Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Now whether this offspring of mentality was like a real camel or not, history does not tell us. Probably it was not, any more than the new map of Europe planned by Prussian militarism will prove like the map of Europe as it will appear in the atlases published, let us say, in 1918. But even if the German camel was totally unrecognizable as such, its constructor had shown himself capable of entering on a higher plane of thought than is intelligible to the ordinary Englishman. The German, in fact, as we are beginning to learn, is able to sit down and think, and out of pure thought to build up an image. The English are excellent learners, quick to assimilate and apply what others have thought out, the French are vivid and keen observers, but neither have the power of sustained internal thought which characterizes the Teuton, who incidentally is quite the equal of the Englishman at learning and of the Frenchman at observation. The German, for instance, thought out the doctrine of submarine warfare, and to our grievous cost applied it to our shipping. Similarly they thought out the doctrine of trench warfare, supplemented by gas, then the French, with their marvellously quick powers of observation, saw and comprehended and applied. In fact, the two great German inventions conceived by them, and originally used by them, have been adopted and brought to a higher pitch of perfection by their adversaries. But if only any of our allied nations could pick up from them the power of concentrated and imaginative thought, for the root of the matter is imagination! We proverbially muddle through, and when occasion arises, by dint of a certain stubbornness and admirable stolidity, though pommelled and buffeted, eventually learn by experience a successful mode of resistance. But constitutionally, we appear incapable of initiating ideas. We cannot imagine an occasion, but can only meet the occasion when somebody else imagines it.

  Of all the disappointments of this year this is the root. We cannot invent: we can only counter. We have not the power of constructive imagination, which is the mother and father of original actions. But when our adversaries indulge in original actions, we can (on occasion) think out an answer to them which is perfectly effective. We can resist and we can hit back when we are hit, but at present we have not shown that we are capable of imagining and dealing the first blow. Perhaps this may come, for it goes without saying that we were notoriously unready at the beginning of the war, and had our hands full and overfull with countering the blows that were rained on us. We were on the defensive and could barely maintain the defence, and could not possibly have collected that coiled force which is necessary for any offensive movement. But if after sixteen months of war we do not begin to show signs of it, it is reasonable to wonder whether the cause of this is not so much that we lack the battering power, but that our statesmen and our generals lack the imagination out of which original plans are made. True, there have been two original schemes, namely, that of forcing the Dardanelles and capturing Bagdad, and if these show the quality of our originality, perhaps we are better without it ...

  It is natural that the stress of war should have brought out the deep-rooted, inherent qualities of the nations engaged, and those qualities are just those that strike you first in a man of whatever nationality. When you know him a little better, you think you detect all sorts of other qualities, but when you come really to know him — singly or collectively — he is usually just such as you first thought him to be. Indeed, it is as Francis said about the orange: the rind has the savour of the fruit within, between the two there is a layer of soft, pulpy stuff. But when you get through that, the man, the essential person is like the taste of the rind. This has been immensely true with regard to the war. On the surface the French strike anyone who comes in contact with them as full of admirable fervour: there is the strong, sharp odour about them, there is a savour that penetrates. Then you get to know them just a little better, and you find a woolly and casual touch about them, which you, in your ignorance born out of a little knowledge, take to be the real spirit of the French. But when intimate acquaintance, or the stripping of the surface takes place, how you must alter your estimate again, going back to your first impression. You meet the fervour, the strong sharp odour again, and it goes into the heart of the nation. The Frenchman is apt on first acquaintance to seem too genuine, too patriotically French to be real. But when you get within, when the stress of war has revealed the nation and shown the strong beating of its heart, how the fervour and the intensity of savour persist! What you thought was superficial you find to be the quality that dwells in the innermost. He will easily talk about La France and La gloire when you first get acquainted with him, but when he stands revealed you find that he talks about it easily because it is the spring and source of his being.

  The same holds with the German. When first you get speaking-acquaintance with a German, you consider him brutal and beery and coarse and loud-tongued. You penetrate a little further, and find him watching by the Rhine and musical and philosophical, a peaceful, aloof dreamer. Such, at any rate, was the experience of Lord Haldane. But when the pulpy, stringy layer is stripped off, when the stress of war makes penetration into his real self, you find him again to be as you first thought him, coarse and brutal and clamant, the most overweening individual in all creation. Both with the French and the German you revised your first impressions when you thought you began to know him, only to find when the real man is revealed that he is as you first thought him. And though it is the hardest thing in the world for anyone to form even an approximately true estimate of the race to which he belongs, I think that the same holds of the English. They are at heart very much what they appear to be on the surface, blundering but tenacious, slow to move, but difficult when once on the move to stop. But really, when I try to think what the English are like, I find I can form no conclusion about them, simply because I am of them.

  I have just had a long letter from Francis, a letter radiant with internal happiness. The exterior facts of life cannot much contribute to that, for the place where he now is consists, so he tells me, entirely of bare hill-side, lined with shallow trenches, bullets and swarms of drowsy flies. He hints in a cryptic manner his belief that he will not remain there very long, leaving me to make any conjecture I please. But in the lines and between them I read, as I said, a radiance of happiness. He knows, with a strength that throttles all qualms of the flesh, that does not, indeed, allow them to exist at all, the bright shining of the light invisible, that diffused illumination in which no shadow can be cast. And as in that walk we had on the downs, the knowledge fills him not only with inward bliss, but with intense physical enjoyment, so that he can be humorous over the horrors of existence on that damned promontory. He is genuinely amused: for nobody was ever such a poor hand at dissimulation as Francis. He finds things to enjoy in that hell; more than that, he finds that hell enjoyable: his letter breathed that serenity of well-being which is the least imitable thing in the world.

  Meantime, he wants the news of everyday happenings, “without any serious reflections, or the internal stomach-ache of pessimists.” These rather pointed remarks refer, I am afraid, to my last letter to him, to which he does not otherwise allude. He quotes Mr. Longfellow’s best-known poem (I am afraid also) in the spirit of mockery, and says:

  “‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ and if you doubt it, come out to Suvla Bay and see. We are damned earnest out here, and I haven’t seen anybody who doubts that Life is extremely real: so are the flies. What I want to know is the little rotten jokes and nonsense, the things you talk about when you don’t think what you are talking about. Here’s one: the other day I was opening a tin of potted meat, and a bit of shrapnel came and took the tin clean out of my hand. It didn’t touch me; it simply whisked it neatly away. Another inch and my hand would have gone with it. But I hope you don’t think I gave thanks for the lucky escape I had had. Not a bit: I was merely furious at losing the potted meat. It lay outside the trench (a trench out here is a tea-spoonful of earth and pebbles which you pile up in front of you, and then hide yourself behind it), and I spent the whole of the afternoon in castin
g for it, with a hook on a piece of string. I was much more interested in that than in the military operations. I wanted my potted meat, which I think you sent me. Well, what I should like you to write to me about, is the things that the part of me which wanted the potted meat would like to hear about. Patriotism and principles be blowed, bless them! That’s all taken for granted— ‘granted, I’m sure,’ as the kitchen-maid said.

  “FRANCIS.

  “P.S. — You alluded to a grey parrot, in one letter. For God’s sake, tell me about the grey parrot. You just mentioned a grey parrot, and then no more. Grey parrot is what I want, and your cat, and all the little, rotten things that are so tremendously important. Write me a grey parrot letter.”

  Well, the grey parrot is rather interesting ... and her name is Matilda, and if you want to know why she is Matilda, you have only got to look at her. If words have any suggestiveness to your mind, if there is to you any magic about them, or if they, unbidden, conjure up images, I should not be surprised if the word “Matilda” connoted to you a grey parrot. It would be more surprising if, when you become acquainted with my grey parrot, you did not become aware that she was Matilda. I don’t see how you can get away from the fact that she must, in the essentials of her nature, be Matilda. Presently you will see what Matilda-ism is: when it is stated, you will know that you knew it all along, but didn’t know you knew it. The same sort of thing happened to somebody, when he became aware that all his life he had been writing prose. And very good prose it was.... Here, then, begins the introduction to Matilda-ism, in general terms to be applied later.

  MATILDA-ISM

  We all of us know (even the most consistent of us) those baffling instincts which lead us to act in manners incompatible with each other, simultaneously. That is not so puzzling as it sounds (nor sounds quite as ungrammatical as it is), and an instance will clarify the principle. For who does not understand and in measure sympathize with the careful housewife who embarks on a two-shilling taxicab expedition in order to purchase some small household commodity at sixpence less than she could have bought it for across the road? The motive of her expedition is economy, and therefore she lashes out into bewildering expenditure in order to achieve it. Economy, in fact, is the direct cause of her indulging in totally unnecessary expenditure. She ties herself to the stake with one hand, ready to be burned for the sake of her faith, and offers incense to the heathen gods with the other.

  It is this strain of self-contradictory conduct that I unhesitatingly label Matilda-ism, for, as far as I am aware, there is no other succinct term in the English language which sums up and expresses it. (Besides, it is characteristic of my grey parrot, for as you shall presently see, this is what Matilda does.) You cannot explain this incompatibility of action and principle otherwise: it is not vacillation, it is not infirmity of purpose, for the economical housewife is one mass of purpose and her motive is as pure as Parsifal. Simply in pursuance of her economical design, she rushes into expense. Nor is it the sign of a weak intellect, for Matilda’s grasp of a subject is, like Mrs. Micawber’s, inferior to none, and yet Matilda is the great example of the quality which takes its name from her. She does not spare thought and industry, perhaps, if anything, she thinks too much, which may account for the inadequacy of her plumage. She has been ill, too, lately, which perhaps makes her plumage worse, for she has been suffering from some obscure affection of the brain. But since her illness her Matilda-ism has been more marked than ever, and I prefer to think that it is Thought which has accounted both for the illness and her abnormal moultings. She had that rare disease, beloved of novelists, called Brain-fever. People’s hair, we are told, falls out after brain-fever, and so did Matilda’s feathers. But I am sure that Matilda would sooner go naked, than cease to think.

  Unlike most women, Matilda does not care about her clothes, and unlike most birds, she does not scoop and preen herself after breakfast. She gives one shake, and then settles down to her studies, which consist in observing, with a scornful wonder, all that goes on round her. When first she came here, she was in no hurry to draw conclusions, or commit herself hastily to irrevocable words, for she sat and waited without speech for some six weeks, until I thought she was either dumb or had nothing to say. Then, unlike Mr. Asquith, she ceased to wait and see, and began calling the kitchen-maid (Mabel) in a voice so like the cook’s, that that deluded young lady came running from the scullery into the kitchen, to find no cook there at all, at all, but only a grey parrot, that sat with stony, half-closed eyes on her perch. Then, as she went out again, believing that some discarnate intelligence had spoken to her, Matilda laughed at her in a rude, hoarse voice that was precisely like the milkman’s, mewed like the cat, and said “Cuckoo” a number of times. (This she had learned last spring in the country, and was unaware that there were no cuckoos in London ever, or even in the country in November.) Matilda, in fact, with her powerful intellect and her awful memory, had been taking stock of everybody, and not telling anybody about it. Now that it was well within her power to deal with every situation that could possibly arise in a mocking manner, she decided to begin talking and taking an active part, that of the critic, in life. Simultaneously, she began to reveal what Matilda-ism was. At this period, since she was too accomplished to be limited to the kitchen, I took her upstairs. I thought she would meet more people there, and enlarge, if possible, a mind that was already vast.

  Her first definite elucidation of Matilda-ism was to make love in the most abandoned manner to the green parrot. She wooed him in the style that the Bishop of L-nd-n so rightly deprecates, with loud Cockney whistles and love-lorn eyes. Of course Joey seemed to like that, and their cages were moved close together, in the hope that eventually they would make a match of it, and that most remarkable babies would chip the shells of their eggs. Matilda continued to encourage him, and one day, when their cages were now quite close to each other, the green gentleman, trembling with excitement, put out a horned claw, and introduced it into Matilda’s cage. On which Matilda screamed at the top of her voice and bit it viciously. I thought at the time that this was only an exhibition of the eternal feminine, which encourages a man, and then is offended and indignant when he makes the natural response to her invitations, but in the light of subsequent events, I believe it to have been Matilda-ism. She was not being a flirt, simply, while she adored, she hated also. It was Matilda, you see: all the time it was Matilda waiting to be classified.

  Matilda knew perfectly well what a cat says: she knew, too, that a cat is called “Puss,” and, putting two and two together, she always said “Meaow” when you went to her cage and said “Puss.” This is synthetic reasoning, like that of the best philosophers, and, all the world over, is taken as a mark of the highest intelligence. Similarly, she knew that my dog is called Taffy, and (by a converse process inaccessible to any but the finest minds) if you went to her cage and said “Bow-ow-ow,” she responded with the neatness of a versicle, “Taffy, Taffy, Taffy.” But — and this is Matilda-ism — when Taffy came near her cage she invariably mewed to him, and when a cat came near her cage, she barked. She did not confuse them; Matilda’s brain shines illustriously above the clouds of muddle. She preferred to abandon synthetic reasoning, and create Matilda-ism.

  I must insist on this, for all the evidence goes to confirm it. For instance, if you pull a handkerchief from your pocket, she makes rude noises which cannot fail to remind you of the blowing of a nose oppressed by catarrh. Also, when Mabel left, she learned the name of the new kitchen-maid at once, and never made mistakes about it. But as she increased in years and wisdom, her ineradicable leanings towards Matilda-ism increased also.

  Then came the crisis in her life, the brain-fever to which I have alluded. She had a fit, and for five or six days was seriously ill in the spare-room, set high above the noises of the street, where no exciting sounds could reach her. But she recovered, and her recovery was held to be complete when from the spare-room where she had undergone her rest-cure, a stream of polyglot n
oises one morning issued forth. I took her back into my sitting-room again, and reminded her of the European War by saying, “Gott strafe the Kaiser.” I thought this would bring her into touch with the world of to-day again, but for a long time she remained perfectly silent. But when I had said, “Gott strafe the Kaiser” two or three hundred times, she burst into speech with a loud preliminary scream.

  “Gott strafe Polly’s head,” she cried. “Gott save the King! Gott save the Kaiser! Gott scratch Polly’s head. Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! Cuckoo! Cuckoo. Puss, Puss, Puss! Bow-ow-ow!...” And the poor demented bird laughed in hoarse ecstasy, at having got in touch with synthetic reasoning again!

  Matilda-ism took control of all her thoughts. If a tea-cup was presented to her notice, she blew her nose loudly, though I cannot believe that she had ever seen a tea-cup used as a handkerchief. When Joey was put near her cage again she called him Taffy. She barked at the kitchen-maid, and mewed at the cook, and called the cat Mabel. All her correlations had gone wrong in that attack of brain-fever, and though she had shown signs of Matilda-ism before, I never thought it would come to this. She was a voluble mass of contradictory and irreconcilable propositions.

  All this I wrote to Francis, since he desired domestic and ridiculous information, but when the letter was sealed and dispatched, I could not help thinking that Matilda, real as she is, is chiefly a parable. It is impossible, in fact, not to recollect that King Constantine of Greece was very ill last spring (like Matilda), and subsequently (i) invited the Allies to land at Salonica, and (ii) turned M. Venizelos out of office. It all looks traitorous, but perhaps it is mere Matilda-ism. But I am not sure that it would not be better for him to have some more brain-fever, and have done with it.