Take, for instance, that immoderately common type, among the most common of God's creatures, which I will call "the Silent Fool," the man who hardly ever talks, and when he does says something so overwhelmingly silly that one remembers it all one's life. I can recollect but one Silent Fool in modern letters, but he comes in a book which is one of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our time, a book like a decisive battle, or like the statue of John the Baptist at South Kensington, a glory for us all. I mean The Diary of a Nobody. In that you will find the silent Mr. Padge, who says "That's right"—and nothing more.
One might go on for ever piling up instances of this divorce between the supposed pictures of our modern life and the truths of it. I will end with what is to me, perhaps, the most glaring of all: the attitude of fiction towards what is called "success." No matter who the author is, no matter what his knowledge of the world, he simply cannot draw "successful men" as they are, that is, in a diversity as great as any to be discovered in the human race. Men who have "got on," that is, who are at once well to do and well known, are as different as men with the toothache or as men with warts on their chins. Some are kind, some brutal, some clever, some stupid, some got their money by luck, some by inheritance, some by theft, some few by being able to make or do something better than their fellows, but at any rate in real life, when you are about to meet someone who is known to you as "successful," you never have the slightest idea what you are going to meet, your last experience of the sort is no guide to the next, and the "successful" chap may turn out to be anything at all. But in novels your wealthy and well-known man is invariably powerful in character. It never fails. He may be good or bad, English or foreign, young or old, but he always has in him something of what you see in a very good sergeant-major at a few shillings a week, an experienced head master at a few hundreds a year, or a capable engineer on a passenger ship. He displays qualities which have no more to do with what is called "success" now-a-days than red hair or brown boots have. In a word, your successful man is a type in the novel. In real life he is not a type at all—he is any one. And another thing you never get in a novel is a well-mannered man or a bad-mannered man. I cannot recollect one character who interrupts at the top of his voice, nor one who joins the conversation of others in an easy way.... But suppose one filled a novel with real people, what escape would there be from daily life?
ON THE EFFECT OF TIME
Of all contrasts the most ironical and the most profound is the contrast between the Tag and the Truth of the Tag. A couple of lines are chosen by humanity from the work of a great poet, and are usually so chosen not only because they are beautiful, but because they are true. When they have been repeated a certain number of times they become a tag. A proverb or a mere popular statement puts into the shortest possible form some extremely simple, and perhaps extremely obvious, at any rate (this is quite certain) some extremely important, truth. Every one sees it is a truth, everybody repeats it, and it becomes a tag.
Now note the next phase in the life of the said tag. It is criticised and it is ridiculed; it becomes a solid butt for the archery of human wit. That phase lasts, perhaps, the lifetime of a man.
Now note the third phase, for it will teach you the most that can be learnt about mankind, and it is endless. It is the consummation of the tag and the test of humanity afforded by the tag. The tag is now taken for granted and is eternal, and the following things happen to it: children are taught it like the alphabet; they are compelled to learn it. Hobbledehoys, great wits, and leaders of thought avoid it because it is commonplace. They can be seen waggling from one side of the road to the other in their grotesque efforts to avoid the tag. The whole world knows that the tag is there. Lastly—most wonderful of all!—the tag ceases to bite: it ceases to affect men; men are saturated with it. Men are acclimatised to it. They are vaccinated with it; and the tag has now arrived at the exercise of its eternal function, which is to wake in individuals, here in one man, there in another, an overwhelming sense of its truth (or beauty). It begins its career of converting individual men. Let it be mentioned where three are gathered together, and it will be fled from as an out-used thing, but two can make confidences each to the other about it, and one can feel it like a thorn or like a gem in his heart.
"Who goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing" has gone through all these phases; so has "Waste not want not." So has "For who to dull forgetfulness a prey," etc. So has "Felix qui potuit," etc. And so have the three or four thousand others that are the stock of a proper mind.
All these set me thinking of yet another tag, and as it is that which most sharply tests humility and, through humility, intelligence, and as, therefore, in this not very humble and not intelligent time it is grossly neglected, there is a pleasure in dwelling upon it. It is to this effect: "The future is veiled from man."