has in any way
died out. Its manifestations may in some respects be more decorous
than they used to be; but the deep, masterful, subtle tendency is
there, and its force is by no means diminished by the advance of a
complicated civilisation. Often and often I have mused quietly amid
scenes where gamblers of various sorts were disporting themselves--in
village inns where solemn yokels played shove-halfpenny with
statesmanlike gravity; in sunny Italian streets where lazy loungers
played their queer guessing game with beans; in noisy racing-clubs
where the tape clicks all day long; on crowded steamboats when
Tynesiders and Cockneys yelled and cursed and shouted their offers as
the slim skiffs stole over the water and the straining athletes bent
to their work; on Atlantic liners when hundreds of pounds depended on
the result of the day's run; on the breezy heath where half a million
gazers watched as the sleek Derby horses thundered round. As I have
gazed on these spectacles, I have been forced to let the mind wander
into regions far away from the chatter of the gamesters. Again and
again I have been compelled to think with a kind of melancholy over
the fact that man is not content until he is taken out of himself. Our
wondrous bodies, our miraculous power of looking before and after, our
infinite capacities for enjoyment, are not enough for us, and the poor
feeble human creature spends a great part of his life in trying to
forget that he is himself. At the best, our days pass as in the dim
swiftness of a dream. The young man suddenly thinks, "It is but
yesterday that I was a child;" the middle-aged man finds the gray
hairs streaking his head before he has realised that his youth is
gone; the old man lives so completely in the past that he is taken
only by a gentle shock of surprise when he finds that the end is upon
him. Swiftly, like some wild hunt of shadows, the generations fleet
away--nothing stays their frantic speed; and to the true observer no
fictitious flight of spirits on the Brocken could be half so weird as
the passage of one generation of the children of men. As we grow old,
the appalling brevity of time impresses itself more and more on the
consciousness of calm and thoughtful men; yet nine-tenths of our race
spend the best part of their days in trying to make their ghostly
sweeping flight from eternity to eternity seem more rapid than it
really is. That hot and fevered youth who stands in the betting-ring
and