In a Green Shade | Page 2

expect of them), and the
labourers like them. All this keeps the pores of the mind open; you
cannot stagnate if you are useful to other people. Nor--unless you are a
fool--can you be strict with your categories. The more you know of
men and systems the more overlapping you see. I could not now, for
my life, pigeonhole my acquaintance in this village of five hundred
souls. "I have now been in Italy two days," Goethe wrote, "and I think I
know my Italians pretty well!" When he had been there two years he
knew better.
If ever there is a time for sententiousness it is when one is elderly,
leisured and comfortable; that is the time to set down one's thoughts as
they come, not inviting anybody to read them, but promising to those

who do, that they will find a commentary upon life as it passes, either
because it may be useful or because it may have been earned. I hope I
have neither prejudice nor afterthought; I know that I have, as we say
now, neither axe to grind nor log to roll. Politics! None. I want people
to be happy; and whether Mr. George make them so, or the Trade
Unions, whether Christ or Sir Conan Doyle, it's all one to me. I have
my pet nostrums, of course. I believe in Poverty, Love, and England,
and am convinced that only through the first will the other two thrive. I
want men to be gentlemen and women to be modest. I want men to
have work and women to have children. Any check on production,
Trade-Union, war, or something else, will get no good words from me.
As for war, after our late experience, I confess that I could be a Mr.
Dick with it, but we are not apt in the country to dwell overmuch on
war now it is over. We honour our beloved dead; those of us who have
returned unbattered go now about our work with cooler, more critical
eyes, but mostly with lips closed against our three or four years'
experience. Khaki has disappeared; the war is over; let us forget it. If
there is a people to be pitied, swarming and groping on this tormented
earth, we say, it is the German people; but that seems an insufficient
reason for hating them _in sæcula sæculorum_. A German is a human
being, and very likely Mr. Bottomley is one too, and not a big-head in a
pantomime; such also may be Mrs. Partington's nephew and the editor
of the Morning Post. There does not seem much difference between
them, and we must be charitable.
The sojourner in the green shade will find himself, as I have found
myself, more interested in people (but not those people) than in books.
We have too many books, as I discovered when I left London for good.
I sold six tons, and again another six, when, after two years in West
Sussex, I came home. Now I have collected about me the things I can't
do without, the things of which I read at least portions every year, as
well as a few which it is good to have handy in case of accidents.
Book-collecting is a foppery, a pastime of youth, when spending
money is as necessary as taking exercise, and you are better for an
object in each case. But I find that I now read with motives other than
those of old. I am now more interested in the author than in his book.
That must mean that I am more interested in life than in art. I am
reading at this moment Professor Child's edition of the Ballads, and

though I am occasionally moved to tears by the beauty and tragic
insight of things like _The Wife of Usher's Well_; Clerk Saunders, or
Lord Thomas and Fair Annie, I am sure that considerations altogether
unliterary move me more--such, for instance, as curiosity to know who
composed, and for whom they composed, these lovely tales. I don't
suppose that we shall ever know the name, or anything of the
personality of any one poet of them. Those poets were as anonymous as
our church-builders, and if they were content to be so we should be
content to have it so. But one would be happy to know of what kind
they were, and perhaps even happier (certainly I should) to realise their
auditors. Did they write for men or women? That is one of my
consuming quests. The staves of the Iliad were for men: that seems
certain. Those of the Odyssey not so certainly. But take this from May
Collin, and consider it.
You know the story, how "She fell in love with a false priest, and rued
it ever mair"? The