From the pen of the Irish poet and essayist, Robert Lynd, comes a collection of humorous and satirical essays on topics as wide ranging as stupidity, Christmas, spring fashions, and the beauty of statistics.
By : Robert Lynd (1879 - 1949)
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Suspicion is a beast with a thousand eyes, but most of them are blind, or colour-blind, or askew, or rolling, or yellow. It is a beast with a thousand ears, but most of them are like the ears of the deaf man in the comic recitation who, when you say "whiskers" hears "solicitors," and when you are talking about the weather thinks you are threatening to murder him. It is a beast with a thousand tongues, and they are all slanderous. On the whole, it is the most loathsome monster outside the pages of The Faërie Queene. Just as the ugliest ape that ever was born is all the more repellent for being so like a man, so suspicion is all the more hideous because it is so close a caricature of the passion for truth. It is a leering perversion of that passion which sent Columbus looking for a lost continent and urged Galileo to turn his telescope on the heavens. Columbus may, in a sense, be said to have suspected that America was there, and Galileo suspected more than was good for his comfort about the conduct of the stars. But these were noble suspicions—leaps into the light. They are no more comparable to the suspicions which are becoming a feature of public life than the energies of an explorer of the South Pole are comparable to the energies of one of those private detectives who are paid to grub after evidence in divorce cases. One might put it a good deal more strongly, indeed, for the private detective may in his own way be an officer of truth and humanity, while the suspicious politician is the prophet only of party disreputableness. He is like the average suspicious husband, in the case of whom, even when his suspicions are true, one is inclined to sympathise with the wife for being married to so green-eyed a fool. Suspicion, take it all in all, is the most tedious and scrannel of the sins.
It would be folly, of course, to suggest that there is no such thing as justifiable suspicion. If you see a man in a Tube lift with his hand on some old gentleman's watch-chain, you are justified in suspecting that his object is something less innocent than to persuade the old gentleman to become a Plymouth Brother. But the man of suspicious temperament is not content with cases of this sort. He is the sort of man who, if it were not for the law of libel, would suspect the Rev. F. B. Meyer of having stolen La Gioconda from the Louvre.
His suspicions are like those of a man who would accost you in the street with the assertion that you had just murdered the President of the United States or that you were hiding a stolen Dreadnought in your pocket. Obviously there would be no reply to a man like this, except that he was mad. He has got an idea into his head, and it is his idea, and not the proof or disproof that the idea has any justification, which seems to him to be the most important thing in the world. Suspicion, indeed, is a well-known form of mania. Husbands suspect their wives of trying to poison their beer; friends suspect friends of planning the most extraordinary series of losses and humiliations for them. Nothing can happen but the suspicious man believes that somebody did it on purpose. He is like the savage who cannot believe that his great-grandmother died without somebody having plotted it. Obviously, to believe things like this is to put poison in the air, and it is not surprising to learn that the savage goes out and murders the first man he meets for being his great-grandmother's murderer. In this matter civilised man is little better than the savage. He knows a little more about natural laws, and so he is not suspicious of quite the same things; but his suspicions, as soon as he begins to harbour them, swiftly strip off his civilisation as a drunken man strips off his coat in order to fight in the street. He becomes Othello while the clock is striking. Straightway, all the world's his bolster; there is no creature on earth so innocent or so beautiful that he will not smother it in the insanity of his passion. Literature is to a great extent an indictment of suspicion. The Ring and the Book is an epic of suspicion, and the Blot on the 'Scutcheon is its tragedy. In the story of Paolo and Francesca, again, we are made feel that the hideous thing was not the love of Paolo and Francesca, but the murderous suspicion of Malatesta. In this case it may be admitted, there was justice in the suspicion; but suspicion is so very loathsome a thing that, even when it is just, we like it as little as we like spying. All we can say in its favour is that it is more pitiable. Men do not go spying because there is a fury in their bosoms, but the suspicious man is one who is being eaten alive at the heart. He wears the mark of doom on his sullen brows as surely as Cain. For such a man the sun does not shine and the stars are silver conspirators. He is a person who can suspect whole landscapes; he sees a countryside, not as an exciting pattern of meadow and river-bend and hills and smoke among trees, but as an arrangement of a thousand farms with fierce dogs eager for the calves of his legs. He can concentrate his affections on nothing beautiful. He can see only worms in buds. He can ultimately follow nothing with enthusiasm but will-o'-the-wisps. To go after these he will leave wife and children and lands, and he will dance into the perils of the marshes, into sure drowning—a lost figure of derision or pity, according to your gentleness.
Nor is it only in private life that suspicion is a light that leads men into bog-holes. Suspicion in public life is also a disaster among passions. Englishmen who realise this must have noticed with apprehension the growth of suspicion as a principle in recent years.
Suspicion is the arch-calumniator. That is why, of all weapons, it is most avoided by decent fighters. Every honourable man would rather be calumniated than a calumniator—every sensible man, too, for calumny is the worst policy. It is clear that while the public men of a country are prepared to believe each other capable of anything there can be no more national unity than in present-day Mexico or than in Poland before the partition. It is the same with parties as with nations. The reason why revolutionary parties are so rarely successful is that the members suspect not only everybody else but each other. The more revolutionary the party is, the more the members are inclined to regard each other, not as potential Garibaldis, but potential traitors. For much the same reasons criminal conspiracies seldom prosper. Crime seems to create an atmosphere of suspicion, and co-operation among men who doubt each other is impossible. But it is the same with every conspiracy, whether it is criminal or not. Secrecy seems to awaken all the nerves of suspicion, even when one is secret for the public good, and the conspirators soon find themselves believing the most ludicrous things. Who has not known committees on which some man or woman will not sit because of an idea that some other member is in the pay of Scotland Yard? The amusing part of the business is that this kind of thing goes on even in committees about the proceedings of which there is no need of secrecy at all and at which reporters from the Times might be present for all the harm to man or beast that is discussed. But there is a tradition of suspicion in some movements that serves the purpose of enabling many innocent people to lead exciting lives. I once knew a man who spent half his time tying up his bootlaces under lamp-posts. He had an invincible belief that detectives followed him, and he was never content till he had allowed whoever was behind him to get past. Scotland Yard, I am confident, knew as little of him as it does of Wordsworth. But it was his folly to think otherwise, and for all I know he may be going on with those slow but sensational walks of his through the London streets at the present day. This is the amusing side of suspicion. Unfortunately, it has also its base and mirthless side. Practically, every bloody mistake—I use the word not as an oath—in the French Revolution was the result of suspicion. It began with suspicion of the Girondins; but suspicion of Danton and Robespierre soon followed. Suspicion is a monster that devours her own children. Manifestly, no movement can succeed in which men believe that their friends are viler than their enemies. But in every movement, there are men who make a trade of suspecting the leaders in their own camp, and the Socialist movement is as much exposed to the plague as any other. Suspicion of this kind, I think, is a bitter form of egoism. It is a trampling of the suspected persons under one's own white feet.
Nor is it only in movements and in nations that suspicion plays havoc. International suspicion is a no less costly visitor. We live in a world in which every cup of tea we drink and every pipe of tobacco we smoke pays toll to this ancient and gluttonous dragon. Every year each country sets up huge altars of men and ships and guns to the beast, but he is not satisfied. He demands universal power, and insists that we shall give all our goods to him except just enough to keep ourselves alive and that we shall not shrink even from offering up human sacrifices at a nod of his head. Perhaps some day a new St George will arise and release us from so shameful a subjection. Common sense seems to have as little force against him as an ordinary foot-soldier against Goliath. We feel the need of some miraculous personage to put an end to our distress. Meanwhile, one may hail as prophetic the continual organisation of new knighthoods for the Suppression of the Dragon.
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