I was not surprised; indeed, my acquaintanceship with theatre harpies would prevent my feeling any surprise at such a demand, even in my waking moments, but I was, I must honestly confess, considerably annoyed. It was not the payment of the cloakroom fee that I so much minded – I offered to give that to the man then and there. It was the parting with my legs that I objected to.
I said I had never heard of such a rule being attempted to be put in force at any respectable theatre before, and that I considered it a most absurd and vexatious regulation. I also said I should write to the Times about it.
The man replied that he was very sorry, but that those were his instructions. People complained that they could not get to and from their seats comfortably, because other people’s legs were always in the way; and it had, therefore, been decided that, in future, everybody should leave their legs outside.
It seemed to me that the management, in making this order, had clearly gone beyond their legal right, and under ordinary circumstances I should have disputed it. Being present, however, more in the character of a guest than in that of a patron, I hardly liked to make a disturbance, and so I sat down and meekly prepared to comply with the demand.
I had never before known that the human leg did unscrew. I had always thought it was a fixture. But the man showed me how to undo them, and I found that they came off quite easily.
The discovery did not surprise me any more than the original request that I should take them off had done. Nothing does surprise one in a dream.
I dreamt once that I was going to be hanged, but I was not at all surprised about it. Nobody was. My relations came to see me off, I thought, and to wish me “Goodbye!” They all came, and were all very pleasant, but they were not in the least astonished – not one of them. Everybody appeared to regard the coming tragedy as one of the most-naturally-to-be-expected things in the world.
They bore the calamity, besides, with an amount of stoicism that would have done credit to a Spartan father. There was no fuss, no scene. On the contrary, an atmosphere of mild cheerfulness prevailed.
Yet they were very kind. Somebody – an uncle, I think – left me a packet of sandwiches and a little something in a flask, in case, as he said, I should feel peckish on the scaffold.
It is “those twin jailers of the daring” thought, Knowledge and Experience, that teach us surprise. We are surprised and incredulous when, in novels and plays, we come across good men and women, because Knowledge and Experience have taught us how rare and problematical is the existence of such people. In waking life, my friends and relations would, of course, have been surprised at hearing that I had committed a murder, and was, in consequence, about to be hanged, because Knowledge and Experience would have taught them that, in a country where the law is powerful and the police alert, the Christian citizen is usually pretty successful in withstanding the voice of temptation, prompting him to commit crime of an illegal character.
But into Dreamland, Knowledge and Experience do not enter. They stay without, together with the dull, dead clay of which they form a part; while the freed brain, released from their narrowing tutelage, steals softly past the ebony gate, to wanton at its own sweet will among the mazy paths that wind through the garden of Persephone.*
Nothing that it meets with in that eternal land astonishes it, because, unfettered by the dense conviction of our waking mind, that nought outside the ken of our own vision can in this universe be, all things to it are possible and even probable. In dreams, we fly and wonder not – except that we never flew before. We go naked, yet are not ashamed, though we mildly wonder what the police are about that they do not stop us. We converse with our dead, and think it was unkind that they did not come back to us before. In dreams, there happens that which human language cannot tell. In dreams, we see “the light that never was on sea or land”; we hear the sounds that never yet were heard by waking ears.
It is only in sleep that true imagination ever stirs within us. Awake, we never imagine anything; we merely alter, vary or transpose. We give another twist to the kaleidoscope of the things we see around us and obtain another pattern, but not one of us has ever added one tiniest piece of new glass to the toy.
A Dean Swift sees one race of people smaller, and another race of people larger, than the race of people that live down his own street. And he also sees a land where the horses take the place of men, and men take the place of horses. A Bulwer-Lytton lays the scene of one of his novels inside the earth instead of outside. A Rider Haggard introduces us to a lady whose age is a few years more than the average woman would care to confess to, and pictures crabs larger than the usual shilling or eighteen-penny size.* The number of so-called imaginative writers who visit the moon is legion, and for all the novelty that they find, when they get there, they might just as well have gone to Putney. Others are continually drawing for us visions of the world one hundred or one thousand years hence. There is always a depressing absence of human nature about the place; so much so that one feels great consolation in the thought, while reading, that we ourselves shall be comfortably dead and buried before the picture can be realized. In these prophesied Utopias everybody is painfully good and clean and happy, and all the work is done by electricity.
There is somewhat too much electricity, for my taste, in these worlds to come. One is reminded of those pictorial enamel-paint advertisements that one sees about so often now, in which all the members of an extensive household are represented as gathered together in one room, spreading enamel paint over everything they can lay their hands upon. The old man is on a stepladder, daubing the walls and ceiling with “cuckoo’s-egg green”, while the parlourmaid and the cook are on their knees, painting the floor with “sealing-wax red”. The old lady is doing the picture frames in “terracotta”. The eldest daughter and her young man are making sly love in a corner over a pot of “high-art yellow”, with which, so soon as they have finished wasting their time, they will, it is manifest, proceed to elevate the piano. Younger brothers and sisters are busy freshening up the chairs and tables with “strawberry-jam pink” and “jubilee magenta”. Every blessed thing in that room is being coated with enamel paint, from the sofa to the fire irons, from the sideboard to the eight-day clock. If there is any paint left over, it will be used up for the family Bible and the canary.
It is claimed for this invention that a little child can make as much mess with it as can a grown-up person, and so all the children of the family are represented in the picture as hard at work, enamelling whatever few articles of furniture and household use the grasping selfishness of their elders has spared to them. One is painting the toasting fork a “skim-milk blue”, while another is giving aesthetical value to the Dutch oven by means of a new shade of art green. The bootjack is being renovated in “old gold”, and the baby is sitting on the floor, smothering its own cradle with “flush-upon-a-maiden’s-cheek peach colour”.
One feels that the thing is being overdone. That family, before another month is gone, will be among the strongest opponents of enamel paint that the century had produced. Enamel paint will be the ruin of that once happy home. Enamel paint has a cold, glassy, cynical appearance. Its presence everywhere about the place will begin to irritate the old man in the course of a week or so. He will call it, “This damn’d sticky stuff!” and will tell the wife that he wonders she didn’t paint herself and the children with it while she was about it. She will reply, in an exasperatingly quiet tone of voice, that she does like that! Perhaps he will say next that she did not warn him against it, and tell him what an idiot he was making of himself, spoiling the whole house with his foolish fads. Each one will persist that it was the other one who first suggested the absurdity, and they will sit up in bed and quarrel about it every night for a month.
The children, having acquired a taste for smudging the concoction about, and there being nothing else left untouched in the house, will try to enamel the cat; and then there will be bloodshed, and broken wi
ndows, and spoilt infants, and sorrows and yells. The smell of the paint will make everybody ill, and the servants will give notice. Tradesmen’s boys will lean up against places that are not dry and get their clothes enamelled, and claim compensation. And the baby will suck the paint off its cradle and have fits.
But the person that will suffer most will, of course, be the eldest daughter’s young man. The eldest daughter’s young man is always unfortunate. He means well, and he tries hard. His great ambition is to make the family love him. But Fate is ever against him, and he only succeeds in gaining their undisguised contempt. The fact of his being “gone” on their Emily is, of itself, naturally sufficient to stamp him as an imbecile in the eyes of Emily’s brothers and sisters. The father finds him slow and thinks the girl might have done better, while the best that his future mother-in-law (his sole supporter) can say for him is that he seems steady.
There is only one thing that prompts the family to tolerate him, and that is the reflection that he is going to take Emily away from them.
On that understanding they put up with him.
The eldest daughter’s young man, in this particular case, will, you may depend upon it, choose that exact moment when the baby’s life is hovering in the balance, and the cook is waiting for her wages with her box in the hall, and a coal-heaver is at the front door with a policeman, making a row about the damage to his trousers, to come in, smiling, with a specimen pot of some new high art, squashed-tomato-shade enamel paint, and suggest that they should try it on the old man’s pipe.
Then Emily will go off into hysterics, and Emily’s male progenitor will firmly but quietly lead that ill-starred yet true-hearted young man to the public side of the garden gate – and the engagement will be “off”.
Too much of anything is a mistake, as the man said when his wife presented him with four new healthy children in one day. We should practise moderation in all matters. A little enamel paint would have been good. They might have enamelled the house inside and out, and have left the furniture alone. Or they might have coloured the furniture and let the house be. But an entirely and completely enamelled home – a home, such as enamel-paint manufacturers love to picture on their advertisements, over which the yearning eye wanders in vain, seeking one single square inch of unenamelled matter – is, I am convinced, a mistake. It may be a home that, as the testimonials assure us, will easily wash. It may be an “artistic” home, but the average man is not yet educated up to the appreciation of it. The average man does not care for high art. At a certain point, the average man gets sick of high art.
So, in these coming Utopias, in which our unhappy grandchildren will have to drag out their colourless existence, there will be too much electricity. They will grow to loathe electricity.
Electricity is going to light them, warm them, carry them, doctor them, cook for them, execute them, if necessary. They are going to be weaned on electricity, ruled and regulated and guided by electricity, buried by electricity. I may be wrong, but I rather think they are going to be hatched by electricity.
In the new world of our progressionist teachers, it is electricity that is the real motive power. The men and women are only marionettes – worked by electricity.
But it was not to speak of the electricity in them, but of the originality in them, that I referred to these works of fiction. There is no originality in them whatever. Human thought is incapable of originality. No man ever yet imagined a new thing – only some variation or extension of an old thing.
The sailor, when he was asked what he would do with a fortune, promptly replied:
“Buy all the rum and ’baccy there is in the world.”
“And what after that?” they asked him.
“Eh?”
“What would you buy after that – after you had bought all the rum and tobacco there was in the world? – what would you buy then?”
“After that? Oh! Um!” (A long pause.) “Oh!” (With inspiration.) “Why, more ’baccy!”
Rum and tobacco he knew something of, and could therefore imagine about. He did not know any other luxuries, therefore he could not conceive of any others.
So if you asked one of these Utopian-dreaming gentry what, after they had secured for their world all the electricity there was in the universe, and after every mortal thing in their ideal paradise was done and said and thought by electricity, they could imagine as further necessary to human happiness, they would probably muse for a while, and then reply, “More electricity.”
They know electricity. They have seen the electric light and heard of electric boats and omnibuses. They have possibly had an electric shock at a railway station for a penny.
Therefore, knowing that electricity does three things, they can go on and “imagine” electricity doing three hundred things, and the very great ones among them can imagine it doing three thousand things – but for them, or anybody else, to imagine a new force, totally unconnected with and different from anything yet known in nature would be utterly impossible.
Human thought is not a firework, ever shooting off fresh forms and shapes as it burns: it is a tree, growing very slowly – you can watch it long and see no movement – very silently, unnoticed. It was planted in the world many thousand years ago, a tiny, sickly plant. And men guarded it and tended it, and gave up life and fame to aid its growth. In the hot days of their youth, they came to the gate of the garden and knocked, begging to be let in, and to be counted among the gardeners. And their young companions without called to them to come back, and play the man with bow and spear, and win sweet smiles from rosy lips, and take their part amid the feast, and dance, not stoop with wrinkled brows, at weaklings’ work. And the passers-by mocked them and called shame, and others cried out to stone them. And still they stayed there labouring, that the tree might grow a little, and they died and were forgotten.
And the tree grew fair and strong. The storms of ignorance passed over it, and harmed it not. The fierce fires of superstition soared around it, but men leapt into the flames and beat them back, perishing, and the tree grew.
With the sweat of their brow have men nourished its green leaves. Their tears have moistened the earth about it. With their blood they have watered its roots.
The seasons have come and passed, and the tree has grown and flourished. And its branches have spread far and high, and ever-fresh shoots are bursting forth and ever-new leaves unfolding to the light. But they are all part of the one tree – the tree that was planted on the first birthday of the human race. The stem that bears them springs from the gnarled old trunk that was green and soft when white-haired Time was a little child; the sap that feeds them is drawn up through the roots that twine and twist about the bones of the ages that are dead.
The human mind can no more produce an original thought than a tree can bear an original fruit. As well might one cry for an original note in music as expect an original idea from a human brain.
One wishes our friends, the critics, would grasp this simple truth, and leave off clamouring for the impossible and being shocked because they do not get it. When a new book is written, the high-class critic opens it with feelings of faint hope, tempered by strong conviction of coming disappointment. As he pores over the pages, his brow darkens with virtuous indignation, and his lip curls with the God-like contempt that the exceptionally great critic ever feels for everybody in this world who is not yet dead. Buoyed up by a touching but totally fallacious belief that he is performing a public duty, and that the rest of the community is waiting in breathless suspense to learn his opinion of the work in question before forming any judgement concerning it themselves, he, nevertheless, wearily struggles through about a third of it. Then his long-suffering soul revolts, and he flings it aside with a cry of despair.
“Why, there is no originality whatever in this,” he says. “This book is taken bodily from the Old Testament. It is the story of Adam and Eve all over again. The h
ero is a mere man! With two arms, two legs and a head (so-called). Why, it is only Moses’s Adam under another name! And the heroine is nothing but a woman! And she is described as beautiful, and as having long hair. The author may call her ‘Angelina’ or any other name he chooses, but he has evidently, whether he acknowledges it or not, copied her direct from Eve. The characters are barefaced plagiarisms from the book of Genesis! Oh! To find an author with originality!”
One spring I went on a walking tour in the country. It was a glorious spring. Not the sort of spring they give us in these miserable times, under this shameless government – a mixture of east wind, blizzard, snow, rain, slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet and thunderstorms – but a sunny, blue-skied, joyous spring, such as we used to have regularly every year when I was a young man and things were different.
It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for those golden days, and as I wandered through the waking land and saw the dawning of the coming green and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening each day beneath the kisses of the sun, and looked up at the proud old mother trees, dandling their myriad baby buds upon their strong fond arms, holding them high for the soft west wind to caress as he passed laughing by, and marked the primrose yellow creep across the carpet of the woods, and saw the new flush of the fields, and saw the new light on the hills, and heard the new-found gladness of the birds, and heard from copse and farm and meadow, the timid callings of the little newborn things, wondering to find themselves alive, and smelt the freshness of the earth, and felt the promise in the air, and felt a strong hand in the wind, my spirit rose within me. Spring had come to me also, and stirred me with a strange new life, with a strange new hope. I too was part of Nature, and it was spring! Tender leaves and blossoms were unfolding from my heart. Bright flowers of love and gratitude were opening round its roots. I felt new strength in all my limbs. New blood was pulsing through my veins. Nobler thoughts and nobler longings were throbbing through my brain.
After-Supper Ghost Stories Page 11
