it is always in a time when one's attention is at the sharpest strain, when innumerable details are separately and clearly grasped by the mind, and, in a word, when the external circumstance of life is most real to us that the comic contrast between ourselves and the greatness outside us can best be appreciated.
we humans make all that present which is never there, and which is always hurrying past us like the tumble of a stream, an all-important thing.
a form of dress unusual at one particularly insignificant moment, a form of words equally unusual, and so forth, seem like immovable eternities to us; they seem so particularly in those moments when we are most thoroughly mixed with our time. then what fun it is to remember that the whole thing, all the trappings of life, are nothing but a suit of clothes: old-fashioned almost before we have used them, and worthless anyhow.
it is a general election that has made me think these things.
in the moment of an election men mix together[pg 99] very closely; the life of one's time is set before one under a very brilliant and concentrated light, which shows a thousand things one had forgotten in the habits of the nation.
one sees so many kinds of men, one finds about one the relics of so many philosophies, one is astonished to meet, still surviving, so many illusions—that these contemporary details take up a very exaggerated place in our mind. then it is good for one to remember that the whole of it is but a little smoke.
there are commonplace tags in history which boys can never understand. one of the most commonplace and the most worn is burke's exclamation in the bristol election. he heard of the death of a man, and said: "what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" and the phrase has gone threadbare, and no school-boy can understand why his elders dwell upon that phrase.
the reason is that it expresses a thing which is not only obvious, but which also happens to be of the utmost moment; and it is peculiarly valuable coming from burke, who of all men was keenest upon the shams of his time, who of all men was most immersed in the game of politics, who of all men, perhaps, in parliamentary history was capable of self-deception and of the salaried advocacy which is the basis of self-deception. burke is, as it were, a little god or idol of your true politician. he was a politician of the politicians. burke is to the politician[pg 100] what keats is to the poet, the exemplar, the mirror of the profession; yet burke it was who said: "what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" he was quite right.
a little time ago in paris an experiment was tried, which later was repeated in london. it was a curious success in each capital. the experiment was this: to put upon the stage a play, the time of which was the sixties of the last century, and to dress the actors up in the clothes of the sixties. in paris they went further: they reproduced the slang, the jests, the very tone and affectations of fashion which marked the period of napoleon iii. the younger generation, which could not remember the time, looked on curiously at the experiment. to the older people it was comic, with an uncanny comedy, and the irony of it was sometimes more bitter than they liked. so this was man! this was the immortal being! this was the ambitious fellow who would now write a deathless poem, now discover the ultimate truths of hell and heaven; now dominate the earth with his machines, now enter the adventure of mexico—and the rest! there he was, in peg-top trousers, long whiskers, and an absurd top-hat with a narrow brim. and there was woman, the woman, for whom such and such a man had killed himself, such and such another had volunteered for the crimea; or the woman of whom a third had made a distant idol in the atlas when he was out in africa. and there was the woman upon whom the court depended, or[pg 101] the ministry; there was the woman who had inspired the best work of hugo, or who had changed the life of renan. she wore a crinoline. at the back of her head was a mass of ugly false hair, and how odd these gestures seemed, and what queer turns of phrases there were in her language! what waxwork, and how dead the whole thing seemed!
that experiment in either capital was a dreadful one, which will not easily be tried again. like all things that grip the mind, the power of its action lay in its truth, and the truth which vivified that experiment and gave it its power was the truth that our affairs are mortal things, and the ephemeral conditions which clothe our lives seem to us at a moment to be the universe itself, and yet are not even as important as the dust. they are small, they are ridiculously small—and also they are evanescent as the snow.
it is an amusement in which i have sometimes indulged, and no doubt many of those who are reading this have tried it for themselves, to turn to the files of old newspapers, choosing some period of great excitement which one can oneself remember, but which is separated from the present time by a sufficient space of years. it is well in practising this sport to choose the columns of a journal which expressed one's own enthusiasm and one's own conviction at the moment. the smile provoked by such a resurrection of the past must be bitter, but it will be the more salutary for its bitterness. there is that great question which (we supposed!) would change[pg 102] the world; there is all the shouting and the exaggeration and violence; and there, beyond it, unseen, is the reality which we have come to know. their future has become our past, and note how utterly the vision disagrees with the real stuff, and see how vain the vision was. look how terrors were never fulfilled, read how these hopes were still less destined to fulfilment, and, above all, attached to worthless ends.
in nothing is this lesson better learned or more valuable than in the matter of loves and hatreds. look up the heroes. they were your heroes too. read mournfully the enormous nonsense which was written of the villains. "sir!" said a famous politician and writer of the victorian time—"sir! the world in which palmerston is allowed to live makes me doubt the kindness of my creator!" that is the kind of thing. smith is your hector and jones is your thersites! and then the mills of the years take up that flimsy stuff and begin grinding out reality, and what a different thing that finished article is from the raw material of guesswork and imagination with which the mills were fed! you can look back now and see the real smith and the real jones. you can see that the real smith was chiefly remarkable for having one leg shorter than the other, and that the principal talent of the real jones was the imitating of a steam engine, or a very neat way of playing cards; and that both jones and smith were of that common stature which men[pg 103] have in the middle distance of a very ordinary landscape.
for the benefit of mankind, the illusion which it is impossible to feel with regard to a past actually remembered re-arises when attached to a past longer still. one can make a hero or villain of fox or of pitt. one can look at the dress of the eighteenth century, or the puffs and slashes of the sixteenth, not only without a smile, but actually with pleasure and admiration. we find it glorious to read the english of elizabeth, and pleasant to read the plain letters written when george the third was king. but, oh heavens! the idylls of a king! i say, for the benefit of man, one is allowed an illusion with regard to the remote past; of the near past which we have known, alas, we know the truth—and it appals one with its emptiness. there is no doubt at all that burke was right for once in his life when he said that we were shadows and that we pursued shadows.
nevertheless, there is one important thing, and there is one eternal subject which survives.
