Idle Ideas in 1905

Mr. Wilkins Micawber, and you, most excellent of faithful wives, Mrs. Emma Micawber, to you I also raise my hat. How often has the example of your philosophy saved me, when I, likewise, have suffered under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities; when the sun of my prosperity, too, has sunk beneath the dark horizon of the world – in short, when I, also, have found myself in a tight corner. I have asked myself what would the Micawbers have done in my place. And I have answered myself. They would have sat down to a dish of lamb’s fry, cooked and breaded by the deft hands of Emma, followed by a brew of punch, concocted by the beaming Wilkins, and have forgotten all their troubles, for the time being. Whereupon, seeing first that sufficient small change was in my pocket, I have entered the nearest restaurant, and have treated myself to a repast of such sumptuousness as the aforesaid small change would command, emerging from that restaurant stronger and more fit for battle. And lo! the sun of my prosperity has peeped at me from over the clouds with a sly wink, as if to say “Cheer up; I am only round the corner.”

Cheery, elastic Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, how would half the world face their fate but by the help of a kindly, shallow nature such as yours? I love to think that your sorrows can be drowned in nothing more harmful than a bowl of punch. Here’s to you, Emma, and to you, Wilkins, and to the twins!

May you and such childlike folk trip lightly over the stones upon your path! May something ever turn up for you, my dears! May the rain of life ever fall as April showers upon your simple bald head, Micawber!

And you, sweet Dora, let me confess I love you, though sensible friends deem you foolish. Ah, silly Dora, fashioned by wise Mother Nature who knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not unduly about the oysters and the underdone mutton, little woman. Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us. Your work is to teach us gentleness and kindness. Lay your foolish curls just here, child. It is from such as you we learn wisdom. Foolish wise folk sneer at you. Foolish wise folk would pull up the laughing lilies, the needless roses from the garden, would plant in their places only useful, wholesome cabbage. But the gardener, knowing better, plants the silly, short-lived flowers, foolish wise folk asking for what purpose.

Gallant Traddles, of the strong heart and the unruly hair; Sophy, dearest of girls; Betsy Trotwood, with your gentlemanly manners and your woman’s heart, you have come to me in shabby rooms, making the dismal place seem bright. In dark hours your kindly faces have looked out at me from the shadows, your kindly voices have cheered me.

Little Em’ly and Agnes, it may be my bad taste, but I cannot share my friend Dickens’ enthusiasm for them. Dickens’ good women are all too good for human nature’s daily food. Esther Summerson, Florence Dombey, Little Nell – you have no faults to love you by.

Scott’s women were likewise mere illuminated texts. Scott only drew one live heroine – Catherine Seton. His other women were merely the prizes the hero had to win in the end, like the sucking pig or the leg of mutton for which the yokel climbs the greasy pole. That Dickens could draw a woman to some likeness he proved by Bella Wilfer, and Estella in “Great Expectations.” But real women have never been popular in fiction. Men readers prefer the false, and women readers object to the truth.

From an artistic point of view, “David Copperfield” is undoubtedly Dickens’ best work. Its humour is less boisterous; its pathos less highly coloured.

One of Leech’s pictures represents a cab-man calmly sleeping in the gutter.

“Oh, poor dear, he’s ill,” says a tender-hearted lady in the crowd. “Ill!” retorts a male bystander indignantly, “Ill! ’E’s ’ad too much of what I ain’t ’ad enough of.”

Dickens suffered from too little of what some of us have too much of – criticism. His work met with too little resistance to call forth his powers. Too often his pathos sinks to bathos, and this not from want of skill, but from want of care. It is difficult to believe that the popular writer who allowed his sentimentality – or rather the public’s sentimentality – to run away with him in such scenes as the death of Paul Dombey and Little Nell was the artist who painted the death of Sidney Carton and of Barkis, the willing. The death of Barkis, next to the passing of Colonel Newcome, is, to my thinking, one of the most perfect pieces of pathos in English literature. No very deep emotion is concerned. He is a commonplace old man, clinging foolishly to a commonplace box. His simple wife and the old boatmen stand by, waiting calmly for the end. There is no straining after effect. One feels death enter, dignifying all things; and touched by that hand, foolish old Barkis grows great.

In Uriah Heap and Mrs. Gummidge, Dickens draws types rather than characters. Pecksniff, Podsnap, Dolly Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp, Mark Tapley, Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellyby – these are not characters; they are human characteristics personified.

We have to go back to Shakespeare to find a writer who, through fiction, has so enriched the thought of the people. Admit all Dickens’ faults twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers of modern times. Such people as these creations of Dickens never lived, says your little critic. Nor was Prometheus, type of the spirit of man, nor was Niobe, mother of all mothers, a truthful picture of the citizen one was likely to meet often during a morning’s stroll through Athens. Nor grew there ever a wood like to the Forest of Arden, though every Rosalind and Orlando knows the path to glades having much resemblance thereto.

Steerforth, upon whom Dickens evidently prided himself, I must confess, never laid hold of me. He is a melodramatic young man. The worst I could have wished him would have been that he should marry Rose Dartle and live with his mother. It would have served him right for being so attractive. Old Peggotty and Ham are, of course, impossible. One must accept them also as types. These Brothers Cheeryble, these Kits, Joe Gargeries, Boffins, Garlands, John Peerybingles, we will accept as types of the goodness that is in men – though in real life the amount of virtue that Dickens often wastes upon a single individual would by more economically minded nature, be made to serve for fifty.

To sum up, “David Copperfield” is a plain tale, simply told; and such are all books that live. Eccentricities of style, artistic trickery, may please the critic of a day, but literature is a story that interests us, boys and girls, men and women. It is a sad book; and that, again, gives it an added charm in these sad later days. Humanity is nearing its old age, and we have come to love sadness, as the friend who has been longest with us. In the young days of our vigour we were merry. With Ulysses’ boatmen, we took alike the sunshine and the thunder with frolic welcome. The red blood flowed in our veins, and we laughed, and our tales were of strength and hope. Now we sit like old men, watching faces in the fire; and the stories that we love are sad stories – like the stories we ourselves have lived.

CREATURES THAT ONE DAY SHALL BE MEN

I ought to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of the many good friends I am proud to possess amongst the Russians. A large square photograph I keep always on my mantel-piece; it helps me to maintain my head at that degree of distention necessary for the performance of all literary work. It presents in the centre a neatly-written address in excellent English that I frankly confess I am never tired of reading, around which are ranged some hundreds of names I am quite unable to read, but which, in spite of their strange lettering, I know to be the names of good Russian men and women to whom, a year or two ago, occurred the kindly idea of sending me as a Christmas card this message of encouragement. The individual Russian is one of the most charming creatures living. If he like you he does not hesitate to let you know it; not only by every action possible, but, by what perhaps is just as useful in this grey old world, by generous, impulsive speech.

We Anglo-Saxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being undemonstrative. Max Adeler tells the tale of a boy who was sent out by his father to fetch wood. The boy took the opportunity of disappearing and did not show his face again beneath the paternal roof for over twenty years. Then one evening, a smiling, well-dressed stranger entered to the old couple, and announced himself as their long-lost child, returned at last.

“Well, you haven’t hurried yourself,” grumbled the old man, “and blarm me if now you haven’t forgotten the wood.”

I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day. A man entered and took his seat at a table near by. Glancing round, and meeting my friend’s eyes, he smiled and nodded.

“Excuse me a minute,” said my friend, “I must just speak to my brother – haven’t seen him for over five years.”

He finished his soup and leisurely wiped his moustache before strolling across and shaking hands. They talked for a while. Then my friend returned to me.

“Never thought to see him again,” observed my friend, “he was one of the garrison of that place in Africa – what’s the name of it? – that the Mahdi attacked. Only three of them escaped. Always was a lucky beggar, Jim.”

“But wouldn’t you like to talk to him some more?” I suggested; “I can see you any time about this little business of ours.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered, “we have just fixed it up – shall be seeing him again to-morrow.”

I thought of this scene one evening while dining with some Russian friends in a St. Petersburg Hotel. One of the party had not seen his second cousin, a mining engineer, for nearly eighteen months. They sat opposite to one another, and a dozen times at least during the course of the dinner one of them would jump up from his chair, and run round to embrace the other. They would throw their arms about one another, kissing one another on both cheeks, and then sit down again, with moist eyes. Their behaviour among their fellow countrymen excited no astonishment whatever.

But the Russians’s anger is as quick and vehement as his love. On another occasion I was supping with friends in one of the chief restaurants on the Nevsky. Two gentlemen at an adjoining table, who up till the previous moment had been engaged in amicable conversation, suddenly sprang to their feet, and “went for” one another. One man secured the water-bottle, which he promptly broke over the other’s head. His opponent chose for his weapon a heavy mahogany chair, and leaping back for the purpose of securing a good swing, lurched against my hostess.

“Do please be careful,” said the lady.

“A thousand pardons, madame,” returned the stranger, from whom blood and water were streaming in equal copiousness; and taking the utmost care to avoid interfering with our comfort, he succeeded adroitly in flooring his antagonist by a well-directed blow.

A policeman appeared upon the scene. He did not attempt to interfere, but running out into the street communicated the glad tidings to another policeman.

“This is going to cost them a pretty penny,” observed my host, who was calmly continuing his supper; “why couldn’t they wait?”

It did cost them a pretty penny. Some half a dozen policemen were round about before as many minutes had elapsed, and each one claimed his bribe. Then they wished both combatants good-night, and trooped out evidently in great good humour and the two gentlemen, with wet napkins round their heads, sat down again, and laughter and amicable conversation flowed freely as before.

They strike the stranger as a childlike people, but you are possessed with a haunting sense of ugly traits beneath. The workers – slaves it would be almost more correct to call them – allow themselves to be exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals. Yet every educated Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution is coming.

But he talks to you about it with the door shut, for no man in Russia can be sure that his own servants are not police spies. I was discussing politics with a Russian official one evening in his study when his old housekeeper entered the room – a soft-eyed grey-haired woman who had been in his service over eight years, and whose position in the household was almost that of a friend. He stopped abruptly and changed the conversation. So soon as the door was closed behind her again, he explained himself.

“It is better to chat upon such matters when one is quite alone,” he laughed.

“But surely you can trust her,” I said, “She appears to be devoted to you all.”

“It is safer to trust no one,” he answered. And then he continued from the point where we had been interrupted.

“It is gathering,” he said; “there are times when I almost smell blood in the air. I am an old man and may escape it, but my children will have to suffer – suffer as children must for the sins of their fathers. We have made brute beasts of the people, and as brute beasts they will come upon us, cruel, and undiscriminating; right and wrong indifferently going down before them. But it has to be. It is needed.”

It is a mistake to speak of the Russian classes opposing to all progress a dead wall of selfishness. The history of Russia will be the history of the French Revolution over again, but with this difference: that the educated classes, the thinkers, who are pushing forward the dumb masses are doing so with their eyes open. There will be no Maribeau, no Danton to be appalled at a people’s ingratitude. The men who are to-day working for revolution in Russia number among their ranks statesmen, soldiers, delicately-nurtured women, rich landowners, prosperous tradesmen, students familiar with the lessons of history. They have no misconceptions concerning the blind Monster into which they are breathing life. He will crush them, they know it; but with them he will crush the injustice and stupidity they have grown to hate more than they love themselves.

The Russian peasant, when he rises, will prove more terrible, more pitiless than were the men of 1790. He is less intelligent, more brutal. They sing a wild, sad song, these Russian cattle, the while they work. They sing it in chorus on the quays while hauling the cargo, they sing it in the factory, they chant on the weary, endless steppes, reaping the corn they may not eat. It is of the good time their masters are having, of the feastings and the merrymakings, of the laughter of the children, of the kisses of the lovers.

But the last line of every verse is the same. When you ask a Russian to translate it for you he shrugs his shoulders.

“Oh, it means,” he says, “that their time will also come – some day.”

It is a pathetic, haunting refrain. They sing it in the drawing-rooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and somehow the light talk and laughter die away, and a hush, like a chill breath, enters by the closed door and passes through. It is a curious song, like the wailing of a tired wind, and one day it will sweep over the land heralding terror.

A Scotsman I met in Russia told me that when he first came out to act as manager of a large factory in St. Petersburg, belonging to his Scottish employers, he unwittingly made a mistake the first week when paying his workpeople. By a miscalculation of the Russian money he paid the men, each one, nearly a rouble short. He discovered his error before the following Saturday, and then put the matter right. The men accepted his explanation with perfect composure and without any comment whatever. The thing astonished him.

“But you must have known I was paying you short,” he said to one of them. “Why didn’t you tell me of it?”

“Oh,” answered the man, “we thought you were putting it in your own pocket and then if we had complained it would have meant dismissal for us. No one would have taken our word against yours.”

Corruption appears to be so general throughout the whole of Russia that all classes have come to accept it as part of the established order of things. A friend gave me a little dog to bring away with me. It was a valuable animal, and I wished to keep it with me. It is strictly forbidden to take dogs into railway carriages. The list of the pains and penalties for doing so frightened me considerably.

“Oh, that will be all right,” my friend assured me; “have a few roubles loose in your pocket.”

I tipped the station master and I tipped the guard, and started pleased with myself. But I had not anticipated what was in store for me. The news that an Englishman with a dog in a basket and roubles in his pocket was coming must have been telegraphed all down the line. At almost every stopping-place some enormous official, wearing generally a sword and a helmet, boarded the train. At first these fellows terrified me. I took them for field-marshals at least.

Visions of Siberia crossed my mind. Anxious and trembling, I gave the first one a gold piece. He shook me warmly by the hand – I thought he was going to kiss me. If I had offered him my cheek I am sure he would have done so. With the next one I felt less apprehensive. For a couple of roubles he blessed me, so I gathered; and, commending me to the care of the Almighty, departed. Before I had reached the German frontier, I was giving away the equivalent of English sixpences to men with the dress and carriage of major-generals; and to see their faces brighten up and to receive their heartfelt benediction was well worth the money.

But to the man without roubles in his pocket, Russian officialdom is not so gracious. By the expenditure of a few more coins I got my dog through the Customs without trouble, and had leisure to look about me. A miserable object was being badgered by half a dozen men in uniform, and he – his lean face puckered up into a snarl – was returning them snappish answers; the whole scene suggested some half-starved mongrel being worried by school-boys. A slight informality had been discovered in his passport, so a fellow traveller with whom I had made friends informed me. He had no roubles in his pocket, and in consequence they were sending him back to St. Petersburg – some eighteen hours’ journey – in a wagon that in England would not be employed for the transport of oxen.

It seemed a good joke to Russian officialdom; they would drop in every now and then, look at him as he sat crouched in a corner of the waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing. The snarl had died from his face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place – the look one sees on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders whether it is thinking.

The Russian worker reads no newspaper, has no club, yet all things seem to be known to him. There is a prison on the banks of the Neva, in St. Petersburg. They say such things are done with now, but up till very recently there existed a small cell therein, below the level of the ice, and prisoners placed there would be found missing a day or two afterwards, nothing ever again known of them, except, perhaps, to the fishes of the Baltic. They talk of such like things among themselves: the sleigh-drivers round their charcoal fire, the field-workers going and coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers, their whispers deadened by the rattle of the looms.

I was searching for a house in Brussels some winters ago, and there was one I was sent to in a small street leading out of the Avenue Louise. It was poorly furnished, but rich in pictures, large and small. They covered the walls of every room.

“These pictures,” explained to me the landlady, an old, haggard-looking woman, “will not be left, I am taking them with me to London. They are all the work of my husband. He is arranging an exhibition.”

The friend who had sent me had told me the woman was a widow, who had been living in Brussels eking out a precarious existence as a lodging-house keeper for the last ten years.

“You have married again?” I questioned her.

The woman smiled.

“Not again. I was married eighteen years ago in Russia. My husband was transported to Siberia a few days after we were married, and I have never seen him since.”

“I should have followed him,” she added, “only every year we thought he was going to be set free.”

“He is really free now?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “They set him free last week. He will join me in London. We shall be able to finish our honeymoon.”

She smiled, revealing to me that once she had been a girl.

I read in the English papers of the exhibition in London. It was said the artist showed much promise. So possibly a career may at last be opening out for him.

Nature has made life hard to Russian rich and poor alike. To the banks of the Neva, with its ague and influenza-bestowing fogs and mists, one imagines that the Devil himself must have guided Peter the Great.

“Show me in all my dominions the most hopelessly unattractive site on which to build a city,” Peter must have prayed; and the Devil having discovered the site on which St. Petersburg now stands, must have returned to his master in high good feather.

“I think, my dear Peter, I have found you something really unique. It is a pestilent swamp to which a mighty river brings bitter blasts and marrow-chilling fogs, while during the brief summer time the wind will bring you sand. In this way you will combine the disadvantages of the North Pole with those of the desert of Sahara.”

In the winter time the Russians light their great stoves, and doubly barricade their doors and windows; and in this atmosphere, like to that of a greenhouse, many of their women will pass six months, never venturing out of doors. Even the men only go out at intervals. Every office, every shop is an oven. Men of forty have white hair and parchment faces; and the women are old at thirty. The farm labourers, during the few summer months, work almost entirely without sleep. They leave that for the winter, when they shut themselves up like dormice in their hovels, their store of food and vodka buried underneath the floor. For days together they sleep, then wake and dig, then sleep again.

The Russian party lasts all night. In an adjoining room are beds and couches; half a dozen guests are always sleeping. An hour contents them, then they rejoin the company, and other guests take their places. The Russian eats when he feels so disposed; the table is always spread, the guests come and go. Once a year there is a great feast in Moscow. The Russian merchant and his friends sit down early in the day, and a sort of thick, sweet pancake is served up hot. The feast continues for many hours, and the ambition of the Russian merchant is to eat more than his neighbour. Fifty or sixty of these hot cakes a man will consume at a sitting, and a dozen funerals in Moscow is often the result.

An uncivilised people, we call them in our lordly way, but they are young. Russian history is not yet three hundred years old. They will see us out, I am inclined to think. Their energy, their intelligence – when these show above the groundwork – are monstrous. I have known a Russian learn Chinese within six months. English! they learn it while you are talking to them. The children play at chess and study the violin for their own amusement.

The world will be glad of Russia – when she has put her house in order.

HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH LITTLE

Folks suffering from Jingoism, Spreadeagleism, Chauvinism – all such like isms, to whatever country they belong – would be well advised to take a tour in Holland. It is the idea of the moment that size spells happiness. The bigger the country the better one is for living there. The happiest Frenchman cannot possibly be as happy as the most wretched Britisher, for the reason that Britain owns many more thousands of square miles than France possesses. The Swiss peasant, compared with the Russian serf, must, when he looks at the map of Europe and Asia, feel himself to be a miserable creature. The reason that everybody in America is happy and good is to be explained by the fact that America has an area equal to that of the entire moon. The American citizen who has backed the wrong horse, missed his train and lost his bag, remembers this and feels bucked up again.

According to this argument, fishes should be the happiest of mortals, the sea consisting – at least, so says my atlas: I have not measured it myself – of a hundred and forty-four millions of square miles. But, maybe, the sea is also divided in ways we wot not of. Possibly the sardine who lives near the Brittainy coast is sad and discontented because the Norwegian sardine is the proud inhabitant of a larger sea. Perhaps that is why he has left the Brittainy coast. Ashamed of being a Brittainy sardine, he has emigrated to Norway, has become a naturalized Norwegian sardine, and is himself again.