On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (2 page)

So the jolly little fellow took the dirty lump of mud and pushed it
this way and that, jabbing with his thumb and scraping with his
nail, until at last he had made Picanthropos, who lived in Java and
was a fool; who begat Eoanthropos, who begat Meioanthropos, who
begat Pleioanthropos, who begat Pleistoanthropos, who is often mixed
up with his father, and a great warning against keeping the same
names in one family; who begat Paleoanthropos, who begat Neoanthropos,
who begat the three Anthropoids, great mumblers and murmurers with
their mouths; and the eldest of these begat Him whose son was He,
from whom we are all descended.

He was indeed halting and patchy, ill-lettered, passionate and rude;
bald of one cheek and blind of one eye, and his legs were of
different sizes, nevertheless by process of ascent have we, his
descendants, manfully continued to develop and to progress, and to
swell in everything, until from Homer we came to Euripides, and from
Euripides to Seneca, and from Seneca to Boethius and his peers; and
from these to Duns Scotus, and so upwards through James I of England
and the fifth, sixth or seventh of Scotland (for it is impossible to
remember these things) and on, on, to my Lord Macaulay, and in the
very last reached YOU, the great summits of the human race and last
perfection of the ages READERS OF THIS BOOK, and you also Maurice,
to whom it is dedicated, and myself, who have written it for gain.

Amen._

Among the sadder and smaller pleasures of this world I count this
pleasure: the pleasure of taking up one's pen.

It has been said by very many people that there is a tangible pleasure
in the mere act of writing: in choosing and arranging words. It has
been denied by many. It is affirmed and denied in the life of Doctor
Johnson, and for my part I would say that it is very true in some rare
moods and wholly false in most others. However, of writing and the
pleasure in it I am not writing here (with pleasure), but of the
pleasure of taking up one's pen, which is quite another matter.

Note what the action means. You are alone. Even if the room is
crowded (as was the smoking-room in the G.W.R. Hotel, at Paddington,
only the other day, when I wrote my "Statistical Abstract of
Christendom"), even if the room is crowded, you must have made
yourself alone to be able to write at all. You must have built up
some kind of wall and isolated your mind. You are alone, then; and
that is the beginning.

If you consider at what pains men are to be alone: how they climb
mountains, enter prisons, profess monastic vows, put on eccentric
daily habits, and seclude themselves in the garrets of a great town,
you will see that this moment of taking up the pen is not least
happy in the fact that then, by a mere association of ideas, the
writer is alone.

So much for that. Now not only are you alone, but you are going to
"create".

When people say "create" they flatter themselves. No man can create
anything. I knew a man once who drew a horse on a bit of paper to amuse
the company and covered it all over with many parallel streaks as he
drew. When he had done this, an aged priest (present upon that occasion)
said, "You are pleased to draw a zebra." When the priest said this the
man began to curse and to swear, and to protest that he had never seen
or heard of a zebra. He said it was all done out of his own head, and
he called heaven to witness, and his patron saint (for he was of the Old
English Territorial Catholic Families—his patron saint was Aethelstan),
and the salvation of his immortal soul he also staked, that he was as
innocent of zebras as the babe unborn. But there! He persuaded no one,
and the priest scored. It was most evident that the Territorial was
crammed full of zebraical knowledge.

All this, then, is a digression, and it must be admitted that there
is no such thing as a man's "creating". But anyhow, when you take up
your pen you do something devilish pleasing: there is a prospect
before you. You are going to develop a germ: I don't know what it
is, and I promise you I won't call it creation—but possibly a god
is creating through you, and at least you are making believe at
creation. Anyhow, it is a sense of mastery and of origin, and you
know that when you have done, something will be added to the world,
and little destroyed. For what will you have destroyed or wasted? A
certain amount of white paper at a farthing a square yard (and I am
not certain it is not pleasanter all diversified and variegated with
black wriggles)—a certain amount of ink meant to be spread and
dried: made for no other purpose. A certain infinitesimal amount of
quill—torn from the silly goose for no purpose whatsoever but to
minister to the high needs of Man.

Here you cry "Affectation! Affectation! How do I know that the
fellow writes with a quill? A most unlikely habit!" To that I answer
you are right. Less assertion, please, and more humility. I will
tell you frankly with what I am writing. I am writing with a
Waterman's Ideal Fountain Pen. The nib is of pure gold, as was the
throne of Charlemagne, in the "Song of Roland." That throne (I need
hardly tell you) was borne into Spain across the cold and awful
passes of the Pyrenees by no less than a hundred and twenty mules,
and all the Western world adored it, and trembled before it when it
was set up at every halt under pine trees, on the upland grasses.
For he sat upon it, dreadful and commanding: there weighed upon him
two centuries of age; his brows were level with justice and
experience, and his beard was so tangled and full, that he was
called "bramble-bearded Charlemagne." You have read how, when he
stretched out his hand at evening, the sun stood still till he had
found the body of Roland? No? You must read about these things.

Well then, the pen is of pure gold, a pen that runs straight away
like a willing horse, or a jolly little ship; indeed, it is a pen so
excellent that it reminds me of my subject: the pleasure of taking
up one's pen.

God bless you, pen! When I was a boy, and they told me work was
honourable, useful, cleanly, sanitary, wholesome, and necessary to
the mind of man, I paid no more attention to them than if they had
told me that public men were usually honest, or that pigs could fly.
It seemed to me that they were merely saying silly things they had
been told to say. Nor do I doubt to this day that those who told me
these things at school were but preaching a dull and careless round.
But now I know that the things they told me were true. God bless
you, pen of work, pen of drudgery, pen of letters, pen of posings,
pen rabid, pen ridiculous, pen glorified. Pray, little pen, be
worthy of the love I bear you, and consider how noble I shall make
you some day, when you shall live in a glass case with a crowd of
tourists round you every day from 10 to 4; pen of justice, pen of
the
saeva indignatio
, pen of majesty and of light. I will
write with you some day a considerable poem; it is a compact between
you and me. If I cannot make one of my own, then I will write out
some other man's; but you, pen, come what may, shall write out a
good poem before you die, if it is only the
Allegro
.

* * * * *

The pleasure of taking up one's pen has also this, peculiar among
all pleasures, that you have the freedom to lay it down when you
will. Not so with love. Not so with victory. Not so with glory.

Had I begun the other way round, I would have called this Work, "The
Pleasure of laying down one's Pen." But I began it where I began it,
and I am going on to end it just where it is going to end.

What other occupation, avocation, dissertation, or intellectual
recreation can you cease at will? Not bridge—you go on playing to
win. Not public speaking—they ring a bell. Not mere converse—you
have to answer everything the other insufficient person says. Not
life, for it is wrong to kill one's self; and as for the natural end
of living, that does not come by one's choice; on the contrary, it
is the most capricious of all accidents.

But the pen you lay down when you will. At any moment: without
remorse, without anxiety, without dishonour, you are free to do this
dignified and final thing (I am just going to do it)…. You lay it
down.

To begin at the beginning is, next to ending at the end, the whole
art of writing; as for the middle you may fill it in with any rubble
that you choose. But the beginning and the end, like the strong
stone outer walls of mediaeval buildings, contain and define the
whole.

And there is more than this: since writing is a human and a living
art, the beginning being the motive and the end the object of the
work, each inspires it; each runs through organically, and the two
between them give life to what you do.

So I will begin at the beginning and I will lay down this first
principle, that religion and the full meaning of things has nowhere
more disappeared from the modern world than in the department of
Guide Books.

For a Guide Book will tell you always what are the principal and
most vulgar sights of a town; what mountains are most difficult to
climb, and, invariably, the exact distances between one place and
another. But these things do not serve the End of Man. The end of
man is Happiness, and how much happier are you with such a
knowledge? Now there are some Guide Books which do make little
excursions now and then into the important things, which tell you
(for instance) what kind of cooking you will find in what places,
what kind of wine in countries where this beverage is publicly
known, and even a few, more daring than the rest, will give a hint
or two upon hiring mules, and upon the way that a bargain should be
conducted, or how to fight.

But with all this even the best of them do not go to the moral heart
of the matter. They do not give you a hint or an idea of that which
is surely the basis of all happiness in travel. I mean, the art of
gaining respect in the places where you stay. Unless that respect is
paid you you are more miserable by far than if you had stayed at
home, and I would ask anyone who reads this whether he can remember
one single journey of his which was not marred by the evident
contempt which the servants and the owners of taverns showed for him
wherever he went?

It is therefore of the first importance, much more important than
any question of price or distance, to know something of this art; it
is not difficult to learn, moreover it is so little exploited that
if you will but learn it you will have a sense of privilege and of
upstanding among your fellows worth all the holidays which were ever
taken in the world.

Of this Respect which we seek, out of so many human pleasures, a
facile, and a very false, interpretation is that it is the privilege
of the rich, and I even knew one poor fellow who forged a cheque and
went to gaol in his desire to impress the host of the "Spotted Dog,"
near Barnard Castle. It was an error in him, as it is in all who so
imagine. The rich in their degree fall under this contempt as
heavily as any, and there is no wealth that can purchase the true
awe which it should be your aim to receive from waiters, serving-wenches,
boot-blacks, and publicans.

I knew a man once who set out walking from Oxford to Stow-in-the-Wold,
from Stow-in-the-Wold to Cheltenham, from Cheltenham to Ledbury, from
Ledbury to Hereford, from Hereford to New Rhayader (where the Cobbler
lives), and from New Rhayader to the end of the world which lies a
little west and north of that place, and all the way he slept rough
under hedges and in stacks, or by day in open fields, so terrified
was he at the thought of the contempt that awaited him should he pay
for a bed. And I knew another man who walked from York to Thirsk, and
from Thirsk to Darlington, and from Darlington to Durham, and so on
up to the border and over it, and all the way he pretended to be
extremely poor so that he might be certain the contempt he received
was due to nothing of his own, but to his clothes only: but this was
an indifferent way of escaping, for it got him into many fights with
miners, and he was arrested by the police in Lanchester; and at
Jedburgh, where his money did really fail him, he had to walk all
through the night, finding that no one would take in such a
tatterdemalion. The thing could be done much more cheaply than that,
and much more respectably, and you can acquire with but little practice
one of many ways of achieving the full respect of the whole house, even
of that proud woman who sits behind glass in front of an enormous
ledger; and the first way is this:—

As you come into the place go straight for the smoking-room, and
begin talking of the local sport: and do not talk humbly and
tentatively as so many do, but in a loud authoritative tone. You
shall insist and lay down the law and fly into a passion if you are
contradicted. There is here an objection which will arise in the
mind of every niggler and boggler who has in the past very properly
been covered with ridicule and become the butt of the waiters and
stable-yard, which is, that if one is ignorant of the local sport,
there is an end to the business. The objection is ridiculous. Do you
suppose that the people whom you hear talking around you are more
learned than yourself in the matter? And if they are do you suppose
that they are acquainted with your ignorance? Remember that most of
them have read far less than you, and that you can draw upon an
experience of travel of which they can know nothing; do but make the
plunge, practising first in the villages of the Midlands, I will
warrant you that in a very little while bold assertion of this kind
will carry you through any tap-room or bar-parlour in Britain.

I remember once in the holy and secluded village of Washington under
the Downs, there came in upon us as we sat in the inn there a man whom
I recognised though he did not know me—for a journalist—incapable of
understanding the driving of a cow, let alone horses: a prophet, a
socialist, a man who knew the trend of things and so forth: a man who
had never been outside a town except upon a motor bicycle, upon which
snorting beast indeed had he come to this inn. But if he was less than
us in so many things he was greater than us in this art of gaining
respect in Inns and Hotels. For he sat down, and when they had barely
had time to say good day to him he gave us in minutest detail a great
run after a fox, a run that never took place. We were fifteen men in
the room; none of us were anything like rich enough to hunt, and the
lie went through them like an express. This fellow "found" (whatever
that may mean) at Gumber Corner, ran right through the combe (which,
by the way, is one of those bits of land which have been stolen bodily
from the English people), cut down the Sutton Road, across the railway
at Coates (and there he showed the cloven hoof, for your liar always
takes his hounds across the railway), then all over Egdean, and killed
in a field near Wisborough. All this he told, and there was not even a
man there to ask him whether all those little dogs and horses swam
the Rother or jumped it. He was treated like a god; they tried to
make him stop but he would not. He was off to Worthing, where I have
no doubt he told some further lies upon the growing of tomatoes
under glass, which is the main sport of that district. Similarly, I
have no doubt, such a man would talk about boats at King's Lynn,
murder with violence at Croydon, duck shooting at Ely, and racing
anywhere.