Books: Idle Ideas in 1905

J >> Jerome K. Jerome >> Idle Ideas in 1905

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The happy Londoner on foggy days can warm himself with the reflection
that the sun never sets on the British Empire. He does not often see
the sun, but that is a mere detail. He regards himself as the owner
of the sun; the sun begins his little day in the British Empire, ends
his little day in the British Empire: for all practical purposes the
sun is part of the British Empire. Foolish people in other countries
sit underneath it and feel warm, but that is only their ignorance.
They do not know it is a British possession; if they did they would
feel cold.

My views on this subject are, I know, heretical. I cannot get it
into my unpatriotic head that size is the only thing worth worrying
about. In England, when I venture to express my out-of-date
opinions, I am called a Little Englander. It fretted me at first; I
was becoming a mere shadow. But by now I have got used to it. It
would be the same, I feel, wherever I went. In New York I should be
a Little American; in Constantinople a Little Turk. But I wanted to
talk about Holland. A holiday in Holland serves as a corrective to
exaggerated Imperialistic notions.

There are no poor in Holland. They may be an unhappy people, knowing
what a little country it is they live in; but, if so, they hide the
fact. To all seeming, the Dutch peasant, smoking his great pipe, is
as much a man as the Whitechapel hawker or the moocher of the Paris
boulevard. I saw a beggar once in Holland--in the townlet of
Enkhuisen. Crowds were hurrying up from the side streets to have a
look at him; the idea at first seemed to be that he was doing it for
a bet. He turned out to be a Portuguese. They offered him work in
the docks--until he could get something better to do--at wages equal
in English money to about ten shillings a day. I inquired about him
on my way back, and was told he had borrowed a couple of forms from
the foreman and had left by the evening train. It is not the country
for the loafer.

In Holland work is easily found; this takes away the charm of looking
for it. A farm labourer in Holland lives in a brick-built house of
six rooms, which generally belongs to him, with an acre or so of
ground, and only eats meat once a day. The rest of his time he fills
up on eggs and chicken and cheese and beer. But you rarely hear him
grumble. His wife and daughter may be seen on Sundays wearing gold
and silver jewellery worth from fifty to one hundred pounds, and
there is generally enough old delft and pewter in the house to start
a local museum anywhere outside Holland. On high days and holidays,
of which in Holland there are plenty, the average Dutch vrouw would
be well worth running away with. The Dutch peasant girl has no need
of an illustrated journal once a week to tell her what the fashion
is; she has it in the portrait of her mother, or of her grandmother,
hanging over the glittering chimney-piece.

When the Dutchwoman builds a dress she builds it to last; it descends
from mother to daughter, but it is made of sound material in the
beginning. A lady friend of mine thought the Dutch costume would
serve well for a fancy-dress ball, so set about buying one, but
abandoned the notion on learning what it would cost her. A Dutch
girl in her Sunday clothes must be worth fifty pounds before you come
to ornaments. In certain provinces she wears a close-fitting helmet,
made either of solid silver or of solid gold. The Dutch gallant,
before making himself known, walks on tiptoe a little while behind
the Loved One, and looks at himself in her head-dress just to make
sure that his hat is on straight and his front curl just where it
ought to be.

In most other European countries national costume is dying out. The
slop-shop is year by year extending its hideous trade. But the
country of Rubens and Rembrandt, of Teniers and Gerard Dow, remains
still true to art. The picture post-card does not exaggerate. The
men in those wondrous baggy knickerbockers, from the pockets of which
you sometimes see a couple of chicken's heads protruding; in gaudy
coloured shirts, in worsted hose and mighty sabots, smoking their
great pipes--the women in their petticoats of many hues, in
gorgeously embroidered vest, in chemisette of dazzling white, crowned
with a halo of many frills, glittering in gold and silver--are not
the creatures of an artist's fancy. You meet them in their thousands
on holiday afternoons, walking gravely arm in arm, flirting with
sober Dutch stolidity.

On colder days the women wear bright-coloured capes made of fine spun
silk, from underneath the ample folds of which you sometimes hear a
little cry; and sometimes a little hooded head peeps out, regards
with preternatural thoughtfulness the toy-like world without, then
dives back into shelter. As for the children--women in miniature,
the single difference in dress being the gay pinafore--you can only
say of them that they look like Dutch dolls. But such plump,
contented, cheerful little dolls! You remember the hollow-eyed,
pale-faced dolls you see swarming in the great, big and therefore
should be happy countries, and wish that mere land surface were of
less importance to our statesmen and our able editors, and the
happiness and well-being of the mere human items worth a little more
of their thought.

The Dutch peasant lives surrounded by canals, and reaches his cottage
across a drawbridge. I suppose it is in the blood of the Dutch child
not to tumble into a canal, and the Dutch mother never appears to
anticipate such possibility. One can imagine the average English
mother trying to bring up a family in a house surrounded by canals.
She would never have a minute's peace until the children were in bed.
But then the mere sight of a canal to the English child suggests the
delights of a sudden and unexpected bath. I put it to a Dutchman
once. Did the Dutch child by any chance ever fall into a canal?

"Yes," he replied, "cases have been known."

"Don't you do anything for it?" I enquired.

"Oh, yes," he answered, "we haul them out again."

"But what I mean is," I explained, "don't you do anything to prevent
their falling in--to save them from falling in again?"

"Yes," he answered, "we spank 'em."

There is always a wind in Holland; it comes from over the sea. There
is nothing to stay its progress. It leaps the low dykes and sweeps
with a shriek across the sad, soft dunes, and thinks it is going to
have a good time and play havoc in the land. But the Dutchman laughs
behind his great pipe as it comes to him shouting and roaring.
"Welcome, my hearty, welcome," he chuckles, "come blustering and
bragging; the bigger you are the better I like you." And when it is
once in the land, behind the long, straight dykes, behind the waving
line of sandy dunes, he seizes hold of it, and will not let it go
till it has done its tale of work.

The wind is the Dutchman's; servant before he lets it loose again it
has turned ten thousand mills, has pumped the water and sawn the
wood, has lighted the town and worked the loom, and forged the iron,
and driven the great, slow, silent wherry, and played with the
children in the garden. It is a sober wind when it gets back to sea,
worn and weary, leaving the Dutchman laughing behind his everlasting
pipe. There are canals in Holland down which you pass as though a
field of wind-blown corn; a soft, low, rustling murmur ever in your
ears. It is the ceaseless whirl of the great mill sails. Far out at
sea the winds are as foolish savages, fighting, shrieking, tearing--
purposeless. Here, in the street of mills, it is a civilized wind,
crooning softly while it labours.

What charms one in Holland is the neatness and cleanliness of all
about one. Maybe to the Dutchman there are drawbacks. In a Dutch
household life must be one long spring-cleaning. No milk-pail is
considered fit that cannot just as well be used for a looking-glass.
The great brass pans, hanging under the pent house roof outside the
cottage door, flash like burnished gold. You could eat your dinner
off the red-tiled floor, but that the deal table, scrubbed to the
colour of cream cheese, is more convenient. By each threshold stands
a row of empty sabots, and woe-betide the Dutchman who would dream of
crossing it in anything but his stockinged feet.

There is a fashion in sabots. Every spring they are freshly painted.
One district fancies an orange yellow, another a red, a third white,
suggesting purity and innocence. Members of the Smart Set indulge in
ornamentation; a frieze in pink, a star upon the toe. Walking in
sabots is not as easy as it looks. Attempting to run in sabots I do
not recommend to the beginner.

"How do you run in sabots?" I asked a Dutchman once. I had been
experimenting, and had hurt myself.

"We don't run," answered the Dutchman.

And observation has proved to me he was right. The Dutch boy, when
he runs, puts them for preference on his hands, and hits other Dutch
boys over the head with them as he passes.

The roads in Holland, straight and level, and shaded all the way with
trees, look, from the railway-carriage window, as if they would be
good for cycling; but this is a delusion. I crossed in the boat from
Harwich once, with a well-known black and white artist, and an
equally well-known and highly respected humorist. They had their
bicycles with them, intending to tour Holland. I met them a
fortnight later in Delft, or, rather, I met their remains. I was
horrified at first. I thought it was drink. They could not stand
still, they could not sit still, they trembled and shook in every
limb, their teeth chattered when they tried to talk. The humorist
hadn't a joke left in him. The artist could not have drawn his own
salary; he would have dropped it on the way to his pocket. The Dutch
roads are paved their entire length with cobbles--big, round cobbles,
over which your bicycle leaps and springs and plunges.

If you would see Holland outside the big towns a smattering of Dutch
is necessary. If you know German there is not much difficulty.
Dutch--I speak as an amateur--appears to be very bad German mis-
pronounced. Myself, I find my German goes well in Holland, even
better than in Germany. The Anglo-Saxon should not attempt the Dutch
G. It is hopeless to think of succeeding, and the attempt has been
known to produce internal rupture. The Dutchman appears to keep his
G in his stomach, and to haul it up when wanted. Myself, I find the
ordinary G, preceded by a hiccough and followed by a sob, the nearest
I can get to it. But they tell me it is not quite right, yet.

One needs to save up beforehand if one desires to spend any length of
time in Holland. One talks of dear old England, but the dearest land
in all the world is little Holland. The florin there is equal to the
franc in France and to the shilling in England. They tell you that
cigars are cheap in Holland. A cheap Dutch cigar will last you a
day. It is not until you have forgotten the taste of it that you
feel you ever want to smoke again. I knew a man who reckoned that he
had saved hundreds of pounds by smoking Dutch cigars for a month
steadily. It was years before he again ventured on tobacco.

Watching building operations in Holland brings home to you forcibly,
what previously you have regarded as a meaningless formula--namely,
that the country is built upon piles. A dozen feet below the level
of the street one sees the labourers working in fishermen's boots up
to their knees in water, driving the great wooden blocks into the
mud. Many of the older houses slope forward at such an angle that
you almost fear to pass beneath them. I should be as nervous as a
kitten, living in one of the upper storeys. But the Dutchman leans
out of a window that is hanging above the street six feet beyond the
perpendicular, and smokes contentedly.

They have a merry custom in Holland of keeping the railway time
twenty minutes ahead of the town time--or is it twenty minutes
behind? I never can remember when I'm there, and I am not sure now.
The Dutchman himself never knows.

"You've plenty of time," he says

"But the train goes at ten," you say; "the station is a mile away,
and it is now half-past nine."

"Yes, but that means ten-twenty," he answers, "you have nearly an
hour."

Five minutes later he taps you on the shoulder.

"My mistake, it's twenty to ten. I was thinking it was the other way
about."

Another argues with him that his first idea was right. They work it
out by scientific methods. Meanwhile you have dived into a cab. The
result is always the same: you are either forty minutes too soon, or
you have missed the train by twenty minutes. A Dutch platform is
always crowded with women explaining volubly to their husbands either
that there was not any need to have hurried, or else that the thing
would have been to have started half an hour before they did, the man
in both cases being, of course, to blame. The men walk up and down
and swear.

The idea has been suggested that the railway time and the town time
should be made to conform. The argument against the idea is that if
it were carried out there would be nothing left to put the Dutchman
out and worry him.

SHOULD WE SAY WHAT WE THINK, OR THINK WHAT WE SAY?

A mad friend of mine will have it that the characteristic of the age
is Make-Believe. He argues that all social intercourse is founded on
make-believe. A servant enters to say that Mr. and Mrs. Bore are in
the drawing-room.

"Oh, damn!" says the man.

"Hush!" says the woman. "Shut the door, Susan. How often am I to
tell you never to leave the door open?"

The man creeps upstairs on tiptoe and shuts himself in his study.
The woman does things before a looking-glass, waits till she feels
she is sufficiently mistress of herself not to show her feelings, and
then enters the drawing-room with outstretched hands and the look of
one welcoming an angel's visit. She says how delighted she is to see
the Bores--how good it was of them to come. Why did they not bring
more Bores with them? Where is naughty Bore junior? Why does he
never come to see her now? She will have to be really angry with
him. And sweet little Flossie Bore? Too young to pay calls!
Nonsense. An "At Home" day is not worth having where all the Bores
are not.

The Bores, who had hoped that she was out--who have only called
because the etiquette book told them that they must call at least
four times in the season, explain how they have been trying and
trying to come.

"This afternoon," recounts Mrs. Bore, "we were determined to come.
'John, dear,' I said this morning, 'I shall go and see dear Mrs.
Bounder this afternoon, no matter what happens.'"

The idea conveyed is that the Prince of Wales, on calling at the
Bores, was told that he could not come in. He might call again in
the evening or come some other day.

That afternoon the Bores were going to enjoy themselves in their own
way; they were going to see Mrs. Bounder.

"And how is Mr. Bounder?" demands Mrs. Bore.

Mrs. Bounder remains mute for a moment, straining her ears. She can
hear him creeping past the door on his way downstairs. She hears the
front door softly opened and closed-to. She wakes, as from a dream.
She has been thinking of the sorrow that will fall on Bounder when he
returns home later and learns what he has missed.

And thus it is, not only with the Bores and Bounders, but even with
us who are not Bores or Bounders. Society in all ranks is founded on
the make-believe that everybody is charming; that we are delighted to
see everybody; that everybody is delighted to see us; that it is so
good of everybody to come; that we are desolate at the thought that
they really must go now.

Which would we rather do--stop and finish our cigar or hasten into
the drawing-room to hear Miss Screecher sing? Can you ask us? We
tumble over each other in our hurry. Miss Screecher would really
rather not sing; but if we insist--We do insist. Miss Screecher,
with pretty reluctance, consents. We are careful not to look at one
another. We sit with our eyes fixed on the ceiling. Miss Screecher
finishes, and rises.

"But it was so short," we say, so soon as we can be heard above the
applause. Is Miss Screecher quite sure that was the whole of it? Or
has she been playing tricks upon us, the naughty lady, defrauding us
of a verse? Miss Screecher assures us that the fault is the
composer's. But she knows another. At this hint, our faces lighten
again with gladness. We clamour for more.

Our host's wine is always the most extraordinary we have ever tasted.
No, not another glass; we dare not--doctor's orders, very strict.
Our host's cigar! We did not know they made such cigars in this
workaday world. No, we really could not smoke another. Well, if he
will be so pressing, may we put it in our pocket? The truth is, we
are not used to high smoking. Our hostess's coffee! Would she
confide to us her secret? The baby! We hardly trust ourselves to
speak. The usual baby--we have seen it. As a rule, to be candid, we
never could detect much beauty in babies--have always held the usual
gush about them to be insincere. But this baby! We are almost on
the point of asking them where they got it. It is just the kind we
wanted for ourselves. Little Janet's recitation: "A Visit to the
Dentist!" Hitherto the amateur reciter has not appealed to us. But
this is genius, surely. She ought to be trained for the stage. Her
mother does not altogether approve of the stage. We plead for the
stage--that it may not be deprived of such talent.

Every bride is beautiful. Every bride looks charming in a simple
costume of--for further particulars see local papers. Every marriage
is a cause for universal rejoicing. With our wine-glass in our hand
we picture the ideal life we know to be in store for them. How can
it be otherwise? She, the daughter of her mother. (Cheers.) He--
well, we all know him. (More cheers.) Also involuntary guffaw from
ill-regulated young man at end of table, promptly suppressed.

We carry our make-believe even into our religion. We sit in church,
and in voices swelling with pride, mention to the Almighty, at stated
intervals, that we are miserable worms--that there is no good in us.
This sort of thing, we gather, is expected of us; it does us no harm,
and is supposed to please.

We make-believe that every woman is good, that every man is honest--
until they insist on forcing us, against our will, to observe that
they are not. Then we become very angry with them, and explain to
them that they, being sinners, are not folk fit to mix with us
perfect people. Our grief, when our rich aunt dies, is hardly to be
borne. Drapers make fortunes, helping us to express feebly our
desolation. Our only consolation is that she has gone to a better
world.

Everybody goes to a better world when they have got all they can out
of this one.

We stand around the open grave and tell each other so. The clergyman
is so assured of it that, to save time, they have written out the
formula for him and had it printed in a little book. As a child it
used to surprise me--this fact that everybody went to heaven.
Thinking of all the people that had died, I pictured the place
overcrowded. Almost I felt sorry for the Devil, nobody ever coming
his way, so to speak. I saw him in imagination, a lonely old
gentleman, sitting at his gate day after day, hoping against hope,
muttering to himself maybe that it hardly seemed worth while, from
his point of view, keeping the show open. An old nurse whom I once
took into my confidence was sure, if I continued talking in this sort
of way, that he would get me anyhow. I must have been an evil-
hearted youngster. The thought of how he would welcome me, the only
human being that he had seen for years, had a certain fascination for
me; for once in my existence I should be made a fuss about.

At every public meeting the chief speaker is always "a jolly good
fellow." The man from Mars, reading our newspapers, would be
convinced that every Member of Parliament was a jovial, kindly, high-
hearted, generous-souled saint, with just sufficient humanity in him
to prevent the angels from carrying him off bodily. Do not the
entire audience, moved by one common impulse, declare him three times
running, and in stentorian voice, to be this "jolly good fellow"? So
say all of them. We have always listened with the most intense
pleasure to the brilliant speech of our friend who has just sat down.
When you thought we were yawning, we were drinking in his eloquence,
open-mouthed.

The higher one ascends in the social scale, the wider becomes this
necessary base of make-believe. When anything sad happens to a very
big person, the lesser people round about him hardly care to go on
living. Seeing that the world is somewhat overstocked with persons
of importance, and that something or another generally is happening
to them, one wonders sometimes how it is the world continues to
exist.

Once upon a time there occurred an illness to a certain good and
great man. I read in my daily paper that the whole nation was
plunged in grief. People dining in public restaurants, on being told
the news by the waiter, dropped their heads upon the table and
sobbed. Strangers, meeting in the street, flung their arms about one
another and cried like little children. I was abroad at the time,
but on the point of returning home. I almost felt ashamed to go. I
looked at myself in the glass, and was shocked at my own appearance:
it was that of a man who had not been in trouble for weeks. I felt
that to burst upon this grief-stricken nation with a countenance such
as mine would be to add to their sorrow. It was borne in upon me
that I must have a shallow, egotistical nature. I had had luck with
a play in America, and for the life of me I could not look grief-
stricken. There were moments when, if I was not keeping a watch over
myself, I found myself whistling.

Had it been possible I would have remained abroad till some stroke of
ill-fortune had rendered me more in tune with my fellow-countrymen.
But business was pressing. The first man I talked to on Dover pier
was a Customs House official. You might have thought sorrow would
have made him indifferent to a mere matter of forty-eight cigars.
Instead of which, he appeared quite pleased when he found them. He
demanded three-and-fourpence, and chuckled when he got it. On Dover
platform a little girl laughed because a lady dropped a handbox on a
dog; but then children are always callous--or, perhaps, she had not
heard the news.

What astonished me most, however, was to find in the railway carriage
a respectable looking man reading a comic journal. True, he did not
laugh much: he had got decency enough for that; but what was a
grief-stricken citizen doing with a comic journal, anyhow? Before I
had been in London an hour I had come to the conclusion that we
English must be a people of wonderful self-control. The day before,
according to the newspapers, the whole country was in serious danger
of pining away and dying of a broken heart. In one day the nation
had pulled itself together. "We have cried all day," they had said
to themselves, "we have cried all night. It does not seem to have
done much good. Now let us once again take up the burden of life."
Some of them--I noticed it in the hotel dining-room that evening--
were taking quite kindly to their food again.

We make believe about quite serious things. In war, each country's
soldiers are always the most courageous in the world. The other
country's soldiers are always treacherous and tricky; that is why
they sometimes win. Literature is the art of make-believe.

"Now all of you sit round and throw your pennies in the cap," says
the author, "and I will pretend that there lives in Bayswater a young
lady named Angelina, who is the most beautiful young lady that ever
existed. And in Notting Hill, we will pretend, there resides a young
man named Edwin, who is in love with Angelina."

And then, there being sufficient pennies in the cap, the author
starts away, and pretends that Angelina thought this and said that,
and that Edwin did all sorts of wonderful things. We know he is
making it all up as he goes along. We know he is making up just what
he thinks will please us. He, on the other hand, has to make-believe
that he is doing it because he cannot help it, he being an artist.
But we know well enough that, were we to stop throwing the pennies
into the cap, he would find out precious soon that he could.

The theatrical manager bangs his drum.

"Walk up! walk up!" he cries, "we are going to pretend that Mrs.
Johnson is a princess, and old man Johnson is going to pretend to be
a pirate. Walk up, walk up, and be in time!"

So Mrs. Johnson, pretending to be a princess, comes out of a wobbly
thing that we agree to pretend is a castle; and old man Johnson,
pretending to be a pirate, is pushed up and down on another wobbly
thing that we agree to pretend is the ocean. Mrs. Johnson pretends
to be in love with him, which we know she is not. And Johnson
pretends to be a very terrible person; and Mrs. Johnson pretends,
till eleven o'clock, to believe it. And we pay prices, varying from
a shilling to half-a-sovereign, to sit for two hours and listen to
them.

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