The jolly, optimistic fellows who assure us that humanity is all right, because mothers love their children, poor folk pity and help one another, and soldiers die for a flag, are comforting us on the grounds that we resemble the whales, the elephants and the bees. But when we ask them to adduce evidence of human sapience, to give us a few specimens of conscious and reasonable well-doing, they rebuke us for our intellectual coldness and our general ‘inhumanity’—which means our refusal to be content with the standards of the animals. However grateful we may feel for the existence in civilized society of these homely jungle virtues, we cannot justifiably set them off against the horrors and squalors of civilized life. The horrors and squalors arise from men’s lack of reason—from their failure to be completely and sapiently human. The jungle virtues are merely the obverse of this animalism, whose Heads is instinctive kindliness and whose Tails is stupidity and instinctive cruelty.
So much for the last consolation of philosophy. We are left with reality. My office in Gog’s Court is situated, I repeat, at the very heart of it, the palpitating heart.
CHAPTER II
Gog’s Court, the navel of reality! Repeating those verses of mine in the silence, I intimately felt the truth of it.
For if of old the sons of squires
And livery stable keepers turned
To flowers and hope, to Greece and God,
We in our later age have learned
That we are native where we walk.
My voice boomed out oracularly across the flat sea. Nothing so richly increases the significance of a statement as to hear it uttered by one’s own voice, in solitude. ‘Resolved, so help me God, never to touch another drop!’ Those solemn words, breathed out in a mist of whiskey—how often, in dark nights, on icy mornings, how often have they been uttered! And the portentous imprecation seems to engage the whole universe to do battle on behalf of the Better Self against its besetting vice. Thrilling and awful moment! Merely for the sake of living through it again, for the sake of once more breaking the empty silence with the reverberating Stygian oath, it is well worth neglecting the good resolution. I say nothing of the pleasures of inebriation.
My own brief recital served to confirm for me the truth of my speculations. For not only was I uttering the substance of my thoughts aloud; I was voicing it in terms of a formula that had an element, I flatter myself, of magic about it. What is the secret of these verbal felicities? How does it come about that a commonplace thought embodied by a poet in some abracadabrical form seems bottomlessly profound, while a positively false and stupid notion may be made by its expression to seem true? Frankly, I don’t know. And what is more, I have never found any one who could give an answer to the riddle. What is it that makes the two words ‘defunctive music’ as moving as the dead march out of the Eroica and the close of Coriolan? Why should it be somehow more profoundly comic to ‘call Tullia’s ape a marmosite’ than to write a whole play of Congreve? And the line, ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’—why should it in effect lie where it does? Mystery. This game of art strangely resembles conjuring.
The quickness of the tongue deceives the brain. It has happened, after all, often enough. Old Shakespeare, for example. How many critical brains have been deceived by the quickness of his tongue! Because he can say ‘Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves,’ and ‘defunctive music,’ and ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ and all the rest of it, we credit him with philosophy, a moral purpose and the most penetrating psychology. Whereas his thoughts are incredibly confused, his only purpose is to entertain and he has created only three characters. One, Cleopatra, is an excellent copy from the life, like a character out of a good realistic novel, say one of Tolstoy’s. The other two—Macbeth and Falstaff—are fabulous imaginary figures, consistent with themselves but not real in the sense that Cleopatra is real. My poor friend Calamy would call them more real, would say that they belong to the realm of Absolute Art. And so forth. I cannot go into poor Calamy’s opinions, at any rate in this context; later on, perhaps. For me, in any case, Macbeth and Falstaff are perfectly genuine and complete mythological characters, like Jupiter or Gargantua, Medea or Mr. Winkle. They are the only two well-invented mythological monsters in the whole of Shakespeare’s collection; just as Cleopatra is the only well-copied reality. His boundless capacity for abracadabra has deceived innumerable people into imagining that all the other characters are as good.
But the Bard, heaven help me, is not my theme. Let me return to my recitation on the face of the waters. As I have said, my conviction ‘that we are native where we walk’ was decidedly strengthened by the sound of my own voice pronouncing the elegant formula in which the notion was embalmed. Repeating the words, I thought of Gog’s Court, of my little room with the reflector at the window, of the light that burns in winter even at noon, of the smell of printer’s ink and the noise of the presses. I was back there, out of this irrelevant poem of a sunshiny landscape, back in the palpitating heart of things. On the table before me lay a sheaf of long galleys; it was Wednesday; I should have been correcting proofs, but I was idle that afternoon! On the blank six inches at the bottom of a galley I had been writing those lines: ‘For if of old the sons of squires . . .’ Pensively, a halma player contemplating his next move, I hung over them. What were the possible improvements? There was a knock at the door. I drew a sheet of blotting paper across the bottom of the galley—‘Come in’—and went on with my interrupted reading of the print. ‘. . . Since Himalayas were made to breed true to colour, no event has aroused greater enthusiasm in the fancier’s world than the fixation of the new Flemish-Angora type. Mr. Spargle’s achievement is indeed a nepoch-making one. . . .’ I restored the n of nepoch to its widowed a, and looked up. Mr. Bosk, the sub-editor, was standing over me.
‘Proof of the leader, sir,’ he said, bowing with that exquisitely contemptuous politeness which characterized all his dealings with me, and handed me another galley.
‘Thank you, Mr. Bosk,’ I said.
But Mr. Bosk did not retire. Standing there in his favourite and habitual attitude, the attitude assumed by our ancestors (of whom, indeed, old Mr. Bosk was one) in front of the half-draped marble column of the photographer’s studio, he looked at me, faintly smiling through his thin white beard. The third button of his waistcoat was undone and his right hand, like a half-posted letter, was inserted in the orifice. He rested his weight on a rigid right leg. The other leg was slightly bent, and the heel of one touching the toe of the other, his left foot made with his right a perfect right angle. I could see that I was in for a reproof.
‘What is it, Mr. Bosk?’ I asked.
Among the sparse hairs Mr. Bosk’s smile became piercingly sweet. He put his head archly on one side. His voice when he spoke was mellifluous. On these occasions when I was to be dressed down and put in my place his courtesy degenerated into a kind of affected girlish coquetry. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Chelifer,’ he said mincingly, ‘I think you’ll find that rabear in Spanish does not mean “to wag the tail,” as you say in your leader on the derivation of the word “rabbit,” so much as “to wag the hind quarters.” ’
‘Wag the hind quarters, Mr. Bosk?’ I said. ‘But that sounds to me a very difficult feat.’
‘Not in Spain, apparently,’ said Mr. Bosk, almost giggling.
‘But this is England, Mr. Bosk.’
‘Nevertheless, my authority is no less than Skeat himself.’ And triumphantly, with the air of one who, at a critical moment of the game, produces a fifth ace, Mr. Bosk brought forward his left hand, which he had been keeping mysteriously behind his back. It held a dictionary; a strip of paper marked the page. Mr. Bosk laid it, opened, on the table before me; with a thick nail he pointed ‘ “. . . or possibly,” I read aloud, “from Spanish rabear, to wag the hind quarters.” Right as usual, Mr. Bosk. I’ll alter it in the proof.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mr. Bosk with a mock humility. Inwardly he was exulting in his triumph. He picked up his dictionary, repeated his contemptuously courteous bow and walked with
