ON CHOOSING A NAME

“As for your name, I offer you the whole firmament to choose from.”  In that prodigal spirit the editor of the Star invites me to join the constellation that he has summoned from the vasty deeps of Fleet Street.  I am, he says, to shine punctually every Wednesday evening, wet or fine, on winter nights and summer eves, at home or abroad, until such time as he cries:  “Hold, enough!” and applies the extinguisher that comes to all.

The invitation reaches me in a tiny village on a spur of a range of beech clad hills, whither I have fled for a breathing space from the nightmare of the war and the menacing gloom of the London streets at night.  Here the darkness has no terrors.  In the wide arch of the sky our lamps are lit nightly as the sun sinks down far over the great plain that stretches at our feet.  None of the palpitations of Fleet Street disturb us, and the rumours of the war come to us like far-off echoes from another world.  The only sensation of our day is when, just after darkness has fallen, the sound of a whistle in the tiny street of thatched cottages announces that the postman has called to collect letters.

In this solitude, where one is thrown entirely upon one’s own resources, one discovers how dependent one is upon men and books for inspiration.  It is hard even to find a name.  Not that finding a name is easy in any circumstances.  Every one who lives by his pen knows the difficulty of the task.  I would rather write an article than find a title for it.  The thousand words come easily (sometimes); but the five-words summary of the thousand, that is to flame at the top like a beacon light, is a gem that has to be sought in travail, almost in tears.  I have written books, but I have never found a title for one that I have written.  That has always come to me from a friend.

Even the men of genius suffer from this impoverishment.  When Goldsmith had written the finest English comedy since Shakespeare he did not know what to call it, and had to leave Johnson to write the label.  I like to think that Shakespeare himself suffered from this sterility—­that he, too, sat biting the feather of his quill in that condition of despair that is so familiar to smaller men.  Indeed, we have proof that it was so in the titles themselves.  Is not the title, As You Like It, a confession that he had bitten his quill until he was tired of the vain search for a name?  And what is Twelfth Night:  or What You Will but an evidence that he could not hit upon any name that would fit the most joyous offspring of his genius?

What parent does not know the same agony?  To name a child, to give him a sign that shall go with him to his grave, and that shall fit that mystery of the cradle which time and temptation and trial shall alone reveal—­hoc opus, hic labor est.  Many fail by starting from false grounds—­fashion, ambition, or momentary interest.  Perhaps the little stranger arrives with the news of a battle, or when a popular novel appears, or at a moment when you are under the influence of some austere or heroic name.  And forgetful that it is the child that has to bear the burden of your momentary impulse, you call him Inkerman Jones, or Kitchener Smith, or Milton Spinks.