And gradually, detail by detail, I re-create the scene. But it takes time. And football only occasionally helps me. There are no championships in rugger. There are no figures, no individual scores, to help one. One game is so like another. Season after season one plays against the same teams, on the same grounds, and with only slightly varying results. It is difficult sometimes even to place offhand any particular game in its right season. And anyhow, football is only a key to week-end associations. It is of small assistance in the dating of a meeting that took place in the middle of the week.
It is different, though, with cricket. People tell me sometimes that I have an uncanny memory for dates. “Did you ever,” they will say, “see that film ‘The Old Nest,’ that was on at the Alhambra about two years ago?” “Yes,” I will answer, “I went there the last Monday in August 1921—the 29th, I think it was.” But it is not “The Old Nest” that I remember. I only remember it through its associations of Lord’s and the second day of that wonderful Middlesex and Surrey match; the morning of inexplicable failure; Donald Knight’s magnificent innings in the afternoon; tea-time with Surrey in an impregnable position. Two fifty runs ahead and eight wickets still to go. And then afterwards that startling, that glorious collapse. Nigel Haig taking wicket after wicket from the nursery end. Fender trying to play for keeps, and being taken by Murrell wide on the leg side off Hearne. The match a match again.
And I remember that evening riding on a bus down Oxford Street and reading the red placards of the newspapers that had been printed while Knight and Shepherd were in. I remember the shriek of the paper boys: “Surrey making sure. Paper! Surrey making sure!” And because it was the climax of an unforgettable day I remember afterwards dining with my mother at the Spanish Restaurant and taking her to “The Old Nest” at the Alhambra.
But that, you will say, is an exceptional occasion. There have only been three such matches since you went first to Lord’s, in a sailor suit, in the May of 1904, and cried when Plum Warner’s wicket fell. But in a lesser way of lesser things; I remember the books I have read, the friends I have met, the parties I have been to, by the matches that were then in progress. Should I, for example, be able to fix the date of the inaugural banquet at the Connaught Rooms of that ill-fated League of Youth, had I not read on the way there in the evening paper the score of the tie-match between Somerset and Sussex; and were I to hear two people wondering in what year and in what month Compton Mackenzie’s Rich Relatives was published, there would be to guide me the picture of a sun-drenched day at Lord’s with Greville Stevens asking me what I thought of the bright red volume that lay unopened on the seat before me. I have never kept a diary. I shall have no need to as long as Wisden’s Almanack is published—during the summer, at any rate. There is always some association. You have met a person for the first time. You walk down Bedford Street towards the Strand. A newsboy rushes past you with the first issue of the late night special. You read in the stop-press column that Fender has taken eight wickets at Trent Bridge. The date and hour of that first meeting is in your memory for ever. And when you come to write your reminiscences, you have only to turn for verification to the Wisden for 1921.
But I begin to detect in the reader an ominous stir of irritation. “Has this man,” he is beginning to ask himself, “no sense of proportion? Does he think that a book or a picture or a romantic episode is of less importance than a game of cricket? Does he seriously discuss in the same breath an innings by Knight and a novel by Mackenzie? Cricket and football! what do they matter, anyway?”
Little enough, no doubt; but then in the face of eternity does anything matter so very greatly? What are we and our works, our triumphs, our ambitions, our disasters, but accidents in the long process of effect and cause. We talk of the eternal verities, but the flowering of art is as temporal as the enjoyment we draw from it. In sixty years we shall be no longer here to admire El Greco’s painting. And in six hundred years its colours will have faded, the canvas will have lost its beauty. It will be valueless. And in the presence of eternity what is six years, or sixty, or six hundred?
Already we are ceasing to read the classics. The Latin and Greek quotation has passed from the leading article and the debate in Parliament. The past is being rapidly immersed in the ever-widening flood of modern literature. The past and present are always at war with one another. China has produced no poetry for two thousand years. “There is already,” they say, “so immense a collection of excellent work that it would be a folly to attempt to add to it.” In China the past has stifled and killed the present. Here in the western world we are busy making an end of Greece and Rome. Will anyone be reading Virgil in the nineteen-eighties? And of Shakespeare as of Virgil.
We are always asking ourselves, “Who will be reading what in 1980?” We have always in our minds that unborn generation that we would influence and address. But either way, does it matter very much? These buildings of ours, these restaurants, and shops, and cinemas, that we are flinging up on all sides of us so recklessly, so haphazardly for purposes of convenience and display, they will speak of us far more distinctly to the men and women of the twenty-second century than these poems and plays and pictures, this music and these novels that we are producing in such profusion.
Contemporary political thought, and its resulting bills and measures and defences, will be as obsolete as is to-day the policy of Gladstone. Our points of issue in religion and morality will doubtless be the occasion for music-hall derision. But our buildings will be there; and as, to the majority of us to-day, the sense of Augustan repose and polish and formality is most easily suggested by the rectangular windows and low lines of London squares; and as the vulgarity, and the pretentiousness, solemnity, and solidity that were the worst characteristics of the Early Victorian age are forced continually on our attention by the elaborate porticos and columns, the theatricality of over-decoration that obscure for us so much that was at that time excellent and that make us exclaim contemptuously, “How typically Victorian,” so shall we too in our turn be judged.
As I am carried on the top deck of a bus down Oxford Street, and see at the end of that avenue of brightly decorated windows the majestic façade of Peter Robinson’s emporium, and consider how it dwarfs the circus it surveys, and when I see from the top of Regent Street, far down beyond the jagged row of roofs and chimney stacks, the lovely low-roofed curve that the demands of utility are busy condemning as a piece of unserviceable decoration, I grow a little wistful, not so much because a beautiful thing is being taken from us, but out of a distrust as to what manner of buildings will take its place. I look nervously into the future. I see a young man, his coat and waistcoat flowered with the brocade of early twenty-second century fashion, passing here in whatever means of locomotion the young blood of that period elects to honour. I see his eye resting contemptuously on this jagged mosaic of ill-assortment. “They made that mess,” he will say to his companion, “in the beginning of the twentieth century.” I am afraid that of the Georgian poets and novelists he will be as ignorant as the majority of us are to-day of the obscure contemporaries of Wordsworth; that he will find a history of our political practices as tedious and as corrupt as those of the other periods with which he has had to acquaint himself for the satisfaction of his university examiners. He will be merely interested, casually, in his spare time in the form life took in 1923 for the average man and woman, and, as he will have inherited from us the amiable quality of laziness, he will favour the short cut; he will be content to contemplate, to absorb the atmosphere of our public buildings, and I am more than a little afraid that, as he passes through Regent Street to Oxford Circus, he will shudder, as we do when we wake from a bad dream, with the shudder that becomes a smile, with the slow reassurance through familiar objects of an averted evil. And he will laugh and point to the façade of Peter Robinson’s, “Typical Twentieth Century!”