks
 
 YOUTH 209 
 
 whisky - and - soda. He attempts, indeed, to 
 lead the perfect life not in his own person but 
 in the pex'son of his nephews. I understand that 
 in the last twenty or thirty years a new generation 
 of uncles has arisen, and that the modern uncle 
 himself tries to behave like a nephew and will 
 scarcely admit the loss of his youth while there 
 is a tooth in his head. But the natural uncle 
 — the uncle that has existed in all ages except 
 this — is a person who deceives himself into the 
 belief that, if only he were young again, he would 
 be a model to his nephews. 
 
 On the whole, however, it is doubtful whether 
 the average man's desire to grow young again, 
 if he does desire to grow young again, has any 
 tinge of morality. We long for youth chiefly 
 because we like being alive, and youth, rather 
 than any later age, is the extreme opposite of 
 death. But there is a limit to our desire to be 
 young. How many men of seventy are there 
 who would submit to an operation as a result 
 of which they would dwindle and dwindle until 
 they were once more babies in the cradle, and 
 had to go through all the stages of life again .f" 
 How many would even consent to be sent back 
 to an infants' school or, for that matter, to a 
 boys' school .^ To be an undergraduate again — 
 that is another matter, though to submit to 
 professors would seem an odious slavery. But 
 the undergraduate is, on the whole, at a stage 
 O
 
 210 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 where there is a reasonable amount of freedom 
 and just the right amount of responsibility. 
 Even so, it is not every old man who would 
 take back the irresponsibility of youth at the 
 cost of giving up the long-acquired habit of 
 dominating others. That, indeed, is the special 
 charm of the monkey-gland treatment. It is 
 not something miraculous that transforms an old 
 man into a boy ; it leaves one an old man in 
 every important respect while giving one back 
 one's youthful energy. Hence its appeal to the 
 old. It has apparently every possible advantage 
 except that it kills you. We must wait, however, 
 to hear what happens to the other old men who 
 have been inoculated with the glands of monkeys 
 and goats. How, for instance, is the American 
 gentleman of seventy-one feeling who told an 
 interviewer last August after the operation : " I 
 feel twenty-five years younger. I'm a new man, 
 full of ' pep,' strong, healthy, and ready to go 
 on with my work. I was ill, old and played out, 
 but the operation has revivified me".'' How 
 is the South African farmer feeling who called 
 on a Transvaal surgeon a few months ago, leading 
 a baboon on a chain, and in regard to whom we 
 were told : " The doctor shot the baboon at the 
 door of the operating-room, removed its gland 
 
 and inoculated Mr with it " .'' We were 
 
 told at the time that the farmer had regained 
 his failing sight and was, as a result, able to
 
 YOUTil 211 
 
 read without glasses. Poor Mr Wilson in the 
 same way began to grow hair again and to learn 
 German in order to be able to converse with 
 the lady to whom he had proposed. And now^ 
 in the flower of his youth, he has withered 
 without warning, and the old-fashioned doctors 
 are pronouncing his epitaph. They say that 
 senile rats have been restored to youth by the 
 gland treatment, and that they, too, begin to 
 grow hair again, become spry and active, and 
 then suddenly collapse. For myself, I confess 
 I am prejudiced from the outset against a cure 
 which seems to ally us with no animal higher 
 than the monkey, the goat and the rat. I see 
 a warning peeping out of the eyes of those 
 dubious animals. To be a goatish old man or 
 to be a man-monkey at the age of eighty is no 
 great result from an elLtir vitcv. I should prefer 
 to trust my old age to sour milk or to the end- 
 less chewings of Mr Fletcher. Mr Fletcher, I 
 remember reading, was an old man at forty, 
 abandoned by all the doctors, when he discovered 
 that it was possible to chew one's way back into 
 youth. Twenty years later he was turning somer- 
 saults at the age of sixty. He set people chewing 
 all over the civilised world, and conversation 
 disappeared from many dinner-tables. One of 
 the greatest of modern novelists became notorious 
 for his scowl when anyone spoke to him while 
 he was counting his chews. He ceased altogether
 
 212 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 to observe human nature, and his brain did no 
 work but registering numbers — " a hundred and 
 eighty-one, a hundred and eighty-two" — continu- 
 ing at a lushy bite even as far as " five hundred 
 and sixty-five, five hundred and sixty-six, five 
 hundred and sixty-seven." Whether he prolonged 
 his life in this way it is difficult to say, and 
 whether it is worth going on living merely in 
 order to go on chewing is another question that 
 is difficult to answer. 
 
 At the same time, all these attempts to find 
 some way of living longer prove that at least 
 some people think it a good thing merely to be 
 alive. Very few people know why they wish to 
 remain alive, but nearly everyone does wish it. 
 Not that we take advantage of the amenities of 
 this charming world while we are in it. We are 
 content even never to go round it to see what 
 it looks like. We have invented a number of 
 abstract words — Truth, Beauty, Love — but we 
 are not curious as to what they mean as we 
 are curious about the winner of the next Derby. 
 We regard Truth and Beauty as affairs for experts, 
 and turn aside from them in search of amuse- 
 ment. We prefer to live the lives of the higher 
 animals. The problem of how to keep our hair 
 from falling out costs us far more anxious thought 
 than the problem of how to make the League 
 of Nations a real thing. We show none of that 
 seriousness that the old preachers used to urge
 
 YOUTH 213 
 
 on us. We are content to breathe, to satisfy 
 a number of our appetites, to amuse ourselves, 
 to share our amusements and our troubles with 
 others, to have a good night's sleep, and to be 
 able to do all these things without getting into 
 debt. We enjoy occasionally reading some great 
 man's utterance on "the dedicated life." There 
 is some chord in our being that responds to it. 
 But there is another part of our nature that is 
 suspicious of ideals and that flies from them, as 
 a young girl flies from a bore. On the whole, 
 we believe simply in keeping alive and in helping 
 other people to keep alive. That is why any 
 man can always create a sensation by announcing 
 that he has discovered a means of prolonging 
 life or delaying old age. Most of us would be 
 glad to live till a hundred if we could be sure 
 of preserving our strength and our wits. There 
 are many people to-day who say they have no 
 wish for extreme old age in this world or for 
 immortality in another. The normal man, I 
 fancy, would like both. He does not, as I have 
 said, want to live for any reason in particular, 
 but he wants to live. He wants to be able to 
 run upstairs without panting — to eat and drink 
 what he likes without regret — to read the cricket 
 results without glasses — to cultivate his garden 
 — to play with his children — to enjoy every 
 hour of the day like a game. He prefers this, 
 indeed, to the life of an angel. He seriously
 
 214 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 believes, indeed, that compared to his own life 
 in a suburban villa the lives of the angels are 
 insipid. He will accept immortality as some- 
 thing better than no life at all. But he cannot 
 imagine that Paradise has anything so entirely 
 satisfying to offer as a day at Lord's. Heaven 
 is a place without a City page, without a Sports 
 page, without a Sunday newspaper — perhaps 
 without a newspaper at all. It is a place in 
 which, according to the Salvationist hymn, " there 
 are no more public-houses," and it is doubtful 
 if there is a golf-course or even a card-table. 
 That is why some old gentlemen turn longingly 
 to the gland treatment. It does not offer to 
 set them dangling in a mid-air immortality, 
 but to leave them in this charming Zoological 
 Gardens of a world behind the bars of which 
 they have grown accustomed to eat, drink and 
 be merry.
 
 XXIV 
 
 THINGS THAT INTEREST 
 
 Mrs Barnett has some cause for complaint. 
 She lectured for an hour on the necessity of 
 improving the conditions of slum children and 
 of saving thousands of them from an environ- 
 ment of crime, immorality and ignorance. It is 
 a subject that makes a strong appeal to the heart 
 and imagination. Yet the newspapers reported 
 the lecture as though it had been, not a plea 
 for poor children, but a vehement attack on the 
 nursery rhyme, Hey, Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the 
 Fiddle. Mrs Barnett naturally protests. She 
 evidently thinks the newspapers ought to have 
 known better. And yet the appalling fact 
 remains that her passing allusion to Hey, Diddle 
 Diddle was to nine persons out of ten one of 
 the most supremely interesting things she could 
 have said. She cannot at least have said any- 
 thing else that was more novel. She may have 
 said true things, profound things, but to de- 
 nounce Hey, Diddle Diddle was an original act 
 that was bound to cause a general stir of excite- 
 ment. We may call human beings silly and 
 trivial for allowing themselves to be distracted 
 
 215
 
 216 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 in this way by the latest novelty. But novelty 
 makes us all gossips, and there are few men so 
 philosophic that they would not lay down the 
 Phaedo itself and look out of the window if they 
 knew that the Lord Mayor of London was about 
 to walk up the street on stilts and with a painted 
 face like a clown. Even the passion for truth 
 does not quite destroy the taste for novelty. A 
 new dance, a new song, a new fashion, a new 
 theory, will set the chins of the wise as well 
 as of the foolish wagging. Philosophies them- 
 selves are interesting to the majority of people 
 only while they are novelties. The philosopher 
 becomes for a few years as popular as a dancing 
 dog : at the end of the boom, even the greatest 
 of them must take his place among the ignored 
 immortals. Everything tends ultimately to sink 
 into the condition of being taken for granted. 
 The great truths have to be re-created as 
 novelties for each new generation. Otherwise 
 they will lie neglected under the dust of use 
 and wont. Hence, even great writers and great 
 preachers have to make concessions to the uni- 
 versal passion for novelty. To make old things 
 new is a part of their genius. Many writers, no 
 doubt, make use of novelty, not as an advertise- 
 ment of truth or beauty, but as an advertisement 
 of themselves. They had rather be notorious 
 than artists. There was one poet of our time 
 who did his best to create a sensation at a dinner
 
 THINGS THAT INTEREST 217 
 
 by casually eating the tulips out of a bowl in 
 the centre of the table. As the other guests 
 were too good-mannered to let it appear that 
 they noticed anything unusual, the poet in 
 desperation seized the bowl in both hands and 
 swallowed a large mouthful of the water in which 
 the flowers had been kept. Admittedly, the 
 way of poets is hard, and it is no easy matter 
 to make poetry interesting to an average human 
 being. The poet with the tulips succeeded at 
 least in making himself, if not his verses, 
 memorable. 
 
 There is no doubt that it is becoming in an 
 ever greater degree the tendency of newspapers 
 to pay attention to poets who eat tulips. They 
 will even give you a photograph of the poet 
 sitting beside the bowl, which will probably be 
 marked with a little cross of identification. They 
 believe that news is only another name for 
 novelties, and a man may nowadays become 
 world-famous by saying that he saved himself 
 from consumption by eating pigs' ears with a 
 silver fork. Many old-fashioned persons believe 
 that this is an entirely modern form of silliness, 
 but, as a matter of fact, it was always novelties 
 that set human beings talking. Even among 
 the most primitive peasants, the birth of a three- 
 legged foal causes vastly more excitement than 
 the birth of a four-legged foal, and a crowing 
 hen will be talked about throughout a country-
 
 218 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 side to which crowing cocks are commonplaces. 
 The startling and the strange make the most 
 obvious appeal alike to the barbarous and the 
 civilised. The ancient Athenians were, on this 
 point, at one with the savages of the South Seas. 
 None of us can escape the attraction of the 
 exceptional. We welcome almost any break in 
 the monotony of things, and a man has only to 
 murder a series of wives in a new way to become 
 known to millions of people who have never 
 heard of Homer. The other day there were an- 
 nouncements of many weddings in the papers, 
 but few of them were of the slightest interest 
 to anybody except the bride and bridegroom and 
 their tiny circle. One of them, however, became 
 a matter of world-wide interest because the 
 bridegroom, in stepping aside to dodge an old 
 shoe, fell and bit his tongue almost in halves. 
 " Bridegroom Bites Off His Tongue," ran the 
 daily paper heading of the story. Who would 
 pass it by without reading it.-* No novelist dare 
 invent so ghastly an accident. No dramatist 
 dare do so, even for the Grand Guignol. At least, 
 one hopes he dare not. Yet, simply because the 
 thing had never happened before, it was worth 
 hurrying the tidings from America through the 
 bowels of the sea to all pai-ts of the world. Our 
 appetite for news of this kind has nothing cruel 
 about it. It is simply the appetite for the novel 
 and the monstrous. The tastes of human beings
 
 THINGS THAT INTEREST 219 
 
 are exceedingly simple. They do not care 
 whether you are the fattest man on earth or the 
 leanest man on earth, whether you are extremely 
 bald or extremely hairy, whether you say an 
 amazingly wise thing or an amazingly foolish one. 
 All that they ask is that, if you can, you should 
 be, do or say something that is superlative of 
 its kind and so out of the common. They are 
 collectors of curiosities, and their curiosities in- 
 clude men of genius and murderers, clever 
 cricketers and clever forgers, sages and buffoons, 
 spendthrifts and misers, winners of the Dunmow 
 flitch and co-respondents, the world's best verse 
 and the world's worst verse. In its rage for the 
 curious the human race is hardly more disturbed 
 by ethical considerations than a collector of 
 stamps. It seeks after the odd and the rare, 
 as a stamp collector seeks after certain three- 
 cornered stamps. If nearly all stamps were 
 triangular, the passion of the collector would 
 turn quadrilateral. 
 
 If this were the last word to be said about 
 curiosity it would be a bad look-out for the human 
 intelligence. It would mean that most of us see 
 life as an incoherent museum of curiosities, and 
 there would be no public for any but the Tit-Bits 
 sort of paper. Luckily, there is nothing that 
 palls on us more quickly than curiosities. Reason 
 is the enemy of incoherence, and compels us to 
 look for meanings and connections in things.
 
 220 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 The entomologist^ rapturous as he becomes over 
 the discovery of a butterfly that has slightly 
 different markings from all other butterflies, misses 
 the most lasting excitement of his hobby unless 
 he ultimately discovers some sort of pattern run- 
 ning through insect life. The stamp collector, 
 in the same way, will in the end reduce his 
 treasures to pattern and order. Literature dare 
 not attempt to dispense with pattern as a popular 
 Sunday newspaper may. The man of letters is 
 the man who in his writing satisfies our sense 
 of pattern. One of the chief differences between 
 Plutarch and the anonymous ladies who write 
 books of gossip, is that Plutarch gives us a 
 pattern of anecdotes, while the anonymous ladies 
 give us merely a jumble of anecdotes. Even 
 the most trivial gossip may become literature 
 if it satisfies our sense of the pattern in life, 
 as we may see in Fepijs's Diary or the Memoires 
 of Saint-Simon. There are two sorts of curiosity 
 — the momentary and the permanent. The 
 momentary is concerned with the odd appearance 
 on the surface of things. The permanent is 
 attracted by the amazing and consecutive life 
 that flows on beneath the surface of things. 
 Inconsecutiveness, which begins by interesting, 
 ends by wearying, us. Even a newspaper would 
 suffer in circulation if it appealed only to our 
 love of the inconsecutive. Its readers demand 
 of it some kind of consecutiveness of pattern
 
 THINGS THAT INTEREST 221 
 
 and policy, whether in its attitude to politics or 
 to life, or to the choice or arrangement of the 
 news. It is difficult to say how far the average 
 human being can be trusted to prefer the con- 
 secutive to the inconsecutive. That he does so 
 to some extent, however, is suggested by the 
 fact that there is no daily edition of Tit-Bits. 
 And, even in his interest in Mrs Barnett's attack 
 on nursery rhymes, it may well be that the 
 average newspaper reader did not stop short at 
 enjoying a novel monstrosity of opinion. He 
 was puzzled by the philosophic challenge of 
 Mrs Barnett's views. His theory of life included 
 the acceptance of the necessity of a great deal 
 of play and nonsense for children and of a little 
 even for grown-up people. He took it for 
 granted that some brightness of colour might be 
 brought even into the slums by those nonsensical 
 nursery rhymes, which are almost the only 
 poetry he knows. He could not imagine a 
 happy nursery without nursery rhymes, or happy 
 nursery rhymes in which the cow did not jump 
 over the moon. Thus, he was horrified by what 
 Mrs Barnett had said, as by a devastating and 
 revolutionary doctrine. If what Mrs Barnett 
 said was true, then his whole theory of life 
 was wrong, and there was nothing left for him 
 but to bring up his children in the blind alleys 
 of reason. Luckily, he does not believe that 
 what Mrs Barnett said was true. He is content
 
 222 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 to regard it as the pardonable error and heresy 
 of a noble mind. The old nursery rhyme has 
 come through the ordeal unscathed. Meanwhile, 
 we must at least be grateful to Mrs Barnett for 
 entertaining us with the most startling literary 
 opinion that has been uttered since the death 
 of Samuel Butler.
 
 XXV 
 
 BEGGARS 
 
 There never were so many beggars in London. 
 At leasts not within living memory. And the 
 worst of it is^ they have none of the romance 
 of beggary. They are prosaic, dull, hopeless. 
 Most of them look as if they had been born to 
 be commonplace citizens, earning a more or less 
 honest living. To speak strictly, indeed, they 
 are not beggars, but collectors. They stand on 
 the kerb ; they wait in the doorways of restaur- 
 ants ; they haunt the streets of the respectable. 
 All the time they keep shaking their narrow 
 white boxes, rattling the coppers that the charit- 
 able have given them and asking for more. They 
 vary from the sullen to the responsive. Some 
 of them seem to demand a right rather than to 
 beg a favour. They believe that there is money 
 somewhere, and that it is only just that it should 
 be shared. It is the habit of civilised societies, 
 at the end of a great war, to provide kerbs fit 
 for heroes to stand on. Heroes are no longer 
 so willing as they used to be to accept this as 
 a fitting reward. Even so, heroes, like other 
 human beings, are strangely submissive. To be 
 223
 
 224 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 licensed to beg is better than to be allowed to 
 starve. And so the West End of London, which 
 a few years ago used to be alive with the tinkle 
 of sovereigns, is at present alive with the dull 
 clatter of pennies in wooden boxes. Strangers 
 to town are at first depressed by the spectacle. 
 Their hearts are touched. They begin by giving 
 to everybody. They feel a boundless charity 
 that flows out in copper and at times even turns 
 into silver. Every beggar they see is a new 
 man. They pity him personally. They shrink 
 from the sin of passing by on the other side. 
 After a week or so they begin to give here and 
 to give there, but cease to give everywhere. If 
 they have given at the door of the restaurant, 
 they can refuse on the kerb with a good con- 
 science. And if they have given on the kerb, 
 they feel justified in not seeing the man with 
 the box at the entrance to the Undei'ground. 
 As a matter of fact, they have become a little 
 impatient of such an incessant appeal to their 
 charity. At first they pitied every beggar as a 
 man wronged by society — wronged almost by 
 themselves. Now they begin to feel as though 
 it were the}' themselves who were the aggrieved 
 persons. They are not sure that other people, 
 however poor, have a right to annoy them so 
 persistently. They can hardly walk down the 
 quietest street without being interrupted by a 
 man with a money-box. What they object to
 
 BEGGARS 225 
 
 most of all, perhaps, is that it puts them in 
 a false position. They cannot refuse without 
 appearing niggardly, and, as they have to refuse 
 sometimes, they are aware of the beginnings of 
 a feeling of hostility against men who make them 
 look niggardly. By the end of a few more weeks 
 they have ceased to see the average collector as 
 a human being in whom they have any interest. 
 They think of him, if they think of him at all, 
 more and more as a nuisance. They probably 
 take little more notice of him than a reader takes 
 of the recurring commas on a page. If they do, 
 it is because he is a comma misplaced. He has 
 lost his original significance. They may still on 
 occasion see him imaginatively, but it is only 
 on occasion. Their charity is no longer constant, 
 but spasmodic. 
 
 I do not think the thin black line of beggars 
 fits in well with the London landscape. In Italy 
 it is different. Beggars seem to be a natural part 
 of Italy. They are picturesque in decay. They 
 have crooked hands that are fit for nothing else. 
 Their thanks are musical — " Grazie, signoi- ! " 
 They are a race by themselves, living in the 
 shadows of church doors. They have a long 
 tradition of poverty, and have adapted themselves 
 courteously to a life of dependence on the passers- 
 by. The Italians are a charitable people, and it 
 is said to be they and not the foreign visitors 
 who keep the beggars in bread. English and 
 p
 
 226 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 American visitors are apt to take it for granted 
 that any man can earn enough to keep him if he 
 is willing to work, and to resent the sight of men 
 who voluntarily choose a life of idleness. I am 
 inclined to doubt the theory that any man can 
 earn a living if he pleases. Almost any man of 
 strong character may, but the man of average 
 character is a creature of circumstances. Luckily 
 for the beggars, the Italian does not ask whether 
 a man is fit to work, but what he wants. And 
 the average beggar wants so little that to be 
 charitable is one of the cheapest of hobbies. 
 The Italian climate, on the other hand, is more 
 suitable to begging than the English. For the 
 greater part of the year it is warm enough to sit 
 idly at a church door without discomfort. In 
 England idleness during at least half the year 
 is misery. There have never been any English 
 beggars of the romantic kind except tramps, who 
 warmed their blood with walking. There are few 
 to-day except gipsies, and even the gipsies have 
 become little more than a nuisance. In London, 
 at least, the beggar is a mere figure of wretched- 
 ness. Most pitiful of all are the blind who sit 
 reading the Scriptures with their fingers, or who 
 clasp a handful of match-boxes and wait for the 
 sound of the penny dropped into the tin cup 
 hung round their necks. Hardly less wretched 
 are the old grey-haired women who sit under the 
 arches of bridges with a tray of match-boxes and
 
 BEGGARS 227 
 
 studs and such pretence of merchandise. They 
 are blown upon by every wind^ especially by the 
 cold wind from the east that finds its way round 
 corners. To sit in the wind and the dust, as 
 they do, for a single day would give an ordinary 
 respectable citizen his death of pneumonia. I 
 have heai'd it maintained that these wretched 
 creatures do not feel the cold, and that there is 
 no need to waste pity on them. This is too com- 
 forting a belief. The beggar under the arches, 
 no doubt, survives as the soldier in the flooded 
 trenches did ; but it is not through want of sensi- 
 bility. Happier, much happier, the beggar who 
 can warm himself by singing ! And yet, strange 
 to say, it is the itinerant musician who of all 
 beggars wins most of our sympathy. He sings 
 songs that we do not wish to hear ; he plays airs 
 we dislike on an instrument that we detest. But 
 he appeals to us somehow as a decayed artist. 
 He may blow his beery breath under a beery 
 nose into a cornet that can emit only discordant 
 blasts of pain. But he is in his way an artist, 
 and, at any rate, it is better that he should go 
 and drink more beer than that he should go on 
 playing the cornet. The man with the hurdy- 
 gurdy and the man who goes round with a gramo- 
 phone do not attract us in the same degree. 
 They are beggars disguised as artists — hawkers 
 of ready-made and imitation music. How differ- 
 ent is the flute-player or the fiddler! Here are
 
 228 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 artists, and artists even with noble instruments. 
 They live in the finest tradition of beggardom. 
 They play to please us, not merely to annoy us 
 into paying them to go away. There was an 
 admirable old man in Dublin who played the flute 
 in the streets right down to the coming of the 
 Black-and-Tans. When he played it outside a 
 fashionable hotel, he played God Save the King, 
 because he knew that the people in the hotel 
 would like that. When he played it in a poor 
 street, he played The Soldiers' Song, because he 
 knew that the people in the poor street would 
 like that. Could courtesy go further.? 
 
 As for beggars in general, one's attitude to 
 them is curiously paradoxical. One's heart is 
 often fullest of sympathy for them on the very 
 days on which one will not go to the trouble 
 of giving them a penny. It is almost entirely 
 a matter of weather. If it is a cold da}', one 
 feels so distressed at the spectacle of a poor 
 man that one would go to almost any lengths 
 in order to help him. As it is a cold day, 
 however, one is closely wrapped up, and the 
 notion of undoing all one's coat-buttons and 
 glove-buttons for the purpose of giving a fellow- 
 creature so trivial a sum as a penny seems 
 positively ludicrous. It would be making a 
 mountain out of a mole-hill. Besides, it would 
 be making a public exhibition of charity. One 
 likes to bestow the copper sort of charity
 
 BEGGARS 229 
 
 hurriedly, stealthily, unseen of the passers-by. 
 On a fine, sunny day one can do this quite 
 easily. One is unimpeded by an overcoat. One 
 can transfer a penny from a pocket to a blind 
 man's tin almost by sleight of hand. But, alas, 
 it is so warm that one takes it for granted that 
 everybody, like oneself, is fairly happy. There 
 is an old story of a farmer's wife who, on seeing 
 a beggar coming to the door on a bitterly cold 
 day, said to her servant : " Mary, go and give 
 that poor old woman a bowl of hot soup." The 
 farmer's wife herself felt so cold that she went 
 into another room, took out the brandy-bottle 
 and helped herself to a glass. She felt its 
 generous warmth spreading through her frame. 
 She then went back to the kitchen. " Mary," 
 she said, "you needn't bother about that bowl 
 of soup. It's not so cold as it was." It is a 
 cruel story, but, really, when one thinks of one's 
 own behaviour, one does not feel like throwing 
 stones at the farmer's wife. 
 
 The best rule is jn'obably to give a penny to 
 anyone who looks as if he were asking for it, 
 whether it is wet or fine. It may seem an easy 
 thing to do, but as a matter of fact it is almost 
 a counsel of perfection. One can do it on a 
 holiday, for giving money to beggars is a natural 
 part of a holiday. But it is extraordinarily 
 difficult to keep it up. Either you take a sudden 
 dislike to some particular beggar, or you see
 
 230 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 somebody else giving him money, and you feel, 
 "Oh, well, that's all right." I have never been 
 able to feel charitable, for instance, to those 
 beggars who attempt to sell you large earthen- 
 ware pots of ferns when you are walking along 
 the street. One of them particularly I detest. 
 He comes up beside you, and says in a husky 
 voice : " Do you want to be my friend ? Do you 
 want to be my friend .'' " And he does not stay 
 for an answer, but attempts to thrust the pot 
 into your arms. It is only a pretence. He has 
 had the pot for yeai's. It is his disguise. It 
 enables him to pass for a merchant. 
 
 No, I cannot take a sentimental view of beggars. 
 I do not like them. I wish they were abolished. 
 Their poverty, it seems to me, is a crime. And 
 it is our crime rather than theirs. That is why 
 I think that it ought to be suppressed.
 
 XXVI 
 
 THE LAST OF THE STREET CRIES 
 
 One of the compensations for living in London 
 in August is that we occasionally hear the voice 
 of a man or woman crying lavender through the 
 streets. Lavender is the only thing that is sold 
 as all beautiful things ought to be sold. It is 
 sold to a song : every other ware is sold either 
 to a shout or in silence. The muffin-man in his 
 white garment has, I fancy, disappeared with his 
 bell for ever. He, too, brought music into mean 
 streets, even for those of us who shrank from 
 eating his muffins. The milkman, happily, is 
 left as a relic of old times, going around with 
 his hand-cart and crying " Mi' O ! " like a strange 
 cat as he approaches our doors. The dustman 
 also still utters a shout as he bangs on our side 
 door for admittance, but it is merely a noise like 
 the inarticulate yell of a man in a nightmare and 
 bears no resemblance to the "Dust O !" of the 
 noble fellows who once drove their treasures of 
 rubbish to Boffin's Bower. Not that I suppose 
 the dustman to have ever been so picturesque 
 a figure as he appears in a certain print described 
 in one of Mr John Ashton's books. He is there 
 
 231
 
 232 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 displayed with a very clean face and " attired in 
 a yellow jacket, green waistcoat, crimson knee- 
 breeches, blue ribbed stockings, and brown 
 gaiters." At the present day, in his sou'-wester 
 of sacking, he is the drabbest of shapes as he 
 lobs down the path with a silver bin on his 
 back. Silver, I say, in obstinate refusal to face 
 the fact of the ugly bucket-colour of my dust-bin. 
 We cannot grant the dustman a clean face, as 
 the old illustrator did, but we can at least invent 
 for him a pretty appurtenance. I confess to a 
 preference for the itinerant knife-grinder, with 
 his queer spindle-legged paraphernalia of wheels, 
 straps and round stone to set the teeth on edge. 
 He does not, in crying his trade, use either 
 words or music, and the only knife I ever gave 
 him to sharpen he certainly returned blunter 
 than it was before he had sharpened it; but 
 I feel none the less tenderly towards him on 
 that account as a seedy relic of the world of 
 travelling trades that preceded the present 
 world of stores. The coal-heaver in his lovely 
 corduroy waistcoat used to make a fine uproar 
 as he announced his journey through the streets. 
 He may do so even now in some places. For 
 my part, I never perceive him in these days save 
 as a silent figure sitting lonel}' on his bags and 
 gazing out at the world with a black face and 
 bloodshot eyes. Would he might shout ! I 
 cannot help wishing, too, for the return of the
 
 THE LAST OF THE STREET CRIES 233 
 
 cockle-seller leaning sideways with a heavy basket 
 on his or her arm and shouting for customers. 
 There was never a more inarticulate shout. As 
 a child I often tried to translate it into speech, 
 but I never got nearer it than " Awpie ! awpie ! 
 awpie ! " In those days even water was sold in 
 the streets from carts shaped like prostrate barrels, 
 and the water-seller would bring it to the door in 
 a great wooden bucket. I remember, too, the man 
 in white who sold honeycombs, which he carried 
 on a plate on the top of his head, a skilled balancer. 
 It was impossible to stay away from the window 
 when he was passing. He seemed eight feet 
 high, and his voice was full of sweetness. But 
 that is all long ago. The old order has changed, 
 giving place to the new. And the lavender- 
 seller is left, a mere sign and memory, like a 
 shell on a mountain-top, recalling the days when 
 a sea of wonderful things covered the world. 
 
 I heard a man crying lavender yesterday. 
 The plaintive melody he sang compelled me 
 as ever to go to the window. I am sure the 
 Highland reaper sang nothing more likely to 
 make one stop and listen. It is a whine, a 
 beggar's appeal, transmuted and made beautiful. 
 London becomes a summer day at the sound. 
 If ever a tune had a dying fall, and affected one 
 
 like the sweet south 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets. 
 Stealing and giving odour.
 
 234 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 it is the song of the lavender-sellers. What 
 the words of the song are I am not quite certain. 
 It begins, I believe : 
 
 Will you buy my sweet lavender, 
 Sixteen branches for a penny ? 
 
 But other verses are sometimes sung, commend- 
 ing it as a plant full of virtue against the moth. 
 For myself, even in this year in which moths 
 flutter through the air like petals in a June 
 orchard, I cannot bring myself to associate the 
 song with utility. To regard a song of this 
 sweetness as the music of disinfection would be 
 unpardonable. My own attitude to the song is 
 purely voluptuous. If I give a penny to the 
 lavender-seller, it is not in return for lavender^ 
 but in return for the song. It brings to the 
 imagination a trim, old and orderly world, a 
 world in which every house has a garden, and 
 men and women grow flowers instead of potatoes. 
 I know a man who sa3^s that the street cry 
 of the lavender-seller always depresses him 
 because it reminds him that the end of the 
 summer is approaching. Most of us would as 
 soon think of being depressed by the spectacle 
 of silk butterflies speeding on their light 
 lumbering way above the hollyhocks. All frail 
 and lovely things cause us a pang when we 
 think of them as a part of the procession and 
 chorus of mortality. But it is the departure of life, 
 not the departure of summer, that is our grief.
 
 THE LAST OF THE STREET CRIES 235 
 
 The man I saw peddling lavender yesterday 
 was a sturdy middle-sized beggar in a tumble- 
 down hat and a weather-beaten coat. He had 
 a face of brick, with anxious wrinkles about his 
 eyes. He had beyond question a good voice for 
 shouting coke. Every time he sang he stopped 
 in his walk, put his hand up to one side of his 
 mouth like an Irish ballad-singer, and howled 
 till the blood came into his forehead. It was 
 impossible to distinguish the words, but the 
 music was recognisable, and, if it had not been, 
 there were the long, dried-up, purple rods in 
 his hand to reveal his purpose, I confess I found 
 the ugliness neither of his voice nor of his colour 
 an offence. His trade made up for everything 
 — his trade and the song he sang so badly. He 
 was as charming as Horace Walpole. He bound 
 one to the world of a hundred and two hundred 
 yeai's ago, when life was not a business but a 
 picture. At least one likes to think so. It is 
 not only sentimentalists who are drawn in their 
 imaginations to old customs, old jingles, old 
 phrases, old houses, old dress, old paintings, 
 even old pronunciation. There is no one more 
 fortunate than the man for whom a long train 
 of yesterdays comes alive at a word, at a sound, 
 at a glimpse of a snuff-box or a tapestry or an 
 old wooden cradle. How delightful it is when 
 tradition, instead of hiding away with a printed 
 label on it in the chill of a museum, appears in
 
 236 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 the streets as a hawker's cry or a Regency house 
 or a cross-timbered inn with mediaeval angles ! 
 If one loves the lavender-seller for one reason 
 more than another, it is that, even when he 
 is at his hoarsest and shabbiest, he informs the 
 working world with the presence of an elder 
 city. It is difficult to understand why the voice 
 of a single hawker or a single bird should suddenly 
 make the whole air populous with invisible life 
 up to the very sky where it had been empty 
 and dull a moment before. But who is there 
 who has not experienced this miracle ? 
 
 Will you buy my sweet lavender, 
 Sixteen branches for a penny ? 
 
 One never hears this but one seems to follow 
 the notes as they die away into the reaches of 
 infinity. Usually it is a woman who sings it. 
 She adds the ti'agic appeal of a begging woman 
 to the appeal, already sufficiently exquisite, of 
 her song. . . . 
 
 But the chief reason why I, at least, like to 
 hear the hawkers crying lavender is probably 
 different from all this. It is simply that lavender 
 used to grow outside the door of a white-washed 
 cottier-house on the top of a hill where I once 
 desired to live as indifferent to the day's news 
 as Thoreau. If London Pride had grown there 
 instead, I should have loved London Pride, and 
 have argued against those who despise it and
 
 THE LAST OF THE STREET CRIES 237 
 
 say that it is ugly. As it is, the scent of lavender 
 has always for me the faint scent of an ideal 
 never accomplished or even attempted. Who 
 is there who would not rejoice to be reminded 
 of the days when Thoreau and Emerson came 
 into the imagination like sons of the morning 
 and filled him with the longing to be a loafer 
 and half a sod ?
 
 XXVII 
 
 WILD LIFE IN LONDON 
 
 Wfld life may be studied in many parts of 
 London. Perhaps the most interesting place of 
 all is a law court, in which a wild animal, dis- 
 guised as a tame animal, sits at a desk and takes 
 measures to keep other wild animals in order. 
 On the whole, however, the study of man as a 
 wild animal does not make for happiness. The 
 more closely we observe the antics of man as an 
 animal, the more depressed we become. Had 
 Swift studied weasels instead of men, he would 
 never have written The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms. 
 Had Anatole France studied penguins instead of 
 men, he would never have written Pengimi Island. 
 It is a curious fact that all the men who write 
 about rats and foxes and spiders are cheerful, 
 while all the men who write about the animal 
 called man are sad. Man is disgusting when he 
 is thought of as an animal. Ways that would 
 amuse us in a dog or a field-mouse we regard as 
 degrading in a human being. We cannot forgive 
 man even that element of rapacity which he 
 shares with most of the wild animals. To follow 
 instinct, which is their exquisite duty, is in him 
 
 238
 
 WILD LIFE IN LONDON 239 
 
 a revolting crime. We do not allow him to be 
 as greedy as a pig, as venomous as a serpent, as 
 cunning as a fox, as savage as a wolf, as cruel as 
 a cat, as lecherous as a goat, or as irresponsible 
 as a cuckoo without a protest. He is capable, if 
 we can trust the reports in the papers, of being 
 all these things, but no one defends him as 
 naturalists will lovingly defend the cat and the 
 cuckoo. There were novelists who called them- 
 selves naturalists in the nineteenth century, but 
 they lacked the great essential of naturalism — a 
 settled cheerfulness in presence of the animals 
 studied. One felt that they positively hated 
 man. The spectacle of his ordinary life reduced 
 them to the deepest gloom. Walt Whitman 
 said many bold words on behalf of man the 
 animal, but all the while he was secretly idealis- 
 ing man as an unconquerable spirit. The poets, 
 indeed, in their inspired moments, write almost 
 without reference to the animal in man, and none 
 of the great lines in poetry describes him at his 
 food or performing any other of those functions 
 in the performance of which he is as the beasts 
 that perish. We, too, may reasonably do our 
 best on occasion to forget the animal of whose 
 greed and cruelty we read in the Sunday papers. 
 If we are fond of animals, there are more charm- 
 ing animals to be seen even in the heart of 
 London. Have not the sea-gulls already come 
 back to the Serpentine for their winter holiday ?
 
 240 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 The most attractive animal I have seen in 
 London was a duck. I was standing on the edge 
 of the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. It 
 was one of those blowy days on which the Round 
 Pond is a tumultuous ocean, whipped by the 
 storm into huge rollers three inches high. As the 
 little model yachts ploughed their way across the 
 pond, many of them heeled over till their main- 
 sails dipped into the tide. Two of them had 
 their sails so heavily weighted with water that 
 they were unable to right themselves and lay 
 helpless and drifting on their sides. Had I been 
 the owner of a model yacht, I should have been 
 timid of racing in such foaming seas. The 
 English are a race of seamen, however, and, even 
 with the spectacle of the wreckage spread out 
 before them as a warning, the yachtsmen loosed 
 their green and their blue and their white boats 
 into the wind as though they had not a fear. 
 There are no other yacht races to compare in ex- 
 citement with those on the Round Pond. Cowes 
 is dull compared to it. Each race takes exactly 
 the right time — two or three minutes — and the 
 spectators can follow it from start to finish. But 
 it was not in appreciation of yacht-racing that I 
 began to write. Man is a spirit, not an animal, 
 in battling with circumstances such as wind and 
 tide. Nor do animals organise games in this 
 sei'ious fashion. The animal that delighted me, 
 as I have said, was a duck. Superficially, it was
 
 WILD LIFE IN LONDON 241 
 
 like all the other ducks on the pond. If all the 
 ducks in Kensington Gardens were marshalled 
 before me for purposes of identification, I could 
 not pick this one out. Yet there must have been 
 something different about it. The ordinary duck, 
 when it sees a yacht bearing down on it^ scuttles 
 out of the way as human beings do when getting 
 out of the way of a motor bus. Never but once 
 have I seen a duck showing any interest in a 
 yacht except for the purpose of not being run 
 down by it. This duck, however, I repeat, was 
 different. A beautiful green yacht with bellying 
 white sails bore down on it while it was not 
 looking, and the duck, on turning its head round 
 after a vigorous preening of its breast feathers, 
 suddenly beheld the deck leaning over towards 
 it and almost touching its tail, as though inviting 
 it to step aboard. Whether it was startled into 
 its next action I do not know, but, quick as 
 a cat, it wheeled round and, to the amazement 
 of the assembled spectators, scrambled on to 
 the deck and took up its position at the tiller. 
 The yacht wobbled for a moment under the un- 
 expected weight, but the duck wobbled too, and 
 so kept its place. In so heavy a sea a heavy 
 duck was an advantage to the yacht, which no 
 longer lay over at a dangerous angle, but began 
 to move in stately speed across the pond. For a 
 time the duck looked about it as though a little 
 puzzled by the motion and by the seascape that 
 
 Q
 
 242 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 swept past it at so incredible a speed. If the 
 boat lurched under a sudden squall the duck 
 gave a frightened lurch also. But, as it kept 
 its footing on its magnificently flat feet, its self- 
 confidence seemed to grow, and it gazed round 
 at the other ducks with an air even of boastful- 
 ness. At last, as though to suggest that it had 
 been accustomed to sailing for years, it ceased 
 even to look round at the others and began 
 to nibble vigorously at its breast feathers like 
 a duck on dry land. By the time the yacht 
 was drawing near the opposite shore the duck 
 appeared to be settling down to sleep, but, on 
 looking up, it saw a crowd of men, women and 
 children laughing uproariously at it, whereupon 
 it slid hastily off into the water and floated off 
 towards the middle of the pond with a ruffled 
 air of contempt for so ill-mannered a race. . . . 
 That, I think, is the most exciting event that 
 has happened in Kensington Gardens in recent 
 years. I am sure that no one who was present 
 on that blue and billowy day and who saw the 
 duck going for a sail will ever forget it. 
 
 But do not be excessively disappointed at 
 having missed it. There are other excitements 
 to be had by observers of wild life in Kensington 
 Gardens. Are there not still a few squirrels 
 left ? The grey squirrel of London has many 
 enemies. He is suspected as an alien of 
 destructive propensities, and there were even
 
 WILD LIFE IN LONDON 243 
 
 rumours some time ago that orders had been 
 sent out for his extermination. But the squirrels, 
 like other aliens, survive persecution, and there 
 are still two or three of them to be seen searching 
 for acorns under the trees on these autumnal 
 days. There are few prettier sights in London 
 than a squirrel standing on its hind legs and 
 nibbling at a nut that it holds between its 
 forefeet. How swiftly its teeth set to work, 
 as though it were apprehensive that an enemy 
 might appear before it had had time to eat it ! 
 How it pauses now and then, the nut still held 
 near its mouth, and looks and listens for a sign 
 of danger ! How jealously it greets another 
 squirrel who comes and watches it at its feast ! 
 You would think that there must be acorns 
 enough in Kensington Gardens, quite apart from 
 the monkey-nuts that amiable ladies scatter, to 
 satisfy the few squirrels that fly among the tree- 
 tops. But squirrels, alas, are as the dogs that 
 bark and bite, or as the cats that rush after one 
 another up trees. One squirrel that I watched, 
 at least, was not content to sit upon the ground 
 and eat his nut quietly when another appeared 
 round a tree-stem. He thrust his nut whole 
 into his mouth and rushed at the other as though 
 he would have murdered it. The latter fled up 
 the tree, round and round the trunk, with the 
 pursuer close on its tail. The squirrel with the 
 nut paused at the first branch, sat in the angle
 
 244 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 of it, took the nut in its forepaws, and began 
 hurriedly nibbling it again. The other, in the 
 crook of a branch just above it, crouched like 
 an angry cat, its tail curved along its body till 
 it touched its ears, and uttered sounds that 
 were half like a cat's mewing growl and half 
 like the chur of a nesting partridge. It was 
 as though every nibble the other took cost it 
 a pang. How it wept ! How it wailed I Never 
 was sorrow like that squirrel's sorrow. After a 
 time the squirrel with the nut became irritated 
 by such plaintive accusations, took the nut 
 between its teeth, and once more gave chase 
 among the branches. At times it would pretend 
 to give up the chase, turn backwards, and would 
 pause, its head hanging towards the ground, and 
 its limbs stretched out. Then the complaints 
 would begin again farther up the tree, and the 
 chase would be resumed, till at last the second 
 squirrel sprang like an acrobat among the top- 
 most leaves and set off on a journey from tree-top 
 to tree-top, which is the squirrels' High Street, 
 and so out of sight. Had children behaved 
 like this, I should have condemned them ; but 
 it was a pleasure to see squirrels behaving so 
 badly. And, to judge by the crowd of people who 
 paused under the tree and smiled at the little 
 lamenting squirrel, as its sides shook with sobs, 
 others enjoyed it as much as I did. Who could 
 condemn an animal with such a panache of tail ?
 
 WILD LIFE IN LONDON 245 
 
 But neither the duck that went for a sail nor 
 the weeping squirrel filled me with quite the 
 same astonishment as did a little greenish yellow 
 bird I saw in Hyde Park perched on a low bush 
 within a few yards of Rotten Row. It looked 
 rather melancholy, and was so wrapped up in its 
 melancholy that it seemed perfectly indifferent 
 to the many people who halted to stare at so 
 curious an apparition. It was like no bird that 
 I had ever seen. At first I thought it might 
 be a canary of some strange breed that had 
 escaped from a cage. But it was no more like 
 a canary than like a yellow-hammer. It had a 
 small, round, rapacious hooked bill such as I had 
 never seen on a green or yellow bird before. 
 There is only one bird that it resembles even in 
 the pictures in the bird-books, and that is the serin. 
 I shrink, however, from boasting that I have 
 seen a serin in London, because the serin is an 
 extremely rare bird even in rural England, and 
 I know how offensive such boasts are to those 
 who have been less fortunate. Besides, I did 
 not really enjoy seeing the serin — or, rather, 
 the bird that looked like a serin — half so much 
 as I enjoyed seeing a willow-wren an hour later 
 dancing silently from shoot to shoot in a clump 
 of bushes on the edge of the Long Water in 
 Kensington Gardens, its green fading in flight 
 into the green of the leaves. How thoughtful 
 of the loveliest of the birds to linger in town in
 
 246 SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 
 
 the first week of October, when all wise 
 willow-wrens have taken wing for the sun- 
 shine of the south ! But even the willow-wren 
 must not tempt me into boasting. It is better 
 to be content to say, as anyone may say, " I 
 have seen rooks in Rotten Row. I have seen 
 bats over the Serpentine." For even these 
 things, common though they are, never cease 
 to delight. The rook, the bat and the sea-gull 
 — how a dead city breaks into life at a mere 
 movement of their wings ! 
 
 THE END
 
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