“’But, O wise friend,
chief Barber of the Strand,
Brother, nor you nor
I have made the world.’
“Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope
better than we, made it under strange limitations,
and with painful conditions of pleasure.
“In the first and darkest of its books it is
fiercely written that a man shall not eat his cake
and have it; and though all men talked until the stars
were old it would still be true that a man who has
lost his razor could not shave with it. But every
now and then men jump up with the new something or
other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice,
that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that
there is no real difference between being shaved and
not being shaved. The difference, they say, is
only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionary
and relative. Shavedness is immanent in man.
Every ten-penny nail is a Potential Razor. The
superstitious people of the past (they say) believed
that a lot of black bristles standing out at right
angles to one’s face was a positive affair.
But the higher criticism teaches us better.
Bristles are merely negative. They are a Shadow
where Shaving should be.
“Well, it all goes on, and I suppose it all
means something. But a baby is the Kingdom of
God, and if you try to kiss a baby he will know whether
you are shaved or not. Perhaps I am mixing up
being shaved and being saved; my democratic sympathies
have always led me to drop my ‘h’s.’
In another moment I may suggest that goats represent
the lost because goats have long beards. This
is growing altogether too allegorical.
“Nevertheless,” I added, as I paid the
bill, “I have really been profoundly interested
in what you told me about the New Shaving. Have
you ever heard of a thing called the New theology?”
He smiled and said that he had not.
The Toy Theatre
There is only one reason why all grown-up people do
not play with toys; and it is a fair reason.
The reason is that playing with toys takes so very
much more time and trouble than anything else.
Playing as children mean playing is the most serious
thing in the world; and as soon as we have small duties
or small sorrows we have to abandon to some extent
so enormous and ambitious a plan of life. We
have enough strength for politics and commerce and
art and philosophy; we have not enough strength for
play. This is a truth which every one will recognize
who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all;
any one who has played with bricks, any one who has
played with dolls, any one who has played with tin
soldiers. My journalistic work, which earns
money, is not pursued with such awful persistency as
that work which earned nothing.
