A. G. Gardiner

“ But not this Easter, not when I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the cherry blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the chestnut tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long and the April meadows are “smoored wi' new grass,” as they say in the Yorkshire dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at the magic casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn to the fringe of Dartmoor and let loose—shall it be from Okehampton or Bovey Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? ”

“ The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the magic word “butterflies” the prison door opened, and out he sailed on the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.
There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. ”

“ He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless, ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent, merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought of nature.
Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. ”

“ For in these expanding skies and tremors of life and unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and hope, and nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes that the joy of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The cherry blossom comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the spring with it, and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent of the lime trees and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days of birth when
“Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.” ”

“ The nations chase each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the generations of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone seem indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when the last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a Jew who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath of air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact in human records. ”

“ The Kerry peasant is always warm with the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted with wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving pleasure to others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every peasant you meet is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted if you will stop to talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be your guide. It is like being back in the childhood of the world, among elemental things and an ancient, unhasting people.
The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess in disguise. ”

“ When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then. Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and the best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the blossoms falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you preaching the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He would catch something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did not lie about on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds. To them, life was real, life was earnest. They were always “up and doing.” ”

“ You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind, that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous, and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation over the Atlantic. “Down town” stands like a strong man on the shore of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind these terrific battlements. ”

“ We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. ”

“ He can light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will not care.
And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me as my own shadow. ”

“ It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You pass it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched within. ”

“ The young women rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was wafted with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown their cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy, languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt the woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and wear rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity. ”

“ There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we are here. Weather in town is only an incident—a pleasurable incident or a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella, whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your visit to the theatre. ”

“ There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars. ”

“ I thought how superior an animal is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish did. He hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb. He looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth even to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his feelings.
It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but this is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. ”

“ ON BORES I was talking in the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat blunt manner when Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and began:
“Well, I think America is bound to——” “Now, do you mind giving us two minutes?” broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom, unabashed and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group. Poor Blossom! I had almost said “Dear Blossom.” For he is really an excellent fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that he is a bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable company. ”

“ It is like a wrestler fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning, every joint creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful strain. A gleam of sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching the clouds of spray turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling ship with the glamour of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there is nothing but the raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler in their midst, and far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the horizon, as if it were a pencil of white flame, to a spectral and unearthly beauty. ”

“ Far off, the cloud approaches like a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting, changing formation, breaking up into battalions, merging into columns, opening out on a wide front, throwing out flanks and advance guards and rear guards, every complication unravelled in perfect order, every movement as serene and assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat of some invisible conductor below—a very symphony of the air, in which motion merges into music, until it seems that you are not watching a flight of birds, but listening with the inner ear to great waves of soundless harmony. ”

“ And I rejected the blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind, but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. “Greatness,” he said, “consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind, and goodness in removing it from them.” ”

“ I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard without any apprehensions as to their safety.
But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment. I do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. ”

“ If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that virtue is a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride Victorian England because it went to watch-night services it is not because I think there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is because, in the words of the old song, I think “It is good to be merry and wise.” I like a festival of foolishness and I like good resolutions, too. ”

“ ON WAKING UP When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, “good.” Waking up is always—given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep—a joyous experience. ”

“ Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have had a sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror of a dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose love and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this perplexity the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. ”

“ I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the heresy of another. ”

“ If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men I should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely than anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance in secondary things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and tenderness with resolution and strength, he stands alone in history. But even he was not a hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too near—near enough to note his frailties, for he was human, too near to realise the grand and significant outlines of the man as a whole. ”

“ These young women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men smoked on the top of the bus they must smoke too—not perhaps because they liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them on an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge of servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the symbols of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of women, but preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to their finer perceptions and traditions. ”

“ It is like a discord in music that in shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music which is all discord is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is deadly dull.
It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. “When I have said 'Malaga,'” says Plancus, in the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” “I am no longer a man.” He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. ”

“ It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never made one. ”