Yet, in essence, the House of Lords is what it was from the first — a body of democratic aristocrats, chosen after trial and observation out of an aristocratic democracy to guard the permanent life of the nation — that inner political life of the race which is very little affected by legislation. Now if aristocracy implies the wealth of inherited tradition, if heredity means the instinct of accumulated experience, then is the House of Commons, equally with the House of Lords, aristocratic and hereditary. Lest there should be any doubt in the matter, it has surrounded itself with an etiquette which would be extreme in a Spanish court; which exacts a deference which would be extravagant at the footstool of a Caesar. Yet it conserves to its members a toleration that would be noticeable in members of a club. There is nothing that a Member of Parliament may not do so long as he respects the written and unwritten laws of the House. This is an excellent tradition, for it is one thing to advocate the repudiation of the National Debt or the abolition of the Navy at sympathetic street-corners; it is quite another thing to explain how you would achieve your ends before an audience of your equals, who may or may not back your sentiments, but who would certainly call you to order if you put on your hat or took it off at the wrong time. This insistence on ceremonial at first sight appears rather a bore, but, when you have to listen to speeches, boredom is an excellent touchstone of character. It is not the actual fighting that tries a man’s nerves so much as the waiting and being ordered about between the engagements.
Then, again, our forefathers were compelled to struggle hand-to-hand against people or institutions that wished to have more power in the State than was good for anyone concerned. The result of these experiences left Englishmen somewhat disinclined to be governed by any class or body, even by their own representatives in Parliament. Up till now, the national idea has been rather to choose capable men and to permit them to govern on the tacit understanding that they were not to govern too much. I suspect, then, that the elaborate ritual and complicated procedure of the House of Commons has been designed by the sense of the House as a barrier against the joys of unbridled legislation. Specialists, like experts, are not unprejudiced. The shoemaker says that there is nothing like leather; the doctor believes that the knife is life; I myself have a bias in favour of the pen; and the legislator is always in favour of making laws for Law’s sake. In spite of our precautions the statute-books of our country are full of laws regulating almost every fact and relation of the Englishman’s life, from the clothes he shall wear to the wages that he shall earn. Most of these laws are dead and inoperative, but the Englishman is still alive and waiting, but not anxiously, for more laws to be tried upon him. Our candid friends tell us that our reluctance to accept law-making as the finest of indoor sports is due to our apathy, our bourgeois nature, and our lack of imagination. Has not someone said or written that our race has been contented to slink through the centuries with no higher object than that of avoiding trouble?
If the charge be true, then “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth”. We hold to-day one square mile in every four of the land of the globe, and through our representatives we are responsible for the protection of one person in five out of the entire population of this little planet. May we not be excused if, so far, we have avoided trouble within these limits? May we not be forgiven if we have not exercised our imagination on our fellow-subjects. May we not plead that in the course of our development we have abated the pretensions and cooled the imaginations of kings, churches, armies, mobs, and their leaders? We cannot foresee what the future may send against us, but remembering who and what our fathers were, and trusting our instincts, we may face that future, if not with a light heart, at least with a steady one.
* * *
The Verdict of Equals
AS I understand it and as recent events have, I believe, proved, the Royal Geographical Society is the supreme Court of ultimate appeal and final revision throughout the geographical world.
To you, Gentlemen, in the long run, come all the survivors of all the expeditions — the men who, like many of you here to-night, have borne the extremes of adventure and hardship, to report what they have done in man’s secular battle against Space and Time. To your tribunal they submit the records of their toil. From your hands that record receives its final stamp of worth.
I confess there is something, to me as terrible as it is touching, in the thought of the men even now scattered under the shadow of death, from the Poles to the deserts, the crown of whose labours, when, please God, they return, will be your judgement. I have had the honour of meeting many such men of many nationalities, explorers of sand-buried cities in Central Asian deserts, bold hunters of big game or of meridians across unexplored mountains. They have told me many tales. But in one tale they never varied. Each took it for granted all he had done availed little till it had been weighed and passed by you — to the end, if I may paraphrase one of the old geographers — to the end that “these men which were the painful and personal travellers might reap that good opinion and just commendation which they had deserved”.
So high stands your credit; so unquestioned is your authority after nearly a hundred years!
And when one thinks a little on the illustrious roll of the living and the dead who have returned from the ends of the earth to speak before your assemblies, one realises that you have preeminently the right to seek from your President all the qualities that mark a leader of men.
If courage, organisation, tenacity, and the habit of commanding achievement are needed in the wilderness where men make their names, they are at least as necessary at headquarters where the work and the names are enrolled. As everyone knows: “Work begins when the work is finished”. And there is yet another saying out of the Bureaucratic East which I am sure His Excellency — I mean your President — knows well. It holds good where anything is being done: “If you give a man more than he can do he will do it. If you only give him what he can do he’ll do nothing”.
It does not lie in my mouth to speak of the continuous, unnoticed, but vitally important work on which an organisation such as yours must be based. In common with thousands of others I have freely availed myself of the information which your Society always stands ready to offer or point the way to. For that reason I am specially glad to know that you are now on the road to house yourselves in a manner more befitting your merits. If the building matched the work, there should arise not only the headquarters of a great Society, but a vast and ample hall — not of lost footsteps, but a Valhalla, as it were, of all the “personal and painful travellers” whose sacrifices have won us the use of the world; a sumptuously equipped Lodge of Instruction where men could find to their hand or see spread out before their eyes the whole history of travel which, after all, is the history of civilisation — where they could consult the sum of recorded science so far as it touches travel.
Maybe this is a dream. We are a race more given to employing the spirit of man in great works than to building temples in his honour. But I believe it will not be all, not always a dream. And when it comes true, the realisation will be due to your President.
It has been his fortune in the past to administer revenues of some size in the interests of a considerable society. If his present work concerns itself with smaller sums and the interests of a body which does not number one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants, the power and personality that spent themselves ungrudgingly on the one, have not been and will not be withheld from the other.
For it is no small part of England glory, as it is her strength, that those who serve her do so without limit or reservation equally in all things. So it is natural to us; it is accepted as part of the order of our nature; that your President should bring to your use and devote to your service energies and experience proven in schools that are neither cramped nor unworthy. I need not speak of that side of his life. It will endure.
Of the man himself it can fairly be said what the pious Richard Hakluyt, who was surely in spirit your first Pre
sident, wrote of himself: “Howbeit, the honour and benefit of this commonwealth wherein I live and breathe hath made all difficulties seem light, all pains and industry pleasant, and all expenses of light value and moment unto me”.
* * *
The Uses of Reading
YOU have done me the honour of asking me to read a paper to your society this evening. Before I begin, I may as well confess that this is the first time I have ever read a paper in school since I was a member of the Natural History Society at my old school, when, for reasons which I need not explain to you, I had to read a paper whether I liked it or not.
It is one thing to write and quite another thing to read. And that brings me directly to what I wanted to speak about — which is the use and value of a little reading.
There is, or there was, an idea that reading in itself is a virtuous and holy deed. I can’t quite agree with this, because it seems to me that the mere fact of a man’s being fond of reading proves nothing one way or the other. He may be constitutionally lazy; or he may be overstrained, and so take refuge in a book to rest himself. He may be full of curiosity and wonder about the life on which he is just entering; and for that reason may plunge into any and every book he can lay hands on, in order to get information about things that are puzzling him, or frightening him, or interesting him.
Now, I am a very long way from saying that literature ought to be a chief or a leading interest in most men’s lives, or even in the life of a nation. But a man who goes into life with no knowledge of the literature of his own country and without a certain acquaintance with the classics and the value of words, is as heavily handicapped as a man who takes up sports or games without knowing what has been done in these particular sports or games, before he came on the scene. He doesn’t know the records and so he can’t have any standards. I have a book at home that gives a summary with diagrams, of practically every attempt at perpetual-motion machines that have ever been invented for the last two hundred years. It was compiled for the purpose of saving inventors trouble; and the compiler says in his preface: “One of the grossest fallacies of the mind is that of taking for granted that ideas of mechanical construction, apparently the result of accident, must of necessity be quite original. The most doubtful originality is that which the inventor attributes to his ignorance of all previous plans coupled with his isolated position in life.”
There you have precisely the position of the man who has no knowledge of literature — ignorant that is, of all previous plans. Such a man is more likely than not to waste his own time and the patience of his friends — perhaps even to endanger the safety of the community — by inventing schemes for the conduct of his own, or his neighbours’ affairs, which have been tried, found wanting, and laid aside any time these thousand years; and the record of which — the diagram and specification, so to say, of which — he could turn to if he had only taken the trouble to read.
One of the hardest things to realise, specially for a young man, is that our forefathers were living men who really knew something, I would go further and say they knew a very great deal. Indeed, I should not be surprised if they knew quite as much as we do about the things that really concern men. What each generation forgets is that while the words which it uses to describe ideas are always changing, the ideas themselves do not change so quickly, nor are those ideas in any sense new.
If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invents a new perpetual-motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised that it doesn’t work. If we confine our attention entirely to the slang of the day — that is to say, if we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature — we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself. In both cases we are likely to be deceived, and what is more important, to deceive others. Therefore, it is advisable for us in our own interests, quite apart from considerations of personal amusement, to concern ourselves occasionally with a certain amount of our national literature drawn from all ages. I say from all ages, because it is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realises how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.
About fifteen hundred years ago some early Anglo-Saxon writer saw, or heard about (I imagine in those days men had generally seen what they wrote about) the ruins of an old Roman city half buried and going to pieces in the jungle somewhere in the south of England; with its walls split and falling; its roofs stripped of its tiles; its towers fallen, and all its, luxurious baths and heating arrangements open to the air. The man begins to wonder about the people who built all this magnificence and he says:
Earth’s grasp holdeth
The mighty workmen
Worn away; lorn away [geworen forloren]
In the grip of the grave.
Then he thinks of the strong man who commanded the place when it was first built — most likely it was a Roman prefect — and he describes him:
Gorgeous and gold-bright,
Gaudily jewelled,
Haughty and wine-hot,
Shining in armour.
And as the poem goes on, we can almost see the band of Anglo-Saxon hunters or raiders, who have scrambled through the bushes, and stand, picking the thorns out of their legs, in the presence of this great, mysterious dead city. There is one touch which is exactly what hot and dirty men would think, when they saw all the paraphernalia of the old Roman baths:
There stood courts of stone.
The steam hotly rushed,
With a wide eddy,
Between shut walls.
There were the baths
Hot to bathe in.
That was a boon indeed!
The whole thing is as modern as to-day’s evening paper — but with a freshness and a directness and a simplicity that isn’t common in modern work.
I’ll take another instance. About five hundred years ago, Chaucer wrote a poem on how a man ought to manage his life. The last verse of it — it is only three verses long — runs:
That thee is sent receive in buxomnesse [be thankful for what you get]
The wrestling of this world asketh a fall.
Here is no home — here is but wildernesse:
Forth pilgrime — forth beast from out thy stall!
Look up on high and thanke the God of all.
Weive thy lusts and let thy ghost thee lead [That means, keep yourself in hand and trust your spirit]
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.
The whole thing absolutely covers the few facts in life that really matter.
A last instance. In the course of his wonderful career, Sir Walter Raleigh had occasion to write his opinion, as you may have to some day, on the value of forts for coast and harbour defence. Well, his practical experience showed him, what we forgot and only realised a few years ago, that mere forts on the land aren’t enough to maintain an effective defence or blockade, unless they are supported by ships. And he says so. But he doesn’t say it as you and I would. For some inscrutable reason Elizabethans, apparently, could not put pen to paper without producing uncommonly good prose. So he gives his reasons and his experiences thus: “In this age a valiant and judicious man-of-war will not fear to pass by the best appointed fort of Europe, with the help of a good tide and a leading gale of wind; no, though forty pieces of great artillery open their mouths against him, and threaten to tear him in pieces. It was not long since, that the Duke of Parma, besieging Antwerp and finding no possibility to master it otherwise than by famine, laid his cannon on the bank of the river so well to purpose that he thought it impossible for the least boat to pass. Yet the Hollanders and Zeelanders, not blown up by any wind of glory, but coming to find a good market for their butter and cheese — even the poor men attending their profit, when all things were extreme dear at Antwerp — passed in boats of ten or twelve tun, by the mouth of the duke’s cannon in despight of them, when a strong westerly wind and flood favoured them. As also with a contrary wind and ebbi
ng tide they returned back again. So he was forced in the end to build his stockade overthwart the river, to his marvellous trouble and charge. It is true, that where a fort is so set that there is no passing along beside it, or that ships are driven to turn upon a bow-line towards it, wanting all help of wind and tide; there, and in such places, it is of great use and fearful. Otherwise not.”
Here I have given you three specimens of not exactly modern literature in three different keys; the first dealing with a concrete thing seen and brought home to a man’s mind; the second describing a man’s thoughts on the conduct of his own soul; and the third a practical man’s plans for dealing with an actual situation — a piece, that is, of pure intellect.
But it is very possible that when you come to read them, these three specimens may not appeal to you. No matter. That is just a question of temperament; and a man is no more to be blamed for not caring for certain forms of literature than he is for not thriving on certain forms of food.
But your choice is practically illimitable; for the literature of our England is strewn from end to end with a prodigality that almost frightens one — strewn with gems and jewels and glories and beauties fitted to every conceivable need that can arise in the course of any human being’s life. But we make very little use of them. That again is quite natural. If we could buy knowledge, prudence, forethought and all the elementary virtues out of sevenpenny editions of standard authors, we should long ago have become a race of unbearably perfect archangels. And we are still quite a little lower than the angels. None the less, it is possible that our reading, if so be we read wisely, may save us to a certain extent from some of the serious forms of trouble; or if we get into trouble, as we most certainly shall, may teach us how to come out of it decently.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 951