Tremendous Trifles

A Great Man

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has

always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing

away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always

dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men.

The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private;

I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly

the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this

is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it

is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.

The Yellow Pressman seems to have no power of catching the first

fresh fact about a man that dominates all after impressions.

For instance, before I met Bernard Shaw I heard that he spoke with

a reckless desire for paradox or a sneering hatred of sentiment;

but I never knew till he opened his mouth that he spoke with

an Irish accent, which is more important than all the other

criticisms put together.

Journalism is not personal enough. So far from digging out

private personalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities

on the surface. Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression

of this kind which we have all felt when we met great poets

or politicians, but which never finds its way into the newspapers.

I mean the impression that they are much older than we thought they were.

We connect great men with their great triumphs, which generally

happened some years ago, and many recruits enthusiastic for the thin

Napoleon of Marengo must have found themselves in the presence

of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.

I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising politician

confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of boyhood.

It described how his "brave young voice" rang in the rafters.

I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably

older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose:

all this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once

met a great man who was younger than I expected.

. . . . .

I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down

a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.

A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight

which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening.

It was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set

an instant after noon. It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened

and the road sank.

I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents;

I felt that the treetops that closed above me were the fixed

and real things, certain as the level of the sea; but that

the solid earth was every instant failing under my feet.

In a little while that splendid sunlight showed only in splashes,

like flaming stars and suns in the dome of green sky.

Around me in that emerald twilight were trunks of trees of every

plain or twisted type; it was like a chapel supported on columns

of every earthly and unearthly style of architecture.

Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature

of the forest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force.

For the meaning of woods is the combination of energy with complexity.

A forest is not in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense

with delicacy. Unique shapes that an artist would copy or a

philosopher watch for years if he found them in an open plain are

here mingled and confounded; but it is not a darkness of deformity.

It is a darkness of life; a darkness of perfection. And I began

to think how much of the highest human obscurity is like this,

and how much men have misunderstood it. People will tell you,

for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead.

Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate;

it is only the live tree that grows too many branches.

. . . . .

These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out

into deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the

evening was so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a

sunset all to itself. I went along that road according to directions

that had been given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling

beyond which the wood changed only faintly to a garden.

It was as if the curious courtesy and fineness of that character

I was to meet went out from him upon the valley; for I felt

on all these things the finger of that quality which the old

English called "fa***"; it is the quality which those can

never understand who think of the past as merely brutal;

it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees.

I went through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table,

looking smallish in his big chair. He was already an invalid,

and his hair and beard were both white; not like snow, for snow

is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even fierce;

rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up

quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand,

and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young.

He was the one great man of the old world whom I have met

who was not a mere statue over his own grave.

He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about

the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that.

He talked about the books he had not written. He unrolled

a purple bundle of romances which he had never had time to sell.

He asked me to write one of the stories for him, as he would

have asked the milkman, if he had been talking to the milkman.

It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort of astronomical farce.

It was all about a man who was rushing up to the Royal Society

with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying comet;

and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped

up at every other minute by his own weakness and vanities;

how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling.

That is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more.

Another, I dimly remember, was a version of the fall of Parnell;

the idea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love

of secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went out of that garden with a

blurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature.

The feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood

is a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere.

I really had the feeling that I had seen the creative quality;

which is supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls the Old Man

of the Forest: I had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind my path;

I have never seen him again; and now I shall not see him,

because he died last Tuesday.