Personal Pleasures (9 page)

The seventeenth century meeting-house stands in a dell in a beech-wood; it is built of mellowed, lichened brick, with latticed windows and whitewashed walls and a gallery running round. Outside the clear glass windows green beech waves, and dark green holly sharply twinkles. The door stands open, and through it sounds the singing of birds, the call of a cuckoo, and the running, leaping and chattering of squirrels. The Friends sit in stillness, waiting on the Spirit, who will presently move some one to rise and speak. For my part, I shall not be ill-pleased should the Spirit move no one this morning, except the squirrels and the birds and that distant hen who would appear to have produced an egg.

But the Spirit is, as usual, stirring. The caretaker of the meeting-house gets up; he speaks about the happy birds, mentioning also the more agreeable among the insects, such as butterflies, who, says he,
are also happy. He refers to the cuckoo, who so soon must fly, with that intelligence bestowed on him so amply by the Lord and so profitably used throughout his English trip, to warmer lands. Happiness: taking no care: this appears, perhaps naturally, to be the caretaker's ambition; his view is that happiness is widely experienced among the feathered and the winged, and that the reason for this is that they take no care, but trust in the Lord. He even appears to be interpreting the piping parliament among the trees as a meeting for worship. Can he be right? And do birds believe, and tell one another, that human beings are happy? And do we perhaps exaggerate the carefreedom of our plumy fellow-creatures, who obviously have their troubles, some of them more troublesome than those which normally visit man? Squirrels, for example. … Still, it gives pleasure to the caretaker, a generous and unenvious man, to think that birds are happy and take no care.

He resumes his seat, having left with us these interesting speculations, over which we meditate for a while, until the Spirit moves again. This time we have a little talk about the importance of making our wills, lest we be cut off intestate, thus causing trouble and confusion among our survivors. The speaker must, I think, be a solicitor. He speaks well: we make mental notes:
Will: make it at once
. He is a more practical man than the caretaker. The caretaker cannot, surely, much approve his advice, for his own was to live like the birds, looking not ahead, but trusting that the
Lord would arrange. The birds do not make wills. That is one of the points about Meeting—you get all points of view. The next is that of a kind-faced woman, who has been sitting surrounded by children, whom she has been successfully pacifying and rendering innocuous for half an hour and has now led out and set free. Returning to her place, she speaks about children. One wonders again, why do children, so attractive in life, become in discourse so uninteresting? Perhaps people say the wrong things about them. … They become, on the tongue of this kind woman, strangely like the birds of the caretaker—happy, care-free, trusting, very religious. In another moment, one feels, she will be saying that those cheerful voices receding through the woods are raised in the praise of God. But no; she does not go so far as that. She is either a mother or a school teacher, and knows children better than the caretaker knows birds. Still, the children of her discourse are shadowy little cherubs, simple-minded, almost winged; by no means the stormy, questioning, imagination-haunted, earthy, ingenious, gluttonous, perverse, exciting and excited little creatures that we know. Those who thus think of children set one wondering at what point the Great Change occurs which turns them into the so different adults that they become. The children they envisage would have been approved by Pelagius, for they have no original sin; they seem ready to die straight away, like a child by Charles Dickens, and wing their way to heaven.

After this, a speaker is moved to talk of living by
conscience. He is practical, idealistic, spiritual, ethical, stirring. He makes it seem, while he speaks, almost possible that humanity should live in such a strange, unusual manner. He brings righteousness into the foreground. … Is this where most churches fail? If they would give religion a rest and concentrate on ethics, who knows what odd results might follow? When the Friends, as they frequently do, speak thus, one understands the disturbing and unwelcome emotions of dislike that they used, in less tolerant centuries, to arouse, so that all the warring churches, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Anabaptist, and the rest, were united when they saw, heard of, or thought of Quakers, by a common and fervent desire to whip them, to set them in stocks, to brand them with hot irons, to fling them into dark cells for life.

How many a meeting, in this very house, has been held in the shadow of these fearful intentions! They seem still to lurk in the beech woods, to be creeping along the deep lane, the constable with his posse of men coming to catch the Quakers red-handed at their damned conventicling blasphemy, to arrest them and hale them off in chains to the magistrate, there to be sentenced to the whip, the stocks and the gaol. The rustling squirrels, the leaping rabbits in the undergrowth, they are the steps of spies, the tramping of armed men, coming to seize us in the name of the King, the Church, and the Laws.

Still, if we live according to the implanted light of conscience … that is what the quiet-voiced speaker is
saying. … Even in gaol and the stocks we could, we suppose, do that—if indeed we could ever do such an extraordinary thing. … But, anyhow, what an idea! Much better sing psalms, hymns, anthems, swing censers, praise the Lord. It is time that I slipped out of this meeting, into the woods.

It is certainly ugly, with its varnished deal seats and green paint. What a pity that those who believe on the Trinity have secured all the best churches! Still, there must be some temporal penalty for those who cannot thus think; not so long since, they used to burn them, and we know, from the Athanasian creed, in what predicament they will find themselves after death. Green painted hot water pipes and varnished yellow deal are, doubtless, their punishment in this life for gainsaying that long line of theologians who have, with no uncertain voice, instructed them through nineteen centuries on the tremendous Triune Mystery. Similar, indeed, is the punishment, in this country, of most of the dissenters from Ecclesia Anglicana, who seldom seem to be able to build good churches for themselves. (Westminster Cathedral is a notable exception.) Anyhow, this Unitarian chapel is a sad ugly place, and must pain its thoughtful, earnest, attentive worshippers and the pale, eager young minister who is preaching about the barren fig-tree. He is concerned about this fig-tree; the story of how it was cursed and
sterilised for evermore troubles him; he cannot see that it was a right way to behave to an innocent tree; perhaps he has a fig-tree of his own at home. That Trinitarians should have related and believed such a story down the ages throws for him an unfortunate light on the mentality of Trinitarians down the ages.

But this was, for him, not necessary. He, and we, already knew that Trinitarians down the ages have been like that. We have found our way to a purer, a more tolerant, a more rational faith. The pleasure of enjoying this, of being so rational, so tolerant, and so pure, lifts our hearts and swells our voices as we sing our monotheistic hymns, from which all references to the Holy Ghost have been expunged. In our kindly voices rings that superiority which comes from never having burnt Trinitarians, Tritheists, or atheists, nor whipped Quakers; no, nor wished to. The first Arians may, it is true, have committed a few excesses against Athanasians, but that was merely because they got out of hand in a hot climate. Since then, all has been with us sweet reasonableness, kindness and light. Photinians, Macedonians, Sabellians, Socinians, Ebionites, Dr. Mar-tineau, all our so rational predecessors hover around us, a small but intelligent cloud of witnesses, delighted that their heresy, so long abhorred, persecuted, despised, is at length permitted to express itself freely in a green and yellow chapel smelling of hot water pipes.

There was a period in my youthful career when I used to think, if one could believe at all, it would be in the Unitarian God. It seemed so easy, so comparatively
reasonable. … But, alas, the Unitarians undid themselves with me by their architectural and ritual inadequacies. Nevertheless, there is a very pure and intelligent atmosphere about their worship, and they are very right to see through the fig-tree story.

Never a dull moment! From a bright foyer we descend in darkness down a slope lit by the flashing torches of fantastic elves, dancing ahead like wills-o'-the-wisp until they settle, pointing us to seats in the middle of an eagerly gazing row of persons, past whom we push, to subside into plush chairs and eagerly gaze too. There is a news reel on; ships are being launched, royalties visit cities and are met by mayors; football is played in the rain before vast crowds, tennis flashes by like lightning, and is repeated in slow motion, horses race and leap, troops walk past with that jerky gait peculiar to animated photography, Signor Mussolini, roaring wide-mouthed like a bull of Bashan, harangues the people of Italy; all is bustle and energy. One feels that ours is a busy world, wherein humanity scuttles about like ants, each bearing his little burden. It is not very like the world which we see about us; still, it is a little too like to be really good entertainment, and we are pleased when it abruptly ceases and the screen burgeons into the colour and fantastic nonsense of a Silly Symphony. This is what films ought to show us; they should assist in the process of apotheosising the absurd. This is, indeed, what they do throughout, even when they mimic life, and this is why I prefer them
to flesh and blood miming on the stage, which is often so near life as to be tedious. This flat, two-dimensioned moving photography can never be at all like life; it is the most charming, the most bizarre, the most ludicrous convention. See how flowers ring bells and sing, how trees turn into forest demons, how hares play lawn tennis, leaping over the net to take the ball they have served! And, the Silly Symphony over, the Big Picture begun, how the photographs representing persons run about, emitting, in metallic, hollow voices and the lilt of the Californian tongue, the most improbable remarks. Those young British officers, trained at Sandhurst and pursuing their vocation on the Indian frontier, have obviously profited by a career of film-seeing, for they speak the purest Hollywood. So does the little Scottish minister, which is stranger, for he lived before films were. So too does that Roman Empress, and the proud patrician Marcus, but that is all right; if you translate the speech of foreigners, it may as well be into American as into English. The remarkable thing is that any of these photographs should speak at all. It is like women preaching, or dogs walking on their hind legs.

See how that daring young man leaps from his aeroplane in mid air, sailing in his parachute so as to alight on the roof of the house in Chinatown where the gangsters have the girl tied up. Can you beat it? Certainly not on the stage; probably not in life. That is the beauty of the films; they expand life, puff it up into a ludicrous, incredible, magnificent balloon, set it soaring
through space, cut loose from the ropes which tie it down to fact. Then, how well they photograph raging seas, glaciers, deserts, mountain peaks, penguins, grasshoppers, and wild beasts prowling through jungles. Battles, too; here are Waterloo and Plassey in little, terrible with battling elephants and upping Guards. Had Shakespeare known of such a way of miming Agincourt, how he would have rejoiced! And in what unearthly, horrid and transparent shapes would his ghosts have revisited the glimpses of the moon, in place of the too solid flesh in which perforce dead Cæsar and King Hamlet stalked the boards and stalk them to this day. As to his fairies, in what elegant and dainty minuteness would Titania and Oberon meet and square, while their elves for fear crept into acorn cups and hid them there.

There is, to be sure, one thing that moving photography should never attempt; that is to portray serious and actual human drama, the relations between human creatures. Indeed, why should they? These we can see all about us in life, and very weary of them we get. To be confronted with them again on the screen would be too much. Indeed, I seldom am so, since I choose my films with care. They should be funny, fantastic, exotic, anything they like, but not human. Love they should shun like the devil; it is not for photographs, however animated, nor for mechanically recorded voices, however Hollywood, to mime this universal terrestrial passion. Let the films know their business, and lead us tip-toe through strange fantastic realms,
soaring above the clouds, burrowing in the bowels of the earth, galloping across cactus deserts among mesquite and Gila monsters, pursued by Sheriffs, zigzagging in wild and rickety cars pursued by the constabulary, grappling with monsters of the deep or of the trackless jungle, wooing humour with the suave voice and face of Mr. Laughton, the impassivity of Mr. Harold Lloyd, the rolling eyes of Mr. Cantor, improbable legs and the impossible figure of Mr. Jack Hulbert and Miss Courtneidge, the imbecility of Mr. Ralph Lynn, the glitter of Miss Lyn Fontaine. Once they stoop, or attempt to stoop, to realism, they are undone, these wonderful contrivances. Heavens above, is there not enough realism in life, that our moving photographs should ape it?

Come away: a gripping drama has begun. Out, past still eagerly gazing rows; out into the night. If we must have gripping dramas, we prefer to see them in the world at large, where, alas, they are all too common. Our comic fairyland falls shattered about us at so crude a trumpet blast. We will adjourn to the Café Royal and consume sandwiches and bock.

How handsome it looks, my new dress, fresh from its maker's hands! How elegant, how eximious, how smug, how quaintly fashioned, how all that there is of the most modish! How like other people I shall appear when I wear it! With what respect they will regard me, saying one to another, Look, do you see that woman? She knows how to dress; she is in the mode; indeed, she looks very well. I think I have at other times seen her in dresses three, four, even five years old, altered, as she believes, but not really, to the discerning eye, altered to matter, for they still remain of their epoch, and insufferable to people of good taste and modern outlook, now that there is such gaudy going and such new fashions every day. But to-day she really has a new dress, and a good dress; to-day she really is a Well-Dressed Woman. I like its cut, do not you? And the colour is precisely right.