Chapter 1

THE FOREST AND THE TREES

THERE is no business quite as interesting as other people’s business. At this point, we are hopelessly illogical. The frontier at which impertinence ends, and at which legitimate inquiry begins, has never been scientifically defined. Suppose, for example, that, screened by his curtains, Smith spends a good deal of his time in observing the activities of his neighbour, Brown. Smith likes to know at what precise hour Brown rises, how he regulates his domestic affairs and at what time he retires at night. If Brown goes out, Smith, inspecting his friend’s attire, hazards a conjecture as to whether he is intent on business, golf or a social function. If, on the contrary, Brown remains within doors, Smith speculates, on the strength of such evidence as presents itself, as to what he is doing and why.

If, by some mischance, Smith’s sleuth-like investigations are discovered, he is bluntly informed that his inquisitive behaviour is a piece of abominable impudence; that he is a contemptible busybody, that he should be heartily ashamed of himself; and that, in future, he had better mind his own business. If, however, Smith displays a lively interest, not in one neighbour, but in fifty thousand, he is applauded as an excellent citizen. And if, taking a continent as the field of his research, he pries into the affairs of fifty million neighbours, he is saluted as an economist, a sociologist, perhaps even a philanthropist, and the whole world echoes with his praise.

We find our first clue to a solution of the problem in the suggestion that Smith’s interest in Brown may not be as offensive to Brown as Brown pretends. We like our neighbours and friends to pay us some attention. The advertisements of Births, Marriages and Deaths indicate that most people like their private business to become public property.

In the realm of literature we all emulate Smith. A good biographer, for example, must be a clever gossip. It is the glory of Boswell that he reveals to us all the grotesque mannerisms, the elephantine oddities and the crude tastes of Dr. Johnson. Macaulay praised him for telling us all about the great man’s appetite for veal pie, his thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange peel and so forth. Similarly, it is the glory of Lockhart — Boswell’s only rival — that he tells us what Sir Walter Scott ate for breakfast, what he said to his dogs, what he wore when he set off in the rain for Melrose and how he looked on all sorts of occasions and in all kinds of circumstances. In this virile and graphic manner every sentence of the monumental work is drafted. Defoe, too, humours this weakness of ours. He tells us exactly how many biscuits Crusoe ate, how he built his raft, and what the parrot talked about. Goethe insists that this intimate element is the very essence of history; and Carlyle, under Goethe’s guidance, so magnified the grandeur of the individual that Mazzini told him bluntly that he could never see the forest for the trees.

It is, of course, the trees that make the forest. One cannot survey the spacious days of great Elizabeth save by conjuring up the monumental figures of Drake and Raleigh and Shakespeare; our naval traditions become incarnate in the electric personality of Nelson; the drama of the West stands crystallized in Washington and Lincoln. There is no phase of history, ancient or modern, that cannot be summoned to the mind, in dramatic and colourful vividness, by the mention of some impressive and well-remembered name. Or take the Bible. On opening it, one is immediately arrested by the striking fact that, whilst other sacred literatures are concerned with nebulous dogmas and philosophical subtleties, this volume presents a ceaseless pageant of human records. One palpitating life story, in all its naked humanism, follows upon the heels of another. Biography succeeds biography, and when we approach the inner shrine of the venerable revelation, we confront, not a manifesto, nor a mandate, nor a general design for living, but a radiant and sublime personality, so lovable, so magnetic and so compelling that it stands without a rival among the archives of mankind.

F. W. Boreham