First and Last
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H. Belloc >> First and Last
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The old man, then, I say, would have nothing to do with first
principles, and he reasserted his position that, in the concrete, in the
existent world, The Fraud no longer paid.
This said for the sixth or seventh time, he drank some brandy to put
heart into him and climbed up into his little cart, I by his side. He
hit the white horse with a stick, making at the same time an
extraordinary shrill noise with his mouth, like a siren, and the horse
began to slop and sludge very dolefully towards Bavai.
"This horse," said Mr. The Duke, "is a wonderfully good horse. He goes
like the wind. He is of Arab extraction, and comes from Africa."
With these words he gave the horse another huge blow with his stick, and
once more emitted his piercing cry. The horse went neither faster nor
slower than before, and seemed very indifferent to the whole
performance.
"He is from Africa," said Mr. The Duke again, meditatively. "Do you know
Africa?"
Africa with the French populace means Algiers. I answered that I knew
it, and that in particular I knew the road southward from Constantine.
At this he looked very pleased, and said:
"I was a soldier in Africa. I deserted seven times."
To this I made no answer. I did not know how he wanted me to take it, so
I waited until he should speak again, which he soon did, and said:
"The last time I deserted I was free for a year and a half. I used to
conduct beasts; that was my trade. When they caught me I was to have
been shot. I was saved by the tears of a woman!"
Having said this the old man pulled out a very small pipe and filled it
with exceedingly black tobacco. He lit it, then he began talking again
rather more excitedly.
"It is a terrible thing and an unhappy thing none the less," he went on,
"that a man should be taken out to be shot and should be saved by the
tears of a woman." Then he added, "Of what use are wars? How foolish it
is that men should kill each other! If there were a war I would not
fight. Would you?"
I said I thought I would; but whether I should like to or not would
depend upon the war.
He was eager to contradict and to tell me that war was wrong and stupid.
Having behind him the logical training of fifteen Christian centuries he
was in no way muddle-headed upon the matter. He saw very well that his
doctrine meant that it was wrong to have a country, and wrong to love
it, and that patriotism was all bosh, and that no ideal was worth
physical pain or trouble. To such conclusions had he come at the end of
his life.
The white horse meanwhile slouched; Bavai grew somewhat nearer as we sat
in silence after his last sentence. He was turning many things over in
his mind. He veered off on to political economy.
"When the rich man at the Manufactory here, the place where they sell
phosphates for the land, when he stands beer to all the workmen and to
the countryside, I always say, 'Fools! All this will be put on to the
cost of the phosphates; they will cost you more!'"
Mr. The Duke did not accept John Stuart Mill's proposition upon the cost
of production nor the general theories of Ricardo upon which Mill's
propositions were based. In his opinion rent was a factor in the cost of
production, for he told me that butter had gone up because the price of
land was rising near the towns. In what he next said I found out that he
was not a Collectivist, for he said a man should own enough to live
upon, but he said that this was impossible if rich people were allowed
to live. I asked him what the politics of the countryside were and how
people voted. He said:
"The politicians trick the people. They are a heap of worthlessness."
I asked him if he voted, and he said "yes." He said there was only one
way to vote, but I did not understand what this meant.
Had time served I should have asked him further questions--upon the
nature of the soul, its ultimate fate, the origin of man and his
destiny, whether mortal or immortal; the proper constitution of the
State, the choice of the legislator, the prince, and the magistrate; the
function of art, whether it is subsidiary or primary in human life; the
family; marriage. Upon the State he had already informed me, and also
upon the institution of property, and upon his view of armies. Upon all
those other things he would equally have given me a clear reply, for he
was a man that knew his own mind, and that is more than most people can
say.
But we were now in Bavai, and I had no time to discover more. We drank
together before we parted, and I was very pleased to see the honest look
in his face. With more leisure and born to greater opportunities he
would have been talked about, this Man of Malplaquet. He had come to his
odd conclusions as the funny people do in Scandinavia and in Russia, and
among the rich intellectuals and usurers in London and Berlin; but he
was a jollier man than they are, for he could drive a horse and lie
about it, and he could also milk a cow. As we parted he used a phrase
that wounded me, and which I had only heard once before in my life. He
said:
"We shall never see each other again!"
Another man had once said this thing to me before. This man was a farmer
in the Northumbrian hills, who walked with me a little way in the days
when I was going over Carter Fell to find the Scots people, many, many
years ago. He also said: "We shall never meet again!"
The Game of Cards
A youth of no more than twenty-three years entered a first-class
carriage at the famous station of Swindon in the county of Wiltshire,
proposing to travel to the uttermost parts of the West and to enjoy a
comfortable loneliness while he ruminated upon all things human and
divine; when he was sufficiently annoyed to discover that in the further
corner of the carriage was sitting an old gentleman of benevolent
appearance, or at any rate a gentleman of benevolent appearance who
appeared in his youthful eyes to be old.
For though the old gentleman was, as a fact, but sixty, yet his virile
beard had long gone white and the fringes of hair attaching to his
ostrich egg of a head confirmed his venerable appearance.
When the train had started the young man proceeded in no very good
temper and with great solemnity to fill a pipe. He turned to his senior,
who was watching him in a very paternal and happy manner, and said
formally:
"I hope you do not mind my smoking, sir?"
"Not at all," said the old boy; "it is a habit I have long grown
accustomed to in others."
The young man bowed in a somewhat absurd fashion and felt for his
matches. He discovered to his no small mortification that he had none.
He was so used to his pipe after a meal that he really could not forgo
it. He came off his perch by at least three steps and asked the old man
very gently whether he had any matches.
The older man produced a box and at the same time brought out with it a
little notebook and a playing card which happened to be in his pocket.
The young man took the matches and lit his pipe, surveying the old man
the while with a more complacent eye.
"It is very kind of you, sir," he said a little less stiffly. He handed
back the matches, wrapped his rug round his legs, sat down in his place,
and knowing that one should prolong the conversation for a moment or two
after a favour, said: "I see that you play cards."
"I do," said the old man simply; "would you like a game?"
"I don't mind," said the young man, who had always heard that it was
unmanly and ridiculous to refuse a game of cards in a railway carriage.
The elder man laughed merrily in his strong beard as he saw his junior
begin to spread somewhat awkwardly a copy of a newspaper upon his knees.
"I'll show you a trick worth two of that," he said, and taking one of
the first-class cushions, which alone of railway cushions are movable
from its place, he came over to the corner opposite the young man and
made a table of the cushion between them. "Now," said he genially,
"what's it to be?"
"Well," said the young man like one who expounds new mysteries, "do you
know piquet?"
"Oh, yes," said his companion with another happy little laugh of
contentment with the world. "I'll take you on. What shall it be?"
"Pennies if you like," said the young man nonchalantly.
"Very well, and double for the Rubicon."
"How do you mean?" said the young man, puzzled.
"You will see," said the old man, and they began to play.
The game was singularly absorbing. At first the young man won a few
pounds; then he lost rather heavily, then he won again, but not quite
enough to recoup. Then in the fourth game he won, so that he was a
little ahead, and meanwhile the old man chatted merrily during the
discarding or the shuffling: during the shuffling especially. He looked
out towards the downs with something of a sigh at one moment, and said:
"It's a happy world."
"Yes," answered the younger man with the proper lugubriousness of youth,
"but it all comes to an end."
"It isn't its coming to an end," said the elder man, declaring a point
of six, "that's not the tragedy; it's the little bits coming to an end
meanwhile, before the whole comes to an end: that's the tragedy...." But
he added with another of his jolly laughs: "We must play. Piquet takes
up all one's grey matter."
They played and the young man lost again, but by a very narrow margin:
it was quite an absorbing game. As they shuffled again the young man
said:
"What did you mean by the little bits stopping, or whatever it was?"
"Oh," said the old man as though he couldn't remember, and then he
added: "Oh, yes, I mean you'll find, as you grow older, people die and
affections change, and, though it seems silly to mention it in company
with higher things, there's what Shelley called the 'contagion of the
world's slow stain.'"
Then their conversation was interrupted by the ardour of the game; but
as they played the young man was ruminating, and he had come to the
conclusion that his senior was imperfectly educated and was probably of
the middle classes, whereas he himself was destined to be a naval
architect, and with that object had recently left the university for an
office in the city. The young man thought that a man properly educated
would never quote a tag: he was wrong there. As he had allowed his
thoughts to wander somewhat the young man lost that game rather heavily,
and at the end of it he was altogether about ten shillings to the bad.
It was his turn to shuffle. The older man was at leisure to speak, and
did so rather dreamily as he gazed at the landscape again.
"Things change, you know," he said, "and there is the contagion of the
world's slow stain. One gets preoccupied: especially about money. When
men marry they get very much preoccupied upon that point. It's bad for
them, but it can't be helped."
"You cut," said the young man.
His elder cut and they played again. This time as they played their game
the old man broke his rule of silence and continued his observations
interruptedly:
"Four kings," he said.... "It isn't that a man gets to think money
all-important, it is that he has to think of it all the time.... No,
three queens are no good. I said four kings.... four knaves.... The
little losses of money don't affect one, but perpetual trouble about it
does, and" (closing up the majority of tricks which he had just gained)
"many a man goes on making more year after year and yet feels himself in
peril.... _And_ the last trick." He took up the cards to shuffle
them. "Towards the very end of life," he continued, "it gets less, I
suppose, but you'll feel the burden of it." He put the pack over for the
younger man to cut. When that was done he dealt them out slowly. As he
dealt he said: "One feels the loss of little material things: objects to
which one was attached, a walking-stick, or a ring, or a watch which one
has carried for years. Your declare."
The young man declared, and that game was played in silence. I regret to
say that the young man was Rubiconed, and was thirty shillings in the
elder's debt.
"We'll stop if you like" said the elder man kindly.
"Oh, no," said the youth with nonchalance, "I'll pay you now if you
like."
"Not at all, I didn't mean that," said the older man with a sudden prick
of honour.
"Oh, but I will, and we'll start fair again," said the young man.
Whereupon he handed over his combined losses in gold, the older man gave
him change, they shuffled again, and they went on with their play.
"After all," said the older man, musing as he confessed to a point of no
more than five, "it's all in the day's work.... It's just a day's work,"
he repeated with a saddened look in his eyes, "it's a game that one
plays like this game, and then when it's over it's over. It's the little
losses that count."
That game again was unfortunate for the young man, and he had to shell
out fifteen and six. But the brakes were applied, Bristol was reached,
the train came to a standstill, and the young man, looking up a little
confused and hurried, said: "Hello, Bristol! I get out here."
"So do I," said the older man. They both stood up together, and the jolt
of the train as it stopped dead threw them into each other's arms.
"I am really very sorry," said the youth.
"It's my fault," said the old chap like a good fellow, "I ought to have
caught hold. You get out and I'll hand you your bag."
"It's very kind of you," said the young man. He was really flattered by
so much attention, but he knew himself what a good companion he was and
he could understand it; besides which they had made friends during that
little journey. He always liked a man to whom he had lost some money in
an honest game.
There was a heavy crowd upon the platform, and two men barging up out of
it saluted the old man boisterously by the name of Jack. He twinkled at
them with his eyes as he began moving the luggage about, and stood for a
moment in the doorway with his own bag in his right hand and the young
man's bag in his left. The young man so saw it for an instant, a fine
upstanding figure--he saw his bag handed by some mistake to the second
of the old man's friends, a porter came by at the moment pushing through
the crowd with a trolley, an old lady made a scene, the porter
apologized, the crowd took sides, some for the porter, some for the old
lady; the young man, with the deference of his age, politely asked
several people to make way, but when he had emerged from the struggle
his companion, his companion's friends, and his own bag could not be
found; or at any rate he could not make out where they were in the great
mass that pushed and surged upon the platform.
He made himself a little conspicuous by asking too many questions and by
losing his temper twice with people who had done him no harm, when, just
as his excitement was growing more than querulous, a very heavy,
stupid-looking man in regulation boots tapped him on the shoulder and
said: "Follow me." He was prepared with an oath by way of reply, but
another gentleman of equal weight, wearing boots of the same pattern,
linked his arm in his and between them they marched him away, to a
little private closet opening out of the stationmaster's room.
"Now, sir," said he who had first tapped him on the shoulder, "be good
enough to explain your movements."
"I don't know what you mean," said the young man.
"You were in the company," said the older man severely, "of an old man,
bald, with a white beard and a blue sailor suit. He had come from
London; you joined him at Swindon. We have evidence that he was to be
met at this station and it will be to your advantage if you make a clean
breast of it."
The young man was violent and he was borne away.
But he had friends at Bristol. He gave his references and he was
released. To this day he believes that he suffered not from folly, but
from injustice. He did not see his bag again, but after all it contained
no more than his evening clothes, for which he had paid or rather owed
six guineas, four shirts, as many collars and dress ties, a
silver-mounted set of brushes and combs, and useless cut-glass bottles,
a patented razor, a stick of shaving soap, and two very, very
confidential letters which he treasured. His watch, of course, was gone,
but not, I am glad to say, his chain, which hung dangling, though in his
flurry he had not noticed it. It made him look a trifle ridiculous. As
he wore no tie-pin he had not lost that, and beyond his temper he had
indeed lost nothing further save, possibly, a textbook upon
Thermodynamics. This book he _thought_ he remembered having put
into the bag, and if he had it belonged to his library, but he could not
quite remember this point, and when the Library claimed it he stoutly
disputed their claim.
In this dispute he was successful, but it was the only profit he made
out of that journey, unless we are to count his experience, and
experience, as all the world knows, is a thing that men must buy.
"King Lear"
The great unity which was built up two thousand years ago and was
called Christendom in its final development split and broke in pieces.
The various civilizations of its various provinces drifted apart, and it
will be for the future historian to say at what moment the isolation of
each from all was farthest pushed. It is certain that that point is
passed.
In the task of reuniting what was broken--it is the noblest work a
modern man can do--the very first mechanical act must be to explain one
national soul to another. That act is not final. The nations of Europe,
now so divided, still have more in common than those things by which
they differ, and it is certain that when they have at last revealed to
them their common origin they will return to it. They will return to it,
perhaps, under the pressure of war waged by some not Christian
civilization, but they will return. In the meanwhile, of those acts not
final, yet of immediate necessity in the task of establishing unity, is
the act of introducing one national soul to another.
Now this is best accomplished in a certain way which I will describe.
You will take that part in the letters of a nation which you maturely
judge most or best to reflect the full national soul, with its
qualities, careless of whether these be great or little; you will take
such a work as reproduces for you as you read it, not only in its
sentiment, but in its very rhythm, the stuff and colour of the nation;
this you will present to the foreigner, who cannot understand. His
efforts must be laborious, very often unfruitful, but where it is
fruitful it will be of a decisive effect.
Thus let anyone take some one of the immortal things that Racine wrote
and show them to an Englishman. He will hardly ever be able to make
anything of it at first. Here and there some violently emotional passage
may faintly touch him, but the mass of the verse will seem to him dead.
Now, if by constant reading, by association with those who know what
Racine is, he at last sees him--and these changes in the mind come very
suddenly--he will see into the soul of Gaul. For the converse task,
to-day not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of presenting
England to the French intelligence--or, indeed, to any other alien
intelligence--you may choose the play "King Lear."
That play has every quality which does reflect the soul of the community
in which and for which it was written. Note a few in their order.
First, it is not designed to its end; at least it is not designed
accurately to its end; it is written as a play and it is meant to be
acted as a play, and it is the uniform opinion of those versed in plays
and in acting that in its full form it could hardly be presented, while
in any form it is the hardest even of Shakespeare's plays to perform.
Here you have a parallel with a thousand mighty English things to which
you can turn. Is there not institution after institution to decide on,
so lacking a complete fitness to its end, larger in a way than the end
it is to serve, and having, as it were, a life of its own which proceeds
apart from its effect? This quality which makes so many English things
growths rather than instruments is most evident in the great play.
Again, it has that quality which Voltaire noted, which he thought
abnormal in Shakespeare, but which is the most national characteristic
in him, that a sort of formlessness, if it mars the framework of the
thing and spoils it, yet also permits the exercise of an immeasurable
vitality. When a man has read "King Lear" and lays down the book he is
like one who has been out in one of those empty English uplands in a
storm by night. It is written as though the pen bred thoughts. It is
possible to conjecture as one reads, and especially in the diatribes,
that the pen itself was rapid and the brain too rapid for the pen. One
feels the rush of the air. Now, this quality is to be discovered in the
literature of many nations, but never with the fullness which it has in
the literature of England. And note that in those phases of the national
life when foreign models have constrained this instinct of expansion in
English verse, they never have restrained it for long, and that even
through the bonds established by those models the instinct of expansion
breaks. You see it in the exuberance of Dryden and in the occasional
running rhetoric of Pope, until it utterly loosens itself with the end
of the eighteenth century.
The play is national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable
things--nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things--which,
in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history
so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every play
of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of the
English turn, has sent out points further into the region of what is not
known than Shakespeare has in sudden flashes of phrase. But "King Lear,"
though it contains a lesser number of lines of this mystical and
half-religious effect than, say, "Hamlet," yet as a general impression
is the more mystical of the two plays. The element of madness, which in
"Hamlet" hangs in the background like a storm-cloud ready to break, in
"King Lear" rages; and it is the use of this which lends its amazing
psychical power to the play. It has been said (with no great profundity
of criticism) that English fiction is chiefly remarkable for its power
of particularization of character, and that where French work, for
instance, will present ideas, English will present persons. The judgment
is grossly insufficient, and therefore false, but it is based upon a
proof which is very salient in English letters, which is that, say, in
quite short and modern work the sense of complete unity deadens the
English mind. The same nerve which revolts at a straight road and at a
code of law revolts against one tone of thought, and the sharp contrast
of emotional character, not the dual contrast which is common to all
literatures, but the multiple contrast, runs through "King Lear" and
gives the work such a tone that one seems as one reads it to be moving
in a cloud.
The conclusion is perhaps Shakespearean rather than English, and in a
fashion escapes from any national labelling. But the note of silence
which Shakespeare suddenly brings in upon the turmoil, and with which he
is so fond of completing what he has done, would not be possible were
not that spirit of expansion and of a kind of literary adventurousness
present in all that went before.
It is indeed this that makes the play so memorable. And it may not be
fantastic to repeat and expand what has been said above in other words,
namely, that King Lear has something about him which seems to be a
product of English landscape and of English weather, and if its general
movement is a storm its element is one of those sudden silences that
come sometimes with such magical rapidity after the booming of the wind.
The Excursion
It is so old a theme that I really hesitate to touch it; and yet it is
so true and so useful that I will. It is true all the time, and it is
particularly useful at this season of the year to men in cities: to all
repetitive men: to the men that read these words. What is more, true as
it is and useful as it is, no amount of hammering at people seems to get
this theme into their practice; though it has long ago entered into
their convictions they will not act upon it in their summers. And this
true and useful theme is the theme of little freedoms and discoveries,
the value of getting loose and away by a small trick when you want to
get your glimpse of Fairyland.
Now how does one get loose and away?
When a man says to himself that he must have a holiday he means that he
must see quite new things that are also old: he desires to open that
door which stood wide like a window in childhood and is now shut fast.
But where are the new things that are also the old? Paradoxical fellows
who deserve drowning tell one that they are at our very doors. Well,
that is true of the eager mind, but the mind is no longer eager when it
is in need of a holiday. And you can get at the new things that are also
the old by way of drugs, but drugs are a poor sort of holiday fabric. If
you have stored up your memory well with much experience you can get
these things from your memory--but only in a pale sort of way.
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