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84 Works of Richard King

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Christmas

Story type: Literature

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Christmas comes but once a year–and the cynic cries, “Thank God!” And so, perhaps, do the very lonely. But then Christmas is not a festival for either the cynic or the desolate. The cynic is as welcome at the annual feast of turkey and plum pudding as Mr. “Pussyfoot” would be at a “beano”; while […]

My one great grievance against people in the mass is that they are so very seldom real. I don’t mean to say, of course, that you can walk through them like ghosts, or that, if they “gave you one straight from the shoulder,” you wouldn’t get a black eye. But what I mean is, that […]

So many people imagine that their love is returned, that their innermost thoughts are appreciated and understood, when lips meet lips in that kiss which brings oblivion–that kiss which even the lowliest man and woman receive once in their lives as a benediction from Heaven. So many people imagine that they have found the Ideal […]

Love Of God

Story type: Essay

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Yet, it seems to me sometimes that even our ideal of God changes with the fleeting years. When we were young, and because He was thus presented to us by our spiritual pastors and masters, we figured Him as some tragically revengeful elderly gentleman, who appeared to show His love for us by always being […]

I wish that the great Shakespeare had not written that “immortal” line: “The wish is father to the Thought.” It haunts you throughout your life. Like a flaming sign of interrogation it burns upon the Altar of Faith Unquestioning, before which, in your perplexity, Fate forces you–at least once in your life–to bow the head. […]

Travel (life)

Story type: Essay

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Do you know those men and women who, to paraphrase Omar Khayyam, “come like treacle and like gall they go”? Well, it seems to me that life is rather like such as they. You may live for something, you may live for someone, but some time, sooner or later, you will be thrown back upon […]

Everybody knows that they could improve human nature. I don’t mean, of course, that they could necessarily improve their own, nor that of the lady who lives next door, nor that of Mr. Lloyd George, nor of Miss Marie Lloyd, nor even of Lenin and Trotsky; but human nature as it is found in all […]

The other day I received a most extraordinary spirit picture anonymously through the post. I cannot describe this picture–it is well-nigh indescribable. The effect is wonderful, though the means are of the simplest. Apparently the artist had upset a bottle of ink over a large piece of white cardboard, and then, with the aid of […]

In every mixed crowd there always seems such a large percentage of the unimaginative and the inane that I am never surprised that the silliest superstitions still flourish, “the Thing” is rampant, and that, in every progress towards real civilisation, the very longest way round is taken with the very feeblest results. It is not […]

I hope when I am old that Fate will give me a garden and a view of the sea. I should hate to decay in a suburban row and be carried away at the end of all my mostly fruitless longings in a hearse; the seven minutes’ wonder of the small children of the street, […]

Clergymen

Story type: Essay

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I always feel so sorry for clergymen–the clergymen who are inspired to their calling, not, of course the “professional” variety who are clergymen because they preferred the Church to the Stock Exchange. They carry with them wherever they go the mark of the professional servant of God, and it creates a prejudice, between them and […]

Their Failure

Story type: Essay

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It is so difficult for men and women, as it were, to really help the East-end while living in West-end comfort. It is so difficult for religious people to realise that the finest prayer of all is to “play the game.” But the poor understand the wonder of that prayer full well; it is, indeed, […]

It seems to me that the poor need a friend more urgently than they need a pastor, or, if they must have a pastor–then the pastor must be completely disguised as a friend. I always wonder why it is the popular fallacy that the poor need religion more than the wealthy. My own experience is […]

I wish the Mystics and the Practical Men could meet, fraternise, and still not yearn to murder one another. It would be of immense benefit to you and me and the rest of us who make up the “hum-drum” world. For the Practical Man who is not something of a mystic is at best a […]

Wives

Story type: Essay

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The wife of a poor man really can be a helpmate, but the wife of a rich man is so often only asked to be a mistress who can bear her husband legitimate children. Everything which a woman can do, a rich woman pays other women to do for her, while she graces the results […]

One of the minor tragedies of life (or is it one of the major?) is the way we grow out of things–often against our will, sometimes against our better judgment. I don’t mean only that we grow out of clothes–that, after all, is nothing very serious, unless you have no younger brother to whom to […]

For a long time past people have been–and, I suppose, for a long time hence people will be–dusting their imaginations in order to discover the most fitting tribute their and other people’s money can erect to the memory of the sailors and soldiers who died so that they and their children might live. And yet […]

The longer I live the more clearly I perceive the extreme difficulty reformers have to interest people in philanthropic schemes which do not place their religion, their brand of politics, or they themselves in prominent positions on the propaganda. It seems to be very much the fashion among those who desire to help others that […]

Modern Clothes

Story type: Essay

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I often think that, if those “Old walls only could speak”–as the “tripper” yearns for them to do, because he can’t think of anything else to remark at the moment–all they would say to him would be the words, “For God’s sake, you guys, CLEAR OUT!” As a matter of fact, it is just as […]

Nearly everybody can “feel sorry”–some, extremely so! Lots of people can exclaim, “How ghastly!” in front of a mangled corpse–and then pass shudderingly on their way with a prayer in their hearts that the dead body isn’t their own, nor one belonging to their friends and acquaintances. But very few people, it seems to me, […]

The Few

Story type: Essay

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But just a few people seem to be enabled to see beneath the surface of things. Around them they seem to shed an extraordinary kind of understanding sympathy. They are not entirely the “people in trouble” who appeal to them; rather they seem able to perceive the misery of a “state of life”–something which obtains […]

I always think that one of the most amusing things (to watch), in all life, is what I term the “Kaiser-spirit” in individuals. Nearly everyone mistakes the trimmings of greatness for the real article, and most people would sooner expire than not be able to flaunt these wrappings, or the rags or them, before somebody’s […]

Love "Mush"

Story type: Essay

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I was standing outside a music shop the other day, gazing through the windows at the songs “everybody is singing.” Their titles amused me. Not a single one promised very much real sense. They were all what I will call love “mush”–“If you were a flowering rose,” and “Come to my garden of love,” were […]

I always secretly wonder what people mean when they say they are “going to the dogs.” Do they mean that they are going to enjoy themselves thoroughly, with Hell at the end of it?–or do they mean that they are going to raise Hell in their neighbourhood and prevent everybody else from enjoying themselves? Personally, […]

All marriage is a lottery–that is why the modern tendency is to examine both sides of the hedge before you ask someone to jump over it with you. A single man may be said to have his own career in his own hands; but once married, he runs the risk of having to begin all […]

Were it not for the fact that we are usually eating at the same time, and so in no mood to criticise the mastication of others, I am sure that not half so many people would fall into love, nor be able to keep up the passionate illusion when fate had pushed them into it. […]

I believe in the heart of democracy, but I am extremely suspicious of its head. Popular education among the masses is the most derelict thing in all our much-vaunted civilisation. To talk to the masses concerning anything outside the radius of their own homes and stomachs is, for the most part, like talking to children. […]

And this mention of the piano-crime among the munition-makers brings me to another fact–how utterly impossible it is for the majority of people to judge any big scheme without having regard to the particular instances which threaten its success. Because some working people are so utterly bestial that they are unfit to live in decent […]

Only those who have worked in the offices of an important newspaper, know that the Power Behind the Throne–which is the Editorial Chair–is rarely the Church, scarcely ever the State, infrequently the Capitalist, and never Labour,–but simply the Advertisement Department. I was sitting the other afternoon–dreaming, as is my wont; and smoking cigarettes, which is […]

How strange it is that human endeavour is, for the most part, always expended upon accomplishing something for which no one has any particular use, while the things which, as it were, are simply begging to be done, are usually among the great “undone” for which we ask forgiveness every Sunday morning in church–that is, […]

Yet these people, as I said before, must be married to one of the two Adored, if their sentiment for each can be called Love. Love, in which passion plays the larger part, is so all-absorbing while it lasts, that only the deep affection and respect which may come through the intimacy of matrimony can […]

I suppose that we all of us have our own little secret “dream-sanctuary”–our way-of-escape which nobody knows anything about, and by which we go when we are weary of the trivialities of the domestic hearth and sick unto death of the “cackle-cackle” of the crowds. When we are very young we long to share this […]

Everybody, as I said before, has his or her own receipt for “getting away.” Some find it in long “chats” over the fireside with old friends; some in reading and music and art; some in travel, some in “good works” and just a few in “bad” ones. A new hat will often lift a woman […]

Most especially do I feel sorry for those people who cannot find a certain illusion of happiness in reading. I thank whatever gods there be that I can generally find the means of “getting-away” between the covers of a book. A book has to be very puerile indeed if I cannot enjoy it to a […]

Looking back on one’s life, I always think it is so strange that just those blows of fate which logic would consider as certain to destroy such things as Faith and Belief, optimism and steadfastness of soul-vision, so many times provide their very foundations. How often those whose Belief in a Life Hereafter is the […]

For myself, I consider that it would do the world good if it had one whole day of silent remembrance each year. And if it be depressing–well, that will be all to the good. The world will come to no harm if it be depressed once a year–depressed for such a noble cause. After all, […]

Humanity

Story type: Essay

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“Humanity is one, and an injury to one member is an injury to the whole.” I cull this line from Mr. Gilbert Cannan’s book, “The Anatomy of Society.” And I quote it because I believe that it sums up in a few words, not only the world-politics of the future, but the religion–the real, practical […]

Responsibility

Story type: Essay

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Personally, I blame the poor for boozing less than I blame the rich for “jazzing.” If I had to live the lives which millions of working men and women lead, and amid the same surroundings, and with the same hopeless future–I would booze with the booziest. You can’t expect the poor to respect themselves when […]

The worst of government by the people is that the moment the people put them into power they are gracefully forgotten. The only real government by the people comes through the people themselves in the form of disturbances and strikes and revolutions. Then, alas, the tiny craft of Progress is borne towards the ocean on […]

Whenever I lend a book–and, in parenthesis, I never lend a book of which I am particularly fond–I always say “good-bye” to it under my breath. I have found that, whereas the majority of people are perfectly honest when dealing with thousands, their sense of uprightness suddenly leaves them when it is only a question […]

I have come to the conclusion that the only books which people are really fond of are those which rightly belong to other people. To them they are always faithful. They are faithful to them not in spite of themselves, which is the way with those “classics” which everybody is supposed to have read while […]

She was sitting half dreaming, half listening to the old preacher, when suddenly one sentence in a sermon, otherwise prosy and conventional, arrested her attention. For the moment she could not remember it, and then it came to her. “All roads lead to Calvary.” Perhaps he was going to be worth listening to at last. […]

Mountain Paths

Story type: Essay

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And the worst of that road to Calvary which we all of us must follow, whether it be a long or short way, is that it is always, as it were, a lonely journey into the Unknown. It is a mystery–a terrific mystery–and sometimes it frightens us so terribly that men and women have been […]

The Unholy Fear

Story type: Essay

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She didn’t object to the celebrations for the anniversary of the signing of Armistice–in fact, she quite enjoyed them–but she did object to the few minutes’ silent remembrance of the Glorious Dead. It depressed her. She brought out the old “tag” so beloved of people who dread sadness, even reverential sadness, that “the world is […]

“The bird was there, and rose and fell as formerly, pouring out his melody; but it was not the same. Something was missing from those last sweet languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had been some disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly believe it since his mate was still […]

The worst of keeping a “Family Skeleton” shut up in a cupboard is that the horrid thing will insist on rattling its old bones at the most inopportune moments–just, for example, when you are entertaining to tea the nearest local thing you’ve got to God–whether she be an “Honourable” (in her own right, mark you!) […]

We have lots of ways of expressing that a man is in a “rut” without ever giving the real reason of our adverse criticisms. An author who has “written himself out,” an artist whose pictures we can recognise without ever looking at the catalogue, the “conventional,” the “dull,” the lovers who have fallen out of […]

What is the happiest time of a man’s life? Not the attainment of his ambitions, but when the attainment is just in sight. Every man and woman must have something to live for, otherwise they become discontented or dull. People wonder at the present unrest among the working classes. But to me this unrest is […]

The Boy Scouts have, I believe, a moral injunction to do at least one good action every day. Older people applaud that injunction wildly. It is so admirable–for Boy Scouts. They consider it to be so admirable, indeed, that they declare it should form part of the moral curriculum of every young boy and girl. […]

Beginnings

Story type: Essay

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Beginnings are always difficult–when they are not merely dull. People worth knowing are always hard to get to know. On the other hand, people with whom you become friendly at once usually end by boring you unto death by the end of the first fortnight. People whom it is easy to get to know, as […]

They say it is better to be born lucky than beautiful. Which contains, by the way, only small consolation for those of us who have been born both lucky and ugly. For, after all, to have been born beautiful is a nice “chunk” of good luck to build upon, and anyway, if you are a […]

Wallpapers

Story type: Essay

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Life is full of minor mysteries–conundrums of the everyday which usually centre round the problem: “Why on earth people do certain things and what on earth makes them do them?” And one of these mysteries is that of their choice in wallpapers. Of course some wallpapers are so pretty that it is not at all […]

Far more than the Big Things are the Teeny Weeny Little Ones which more quickly divide lovers. A woman may conveniently overlook the fact that her husband poisoned his first wife in order to marry her, when she cannot ignore the perpetual example which he gives her of the truth that Satan finds some evil […]

February

Story type: Essay

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February is the month when, cold-red are the noses–and so (oh help!) are the “toes-es.” No one ever sings about February: scarcely anyone speaks about It. It is indeed unspeakable. Its only benefit is that, once every four years, it keeps people younger a day longer. If you’re thirty-nine, you’re thirty-nine for an extra twenty-four […]

Strange as the confession may appear coming from one who, week in, week out, writes about books, I am not a great book-lover! I infinitely prefer to watch and think, think and watch, and listen. All the same, I would not be without books for anything in this world. They are a means of getting […]

Tub-Thumpers

Story type: Essay

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I often wonder what born tub-thumpers are like in their own homes. Perhaps they are as meek and mild as watered buttermilk. Thinking it over, I think they must be. No self-respecting woman could be tub-thumped at daily without eyeing furtively the nearest meat-carver. For the genius of a tub-thumper is that he is usually […]

But I sometimes wonder if this indifference towards the facts which are “big” to so many people and ought, perhaps, to be “big” to everybody, be a sign of national weakness or of national strength. Personally, I longed, metaphorically speaking, to tear that female limb from limb and send that young man to a village […]

But the various types of cranks always provide a psychological interest to the student of intellectual freakishness. There are the “cranks” you laugh at; others who make you wish to murder them outright. Then there are a few pathetic cases–elderly men, who bring their own little wooden box as well as the vast majority of […]

Two Lives

Story type: Essay

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I often wish that we could all of us lead two lives. I don’t mean I wish that we could live twice as long–though, in reality, it would come to the same thing. But I would like to live the two lives which I want to lead, and only do lead in a sort of […]

Thus for the most part, things look most beautiful when we anticipate them, or as we look back upon them in memory over the fireside. For distance lends enchantment, not only to most views, but also to memories and love. As, metaphorically, we stand on the Mount of Olives gazing down at the city of […]

Too many fond parents like to imagine that their children know nothing at all of sexual matters–that they are clean and innocent and ignorant, and that, as long as they can be kept so, they will not run into danger and disgrace. But no parent really knows how much or how little their children know […]

If only the people who repeat the words of wisdom uttered by philosophers lived as if they believed them, how much happier the world would be! It is, however, so much easier to give, or to repeat, advice, than to follow it, isn’t it? Conventionality is far stronger than common sense, and a fixed habit […]

Polite Masks

Story type: Essay

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You never really know anybody–until you have either lived with them, travelled with them, or drunk a glass of port with them quietly over the fireside. In almost every other instance, what you become acquainted with is one of a variety of masks! And everyone has a fine assortment of these, haven’t they? For the […]

It is rare to come across anybody with very definite ideas; it is rarer still to meet a man and woman brave enough to put their ideas into practice. The hardest battle in life–and one of the longest–is the battle to live your own life. No one realises what fighting really means until they stand […]

Autumn Sowing

Story type: Essay

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I sometimes think the man who first said that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” must have said it in November. The autumn is full of good intentions–just as spring is full of holiday and hope, and summer of heat and dolce far niente. But, just as the first warm day in […]

But alas! all you do . . . all you really do, is . . . Well, as I said before, the man who first said that “the way to hell is paved with good intentions,” must have said it in the autumn, or perhaps, in the spring, when he realised how few of the […]

But unless your determination be something Napoleonic, you won’t have achieved very much more than this. It has all been so invigorating and delightful to contemplate; and the way of your decline has been so cosy and so comfortable, and it has so often ended in a glass of hot “toddy” and so to bed. […]

Relations

Story type: Essay

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Our Relations are a race apart. They are not often our friends; rarer still are they our enemies. They are just “relations”–men and women who treat our endeavours towards righteousness with all the outspoken hostility of those who dislike us, whom yet we do not want to quarrel with because then there may be nobody […]

A man may live to be a hundred; he may have learnt to speak twelve different languages–all badly; he may know, in fact, everything a man ought to know, and have done everything a man ought to have done; but one thing he probably won’t have learnt–or, if he has done so, then he ought […]

Awful Warnings

Story type: Essay

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Old Age is bad enough, but a dyspeptic Old Age–that surely is fate hitting us below the belt! For with advancing years the love of adventure leaves us; the “Love of a Lifetime” becomes to us of more real consequence than our pet armchair–but the love of a good dinner, that, at least, can make […]

I don’t know if you, fair reader, find that in the spring your fancy turns to thoughts of love–I know mine doesn’t! On the contrary, it turns to thoughts of sulphur tablets and camomile tea and other sickly or disagreeable circumventions of the “creakiness” of the human body. For among the things I could teach […]

I would sooner live with an immoral man or woman than a bad-tempered one. An immoral person can often be a very charming companion, quite easy to live with–if you take the various excuses for sudden absences at their face value, and don’t probe too deeply into the business; in fact, if you are not […]

I always think that the author who places his own photograph as an illustrated frontispiece to his own book must be either an exceedingly brave man or an exceedingly misguided one. At any rate, he runs a terrible risk, amounting almost to certain calamity, in regard to his literary admirers. I have never yet known […]

Seaside Piers

Story type: Essay

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The only real excitement I can ever perceive about a Seaside Pier is when the sea washes half of it away. To me, Seaside Piers are the most deadly things. You pay tuppence to go on them, and you generally stay on them until you can stay no longer because–well, because you have paid tuppence. […]

Visitors

Story type: Essay

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I always think that visitors are charming “interruptions.” They are delightful when they arrive; they are equally delightful–perhaps more so–when they go. Only on the third day of their visit are they tiresome, and their qualities distinctly below the par we expected. Almost anybody can put up with almost anybody for three days. There is […]

I have just been to see the latest musical comedy. Of course, I feel in love with the heroine. Could I help myself? Even women have fallen in love with her–so what chance has a mere male, and one at the dangerous age at that? But what struck me almost as much as the youthful […]

Farewells!

Story type: Essay

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When Youth bids “Good-bye” to anything, it is usually to some very tremendous thing–or at least, it seems to be tremendous in the eyes of Youth. But Age–although few people ever suspect–is always saying Farewell, not to some tremendous thing, because Age knows alas! that very few things are tremendous, but to little everyday pleasures […]

The "Butters"

Story type: Essay

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Of all the human species–preserve, oh! preserve me from the monstrous family of the Goats. I don’t mean the people who go off mountain climbing, nor those old gentlemen who allow the hair round their lower jaw to grow so long that it resembles a dirty halo which has somehow slipped down over their noses; […]

Age That Dyes

Story type: Essay

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So many women seem to imagine that when they dip their heads in henna twenty years suddenly slips from off them into the mess. As a matter of fact, they invariably pick up an additional ten years with the dye every time. After all, the hair, even at its dullest and greyest, shows fewer of […]

Women In Love

Story type: Essay

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Have you noticed how a woman displays much more “sang froid” in love than a man? Her heart may be aflame, but there always seems to be a tiny lump of ice which keeps her head cool. Only when a woman is not quite sure of her captor does she begin to lose her feminine […]

It is so difficult for them to get away from themselves, to seek that change and novelty which, in our hours of dread and suspense, are our most urgent need. All the time, day in, day out, their perpetual darkness thrusts them back upon themselves. They cannot get away from it. Nothing–or perhaps, so very, […]

How To Help

Story type: Essay

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I must confess, his remark gave me an additional respect for those huge volumes of books written in Braille which he always carried about with him than I had ever felt before. When you and I are “fed up” with life and everybody surrounding us–and we all have these moods–we can escape open grousing by […]

I always feel so sorry for the blind, because it seems to me they can never get away from themselves by wandering in pastures new. It is trite to say that the glory of the golden sunsets, the glory of the mountains and the valleys, the coming of spring, the radiance of summer–all these things […]

We know what it would be were we never for a single instant able to get away from the too-familiar scenes and people who, unconsciously, because of their very familiarity, drive us back upon ourselves. In each life there are a series of soul crises, when the spirit has to battle against some great pain, […]