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2023/02/26
2023/02/26
2023/02/26
book,comedy
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1915
Follow up to "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow", by Jerome Klapka Jerome.
Some excerpts I found funny and/or interesting.
Accordingly, I cast about for a new character, and found one to suit me. The German professor was becoming popular as a hero about this period. He wore his hair long and was otherwise untidy, but he had "a heart of steel," occasionally of gold. The majority of folks in the book, judging him from his exterior together with his conversation-in broken English, dealing chiefly with his dead mother and his little sister Lisa,-dubbed him uninteresting, but then they did not know about the heart. His chief possession was a lame dog which he had rescued from a brutal mob; and when he was not talking broken English he was nursing this dog.
But his speciality was stopping runaway horses, thereby saving the heroine's life. This, combined with the broken English and the dog, rendered him irresistible.
(...)
(...) It is difficult to pose as a young man with a heart of gold, when discovered in the middle of the road throwing stones at your own dog. And stones were the only things that would reach and influence him.
I was also hampered by a scarcity in runaway horses. The horse of our suburb was not that type of horse. Once and only once did an opportunity offer itself for practice. It was a good opportunity, inasmuch as he was not running away very greatly. Indeed, I doubt if he knew himself that he was running away.
It is because you are a woman, and the fate of all us, men and women alike, is to be for ever wanting what we have not, and to be finding, when we have it, that it is not what we wanted.
The doll is broken: no longer it sweetly squeaks in answer to our pressure, "I love you, kiss me."
Wut? How did dolls in 1898 squeak to speak?
Make a home, lad, for the woman who loves you; gather one or two friends about you; work, think, and play, that will bring you happiness. Shun this roaring gingerbread fair that calls itself, forsooth, the 'World of art and letters.' Let its clowns and its contortionists fight among themselves for the plaudits and the halfpence of the mob. Let it be with its shouting and its surging, its blare and its cheap flare. Come away, the summer's night is just the other side of the hedge, with its silence and its stars."
One wonders whether the Ten Commandments are so all-sufficient as we good folk deem them-whether the eleventh is not worth the whole pack of them: "that ye love one another" with just a common-place, human, practical love. Could not the other ten be comfortably stowed away into a corner of that! One is inclined, in one's anarchic moments, to agree with Louis Stevenson, that to be amiable and cheerful is a good religion for a work-a-day world. We are so busy _not_ killing, _not_ stealing, _not_ coveting our neighbour's wife, we have not time to be even just to one another for the little while we are together here. Need we be so cocksure that our present list of virtues and vices is the only possibly correct and complete one? Is the kind, unselfish man necessarily a villain because he does not always succeed in suppressing his natural instincts? Is the narrow-hearted, sour-souled man, incapable of a generous thought or act, necessarily a saint because he has none? Have we not-we unco guid-arrived at a wrong method of estimating our frailer brothers and sisters? We judge them, as critics judge books, not by the good that is in them, but by their faults. Poor King David! What would the local Vigilance Society have had to say to him? Noah, according to our plan, would be denounced from every teetotal platform in the country, and Ham would head the Local Vestry poll as a reward for having exposed him. And St. Peter! weak, frail St. Peter, how lucky for him that his fellow-disciples and their Master were not as strict in their notions of virtue as are we to-day.
My wonder is that young men ever marry. The difficulty of selection must be appalling.
There are times when one asks oneself: Why this endless labour? Why this building of houses, this cooking of food, this making of clothes? Is the ant so much more to be envied than the grasshopper, because she spends her life in grubbing and storing, and can spare no time for singing? Why this complex instinct, driving us to a thousand labours to satisfy a thousand desires? We have turned the world into a workshop to provide ourselves with toys. To purchase luxury we have sold our ease.
Oh, Children of Israel! why were ye not content in your wilderness? It seems to have been a pattern wilderness. For you, a simple wholesome food, ready cooked, was provided. You took no thought for rent and taxes; you had no poor among you-no poor-rate collectors. You suffered not from indigestion, nor the hundred ills that follow over-feeding; an omer for every man was your portion, neither more nor less. You knew not you had a liver. Doctors wearied you not with their theories, their physics, and their bills. You were neither landowners nor leaseholders, neither shareholders nor debenture holders. The weather and the market reports troubled you not. The lawyer was unknown to you; you wanted no advice; you had nought to quarrel about with your neighbour. No riches were yours for the moth and rust to damage. Your yearly income and expenditure you knew would balance to a fraction. Your wife and children were provided for. Your old age caused you no anxiety; you knew you would always have enough to live upon in comfort. Your funeral, a simple and tasteful affair, would be furnished by the tribe. And yet, poor, foolish child, fresh from the Egyptian brickfield, you could not rest satisfied. You hungered for the fleshpots, knowing well what flesh-pots entail: the cleaning of the flesh-pots, the forging of the flesh-pots, the hewing of wood to make the fires for the boiling of the flesh-pots, the breeding of beasts to fill the pots, the growing of fodder to feed the beasts to fill the pots.
"Just so," he growled; "and your twopenny-three-farthing weed gives you precisely the same amount of satisfaction that this five shilling cigar affords me. That means four and ninepence farthing wasted every time I smoke. I pay my cook two hundred a year. I don't enjoy my dinner as much as when it cost me four shillings, including a quarter flask of Chianti. What is the difference, personally, to me whether I drive to my office in a carriage and pair, or in an omnibus? I often do ride in a bus: it saves trouble. It is absurd wasting time looking for one's coachman, when the conductor of an omnibus that passes one's door is hailing one a few yards off. Before I could afford even buses-when I used to walk every morning to the office from Hammersmith-I was healthier. It irritates me to think how hard I work for no earthly benefit to myself. My money pleases a lot of people I don't care two straws about, and who are only my friends in the hope of making something out of me. If I could eat a hundred-guinea dinner myself every night, and enjoy it four hundred times as much as I used to enjoy a five-shilling dinner, there would be some sense in it. Why do I do it?"
"I would advise a long honeymoon," she replied at length, "the old-fashioned month."
"Why," I persisted, "I thought the tendency of the age was to cut these things shorter and shorter."
"It is the tendency of the age," she answered, "to seek escape from many things it would be wiser to face. I think myself that, for good or evil, the sooner it is over-the sooner both the man and the woman know-the better."
Our young men and women marry, and we kiss them and congratulate them; and, standing on the doorstep, throw rice and old slippers, (...)
They already threw rice in 1898, I wonder why...
(...) Then we go about our own business, and a short time passes by; and one day we meet them again, and their faces have grown older and graver; and I always wonder what the Voice has told them during that little while that they have been absent from our sight. But of course it would not do to ask them. Nor would they answer truly if we did."
To bear it as a man we must also feel it as a man. My philosophic friend, seek not to comfort a brother standing by the coffin of his child with the cheery suggestion that it will be all the same a hundred years hence, because, for one thing, the observation is not true: the man is changed for all eternity-possibly for the better, but don't add that.
We whimper and whine at every pain. In old strong days men faced real dangers, real troubles every hour; they had no time to cry. Death and disaster stood ever at the door. Men were contemptuous of them. Now in each snug protected villa we set to work to make wounds out of scratches. Every head-ache becomes an agony, every heart-ache a tragedy. It took a murdered father, a drowned sweetheart, a dishonoured mother, a ghost, and a slaughtered Prime Minister to produce the emotions in Hamlet that a modern minor poet obtains from a chorus girl's frown, or a temporary slump on the Stock Exchange. (...) The lighter and easier life gets the more seriously we go out to meet it. The boatmen of Ulysses faced the thunder and the sunshine alike with frolic welcome. We modern sailors have grown more sensitive. The sunshine scorches us, the rain chills us. We meet both with loud self-pity.
Don't sit still to be examined. Besides, remember that a man always appears at his best when active, and a woman at her worst. Bustle her, my dear boy, bustle her: I don't care who she may be. Give her plenty of luggage to look after; make her catch trains. Let her see the average husband sprawling comfortably over the railway cushions, while his wife has to sit bolt upright in the corner left to her. Let her hear how other men swear. Let her smell other men's tobacco. Hurry up, and get her accustomed quickly to the sight of mankind. Then she will be less surprised and shocked as she grows to know you.
Our joke is generally another's pain. The man who sits down on the tin-tack rarely joins in the laugh.
The housekeeping is gone up a pound a week already. I know what that means. The dear little woman is saving up to give me an expensive present that I don't want. I think the presents are the worst part of Christmas. Emma will give me a water-colour that she has painted herself. She always does. There would be no harm in that if she did not expect me to hang it in the drawing room. Have you ever seen my cousin Emma's water-colours?
"The idiotic presents that people give you!" he continued. "I said I'd like Tennyson's poems one year. They had worried me to know what I did want. I didn't want anything really; that was the only thing I could think of that I wasn't dead sure I didn't want. Well, they clubbed together, four of them, and gave me Tennyson in twelve volumes, illustrated with coloured photographs. They meant kindly, of course. If you suggest a tobacco-pouch they give you a blue velvet bag capable of holding about a pound, embroidered with flowers, life-size. The only way one could use it would be to put a strap to it and wear it as a satchel. Would you believe it, I have got a velvet smoking-jacket, ornamented with forget-me-nots and butterflies in coloured silk; I'm not joking. And they ask me why I never wear it. I'll bring it down to the Club one of these nights and wake the place up a bit: it needs it."
I waste money on white gloves with black backs, to find that white gloves with black backs stamp a woman as suburban. I believe all the shop-keepers in London save their old stock to palm it off on me at Christmas time.
And then a fool took me out the wrong way to show me a special line in sleeping-socks. I told him I was not requiring any. He said he didn't want me to buy, he only wanted me to see them. No wonder the drapers have had to start luncheon and tea-rooms. They'll fix up small furnished flats soon, where a woman can live for a week."
"I don't believe they do," he snapped; "nobody enjoys it. We excite them for three weeks beforehand, telling them what a good time they are going to have, over-feed them for two or three days, take them to something they do not want to see, but which we do, and then bully them for a fortnight to get them back into their normal condition. I was always taken to the Crystal Palace and Madame Tussaud's when I was a child, I remember. How I did hate that Crystal Palace! Aunt used to superintend. It was always a bitterly cold day, and we always got into the wrong train, and travelled half the day before we got there. We never had any dinner. It never occurs to a woman that anybody can want their meals while away from home. She seems to think that nature is in suspense from the time you leave the house till the time you get back to it. A bun and a glass of milk was her idea of lunch for a school-boy. Half her time was taken up in losing us, and the other half in slapping us when she had found us. the only thing we really enjoyed was the row with the cabman coming home."
Only one argument of any weight with us was advanced in favour of the festival, and that was our leading cynic's suggestion that it was worth enduring the miseries of Christmas, to enjoy the soul-satisfying comfort of the after reflection that it was all over, and could not occur again for another year.
I adopted the plan. I could not see them very clearly. I aimed rather at the noise; and I had thrown about twenty choice lumps without effect, and was feeling somewhat discouraged, when a yell, followed by language singularly unappropriate to the season, told me that Providence had aided my arm.
HAVE you ever noticed the going out of a woman?
When a man goes out, he says-"I'm going out, shan't be long."
"Oh, George," cries his wife from the other end of the house, "don't go for a moment. I want you to-" She hears a falling of hats, followed by the slamming of the front door.
"Oh, George, you're not gone!" she wails. It is but the voice of despair. As a matter of fact, she knows he is gone. She reaches the hall, breathless.
"He might have waited a minute," she mutters to herself, as she picks up the hats, "there were so many things I wanted him to do."
She does not open the door and attempt to stop him, she knows he is already half-way down the street. It is a mean, paltry way of going out, she thinks; so like a man.
They talk about the weather, and wonder what it is going to do. They wish it would make up its mind, one way or the other. They are very bitter on weather that cannot make up its mind. After breakfast it still looks cloudy, and they decide to abandon the scheme altogether.
We are for ever looking down upon the ground. Maybe, we do avoid a stumble or two over a stone or a brier, but also we miss the blue of the sky, the glory of the hills. (...) We will put off the gathering of the roses till to-morrow, to-day it shall be all work, all bargain-driving, all plotting. Lo, when to-morrow comes, the roses are blown; nor do we care for roses, idle things of small marketable value; cabbages are more to our fancy by the time to-morrow comes.
There would be no rich men, for what reasonable man cares for luxury and ostentation? There would be no poor: that I should eat enough for two while my brother in the next street, as good a man as I, starves, is not reasonable.
There are times when a man is better without the woman, when a woman is better without the man. Love drags us from the depths, makes men and women of us, but if we would climb a little nearer to the stars we must say good-bye to it. We men and women do not show ourselves to each other at our best; too often, I fear, at our worst. The woman's highest ideal of man is the lover; to a man the woman is always the possible beloved.
There were two women once. This is a play I saw acted in the daylight. They had been friends from girlhood, till there came between them the usual trouble-a man. A weak, pretty creature not worth a thought from either of them; but women love the unworthy; there would be no over-population problem did they not; and this poor specimen, ill-luck had ordained they should contend for.
Virtue lies like the gold in quartz, there is not very much of it, and much pains has to be spent on the extracting of it. But Nature seems to think it worth her while to fashion these huge useless stones, if in them she may hide away her precious metals.
We have fought for the Right. We have died for the Truth-as the Truth seemed to us.
We all know how the pudding _ought_ to be made. We do not profess to be able to make it: that is not our business. Our business is to criticize the cook. It seems our business to criticize so many things that it is not our business to do. We are all critics nowadays. I have my opinion of you, Reader, and you possibly have your own opinion of me. I do not seek to know it; personally, I prefer the man who says what he has to say of me behind my back.