){kind=link}
A prolific essayist, journalist, and editor, E.V. Lucas acquired much of his education working at a bookshop in Brighton, England. He wrote frequently for the weekly humor magazine Punch and produced the standard editions of Charles Lamb's essays and letters.
In "The Perfect Holiday," Lucas imagines joining the circus for a fortnight to play the role of "a great man"--Pimpo, the clown.
The Perfect Holiday (A Letter)*
by E.V. Lucas
Great men are few in any case, and we are so much too apt to look for them in the wrong places--in Parliament for example--that we are in danger of missing some of those that do exist. Not only did I find a great man, but I discovered a great secret too. I discovered how to spend a holiday.
The secret is that our holidays should rest not only our minds and bodies but our characters too. Take, for example, a good man. His goodness wants a holiday as much as his poor weary head or his exhausted body. I wonder if he should not rest it by becoming for three weeks a bad man. Instead of sitting quietly on the pier, as he now does, he might pick a pocket or two. On returning from a sail in a boat he could furtively bore a hole in it. In his hotel he could mix up the boots, turn out the electric light, and decamp without paying his bill. Such expenditure as his holiday involved might be met with a forged cheque. On returning to town all the errors of the three weeks could be rectified; the handkerchiefs and purses returned to his victims on the pier; provision made for the survivors of those who had been drowned when the boat filled and sank; and so forth.
But that is not the point. The point is that he would have had a complete holiday. Similarly a wicked man should rest his wickedness and devote his month at Brighton to good works.
I do not, I must confess, see, in England, any period of prosperity for my plan; but it is sound, none the less. Perhaps the nearest practicable advice to it that one dares to give is that on a holiday we should endeavor to change the conditions of our life in every way as completely as possible. Only thus can a holiday be, for those of us who are active and restless in mind, a genuine rest. For it is not idleness that such require, but a change of employment.
For myself, who am neither good nor bad, and therefore have neither goodness nor badness to rest, the best holiday would be some occupation in the open air of an exciting or continually engrossing character, as utterly opposed to the ordinary routine of driving a pen as could be devised. And I think I have found it. I believe that a perfect holiday would be to join a traveling circus for a week or so as a utility man.
This discovery came upon me in a flash at Southampton as I watched the performance. During one turn--it was that hoary bare-backed jockey act in which the rider sits on the horse's tail and rocks his arms, and of which I tired permanently thirty years ago--I read in the programme the announcement of the circus's immediate intentions, and it was then that the desirability of such a life made itself felt--desirability at any rate to a weary literary hack who wished to forget himself and his trade in a certain absorbing Bohemian strenuousness. For on the next day there were to be two performances and a grand procession at Winchester; and the next day at Basingstoke; and the next day at Farnham, and so forth--always the two performances and always (weather permitting) the grand procession of triumphal cars through the principal streets at noon.
What a life! Everything in it but sleep, so far as I can see. Popularity, applause, naphtha lamps, might and muscle; the contiguity of wild beasts; tigers, tigers, burning bright in the watches of the night; acquaintance with clowns; proximity to dazzling equestriennes--all inspiring reverence and wonder in small boys. What a life! And wages, too, honestly earned, and perhaps now and then some food and drink. Perhaps a word from Lord John himself: not necessarily friendly, but a word from a lord.
So I felt as I read the programme, quite content to be just a menial hand. But then came the great man, Pimpo, and I saw that I must aim higher.
I may say at once that Pimpo was the busiest clown I have ever seen, and the most versatile. The ordinary clown, it is true, may now and then be detected by the observant--and all of us are observant in a circus--within the clothes of the ring-master, or among the gentlemen who stand at the entrance with white gloves and applaud the ladies; while his appearance, devoid of humor, among the troupe of acrobats who leap over elephants, is not uncommon. But Pimpo never divested himself of his character as a laughter maker, whatever his role might be. And he had more roles than I can remember. We saw him first as a clown and a clown only, winning bottles of wine from the ring-master by a series of adroit sophisms. He was then, as I say, a clown only: a good one, it is true, but no more. He came next with a tea-tray and essayed to loop the loop on it, on this occasion proving himself to be a finished acrobat. A troupe of jumping dogs soon after entered; and who should be their trainer and exhibitor but Pimpo? Later came the great attraction of the evening, if the size of type on the bills is an indication: a "Horde of Forest-bred Siberian Bears." In strolled the horde, very tame and mild, three in number, and sat at a desk and drank milk from a bottle and rode on a toy roundabout--all under the direction of whom? Pimpo. (There is no doubt about his name, for it was on his back.)
Here was versatility enough, one would think: but Pimpo had other views. Only a few minutes passed before he was again in our midst as a wire-walker, doing things in mid-air that I could not do on the ground and putting to shame his three companions, who performed as it were on crutches beside him. And then a final entry, as impresario to a couple of elephants whose special talent was shaving each other and extinguishing a house on fire. That was an evening's work of some magnitude alone: but Pimpo did not merely put his various beasts through their tricks and nothing else: he jested incessantly until the little boys' laughter was as steadily recurrent as the roar of the surge; he tumbled; and once, threatening to fight the ring-master, he took off twenty waistcoats.
The elephants gone, and the burning house extinguished, the circus men began to tear up the seats, and loosen the tent-ropes, and prepare for the march on Winchester. I waited a little to watch them, and then turned away towards my inn. As I did so I caught sight of a sturdy fellow with a chalked face carrying a truss of hay towards the elephants' tent. It was Pimpo, beginning his night's work.
"There," I said to myself, "goes a great man. It is he I would be for a fortnight--that would be a holiday indeed."
*"The Perfect Holiday" originally appeared in From A Little of Everything by E.V. Lucas (Macmillan Company, 1912).