Summaries of Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner) essays (1920s)


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward
Draft version: version 4 (29th Sep, "On Black Sheep", 27th Sep, "On reading in bed", 22nd September 2026 "On Living Forever" "To an Unknown Artist", "On Losing One's Memory", v1 20th Sep)
Note: some of these are not summaries, merely what I found interesting. Also most were made after one brief reading! I may add more later. And they are mostly from the collection Many Furrows.

Dream Journeys. "Most dreams are easily traceable to some waking circumstance". "There is that fellow Karl Marx, for example.  He certainly must beread--some day.  It is absurd not to know what he said, when all the world goes on babbling so learnedly about him.  No doubt he is a dull fellow, but we cannot, of course, leave the world without knowing why he created such a hubbub.  And there are a lot of other high-brows that we shall become acquainted with in good time…That is how we drift until, somewhere in the fifties, we begin to suspect that we are cutting it rather fine...  Karl Marx is still joyfully unthumbed..."

On Coming Home. "The main purpose of a holiday is to make us home-sick.  We go to the forest of Arden in order that we may be reconciled to No. 14, Beulah Avenue, Peckham." "It is when the holiday is over that we begin to enjoy it."

A Log Fire. "There are certain things about which I have never made up my mind, and about which, I suppose, I never shall make up my mind.  That is to say I  it up, and then unmake it, after which I remake it, like the child on the sea-shore who sees his sand-castle swept away by one tide, and returns to build it for another tide to sweep away… If I affirm that The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest achievement of the imagination since Shakespeare, I do not promise not to say the same thing of something else, David Copperfield or Les Miserables, when, after a due interval, I express my view again.  And so with pictures and authors and towns and trees and flowers--in short, all the things that appeal to the changing emotions or to that vague and unstable thing called taste."

On Saying Please. "The young lift-man in a City office who threw a passenger out of his lift the other morning and was fined for the offence was undoubtedly in the wrong.  It was a question of 'Please.'  The complainant entering the lift, said, "Top."  The lift-man demanded, 'Top--please,' and this concession being refused he not only declined to comply with the instruction, but hurled the passenger out of the lift.  This, of course, was carrying a comment on manners too far. Discourtesy is not a legal offence, and it does not excuse assault and battery… no legal system could attempt to legislate against bad manners." "This does not mean that the damages are negligible.  It is probable that the lift-man was much more acutely hurt by what he regarded as a slur upon his social standing than he would have been if he had had a kick on the shins, for which he could have got legal redress.  The pain of a kick on the shins soon passes away, but the pain of a wound to our self-respect or our vanity may poison a whole day." "If we encounter incivility most of us are apt to become uncivil, but it is an unusually uncouth person who can be disagreeable with sunny people... 'Nothing clears up my spirits like a fine day,' said Keats, and a cheerful person descends on even the gloomiest of us with something of the benediction of a fine day." "...the lift-man's way of meeting moral affront by physical violence help us to restore the civilities. I suggest to him that he would have had a more subtle and effective revenge if he had treated the gentleman who would not say 'Please' with elaborate politeness.  He would have had the victory, not only over the boor, but over himself, and that is the victory that counts. The polite man may lose the material advantage, but he always has the spiritual victory."

Bilitch at Lords. I didn't find anything here worth summarizing or quoting.

On Shop WIndows. "There are, of course, people who love shopping and whose life is irradiated by victories at the counter.  They are chiefly women, but I have known men who had gifts in this line of no mean order.  They could march into a shop as boldly as any woman and have the place turned upside down and go away without spending a copper, carrying their heads as high and haughtily as you please.  But men of this heroic mould are rare. Men are usually much too mean-spirited, too humble, too timid to be fit to go into a shop to buy anything. Perhaps I ought to say they are too proud.  They would slink out, if they could do so unobserved.  They would decline to buy what they don't want to buy if their vanity would permit them.  But they cannot face the ordeal.  They cannot leave the impression that they are not rolling in riches and are not able to buy anything in the shop, whether they want it or not.  And it is only fair to us to say that sometimes we fall from compassion.  We buy because the lady has been so attentive..."

A Day With The Bees. "There is a theory that the country is good place to work in because the quiet leaves the mind undistracted. But the noise of the city is like the sound of the waves: no personal significance and not attended to. In the country each sound is a particular thing demanding attention." He goes on to present various country sounds: the bee, the thrush. He asks for the solitude of London.

On Shaking Hands. "If there is one custom that might be assumed to be beyond criticism it is the custom of shaking hands; but it seems that even this innocent and amiable practice is upon its trial.  A heavy indictment has been directed against it in the Press on hygienic grounds, and we are urged to adopt some more healthy mode of expressing our mutual emotion when we meet or part.  I think it would need a pretty stiff Act of Parliament and a heavy code of penalties to break us of so ingrained a habit."

On A Finger-Post. "Who is there who has not felt the beauty of that word "Wyoming"? It is a name that would almost make one forget the toothache. It is the very stuff of poetry, a balm for the troubled spirit, an anodyne for the jangled nerves. I could imagine a doctor prescribing that a patient should repeat "Wyoming" half a dozen times every hour as a cure for neurasthenia or something like that. That was how Stevenson felt about it until he had the misfortune to see it."

The Open Window.

On An Unposted Letter. "Most of the actions of other people which give us annoyance spring from causes that have nothing to do with the motives we assign to them. Othello smothers Desdemona through a misunderstanding about a handkerchief that five minutes' quiet talk would have cleared up, with disastrous results to the villain, Iago."

A Note on a Dress. He is used to seeing a series of women looking vacuous in stylish clothes, but this is the first time he has encountered a series of rules in the newspaper for male dress. Women are all interested in dress. "men are wholly indifferent to dress. It does not fill anything like the place in their mind that it fills in the mind of women, and I fancy there is an unwritten convention among them that it is bad form almost bordering on the improper to talk about clothes. It would smack of vanity in regard to one's personal appearance. " Women talk about dress as if it were objective art. "Where a man is keenly interested in dress, he is interested in his own dress." Are men superior for not treating dress as objective art, meriting disinterested analysis? "We are better men, more civilised men, in a well-fitting garment than in an ill-made garment."

Farewell to Hampstead. He says how pleasant Hampstead is.

On Plagiarism. He is not disturbed Professor Karl Pearson's discover that Pope is a plagiarist. "The proper study of mankind is Man," is lifted from Pierre Charron-"La vraye science et le vray estude de l'homme c'est l'Homme." "If this were the worst charge of plagiarism that could be brought against Pope—and I shall show presently that it is not—few illustrious poets would have so clean a record." Gives evidence: Burns from Motherwell's Chapbook. Says, "Milton's borrowings from Dante are abundant, but they are done in the grand manner, as of a prince taking a loan from an equal, not because he needs it, but as a token of their high companionship and their starry discourse. To be plagiarised by Milton would be no grievance, but a crowning distinction." "The indebtedness of Keats to others is indebtedness for words rather than ideas, but it is an immense debt. You can almost trace his reading by the perfumed words that he has ravished from other gardens, and to which he has given a new and immortal setting.": Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton and Spenser, Shakespeare and Chapman, Sandys' Ovid and Thomson's Seasons. Tennyson took from Shelley. Shelley from St Augustine. "Often the apparent plagiarism is unintended, even unconscious. Some minds are tenacious of good things and quite honestly forgetful of the source." He does not mean these cases though: "Canon Fleming, who preached and published a sermon of Dr. Talmage's as his own," "Disraeli from Thiers," "Disraeli, like Fleming, explained that he had copied the passage into his commonplace book and mistaken it for his own." Tennyson obviously knew of the source, he says. Rupert Brooke echoes Thoreau but probably did not know what he is doing. "It is conceivable that Brooke had not read Thoreau, though not probable. What is probable is that he had read the lines and that their vivid comparison of physical and spiritual apprehension had taken seed in his fertile mind and germinated in due season." "It is conceivable that Brooke had not read Thoreau, though not probable. What is probable is that he had read the lines and that their vivid comparison of physical and spiritual apprehension had taken seed in his fertile mind and germinated in due season." "Of course, Macaulay was familiar with the passage, and I assume he would have said that the idea was so exploited that it was common property which anybody was entitled to use who had a need and a use for it. And that is the best excuse that can be urged for most plagiarisms which are not mere cases of brazen theft or sheer desecration." Quotes Warburton's Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles : "If this banal nonsense is compared with Milton's original, it will not be easy to deny it the distinction of being the most clumsy example of plagiarism on record."  "Mr. Kipling, who is not himself, I think, much given to borrowing from others, is the most unequivocal advocate of free trade in plagiarism" "That may be the lawless law for the Olympians, but it will not serve humbler folk. You must be a big man to plagiarise with impunity. Shakespeare can take his "borrowed plumes" from whatever humble bird he likes, and, in spite of poor Greene's carping, his splendour is undimmed, for we know that he can do without them." In literature, one law for the rich, another for the poor.

Do We Buy Books? Alpha says he has over 2000 books and does not think this is unusual, given he is middle class and has lived a long life, although the van removal man was struck by them. But he finds that actually books are the last thing people attend to when furnishing a house. "They will ransack London for suitable fittings, for rugs and hangings, china and cut-glass, mirrors and what-nots, but the idea of providing themselves with a moderate and well-selected library does not occur to them." "People who will spend one hundred and fifty pounds on a piano as a matter of course will not spend ten pounds a year or even five pounds a year in enriching their homes with all the best thought of all time." "Yet, merely as furniture, books are a cheaper and better decoration than blue china or Chippendale chairs." "Go into any average provincial town and the last thing you will find is a decent book-shop. I recall more than one great industrial town of a population of over a hundred thousand which has only one such shop, and that is generally kept going by the sale of school-books. It is not because we cannot afford to buy books. We spend two hundred millions sterling a year on beer, and I doubt whether we spend two hundred million pence on literature." [Structure issues.] " a row of books will give a house character and meaning. It will tell you about its owner. It is a window let into the landscape of his life." "The Persian rugs only tell you that the owner has got money, but the books will tell you whether he has got a mind as well." "Holmes used to say that it took three generations of sprawling in a library to create a reading man; but I believe that any intelligent child who stumbles upon, let us say, Herodotus or Two Years Before the Mast or Prescott's Conquest of Peru, or any similar masterpiece, will be caught by the glamour of books and will contract the reading habit for life."

To an Unknown Artist. Alpha observes a skilled brickworker. "All his working life is spent on some such giddy task as this, swaying to and fro with his axe between a drop of fifty feet on one side and fifty feet on the other. He must never forget-for a moment. He must never be dizzy-for a moment. He must be prepared for any sudden gust of wind that blows. As I watched him he seemed to assume the proportions of a great artist." "I wondered what he got for risking his life every hour of every day. Perhaps as much in a week or a month as the Star will pay me for writing this article about him." Did an accident then happen? "When I passed through Piccadilly Circus in the evening the man had gone. So had the fragment of wall on which he stood. You may see the mark of the place where the wall rose on the side of the "Criterion." It is the mark of an unknown artist to whom I offer this tribute of my admiration." 

On Living For Ever. Alpha has noticed some pictures of an American Rutherford, who declares there are 1000s in this city who will never die. Alpha infers that Rutherford thinks this is good news. It is not, Alpha thinks: "the pleasure as well as the pathos of life springs from the knowledge of its transitoriness". "It is not alone the beauty of the sunset that touches us with such poignant emotion: it is because in the passing of the day we see the image of another passing to which we move as unfalteringly as the sun moves into the shadow of the night." "And such is the perversity of human nature that if Mr. Rutherford should turn out to be well-informed, those of us who are marked down for deathlessness would find that the pleasure of life had vanished with its pathos. We should be panic-stricken at the idea of never coming to an end, of never being able to escape from what Chesterfield called "this silly world," and Salisbury "this miserable life." "I remember that in one of her letters Lady Mary Wortley Montagu remarks that she is so happy that she regrets that she cannot live three hundred years. We all have moments like that, moments when life seems so good that we envy the patriarchs and would be glad if we could abide here longer than Nature permits." But it is a bad idea for us humans to never die.
See also the Makropulos case entries from: https://website2.net/williams_sl_summaries.txt

On Losing One's Memory. Opens with a soldier who lost his memory in the war and "and has been identified by rival families as a Scotchman, a Yorkshireman, and so on". "The most notorious case of the sort was that of Arthur Orton, the impudent Tichborne claimant, whose strongest card in his imposture was that Lady Tichborne believed him to be her long-lost son. In that case, no doubt, the maternal passion was the source of a credulity that blinded the old lady to the flagrant evidence of the fraud." He says, "our memory of other faces is extremely vague and elusive. I have just come in from a walk with a friend of mine whom I have known intimately for many years. Yet for the life of me I could not at this moment tell you the colour of his eyes, nor could I give a reasonable account of his nose or of the shape of his face. I have a general sense of his appearance, but no absolute knowledge of the details..." He says memory is reciprocal: I have to remember you and you have to remember me, or it is like the key does not work in this lock: one must accept that. He registers how memory can fail when faced with a question one can answer when unprompted: "You are asked, let us say, to spell "parallelogram." In an ordinary way you could do it on your head or in your sleep; but the sudden demand gives you a mental jerk that makes the wretched word a hopeless chaos of r's and l's". "The worst experience of a lapse of memory that ever came to me was in the midst of a speech which I had to make before a large gathering in a London hall. I had got to the middle of what I had to say when it seemed to me that the whole machine of the mind suddenly ceased to work. It was as though an immense loneliness descended on me." Says when "memory is gone personality itself has gone. Nothing is left but the empty envelope." "Macaulay could recite Paradise Lost.. I once met an American elocutionist who could recite ten of Shakespeare's plays, and he showed me the wonderful system of mnemonics by which he achieved the miracle. But he was a mere recording machine—a dull fellow. The true argosy of memory is not facts, but a perfume compounded of all the sunsets we have ever seen, all the joys and friendships, pleasures and sorrows we have ever known..."
Regarding faces and detail, see also: https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddawg92sqED/
Regarding the lecture experience, see also Proof Positive from: https://website2.net/greene_summaries.txt

On Reading in Bed. Alpha describe how he he is generally good at sleeping. But he sometimes wakes in the middle of the night. "My sleep is then divided into two chapters, and between the chapters there is a slab of unmitigated dreariness. It is my hour of pessimism. " Then he turns to reading. "It is necessary to avoid the deep-browed argumentative fellows. I do not want Plato or Gibbon or any of the learned brotherhood by my bedside, nor the poets, nor the novelists, nor the dramatists, nor even the professional humorists. These are all capital fellows in their way, but let them stay downstairs. To the intimacy of the bedside I admit only the kindly fellows who come in  their dressing-gowns and slippers, so to speak, and sit down and just talk to you as though they had known you ever since you were a little nipper, and your father and your grandfather before you." Montaigne, Bozzy (Boswell), Pepys, Agnes Paston. (From Pebbles on the Shore.)
Note he praises Gutenberg and text available here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10675/pg10675-images.html

On Black Sheep. Alpha observes that soldiers who have a past of social failure - reformatory school, convictions - often make excellent soldiers. He heard this often in France and agrees. Although there are a few people who are exceptionally balanced, he thinks most of us avoid becoming black sheep by good fortune."Most of us know what it is to be on the brink of the precipice--know, if we are quite honest with ourselves, how narrow a shave we have had from joining the black sheep. Perhaps, if we are still honest with ourselves, we shall admit that the thing that turned the balance for us was not a very creditable thing—that we were protected from ourselves not by any high virtue, but by something mean, a touch of cowardice, a paltry ambition, a consideration that we should be ashamed to confess." He does not believe that circumstances wholly determine a man's behaviour, but "we are so variously composed that circumstance does play a powerful part in giving rein to this or that element in us" Essay ending:"Dirt, it is said, is only matter in the wrong place. Put it in the right place, and it ceases to be dirt. Give that man with twenty-seven convictions against him a chance of revealing the better metal that is in him, and, lo! he is hailed as a hero and decorated with the V.C." (From Pebbles on the Shore)

On Rumour. Alpha tells us that it is a common transformation for someone who once believed new sources, etc., easily to become very cautious in accepting testimony. [Is this mainly so in war time with false or misleading information from newspapers and more?] Alpha proposes that the chief problem with official sources is omission: " It is not what I am "officially" told that interests me: it is what I am "officially" not told that I want to know in order to arrive at the truth." He then presents a story about the damage that acceptance of rumour can do. "Was there ever a more pitiful story than that told at the inquest on an elderly woman at Henham in Suffolk? Her husband had been the village schoolmaster for twenty-eight years. The couple had a son whom they sent to Germany to learn the language. The average village schoolmaster has not much money for luxuries, and I can imagine the couple screwing and saving to give their boy a good start in life. When he had finished his training he set out to seek his fortune in South America, and there in far Guatemala he became a teacher of languages. When the war broke out he heard the call of the Motherland to her children and like thousands of others came back to fight. But in the meantime the lying tongue of rumour had been busy with his name in his native village. It was said that he was an officer in the German Army, and on the strength of that rumour his parents were ordered by the Chief Constable to leave the village and not to dwell on the East Coast. It was a sentence of death on them. The order broke the old man's heart, and he committed suicide. The son arrived to find his father dead and his mother distracted by her bereavement. He took her away to the seaside for a rest, but on their return to the village she, too, committed suicide." We are told the jury did not say, "Killed by slander," rather "Suicide while of unsound mind." 

On a Painted Face. Alpha meets a person who has suddenly lept into womanhood from being a girl. Interestingly says, "When I had seen her last there would have been no impropriety in giving her a kiss in the street. Now I should as little have thought of offering to kiss her as of whistling to the Archbishop of Canterbury". She is wearing make-up. "Now if there is one thing I abominate above all others it is a painted face. On the stage, of course, it is right and proper. The stage is a world of make-believe, and it is the business of the lady of sixty to give you the impression that she is a sweet young thing of seventeen." [Strange!] "But that any one, not compelled to do it for a living, should paint the face or dye the hair is to me unintelligible. It is like attempting to pass off a counterfeit coin. It is either a confession that one is so ashamed of one's face that one dare not let it be seen in public, or it is an attempt to deceive the world into accepting you as something other than you are. It has the same effect on the observer that those sham oak beams and uprights that are so popular on the front of suburban houses have." "There are, of course, degrees of failure. Mrs. Gamp's curls were so obviously false that they could not be said to be intended to deceive. On the other hand, the great lady who employs the most scientific face-makers in order to defeat the encroachments of Time does very nearly succeed. But her failure is really more tragic than that of Mrs. Gamp." "It was as though Death himself was peeping out triumphantly through the painted mask." "Why should we be so much afraid of wrinkles and grey hairs? In their place they can be as beautiful as the freshest glow on the face of youth. There is a beauty of the sunrise and a beauty of the sunset." [Um, er...] "And if the painted face of age is horrible the painted face of youth is disgusting... It is like painting the lily or adding a perfume to the violet, and has on one the unpleasant effect that is made by the heavy odours in which the same type of person drenches herself, so that to pass her is like passing through a sickly fog. These things are the symptom of a diseased mind--a mind that has lost the healthy love of truth and nature". [From Pebbles on the Shore]