Papers from Lilliput

by J. B. Priestley

Suddenly, I see a tiny moving figure on the road before me, and immediately it focuses my attention. What are walls, fields, trees, and cows compared with this miraculous thing, a fellow human being, played upon by the same desires and passions, his head stuffed with the same dreams and fluttering thoughts? In one of the world’s greatest romances is not the most breathless moment concerned with the discovery of a human footprint in the sand? Does not the world’s story begin with one human being meeting another? As I keep my eyes fixed on the nearing figure the last of my vague fancies and egotistical imaginings are blown away; my mind is engrossed by the solidly romantic possibilities of the encounter. Just as I was glad to escape from the sight and sound of men, so I am eager now to break my solitude: the circle is complete. And as we come up together, the stranger and I, I give him a loud greeting, and he, a little startled, returns the salute; and so we pass on, fellow-travellers and nameless companions in a great adventure, knowing no more of each other than the brief sight of a face, the sound of a voice can tell us. We only cry out a Hail and Farewell through the mist, yet I think we go on our way a little heartened.

THE EDITOR

I HAVE just learned from a little paragraph in a newspaper that another old acquaintance of mine has gone—old Wimpenny-Brown, ‘for many years editor of the Wallerdale Herald’—as the paragraph is careful to inform me. But there is little need, for it was in his editorial days that I met Wimpenny-Brown, and I can only think of him as an editor. Apart from a few early years spent as a reporter on a lesser London paper, all his time had been given to the Wallerdale Herald. It was an obscure provincial sheet, Liberal-cum-Radical in tone, strongly upholding Free Trade and much given to enunciating those few leading principles ‘upon which the prosperity and happiness of this country must inevitably depend.’ But in the days when I knew its editor, the Herald was nothing more to me than a frame, the necessary boundaries of gilt and moulding, that set off his personality. Thus framed, my old acquaintance was a man to be sought out and gathered to oneself. To a youngster in quest of the absurd, as I was at that time, he was meat and drink. Even so long ago, he was considered one of the old school, and so true to type that he seemed to have been specially created to verify the comic novelists. He seemed to dwell in the great shadow of Mr. Potts, of the Eatanswill Gazette, and to be closely related to that solemn editorial host of Colonels and Majors dear to the American humorist.

A pipe and an occasional glass served Wimpenny-Brown as a tribute to the bohemianism of his profession; as hostages to respectability he had a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses at the end of a black ribbon, trim whiskers, and a large umbrella; with his staff he was—I believe—majestically paternal, but to his opponents he was a very Jupiter; and for the rest—he had a manner. In his presence, it seemed as if the Essay on Liberty had just been published, as if dusty men of letters were still delightedly wondering where Macaulay’s style came from, as if radical masterpieces were still being issued in fortnightly parts. Many men had his respect, even his homage, but as an editor—and I never knew him as anything else—he would allow no man to dictate to him; he served only the Public and ‘those few great principles.’ ‘An editor,’ he would say, tapping a sheet of paper with his glasses, ‘is the servant of the Public although his duty is to educate it.’ And his innocent vanity would swell out into such monstrous proportions, would bud and blossom into such foolish phrases, that his hearer would wonder if he had suddenly strayed into the rigid world of the third-rate comic novel. But all was sincerely spoken. Wimpenny-Brown meant all that he said, and he strove hard to educate his public. He would not pander to low tastes (he has said so many a time in my hearing); nor was he prepared to tickle rather higher tastes with the bright confectionery of fiction and verse and such things. No, it was by enunciating and applying those great principles, giving solid bread, so to speak, that he meant to educate his readers. ‘You must remember, sir’—he would point the glasses—‘that this is a News-Paper, and not a magazine’—the last with magnificent scorn. At ordinary times, his hand was hardly to be traced in the paper; he remained hidden afar-off, brooding over the great principles. But at a crisis, Wallerdale knew what it meant to have a Herald and a Wimpenny-Brown as its editor. On the eve of an election, at the outbreak or at the conclusion of a war, at all times like these, he could be counted upon; leaders would flow from his pen, and the Herald would look Monarch, Lords, Commons, in the face, would address all Europe, and the two Americas if need be, re-assuring friends and denouncing enemies here, there, and everywhere. Opinion would perhaps differ as to when he was at his best, but I, for one, found most to admire in his leaders on the death—say—of a political opponent: the decent respect for the dead man’s private virtues, tempered by regret at the waste of brilliant qualities in a bad cause, at the ‘late lamented minister’s fatal inability to comprehend those great principles which have ...’ and so forth. One saw the gold-rimmed glasses and the trim whiskers poised over the foolscap; he was no longer a fellow-citizen but the supreme arbiter, measuring out praise and blame while the organ wails and the strange dust is borne away.

Well, he is gone now, long after he quitted the editorial chair and declined from a servant of the public (and its educator) to an old fellow mumbling in a corner of a club-room. And in thinking of what he was, I may have done him little justice; probably the soft delicate lights of character have faded out of my memory and left the crude lines of a caricature. But still the little round figure (for he was little and round) rises from the past; I see the unfathomably profound look, I hear the solemn accents, and again his unconscious absurdity swells monstrously, and again the farce is played out. He seems now as extinct as the mastodon. Even his foolish dull little paper has disappeared; Wallerdale has no Herald now, but listens to the brazen voices from London. Even those few great principles have sadly declined, and we hear little of them now. He would, I suppose, be as helpless as a babe in the office of a great modern newspaper. His solemn gestures, worn rhetorical finery and great principles would not carry him in that tense atmosphere. More sense of organisation, quick decisions, lightning judgments, would be demanded from him—and, I think, in vain. A greater knowledge of what can be done in a newspaper, of what catches the public eye, in short, of the tricks of the trade, would certainly be necessary. Yes, he would have to know more.

And yet, in a way, he would have to know less. Looking back at him, the obscure editor of an obscure sheet, amazingly rigid with self-importance, a little figure of fun, I realise that he was a better man than most of his successors of to-day, those undeniably clever, industrious journalists who put the great newspapers into the hands of the million. He could not have done what they do, day by day, but would he have tried? He, at least, would never have consented to become the mouthpiece of the rich, no better—nay, worse—than their lackeys. His talents were slender enough and monstrously exaggerated in his own mind, but such as they were, they were genuinely at the service of his readers. To him the public was not that million-eyed monster waiting to be cajoled and tricked which it has since become. And though his successors may be infinitely more clever, the worst of them can only run their dubious course to-day because yesterday my old editor and his like ran another and better course; the trickster of to-day is nothing but a huge parasite battening on the good name that some honest men in his trade left behind them. That lying sheet, the What’s-its-Name from London, has, I believe, taken the place of the Wallerdale Herald, and when a reader from those parts goes trustfully through its smudgy columns of falsehood, perhaps he does it because he still imagines that someone like Wimpenny-Brown is responsible for its utterance. Alas!—he does not know that the Wimpenny-Browns, those Servants of the Public with their few great principles, are dead and gone, and that something more than innocent folly perished with them.

ON AN OLD BOOK OF NATURAL HISTORY

THE observation that ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is looked upon, in these days, rather as a platitude than a paradox; yet it does not necessarily follow that we, in our heart of hearts, really accept this smart saying. But everyone who has read in our old literature must admit that it is true of our forefathers; their idea of truth and their so-called facts are a thousand times stranger to us than their fiction. The mediaeval romances are full of the marvellous, but they pale before the grave books of instruction written by quite serious, learned old gentlemen. Some of the latter merely set out to edify the young mind, but the result of their labours often seems to us a very riot of the imagination, and our schoolboys would consider themselves lucky if they could meet with matter one-half so entertaining. The quaint, unconscious humour of these solemn, old authors over-shadows even their historical and antiquarian interest.

Some such thoughts as these were going through my head the other night when I was gleefully devouring, in one of the Early English Text Society’s wonderful reprints, some extracts from a very quaint old book: ‘The noble lyfe and natures of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles and fisshes,’ by one Laurens Andrewe. The date of this volume is unknown, but it was probably written and published early in the sixteenth century. The Third Part of the book is particularly occupied with the noble life and natures of fishes, and begins: ‘Here after followeth of the natures of the fisshes of the See, whiche be right profitable to be understande.’ Now I care little for Natural History at any time, and fishes do not make a very lively subject for study, but in the hands of Master Andrewe, Natural History becomes ‘all a wonder,’ and the sea, to him, is certainly filled with creatures that are ‘rich and strange.’

When he is dealing with the commonest fishes, like the herring, our author is fairly sure of his facts, and we get nothing very exciting, but once he leaves the familiar types, there is no end to his phantasies. The Ahuna, when in danger, withdraws his head into his belly, and, as Laurens wisely notes: ‘He dothe ete (eat) a parte of himselfe rather than the other fisshes sholde ete him whole.’ The most interesting fact about the Balena, a creature resembling a whale, is that in rough weather she puts her young ones in her mouth for safety. But, according to our author, the Cetus ‘is the greatest whale fisshe of all,’ and the manner of his capture is most extraordinary. Such is the perfidious and cruel nature of mankind that the most gentle, lovable trait of this great creature becomes his undoing. For, you must know, the Cetus is very fond of music, and, in order to ensnare the unsuspecting leviathan, men assemble a number of ships, and then, with ‘divers instruments of musike, they play with grete armonye.’ The hapless creature, innocent of the nature of man, comes to the surface and draws nearer and nearer, being ‘very gladde of this armonye,’ only to find a terrible death awaiting him.