It is impossible to think of greatness in the terms of the eyeglass. Shakespeare himself could hardly survive so limiting and belittling a circumstance. Try to think of Milton, in the days before blindness had come upon him, sitting at Cromwell's elbow with an eyeglass in his right eye. Imagine Gladstone or Newman wearing eyeglasses. The mind rejects the image as a sort of sacrilege. Indeed one may almost say that the measure of greatness is the extent of the humiliation which an eyeglass would inflict upon the subject. And, yet again—so dangerous is it to generalise—there are rare cases in which an eyeglass seems the fitting property of the man. Joseph Conrad was such a case. There was in him a haughty aloofness from the drama that he observed with such cold and dispassionate understanding that his eyeglass had a certain significance that gave it warrant. He did not wear it "like a gentleman." He wore it like a being of another creation.
I do not know whether we invented the monocle, nor do I know whether it is a peculiarly English institution; I fancy it is. In any case, it is the universal attribute of the stage Englishman abroad, and in America, where an eyeglass would be an offence against the unwritten law of the republic, it symbolises all those manners of the superior person whose export abroad, and especially to the United States, does our interests much harm. The warning of the writer in the New Statesman is badly needed. Let us keep the Eyeglass Englishman (whether he wears an eyeglass or not) at home, where we are used to him, and where he can do no mischief. After all, he does not represent us. He is only one in ten thousand of us. Why should he be chosen to make us misunderstood by people who dislike the idea of social caste and all its appurtenances?
A MAN AND HIS WATCH
I suppose most people recognised something of themselves in the story, reported in the papers the other day, about the man and his watch. He was hurrying to the station when it occurred to him that he had not got his watch on. So he took his watch out of his pocket to see if he had time to run home and get it. I do not know how the affair continued; but I like to think of him hurrying back, bursting into his house, bouncing upstairs, feeling under his pillow for the watch, finding it was not there, and creating a fine hubbub in his family, before his little daughter remarks that it is in his pocket. And of course he misses the train. We have all done this sort of thing. A very grave and responsible man who sat in Parliament for many years told me that he went up to his bedroom one evening to change into evening-dress. And at the stage of undressing at which the ceremony of winding up his watch usually occurred, he wound it up, put it under his pillow—and got into bed. Happily, before he had fallen asleep he remembered that he had come up, not to undress for bed, but to dress for dinner.
I had an absurd experience of the kind myself not long ago. As everyone knows, there are two tube-stations at Oxford Circus, connected underground. I went down the lift at one station intending to catch a train somewhere, and walked along the subway until I came to a lift, into which a crowd of people were hurrying. I suppose my mind was occupied with some affair, and the mere habit of joining any crowd that is going into any lift swept me in on the tide. The ticket-collector was too busy to check my ticket, and I duly found myself out in the street again at the place from which I had started before I realised what I had done. I have the less hesitation in making this confession because few of us can have failed to have some experience of the sort. Most of our actions are as automatic as the functions of walking, or breathing, or masticating our food. They have become so habitual that we do not have to think about doing them. They perform themselves, as it were, without our help.
If it is your custom to lock up at night and put out the lights, you do so quite mechanically, and if, having locked the sitting-room door and reached the foot of the stairs, your mind chances to wake up and inquire: "Now did you put the lights out?" and sends you back to make sure, you never fail to find that the action has performed itself without any conscious effort on your part. It used to be no uncommon thing for my family to find the front-door securely bolted in broad daylight. I was in those days always the last home at night, and, having opened and closed the door, it was my custom to stoop down and bolt it. If by chance I came in during the morning or afternoon the process was faithfully performed. The habit of bolting the door had become a part of the habit of unlocking it, and it needed a conscious effort of the mind to break the sequence. Or to take another example, anybody can walk asleep down his own stairs quite safely, but if he woke up at the head of the stairs in the dark and began to think how the stairs went on and how many there were, he would not be able to get down them without feeling his way like a blind man.
And most of us, I suppose, know how easy it is to forget the most familiar name when the mind wakes up and urgently asks for it. You are talking, let us say, to Blessington when up comes Whorlow. You know Whorlow as well as you know your own shadow, and if you met him in the street in the ordinary way his name would be on your tongue as naturally as your own. But now your mind interferes. It demands Whorlow's name for the purposes of introduction on the spot—instantly. The passive habit of thinking Whorlow when you see Whorlow vanishes. Your active thought becomes engaged. It rushes round in search of his name, and cannot find it, and you end by mumbling something unintelligible. And probably Whorlow, who is a little sensitive about his name, feels that you have deliberately slighted him.
It is not difficult to credit the stories of the people who forget their own names or their own telephone number. These things have been committed to the automatic workings of the mind. Our active thought is not concerned with them, and when we consciously think about them they escape. As Samuel Butler says, we don't know a thing until we have ceased to know that we know it. If we ask ourselves whether we know it we are on the way to being lost. He takes the case of the accomplished pianist who rattles off a nocturne of Chopin or an impromptu of Schubert without a check or a mistake. The habit of the thing acquired by infinite practice carries him on like the wind. But let him be stopped in mid-flight, as it were, and then begin to think about the notes, and he will flounder and hesitate until the current of habit seizes him again and sweeps him to the close. Anyone can provide illustrations out of his own experience. I can spell Philippi as well as most if I take it at a rush, but if I begin by asking myself how to spell it, I fancy I should get entangled in the "l's" and "p's."
In the case of the man and his watch, we see this conflict of the active and passive mind in its most elementary form. His conscious thought is that he has forgotten his watch and that there is little time to spare to get it. Is there enough time? In comes habit and takes his watch out of his pocket to tell him how long it is before the train starts. The action is so automatic that he does not associate it with the subject of his disquietude. And there he stands, looking at his watch to see if he has time to go home and get it—a perpetual joke which we can all enjoy, none the less, perhaps all the more, because we suspect that we all stand there with him.