Books: Idle Ideas in 1905
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Jerome K. Jerome >> Idle Ideas in 1905
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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.
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