But even if two and two really did make four, the fact would remain supremely useless. However cunningly it was conveyed, the statement would not abate one tear from the sorrows of a child, nor would it brighten, even for an instant, the eyes of a dying man. You could not win a girl with it, because the man who counts his kisses is damned from the start. A poet could not turn it into song; it would draw no briefest flame from the ashes of a storyteller’s fire. The thing is cold, inhuman; it is made for lawyers and politicians, and the persons who argue their lives away on matters of no importance. We who are simpler never put two and two together for the purpose of making four, for four is of no more use to us than a nice brace of twos. The infinite is the answer of all our mathematical problems, and if we cannot find it we are quick to sponge the sum off our slates. The belief that two and two make four leads most people to think four a better fellow than two; to hold, for instance, that a man with four millions must be richer than a man with two, though the groans of our pauper millionaires never cease to admonish our national cupidity. Two and two make just what your heart can compass, neither more nor less, and, if your unit is worthless, they make nothing at all.
Facts are worse than useless, for they limit the journeys of the human mind; but there is a common sense not founded on facts that represents the extreme limits of our intellectual pilgrimages. It is common only in this: it is true for all humanity when humanity is wise enough to accept it. Shakespeare had it deliciously, and even now we are only beginning to learn the things he knew. For instance—
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
This seems more wisely true to us to-day than it did to the men and women of his age, but it was as true when he wrote it as it is now. Or again—
“Men must abide
Their going hence even as their coming hither,
Ripeness is all.”
This is the true common sense—all that we know, all that we shall know; but this is not the thing that we teach the children in our schools, nor is it the light by which most of us guide our lives. We invent trivial rules and conventions to belittle the life we have to lead, and make marks in the dust with our fingers to cheat an uncheatable fate. We add illusion to illusion in coward hopes of outliving the greatest illusion of all. We add folly to folly, and lie to lie, and are content that the results of our labours should be unwisdom and untruth. We add two to two and worship the mournful constancy of four.
I began my article on common sense with a children’s party; I must end it, I suppose, somewhere within the limits of our unhoping lives. When the night of a hundred kisses draws to a close, and Dawn, with her painted smile, creeps like a spy into the room, men and women believe that they can see things as they really are. The earth is grey to their eyes, though not more grey than their own tired flesh, and their little hearts are quick to believe that grey is the normal colour of life. The sun comes up and tints the world with rose, and they forget their sorrow, as they have so often forgotten it before, and go their boasting way through the world they believe their own. Around them, in the light that is not the sun’s, the shadows tremble—shadows of the dead, shadows of the yet unborn. The wise cannot tell them apart.
THE END
The Gresham Press,
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,