The Angel and the Author, and Others

by Jerome K. Jerome

Your butcher and your baker say it does, and insist on making a row in the passage.

You fill yourself up with gooseberry wine. You tell yourself it is seasoned champagne. Your liver next morning says it is not.

The dæmon within us means well, but forgets it is not the only thing there. A man I knew was an enthusiast on vegetarianism. He argued that if the poor would adopt a vegetarian diet the problem of existence would be simpler for them, and maybe he was right. So one day he assembled some twenty poor lads for the purpose of introducing to them a vegetarian lunch. He begged them to believe that lentil beans were steaks, that cauliflowers were chops. As a third course he placed before them a mixture of carrots and savoury herbs, and urged them to imagine they were eating saveloys.

“Now, you all like saveloys,” he said, addressing them, “and the palate is but the creature of the imagination. Say to yourselves, ‘I am eating saveloys,’ and for all practical purposes these things will be saveloys.”

Some of the lads professed to have done it, but one disappointed-looking youth confessed to failure.

“But how can you be sure it was not a saveloy?” the host persisted.

“Because,” explained the boy, “I haven’t got the stomach-ache.”

It appeared that saveloys, although a dish of which he was fond, invariably and immediately disagreed with him. If only we were all dæmon and nothing else philosophy would be easier. Unfortunately, there is more of us.

Another argument much approved by philosophy is that nothing matters, because a hundred years hence, say, at the outside, we shall be dead. What we really want is a philosophy that will enable us to get along while we are still alive. I am not worrying about my centenary; I am worrying about next quarter-day. I feel that if other people would only go away, and leave me—income-tax collectors, critics, men who come round about the gas, all those sort of people—I could be a philosopher myself. I am willing enough to make believe that nothing matters, but they are not. They say it is going to be cut off, and talk about judgment summonses. I tell them it won’t trouble any of us a hundred years hence. They answer they are not talking of a hundred years hence, but of this thing that was due last April twelvemonth. They won’t listen to my dæmon. He does not interest them. Nor, to be candid, does it comfort myself very much, this philosophical reflection that a hundred years later on I’ll be sure to be dead—that is, with ordinary luck. What bucks me up much more is the hope that they will be dead. Besides, in a hundred years things may have improved. I may not want to be dead. If I were sure of being dead next morning, before their threat of cutting off that water or that gas could by any possibility be carried out, before that judgment summons they are bragging about could be made returnable, I might—I don’t say I should—be amused, thinking how I was going to dish them. The wife of a very wicked man visited him one evening in prison, and found him enjoying a supper of toasted cheese.

“How foolish of you, Edward,” argued the fond lady, “to be eating toasted cheese for supper. You know it always affects your liver. All day long to-morrow you will be complaining.”