I HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNB THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • KAN FRANCISCO THF MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltp. TORONTO I HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE BY STEPHEN PAGET Take of English earth as much As either hand may rightly clutch. In the taking of it breathe Prayer for all who lie beneath. Not the great nor well-bespoke, But the mere uncounted folk Of whose life and death is none Report or lamentation. Lay that earth upon thy heart, And thy sickness shall depart ! It shall sweeten and make whole Fevered breath and festered soul. It shall mightily restrain Over-busy hand and brain. It shall ease thy mortal strife 'Gainst the immortal woe of life, Till thyself restored shall prove By what grace the heavens do move, Rudyard Kipling, MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON i 9 2 I * > i • • ■ ... » » ... . . Copyright • • * • « • • • • i * • • • • * * • • * * t, • « ■ « ■ • • • • • i * t * i * « * • • i • • v .♦« $ THESE ESSAYS ARE NOT WORTH DEDICATING TO ANYBODY *3- c D O is* >7 CONTENTS PAGE I. TOWN MICE TURNED COUNTRY MICE - - - I II. THE WRITING OF A LIFE - - - - 14 III. REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES - - - "3° IV. CATCH-WORDS - - - - - "38 V. HE, SHE, AND IT - - - - "5° VI. I HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE - - - - 6"J VII. A NOTE ON LOYALTY - - - - "79 VIII. THE VICTORIAN AGE - - - - - 88 IX. THE WATER-BABIES - - 102 X. A QUESTION OF SIZE - - - - - 117 XI. OUR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT - 128 XII. AN EMINENT VICTORIAN - - - - - I 3 8 Vll TOWN MICE TURNED COUNTRY MICE I had not thought that y£sop's Fables were so old. I find that some of them are " the common property of all Eastern nations," and that critics have even doubted the existence of the man /Esop. To me, near sixty years ago, they were new as new can be: and I read them — or am I thinking of Lafontaine ? — as a story-book of real creatures. Not that mice could talk, not really talk: but the town mouse and the country mouse were almost as real to me as were my parents. They put in happy fable the moral which Sandford and Merton put in heavy prose. First, the town mouse went to stay with the country mouse, who had everything very simple. He did not stay long. It may have been only for " the inside of a Sunday " — horrible phrase — just for lunch in a cornfield, and tea with the country church mouse. It could hardly have been for a week-end: the fashion of week-ends is later than my childhood. He was bored by the country, and went back to town. Then, the country mouse went to stay with him. Oh, such a grand big mansion, and such delicious things to eat : ham, cheese, plumcake. But there was a terrible giant of a footman, and a i 2 TOWN MICE i ferocious lion of a cat : and the country mouse fled home, and joined the local branch of the Life and Liberty movement. I envied the town mouse, I despised the country mouse. Nothing, not even a footman, would have prevented me, at my age, from going on with the plumcake. Now, sixty years later, the fable has come into my head again. But things are changed, and it comes with a difference. It invites me to think, not of the contrast between town mice and country mice, but of the transformation of town mice into country mice. I am glad of the failures, in work and health, which had this effect on me. It is not yet complete, nor ever will be: I am ob- serving it in the process: not in myself alone, but likewise in Mrs. Mouse: for she and I went side by side into the country, as our first ancestors went side by side into the Ark, antediluvian male and female that should replenish the earth with mice. One word about the half-way multitude of the suburban mice. I am glad that I do not live in Ilford, Willesden, Bromley, or Sydenham. The more honour be given to the lives and homes which exalt them. So dutiful and so patient, the lives: so comfortable and well-ordered, the little houses and their gardens. It is only snobs and fools who poke fun at the suburbs. Still, I am thankful that Fortune put me outside the ring round Greater London : thankful for the magic tunnel which finally i TURNED COUNTRY MICE 3 divides a world adherent to London from a world that is the country. The process of this transformation might well engage the attention of our psychologists. It might even divert some of them from " psycho- analysis." The process is very gradual. At one time it moves apace, at another it is arrested. It has moments of illumination, it has moments of misgiving. Subliminal instincts rise above the threshold and flood the ground-floor of the new house: and the familiar furniture withstands them, and proclaims the forfeited advantages of the old home. London refuses to leave off. By rail and road, by post and telephone and newspapers, by goods consigned or delivered, London is in the country. Moreover, London supplies us not only with material goods, but with imaginings. " I wonder how their dinner-party went off: I wonder whether they will come on Saturday " — by these and the like ejaculations, we confess the power of London over us. We have no desire that London should leave off. I remember, at Nuremberg, in 1878, an "English service ' in a hotel- room, with six worshippers, and a long sermon which included the phrase, " Not that I would do away with human knowledge altogether." Worth all the journey to Nuremberg, to have heard that phrase. We would not do away with London altogether. 4 TOWN MICE i Only, of late years, London has been strangely unkind to elderly visitors. It is larger than ever, but less lovable; more insatiable of pleasures, but not happier; noisier, but less articulate. It can be as unfriendly, in a black mood, as Petrograd, where in the winter of 1915-16 I felt, through all the enveloping warmth of personal kindnesses, that I was in the presence of a frozen city which did not care a copeck whether we lived or died. Ah, but London in a golden mood — London rejoicing, London mourning, London exultant in fine weather — the imperishable magnificence of it, body and soul, is more wonderful than ever. Talk of the country — are not London parks the country ? And the daily tons of flowers, in thousands of shops, on thousands of stalls, are not they the country ? Sixty years ago, there was not one flower-shop all the way from the Marble Arch to Mudie's, except a few fruit-shops with flowers subservient : not one, I think, in Regent Street, nor in Bond Street. Miles of parks, tons of flowers — the country is in London. But London has to pay heavily for its open spaces and its flowers: we here get them for nothing. " With a great sum," says London, " obtained I this freedom :" and the country answers, " But I was free born." They who exchange London for the country must behave carefully, lest the country should be offended by them. For, in this wood near Athens, I am i TURNED COUNTRY MICE 5 Bottom. In the room in Quince's house, with the clinging smell of glue-pots and sawdust, and the traffic and street-cries passing the door, and the company of Snug and Flute and Snout and Starve- ling, I was full of confidence. Here, I have the ass's head on my shoulders. I am dimly conscious of trespassing. I am in strange surroundings : but I stay in the wood. " I will not stir from this place: I will walk up and down here, and I will sing." I receive stupidly the gifts of Titania, her love, her kisses. The most that I require of her fairies is that they should scratch my new head. She offers me fairy music: and I say that I have a reasonable good ear in music : let us have the tongs and the bones. She offers me fairy food: and I say, or my head says it for me, that I have a great desire to a bottle of hay. Yet, when the dream ends, and everybody all round is disillusioned, I am as well off as any of them : — I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream — past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was — there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had — but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. That is how I receive the gifts of the country; with enjoyment, but not with insight. It is not 6 TOWN MICE i for me to talk of crops, live stock, and garden pro- duce; nor to predict the weather; nor to distinguish the notes of all the birds. To the farm-labourer, the gardener, the born countryman, I must ever be an outsider, come for change of air. The affectation of country lore would show up on me like the red cloth on the German prisoners who used to be about here. My wife does understand the country; especially, the goings-on of her poultry, and the surprises of her garden. But these experiences are within her control: I am just as good as she is over experiences which are beyond our control. I have heard her speak with contempt of a hen,* and with disappoint- ment of a corner of the garden: but the uncontrol- lable experiences — the woods, the common, the nightingales in due season, the legions of bluebells — are above contempt or disappointment. I never thought that I should live to be kept awake, and sung to sleep, by nightingales. It is not easy, at first, to recognise the note of pain. The ear is taken up with the unexpected diversity of themes, with the variation of compass from deep to almost shrill, and with the interrupted rhythm, incessantly making and breaking silence. But the note of pain, * The hen had eaten one or more of its own eggs. None but Christian Scientists can deal with such hens. As a practitioner of Christian Science told me, " We put the hen in a separate partition: and I treated it. I realised God's idea — that it could not be God's idea that the bird should eat its own eggs. You see, it was something like what sin is in us." i TURNED COUNTRY MICE 7 once learned, is not forgotten: the quick, pitiful Oh, oh, oh ! — rising by semitones or quarter-tones, or falling by them, but usually rising — then a moment of silence, and then a wholly different theme. It is a curious trick of sound in darkness. Taking them song and all, and all in all, I prefer the lark to the nightingale : for the lark is overhead, and music overhead is delightful: so is music that comes up from a depth; I am remembering past joys — the sound of the sea from the edge of a cliff in Cornwall, and the music of the orchestra beating- up to the corner of the front row of the gallery at the opera, and the music at Mr. Gladstone's funeral coming up from the screen to the triforium of the Abbey. Music level with us is at some disadvan- tage. But I admire the lark not only for its choice of the sky as a concert-room, but for the continuity of its song through the alternations of its breathing, and for its power to sing and wing both at once: such a whirring and incredible speck of brown fluff, with such a torrent of music rushing down to earth. Enjoyment, when the weather is favourable, seldom fails me. Beech, birch, pine, gorse, heather, bracken; stretches of common and park; woods with cunning little paths to be learned slowly — all intro- duce themselves with charming and informal gaiety, and put me at my ease. I am able to admire them; unable to have the mind of science toward them. Happily, as between a man and a maid, so between 8 TOWN MICE i me and this kind country, love runs ahead of science. Here are woods so full of bluebells that the ground is all coloured and scented. The extravagance of them persuades me that there must be a Ministry of Bluebells. The miracle is wrought annually. What is the good of investigation ? If I do but watch the behaviour of a spider, or note the flowering of an apple-tree, thought is lost in amazement. The spider's individuality, the tree's deliberate intention, will not let me into their secrets. Sometimes, but not often, Nature is impatient of my complacency. On these occasions, the beauty and the silence of the country bear witness to lives of men and women in London who have earned, and have renounced, the right to be leisurely, and will hold on to their work till they drop, till they die in harness — a poor phrase for their victory — and I swing round to one of Scott Holland's letters, Brindisi, 1 886 : "Human interests are all in all. Without a core of human interest to vivify it, beauty is a poor super- ficial affair. No Salerno Bay, or Sorrento hills, can compensate for the loss of Rome." Nor Surrey hills, he would say, for the loss of London. But Surrey has a core of human interest. It is not uninhabited. We came here, we two, Emeritus and Emerita, at the opportune turn of age; neither too old to make friends with the young, nor too young to make friends with the old, whose minds are spheres for i TURNED COUNTRY MICE 9 crystal-gazing. To have been, for so many years, one of the most fortunate of Londoners: to have seen and known so many great people : to have lived in London, except for compulsory outings, through the years of the War — it is almost too good to be true, that I have this inexhaustible wealth of memories to play with, in my new surroundings. This residential neighbourhood offers us no lurid contrasts, no desperate encounters. We move gently in a quiet luminous haze of kindliness and courtesy and acceptance of us as we are, which we did not invent but discovered. Especially, we have pleasure in the goodwill of our poorer neighbours. Nobody here is poor to the bone: but a group of tired-looking cottages, at the end of our lane, gives us unaffected friendship with lives less elaborate and more casual than ours. The children of these cottages greatly admire us : they run to us, thrust their hands into our hands, tell us everything, take us to their hearts. I have observed them for two years, and have never heard them swear nor seen them quarrel. They and their parents have adopted us; and have admitted us to the Freedom of the End of the Lane. We have deserved it : for we are advice gratis, we are the use of the telephone, we are occasional jobs, we are Father Christmas. Nothing short of death or departure will estrange that end of the lane from this. To one of the children, a miniature Ariel, I would leave something io TOWN MICE i in my will, if I did not know that the other children would be hurt. I have no less pleasure in the wider courtesies of the countryside and the village. I like to be called Sir, and to have hats touched to me. Some- times it embarrasses me, and I answer Sir with Sir: but the embarrassment goes, and the pleasure stays. Young men ought to dislike to be called Sir : middle-aged men ought not to care one way or the other: but men in later life covet these trivial insignia, and are hungry for them: not in vanity, but in the joy of standing on the old ways that will outlast any revolution. I find myself able to deduce, from a touched hat, from a Sir, that God's in His heaven — all's right with the world. Death will not call me Sir: but Life does. Best of all, the friendliness of lane and country- side and village is continuous with the friendliness of our own class toward us. I am prepared to back our clerics against London clerics, our doctors against London doctors, our manners against London manners, our ideals against London ideals. Friendships come as natural here as bluebells. Perhaps the War has helped to make the place thus kind. Possibly, in the years before the War, which do not count now, it was narrow, gossipy, stand-offish. Perhaps the lesson of the War goes farthest in quiet little places which have time to think and are immune against the fever of reaction. i TURNED COUNTRY MICE n Each of the villages about here sent out its men; displays its roll of honour, and its flower- decked shrine in a church or by the wayside; and is careful to remember its dead : and the length of the rolls of honour tells what was endured through those years. The old phrase, genius loci, finds its proper meaning in local sorrow and local pride. The genius loci, once on a time, was a nymph in a sacred wood: and the woods here are beautiful enough to contain any amount of nymphs : but the local genius, the abiding spirit of the place, is not in the woods, but in the lives of men and women with whom we two have thrown- in our lot. Then comes the Londoner's answer. " All this wordy fuss about a backwater ! You and your tea- parties ! Have you forgotten what it is, to belong to a city which gets the best and the biggest and the most and the first of everything, and has in it more lives than are in all Canada ?" No, that is not the Londoner's answer. It is London's answer — if London could think us worth answering. The individual Londoner is not London: and I dare to stand up to him, or her. It is a common belief, among Londoners, that they are somehow partakers of London's immensity.* * As Byron, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, says of St. Peter's: — Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not; And why ? it is not lessen'd; but thy mind, Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal. 12 TOWN MICE i This belief is not wholly false: and I will not stop to ask, In what way, if in any, is London more immense than the Surrey hills ? For I know that London does give, to many of its inhabitants, moments of real exaltation. But these fugitive moments do not overcome the sense of personal insignificance. The good Londoner would love to have that zest for the streets which was in Johnson and in Lamb : he would like to be able to say, " I have cried with fullness of joy at the multitudinous scenes of life in the crowded streets of ever dear London." He cannot say it. The streets are too crowded now. The moments of exaltation are too rare: the sense of personal insignificance is too persistent. He cannot isolate his liking for multitude: it refuses to be separated from his longing for solitude. He must get home, there to recover his identity; there to assure himself, by shutting his front- door, opening his letters, ringing his bell, handling his possessions, that he still has individual existence. At home, he renews his strength for next day's plunge into immensity. Londoner, Londoner, you say with some justice that we here live in a backwater. Are there not fifty thousand backwaters in London ? Perhaps you live in one of them. You mock at the size which we take in thoughts. What size do you take ? Say that we take a large six- and- a- half. Do you, at the most, take more than a small six-and- threequarters ? Our tea-parties are a poor thing i TURNED COUNTRY MICE 13 in your sight. But are your dinner-parties ablaze with intellect and wit ? You are a citizen of no mean city. What have you done for it ? You despise the range and level of our interests. Lon- doner, tell me true, How wide is the range, how high the level, of yours ? II THE WRITING OF A LIFE Sir Sidney Lee, in his Leslie Stephen Lecture, 191 1, denned the principles of biography. His exposition is perfect. Nothing is to be added to it, or taken from it. Only, it seems to forbid all but the best of writers; it is deterrent, by weight of authority; it is a flaming sword, turning every way, to keep the way of the Tree of Life. But why should he be less decisive ? Surely, he does well to guard the honour of biography, and to keep off the crowd that would profane it. There is a saying by Novalis — it is the beginning and the end of my acquaintance with him — that we touch Heaven when we lay our hands on a human body. But we touch Heaven with more audacity, when we lay our hands on a human life. " Let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature, that breeds these hard hearts ?" Regan gives herself to be anatomized; for she is a stage- figure, constructed on plain lines. The difficulty is with a life in real life, to sift and weigh and arrange all that made it what it was. Still, we must not be unduly timid: for we may H ii THE WRITING OF A LIFE 15 do useful work, even if we fall short of Sir Sidney Lee's counsel of perfection. It may come to any man or woman to write a life. For some of us, there is the need of earning a little money: and we look back, and find this or that outstanding life, dominant once, but neglected now. As the rough- hewn effigies on Easter Island have at last been studied and interpreted, so there are lives waiting for interpretation; not rough-hewn, but elaborately finished, and set in history, so that the student of any one of them touches a hundred interests. Others of us, in the writing of a life, are " doing it for the love of the thing." The life was there: we warmed ourselves at its fire, sunned ourselves in its light: and we want to tell everybody about it. So many people would like to hear of it: so much of it was delightful, and as good as good can be. It had plenty of admirers, but well deserves to have more : Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, Ouique amavit eras amet. Lives thus written ought to be gently treated, not set-up as targets for the arrows of young critics. That the widow is the worst enemy of biography; that men may be divided into those whose lives ought to be written, and those whose lives ought not to be written; that the biographer has added a new terror to death — these epigrams are like heavy old gentlemen looking out of club-windows at the crowd in the street. It is true that some biographies are 16 THE WRITING OF A LIFE n very dull. Yet, with few exceptions, they who write lives are faithful servants, lovers of their work; to be encouraged, not discountenanced, by the guardians of the ideals of biography. Let not the guardians threaten the amateurs. Trespassers will be 'prosecuted. As if no right of way ran through the enticing woods. Keep off the grass. As if the grass did not belong to all of us, every blade of it. Some of us, perhaps, are scared by the grave sound of the name of Biography. These official words ending in -graphy are in need of adjustment. As biology is the study of life, so biography should be the description of life, not of lives. As geo- graphy is the description of earth, so photography and calligraphy should be the description of light and of beauty. It is better to talk not of biography, but of the writing of lives. At least, we can avoid the phrase " a full-dress biography." The writing of lives is not uniform. They must attain a good likeness, but there is more than one way of attainment : the likeness may come very slowly, or may come quickly, of its own accord; as in the memoir of John Smith of Harrow, and in some of the short memoirs of men killed in the War — slight, informal, eager, sensitive writings, full of pride and faith and loyalty — voices crying in the wilderness, and broken with pain. Our valua- tions of biography must be revised in the light of recent experiences. ii THE WRITING OF A LIFE 17 But the occasion may demand, or may seem to demand, the full-length biography, the authoritative life. The chosen writer is glad that the work has been entrusted to him; but is afraid of what may come of it. Here is the chance for a tale of magic. A great man has just died, and a family council meets to settle the question, Who shall write his life? Many side-issues perplex them: but the de- cision falls at last on his only son. There are nearly a thousand letters. As the young man works at them, a shameful secret leaps out, hissing and veno- mous : and his father is at his elbow, trying to explain away what happened, and forbidding him to refer to it. The young man is driven up and down, between his father and the truth, like a hunted creature: he cannot escape into the open: he is trapped and helpless: he desperately burns the damning letters, and hands over the work to an old friend of the family. She is a devoted admirer, a facile writer, with a weakness for florid eulogy: she writes half-a-dozen pages daily : but the dead man is back at her elbow, as he was at his son's: he is furious, that she is making a saint of him. By overpowering will, he wrecks page after page; she becomes irresolute and confused: the whole thing is out of proportion, unbalanced, muddled with heaped-up corrections, no strength in it, no unity, no conviction: till at last she surrenders, and hands over the work to a methodical old gentleman, 1 8 THE WRITING OF A LIFE n who in more prosperous days was associated with the dead man, at a respectful distance, in affairs of politics and of business. He sets himself to all the ins and outs of the politics, all the ups and downs of the business : he amasses facts and figures, minutes of meetings, incidents of partisanship and of partnership, speeches to constituents, reports to shareholders : and the dead man is still there, saying, " Cut all that: come to me: tell them what I really was like:" till at last this third writer, caught in a labyrinth of his own making, despairs, and hands over the work — but you can finish the story: for the book was never finished. The dead man, for one reason or another, would not allow it. But my theme is the pleasure, not the peril, of the writing of lives. And, as Ambroise Pare addresses himself to the young surgeon, so I venture to address myself to the young biographer. I assume that you are not writing of somebody remote; that you are impelled by friendship, or by home-love, to write of somebody who has lately died. It goes without saying, that you will start on the ordinary lines. You will collect materials, ask for letters and reminiscences, and visit places which will come into your book. Keep three note-books, and keep them separate; one for the transcription of letters, one for general notes, and one for the scribbling of rough drafts of sentences and plans for chapters. ii THE WRITING OF A LIFE 19 You will be tempted to make your book too long. There are lives which are worthy of " exhaustive ' writing : but they are few. Think rather of what you can leave out than of what you can get in. Surely you may be content with 300 or, at the most, 350 pages. The War has touched everything, even biography; our young men have been killed: we are not in the mood for long books in two volumes about men who died old in their beds. Besides, we cannot afford to buy them. You will need a model: and I think that a well- read man would advise you to take Carlyle's Life of Sterling, and Stevenson's Life of Fleeming Jenkin. Not that you can appropriate the style of either : but they have to perfection the gift of portraiture. Masterpieces of great size are useless, as models, to the likes of you and me. Here it comes into my head to say that you must be very careful over your first and last chapters. In the long stretch between them, you will go wrong again and again : be the more careful to begin and end your book well. Waste no time over his ancestors. Let him be born on the third page, or at the latest on the fourth. Beyond his grand- parents, you will hardly find anything: nor will your readers give much attention to anything that you find. Leave out the " good yeoman family " who spelt the name differently, and the " collateral branches." Avoid the didactic method of the 20 THE WRITING OF A LIFE n Life of Sir Francis Galton, which pushes us back through a series of Hanoverian and Stuart ghosts contributory to Galton, who arrives mottled all over with birthmarks, showing the importance of eugenics. Your man was what he was, and did what he did, and failed where he failed, more of himself than of heredity. Great-grandpapa, cut in sil- houette, with the family profile, is not important. Get your man born quick. But give endless thought to your description of his parents: they require all your skill, and more: you cannot be too diligent over them: but you must work in small compass, as if you were painting a pair of miniatures on ivory. Dismiss childhood and boyhood lightly. Neither grope in them for prophecies, nor quote Wordsworth, nor write as if the child were yours. Give the facts, and there stop. It is true that the letters of children may be admirable: a child's candid opinion of a new plaything may surpass a man's opinion of the League of Nations: therefore capture your reader, if you can, straight away, with chapter one: but do not spin it out with hints and comments. Your first chapter and your last are as different as birth and death. You and your reader, side by side with the man who lived the life, journey through the book : it is like the story of the walk to Emmaus. At first, you do not know him, and you tell him the news about him, as if he were a stranger: then he ii THE WRITING OF A LIFE 21 expounds to you the things concerning himself: till you cannot let him go, and he stays with you, and at the point where you know him, there he vanishes. So this last chapter will be written with a heart that burned within you on the way. But you will not call the attention of the public to your heart. With him dying, nobody wants to hear you crying, or to see you putting the room tidy. Besides, you cannot wish to be heard or seen: you prefer to let your reader be alone with him. Do not be afraid to write out the details of his last illness, and his death. They touch that in us which is natural and wholesome. Lewis Nettleship has said, " Death doesn't count." But, in your book, it does count. Think how many written lives are dulled and padded so thick with common stuff that we hardly see what the man was made of : but his death is slurred over, as if something were wrong with it. There is no excuse for this want of proportion. You have told us how he faced life: tell us how he faced loss of life. End your book there. If you have failed, in the book, to make him explain himself, it is too late now for you to redeem that failure by any attempt to explain him. We do not want an extra chapter or half- chapter, your analysis of his temperament, your summing-up of his influences, your verdict on his doings. You would produce only a few laborious pages, not worth reading. 22 THE WRITING OF A LIFE n But do not, for fear of dragging on, be awkwardly abrupt. Do not ask us as it were to shut the book with a slam on the bare announcement of his death on such a day at such an hour. I venture to think that the Life of Pasteur, which is one of the best books in the world, ends too abruptly. " On Satur- day, September 28, 1895, at 4.40 in the afternoon, very peacefully, he passed away." The whole chapter is of exquisite beauty; but these words are hardly strong enough to be the last words of all. As, at the end of Hamlet, there is a dead march, and a peal of ordnance is shot off, so you must arrange a loyal and reverent leave-taking. But you will not be so unwise as to end your book with any sudden reference, the first of its kind, to his religion: or, even more unwise, with a tag of verse. Nobody cares for your flourished text from Browning or the Bible. Set yourself to think out what he would have liked. Some saying of his, or some turning-point in his course, or some intimate memory of him, may suggest a good ending: so may the thought that his work did not stop when his life stopped. There are men whose work seems to die with them: actors, artists, orators, writers. It was mortal as they were mortal, and is immortal as they are immortal. But there are other men, whose work is developed in the work of their followers, and is extended to unforeseen pur- poses : you may be able to find a good ending, in ii THE WRITING OF A LIFE 23 this thought of work not arrested by death, but quickened and multiplied. I come now to your title-page, dedication, pre- face, and headings. I am Grandmama, planning little garments for the book that you are expecting. The title-page is the christening- robe : any amount of hand-made embroidery: I hate a bare title-page — So-and-so. By So-and-so. Illustrated. So-and-so. London. Why should your baby be dressed in this ugly shift for its public baptism ? Why should not your title-page be admired ? Here is the place for quotations. Do not hesitate between three passages, each of them exactly right : have all three of them : crowd the page. Your publisher will raise his eyebrows — " It will look so crowded." Why should it not ? But these annunciatory sayings must not be spoiled by small or ignoble type. Force yourself even to sacrifice one of them, that the survivors may be legible to us who can ill afford to buy books, and are lovers of booksellers' windows. If you care to exercise our brains with your quotations, you can set us a bit of French or of Latin to translate: but be careful to exercise our hearts : give us something to read, on your title-page, that shall be as drums and trumpets and warmth and colour. As a bare title-page is at fault, so is a bare dedi- cation. To So-and-so. What spark of interest is here ? If he or she to whom the book is dedicated has extorted a promise from you to say only To So- 24 THE WRITING OF A LIFE n and-so — well, you must keep your promise. But think what you might have said. Think how Stevenson would have done it. He would have written a little dedicatory letter, every word of it weighed, every line of it beautiful, yet without sign of effort : or a little poem, as good as his best prose. I am downright sorry for you, thus compelled not to dedicate but only to direct or label your book. It is not simplicity; it is sterility. A dedication ought to be what Plato says that a poet is, a light and winged and sacred creature. Still, To So-and- so may be better than a comprehensive phrase. To the Master, Fellows, and Undergraduates of Saint Jade's College. Or again, To All who were inspired by his Example 1 offer this Record of his Life. These omnibuses are clumsy vehicles: you cannot pay one compliment to such a load of passengers. Call your preface by its right name; do not call it a foreword. The intention of the preface is to say why you, of all people, took the work in hand; what materials you had for it, what help was given to you; and how you have used them. There is no need for a long descriptive list of helpers: you are free to thank them collectively. Try to keep your preface down to the outlines of the book: as a ground-plan at the beginning of a guide to a cathedral. Perhaps you will ask some person of authority to write an introduction to the book. You cannot ii THE WRITING OF A LIFE 25 write it yourself. Introductions are to commend books to the public : you cannot commend to us your own book: you preface, you do not introduce. If you forgo an introduction, you may need to amplify your preface. But, in that case, you must give to it your utmost skill, with endless patience. These few pages must be so delightful that all of us will read them. Now for your headings. I do not mean that you should head each chapter with a quotation: it is a poor device: but each of the left-hand pages must be headed with the man's name : I hardly know why. Each of the right-hand pages must be headed with the title of the chapter. If your publisher asks you to head each right-hand page differently — hundreds of headings, no two of them the same — resist him. Over the division of your chapters, you must not be the slave of time. Written lives ought not to tick like clocks. Break the monotony with a chapter on some special subject, or with a group of letters, or with passages of a diary. Resolutely avoid the use of appendices. Be sparing of foot-notes. Where you are driven to use a foot-note, let it be of sufficient length to command attention, and let it be printed in legible type. Have none of those jerky, slovenly, one-line foot- notes which merely vex the eye — See cb. vii, p. 100 — or again, This venerable lady died in the following year. The points of a good foot-note are (1) It is 26 THE WRITING OF A LIFE n essential to the purpose of the book. (2) It is long enough to be worth reading. (3) It is written very carefully, every line of it well thought-out. You will perhaps be tempted — as I know from my own excesses — to be prodigal of letters. The safest plan, I think, is to transcribe them all, to begin with, in whole or in part, into one or more big notebooks. There let them wait for you. Slowly, they will adapt themselves to your design, as it were by natural selection. What is vestigial will be repressed; what is vital will be developed. Leave them alone, thus to cancel or attract each other. It will clear your way a little; but not enough. The difficulty remains, that if you make use of a great multitude of letters, your book may be over- weighted : and if you reject all except " his best letters," you may lose the quiet homely touch. Besides, you are not sure of your ground. Did he like, or dislike, letter- writing ? Did he let himself go in his letters, or hold himself back in fear of affectation of style ? Was he favourable, or indifferent, or hostile, to self- consciousness ? Did he know, did he care, whether his letters would be published after his death ? Hold yourself free to amend his punctuation, his use of capitals and of words underlined, and so forth. Omit, where you can, the My dear and the Tours sincerely. Do not habitually put rows of dots, like buttons on a coat, to mark the leaving- ii THE WRITING OF A LIFE 27 out of sentences: we cannot guess what they stand for. Letters are to be edited as letters, not as ancient manuscripts. Where you need to add in brackets an explanatory word — for instance, the English for a Greek word, or the change of a man's title — use brackets shaped thus []. Keep brackets shaped thus () for ordinary use. Do what you will, the letters, in the precise lines of cold print, are not exactly what they were as he wrote them, as his friends received them. Try to keep the life in them, under these new conditions of rigidity and of formal spacing. I am thinking of Mr. Lytton Strachey's Life of Queen Victoria. I venture to doubt whether he ought to have printed in italics words once underlined; and in capitals, words twice underlined. A word printed in capitals now is much heavier than it was when she underlined it seventy years ago. Here are some scraps of advice left over. (1) Have no dealings with phenomenal, heterogeneous, reliable, adaptable, prater natural, practically, and the like dangerous words. (2) Make your own index: nobody can make it so well. (3) If he wrote books, give us a full and accurate bibliography. In the British Museum catalogue, you may come across two dates assigned to one book: the later is the publisher's date on the title-page; the earlier is the date when a copy of the book was sent to the Library. Go by the earlier date. (4) Avoid, except in your 28 THE WRITING OF A LIFE n preface, the use of the first person. Circumvent it where you can. With ingenuity, you may get through 300 or 350 pages without it. If, at this or that point, you cannot escape, use it boldly: spare us the uncomfortable sense that you are clumsily dodging; that you are disguising yourself as " one " or as " we." Last question of all. For whom are you writing ? Who are in the foreground of your mind, as you add page to page ? Probably there will be one man or woman, who knew him well, and knows you well. It will not always be the same figure : you will change one judge for another: you will face them one at a time, and submit something to each of them: some description, or opinion, or phrase. This invisible presence will guard you against cheap cleverness, bad style, helpless adverbs, parasitical adjectives — "l'adjectif, c'est l'ennemi du substantia" And there is the family. Do not imagine that they will want you to be untruthful. At the most, they will ask you, here or there, to reconsider and recast a sentence, or to leave out some anecdote which, after all, is hardly more than gossip. Surely you can do that much for them, without whom your book would be nowhere. It will occur to you, with a twinge of conscience, that you were posing, were trying to be brilliant, even to score off a dead man — oh, the least little score, no harm in it — still, you are not sorry to put your pen through the lines ii THE WRITING OF A LIFE 29 which vexed them, and to write something better; remembering that the book, every page of it, is about him, not about you. For your encouragement, let me tell you what George Eliot said to one of my people. " After all," she said, " biography is the only thing worth reading." And for your warning, let me remind you that men and women are mysterious creatures : we never get all the way down to the secret of them. There is no opening, in biography, for that sort of quantitative and qualitative analysis which is habitual in chemistry. You will be tempted to say that your man was inconsistent. Of course he was inconsistent: or he would not have been a man. But you do not explain mysteries by talking of inconsistency, as chemists talk of an irreducible residuum. You are out of your depth in his life: just as you are out of your depth in your own life. Ill REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES The conjunction of these two words is neither good Latin nor good English. I have just looked them up in my Latin dictionary. I find that circum- stances began life in the singular, not in the plural. The word was not in a hurry to begin life: it is post- Augustan : and it was not born in Latin, but was adopted from Greek. There is circumstantia hostium, circumstantia angelorum, and so forth : enemies surrounding, and angels encompassing. I do not know when the word began to be used in the plural. Circumstances are anything and everything round about us. Therefore, it is correct to say " under the circumstances." They are towering cliffs: we loitered on the beach, under the cliffs, and are caught between advancing sea and pathless rock. They are the high encircling walls of our besieged city, and we are herded under them for shelter. Likewise a dish- cover is circumstantial to the food under it: and the dome of the British Museum reading-room is circumstantial to the readers under it. But the best of all examples of circumstance 30 in REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES 31 comes in a verse of the Psalms — " The hills stand about Jerusalem: even so standeth the Lord round about His people." Those were the circumstances of a man in Jerusalem: he was under his own hills and his own God. I am the centre of my God and of my environment: two circumstances which make one circumstance: and that not as a ring round me, but as a sphere all round me. The other word is less proud; it crosses the stage of thought most impudently, with its hands in its pockets: it makes faces at me, trying to be funny. Of its antecedents, I find in the dictionary what I expected. To reduce, in good Latin, is to bring back, reinstate, restore. Constantine was reduced to Greece, and Mr. Asquith to the House of Commons. To reduce a dislocation, is to restore a bone to its original place: to reduce a temperature, is to bring a temperature down to its proper level. That was the meaning of the word: no hint of loss or failure: it was a word of success, of home-coming; the return to camp after a victory, the return to Rome for a triumph. But the prefix, the tricky featherweight re-, touched the word with a sense of withdrawal: Horace uses it of enfolded valleys. Gradually, it became a word of disheartenment and of disappointment: and at last it entered the service of Lady Poverty — one of the most incapable servants that she ever had — and we fell to talking of reduced circumstances. 32 REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES m This unhallowed conjunction of two words, both of them in the wrong, ought to be declared null and void. We might at least keep them apart. Addison has the phrase, " men easy in their circumstances." We might at least say of people, not that they are in reduced circumstances, but that they are reduced in their circumstances. It is we, not our circumstances, that are marked down. The question is, Are we marked down to our true worth, or below it ? Consider what has happened. Before 1914, reduced circumstances were brought about by ill-health, bereavement, advancing age, lowered efficiency, bad investments. Except this last — and even a bad investment may be nothing to be ashamed of — here are elemental forces, our natural enemies, invincible. It is not our fault, that we cannot hold out against them. Sure as death, whose front line they are, they will have their way with us. Then, the War : then, the hardship of the years after the War. Where shall we now find, for the victims of reduced circumstances, consola- tion ? It will not console them to hear from us that money, after all, is not everything. No one word more nearly describes what money is, than the word everything. Money is charity: they ache to be charitable. It is the saving of life : they ache to be saving lives. For every flower in this garden, there in REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES 33 is a crowd of people who cannot afford sixpenny- worth of flowers : for each dav's meals in this house, there is a crowd starved: for each fire in the house to-night, there is a crowd of children left cold : if I do but throw a log on my fire, some Austrian or Russian baby cries for it, and shivers and coughs: let alone London babies. What is there, that money is not ? It can be what it likes : either charity, or self- charity, which is the refreshing of our souls with an occasional wholesome pleasure. Once on a time, I was doctor to a home for poor governesses. I learned from them the cruelty of reduced circumstances: the inevitable closing- down of their energies. They were depressed, ill- nourished, inefficient. Youth and good looks and romance and hopefulness had taken leave of them. New methods of teaching had left them far behind — them and their wizened little accomplishments, which were like the monkeys that make worn-out barrel-organs attractive. These poor ladies waited for employment as the sick folk round the pool of Bethesda waited for health. But the only angel that could help them is called Money, and is covered with silver wings, and its feathers like gold. Be- tween them and that angel, all communication either way was cut off. I say and stick to it, that money is everything, if only you have enough. But a small fund, with a multitude of claims on it, is wellnigh useless. 3 34 REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES in Look at the dismal grinding slowness of the old- fashioned " voting charities." Or look at the stinginess of the Civil List Pensions. It is one of our national disgraces. Here is a recent award: To , in view of her late husband's services in the investigation and prevention of rinderpest, and in consideration of his death through contracting leprosy in the Public Service, .£50. Here is another : To , in consideration of the services rendered by her late husband in connection with inoculation against enteric and typhoid fevers, at considerable risk to his own health, and of her straitened cir- cumstances, ^50. These two men, by their work, and by their example, enriched the world: and we give to their widows this beggarly dole: and to how many do we give nothing ? When you think of what we spend on picture-palaces, football- matches, luxuries, drink, gambling, and wild- cat Government Departments, this Pensions List makes you howl with shame. A third flagrant example of the cruelty of reduced circumstances is the poverty of the clergy. They have no Union: they cannot strike. How does the poor parson still hold out, with the price of neces- saries rushing up round him ? Though he were the most useful and best educated man in the parish, he may have to go short of food and fuel, and his wife and children with him. He is never out of work : but there is no rise in the worth of livings to in REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES 35 meet the increased cost of living : there are parsons so poor that they might almost envy the bodies which they commit to the ground, beyond the need of necessaries. These poor governesses, widows, parsons, are help- less. During the War, it was easier for them to make light of hardship: but the closing- in of their circumstances, since 1 9 1 8, is pitiful. Their only hope is in the daily renewal of will, faith, and courage. Many of them achieve this renewal; they get as much happiness out of reduced circumstances as some of us get out of circumstances vastly expansive and expensive. I watch the divine conjuring trick; I sit and stare and applaud: I could have sworn that the hat was empty: I cannot imagine how they manage to produce from it yards of paper ribands, and crackers, and a rabbit. They go on: more yards of ribands, another handful of crackers, and bless my soul ! another rabbit. They are wonderful : I could kneel to them; and I blush, when they thank me for my kind attention. In the light of these victories of spirit over cir- cumstances, 1 amend my phrase, that money is everything. It is not will and faith and courage. Its power is not creative, but redemptive. " I think," says Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, " I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year." As- suredly, she would have been a better woman, though she mocks at the notion: " I could order half- a- 36 REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES in crown's worth of soup for the poor. I shouldn't miss it much out of five thousand a year." At the least, she could have been more honest : " I could pay everybody, if I had but the money." You and I, with that income, would have the time of our lives. Though money be powerless to create virtues and abilities, it is mighty powerful to sustain them. The arts, the sciences, love of learning, love of travel, quietness of thought, open-handed giving, hospitality — these are the delicate fruit-trees : money is the sheltering wall, the south aspect, the fertilised soil, the protective netting. The rougher fruits, the currants and the gooseberries, can look after themselves: but the apricots and the nec- tarines require every advantage. And some fruits are so fastidious that they must have hothouses, and a special gardener to cosset them : but these are hardly worth the bother of growing, except for the pride of exhibiting. What will you do with your five thousand a year ? I know what I will do with mine. First, I will so far enlarge my circumstances that I shall not feel reduced in them, nor straitened, from this time onward. It will be delightful, to ease them a bit, and breathe deep, as a tired woman takes off her stays: delightful, to forget them, and to ensure my life against a relapse of anxiety over them. It will not cost much. The War, and the present, and the near future, proclaim the absurdity of cost- in REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES 37 ing much. I shall have plenty of money for other delights. Generosity, after all these years of abstinence, shall send me reeling down unfamiliar channels: I will subscribe to strange charities, be lavish of unexpected gifts, put explosive donations in dusty collecting- boxes and flat- chested offertory- bags, tip small children fantastically — play, play, play with my money. Nor will I stop here. Better fun still, to let other folk join in the game. As in some old fresco — Florence, Padua, I forget where I saw it — Christ descends into Hell and sets free its prisoners, so shall my redemptive money shake the walls of reduced circumstances, and break the gates, and set souls free to be generous. Here I sit in my arm-chair and spin sentences, with a brain at one end and a pen at the other. But I am haunted by the image of the sufferings of my own class. I can lay this ghost, for a day or two, if I set my thoughts on the damnable torture and wholesale slavery of my class in Russia, or on its misery in Austria : but what is the good of a day or two ? Or I can start on the lines of Matthew Arnold's "Consolation." My class is down: yes, but another class is up. I do not get far on these lines : for the classes that are up have not yet grasped the idea of the redemptive power of money. But things will mend: and the most that my class can do, is to wait and work for their mending. 34851 17 IV CATCH-WORDS We say of a voluble speaker that he has words at his command. It might be truer to say that they have him at theirs. He is their servant, who ought to be their master: he is conscious that he is using them, not conscious that they are using him. But this cumulative power of a long series of words is less remarkable than the individual power of iso- lated words. For there are words that we cannot put into words. They are in our life as the stars are in the sky: words of the first magnitude, and the Pole-star word that guides all of us; and familiar constellations, the Great Bears and Orions of lan- guage; and a whole Milky Way of adjectives and adverbs, and mere star- dust of prepositions. But this comparison will not hold. Words, in our life, are not stars in the sky, but candles in a draught. They flicker and flare, they throw vague shadows about the room. Their power is incon- stant; it comes and goes; we cannot foretell the shiftings of it. That is why we talk of catch- words. They have power, but it does not endure. They wait their opportunity, they look out for their 38 iv CATCH-WORDS 39 chance. They range from the transient slang of the day to the popular phrases which decide a general election — catch- words, all of them, self-appointed fishers of men, casting their nets round us. Years ago, at Sennen in Cornwall, I watched a take of pilchards; the moving stretch of darkness under the waves, as the shoal came inland; the huer on the hillside, shouting and signalling to the boats; the great seine-net drawn across the bay, and closed; thousands and thousands of pilchards ladled-up, with baskets and buckets, till the huge barges were down to the water-line with fish. That is what happens to us, when we swim into the net of a catch-word. It seems to us, while we are out- side it, a very fragile, harmless, indefinite fabric, which has drifted our way by accident, not by design; we play round it, knocking-up against the shadowy meshes, and they yield to a touch: but we find ourselves caught before we know where we are. To make a list of outstanding catch-words, preju- dice and ignorance must lend a hand. Philosophers refuse to make it : they know too much, they are too high above prejudice. Here is my list, at random, six words — Democracy, Labour, Peace, Militarism, Reconstruction, Internationalism. It shows up, on the clean page, as a fool's waste of ink. Besides, as Mrs. Weir says, " Keep me, my dear ! This is poleetical. Ye must never ask me anything polee- tical." But what is not political ? And are they 40 CATCH-WORDS iv not catch- words ? Democracy, when it implies that one class is Demos more than another; Labour, when it implies that labour is separable from work; Peace, when it tempts us to think of peace without thinking of war; Internationalism, when it tempts us to think lightly of our own country. The two remaining words are hardly less ambiguous. But how did I come to leave out Proletariat from my list ? Militarism. If only we had a Who's Who of words, and their derivations.* Miles, a soldier: but why does mil- denote, soldiering ? Because, Varro says, a Roman regiment was mille, a thousand men. The soldier is a man in a thousand. I have often thought it of him. Note the degeneracy, the change for the worse, from miles to militarism — unhappy word, alien to our language. It has been agent provocateur to entrap us. It is played-out now: and the sooner it is forgotten, the better. * " A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages, — may not be able to speak any but his own, — may have read very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above aD, he is learned in the -peerage of words ; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their inter-marriages, distant relation- ships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at any time, and in any company." Ruskin: Sesame and Lilies. iv CATCH-WORDS . 41 Militarism and Superman are the last of the great line of German words naturalised as British subjects and introduced into our literature by Coleridge, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Some day, the line will begin again, with representatives more honourable to Germany. Militarism was over- worked, in the evil years before the War, as an epithet ad invidiam against our prophets; and, by a turn of thought, against the enforcement of law and order: " Prussian militarism," if the police hit out at a brutal crowd. Moreover, the word helped to persuade some of us not only to think lightly of the Army, but to think of the Army without thinking of the Navy. We are wiser now. But in the days before The Day, indifference to the Navy, and civilian conceit toward the Army, were two of our national sins. During the War, we did not hear much of the old belief that nations, as nations, are punished for their sins. We were properly sure of the righteousness of our cause: we were not in the mood to imagine that the War had been " sent to punish us," had been inflicted on us by " an angry God." But no religion can rid itself absolutely of some sort of belief in national punishment. Our phrases for it are childish and grotesque: we cannot measure the principles of individual, let alone national, punishment: but there the belief is, logical or illogical. This was not the least of our pre- War sins, that we 42 CATCH-WORDS iv despised " the common soldier." Pre- War is an ill-defined term : I am thinking a long way back : the sin was old and habitual. We dressed him as if we were mad — tight skimpy lobster- jacket, stifling collar, long black insect legs, silly brimless little cap — a suit of clothes for a man with neither brain nor heart, neither lungs nor bowels. We neglected his health: we put him in overcrowded and badly ventilated barracks, and he died of consumption. He was ill- paid, his uniform was excluded from theatres, he was shunned as a fellow-traveller, he figured in caricatures and comic valentines, and was in every pantomime as the clown's victim. Let him go and get drunk, round the corner, where we shall not see him. We were in love with business, and with the idol that we called Peace. We were so proud of discovering the rights and the wrongs of the working man, that we failed to discover the rights and the wrongs of the fighting man. Some trace of this vulgar contempt for the common soldier, even after the South African War, was in us up to 1914, when he set to work not only to save us, but to shame us. In the light of 1914- 191 8, our former insolence has the unmistakable hangdog look of a sin found out. Militarism, as a word of party- politics, went to its grave on the day when we buried the common soldier in Westminster Abbey. But if, or when, after many years of what we call Peace, we relapse, this devil will come back into us. iv CATCH-WORDS 43 Reconstruction. " Whatever you write about," somebody said to me, " don't write about reconstruction." She was tired of the monotony of the word. Before the War, everything was at the cross-roads: during the War, everything was in the melting-pot: after the War, everything was waiting for reconstruc- tion. It was more than a word: it was a solemn league and covenant. But the exaltation of words does not save them from offhand use : none of them is inviolable. It is no disgrace to us, that we were anxious to help the Lord to build-up Zion : but we were unduly confident of our ability to help : and our ambitious talk was concerned more with the name of recon- struction than with its nature. Reconstruction is incessant movement, incessant creation. Every- thing is on the run, and no man goes down twice into the same stream. All the way from here to the ultimate stars and beyond them, nothing is the same for two moments together. Every creature, seed, blade of grass, drop of water, grain of dust, is changing and shifting its constituent atoms: and every atom is a whirling system of myriads of less than atoms. Everything is everlasting, because nothing is permanent. Mr. Babbage, the inventor of the calculating- engine, says that the vibrations of the blow struck by Cain when he murdered Abel 44 CATCH-WORDS iv are still going on, somehow, somewhere. None of us can stir so much as a finger or a nerve- cell with- out upsetting everything. If I do but sneeze, the Universe has to be reconstructed. It made me sneeze; and my vibrations rebounded into illimitable space, and were lost among the stars, but not an- nulled. As with physical, so with political reconstruction. If the stirring of my finger affects, as it certainly does, the balance of the Universe, no less do I affect the balance of Europe when I subscribe, or refuse to subscribe, five shillings to the League of Nations Union. It is terrible, to be thus responsible to interstellar space and Europe: I must find some intelligible meaning in my omnipotence, some practical use for it. My only chance here is to drop into myself. The Universe and Europe are old enough to be trusted out of my sight. All talk of reconstruction cried aloud that we must make an effort. Every newspaper hurled this text at us, and preached on it. We must set our teeth, be grim and resolute, shoulder our burden, fulfil our destiny. Indomitable, stalwart, inde- fatigable — these crashing adjectives thundered at us. But I am not We. Through all the din about Us, I heard the individual Mrs. Chick telling the individual Mrs. Dombey to make an effort. Mrs. Dombey could not; she was dying, and she drifted out of the clutch of Mrs. Chick's advice : the history iv CATCH-WORDS 45 of Dombey and Son begins where she leaves off. If she had made an effort, and had got well, every constituent figure in the book would have been shifted, would have behaved otherwise. But none of us can shift nations, or make them behave otherwise. The newspapers, with that impudent plural, had no message for the individual man or woman. There is a line of Hesiod — epya veu)V, /3ou\cu re jxeatov, ev^ai re yepovrutv — that is to say, The works of the young, and the counsels of the middle-aged, and the prayers of the old. But this or that man, getting old, past the works of the young, not in the counsels of the middle- aged, and unable to believe that he can advance international politics by praying for them, is not of much use. Now and again, he will be of some passing influence, in a little sphere so close round him that it is rather a shell than a sphere. He will be thrifty of argument; he will handle silence, as a weapon, with adroitness. There will be moments when the young take his advice over their works; when the middle-aged refer to him some point in their counsels; when he forgets his age in a touch of unexpected sympathy with new causes: but that will be all. It is absurd to talk to him about clenched teeth and iron wills. He is content to believe — not with- out misgivings — that there are men of supreme authority, men in highest office, to be, if they can, 46 CATCH-WORDS iv the surveyors, architects, masons, carpenters, artists of the building-up of Zion, when the plans and the estimates have been put through. He is none of them: besides, he will be dead before the founda- tions are well and truly laid. He is conservative, not constructive: re- conservative, not reconstruc- tive; his only job is not building, but the occasional mending of bits of second-hand furniture, just to make them hold together, for a few regular custo- mers: and he prefers to work alone, in a very small shop, in a very small way. A man like that, the more he hears of recon- struction, the more he thinks of self-reconstruction. There is nothing to be done for him, except to leave him, where he desires to be left, in his shell. Proletariat. I wish that I could be sure of living to see this horrid word dead at my feet. What is it here for ? Whom does it please ? Why does it end in a rattle of syllables that no other word, except commis- sariat, ever makes ? It is a word of contempt and class-hatred. It has taken advantage of our ignor- ance of Latin; it has played on our weakness for long words; it has crept into favour with many of us who cannot translate it, but think that a word so unusual is bound to be significant. This villainous word is of great age : it has had time IV CATCH-WORDS 47 to repent. Proletarius, says the dictionary, " Ac- cording to a division of the people by Servius Tullius, a citizen of the lowest class, who served the state not with his property, but only with his children {