about this time last year i was fortunate enough to go to a very nice children’s party, or, rather, a very nice party for children. i add the appreciative epithet because there was only one grown-up person there, and that person was not i; and when all is said it may be stated confidently that the fewer the grown-ups the better the children’s party. nevertheless, although there was only one grown-up for about thirty children, and she the most charming and tactful of girls, i had not been long in the place of fairy-lamps before i discovered that with one exception i was the youngest person there. i had come out that night in the proper party frame of mind. my shoes were tight and my mind was full of riddles of which i had forgotten the answers, and as i drove along in a four-wheeler—who ever went to a party p. 240in anything else?—i noticed that the stars smelt of tangerine oranges. when i reached the house everything looked all right. the place was very busy, and there were lots of white frocks and collars, and pink faces.
yes, it ought to have been a jolly party, but it came about twenty years too late, and the children, i had almost added, were about twenty years too old. instead of forgetting everything else in the whirl and clamour of play and dancing, they were, it seemed to me, too busy registering the impressions to enjoy themselves. one of them, a child of eleven, was already smitten with a passion for the mot juste. “my tongue,” she told me gravely, “is like a cloud”; and, later, “a marigold is like a circus.” she had a crushing word for a comrade who was looking at herself in a mirror. “but you don’t really look as nice as you do in the looking-glass!” the other children did not seem much better, and i stood forlornly in their midst, as a child stands among the creased trouser-legs of its elders, until i saw a scared little face in a corner apart from the rest. “why aren’t you playing?” i asked. the p. 241child looked me straight in the face, and burst into a thousand tears. at least here was something young, something not wholly wise. we sat together, exchanging grave confidences all the evening.
possibly this is a queer way in which to start an article on common sense, but there is more than madness in my method, for i feel assured that the children have derived their new wisdom—a senseless wisdom, a wisdom of facts—from their absurd parents. the latest creed, the belief that comfort for the masses prevents remorse in the individual, may be well enough in its way, but it creates a very bad atmosphere in which to bring up children. they are taught that life is an agglomeration of facts, and no sort of miracle, and by learning these facts like little parrots they lose the whole thrill and adventure of life. they do not go out to kill dragons, because they know that there are no dragons there. chivalry survived with children long after common sense had killed it as dead as mutton in the adult mind. but now they, too, have found it out, and there are only a few silly poets and mad p. 242lovers to keep the memory of quixote green.
what are these facts by which we are to guide our lives, of which, indeed, our lives are to consist? one of the simplest, one that has come to have the force of a proverbial expression, is the fact that two and two make four, and this is one of the first things we teach our children.
i have a friend who suspects that in moments of intense consciousness two and two, weary of making four, would make five for a change. i have heard it argued against him by mathematicians that the fourness of four—four’s very existence, as it were—depends on its being related to two in the subtle fashion suggested by the well-known dogma, but i can discern no grounds for this assertion. consider the fate that would befall a man who went for a ride on an omnibus for the purpose of making use of this one fact. he might be aware that the fare to putney was fourpence, and, proud of his mathematical knowledge, might pay his fare in two instalments of twopence. what would be his consternation to find that, as p. 243he reached his journey’s end, he would have to pay another penny because he had not paid his fourpence in one lump sum? in terms of ’bus fares, two and two do not make four, and i would multiply examples of such exceptions to the accepted rule.
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 p. 244quick 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 p. 245age, 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 p. 246smile, 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.
