Part 17 (1/2)

I reat an effect his book of collected _Spectator_ articles dealing with Asia, and especially India, has had upon public opinion _Asia and Europe_ (Constable, London, Putnam, New York) remains the essential book on the subject handled, and every year its influence is widening No one can understand Asia or Islaes For example, I notice that Mr Stoddard, in his recent book on _The Revival of Islam_ (Scribner), constantly quotes Mr Townsend on the subject And this, remember, is not due to any fascination of style, but rather to the fact that many of Townsend's prophecies, which at the tih, have coh I have said that Mr Townsend's style as a journalist was perfect, and I firmly believe this, it ed in paradoxes which cannot be defended I will not conceal the fact that these occasional kickings over the traces personally delighted ht me, but, all the same, they are indefensible from the point of view of the serious ravis_ For instance, it was always said by some of his friends, and I think with truth, for I have not dared to verify the point, that he began his leader recording the Austrian defeat and the Battle of Sadoith these words: _”So God not only reigns but governs”_

Another example of his trenchant style occurred in a ”sub-leader” on a story from America, which related how the inhabitants of the ”coast towns,” _ie_, villages in one of the Eastern States, had refused to allow a shi+p that was supposed to contain cholera or fever patients from New York to land at a local port The faruns, so the story went, fired upon the sailors and even the invalids, while they were atte to land, and drove theend, no doubt purely apocryphal, was full of wise things, but ended up with the general reflection that people are apt to forget that ”ers in trousers” and that the majority of them ”would cheerfully shoot their own fathers to prevent the spread of infection”

No doubt, if you had asked Townsend to justify his statee was a little strong, and would have been quite willing to introduce some modification, such as ”ers in trousers,” and to add that ”in certain instances soht be a public duty to shoot their own fathers to prevent the spread of infection” He was always rather sad, however, if one suggested a little hedging of this kind when one was reading over the final proofs of the paper What he liked, and as a journalist was quite right to like, was definiteness Qualifying words were an aboination No man ever loved the dramatic side of life more than he did He even carried this love of dras simply and solely because they were sensational The ordinary man when he hears an extraordinary tale is inclined to say, ”What rubbish!+ That can't be true I never heard anything like that before,” and so on Townsend, on the other hand, was like the Father of the Church who said, _”Credo quia iested that it could not possibly be true because of some marvellous or absurd incident which was supposed to have occurred, his natural and immediate impulse was to look upon that special circumstance as conclusive proof of its credibility and truth His extraordinarily wide, if inaccurate, recollections of historical facts and fictions would supply him with a hundred illustrations to show that what seemed to you ridiculous, or, at any rate, inexplicable, was the si toward the sensational, which belongs to so many journalists and is probably a beneficial part of their equipe the Press harshly in thehas been inserted in the Press that turns out later to be a cock-and-bull story, the plain man is apt to think that it h he kneas false, thought it good copy and likely to sell his paper Inworks A great reatly like and are naturally inclined to believe in ”good copy” And, after all, they have gotso than the ordinaryto do with a newspaper without being aeness, the oddity, the topsy-turvy sensationalism of life, when once it is laid bare by the newspaper reporters

For exay has absolutely died out in England A day afterwards you get a letter froentle you that in his s astrologers, not to y in their odd moments” And all this is written with an air of perfect simplicity, as if the infor in the world and would be no surprise to any ordinary well-informed person

But it was not only in outside affairs and in his view of the world that lay outside the s of hisof odd discoveries, strange secrets, and thrilling hazards His own existence, though in reality an exceedingly quiet one, indeed alreat adventure There was always for him the possibility of the sudden appearance of the man in the black cloak with hat drawn over his brows, either looking, or saying ”Beware!”

I re out to a ue of eton Street, Strand Townsend co-table was in a very cold corner, and that from it he could not feel the warested to hi the table nearer to the fire and to sit with his back to the door ”But don't you see,” said Townsend, ”that would be i the rooures in white turbans gliding in stealthily and with silent tread, and standing behind the editorial chair, unseen but all-seeing Alas! we did not often have such adventures in Wellington Street, but no doubt it stiht otherwise have been insupportably dull surroundings to think of such possibilities This idea, indeed, of watching the entry was a favourite topic of his I reularly to the office, that Mr---, the then er, who sat in the inner room downstairs, had a h theto place callers under observation Atsome surprise that this was necessary, I was h it wasn't talked about, such an arrangement would be found ”in every office in London” Of a piece with this half-reality, half make-believe, hich, as I say, Townsend transfor adventure, was a re in the course of a most innocent country walk: ”If the country people knew the secret of the foxglove root it would be impossible to live in the country”

Apropos of this remark, my painter brother, who had always lived in the country and had plenty of cottage friends in Somersetshi+re, pointed out that as a italis as a poison exceedingly well, even though they were not inclined so to use it as to make life in the country impossible He went on to tell, if Iquietly behind a hedge, he caught a scrap of conversation between two hedge-makers ere unaware of his presence It ran as follows: ”And so they did boil down the heave it to the woman, and she died” That was the statement: whether ancient or modern, who knows? For ers would have said if they had suddenly had their rustic _on dit_ capped with the tale of how the heo Did the ”woman” of So about? Did her lirow cold and numb and dead while the brain still worked? But such questions are destined to remain for ever unanswered Country people do not like to be cross-questioned upon stray remarks of this character, and if you atteard you with suspicion almost deadly in its intensity till the end of your days ”What business had he to be asking questions like that?” is the verdict which kills in the country

CHAPTER XVII

MEREDITH TOWNSEND (_Continued_)

Though I cannot resist writing upon the picturesque side of Townsend's character, Iimpression nobody must think, because of Townsend's eination he introduced into every thought and every sentence, that he was an oddity or an eccentric In spite of the fact that he would never take life plain when he could get it coloured, he was a perfectly sane person As I have said, the ht be shocked by the first rashness of his thought, it would very likely turn out to be a perfectly sane judg allowed for his brilliance of vision I used so statelish, and then ask hienerally received the instant assurance that my sober version exactly represented his view

His attitude ofthat he once said to ust in the 'nineties ”_Strachey, I wish so dramatic would happen_” He went on to explain hoas fretted almost beyond endurance by the dullness of the world And yet I often wonder whether even he hly ”accidented” even for hi If he had the anxious hest point, he was essentially a brave man and a true lover of his country If he had been destined to live through the war there would have been no stouter heart than his, and none would have given aexpression to the spirit of the nation than he

I wish profoundly that I had ht to have done, a proper collection of Townsend's aphoristic and sensational sayings They would have been not only a source of delight and entertainht be called the practical wisdoood exa an exciting and not to say violent arguer man In the course of the couage, and it was returned in kind by his opponent The clash of ether He felt he had gone too far in soised to Townsend If he had been rude or over-vehement in the way in which he had maintained and insisted upon his view--he hoped he should be forgiven ”Not at all,”

was the instant reply _”You have a perfect right to be wrong!”_ There was here a great dealunderlay Townsend's philosophy of life and his religious attitude Though, curiously enough, he had borrowed a certain touch of fatalis ly the essential freedom of the will But that freedom he saw could not exist, could not be worthily exercised, could not, as it were, have its full reward in a man's own soul, unless it were a true freedo as well as the freedoht he was not really free It was idle to pretend that you were giving people a choice of freedom if you put restrictions upon the but that which the inventor of the restrictions considered to be right; if the doing of the right resulted not from their own impulse but from the application of exterior force over which they had no control, no virtue, no moral force ”There is no compulsion, only you must” meant to him, as it must to every ation of freedom

I have spoken of the influence of the East upon Townsend's h he never became a mystic, and had not naturally theof what h the half-open door of the Eastern world not reat deal of sympathy He went to Calcutta, or, rather, to one of its suburbs, when he was a boy of eighteen, and re home for over ten years In that ties, and an intiarded as the Italian of the East In Bengali he was so accoiven the post of Governuerreotype here reproduced he is seen sitting, by his hest caste,--see the mystic Brah,--from whom he learned Hindustani and, I think, a certain a talks upon those subjects on which the intellectual Brahhted to discourse ever since the day when Alexander took his bevy of hellenic Sophists across the Indus

Greeks bursting with the new lore of Aristotle--Alexander's own tutor-- at once got to work on the Brahration of Souls, the nature of thought, the power of words, and the mystery of the soul The Brah European er spirit, and he and the moonshee tired the sun with talk

But there was rew to be real friends, in spite of an interval of some forty years Townsend used to say of the moonshee, ”If there is a heaven, that old h Priests of the Hindu faith, he was poor in worldly possessions But though holy and learned he had no touch in hi the sort of veneration hich Brahal

To illustrate the depth of this veneration, Townsend was fond of telling a story of how he had in his e office of his paper, _The Friend of India_, a high-class Brahes It chanced that on sonate, a h of co Townsend a proof, or upon some other business of the paper, the rich noble rose, and, as Townsend picturesquely put it, ”swept the dust off the Brahmin's feet with his forehead” The Brahhtest eht entirely his due ”There,” said Townsend, ”is the whole of the East” Fanciful shapes of the plastic earth, the wealth and the power of the rich man, and the nised, but they ion Caste in its religious aspects is solish people have no conception

I re Townsend with an illustration of the truth of how English people cannot conceive of great rank without a considerable a for the Bar, I can of Henry VI, which was passed to deprive the existing Duke of Buckingham of all his rank and titles ”because he was so poor” The two Houses of Parliament were sorry, no doubt, to have to act, but they felt it was no o about without o about without clothes They were doing the right thing by hi him to the ranks of the proletariat in nalish people, insisted Townsend, never seem to realise that the distinction of birth is so valuable because it is incolish people, happily, as I think, never have, and never will, regard mere birth with any veneration or even interest What affects the, position--the aura of distinction which surrounds great office, great wealth, and even great learning; and, oddly enough, most of all by the acclamation of fashi+on

The Co exactly, when a certain duchess, to who in expostulation reminded them of her rank They sih undoubtedly a woman of rank, was not a woman of fashi+on” It was only to ”persons of fashi+on” that the doors of Almack's stood always open

Townsend's conversation was a curious contradiction Half of it consisted of treasp with a kind of mental deflation The other side consisted of specific statements of the most meticulous kind And these contradictory forence hoether in the most admired disorder I remember well a lady who met Mr Townsend for the first ti me that at a pause in the conversation she heard hi in town, ”She has the most mobile face in South-western Europe” On another occasion the oracle gave forth this tremendous sentence: _”Musicians have noa musician as a close friend of his and mine, Townsend added, ”Except G--”

This is a beautiful exa descent to the ested to Townsend that this was rather a large order, he would have replied, without turning a hair, that you were no doubt perfectly right, and would probably have li flash--”Statisticians would probably put the figure at 27 1/2 per cent, or soure”

If he had been eneral, he would, however, I am convinced, have chosen the specific, for the specific state rule in journalism, as no doubt it was one of the sources of the charm of his style You should always be specific even if you could not be accurate, iven as an accurate parody of his principle

This predilection soe difficulties, especially in medicine, where he loved to use all the ”terms of art”