"Alpha of the Plough"

“ It is not alone the beauty of the sunset that touches us with such poignant emotion: it is because in the passing of the day we see the image of another passing to which we move as unfalteringly as the sun moves into the shadow of the night. When in these autumn days we walk in the woodlands amid the patter of the falling leaves, it is the same subtle suggestion that attunes the note of beauty to a minor key. Through the stillness of the forest there echo the strokes of a distant axe felling some kingly beech. ”

“ The New Jerusalem which he will build in England's green and pleasant land will have no children playing in its streets. When he hears of a childless home, a ghost of a smile flits over his features, and when he hears of a family of six he looks as though he has heard of some unmentionable sin. He dreams of a golden age when the propagation of children among the poor will be a punishable offence, and when the people of whom he does not approve will be sterilised by order of the court. His prophet is Dean Inge. ”

“ Long enough had November been misjudged and slandered, usually by Cockney poets like Tom Hood, who looked at it through the fogs of a million coal fires. Bare justice demanded that the truth should out, that the world should be told of this beautiful though aged spinster of the months who clothed the landscape in such a radiant garment of sunshine, carpeted the beech-woods with such a glow of gold and russet, filled the hedgerows with the scarlet of the hips and haws, the wine-red of the blackthorn, and the yellow of the guelder rose, and awoke the thrushes from their late summer silence. ”

“ Take the most illustrious of all maiden aunts, the dear, lovable, unforgettable Betsy Trotwood. I have had many affairs of the heart in fiction, from Rosalind to Tess, but I do not think that there is any woman who lives in books who ever won my affection more securely and uninterruptedly than Miss Trotwood. It is a pleasure merely to write her name. It must be nearly fifty years since I made that amazing journey with David Copperfield on the Dover road, but I still remember the first meeting with Aunt Betsy as I remember no other adventure in life. ”

“ If he were to recognise me as I had recognised him he, no doubt, would be as surprised as I had been to find what an elderly person I had grown into since the days when I was a fresh-coloured youth and we played cricket together.
It is by these reflected lights that the havoc which the years play with us is visible to us. The approach of age is so stealthy that we do not perceive it in ourselves. Others grow old, but we live on under the illusion of unchanging youth. ”

“ There was no reason to fear the Mayor of Birmingham. He was "one of us." No one would say that So-and-So "wears his spectacles like a gentleman" any more than he would say that he "wears his hat" (or his boots) "like a gentleman." What Disraeli meant was that Chamberlain could do an exceptional thing with the air of one who was doing an ordinary thing. He knew how to be conspicuous without being unhappy. He wore the badge of the superior person as if he had forgotten it was there. He wore it as though Nature had decorated him at birth with the Order of the Eyeglass. He was a Perfect Gentleman. ”

“ In a word, a monocle calls attention to itself. It is a calculated affectation. It is an advertisement that we are someone in particular, and that we expect to be observed. It is as much a symbol of class consciousness as the red tie of the Socialist, and it is much less pleasing, for the red tie is an assertion of human equality, while the monocle sets up a claim to social exclusiveness. The wearer of the red tie wants everybody to wear red ties. The more red ties he sees, the happier he feels. If everybody wore red ties it would be very heaven. Surely the millennium is at hand, he would say. ”

“ If there is anything contemplated at the village schoolroom down in the valley it is fixed for an evening when the moon is high to light us by road or field-path; and when the moon is near the full we reach the high festival of our country nights. Then, no matter how busy the day has been or how comfortable the fireside is, the call of our neighbour the moon to come out and see the magic he can throw over the landscape is irresistible. ”

“ The taste for Chippendale chairs and blue china may be a mere vanity, a piece of coxcombry and ostentation, a fancy that represents, not a genuine personal taste for beautiful things, but an artificial passion for rare or expensive things. But a row of books will give a house character and meaning. It will tell you about its owner. It is a window let into the landscape of his life. When I go into a stranger's library I wander round the bookshelves to learn what sort of a person the stranger is, and when he comes in I feel that I know the key to his mind and the range of his interests. ”

“ I walk amongst them with the feeling that I, too, seem about to become a shadow, and as I leave the Heath where the children are playing hide-and-seek among the hawthorn trees and the dogs are splashing in the Leg of Mutton Pond and turn into a road where the one brazen word "Sold" seems to fill the landscape, I have a vague sense of attending a funeral. Fortunately it is my own funeral—the funeral of twenty happy years on this sunny eminence—and not the funeral of Happy Hampstead. Men may come and men may go, but neither time nor change can touch the spirit of this enchanted hill. ”

“ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
In short, whether life is a comedy or a tragedy or just a humdrum affair that cannot be called either, does not depend upon the time in which we happen to live, for it is all these things at all times. It depends upon our point of view. I fancy Little Tich would have found the world as amusing as a country fair if he had lived in the Rome of Caligula, and I am sure that Carlyle would have found it as sad as a funeral if he had lived in the Garden of Eden. ”

“ Indeed, if we want to play with the idea of how we might have been happy, it is not the thought of living in other times that will satisfy us, but the thought of living other men's lives. If I had the privilege of antedating my birth, I would not bother about the period, but would choose very carefully my personality. Among the ancients I should select to be Herodotus, whose immortal work is saturated with the sunshine of as delighted a spirit as ever walked the earth. And among the moderns I would choose with equal confidence to live the life of Macaulay. ”

“ There are few more depressing spectacles than a garden that has fallen on evil times and has become a sort of slum of nature, where everything that is beautiful and wholesome has been trampled out of existence and everything that is coarse and worthless riots in profusion and triumph. As I hoed the weeds up I indulged in the familiar reflection on the prodigality with which Nature looks after the weeds and the parsimony she shows for the more delicate and beautiful of her children. Lincoln said that God must love the common people, or He would not have made so many of them. ”

“ You cannot do that with an eyeglass. The world cannot do that with an eyeglass. Spectacles convey no implications, carry no comment; but an eyeglass is as declaratory as a Union Jack. It is a public announcement of ourselves. It is an intimation to the world that we have arrived. And the world takes note of the fact. When it thinks of Mr. Austen Chamberlain, it thinks of an eyeglass as inevitably as when it thinks of Nelson it thinks of an armless sleeve, or when it thinks of Richard III. it thinks of a hump-back. An eyeglass is as troublesome as a feverish baby. It is an occupation. ”

“ An idea may be good or bad, but no idea is good enough to claim one's whole waking thoughts. We like people who have many facets to their minds, who hold strong opinions on a variety of subjects and know how to keep them under control, airing them when they are in season and putting them in cold storage when they are not of season. We like them to think in many quantities, to let their thought range over the whole landscape of things, to have plenty of windows to their mind and to open them in turn to all the winds that blow. ”

“ If it were possible for me to take such a holiday I should go to Tewkesbury, where the eighth centenary of the famous Norman church of that town is being celebrated. There was a time when I had no desire to go to Tewkesbury. It was one of the places I did not want to go to because I feared that seeing it would destroy the Tewkesbury of my fancy. No one would hesitate to go to a place like Birmingham or Glasgow, for their names awaken no emotions in the mind, and experience of them can shatter no pleasant images. ”

“ We just go round and round in circles. Sometimes we seem to be getting our garden of life civilised and cultivated. At last, we say, we have got the weeds under. Then suddenly we relapse into barbarism and all our delicate cultures vanish before the onrush of the blind furies and savageries that may be chained in us, but are never extinguished. It is a depressing philosophy, and in the light of our recent experience it would not be easy to entertain the dream of human perfectibility which was so popular an idea with the philosophic Radical of a century ago. ”

“ It is not possible to live much among trees without experiencing a subtle sense of comradeship with them. Our intimacy may not go so far as that of Giles Winterbourn, in The Woodlanders, who could tell what sort of trees he was passing in the dark by the sound of the wind in the branches—but without that erudition it can create an affection almost personal, not unlike that we feel for those quiet companions of whom we have not thought much, perhaps, until we find that their simple constancy and friendliness had made the atmosphere and sunshine in which we moved. ”

“ And so I repeat that I do not know who is the most important man in the world. He may be a solitary thinker wrestling with some vast conception that is destined to reshape all our thought. He may be some unknown scientist from whose laboratory there will emerge one day a power that will shake the heavens. He may be a prophet or a teacher who will help us to solve the riddle of this unintelligible world. He may be a discoverer or even a poet. I am sure he will not be a soldier, and I don't think he will be a politician. ”

“ The elms that have stood so long garbed in sober green are showing wonderful tufts and curls of bright yellow at the top, like old gentlemen who are growing old gaily. It is as though they have suddenly become vocal and hilarious and are breaking into song. A few days hence they will be a glory of bright yellow. But that last note of triumph does not belong to October. It is in the first days of November that the elm is at its crowning hour. But the beech is at its best now, and the woodlands that spread up the hillside glow, underfoot and overhead, with the fires of fairyland. ”

“ But it is no use for those of us who have only humdrum smiles to attempt to set up a smile that is an incantation. Smiles, like poets, are born, not made. If they are made, they are not smiles, but grimaces, and convict us on the spot. They are simply an attempt to circulate false news. There is no remedy for us of the negligible smile, but to be born again and to be born different, not outside but within, for the smile is only the publication of the inward spirit. ”

“ The call of the mighty Missouri falls faint on our ears, and Ceylon's spicy breezes we have to take at second-hand from the saintly Heber. We are chained to the No. 16 bus to Cricklewood or the tube to Shepherd's Bush, and when we break loose we find ourselves on the pier at Brighton or heroically scaling Beachy Head. We pass our dreams of adventure on to hopeful and undazzled youth, browsing greedily in the breathless pages of Prescott. ”

“ And there is the limp and lingering hand that seems so overcharged with affection that it does not know when to go, but lies in your palm until you feel tempted to throw it out of the window. But though there are hands that make you shudder and hands that make you writhe, the ritual is worth the occasional penalty we have to pay for it. It is the happy mean between the Oriental's formal salaam and the Russian's enormous hug, and if it has less dignity than the Arab's touch with the finger-tips, which is like a benediction, it has more warmth and more of the spirit of human comradeship. ”