He may draw the morning mist on the Grimsel, six
months afterwards; when he has forgotten what it was like: and he may
frame it for a masterpiece to make the good draughtsman rage.
The world has grown a boy again this long time past, and they are
building hotels (I hear) in the place where Acedes discovered the
Water of Youth in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes.
Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon
laugh no longer - and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest
men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for
that is only to suffer one another.
Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious fellow that sat down
dutifully to paint the soul of Switzerland upon a fan.
When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon all peoples by his
epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism and his wanton
appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I take it he
was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he launched
among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, _'Ce n'est que le
premier pas qui coute'_ and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth
self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his day at
least seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two thousand five
hundred and four times by a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company
Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general
whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up
and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the
true breeding soil of Revelation.
For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other blossoms and prides
of nature, are for lying steady in the shade and letting the Mind
commune with its Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority busking about
and eager as though it were a duty to force the said Mind to burrow
and sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its temporary
habitation.
'Up,' says Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing
something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with
circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at
least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.'
Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, and the boy takes his
horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church's book, alas!); the Poet
his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed pen; the
Soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in ordinary
clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his
boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and
Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the
Boy, a rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier a long and
thirsty march.
