The Bed-Book of Happiness Part 10

I address from the Rectory (_Vicarage_it ought to be) of Crabbe, the "Radiator," whose mind is now greatly exercised with Dr. Whewell's "Plurality of Worlds." Crabbe, who is a good deal in the secrets of Providence, admires the work beyond measure, but most indignantly rejects the doctrine as unworthy of G.o.d. I have not read the book, contented to hear Crabbe's commentaries. I have been staying with him off and on for two months, and, as I say, give his address because any letter thither directed will find me sooner or later in my little wanderings. I am at present staying with a farmer in a very pleasant house near Woodbridge, inhabiting such a room as even you, I think, would sleep composedly in; my host a taciturn, cautious, honest, active man whom I have known all my life. He and his wife, a capital housewife, and his son, who would carry me on his shoulders to Ipswich, and a maid-servant, who, as she curtsies of a morning, lets fall the teapot, etc., const.i.tute the household. Farming greatly prospers, farming materials fetching an exorbitant price at the Michaelmas auctions--all in defiance of Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who got returned for Suffolk on the strength of denouncing Corn Law Repeal as the ruin of the country. He has bought a fine house near Ipswich, with great gilded gates before it, and, by dint of good dinners and soft sawder, finally draws the country gentry to him....

Please to look at the September Number of Fraser's Magazine, where there are some prose translations of Hafiz by Cowell which may interest you a little. I think Cowell (as he is apt to do) gives Hafiz rather too much credit for a mystical wine-cup, and cup-bearer; I mean, taking him on the whole. The few odes he quotes have certainly a deep and pious feeling, such as the Man of Mirth will feel at times: none perhaps more strongly.

Some one by chance read out to me the other day at the seaside your account of poor old Naseby village from "Cromwell," quoted in Knight's "Half-Hours," etc. It is now twelve years ago, at this very season, I was ransacking for you; you promising to come down, and never coming. I hope very much you are soon going to give us something: else Jerrold and Tupper carry all before them.

TO "LYDIA LANGUISH"

[Sidenote: _Austin Dobson_]

"Il me faut des emotions"--_Blanche Amory_

You ask me, Lydia, "whether I, If you refuse my suit, shall die."

(Now pray don't let this hurt you!) Although the time be out of joint, I should not think a bodkin's point The sole resource of virtue; Nor shall I, though your mood endure, Attempt a final Water-cure Except against my wishes; For I respectfully decline To dignify the Serpentine, And make _hors-d'oeuvres_ for fishes; But if you ask me whether I Composedly can go, Without a look, without a sigh, Why, then I answer--No.

"You are a.s.sured," you sadly say (If in this most considerate way To treat my suit your will is), That I shall "quickly find as fair Some new Neaera's tangled hair-- Some easier Amaryllis."

I cannot promise to be cold If smiles are kind as yours of old On lips of later beauties; Nor can I, if I would, forget The homage that is Nature's debt, While man has social duties; But if you ask shall I prefer To you I honour so, A somewhat visionary Her, I answer truly--No.

You fear, you frankly add, "to find In me too late the altered mind That altering Time estranges."

To this I make response that we (As physiologists agree) Must have septennial changes; This is a thing beyond control, And it were best upon the whole To try and find out whether We could not, by some means, arrange This not-to-be-avoided change So as to change together: But had you asked me to allow That you could ever grow Less amiable than you are now,-- Emphatically--No.

But--to be serious--if you care To know how I shall really bear This much-discussed rejection, I answer you. As feeling men Behave, in best romances, when You outrage their affection;-- With that gesticulatory woe, By which, as melodramas show, Despair is indicated; Enforced by all the liquid grief Which hugest pocket-handkerchief Has ever simulated; And when, arrived so far, you say In tragic accents, "Go,"

Then, Lydia, then ... I still shall stay, And firmly answer--No.

MARK'S BABY [Sidenote: _Mark Twain_]

"Mark, one day, was found at home, in his library, dandling upon his knee, with every appearance of fond 'parientness,' the young Twain--so young as not yet to be able to 'walk upright and make bargains.' Mrs.

Twain, on showing the visitor into the sanctum, and finding her spouse thus engaged, said:

"'Now, Mark, you _know_ you love that baby--don't you?'

"'Well,' replied Mark, in his slow, drawling kind of way, 'I--can't--exactly--say--I--love it,--_but--I--respect--it!_'"

THE WISDOM OF G.K.C.

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

Jesus Christ made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. "Drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace." So he stands offering us the cup in his hands. And in the high altar of Christianity stands another figure in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. "Drink," he says, "for the whole world is as red as this wine with the crimson of the love and wrath of G.o.d. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle, and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this is My blood of the New Testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know whence you come and why. Drink, for I know when you go and where."--"Heretics."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

Everything is military in the sense that everything depends upon obedience. There is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness; but we are glad that the net-maker did not make the net in a fit of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a child's rocking-horse for a joke; but we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke.--"Heretics."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.--"Tremendous Trifles."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

In a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland lived an old, old woman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat-race. But in her grey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this; she didn't know that there was a Boat-race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard of n.o.body at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple trust. And by and by, in G.o.d's good time, it was discovered that this uncle of hers was really not her uncle, and they came and told her so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, "Virtue is its own reward."--"The Napoleon of Notting Hill."

In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified att.i.tudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, "Life is real, life is earnest," and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.--"The Napoleon of Notting Hill."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.--"George Bernard Shaw."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called weather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English) have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather posed for Turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen aganst a dark background, and seem to be burning with a l.u.s.tre of their own. Against a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high-light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost red eyes of day, and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun.

Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white, or breaking into green or gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.--"Daily News."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesteron_]

Silence is the unbearable repartee.--"Charles d.i.c.kens."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who cannot do their work in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.--"Tremendous Trifles."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. All doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase--he will be always "taken in." To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circ.u.mstance. With torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life.

And the sceptic is cast out by it.--"Charles d.i.c.kens."

[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]

I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions, with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water--an excellent thing if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard Shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens, but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms than that.--"William Blake."

To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon any one who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realises one of our visions.--"The Defendant."

"THE VULGAR TONGUE"

[Sidenote: _Dean Hole_]

First, of abuses. I protest against those sensational adjectives, which are so commonly misapplied--against the union of grand and n.o.ble words with subjects of a minute and trivial nature. It is as though a huge locomotive engine were brought out to draw a child's perambulator, or as though an Armstrong gun were loaded and levelled to exterminate a tom-t.i.t.

I heard a tourist say the other day that, when he was at Black Gang Chine, in the Isle of Wight, he had seen the _most magnificent_--what do you think? A sunset, a man-of-war, a thunderstorm? Nothing of the kind.