18 
LAND fe? WATER 
November 28, 1918 
Life and Letters 6y J. C- Squirt 
A Subject 
GOINCr into the countrj' for a week-end (without 
the least intention of beginning this article 
bestially with a participle), I found that I had 
left at home the book which I had intended to 
review. Had it been a book of argument, that 
need not have been much of a difficulty ; for I could have 
mentioned the book's name and then argued with and about 
everybody else who had ever dealt with the matter under 
consideration. But it was a collection of letters, and you 
cannot review a collection of letters without quoting from 
them, or, at least, reading them : that is, unless you are 
cleverer than I am or more impudent than 1 dare to be. 
The result was that I found myself with " nothing to write 
about." 
The situation must be a familiar one to every routine 
writer ; and I conceive that all men meet it in the same 
way. They wished that they liad gone to the Straits Settle- 
ments to plant rubber at Kuala Lumpur or some such place ; 
or that they had become doctors or professional soldiers ; 
or that they had gone into the Civil Service, or that they had 
jumped at that opening on the Stock Exchange. They 
madden those around them with their querulous complaints, 
beneath which there seems to be an implication that it 
is a monstrous injustice that a subject has not been 
provided by family, or friends, or rained down from heaven 
by Providence. They sit down, get up, walk about, pull 
their hair, pick up papers and look at them, open books 
and begin to read, though they know time presses, smoke 
pipes and cigarettes alternately, spill ashes, talk jerkily to 
dogs and cats, wish they were rich, write headlines in a fair, 
round hand, draw faces, and put down words like "The," 
"Everybody" (and "Going"), in the hope that they will 
start trains of thought — or, at any rate, trains of words, 
which are the next best thing. The clock ticks on as remorse- 
lessly as it did to Faustus ; the time of train or post ap- 
proaches ; the game seems up ; suicide presents itself as a 
remedy for life's ills ; reason interposes that the worst troubles 
can be survived ; and in the end something happens. As 
a fact, no editor ever gets letters from regular essayists 
saying " Excuse me this week, I have no ideas." The pressure 
of necessity forces the door and something rushes in. 
So it was with what I was long ago warned not to call 
"oneself." I had told myself twenty times that I had 
nothing to write about ; I had ransacked my memory in 
vain for fragments of soriie recent intelligent conversation 
which might have raised some literary problem of interest ; 
I had searched several papers and many shelves for something 
which might appear capable of exposition or dispute ; I had 
finally sat down in a sulk ; and then an Inner Voice repeated 
"nothing to write about" in tones of contempt. Justly; 
for what nonsense it was ! To begin with, there is " Nothing '' 
itself, a subject which has not been exhausted, though it 
has been glorified, by a dead poet and a living essayist. 
And, apart from nothing, there is anything and everything 
else, inclufiing (as was long ago observed)^ a broom-stick. 
A change came over my brain, and I felt suddenly as though 
I could write, with equal fecundity, on anything in the 
world. My mind, my body, the room, the landscape, the 
sky, the universe, instantaneously became crowded with 
subjects all clamouring to be investigated. 
That is what is known as the awakening of the imagination, 
a process that may take place in all sorts of ways : that may 
be brought about by a word, a sound, a scent, a drink. The 
world, that seemed a collection of lifeless matter, is suddenly 
invested with wonder ; all things spring to life and are 
clothed with infinite associations ; every object recovers its 
history and its mystery— which is history undisclosed. Every 
shape and colour acquires interest, every aspect of every 
object asks questions. Here, at this moment, I look at 
my hand, my moving hand. I see it as the slave of will, the 
prodigious garment of soul ; as a concourse of chemicals 
drawn together by unimaginable forces ; as the heir of 
innumerable ancestors, paws and claws and tendrils. I pore 
over the elevations and depressions, the nails and the little 
hairs, the pits whence the little hairs grow, the ribs and 
wrinkles of the skin, never the same on any two human 
hands. I think of chiromancy, and wonder how began the 
human behef that a man's fate was written on his hands ; 
who it was named those thin, pink streaks and girdles by 
the names of Life and Venus and Mars ; and why so remark- 
able a doctrine should have started if there was no truth in it. 
How interesting it would be to pursue that speculation, to 
meditate on it and to examine the reflections of other men 
on it, of the ancients, of Paracelsus perhaps, of modern 
doctors. The mind travels to Bertillon and Scotland Yard ; 
to finger-prints on windows and woodwork ; to greasy and 
bloody finger-prints ; to counter-detective work ; to gloves. 
At that word gloves, all the gloves in the world soar into 
sight : velvet gloves, the gauntlet of the King's champion, 
the glove that the heartless French lady flung among the 
lions for the seigneur to pick up, gloves to which men have 
written songs, gloves of an ancient fashion kept in lavender 
with faded letters. And, returning, I think of metaphorical 
hands, of the hands of fate and the hands of destiny ; of 
symbolical hands, of clouds no bigger than a man's hand, 
of finger-posts and pointers ; of sculptured hands, the giant 
hand of Rodin ; of real hands, hands long dust, Queen Mary's, 
and Alexander's that curbed Bucephalus ; of Lady Macbeth's 
little hand from which no waters could wash the stain, of the 
white hands of Iseult of Brittany, and the pale hands that 
the ghosts stretched out across Acheron. 
* * * * Itl it: 
How easy it would be to write a large book about hands ; 
how impossible to exhaust their beauties and their strange- 
nesses, their diversity and multitude of their works. But 
why linger on the hand ? There is the pen also. It is a 
fountain-pen, and has to be dipped continually in an inkpot ; 
but, though degenerate as an individual, it is the scion of a 
wonderful race. Its very name is history in a crystal, and 
memories the wing of the goose with strong quills. Steel 
pens and gold pens, now dominant, are but newcomers ; 
the stylus had a longer and a wider reign ; there is also the 
brush, which the Chinese — whose ink the French call chinois 
and we Indian — prefer ; there are also fingers which, used 
by prisoner's and dying travellers for writing messages in their 
own blood, have established a peculiarly intimate link between 
the hand and the pen. Then, the characters of pens, their 
racial pecuHarities and habits : the broad pens, the fine 
pens, the new pen that refuses to take ink, the old one that is 
encrusted ; the wilfulness of the pen that crosses ; the 
mania of pens for the collection of hairs ; the difficulties of 
removing such hairs ; smudges ; blots ; the problem of 
what sized blot really matters, and when. Here, in looking 
at the operation of writing, we come upon a large area of 
human life and activity ; yet who has explored it and 
analysed its content ? One thinks into it like a man 
digging in a cave ; the more one discovers the larger the 
surface exposed to research. 
****** 
I come to the ink. How is it made ? I don't know ; if 
I looked it up in the encyclopaedia, I should find a whole 
article about that. I fancy that gall and lamp-black come 
in. What is gall ? What things have been done with ink ! 
How much ink has been shed by journalists in noble causes ! 
How pathetic is the yellowness of old ink ! How true 
is that observation of the Mid-Victorian litterateur that we 
should have very little to drink if all the sea were ink. A 
great vista opens up from ink. 
****** 
The pen, the ink, the table-cloth (black and white check) ; 
paper ; a blue bowl full of oddments ; a window ; brick 
chimneys ; bare elrns ; a mottled sky. Below, a garden and 
plants in winter sleep ; a pond where fat goldfish used to be, 
and probably still are, waving to and fro with gaping and 
closing mouths, amid a green growth, hiding under flat 
leaves, diving out of sight, rising bright to the sm-face. 
Fields, farms, churches, trains, towns, London, the sea. 
Each word is the head of a comet with an infinite tail of 
coloured light. I am humiliated at the variety and splendour 
of things and ashamed of my own dullness. Never again, 
I say, shall I feel that there is nothing to write about. . . . 
****** 
But I shall. 
