Lucian the dreamer

by J. S. Fletcher

‘It is nothing of the sort,’ said the other. ‘You know it is your great curse, my dear Lucian, that you never get a clear notion of the truth. You have a trick of seeing things as you think they ought to be; you will not see them as they are. Just because the Boers happen to be numerically small, to lead a pastoral life, and to have gone into the desert like the Israelites of old, you have brought that far too powerful imagination of yours to bear upon them, and have elevated them into a class with the Swiss and the Italians, who fought for their country.’

‘What are the Boers fighting for?’ asked Lucian.

‘At present to grab somebody else’s property,’ returned the other. ‘Don’t get sentimental about them. After all, much as you love us, you’re only half an Englishman, and you don’t understand the English feeling. Are the English folk not suffering, and is a Boer widow or a Boer orphan more worthy of pity than a Yorkshire lass whose lad is lying dead out there, or a Scottish child whose father will never come back again?’

Lucian swept these small and insignificant details aside with some impatience.

‘You are the mightiest nation the world has ever seen,’ he said. ‘You have a past—such a past as no other people can boast. You have a responsibility because of that past, and at present you have thrown all sense of it away, and are behaving like the drunken brute who rises gorged with flesh and wine, and yells for blood. This is an England with vine-leaves in her hair—it is not the England of Cromwell.’

‘I thank God it is not!’ said the other man with heartfelt reverence. ‘We wish for no dictatorship here. Come, leave off slanging us in this bloodthirsty fashion, and try to arrive at a sensible view of things. Turn your energies to a practical direction—write a new romantic play for Harcourt, something that will cheer us in these dark days, and give the money for bandages and warm socks and tobacco for poor Tommy out at the front. He isn’t as picturesque—so it’s said—as Brother Boer, but he’s a man after all, and has a stomach.’

But Lucian would neither be cajoled nor chaffed out of his rôle of prophet. He became that most objectionable of all things—the man who believes he has a message, and must deliver it. He continued to hurl his philippics at the British public through the ever-ready columns of the peace-at-any-price paper, and the man in the street, who is not given to the drawing of fine distinctions, called him a pro-Boer. Lucian, in strict reality, was not a pro-Boer—he merely saw the artistry of the pro-Boer position. He remembered Byron’s attitude with respect to Greece, and a too generous instinct had led him to compare Mr. Kruger to Cincinnatus. The man in the street knew nothing of these things, and cared less. It seemed to him that Lucian, who was, after all, nothing but an ink-slinger, a blooming poet, was slanging the quarter of a million men who were hurrying to Table Bay as rapidly as the War Office could get them there. To this sort of thing the man in the street objected. He did not care if Lucian’s instincts were all on the side of the weaker party, nor was it an excuse that Lucian himself, in the matter of strict nationality, was an Italian. He had chosen to write his poems in England, said the man in the street, and also in the English language, and he had made a good thing out of it too, and no error, and the best thing he could do now was to keep a civil tongue in his head, or, rather, pen in his hand. This was no time for the cuckoo to foul the nest wherein he had had free quarters for so long.

The opinion of the man in the street is the crystallised common-sense of England, voiced in elementary language. Lucian, unfortunately, did not know this, and he kept on firing sonnets at the heads of people who, without bluster or complaint, were already tearing up their shirts for bandages. The man in the street read them, and ground his teeth, and waited for an opportunity. That came when Lucian was ill-advised enough to allow his name to be printed in large letters upon the placard of a great meeting whereat various well-intentioned but somewhat thoughtless persons proposed to protest against a war which had been forced upon the nation, and from which it was then impossible to draw back with either safety or honour. Lucian was still in the clouds; still thinking of Byron at Missolonghi; still harping upon the undoubted but scarcely pertinent facts that England had freed slaves, slain giants, and waved her flag protectingly over all who ran to her for help. The foolishness of assisting at a public meeting whereat the nation was to be admonished of its wickedness in daring to assert itself never occurred to him. He was still the man with the message.

He formed one of a platform party of whom it might safely have been said that every man was a crank, and every woman a faddist. He was somewhat astonished and a little perplexed when he looked around him, and realised that his fellow-protestants were not of the sort wherewith he usually foregathered; but he speedily became interested in the audience. It had been intended to restrict admission to those well-intentioned folk who desired peace at any price, but the man in the street had placed a veto upon that, and had come in large numbers, and with a definite resolve to take part in the proceedings. The meeting began in a cheerful and vivacious fashion, and ended in one dear to the English heart. The chairman was listened to with some forbearance and patience; a lady was allowed to have her say because she was a woman. It was a sad inspiration that led the chairman to put Lucian up next; a still sadder one to refer to his poetical exhortations to the people. The sight of Lucian, the fashionably attired, dilettante, dreamy-eyed poet, who had lashed and pricked the nation whose blood was being poured out like water, and whose coffers were being depleted at a rapid rate, was too much for the folk he essayed to address. They knew him and his recent record. At the first word they rose as one man, and made for the platform. Lucian and the seekers after peace were obliged to run, as rabbits run to their warrens, and the enemy occupied the position. Somebody unfurled a large flag, and the entire assemblage joined in singing Mr. Kipling’s invitation to contribute to the tambourine fund.

In the school of life the teacher may write many lessons with the whitest chalk upon the blackest blackboard, and there will always be a child in the corner who will swear that he cannot see the writing. Lucian could not see the lesson of the stormed platform, and he continued his rhyming crusade and made enemies by the million. He walked with closed eyes along a road literally bristling with bayonets: it was nothing but the good-natured English tolerance of a poet as being more or less of a lunatic that kept the small boys of the Strand from going for him. Men at street corners made remarks upon him which were delightful to overhear: it was never Lucian’s good fortune to overhear them. His nose was in the air.