YOU will not do your business better because you wear a long face all the time; you will do it worse. If you are talking about your high ideals all day you are not only a nuisance: you are either dishonest or unbalanced. We are not creatures with wings. We are creatures who walk. We have to “foot it” even to Mount Pisgah,* and the more cheerful and jolly and ordinary we are on the way the sooner we shall get over the journey. The noblest Englishman that ever lived, and the most deeply serious, was as full of innocent mirth as a child and laid his head down on the block with a jest.* Let us keep our course by the stars, by all means, but the immediate tasks are much nearer than the stars
The charities that soothe and heal and bless
Are scattered all about our feet like flowers.*
It is just this frightful gravity of the German mind that has made them mad.*
* Mount Pisgah or Mount Nebo was the peak (today in Jordan) from which Moses was permitted to view the Promised Land, though he knew he would die and never enter it. See The Kiss of the Eternal. Gardiner was speaking of those British soldiers who would die in the War and so never taste the liberty for which they were fighting.
* A reference to Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), who was executed at Tower Hill on the orders of King Henry VIII. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) tells us in his Apophthegms, No. 183: “Sir Thomas More, (who was a man, in all his life-time, that had an excellent vein in jesting) at the very instant of his death, having a pretty long beard, after his head was upon the block, lift it up again, and gently drew his beard aside, and said ‘This hath not offended the king.’”
* Slightly misquoted from The Excursion by William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who is making the point made by St Paul in Romans 1:18-21 that the fundamental moral duties of Man are not hidden from anyone:
The primal duties shine aloft — like stars;
The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless,
Are scattered at the feet of Man — like flowers.
* According to Major-General Sir George Younghusband (1859-1944), the typical British soldier prior to the 1900s was “a bluff, rather surly person, never the least jocose or light-hearted, except perhaps when he had too much beer”, and there was “no Tipperary or kicking footballs about it”. In his opinion, the transformation was effected by journalist and story-teller Rudyard Kipling, who had persuaded ‘Tommy Atkins’ that he had hidden depths of chirpy good-humour. See The Making of Tommy Atkins. It is one of those ironies that Gardiner was savagely critical of Kipling and his writings; but here he unconsciously paid him a high compliment.