Counsel in Season

by Max Beerbohm

The Ways of the World

COUNSEL IN SEASON.

BY MAX BEERBOHM.

ONE of my bookshelves is guarded by a ragged squad in uniform of pale buff. This guard is quite twenty odd in number; but seldom does any one inspect it, for it is stationed so ingloriously high up as to necessitate a chair. He who does mount a chair and pass his eye along these veterans, notices that they all bear on their paper backs the name of one and the same author. Surprise comes to his eyes, and disdain to his lips (for the name of the author is not, certainly, one to conjure with), and he cuts the inspection short. He does not even express himself, according to the convention, well pleased with the general trim and smartness of the guard. Truly, they are not much to look at, these veterans. Some of their leaves are uncut; others, obviously, have been cut with a careless human finger. Some of them have lost their stitchings; others are soiled, torn, broken. All of them are somehow maimed and scarred, not in the way of glory. Yet will I not disband them. They have their meaning for me—their dear meaning. They are the books which, from year to year, I have bought and read in my holidays. Because I believe them to be such books as many of you, too, ought to buy and read in your holidays, and because August is now at hand, I am venturing to speak of them.

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"MANY of you," I say: not all. Some people are in the deplorable, enviable position of being immune from work. Never doing anything, they have no holidays. Having no holidays, they need no holiday-literature. And except as holiday-literature I cannot possibly recommend these books of mine. Other people there are who may be classed as workers, but not as brain-workers, their duties being merely mechanical duties of routine. Of this class clerks in banks, private members of the House of Commons, and curates, are perhaps the most salient types. Such people have holidays; but it is their bodies merely, not their brains also, that require rest. Their bodies being released from the ordinary routine, their brains are set free, and, like horses that have not been exercised, must be rather restive. Such people, I conceive, snatch eagerly at their vacations as opportunities for mental activity, and pack into their trunks, as a necessary item, many stout volumes of history, philosophy, and so forth. That is their holiday-literature. I address myself not to them, but to the many people who, like myself, may be called brain-workers: the people who depend for their comfort on the activity of their brains in this or that direction—in the direction of a business, or of an art, or of a learned profession.

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WHEN people of this kind—when we—periodically are released from work, what is our exact condition? Primarily, of course, we have the desire to go as far away as is possible, to merge ourselves in some environment as little as possible like our own. In that respect we are not at all different from the mere routine-workers. The difference between us and them begins to be apparent so soon as we make the actual preparations for our flight. None of us ever dreams of taking away with him a book of any sort or kind. The mere notion of taking away a book would revolt us. We wish to give our minds a perfect rest, to exclude from them anything in the guise of a thought. We desire a vacation in the literal sense of the word. We desire vacuity, a void, a blank. It is not that our minds are tired: it is that we are tired of our minds. Our minds have so thoroughly worn out our bodies that we can no longer, physically, bear the burden of cerebration. Our fatigue, like that of the routine-worker, is merely physical. But the routine-worker is luckier than we, inasmuch as his fatigue, not being due to excessive cerebration, does not disgust him of his brain. He sets forth, buoyantly, with a positive aim, beyond the merely negative aim of rest: he is going to improve his mind. We set forth, limply, for rest only.

At our destination we settle down, stolidly, to become mere vegetables. Gradually, impalpably, our tissues renew themselves, until, anon, we feel very well indeed. Our cheeks are sanguine in the sunlight, and curve convexly; our eyes are bright and clear; our step is elastic; our manner is nothing if not breezy. We are at peace with the world. Our bodies, magnanimous in their strength, have forgiven our brains the selfishness and cruelty practised by them in the past. Our bodies hearken, at length, to our brains' timid request for a little light refreshment, and move into the nearest book-shop. Yes, the time soon comes when we feel inclined to read something—something of a trivial kind.

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ANYTHING not trivial is out of the question. I recall one holiday when my body, eager to show its nobility by conferring on my brain a far greater favour than that deposed tyrant had dared to hope for, purchased a new book by George Meredith. The result was a most humiliating failure. My brain overwhelmed my body with broken words of gratitude, and began to devour the book with the appetite of a starved creature; but, having gulped down a few sentences, it suddenly sickened, reeled, collapsed in a dead faint, and was ordered complete rest and constant care. My body should have known better (and so I told it) than to let loose a starving creature on such a diet. It replied that it was very sorry, but that it had thought it was doing the right thing in giving my brain the kind of diet which had always seemed to agree with it better than any other. I said I was sure that my body had meant well, and that we would say no more about the matter. Indeed, the reply of my body non-plussed me. In London, was I not always reading Meredith? There I could never read enough of him to stay my appetite, and had never had any patience with the people who found him obscure—never, at any rate, with those who found in such obscurity a reason for not reading him, rather than a reason for reading him with all the might they could muster. And yet, here was I in exactly that piteous state of wooden-headedness which I had scorned in others. What was the explanation? I gave it up, but found it, a year or two later, in a theory somewhere propounded by Mr. Chalmers Mitchell, to the effect that the stronger and healthier be our bodies, the less readily do our brains work. Mr. Mitchell argued, in a highly technical and persuasive manner, that in every human being the amount of nervous force is invariable, and that, when the body is weak, this force is absorbed by the brain, whereas, when the body is strong it is absorbed by the body. I know not whether I have stated Mr. Mitchell's theory with scientific accuracy; if you see any flaws in it as stated by me, I beg you will blame me, not Mr. Mitchell, whose career I have no wish to blast. In any case, Mr. Mitchell's theory convinced me. He instanced, in support of it, his own experience—that he always found the utmost difficulty in performing during a holiday any one of the mental tasks that in ordinary circumstances were quite easy to him, and that whenever he returned from a holiday it was long before his brain recovered the powers which it had possessed before his holiday began. This experience tallies exactly with my own (and, I doubt not, with yours). The difficulty of brain-work during and after a holiday cannot be explained away by the mere assumption that one is lazy and loth to work. It has often happened to me that in the midst of a holiday I have been obliged to write something. Though, invariably, I would much rather not have had to write it, I have bowed, with philosophic courtesy, to the inevitable, and have sat down and concentrated myself on my task with the best will in the world—with a will better than usual in proportion to my abnormal eagerness to get the beastly thing off my hands. And yet, invariably I have taken about double my ordinary time to get the——"to reach my goal" were a prettier phrase. Exactly similar has been my experience of work that had to be done as soon as I returned to London. Mr. Mitchell's theory seems the only plausible explanation, and accordingly we must accept it. Not merely, then, are we unwilling to read during a holiday an author who much exercises our brains; it follows from Mr. Mitchell's theory that we cannot do so except at the expense of that physical well-being which our immediate aim is to preserve. To read Meredith without trying to understand him would be absurd, obviously. But while we are physically strong we cannot understand him. By efforts to understand him we could lower our vitality to the point of perfect comprehension. But how foolish to do that! During (on an average) ten months in the year, our brains are in the ascendant. Surely in the other two months our bodies need not be grudged their fling.

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WHAT, then, is the right kind of literature for our holidays? We have already excluded philosophic fiction, on the ground that it forces us to think. Thus pure philosophy, philosophic poetry, history and science are likewise taboo. Our quest is narrowed down to non-philosophic poetry and fiction. Now, even as we do not wish to think, so are we averse from having our emotions stirred, during a holiday. We wish to be as vegetable as possible. Thus poetry (and passionate fiction) must be ruled out altogether; for a poem which appeals neither to our brains nor to our hearts must be a thoroughly bad poem, and, being so, is bound to make us angry—to stir indirectly an emotion. But fiction we do not take so seriously. We do not necessarily detest a novel which appeals neither to our brains nor to our hearts: on the contrary, this is just the kind of book that pleases us in our vacations. We wish to be mildly illuded, and no more. We do not, on the one hand, want an intricate or original plot; nor, on the other hand, do we want an utterly trite or stupid plot. We want neither characters of real flesh and blood, nor characters that are mere puppets. We want characters that we have seen before, but not seen too often, nor seen in exactly the same guise. In fact, we want to be illuded mildly. The style in which the book is written must be neither remarkably good nor remarkably bad, else it would mar the mild illusion, and indirectly excite an emotion in us. "But is there," you ask me, "any author on whom we can rely for such books as those which you have so sympathetically adumbrated?" There is. There is one author on whom you may rely implicitly. I refer to him of whom, throughout the past twenty years or so, the reviewers, with one accord, have been predicating that "he always writes like a gentleman." A monotonous chorus? But, indeed, there is nothing else for the poor reviewers to say. They cannot say "he writes like a profoundly thoughtful gentleman," or "like a foolish gentleman," or "like a witty gentleman," or "like a dull gentleman." Indeed, "gentlemanly" is the only epithet they could well apply to him, and that were tautological. If you have read one of Mr. Norris' novels, you will admit that it responded exactly to all the negative requirements of the holiday mood. And you may take my word for it that all his other novels are of precisely the same kind—not better, not worse, and neither bad nor good. Through all of them you may skip without losing the thread, and of all of them you may read every word without being bored. When you have nothing better to do you can always take one of them up with pleasure, and when you have something better to do you can always lay it down without regret. In a garden, or on the deck of a ship, or on the terrace of a casino—wherever you be lolling, hale and hearty, away from your usual environment—these, I assure you, are the very books you need, and are the only books you need.

Long may their author live, to add many to their number; and long live I, to take my annual fill of him; and long live the descendants of the late Baron Tauchnitz, to carry on that subtly appropriate form in which I always buy him—that plain, pale, easy, decorous, attractive form in which I, sentimentally ignoring the "earnest request" on the covers, bring across the Channel his latest volumes, year by year, and place them upon that upper shelf, with their elder comrades.