A Conscientious Man Who Really Felt
That His Words Would Carry Weight And Influence With Them Would Be
Almost Afraid To Speak At All.
It is the man who knows that it will
not make an ounce of difference to anyone what he says, that can
grow eloquent and vehement and positive.
It will not make any
difference to anybody or anything what I say about the Ober-Ammergau
Passion Play. So I shall just say what I want to.
But what do I want to say? What can I say that has not been said,
and said much better, already? (An author must always pretend to
think that every other author writes better than he himself does.
He does not really think so, you know, but it looks well to talk as
though he did.) What can I say that the reader does not know, or
that, not knowing, he cares to know? It is easy enough to talk
about nothing, like I have been doing in this diary hitherto. It is
when one is confronted with the task of writing about SOMEthing,
that one wishes one were a respectable well-to-do sweep - a sweep
with a comfortable business of his own, and a pony - instead of an
author.
B. says:
"Well, why not begin by describing Ober-Ammergau."
I say it has been described so often.
He says:
"So has the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Derby Day, but
people go on describing them all the same, and apparently find other
people to read their descriptions. Say that the little village,
clustered round its mosque-domed church, nestles in the centre of a
valley, surrounded by great fir-robed hills, which stand, with the
cross-crowned Kofel for their chief, like stern, strong sentinels
guarding its old-world peace from the din and clamour of the outer
world. Describe how the square, whitewashed houses are sheltered
beneath great overhanging gables, and are encircled by carved wooden
balconies and verandahs, where, in the cool of the evening, peasant
wood-carver and peasant farmer sit to smoke the long Bavarian pipe,
and chat about the cattle and the Passion Play and village politics;
and how, in gaudy colours above the porch, are painted glowing
figures of saints and virgins and such-like good folk, which the
rains have sadly mutilated, so that a legless angel on one side of
the road looks dejectedly across at a headless Madonna on the other,
while at an exposed corner some unfortunate saint, more cruelly
dealt with by the weather than he ever was even by the heathen, has
been deprived of everything that he could call his own, with the
exception of half a head and a pair of extra-sized feet.
"Explain how all the houses are numbered according to the date they
were built, so that number sixteen comes next to number forty-seven,
and there is no number one because it has been pulled down. Tell
how unsophisticated visitors, informed that their lodgings are at
number fifty-three, go wandering for days and days round fifty-two,
under the not unreasonable impression that their house must be next
door, though, as a matter of fact, it is half a mile off at the
other end of the village, and are discovered one sunny morning,
sitting on the doorstep of number eighteen, singing pathetic
snatches of nursery rhymes, and trying to plat their toes into door-
mats, and are taken up and carried away screaming, to end their
lives in the madhouse at Munich.
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