As I walked, Nature came and talked beside me, and showed me the world and myself, and the ways of God seemed clearer.
It seemed to me a pity that all the beautiful and precious thoughts and ideas that were crowding in upon me should be lost to my fellow men, and so I pitched my tent at a little cottage and set to work to write them down then and there as they came to me.
“It has been complained of me,” I said to myself “that I do not write literary and high-class work – at least, not work that is exceptionally literary and high-class. This reproach shall be removed. I will write an article that shall be a classic. I have worked for the ordinary, everyday reader. It is right that I should do something now to improve the literature of my beloved country.”
And I wrote a grand essay – though I say it who should not, though I don’t see why I shouldn’t – all about spring, and the way it made you feel, and what it made you think. It was simply crowded with elevated thoughts and high-class ideas and cultured wit, was that essay. There was only one fault about that essay: it was too brilliant. It wanted commonplace relief. It would have exhausted the average reader: so much cleverness would have wearied him.
I wish I could remember some of the beautiful things in that essay and here set them down, because then you would be able to see what they were like for yourselves, and that would be so much simpler than my explaining to you how beautiful they were. Unfortunately, however, I cannot now call to mind any of them.
I was very proud of this essay, and when I got back to town I called on a very superior friend of mine, a critic, and read it to him. I do not care for him to see any of my usual work, because he really is a very superior person indeed, and the perusal of it appears to give him pains inside. But this article, I thought, would do him good.
“What do you think of it?” I asked, when I had finished.
“Splendid,” he replied, “excellently arranged. I never knew you were so well acquainted with the works of the old writers. Why, there is scarcely a classic of any note that you have not quoted from. But where… where,” he added, musing, “did you get that last idea but two from? It’s the only one I don’t seem to remember. It isn’t a bit of your own, is it?”
He said that, if so, he should advise me to leave it out. Not that it was altogether bad, but that the interpolation of a modern thought among so unique a collection of passages from the ancients seemed to spoil the scheme.
And he enunciated the various dead-and-buried gentlemen from whom he appeared to think I had collated my article.
“But,” I replied, when I had recovered my astonishment sufficiently to speak, “it isn’t a collection at all. It is all original. I wrote the thoughts down as they came to me. I have never read any of these people you mention, except Shakespeare.”
Of course Shakespeare was bound to be among them. I am getting to dislike that man so. He is always being held up before us young authors as a model, and I do hate models. There was a model boy at our school, I remember, Henry Summers, and it was just the same there. It was continually “Look at Henry Summers! He doesn’t put the preposition before the verb, and spell business B-I-Z!” or “Why can’t you write like Henry Summers? He doesn’t get the ink all over the copybook and halfway up his back!” We got tired of this everlasting “Look at Henry Summers!” after a while, and so, one afternoon, on the way home, a few of us lured Henry Summers up a dark court; and when he came out again he was not worth looking at.
Now it is perpetually “Look at Shakespeare!”, “Why don’t you write like Shakespeare?”, “Shakespeare never made that joke. Why don’t you joke like Shakespeare?”
If you are in the play-writing line it is still worse for you. “Why don’t you write plays like Shakespeare’s?” they indignantly say. “Shakespeare never made his comic man a penny-steamboat captain.” “Shakespeare never made his hero address the girl as ‘ducky’. Why don’t you copy Shakespeare?” If you do try to copy Shakespeare, they tell you that you must be a fool to attempt to imitate Shakespeare.
Oh, shouldn’t I like to get Shakespeare up our street and punch him!
“I cannot help that,” replied my critical friend – to return to our previous question – “the germ of every thought and idea you have got in that article can be traced back to the writers I have named. If you doubt it, I will get down the books and show you the passages for yourself.”
But I declined the offer. I said I would take his word for it, and would rather not see the passages referred to. I felt indignant. “If,” as I said, “these men – these Platos and Socrateses and Ciceros and Sophocleses and Aristophaneses and Aristotles and the rest of them had been taking advantage of my absence to go about the world spoiling my business for me, I would rather not hear any more about them.”
And I put on my hat and came out, and I have never tried to write anything original since.
I dreamt a dream once. (It is the sort of thing a man would dream. You cannot very well dream anything else, I know. But the phrase sounds poetical and biblical, and so I use it.) I dreamt that I was in a strange country – indeed, one might say an extraordinary country. It was ruled entirely by critics.
The people in this strange land had a very high opinion of critics – nearly as high an opinion of critics as the critics themselves had, but not, of course, quite, that not being practicable – and they had agreed to be guided in all things by the critics. I stayed some years in that land. But it was not a cheerful place to live in, so I dreamt.
There were authors in this country, at first, and they wrote books. But the critics could find nothing original in the books whatever, and said it was a pity that men, who might be usefully employed hoeing potatoes, should waste their time and the time of the critics, which was of still more importance, in stringing together a collection of platitudes, familiar to every schoolboy, and dishing up old plots and stories that had already been cooked and recooked for the public until everybody had been surfeited with them.
And the writers read what the critics said, and sighed, and gave up writing books, and went off and hoed potatoes, as advised. They had no experience in hoeing potatoes, and they hoed very badly; and the people whose potatoes they hoed strongly recommended them to leave hoeing potatoes, and to go back and write books. But you can’t do what everybody advises.
There were artists also in this strange world, at first, and they painted pictures, which the critics came and looked at through eyeglasses.
“Nothing whatever original in them,” said the critics. “Same old colours, same old perspective and form, same old sunset, same old sea and land and sky and figures. Why do these poor men waste their time painting pictures, when they might be so much more satisfactorily employed on ladders, painting houses?”
Nothing, by the by you may have noticed, troubles your critic more than the idea that the artist is wasting his time. It is the waste of time that vexes the critic: he has such an exalted idea of the value of other people’s time. “Dear, dear me!” he says to himself. “Why, in the time the man must have taken to paint this picture or to write this book, he might have blacked fifteen thousand pairs of boots, or have carried fifteen thousand hods of mortar up a ladder. This is how the time of the world is lost!”
It never occurs to him that, but for that picture or book, the artist would, in all probability, have been mooching about with a pipe in his mouth, getting into trouble.
It reminds me of the way people used to talk to me when I was a boy. I would be sitting, as good as gold, reading The Pirate’s Lair, when some cultured relative would look over my shoulder and say: “Bah! What are you wasting your time with that rubbish for? Why don’t you go and do something useful?” and would take the book away from me. Upon which I would get up, and go out to “do something useful?” and would come home an hour afterwards, looking like a bit out of a battle picture, having tumbled through the roof of Farmer Bates’s greenhouse and
killed a cactus, though totally unable to explain how I came to be on the roof of Farmer Bates’s greenhouse. They had much better have left me alone, lost in The Pirate’s Lair!
The artists in this land of which I dreamt left off painting pictures, after hearing what the critics said, and purchased ladders, and went off and painted houses.
Because, you see, this country of which I dreamt was not one of those vulgar, ordinary countries, such as exist in the waking world, where people let the critics talk as much as ever they like, and nobody pays the slightest attention to what they say. Here, in this strange land, the critics were taken seriously, and their advice followed. As for the poets and sculptors, they were very soon shut up. The idea of any educated person wanting to read modern poetry when he could obtain Homer, or caring to look at any other statue while there was still some of the Venus de’ Medici left, was too absurd. Poets and sculptors were only wasting their time.
What new occupation they were recommended to adopt, I forget. Some calling they knew nothing whatever about, and that they were totally unfitted for, of course.
The musicians tried their art for a little while, but they too were of no use. “Merely a repetition of the same notes in different combinations,” said the critics. “Why will people waste their time writing unoriginal music, when they might be sweeping crossings?”
One man had written a play. I asked what the critics had said about him. They showed me his tomb.
Then, there being no more artists or littérateurs or dramatists or musicians left for their beloved critics to criticize, the general public of this enlightened land said to themselves, “Why should not our critics come and criticize us? Criticism is useful to a man. Have we not often been told so? Look how useful it has been to the artists and writers – saved the poor fellows from wasting their time! Why shouldn’t we have some of its benefits?”
They suggested the idea to the critics, and the critics thought it an excellent one, and said they would undertake the job with pleasure. One must say for the critics that they never shirk work. They will sit and criticize for eighteen hours a day, if necessary, or even if quite unnecessary, for the matter of that. You can’t give them too much to criticize. They will criticize everything and everybody in this world. They will criticize everything in the next world, too, when they get there. I expect poor old Pluto* has a lively time with them all, as it is.
So, when a man built a house, or a farmyard hen laid an egg, the critics were asked in to comment on it. They found that none of the houses were original. On every floor were passages that seemed mere copies from passages in other houses. They were all built on the same hackneyed plan: cellars underneath, ground floor level with the street, attic at the top. No originality anywhere!
So, likewise, with the eggs. Every egg suggested reminiscences of other eggs.
It was heart-rending work.
The critics criticized all things. When a young couple fell in love, they each, before thinking of marriage, called upon the critics for a criticism of the other one.
Needless to say that, in the result, no marriage ever came of it.
“My dear young lady,” the critics would say, after the inspection had taken place, “I can discover nothing new whatever about the young man. You would simply be wasting your time in marrying him.” Or, to the young man it would be:
“Oh dear, no! Nothing attractive about the girl at all. Who on earth gave you that notion? Simply a lovely face and figure, angelic disposition, beautiful mind, staunch heart, noble character. Why, there must have been nearly a dozen such girls born into the world since its creation. You would be only wasting your time loving her.”
They criticized the birds for their hackneyed style of singing, and the flowers for their hackneyed scents and colours. They complained of the weather that it lacked originality – (true, they had not lived out an English spring) – and found fault with the sun because of the sameness of his methods.
They criticized the babies. When a fresh infant was published in a house, the critics would call in a body to pass their judgement upon it, and the young mother would bring it down for them to sample.
“Did you ever see a child anything like that in this world before?” she would say, holding it out to them. “Isn’t it a wonderful baby? You never saw a child with legs like that, I know. Nurse says he’s the most extraordinary baby she ever attended. Bless him!”
But the critics did not think anything of it.
“Tut, tut,” they would reply, “there is nothing extraordinary about that child – no originality whatever. Why, it’s exactly like every other baby – bald head, red face, big mouth and stumpy nose. Why, that’s only a weak imitation of the baby next door. It’s a plagiarism, that’s what your child is. You’ve been wasting your time, madam. If you can’t do anything more original than that, we should advise you to give up the business altogether.”
That was the end of criticism in that strange land.
“Oh! Look here, we’ve had enough of you and your originality,” said the people to the critics after that. “Why, you are not original, when one comes to think of it, and your criticisms are not original. You’ve all of you been saying exactly the same thing ever since the time of Solomon. We are going to drown you and have a little peace.”
“What, drown a critic!” cried the critics. “Never heard of such a monstrous proceeding in our lives!”
“No, we flatter ourselves it is an original idea,” replied the public, brutally. “You ought to be charmed with it. Out you come!”
So they took the critics out and drowned them, and then passed a short act, making criticism a capital offence.
After that, the art and literature of the country followed, somewhat, the methods of the quaint and curious school, but the land, notwithstanding, was a much more cheerful place to live in, I dreamt.
But I never finished telling you about the dream in which I thought I left my legs behind me, when I went into a certain theatre.
I dreamt that the ticket the man gave me for my legs was no. 19, and I was worried all through the performance for fear no. 61 should get hold of them and leave me his instead. Mine are rather a fine pair of legs, and I am, I confess, a little proud of them – at all events, I prefer them to anybody else’s. Besides, no. 61’s might be a skinny pair and not fit me.
It quite spoilt my evening, fretting about this.
Another extraordinary dream I had was one in which I dreamt that I was engaged to be married to my Aunt Jane. That was not, however, the extraordinary part of it: I have often known people to dream things like that. I knew a man who once dreamt that he was actually married to his own mother-in-law! He told me that never in his life had he loved the alarm clock with more deep and grateful tenderness than he did that morning. The dream almost reconciled him to being married to his real wife. They lived quite happily together, after that dream, for a few days.
No, the extraordinary part of my dream was, that I knew it was a dream. “What on earth will uncle say to this engagement?” I thought to myself, in my dream. “There’s bound to be a row about it. We shall have a deal of trouble with uncle, I feel sure.” And this thought quite troubled me until the sweet reflection came: “Ah! Well, it’s only a dream.”
And I made up my mind that I would wake up as soon as uncle found out about the engagement, and leave him and Aunt Jane to fight the matter out between themselves.
It is a very great comfort, when the dream grows troubled and alarming, to feel that it is only a dream, and to know that we shall awake soon, and be none the worse for it. We can dream out the foolish perplexity with a smile then.
Sometimes the dream of life grows strangely troubled and perplexing, and then he who meets dismay the bravest is he who feels that the fretful play is but a dream – a brief, uneasy dream of three score years and ten, or thereabouts, from which, in a little while, he will awake –
at least, he dreams so.
How dull, how impossible, life would be without dreams – waking dreams, I mean – the dreams that we call “castles in the air”, built by the kindly hands of Hope! Were it not for the mirage of the oasis, drawing his footsteps ever onward, the weary traveller would lie down in the desert sand and die. It is the mirage of distant success, of happiness that, like the bunch of carrots fastened just beyond the donkey’s nose, seems always just within our reach, if only we will gallop fast enough, that makes us run so eagerly along the road of Life.
Providence, like a father with a tired child, lures us ever along the way with tales and promises, until, at the frowning gate that ends the road, we shrink back, frightened. Then, promises still more sweet he stoops and whispers in our ear and, timid yet partly reassured, and trying to hide our fears, we gather up all that is left of our little stock of hope and, trusting yet half-afraid, push out our groping feet into the darkness.
Notes
p.73, pew rates: A sum levied from churchgoers, used for church repairs and other costs.
p.76, Cleopatra’s Needle: A name given to the Egyptian obelisk that was taken to London and erected on the Victoria Embankment.
p.88, stretch lame hands of faith and grope: From Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849) lv, 17.
p.89, The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him: From Habakkuk 2:20.
p.100, The little girl in Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’… Byron’s blighted pirates bored me: ‘We Are Seven’ is a poem by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) contained in Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which a young girl recounts talks of her siblings, alive and dead. “Blighted pirates” is a reference to the 1814 verse tale The Corsair by Lord Byron (1788–1824), which recounts the adventures of privateers.
p.128, Persephone: The ancient Greek goddess of the Underworld and vegetation.
p.129, A Dean Swift sees one race of people smaller… eighteen-penny size: The references are to Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745); The Coming Race (1871) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73); She (1886) and Allan Quatermain (1887) by H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925).
After-Supper Ghost Stories Page 12