Sometimes
when the printer is waiting for an article which really should have been sent
to him the day before, I sit at my desk and wonder if there is any possible
subject in the whole world upon which I can possibly find anything to say. On
one such occasion I left it to Fate, which decided, by means of a dictionary
opened at random, that I should deliver myself of a few thoughts about
goldfish. (You will find this article later on in the book.) But to-day I do
not need to bother about a subject. To-day I am without a care. Nothing less
has happened than that I have a new nib in my pen.
In the
ordinary way, when Shakespeare writes a tragedy, or Mr. Blank gives you one of
his charming little essays, a certain amount of thought goes on before pen is
put to paper. One cannot write "Scene I. An Open Place. Thunder and
Lightning. Enter Three Witches," or "As I look up from my window, the
nodding daffodils beckon to me to take the morning," one cannot give of
one's best in this way on the spur of the moment. At least, others cannot. But
when I have a new nib in my pen, then I can go straight from my breakfast to
the blotting-paper, and a new sheet of foolscap fills itself magically with a
stream of blue-black words. When poets and idiots talk of the pleasure of writing,
they mean the pleasure of giving a piece of their minds to the public; with an
old nib a tedious business. They do not mean (as I do) the pleasure of the
artist in seeing beautifully shaped "k's" and sinuous "s's"
grow beneath his steel. Anybody else writing this article might wonder
"Will my readers like it?" I only tell myself "How the
compositors will love it!"
But
perhaps they will not love it. Maybe I am a little above their heads. I
remember on one First of January receiving an anonymous postcard wishing me a
happy New Year, and suggesting that I should give the compositors a happy New
Year also by writing more generously. In those days I got a thousand words upon
one sheet 8 in. by 5 in. I adopted the suggestion, but it was a wrench; as it
would be for a painter of miniatures forced to spend the rest of his life
painting the Town Council of Boffington in the manner of Herkomer. My canvases
are bigger now, but they are still impressionistic. "Pretty, but what is
it?" remains the obvious comment; one steps back a pace and saws the air
with the hand; "You see it better from here, my love," one says to
one's wife. But if there be one compositor not carried away by the mad rush of
life, who in a leisurely hour (the luncheon one, for instance) looks at the
beautiful words with the eye of an artist, not of a wage-earner, he, I think,
will be satisfied; he will be as glad as I am of my new nib. Does it matter,
then, what you who see only the printed word think of it?
A woman,
who had studied what she called the science of calligraphy, once offered to
tell my character from my handwriting. I prepared a special sample for her; it
was full of sentences like "To be good is to be happy," "Faith
is the lode- star of life," "We should always be kind to
animals," and so on. I wanted her to do her best. She gave the morning to
it, and told me at lunch that I was "synthetic." Probably you think
that the compositor has failed me here and printed "synthetic" when I
wrote "sympathetic." In just this way I misunderstood my
calligraphist at first, and I looked as sympathetic as I could. However, she
repeated "synthetic," so that there could be no mistake. I begged her
to tell me more, for I had thought that every letter would reveal a secret, but
all she would add was "and not analytic." I went about for the rest
of the day saying proudly to myself "I am synthetic! I am synthetic! I am
synthetic!" and then I would add regretfully, "Alas, I am not
analytic!" I had no idea what it meant.
And how
do you think she had deduced my syntheticness? Simply from the fact that, to
save time, I join some of my words together. That isn't being synthetic, it is
being in a hurry. What she should have said was, "You are a busy man; your
life is one constant whirl; and probably you are of excellent moral character
and kind to animals." Then one would feel that one did not write in vain.
My pen is
getting tired; it has lost its first fair youth. However, I can still go on. I
was at school with a boy whose uncle made nibs. If you detect traces of
erudition in this article, of which any decent man might be expected to be
innocent, I owe it to that boy. He once told me how many nibs his uncle made in
a year; luckily I have forgotten. Thousands, probably. Every term that boy came
back with a hundred of them; one expected him to be very busy. After all, if
you haven't the brains or the inclination to work, it is something to have the
nibs. These nibs, however, were put to better uses. There is a game you can
play with them; you flick your nib against the other boy's nib, and if a lucky
shot puts the head of yours under his, then a sharp tap capsizes him, and you
have a hundred and one in your collection. There is a good deal of strategy in
the game (whose finer points I have now forgotten), and I have no doubt that
they play it at the Admiralty in the off season. Another game was to put a
clean nib in your pen, place it lightly against the cheek of a boy whose head
was turned away from you, and then call him suddenly. As Kipling says, we are
the only really humorous race. This boy's uncle died a year or two later and
left about £80,000, but none of it to his nephew. Of course, he had had the
nibs every term. One mustn't forget that.
The nib I
write this with is called the "Canadian Quill"; made, I suppose, from
some steel goose which flourishes across the seas, and which Canadian
housewives have to explain to their husbands every Michaelmas. Well, it has
seen me to the end of what I wanted to say—if indeed I wanted to say anything.
For it was enough for me this morning just to write; with spring coming in
through the open windows and my good Canadian quill in my hand, I could have
copied out a directory. That is the real pleasure of writing.
