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Title: The Uses of Diversity: A book of essays

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release date: August 4, 2019 [eBook #60057]
                Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE USES OF DIVERSITY: A BOOK OF ESSAYS ***

THE USES OF DIVERSITY




      BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  CHARLES DICKENS
  ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
  TREMENDOUS TRIFLES
  ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS
  A MISCELLANY OF MEN
  THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE




         THE USES OF DIVERSITY

           A BOOK OF ESSAYS

                  BY
           G. K. CHESTERTON

           METHUEN & CO. LTD
         36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
                LONDON


_First Published in 1920_




CONTENTS


                                     PAGE

  ON SERIOUSNESS                         1

  LAMP-POSTS                             7

  THE SPIRITS                           13

  TENNYSON                              18

  THE DOMESTICITY OF DETECTIVES         24

  GEORGE MEREDITH                       30

  THE IRISHMAN                          34

  IRELAND AND THE DOMESTIC DRAMA        39

  THE JAPANESE                          44

  CHRISTIAN SCIENCE                     49

  THE LAWLESSNESS OF LAWYERS            54

  OUR LATIN RELATIONS                   61

  ON PIGS AS PETS                       66

  THE ROMANCE OF ROSTAND                71

  WISHES                                75

  THE FUTURISTS                         80

  THE EVOLUTION OF EMMA                 85

  THE PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC BOOKS           91

  THE HUMOUR OF KING HEROD              96

  THE SILVER GOBLETS                   101

  THE DUTY OF THE HISTORIAN            106

  QUESTIONS OF DIVORCE                 112

  MORMONISM                            121

  PAGEANTS AND DRESS                   126

  ON STAGE COSTUME                     132

  THE YULE LOG AND THE DEMOCRAT        138

  MORE THOUGHTS ON CHRISTMAS           144

  DICKENS AGAIN                        149

  TAFFY                                154

  “EGO ET SHAVIUS MEUS”                159

  THE PLAN FOR A NEW UNIVERSE          164

  GEORGE WYNDHAM                       171

  FOUR STUPIDITIES                     177

  ON HISTORICAL NOVELS                 182

  ON MONSTERS                          186




THE USES OF DIVERSITY




THE USES OF DIVERSITY




On Seriousness ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


I do not like seriousness. I think it is irreligious. Or, if you prefer
the phrase, it is the fashion of all false religions. The man who takes
everything seriously is the man who makes an idol of everything: he
bows down to wood and stone until his limbs are as rooted as the roots
of the tree or his head as fallen as the stone sunken by the roadside.
It has often been discussed whether animals can laugh. The hyena is
said to laugh: but it is rather in the sense in which the M.P. is said
to utter “an ironical cheer.” At the best, the hyena utters an ironical
laugh. Broadly, it is true that all animals except Man are serious. And
I think it is further demonstrated by the fact that all human beings
who concern themselves in a concentrated way with animals are also
serious; serious in a sense far beyond that of human beings concerned
with anything else. Horses are serious; they have long, solemn faces.
But horsey men are also serious--jockeys or trainers or grooms: they
also have long, solemn faces. Dogs are serious: they have exactly
that combination of moderate conscientiousness with monstrous conceit
which is the make-up of most modern religions. But, however serious
dogs may be, they can hardly be more serious than dog-fanciers--or
dog-stealers. Dog-stealers, indeed, have to be particularly serious,
because they have to come back and say they have found the dog. The
faintest shade of irony, not to say levity, on their features, would
evidently be fatal to their plans. I will not carry the comparison
through all the kingdoms of natural history: but it is true of all who
fix their affection or intelligence on the lower animals. Cats are as
serious as the Sphinx, who must have been some kind of cat, to judge by
the attitude. But the rich old ladies who love cats are quite equally
serious, about cats and about themselves. So also the ancient Egyptians
worshipped cats, also crocodiles and beetles and all kinds of things;
but they were all serious and made their worshippers serious. Egyptian
art was intentionally harsh, clear, and conventional; but it could very
vividly represent men driving, hunting, fighting, feasting, praying.
Yet I think you will pass along many corridors of that coloured and
almost cruel art before you see a man laughing. Their gods did not
encourage them to laugh. I am told by housewives that beetles seldom
laugh. Cats do not laugh--except the Cheshire Cat (which is not found
in Egypt); and even he can only grin. And crocodiles do not laugh. They
weep.

This comparison between the sacred animals of Egypt and the pet animals
of to-day is not so far-fetched as it may seem to some people. There is
a healthy and an unhealthy love of animals: and the nearest definition
of the difference is that the unhealthy love of animals is serious. I
am quite prepared to love a rhinoceros, with reasonable precautions:
he is, doubtless, a delightful father to the young rhinoceroses. But
I will not promise not to laugh at a rhinoceros. I will not worship
the beast with the little horn. I will not adore the Golden Calf;
still less will I adore the Fatted Calf. On the contrary, I will eat
him. There is some sort of joke about eating an animal, or even about
an animal eating you. Let us hope we shall perceive it at the proper
moment, if it ever occurs. But I will not worship an animal. That is, I
will not take an animal quite seriously: and I know why.

Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is,
both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience.
Suppose a thousand black slaves were sacrificed to the blackbeetle;
suppose a million maidens were flung into the Nile to feed the
crocodile; suppose the cat could eat men instead of mice--it could
still be no more than that sacrifice of humanity that so often makes
the horse more important than the groom, or the lap-dog more important
even than the lap. The only right view of the animal is the comic view.
Because the view is comic it is naturally affectionate. And because it
is affectionate, it is never respectful.

I know no place where the true contrast has been more candidly,
clearly, and (for all I know) unconsciously expressed than in an
excellent little book of verse called _Bread and Circuses_ by Helen
Parry Eden, the daughter of Judge Parry, who has inherited both the
humour and the humanity in spite of which her father succeeded as a
modern magistrate. There are a great many other things that might be
praised in the book, but I should select for praise the sane love
of animals. There is, for instance, a little poem on a cat from the
country who has come to live in a flat in Battersea (everybody at some
time of their lives has lived or will live in a flat in Battersea,
except, perhaps, the “prisoner of the Vatican”), and the verses have
a tenderness, with a twist of the grotesque, which seems to me the
exactly appropriate tone about domestic pets:

    And now you’re here. Well, it may be
    The sun _does_ rise in Battersea
    Although to-day be dark;
    Life is not shorn of loves and hates
    While there are sparrows on the slates
    And keepers in the Park.
    And you yourself will come to learn
    The ways of London; and in turn
    Assume your Cockney cares
    Like other folk that live in flats,
    Chasing your purely abstract rats
    Upon the concrete stairs.

That is like Hood at his best; but it is, moreover, penetrated with a
profound and true appreciation of the fundamental idea that all love
of the cat must be founded on the _absurdity_ of the cat, and only
thus can a morbid idolatry be avoided. Perhaps those who appeared to
be witches were those old ladies who took their cats too seriously.
The cat in this book is called “Four-Paws,” which is as jolly as a
gargoyle. But the name of the cat must be something familiar and even
jeering, if it be only Tom or Tabby or Topsy: something that shows man
is not afraid of it. Otherwise the name of the cat will be Pasht.

But when the same poet comes accidentally across an example of the
insane seriousness about animals that some modern “humanitarians”
exhibit, she turns against the animal-lover as naturally and
instinctively as she turns to the animal. A writer on a society paper
had mentioned some rich woman who had appeared on Cup Day “gowned”
in some way or other, and inserted the tearful parenthesis that “she
has just lost a dear dog in London.” The real animal-lover instantly
recognizes the wrong note, and dances on the dog’s grave with a
derision as unsympathetic as Swift:

    Dear are my friends, and yet my heart still light is,
      Undimmed the eyes that see our set depart,
    Snatched from the Season by appendicitis
      Or something quite as smart.

    But when my Chin-Chin drew his latest breath
      On Marie’s outspread apron, slow and wheezily,
    I simply sniffed, I could not take _his_ death
      So Pekineasily....

        ... Grief courts these ovations,
      And many press my sable-suèded hand,
    Noting the blackest of Lucile’s creations
      Inquire, and understand.

It is that balance of instincts that is the essence of all satire:
however fantastic satire may be, it must always be potentially rational
and fundamentally moderate, for it must be ready to hit both to right
and to left at opposite extravagances. And the two extravagances which
exist on the edges of our harassed and secretive society to-day are
cruelty to animals and worship of animals. They both come from taking
animals too seriously: the cruel man must hate the animal; the crank
must worship the animal, and perhaps fear it. Neither knows how to love
it.




Lamp-Posts ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


In contemplating some common object of the modern street, such as an
omnibus or a lamp-post, it is sometimes well worth while to stop and
think about why such common objects are regarded as commonplace. It is
well worth while to try to grasp what is the significance of them--or
rather, the quality in modernity which makes them so often seem not so
much significant as insignificant. If you stop the omnibus while you
stop to think about it, you will be unpopular. Even if you try to grasp
the lamp-post in your effort to grasp its significance, you will almost
certainly be misunderstood. Nevertheless, the problem is a real one,
and not without bearing upon the most poignant politics and ethics of
to-day. It is certainly not the things themselves, the idea and upshot
of them, that are remote from poetry or even mysticism. The idea of a
crowd of human strangers turned into comrades for a journey is full of
the oldest pathos and piety of human life. That profound feeling of
mortal fraternity and frailty, which tells us we are indeed all in the
same boat, is not the less true if expressed in the formula that we are
all in the same bus. As for the idea of the lamp-post, the idea of the
fixed beacon of the branching thoroughfares, the terrestrial star of
the terrestrial traveller, it not only could be, but actually is, the
subject of countless songs.

Nor is it even true that there is something so trivial or ugly about
the names of the things as to make them commonplace in all connexions.
The word “lamp” is especially beloved by the more decorative and
poetic writers; it is a symbol, and very frequently a title. It is
true that if Ruskin had called his eloquent work “The Seven Lamp-Posts
of Architecture” the effect, to a delicate ear, would not have been
quite the same. But even the word “post” is in no sense impossible in
poetry; it can be found with a fine military ring in phrases like “The
Last Post” or “Dying at his Post.” I remember, indeed, hearing, when
a small child, the line in Macaulay’s “Armada” about “with loose rein
and bloody spur rode inland many a post,” and being puzzled at the
picture of a pillar-box or a lamp-post displaying so much activity. But
certainly it is not the mere sound of the word that makes it unworkable
in the literature of wonder or beauty. “Omnibus” may seem at first
sight a more difficult thing to swallow--if I may be allowed a somewhat
gigantesque figure of speech. This, it may be said, is a Cockney and
ungainly modern word, as it is certainly a Cockney and ungainly modern
thing. But even this is not true. The word “omnibus” is a very noble
word with a very noble meaning and even tradition. It is derived
from an ancient and adamantine tongue which has rolled it with very
authoritative thunders: _quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus_. It
is a word really more human and universal than republic or democracy.
A man might very consistently build a temple for all the tribes of
men, a temple of the largest pattern and the loveliest design, and then
call it an omnibus. It is true that the dignity of this description
has really been somewhat diminished by the illogical habit of clipping
the word down to the last and least important part of it. But that
is only one of many modern examples in which real vulgarity is not
in democracy, but rather in the loss of democracy. It is about as
democratic to call an omnibus a bus as it would be to call a democrat a
rat.

Another way of explaining the cloud of commonplace interpretation upon
modern things is to trace it to that spirit which often calls itself
science but which is more often mere repetition. It is proverbial that
a child, looking out of the nursery window, regards the lamp-post
as part of a fairy-tale of which the lamplighter is the fairy. That
lamp-post can be to a baby all that the moon could possibly be to a
lover or a poet. Now, it is perfectly true that there is nowadays a
spirit of cheap information which imagines that it shoots beyond this
shining point, when it merely tells us that there are nine hundred
lamp-posts in the town, all exactly alike. It is equally true that
there is a spirit of cheap science, which is equally cocksure of its
conclusiveness when it tells us that there are so many thousand moons
and suns, all much more alike than we might have been disposed to
fancy. And we can say of both these calculations that there is nothing
really commonplace except the mind of the calculator. The baby is much
more right about the flaming lamp than the statistician who counts the
posts in the street; and the lover is much more really right about
the moon than the astronomer. Here the part is certainly greater than
the whole, for it is much better to be tied to one wonderful thing
than to allow a mere catalogue of wonderful things to deprive you of
the capacity to wonder. It is doubtless true, to a definite extent,
that a certain sameness in the mechanical modern creations makes them
actually less attractive than the freer recurrences of nature; or, in
other words, that twenty lamp-posts really are much more like each
other than twenty trees. Nevertheless, even this character will not
cover the whole ground, for men do not cease to feel the mystery of
natural things even when they reproduce themselves almost completely,
as in the case of pitch darkness or a very heavy sleep. The mere fact
that we have seen a lamp-post very often, and that it generally looked
very much the same as before, would not of itself prevent us from
appreciating its elfin fire, any more than it prevents the child.

Finally, there is a neglected side of this psychological problem which
is, I think, one aspect of the mystery of the morality of war. It is
not altogether an accident that, while the London lamp-post has always
been mild and undistinguished, the Paris lamp-post has been more
historic because it has been more horrible. It has been a yet more
revolutionary substitute for the guillotine--yet more revolutionary,
because it was the guillotine of the mob, as distinct even from the
guillotine of the Republic. They hanged aristocrats upon it, including
(unless my memory misleads me) that exceedingly unpleasant aristocrat
who promulgated the measure of war economy known as “Let them eat
grass.” Hence it happened that there has been in Paris a fanatical
and flamboyant political newspaper actually called _La Lanterne_, a
paper for extreme Jacobins. If there were a paper in London called the
_Lamp-Post_, I can only imagine it as a paper for children. As for my
other example, I do not know whether even the French Revolution could
manage to do anything with the omnibus; but the Jacobins were quite
capable of using it as a tumbril.

In short, I suspect that Cockney things have become commonplace because
there has been so long lacking in them a certain savour of sacrifice
and peril, which there has been in the nursery tale, for all its
innocence, and which there has been in the Parisian street, for all its
iniquity.

The new wonder that has changed the world before our eyes is that all
this crude and vulgar modern clockwork is most truly being used for a
heroic end. It is most emphatically being used for the slaying of a
dragon. It is being used, much more unquestionably than the lantern of
Paris, to make an end of a tyrant. It was a cant phrase in our cheaper
literature of late to say that the new time will make the romance of
war mechanical. Is it not more probable that it will make the mechanism
of war romantic? As I said at the beginning, the things themselves are
not repulsively prosaic; it was their associations that made them so;
and to-day their associations are as splendid as any that ever blazoned
a shield or embroidered a banner. Much of what made the violation of
Belgium so violent a challenge to every conscience lay unconsciously
in the fact that the country which had thus become tragic had often
been regarded as commonplace. The unpardonable sin was committed in a
place of lamp-posts and omnibuses. In similar places has been prepared
the just wrath and reparation; and a legend of it will surely linger
even in the omnibus that has carried heroes to the mouth of hell, and
even in the lamp-post whose lamp has been darkened against the dragon
of the sky.




The Spirits ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


The magazines continue to abound in articles about Spiritualism. Those
articles which expose and explode Spiritualism are certainly calculated
to make converts to that novel creed; but fortunately the balance
is redressed by the articles which defend and expound Spiritualism,
which will probably make any thoughtful convert hastily recant his
conversion. I believe myself that nothing but advantage can accrue to
Spiritualism from all criticisms founded on Materialism. I think there
is a mystical minimum in human history and experience, which is at once
too obscure to be explained and too obvious to be explained away. It
may be admitted that a miracle is rarer than a murder; but they are
made obscure by somewhat similar causes. Thus a medium will insist on
a dark room; and a murderer is said to have a slight preference for a
dark night. A medium is criticized for not submitting to a sufficient
number of scientific and impartial judges; and a murderer seldom
collects any considerable number of impartial witnesses to testify to
his performance. Many supernatural stories rest on the evidence of
rough unlettered men, like fishermen and peasants; and most criminal
trials depend on the detailed testimony of quite uneducated people. It
may be remarked that we never throw a doubt on the value of ignorant
evidence when it is a question of a judge hanging a man, but only when
it is a question of a saint healing him. Morbid and hysterical people
imagine all sorts of ghosts and demons that do not exist. Morbid and
hysterical people also imagine all sorts of crimes and conspiracies
that do not exist. A great many spiritual communications may be
auto-suggestions; and a great many apparent murders may be suicides.
But there is a limit to the probability of self-destruction; so there
is of self-deception.

Now I think it well worth while to concentrate our common sense, not
on where these messages come from, or why they come, but simply on the
messages. Let us consider the thing itself about which there is no
doubt at all. Let us consider, not whether spirits can speak to us, or
how they speak, but simply what they say, or are supposed to say. If
spirits in heaven, or scoundrels on earth, or fiends somewhere else,
have brought us a new religion, let us look at the new religion on its
own merits. Well, this is the sort of thing the spirits are supposed to
write down, and very possibly do write down:

“You make death an impenetrable fog, while it is a mere golden mist,
torn easily aside by the shafts of faith, and revealing life as not
only continuous but as not cut in two by a great change. I cannot
express myself as I wish.... It is more like leaving prison for freedom
and happiness. Not that your present life lacks joy; it is all joy, but
you have to fight with imperfections. Here, we have to struggle only
with lack of development. There is no evil--only different degrees of
spirit.”

The interrogator, Mr. Basil King, who narrates his experiences in an
interesting article in _Nash’s Magazine_, proceeds to ask whether the
lack of development is due to the highly practical thing we call sin.
To this the spirit replies: “They come over with the evil, as it were,
cut out, and leaving blanks in their souls. These have by degrees to be
filled with good.”

Now I will waive the point whether death is a mist or a fog or a front
door or a fire-escape or any other physical metaphor; being satisfied
with the fact that it is there, and not to be removed by metaphors.
But what amuses me about the spirit is that for him it is both there
and not there. Death is non-existent in one sentence, and of the most
startling importance six sentences afterwards. The spirit is positive
that our existence is _not_ cut in two by a great change, at the moment
of death. But the spirit is equally positive, a little lower down, that
the whole of our human evil is instantly and utterly cut out of us,
and all at the moment of death. If a man suddenly and supernaturally
loses about three-quarters of his ordinary character, might it not
be described as “a great change”? Why does so enormous a convulsion
happen at the exact moment of death, if death is non-existent and not
to be considered? The Spiritualist is here contradicting himself, not
only by making death very decidedly a great change, but by actually
making it a greater change than Dante or St. Francis thought it was. A
Christian who thinks the soul carries its sins to Purgatory makes life
much more “continuous” than this Spiritualist, who says that death, and
death alone, alters a man as by a blast of magic. The article bears
the modest title of “The Abolishing of Death”; and the spirit does say
that this is possible, except when he forgets and says the opposite. He
seldom contradicts himself more than twice in a paragraph. But since
he says clearly that death abolishes sin, and equally clearly that he
abolishes death, it becomes an interesting speculation what happens
next, and especially what happens to sin: a subject of interest to many
of us.

Mr. Basil King asked the spirit, who had told him that animals are
human, whether it is wrong to destroy animal life. It may be remarked
that the questions Mr. King asks are always much more acute than the
answers he gets. The answer about the killing of animals is this:
“You can _never_ destroy life. Life is the absolute power which
overrules all else. There can be no cessation. It is impossible.”
And that is all; and for a man considering whether he shall or shall
not kill a tom-cat, it does not seem very helpful. Logically, if it
means anything, it would seem to mean that you may do anything to
the cat, for its nine lives are really an infinite series. In short,
you can kill it because you cannot kill it. But it is obvious that
if a man relies on this reason for killing his cat, it is an equally
good reason for killing his creditor. Creditors also are immortal
(a solemn thought); creditors also pass through a golden mist torn
easily aside by the shafts of faith, and have all the evil of their
souls (including, let us hope, their avarice) cut out of them with
the axe of death, without noticing anything in particular. In short,
Mr. Basil King, when he asks a reasonable question about a real moral
question, the relations of man and the animals, gets no reply except
a hotch-potch of words which might mean anarchy and may mean anything.
From beginning to end the spirit never answers any real question on
which the real religions of mankind have been obliged to legislate
and to teach. The only practical deduction would be that it is _no_
disadvantage to have sinned in this life; as in the other case that
it is _no_ disgrace to kill either a creditor or a cat. If it means
anything, it means that; and if it is spirits and not spifflications,
the spirits mean that: and I do not desire their further acquaintance.




Tennyson


I have been glancing over two or three of the appreciations of Tennyson
appropriate to his centenary, and have been struck with a curious tone
of coldness towards him in almost all quarters. Now this is really a
very peculiar thing. For it is a case of coldness to quite brilliant
and unquestionable literary merit. Whether Tennyson was a great poet
I shall not discuss. I understand that one has to wait about eight
hundred years before discussing that; and my only complaint against
the printers of my articles is that they will not wait even for
much shorter periods. But that Tennyson was a poet is as solid and
certain as that Roberts is a billiard-player. That Tennyson was an
astonishingly good poet is as solid and certain as that Roberts is an
astonishingly good billiard-player. Even in these matters of art there
are some things analogous to matters of fact. It is no good disputing
about tastes--partly because some tastes are beyond dispute. If anyone
tells me that

    There is fallen a splendid tear
    From the passion-flower at the gate;

or that

    Tears from the depth of some divine despair

is not fine poetry, I am quite prepared to treat him as I would one
who said that grass was not green or that I was not corpulent. And by
all common chances Tennyson ought to be preserved as a pleasure--a
sensuous pleasure if you like, but certainly a genuine one. There is
no more reason for dropping Tennyson than for dropping Virgil. We
do not mind Virgil’s view of Augustus, nor need we mind Tennyson’s
view of Queen Victoria. Beauty is unanswerable, in a poem as much as
in a woman. There were Victorian writers whose art is not perfectly
appreciable apart from their enthusiasm. Kingsley’s _Yeast_ is a fine
book, but not quite so fine a book as it seemed when one’s own social
passions were still yeasty. Browning and Coventry Patmore are justly
admired, but they are most admired where they are most agreed with.
But “St. Agnes’ Eve” is an unimpeachably beautiful poem, whether one
believes in St. Agnes or detests her. One would think that a man
who had thus left indubitably good verse would receive natural and
steady gratitude, like a man who left indubitably good wine to his
nephew, or indubitably good pictures to the National Portrait Gallery.
Nevertheless, as I have said, the tone of all the papers, modernist or
old-fashioned, has been mainly frigid. What is the meaning of this?

I will ask permission to answer this question by abruptly and even
brutally changing the subject. My remarks must, first of all, seem
irrelevant even to effrontery; they shall prove their relevance later
on. In turning the pages of one of the papers containing such a light
and unsympathetic treatment of Tennyson, my eye catches the following
sentence: “By the light of modern science and thought, we are in
a position to see that each normal human being in some way repeats
historically the life of the human race.” This is a very typical
modern assertion; that is, it is an assertion for which there is not
and never has been a single spot or speck of proof. We know precious
little about what the life of the human race has been; and none of our
scientific conjectures about it bear the remotest resemblance to the
actual growth of a child. According to this theory, a baby begins by
chipping flints and rubbing sticks together to find fire. One so often
sees babies doing this. About the age of five the child, before the
delighted eyes of his parents, founds a village community. By the time
he is eleven it has become a small city state, the replica of ancient
Athens. Encouraged by this, the boy proceeds, and before he is fourteen
has founded the Roman Empire. But now his parents have a serious
set-back. Having watched him so far, not only with pleasure, but with
a very natural surprise, they must strengthen themselves to endure the
spectacle of decay. They have now to watch their child going through
the decline of the Western Empire and the Dark Ages. They see the
invasion of the Huns and that of the Norsemen chasing each other across
his expressive face. He seems a little happier after he has “repeated”
the Battle of Chalons and the unsuccessful Siege of Paris; and by the
time he comes to the twelfth century, his boyish face is as bright as
it was of old when he was “repeating” Pericles or Camillus. I have no
space to follow this remarkable demonstration of how history repeats
itself in the youth; how he grows dismal at twenty-three to represent
the end of Mediævalism, brightens because the Renaissance is coming,
darkens again with the disputes of the later Reformation, broadens
placidly through the thirties as the rational eighteenth century, till
at last, about forty-three, he gives a great yell and begins to burn
the house down, as a symbol of the French Revolution. Such (we shall
all agree) is the ordinary development of a boy.

Now, seriously, does anyone believe a word of such bosh? Does anyone
think that a child will repeat the periods of human history? Does
anyone ever allow for a daughter in the Stone Age, or excuse a son
because he is in the fourth century B.C. Yet the writer who lays down
this splendid and staggering lie calmly says that “by the light of
modern science and thought we are in a position to _see_” that it is
true. “Seeing” is a strong word to use of our conviction that icebergs
are in the north, or that the earth goes round the sun. Yet anybody can
use it of any casual or crazy biological fancy seen in some newspaper
or suggested in some debating club. This is the rooted weakness of our
time. Science, which means exactitude, has become the mother of all
inexactitude.

This is the failure of the epoch, and this explains the partial failure
of Tennyson. He was _par excellence_ the poet of popular science--that
is, of all such cloudy and ill-considered assertions as the above. He
was the perfectly educated man of classics and the half-educated man
of science. No one did more to encourage the colossal blunder that the
survival of the fittest means the survival of the best. One might as
well say that the survival of the fittest means the survival of the
fattest. Tennyson’s position has grown shaky because it rested not on
any clear dogmas old or new, but on two or three temporary, we might
say desperate, compromises of his own day. He grasped at Evolution, not
because it was definite, but because it was indefinite; not because
it was daring, but because it was safe. It gave him the hope that man
might one day be an angel, and England a free democracy; but it soothed
him with the assurance that neither of these alarming things would
happen just yet. Virgil used his verbal felicities to describe the
eternal idea of the Roman Imperium. Tennyson used his verbal felicities
for the accidental equilibrium of the British Constitution. “To spare
the humble and war down the proud,” is a permanent idea for the
policing of this planet. But that freedom should “slowly broaden down
from precedent to precedent” merely happens to be the policy of the
English upper class; it has no vital sanction; it might be much better
to broaden quickly. One can write great poetry about a truth or even
about a falsehood, but hardly about a legal fiction. The misanthropic
idea, as in Byron, is not a truth, but it is one of the immortal lies.
As long as humanity exists, humanity can be hated. Wherever one shall
gather by himself, Byron is in the midst of him. It is a common and
recurrent mood to regard man as a hopeless Yahoo. But it is not a
natural mood to regard man as a hopeful Yahoo, as the Evolutionists
did, as a creature changing before one’s eyes from bestial to
beautiful, a creature whose tail has just dropped off while he is
staring at a far-off divine event. This particular compromise between
contempt and hope was an accident of Tennyson’s time, and, like his
liberal conservatism, will probably never be found again. His weakness
was not being old-fashioned or new-fashioned, but being fashionable.
His feet were set on things transitory and untenable, compromises and
compacts of silence. Yet he was so perfect a poet that I fancy he will
still be able to stand, even upon such clouds.




The Domesticity of Detectives ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


I have just been entertaining myself with the last sensational story by
the author of _The Yellow Room_, which was probably the best detective
tale of our time, except Mr. Bentley’s admirable novel, _Trent’s Last
Case_. The name of the author of _The Yellow Room_ is Gaston Leroux; I
have sometimes wondered whether it is the alternative _nom de plume_ of
the writer called Maurice Leblanc who gives us the stories about Arsène
Lupin, the gentleman burglar. There would be something very symmetrical
in the inversion by which the red gentleman always writes about a
detective, and the white gentleman always writes about a criminal. But
I have no serious reason to suppose the red and white combination to be
anything but a coincidence; and the tales are of two rather different
types. Those of Gaston the Red are more strictly of the type of the
mystery story, in the sense of resolving a single and central mystery.
Those of Maurice the White are more properly adventure stories, in
the sense of resolving a rapid succession of immediate difficulties.
This is inherent in the position of the hero; the detective is always
outside the event, while the criminal is inside the event. Some would
express it by saying that the policeman is always outside the house
when the burglar is inside the house. But there is one very French
quality which both these French writers share, even when their writing
is very far from their best. It is a spirit of definition which is
itself not easy to define. To say it is scientific will only suggest
that it is slow. It is much truer to say it is military; that is, it
is something that has to be both scientific and swift. It can be seen
in much greater Frenchmen, as compared with men still greater who were
not Frenchmen. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, for instance, both wrote
fairy-tales of science; Mr. Wells has much the larger mind and interest
in life; but he often lacks one power which Jules Verne possesses
supremely--the power of going to the point. Verne is very French in
his rigid relevancy; Wells is very English in his rich irrelevance.
He is there as English as Dickens, the best passages in whose stories
are the stoppages, and even stopgaps. In a truly French tale there are
no stoppages; every word, however dull, is deliberate, or directed
towards the end. The comparison could be carried further back among
the classics. The romance of Dumas may seem a mere riot of swords
and feathers; it is often spoken of as a mere revel in adventure and
variety; the madness of romance. But it is not a mere riot, but rather
a military revolution, and even a disciplined revolution; certainly,
a very French revolution. It is not a mere mad revel, but a very
gorgeous and elaborate banquet planned by a great cook; a very French
cook. Scott was a greater man than Dumas; and a greater novelist on
the note of the serious humours of humanity. But he was not so great
a story-teller, because he had less of something that can only be
called the strategy of the soldier. The Three Musketeers advance like
an army; with their three servants and their one ally, they march,
manoeuvre, deploy, wheeling into positions and almost making patterns.
They are always present wherever their author wants them; which is by
no means true of all the characters of all the novelists. Dumas, and
not Scott, ought to have written the life of Napoleon; Dumas was much
nearer to Napoleon, in the fact that there was most emphatically method
in his madness. Nobody ever called Scott mad; and certainly nobody
could ever call him methodical. He was as incapable of the conspiracy
which carried off General Monk in a box as Dumas was incapable of the
curse of Meg Merrilies or the benediction of Di Vernon. But there is
eternally present in the Frenchman something which may truly be called
presence of mind. There to be an artist is not to be absent-minded,
however harmless or happy the holidays of the mind may be. Art is to
have the intellect and all its instruments on the spot and ready to go
to the point; as when, but a little while ago, a great artist stood by
the banks of the Marne and saved the world with one gesture of living
logic--the sword-thrust of the Latin.

But though the strategy of the French story is allied to the strategy
by which the French army has always affected the larger matters of
mankind, I doubt whether such a story ought to deal with such matters.
I mentioned at the beginning M. Gaston Leroux’s last mystery story
because I think I know why it is not anything like so good as his first
mystery story. The truth is that there are two types of sensational
romance between which our wilder sensationalists seem to waver; and I
think they are generally at their strongest in dealing with the first
type, and at their weakest in dealing with the second. For the sake
of a convenient symbol, I may call them respectively the romance of
the Yellow Room and the romance of the Yellow Peril. We might say that
the great detective story deals with small things; while the small
or silly detective story generally deals with great things. It deals
with diabolical diplomatists darting about between Vienna and Paris
and Petrograd; with vast cosmopolitan conspiracies ramifying through
all the cellars of Europe; or worse and most widespread of all, occult
and mystical secret societies from China or Tibet; the vast and vague
Oriental terrorism which I call for convenience here the Yellow Peril.
On the other hand, the good detective story is in its nature a good
domestic story. It is steeped in the sentiment that an Englishman’s
house is his castle; even if, like other castles, it is the scene of a
few quiet tortures or assassinations. In other words, it is concerned
with an enclosure, a plan or problem set within certain defined limits.
And that is where the French writer’s first story was a model for
all such writers; and where it ought to have been, but has not been
a model for himself. The point about the Yellow Room is that it was
a room; that is, it was a box, like the box in which Dumas kidnapped
General Monk. The writer dealt with the quadrate or square which Mrs.
Battle loved; the very plan of the problem looked like a problem in
the Fourth Book of Euclid. He posted four men on four sides of a space
and a murder was done in the middle of them; to all appearance, in
spite of them; in reality, by one of them. Now a sensational novelist
of the more cosmopolitan sort could, of course, have filled the story
with a swarm of Chinese magicians who had the power of walking through
brick walls, or of Indian mesmerists who could murder a man merely by
meditating about him on the peaks of the Himalayas; or merely by so
human and humdrum a trifle as a secret society of German spies which
had made a labyrinth of secret tunnels under all the private houses in
the world. These romantic possibilities are infinite; and because they
are infinite they are really unromantic. The real romance of detection
works inwards towards the household gods, even if they are household
devils. One of the best of the Sherlock Holmes stories turns entirely
on a trivial point of housekeeping: the provision of curry for the
domestic dinner. Curry is, I believe, connected with the East; and
could have been made the excuse for infinities of sham occultism and
Oriental torments. The author could have brought in a million yellow
cooks to poison a yellow condiment. But the author knew his business
much better; and did not let what is called infinity, and should rather
be called anarchy, invade the quiet seclusion of the British criminal’s
home. He did not let the logic of the Yellow Room be destroyed by the
philosophy of the Yellow Peril. That is why I lament the fact that the
ingenious French architect of the original Yellow Room seems to have
made an outward step in this direction; not, indeed, towards the plains
of Tibet, but towards the hardly less barbaric plains of Germany. His
last book, _Rouletabille Chez Krupp_, concerns the manufacture of a
torpedo big enough to smash a town; and an object of that size may be
a sensation, but will not long be a secret. It may be inevitable that
a French patriot should now write even his detective stories about the
war; but I do not think this method will ever make the French mystery
story what the war itself has been--a French masterpiece; _Gesta Dei
per Francos_.




George Meredith


The death of George Meredith was the real end of the Nineteenth
Century, not that empty date that came at the close of 1899. The last
bond was broken between us and the pride and peace of the Victorian
age. Our fathers were all dead. We were suddenly orphans: we all felt
strangely and sadly young. A cold, enormous dawn opened in front of us;
we had to go on to tasks which our fathers, fine as they were, did not
know, and our first sensation was that of cold and undefended youth.
Swinburne was the penultimate, Meredith the ultimate end.

It is not a phrase to call him the last of the Victorians: he really is
the last. No doubt this final phrase has been used about each of the
great Victorians one after another from Matthew Arnold and Browning to
Swinburne and Meredith. No doubt the public has grown a little tired
of the positively last appearance of the Nineteenth Century. But the
end of George Meredith really was the end of that great epoch. No great
man now alive has its peculiar powers or its peculiar limits. Like all
great epochs, like all great things, it is not easy to define. We can
see it, touch it, smell it, eat it; but we cannot state it. It was a
time when faith was firm without being definite. It was a time when
we saw the necessity of reform without once seeing the possibility of
revolution. It was a sort of exquisite interlude in the intellectual
disputes: a beautiful, accidental truce in the eternal war of mankind.
Things could mix in a mellow atmosphere. Its great men were so
religious that they could do without a religion. They were so hopefully
and happily republican that they could do without a republic. They are
all dead and deified; and it is well with them. But we cannot get back
into that well-poised pantheism and liberalism. We cannot be content to
be merely broad: for us the dilemma sharpens and the ways divide.

Of the men left alive there are many who can be admired beyond
expression; but none who can be admired in this way. The name of that
powerful writer, Mr. Thomas Hardy, was often mentioned in company with
that of Meredith; but the coupling of the two names is a philosophical
and chronological mistake. Mr. Hardy is wholly of our own generation,
which is a very unpleasant thing to be. He is shrill and not mellow.
He does not worship the unknown God: he knows the God (or thinks he
knows the God), and dislikes Him. He is not a pantheist: he is a
pandiabolist. The great agnostics of the Victorian age said there
was no purpose in Nature. Mr. Hardy is a mystic; he says there is an
evil purpose. All this is as far as possible from the plenitude and
rational optimism of Meredith. And when we have disposed of Mr. Hardy,
what other name is there that can even pretend to recall the heroic
Victorian age? The Roman curse lies upon Meredith like a blessing:
“Ultimus suorum moriatur”--he has died the last of his own.

The greatness of George Meredith exhibits the same paradox or
difficulty as the greatness of Browning; the fact that simplicity
was the centre, while the utmost luxuriance and complexity was the
expression. He was as human as Shakespeare, and also as affected as
Shakespeare. It may generally be remarked (I do not know the cause of
it) that the men who have an odd or mad point of view express it in
plain or bald language. The men who have a genial and everyday point
of view express it in ornate and complicated language. Swinburne
and Thomas Hardy talk almost in words of one syllable; but the
philosophical upshot can be expressed in the most famous of all
words of one syllable--damn. Their words are common words; but their
view (thank God) is not a common view. They denounce in the style of
a spelling-book; while people like Meredith are unpopular through
the very richness of their popular sympathies. Men like Browning or
like Francis Thompson praise God in such a way sometimes that God
alone could possibly understand the praise. But they mean all men to
understand it: they wish every beast and fish and flying thing to take
part in the applauding chorus of the cosmos. On the other hand, those
who have bad news to tell are much more explicit, and the poets whose
object it is to depress the people take care that they do it. I will
not write any more about those poets, because I do not profess to be
impartial or even to be good-tempered on the subject. To my thinking,
the oppression of the people is a terrible sin; but the depression of
the people is a far worse one.

But the glory of George Meredith is that he combined subtlety with
primal energy: he criticized life without losing his appetite for
it. In him alone, being a man of the world did not mean being a man
disgusted with the world. As a rule, there is no difference between
the critic and ascetic except that the ascetic sorrows with a hope and
the critic without a hope. But George Meredith loved straightness even
when he praised it crookedly: he adored innocence even when he analysed
it tortuously: he cared only for unconsciousness, even when he was
unduly conscious of it. He was never so good as he was about virgins
and schoolboys. In one curious poem, containing many fine lines, he
actually rebukes people for being quaint or eccentric, and rebukes them
quaintly and eccentrically. He says of Nature, the great earth-mother,
whom he worshipped:

    ... She by one sure sign can read,
    Have they but held her laws and nature dear;
    They mouth no sentence of inverted wit.
    More prizes she her beasts than this high breed
    Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.

That is the mark of the truly great man: that he sees the common man
afar off, and worships him. The great man tries to be ordinary, and
becomes extraordinary in the process. But the small man tries to be
mysterious, and becomes lucid in an awful sense--for we can all see
through him.




The Irishman


The other day I went to see the Irish plays, recently acted by real
Irishmen--peasants and poor folk--under the inspiration of Lady Gregory
and Mr. W. B. Yeats. Over and above the excellence of the acting and
the abstract merit of the plays (both of which were considerable),
there emerged the strange and ironic interest which has been the source
of so much fun and sin and sorrow--the interest of the Irishman in
England. Since we have sinned by creating the Stage Irishman, it is
fitting enough that we should all be rebuked by Irishmen on the stage.
We have all seen some obvious Englishman performing a Paddy. It was,
perhaps, a just punishment to see an obvious Paddy performing the comic
and contemptible part of an English gentleman. I have now seen both,
and I can lay my hand on my heart (though my knowledge of physiology is
shaky about its position) and declare that the Irish English gentleman
was an even more abject and crawling figure than the English Irish
servant. The Comic Irishman in the English plays was at least given
credit for a kind of chaotic courage. The Comic Englishman in the Irish
plays was represented not only as a fool, but as a nervous fool; a
fussy and spasmodic prig, who could not be loved either for strength
or weakness. But all this only illustrates the fundamental fact that
both the national views are wrong; both the versions are perversions.
The rollicking Irishman and the priggish Englishman are alike the
mere myths generated by a misunderstanding. It would be rather nearer
the truth if we spoke of the rollicking Englishman and the priggish
Irishman. But even that would be wrong too.

Unless people are near in soul they had better not be near in
neighbourhood. The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to
love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
And there is a real human reason for this. You think of a remote man
merely as a man; that is, you think of him in the right way. Suppose
I say to you suddenly--“Oblige me by brooding on the soul of the man
who lives at 351 High Street, Islington.” Perhaps (now I come to think
of it) you _are_ the man who lives at 351 High Street, Islington.
In that case substitute some other unknown address and pursue the
intellectual sport. Now you will probably be broadly right about the
man in Islington whom you have never seen or heard of, because you will
begin at the right end--the human end. The man in Islington is at least
a man. The soul of the man in Islington is certainly a soul. He also
has been bewildered and broadened by youth; he also has been tortured
and intoxicated by love; he also is sublimely doubtful about death.
You can think about the soul of that nameless man who is a mere number
in Islington High Street. But you do not think about the soul of your
next-door neighbour. He is not a man; he is an environment. He is the
barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about
a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are
better than yours. Now, all these are the wrong ends of a man; and a
man, like many other things in this world, such as a cat-o’-nine-tails,
has a large number of wrong ends, and only one right one. These
adjuncts are all tails, so to speak. A dog is a sort of curly tail to
a man; a substitute for that which man so tragically lost at an early
stage of evolution. And though I would rather myself go about trailing
a dog behind me than tugging a pianola or towing a rose-garden, yet
this is a matter of taste, and they are all alike appendages or things
dependent upon man. But besides his twenty tails, every man really
has a head, a centre of identity, a soul. And the head of a man is
even harder to find than the head of a Skye terrier, for man has nine
hundred and ninety-nine wrong ends instead of one. It is no question
of getting hold of the sow by the right ear; it is a question of
getting hold of the hedgehog by the right quill, of the bird by the
right feather, of the forest by the right leaf. If we have never known
the forest we shall know at least that it is a forest, a thing grown
grandly out of the earth; we shall realize the roots toiling in the
terrestrial darkness, the trunks reared in the sylvan twilight.

But to find the forest is to find the fringe of the forest. To approach
it from without is to see its mere accidental outline ragged against
the sky. It is to come close enough to be superficial. The remote man,
therefore, may stand for manhood; for the glory of birth or the dignity
of death. But it is difficult to get Mr. Brown next door (with whom
you have quarrelled about the creepers) to stand for these things in
any satisfactorily symbolic attitude. You do not feel the glory of his
birth; you are more likely to hint heatedly at its ingloriousness.
You do not, on purple and silver evenings, dwell on the dignity and
quietude of his death; you think of it, if at all, rather as sudden.
And the same is true of historical separation and proximity. I look
forward to the same death as a Chinaman; barring one or two Chinese
tortures, perhaps. I look back to the same babyhood as an ancient
Phoenician; unless, indeed, it were one of that special Confirmation
class of Sunday-school babies who were passed through the fire to
Moloch. But these distant or antique terrors seem merely tied on to the
life: they are not part of its texture. Babylonian mothers (however
they yielded to etiquette) probably loved their children; and Chinamen
unquestionably reverenced their dead. It is far different when two
peoples are close enough to each other to mistake all the acts and
gestures of everyday life. It is far different when the Baptist baker
in Islington thinks of Irish infancy, passed amid Popish priests and
impossible fairies. It is far different when the tramp from Tipperary
thinks of Irish death, coming often in dying hamlets, in distant
colonies, in English prisons or on English gibbets. There childhood and
death have lost all their reconciling qualities; the very details of
them do not unite, but divide. Hence England and Ireland see the facts
of each other without guessing the meaning of the facts. For instance,
we may see the fact that an Irish housewife is careless. But we fancy
falsely that this is because she is scatter-brained; whereas it is, on
the contrary, because she is concentrated--on religion, or conspiracy,
or tea. You may call her inefficient, but you certainly must not call
her weak. In the same way, the Irish see the fact that the Englishman
is unsociable; they do not see the reason, which is that he is romantic.

This seems to me the real value of such striking national sketches as
those by Lady Gregory and Mr. Synge, which I saw last week. Here is
a case where mere accidental realism, the thing written on the spot,
the “slice of life,” may, for once in a way, do some good. All the
signals, all the flags, all the declaratory externals of Ireland we are
almost certain to mistake. If the Irishman speaks to us, we are sure to
misunderstand him. But if we hear the Irishman talking to himself, it
may begin to dawn on us that he is a man.




Ireland and the Domestic Drama


In a sense so gigantic that it would have staggered the statesman who
once used the phrase, we have called in the new world to redress the
balance of the old. The new world has found new worlds to conquer;
it has new tasks not only drastic but delicate, not only political
but psychological. Among the things which America may yet help us to
achieve is one about which I feel strongly and even painfully--the
reconciliation, a thousand times thwarted but now a thousand times
more necessary, between the English and the Irish. The triangular
table of such a peace conference need not, and perhaps had better not,
be found in any public building. Rather it should be found in every
public house and even in every private house. The change should come
through something which is far nobler and more eternal than diplomacy
or politics; talk. It should come through the only real public opinion,
which is always uttered in private; the public opinion that is a mass
of private opinions. A famous Irishman said of the Irish that they were
too poetical to be poets, but that they were the greatest talkers since
the Greeks. My personal memory does not stretch back to the greatest
period of Greece; and perhaps the best talker I ever knew was an
Irishman, who is now living in America and (I will confidently affirm)
talking in America. It may be true that he is too poetical to be a
poet; anyhow, he is not too poetical to be the father of a poet. He is
Mr. J. B. Yeats, the father of Mr. W. B. Yeats; and he has lately been
persuaded to write and print some of the good things he has said all
his life--first in the form of a book of letters, and later of a book
of essays, _Essays Irish and American_, published by Mr. Fisher Unwin.
But my real satisfaction, in the social and political sense, is to know
not that he has written a little, but that he has spoken much; for out
of such seemingly lost and wasted words come the real international
understandings.

There was a type of detachment during the late war, not to be confused
with what I can only call the view of the vulgar peacemonger. It was
not the patronizing pacifism of the gentleman who took a holiday in
the Alps and said he was “above the struggle”; as if there were any
Alp from which the soul can look down on Calvary. There is, indeed,
one mountain among them that might be very appropriate to so detached
an observer--the mountain named after Pilate, the man who washed his
hands. The isolation I mean is far removed from such impudence. The
defence of this detachment is that it is not really detached; it was
not indifference, but indignation. It was not without foundation; it
was only without proportion. Indeed, the real case against it was
that while its expression was largely cynical, its motive was largely
sentimental. Such was the irritation of Mr. Bernard Shaw; such was the
irritation of many Irishmen much more national than Mr. Bernard Shaw.
Their irritation can be analysed in a simple phrase; it annoyed them
that the men who were wrong should be right. It annoyed them that all
the snobs and sneaks of our corrupt parliamentarianism should free the
world by accident. In the quarrel with Prussia, they could not really
doubt--they did not really doubt--that England was right. But they did
doubt whether England had any right to be right.

It is a view I think self-stultifying and even suicidal. For the
great work will be remembered and the meaner workers forgotten; and
it is madness to praise the Persians on the eve of Marathon because
one has quarrelled with some silly archon at Athens, whose very name
will be lost in a few years. But it is not a treasonable, far less
a treacherous view; and its anger is the same as the popular anger
it arouses. This is the Irish mood which common sense and common
sympathy must deal with; and this is the peculiar value of real Irish
intellectual detachment like that of Mr. Yeats. First of all, a man
like Mr. Yeats is so genuinely detached that he can be definite and
clear in his sympathy with the Allies. He would be capable of the
supreme impartiality of seeing that England could be right although she
had been wrong; and even that Ireland could be wrong although she had
been wronged. But all the time he would play with a perennial fount of
satire and insight on the fundamental spiritual facts that falsify the
English position in Ireland. He would make us feel that we were only
right in one thing because we were so wrong in many things. There are
many examples of this in his little book of essays; but the one I would
emphasize here especially is his very vital point about the domestic
nature of the whole sociology of Ireland. Here again he is all the
more impressive for being in a sense impartial, or even what some would
call indifferent. He is not what is called orthodox; he might well be
called sceptical. He has cultivated rather Continental æsthetics than
Catholic apologetics. It is solely by a serene insight into what his
French teachers would call the _vraie verité_ that he sees the way the
world ought to go; and pauses upon the phrase, “the return to the home.”

Irish education, he declares, must always depend on the fact that the
child’s mind is full of “the drama of the home.” It marks his judicial
emancipation that he contrasts this domestic drama favourably with two
other types of teaching, one of which would be called conventional
and conservative, while the other would be called unconventional and
advanced. He criticizes the old English public-school boy; he also
criticizes (I grieve to state) the new American woman. The two things
called in England the “public school” and the “high school” are counted
almost contraries, merely because one is old and the other new. But
the critic sees them to be essentially the same; because in both cases
the school overshadows the home. Here is a profound practical instance
of the root realities of the Irish national claim. Here is a case in
which Home Rule literally means the rule of the home. It will never be
possible to establish the English fashion in Ireland, and I for one
should not pretend to be sorry if it were possible to spread the Irish
fashion to England.

For the drama of the home is really very dramatic. It is one of those
facts that are confused and hidden by the modern fuss about social
machinery, which is the mere scene-shifting and stage-carpentering
of the domestic drama. The household is the lighted stage, on which
the actors appeal literally to the gods. It is in private life that
things happen. A human being is born at home; he generally dies at
home, and the social philosophy that can deal with nothing but his
coffin carried out of the house is merely a philosophy of boxes and
parcels, a philosophy of luggage and labels. Half our human effort is
now wasted on mere transit, transport, and exchange; the commonwealth
is a clearing-house of cases we never open and presents we never enjoy.
Rulers and reformers are a race of rather pedantic porters, always
carrying an unknown present to an unknown person, not unfrequently (I
fancy) the wrong present to the wrong person. Some of our strenuous
social organizers may be content to spend Christmas at Charing Cross
Station for the pride of controlling the traffic and the luggage. But I
confess I find it more exciting to be at the end of the journey where
the Christmas gifts can be seen.




The Japanese


Is it not time that we western people protested against being
perpetually browbeaten with the high morality of the Orient--especially
of Japan? I remember a curious occasion some years ago when certain
able journalists on a Socialist paper in Fleet Street suddenly burst
into a blazing excitement about King Asoka. Their relations with this
prince could not be called intimate; in point of fact, he died some
thousands of years ago somewhere in the middle of Asia. But it seemed
that in him we had lost our only reliable moral guide. Religion was a
failure, and human life, on the whole, a tragedy; but King Asoka was
all right. He was faultlessly just, infinitely merciful, the mirror of
the virtues, the prop of the poor. Outsiders were naturally interested
in the sources of this revelation. And after some discussion it was
discovered and mildly pointed out that this description of the King’s
virtues is only found on a few of the King’s own official inscriptions.
Old Asoka may have been a very nice man, but we have only his own word
for it that he was so nice as all that. And even in the benighted
West it might not be impossible to find monarchs who were very just
and mighty according to their own proclamations; and courts that
were quite exemplary in the _Court Circular_. It had never struck
these simple Asokites in Fleet Street that the pompous enunciation of
ideals probably meant no more in Bengal than in Birmingham, in the
ancient East than in the modern West. It is as if a Hindoo should
say that under the sublime French monarchy every King had to be a
good Christian; for he was called on coins and parchments “the most
Christian King.” It is as if an Arab said that honour was so high and
sensitive among English M.P.’s that they constantly called each other,
with a burst of admiration, “The Honourable Member for Tooting.” It
could hardly be more absurd if the Japanese declared that an English
Duke must have an elegant figure, for they had seen an allusion to “His
Grace.” And yet it is with just this comic solemnity that we are asked
to accept the moral pretensions of the East to-day, and especially the
moral pretensions of Japan. My eye has just fallen upon two newspaper
paragraphs, each of which exclaimed mournfully what a pity it was
that we had not the high conception of chivalric devotion which the
Japanese call “Bushido,” or some such name. As if we had no chivalrous
principles in Europe! And as if they had no unchivalrous practices
in the Far East! If we see no beauty in Excalibur, are we likely to
take more seriously the two swords of some outlandish Daimio? If we
are truly dumb after the death of Roland, are we likely to shout with
enthusiasm at the sight of a _hara-kiri_?

Here is, perhaps, the queerest case of all. Many of these Orientalists
have lately been filled with horror at finding that Young Turks still
propose to be Turkish, and that advanced Japan is still unaccountably
Japanese. Dr. Parker damned Abdul Hamid. These modern humanitarians
cannot understand any people wishing to get rid of Abdul Hamid without
also wishing to become exactly like Dr. Parker. In the same way they
are horrified that the Japanese Government has very abruptly condemned
some criminals said to be conspiring against the sacred person of the
Mikado. It never seems to occur to them that you can take off a Turk’s
turban without taking off his head; and that, under a Brixton bowler,
the head would go on thinking the same thoughts. It never seems to
strike them that the man of the Far East still has a yellow skin, even
when you have also given him a yellow press. But the most astounding
version of the thing I found in the following paragraph, the opening
paragraph of an article on the Japanese condemnations in an influential
weekly paper:

“Japan has followed Western ways in a great many respects, but it
is saddening to learn that she is adopting the most reprehensible
methods of Russia and Spain in dealing with men and women who have the
intelligence to be ahead of their time and have the courage to avow
their opinions.”

This really strikes me as colossal. I quite agree that Japan has
imitated many Western things; I also think that Japan has mostly
imitated the worst Western things. That is the cause of my very
defective sympathy with Japan. If the Japanese had imitated Dante or
mediæval architecture, if they had imitated Michelangelo or Italian
painting, if they had imitated Rousseau and the French Revolution--then
I, as a European, should have felt at least flattered. But the
Japanese have only imitated the worst things of our worst period:
the inhuman commercialism of Birmingham; the inhuman militarism of
Berlin. I feel as if I had looked in a mirror and seen a monkey. Or,
if this metaphor be counted uncharitable, I feel just as some coarse
but kindly man might feel if a little brother began to imitate only
his vices. I say this to show how easily I embrace the idea that Japan
might borrow from us bad things as well as good; and then I turn with
astonishment--nay, consternation--to the paragraph I have quoted.
Japan (it seems) has borrowed from Russia and Spain the reprehensible
habit of executing people without adequate trial. Trial by jury, with
complete reports in the newspapers next day, was the common practice
all over the Far East until the dreadful example of Spain somehow crept
across two continents and destroyed it. Such a thing as autocratic
execution was unknown in the East. Such a notion as that of despotism
had never occurred to the Japanese. Up to that last lost moment when
they heard of Russia, County Councils had been buzzing in every town,
republics established in every island of the East. Before the European
came, polling-booths were at the end of every street and ballot-boxes
rattled over all Asia. But, alas! they heard of Spain. They heard that
in Spain the trials of rebels in arms had occasionally been conducted
in secret; and this was enough to destroy the long and famous tradition
of free democracy in the Far East.

Now I do think that, compared with this amazing bosh, Gilbert’s
_Mikado_, with his punishment “lingering, with boiling oil in it,”
might be called a good, solid, sensible picture of Japan. Eastern
despotism has many advantages; and I do not doubt that many of its
decisions were not “lingering,” but as rough and rapid as they were
just. But to what mental state have people come if they cannot see that
Europe has been, upon the whole, the home of democracy, and Asia, upon
the whole, the home of despotism? Really, Japan is not so barren of
resource as this writer supposes. The Far East really has no need to
go to Russia for autocracy, or to Spain for torture. It has done very
artistic things in that way itself. And if Spain and Russia have indeed
terrorized and tortured, it is much more historically likely that they
got it from Asia than that Asia ever had the slightest need to borrow
it from them.

The plain facts, of course, are perfectly simple. Japan has borrowed
our guns and telephones, but she has not borrowed our morality; and,
morally speaking, I really do not see why she should. Under all Japan’s
elaborate armour-plating she is still the same strange, heathen,
sinister, and heroic thing: she has still the two deep Oriental habits,
prostration before despotism and ferocity of punishment. She still
thinks, in the Eastern style, that a king is infinitely sublime: the
brother of the sun and moon. She still thinks, in the Eastern style,
that a criminal is infinitely punishable; “something with boiling
oil in it.” Why on earth should Japan abandon the adoration of the
Mikado and the destruction of his enemies, merely because a scientific
apparatus has made the Mikado more victorious and the destruction of
his enemies more easy?




Christian Science


I have read recently, within a short period of each other, two
books that stand in an odd relation, and illustrate the two ways of
dealing with the same truth. The first was Mrs. Eddy’s _Science and
Health_, and the other a very interesting collection of medical and
ecclesiastical opinion called _Medicine and the Church_. It is edited
by Mr. Geoffrey Rhodes, and published by Kegan Paul. Of the first work,
the Christian Science Bible, my recollections are somewhat wild and
whirling. My most vivid impression is of one appalling passage to the
effect that the continued perusal of this book through the crisis of
an illness had always been followed by recovery. The idea of reading
any book “through the crisis of an illness” is rather alarming. But
I incline to agree that anyone who could read _Science and Health_
through the crisis of an illness must be made of an adamant which
no malady could dissolve. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to oppose
Christian Science on the impossibility or even the improbability of
its cures. There is always this tendency for normal men to attack
abnormalities on the wrong ground; their arguments are as wrong as
their antagonism is right. Thus the only sensible argument against
Female Suffrage is that, with her social and domestic powers, woman
is as strong as man. But silly people will attack Female Suffrage on
the ground that she is weaker than man. Or, again, the only sensible
argument against Socialism is that every man ought to have private
property. But the wretched Anti-Socialists will give themselves away by
trying to maintain that only a few people ought to have property, and
even that only in the shape of monstrous American trusts. In the same
way, there is great danger that the modern world may give battle to
Mrs. Eddy upon the wrong _terrain_, and give her the opportunity (or,
rather, her more clear-headed lieutenants) of claiming some popular
success. There is such a thing as spiritual healing. No one has ever
doubted it except one dingy generation of materialists in chimney-pot
hats. If we seem to stand with the materialists, and Mrs. Eddy seems
to stand for the healing, she will have a chance of success. A man
whose toothache has left off will think with gratitude of the healer,
and with some indifference of the scientist explaining the difference
between functional and organic toothaches. I will grant what Mrs. Eddy
does to people’s bodies. It is what she does to their souls that I
object to.

Mrs. Eddy summarizes the substance of her creed in the characteristic
sentence: “But in order to enter into the kingdom, the anchor of Hope
must be cast beyond the veil of matter into the Shekinah into which
Jesus has passed before us.” Now personally I should prefer to sow the
anchor of Hope in the furrows of primeval earth; or to fill the anchor
to the brim with the wine of human passion; or to urge the anchor of
hope to a gallop with the spurs of moral energy; or simply to pluck
the anchor, petal by petal, or spell it out letter by letter. But
whatever slightly entangled metaphor we take to express our meaning,
the essential difference between Mrs. Eddy’s creed and mine is that she
anchors in the air, while I put an anchor where the groping race of
men have generally put it, in the ground. And this very fact, that we
have always thought of hope under so rooted and realistic a figure, is
a good working example of how the popular religious sense of mankind
has always flowed in the opposite direction to Christian Science. It
has flowed from spirit to flesh, and not from flesh to spirit. Hope has
not been thought of as something light and fanciful, but as something
wrought in iron and fixed in rock.

In short, the first and last blunder of Christian Science is that it is
a religion claiming to be purely spiritual. Now, being purely spiritual
is opposed to the very essence of religion. All religions, high and
low, true and false, have always had one enemy, which is the purely
spiritual. Faith-healing has existed from the beginning of the world;
but faith-healing without a material act or sacrament--never. It may
be the ancient priest, curing with holy water, or the modern doctor
curing with coloured water. In either case you cannot do without the
water. It may be the upper religion with its bread and wine, or the
under religion with its eye of newt and toe of frog: in both cases what
is essential is the right materials. Savages may invoke their demons
over the dying, but they do something else as well. To do them justice,
they dance round the dying, or yell, or do something with their bodies.
The Quakers (I mean the really admirable, old-fashioned Quakers) were
far more ritualistic than any Ritualists. The only difference between
a Ritualist curate and a Quaker was that the Quaker wore his queer
vestments all the time. The Peculiar People do without doctors; but
they do not do without oil. They are not so peculiar as all that.

The book which Mr. Geoffrey Rhodes has edited is just what was wanted
for the fixing of these facts of flesh and spirit. When I was a boy,
people used to talk about something which they called the quarrel
between religion and science. It would be very tedious to recount the
quarrel now; the rough upshot of it was something like this: that
some traditions too old to be traced came in vague conflict with some
theories much too new to be tested. Many things three thousand years
old had forgotten their reason for existing; many things a few years
old had not yet discovered theirs. To this day this remains roughly
true of all the relations between science and religion. The truths of
religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved.

It really looks just now as if a reconciliation would be made between
religion and science, a reconciliation well embodied in Mr. Rhodes’s
work. I will not any longer dispute the divine mission of Mrs. Eddy. I
think she was supernaturally sent on earth to reconcile all the parsons
and all the doctors in a healthy hatred of herself. Here _is_ the
reconciliation of science and religion; you will find it in _Medicine
and the Church_. In this interesting book all the clerics become as
medical as they can, and all the doctors become as clerical as they
can, with the one honourable object of keeping out the healer. The
chaplain sits on one side of the bed and the physician on the other,
while the healer hovers around, baffled and furious. And they do well;
for there really is a great link between them. It is the link of the
union of flesh and spirit, which the heresy of the healer blasphemes.
The priest may have taken his spirit with a little flesh, or the doctor
his flesh with a little spirit; but the union was essential to both.
With the religious there might be much prayer and a little oil; with
the scientific there might be much oil (castor oil) and precious little
prayer. But no religion disowned sacraments and no doctors disowned
sympathy. And they are right to combine together against the great and
horrible heresy--the horrible heresy that there can be such a thing as
a purely spiritual religion.




The Lawlessness of Lawyers


Judge Parry is one of the men who have done mountains of good merely by
being alive; while many judges act as if they were already dead, not
to say ... but Judge Parry might misunderstand a misuse of theological
imagery. He is somewhat anti-clerical; which seems a waste of talent
in a country where there is no clericalism. In his last book, _Law and
the Woman_, I find much with which I do not agree, yet nothing which is
not agreeable. Not only does he say everything with a disarming humour
and candour; but even in error he never loses sight of the large fact:
that sex relations do not depend on the exceptional action of law, but
on the normal action of creed and custom. Alone among such lawyers he
understands that the poor live on laughter as on a fairy-tale; and
can be more scientifically studied in the fictions of Jacobs than the
facts of Webb. I might pursue the view further than he on some points;
as when he would infer the mere enslavement of women from some stories
about the selling of wives. He is doubtless correct in detail; but the
rhyme he gives to prove his point may almost be said to disprove it.
He quotes a jolly ballad about a man who tried to sell his wife with a
halter round her neck and, failing to do so, tried to hang himself in
the halter rather than go on living with her. Obviously this is simply
the fable of the grey mare; and does not mean that the man ruled his
wife, but rather that she ruled him. I do not agree about divorce; but
I am not going to argue about it here, or about any such problem of the
sexes. This is partly because I should have to begin about the nature
of a vow, and it feels like talking to a judge about the nature of an
oath, and might almost be contempt of court. But it is more, I hope,
for the manlier reason that I do want to argue about something else.

I think this delightful book might really mislead by a view of progress
which over-simplifies history: the view that “the thoughts of men are
widened by the process of the suns”--a monotonous process which cannot
even widen itself. He begins his story of the subjection of women from
the Bible story of Adam and Eve. He then proceeds at once to quote,
not the Bible, but John Milton, and says it is almost exactly in the
form “in which mediæval man was wont to explain to mediæval woman
the kind of thing she really was.” Now whatever Milton was, he was
not mediæval. He was, in his own opinion and in real though relative
truth, highly modern and rationalistic. And he would have regarded
his somewhat contemptuous view of woman as part of his emancipation
from mediævalism. Probably the very same attitude made him approve of
divorce; and makes the difference between woman’s place in his epic
and her place in Dante’s. On either side of that Gothic gateway of
the Middle Ages out of which he had emerged (as he would have said)
into the daylight, there had stood two symbolic statues of women, at
least of equal importance in the scheme. One represented the weak woman
by whom Satan had entered the world; the other the strong woman by
whom God had entered the world. Milton and his Puritans deliberately
battered and obliterated the image of the good woman and carefully
preserved the bad woman, to be a standing reproach to womanhood. But
they unquestionably thought their anti-feminist iconoclasm was a great
step in progress; and the fact illustrates what an uncommonly crooked
and even backward path the path called progress has really been. Nor
is it difficult to discover, even in the writer’s own account, whence
this anti-feminism iconoclasm drew its force; which was certainly not
merely from the Book of Genesis. Judge Parry says, perhaps disputably,
that the rude Saxons had more legal regard for women than the Romans.
But assuming for the sake of argument that the heathen Romans did give
a low status to woman, they clearly cannot have got it either from the
Hebrew Scriptures or the mediæval Church. If he will ask where they did
get it, he will probably also find where Milton got it. The truth is
that there was an element of intellectual brutality in the Renaissance
and revival of the pagan world. The very worship of power and reason
embodied itself in a preference for the sex that was supposed superior
in them. New tyrannies as well as new liberties were encouraged by the
New Learning; and Cervantes was laughing at the unreal adventurer who
fancied he was unchaining captives, at the very time when Hawkins, the
real adventurer, was first leading negroes in chains.

Those chains may be linked up again presently in the chain of my own
argument: here I use the matter merely to show the danger of trusting
each ethical fashion as it comes. There is one matter on which I would
respectfully and seriously differ from Judge Parry; and that does
not concern laws about women, but rather law itself. In praising the
judgment in the Jackson Case, despite its technical irregularity, he
speaks of a fine example of our judge-made law, and says: “But that
is one of the sane and healthy attributes of our judicial system.
There comes a breaking-point where a great judge recognizes that the
precedents in the books are obsolete, and what has to be stated is the
justice of the case according to the now existing standard of human
righteousness.” Now it is surely as plain as a pikestaff that this
doctrine makes a small number of very wealthy old gentlemen in wigs
absolute despots over the whole commonwealth. The Emperor of China was
supposed to state the justice of the case. The Sultan of the Indies was
supposed to judge by the existing standard of human righteousness. If
the judges are not restrained by the law, what are they restrained by,
which every autocrat on earth has not claimed to be restrained by?

Now there is certainly a case for personal and arbitrary government;
and as there are good sultans, so there are good judges. I should not
be afraid to appear before Judge Parry (if I may presume to imagine
myself innocent) though he were surrounded with janissaries in a secret
divan, or delivering dooms under an oak tree in a wild, prehistoric
forest. I should not mind his having the power to skin me or boil
me in oil; for I feel sure he would “recognize that these precedents
were obsolete” and not do it. But it is by no means true that the
confidence I should feel in Judge Parry would be extended to any judge
who talked about obsolete precedents and human righteousness. Quite
the contrary, if anything. I trust him because he often takes the side
of the under-dog. I should not trust a man who always took the side of
the opinion which happened to be top-dog. He understood, for instance,
the case for “Pro-Boers”; but in the mafficking time a dozen great
judges would have strained any law to make a case against Pro-Boers.
Feminism was the fashion and may have produced some acts of justice;
but Imperialism was also the fashion and might have produced any acts
of any injustice. There is, let us suppose, an old statute that certain
prisoners may be tortured for evidence; but the judges disregard it,
and Judge Parry is satisfied. But there are three very vital reasons
why he should not be satisfied. First, it encourages legislators to
be lazy and leave a bad statute they ought to repeal. Second, they
leave it so that it can be resharpened in some reaction or panic
against particular people, who _will_ be tortured. And third, and most
important of all, the same judge who has said that prisoners must not
be tortured for evidence may say some fine morning that prisoners may
be vivisected for scientific inquiry; and he may have the same reason
for saying the one as the other, the simple reason that such talk is
fashionable in his set. And the set is very small and very rich; we
are dealing strictly with fashion and not even, in any large sense,
with public opinion. The standards of that world are often special
and sometimes rather secretive. Judge Parry even quotes a “paradox” of
Lord Reading to the effect that persons like himself should administer
justice and not law. Law is narrow and national, and might possibly
lead a British Minister to look no further than the British Parliament
as an appropriate place for telling the truth. But justice, being
international and surveying the world from China to Peru, perceives
without difficulty the office of the one particular Parisian newspaper
which has the right to insist on an explanation.

But the vital point is this. Judge Parry gives the instance of a
judgment in which Mansfield, overriding certain remote precedents and
quaint survivals, declared that there cannot be slaves in England.
I am sorry to mention such a detail, but the fact is that the same
judge made law is now declaring in the same way that there _can_ be
slaves in England. A magistrate has forbidden men to leave an employer,
though the contract had admittedly terminated. Practical courts are
overriding the obsolete and remote precedent of some man, far in the
mists of mediævalism, who is said to have made a free contract with a
wealthier fellow-creature. They are disregarding the quaint survivals
in our language, whereby the hand holding the tool is described as
“his” hand. Our more vivid modern speech calls the man himself a hand;
merely one of the many hands of his Briarean master. “There comes a
breaking-point”; and it is liberty that is broken.

Whether the silent millions approve this judgment, or the other
judgments, liberal or servile, feminist or anti-feminist, which Judge
Parry quotes, I will not debate, but I leave the query to his very
fair consideration. For if those silent millions spoke, I fancy they
would surprise us in many matters, but most of all in the discovery of
how little they think of all of us, judges, lawyers, literary fellows,
and the rest. But I am very certain that Judge Parry would be found
among the few, among the very few, who amid all the insolence of our
inconsistencies have never lost that rare and even awful thing, the
respect of the poor.




Our Latin Relations


It is odd how often one may hear, in the middle of a very old and
genuine English town, the remark, that it looks like a foreign town. I
heard it only yesterday, standing on the ramparts of the noble hill of
Rye, which overlooks the flats like a Mount of St. Michael left inland.
Most people know that Rye contains a mediæval monument which might
almost be called a mediæval prophecy--a prophecy of modern things more
awful than anything mediæval. It is an ancient tower, which has not
only always been marked on maps with the name of Ypres, but has always
been actually pronounced by the name of Wipers. Nothing could mark
a thing as more continuously national than that Englishmen sundered
by vast centuries should actually make the same mistake and should
mispronounce the same word in the same way.

There is in this small point a paradox we must understand, especially
just now, if we are to have a really patriotic foreign policy. It
is very unlucky that for some time our teaching of history has been
rather the unteaching of history, because it has been the unteaching of
tradition. Our histories told us we were Teuton; our legends told us we
were Roman--and, as usual, the legends were right. It is not only true
that England is nowhere more really English than where she is Roman--it
is even true that she is nowhere more really English than where she
is French. To take only the chance example, with which I began above,
you could find nothing more national, more typical, more traditional,
as a real piece of English history, than the very phrase “The Cinq
Ports.” And it is all the more English because the word “cinq” is
French and the word “port” is Latin. A Teutonist professor, full of
some folly about “folk-speech,” might insist on our calling them “The
Five Harbours,” or (for all I know) “The Five Holes.” But his version
would be less popular, and only more pedantic. The Latin was always the
popular element, which may not sound so odd if we happen to remember
that the very word “popular” is Latin.

Thus our alliance with the French and the Italians is not something
to be supported for the sake of the last five years. It is something
to be solidified for the sake of more than a thousand. The fact has
been hidden by the historical accident that we have often been the
antagonists of the French in particular rivalries for particular
things. But we were always much nearer to the French when we were their
antagonists than to the Germans when we were their Allies. There was
much more resemblance between a knight like the Black Prince and a
knight like Bertrand du Guesclin than there ever was between a sailor
like Nelson and a soldier like Blücher. A town like Rye is full of
memories of fighting with the French, especially in the Middle Ages;
of raids to and fro across the narrow seas, in which the bells of
the coast-town churches were captured and recaptured; and there are
spirited stories about the Abbot of Battle, worthy to be turned into
ballads. But the very fact of these coast-town raids suggests that it
was coast against coast, and even seaman against seaman. But the whole
point of Prussian war was that it was an inland thing; the whole point
of English war that it was an island thing. The alliance with Prussia
was never either popular or natural; it was wholly aristocratic and
artificial. Compared with that, the mediæval war was as friendly as a
mediæval tournament. Nor was it peculiar to the case of France; it was
true of all we call Latin--all that remains of the Roman Empire. The
Latins, even when treated as foes in politics, were treated almost as
friends in popular tradition. The English sailors sang in their idle
moments “Farewell and adieu to you, fine Spanish ladies,” even when
they had devoted their working hours to singeing the beards of the fine
Spanish gentlemen. The children in the nurseries sang in imaginative
triumph “The King of Spain’s daughter came to visit me,” though their
Elizabethan parents might have been lighting the beacons and calling
out the train-bands to prevent the King of Spain’s son, the noble Don
John of Austria, from paying them such a visit. A thousand nursery
rhymes and nonsense tags testify to a vast popular tradition that
Southern Europe was the world to which we belonged. We belonged to a
system of which Rome was the sun, and of which the old Roman provinces
were planets. We were never meant to pursue a meteor out of empty
space, the comet of Teutonism. Our place was in an order and a watch
of stars, though one star might differ from another in glory. Our place
was with that red star of Gaul which might well bear the name of Mars;
or that morning and evening star which the Latins themselves named
Lucifer, last to fade and first to return in every twilight of history;
Italy, the light of the world.

A Latin alliance is founded on our history, though not on our
historians. The French and English who fought each other round these
southern harbours were also ready to help each other, and often did
help each other. Not only did they frequently go crusading together
against the Turks, but they would have been ready at any moment to
go crusading against the Prussians. Chaucer was exceedingly English,
and therefore partly French; and he sends his ideal knight to fight
the heathen in Prussia. Froissart was highly French, and therefore
respectful to the English; and he says that the French and English
always do courtesy, but the Germans never. The truth is that all the
old English traditions, scholarly and legendary, chivalric and vulgar,
were at one in referring back to Roman culture, until we come to a new
crop of very crude pedants in the nineteenth century.

Most of them were prigs, and many of them were snobs--for it was
largely a Court fashion, spread by Court poets and Court chaplains. It
was like a huge, hideous, gilded German monument; and, fortunately,
it has already fallen down. But I think it undesirable that the mere
discredited litter and lumber of it, left lying about, should for ever
prevent us from building anything else.

Even after the ghastly enlightenment of the war there are people
who cannot clear their minds of the notion that the Prussian is the
Progressive. They think he is progressing now, because he is picking
up new things. Picking up new things is not the way to progress, any
more than picking up grass by the roots is the way to make it grow.
The northern barbarian always has picked up new things, especially
when they were other people’s things. It was still only picking up new
things, whether it was picking pockets or picking brains. And there was
always one other note about the new things--that they never lived to be
old. The barbarians followed the creed of Arius as they followed the
ensign of Attila. But nobody remembers Attila as everybody remembered
Alfred; and, though some modern people object to hearing the Athanasian
Creed, they have no opportunity of objecting to hearing the Arian
Creed. The enthusiasms of semi-savages do not last.




On Pigs as Pets


A dream of my pure and aspiring boyhood has been realized in the
following paragraph, which I quote exactly as it stands:

 A complaint by the Epping Rural District Council against a spinster
 keeping a pig in her house has evoked the following reply: “I received
 your letter, and felt very much cut up, as I am laying in the pig’s
 room. I have not been able to stand up or get on my legs; when I can,
 I will get him in his own room, that was built for him. As to getting
 him off the premises, I shall do no such thing, as he is no nuisance
 to anyone. We have had to be in the pig’s room now for three years. I
 am not going to get rid of my pet. We must all live together. I will
 move him as soon as God gives me strength to do so.”

The Rev. T. C. Spurgin observed: “The lady will require a good deal of
strength to move her pet, which weighs forty stone.”

It appears to me that the Rev. T. C. Spurgin ought, as a matter of
chivalry, to assist the lady to move the pig, if it is indeed too
heavy for her strength; no gentleman should permit a lady, who is
already very much cut up, to lift forty stone of still animated and
recalcitrant pork; he should himself escort the animal downstairs. It
is an unusual situation, I admit. In the normal life of humanity the
gentleman gives his arm to the lady, and not to the pig; and it is the
pig who is very much cut up. But the situation seems to be exceptional
in every way. It is all very well for the lady to say that the pig is
no nuisance to anyone: as it seems that she has established herself in
the pig’s private suite of apartments, the question rather is whether
she is a nuisance to the pig. But indeed I do not think that this poor
woman’s fad is an inch more fantastic than many such oddities indulged
in by rich and reputable people; and, as I say, I have from my boyhood
entertained the dream. I never could imagine why pigs should not be
kept as pets. To begin with, pigs are very beautiful animals. Those
who think otherwise are those who do not look at anything with their
own eyes, but only through other people’s eyeglasses. The actual lines
of a pig (I mean of a really fat pig) are among the loveliest and most
luxuriant in nature; the pig has the same great curves, swift and yet
heavy, which we see in rushing water or in rolling cloud. Compared to
him, the horse, for instance, is a bony, angular, and abrupt animal.
I remember that Mr. H. G. Wells, in arguing for the relativity of
things (a subject over which even the Greek philosophers went to sleep
until Christianity woke them up), pointed out that, while a horse is
commonly beautiful if seen in profile, he is excessively ugly if seen
from the top of a dogcart, having a long, lean neck, and a body like a
fiddle. Now, there is no point of view from which a really corpulent
pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves. You can look down
on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dogcart; you can
(if not pressed for time) allow the pig to draw the dogcart; and I
suppose a dogcart has as much to do with pigs as it has with dogs. You
can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the
Monument, from a balloon, or an airship; and as long as he is visible
he will be beautiful. In short, he has that fuller, subtler, and more
universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking (gazing at pigs
and distinguished journalists) mistake for a mere absence of shape.
For fatness itself is a valuable quality. While it creates admiration
in the onlookers, it creates modesty in the possessor. If there is
anything on which I differ from the monastic institutions of the past,
it is that they sometimes sought to achieve humility by means of
emaciation. It may be that the thin monks were holy, but I am sure it
was the fat monks who were humble. Falstaff said that to be fat is not
to be hated; but it certainly is to be laughed at, and that is a more
wholesome experience for the soul of man.

I do not urge that it is effective upon the soul of a pig, who, indeed,
seems somewhat indifferent to public opinion on this point. Nor do I
mean that mere fatness is the only beauty of the pig. The beauty of the
best pigs lies in a certain sleepy perfection of contour which links
them especially to the smooth strength of our south English land in
which they live. There are two other things in which one can see this
perfect and piggish quality: one is in the silent and smooth swell of
the Sussex downs, so enormous and yet so innocent. The other is in the
sleek, strong limbs of those beech trees that grow so thick in their
valleys. These three holy symbols, the pig, the beech tree, and the
chalk down, stand for ever as expressing the one thing that England
as England has to say--that power is not inconsistent with kindness.
Tears of regret come into my eyes when I remember that three lions
or leopards, or whatever they are, sprawl in a fantastic, foreign
way across the arms of England. We ought to have three pigs passant,
gardant, or on gules. It breaks my heart to think that four commonplace
lions are couched around the base of the Nelson Column. There ought to
be four colossal Hampshire hogs to keep watch over so national a spot.
Perhaps some of our sculptors will attack the conception; perhaps the
lady’s pig, which weighs forty stone and seems to be something of a
domestic problem, might begin to earn its living as an artist’s model.

Again, we do not know what fascinating variations might happen in the
pig if once the pig were a pet. The dog has been domesticated--that
is, destroyed. Nobody now in London can form the faintest idea of what
a dog would look like. You know a Dachshund in the street; you know
a St. Bernard in the street. But if you saw a Dog in the street you
would run from him screaming. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years
no one has looked at the horrible hairy original thing called Dog.
Why, then, should we be hopeless about the substantial and satisfying
thing called Pig? Types of Pig may also be differentiated; delicate
shades of Pig may also be produced. A monstrous pig as big as a pony
may perambulate the streets like a St. Bernard without attracting
attention. An elegant and unnaturally attenuated pig may have all the
appearance of a greyhound. There may be little, frisky, fighting pigs
like Irish or Scotch terriers; there may be little pathetic pigs like
King Charles spaniels. Artificial breeding might reproduce the awful
original pig, tusks and all, the terror of the forests--something
bigger, more mysterious, and more bloody than the bloodhound. Those
interested in hairdressing might amuse themselves by arranging the
bristles like those of a poodle. Those fascinated by the Celtic mystery
of the Western Highlands might see if they could train the bristles to
be a veil or curtain for the eye, like those of a Skye terrier; that
sensitive and invisible Celtic spirit. With elaborate training one
might have a sheep-pig instead of a sheep-dog, a lap-pig instead of a
lap-dog.

What is it that makes you look so incredulous? Why do you still feel
slightly superior to the poor lady who would not be parted from her
pig? Why do you not at once take the hog to your heart? Reason suggests
his evident beauty. Evolution suggests his probable improvement. Is it,
perhaps, some instinct, some tradition ...? Well, apply that to women,
children, animals, and we will argue again.




The Romance of Rostand


Rostand, the romantic dramatist of France, and a very national poet,
died almost on the day of the great national triumph. He had lived,
to use his own imaginative heraldry, to see the golden eagles of Gaul
and Rome drive back the black eagles of Prussia and Austria. He was
too much of an earlier generation to take the precise part of Pequy or
Claudel in the process which banished the birds of barbaric night from
the land of the Eagles of the sun. But the part he had played in that
earlier time might well merit the use of a kindred metaphor, drawn from
his own fairyland of ornithology. He had a special claim to use as one
of his titles the noble mediæval name of Chantecler. He might well be
called the Gallic cock in that earlier twilight of vultures and bats.
The end of the nineteenth century was a time of pessimism for Europe,
and especially of pessimism for France; for pessimism was the shadow of
Prussianism. Rostand was really a cock that crowed before the coming of
sunrise. When it came it was red as blood; but the sun rose.

But that mediæval nickname of the cock contains a still more
appropriate criticism. The word “clear” is always a clue to Rostand’s
country, and to Rostand’s work. He suffered in the decadent days, he
suffers to some extent still, from a strange blunder which supposes
that what is clear must be shallow. It is chiefly founded on false
figures of speech; and is akin to the mysteriously meaningless saying
that still waters run deep. It is repeated without the least reference
to the evident fact that the stillest of all waters do not run at all.
They lie about in puddles, which are none the less shallow because
they are covered with scum. Such were the North German philosophies
fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century; men believed in the
puddle’s profundity solely because of its opacity. When the decadent
critics sneered at Rostand’s popularity, they were simply sneering at
his lucidity. They were protesting against his power of conveying what
he meant in the most direct and telling fashion. They were complaining
bitterly because he did not think with a German accent, which is nearly
the same thing as an impediment in the speech. The wit with which
all his dialogues blazed was also a positive disadvantage in that
muddle-headed modern world, which even now will only begin to realize
gradually the greatness of France. Nothing has been so senselessly
underrated as wit, even when it seems to be the mere wit of words. It
is dismissed as merely verbal; but, in fact, it is more solemn writing
that is merely verbal, or rather merely verbose. A joke is always a
thought; it is grave and formal writing that can be quite literally
thoughtless. This applies to jokes when they are not only quite verbal
but quite vulgar. A good pun, or even a bad pun, is more intellectual
than mere polysyllables. The man, the presumably prehistoric man, who
invented the phrase, “When is a door not a door; when it’s ajar,” made
a serious and successful mental effort of selection and combination.
But a Prussian professor might begin on the same problem, “When is
a door not a door; when its doorishness is a becoming rather than a
being, and when the relativity of doorishness is co-ordinated with the
evolution of doors from windows and skylights, of which approximation
to new function, etc. etc.”--and the Prussian professor might go on
like that for ever, and never come to the end because he would never
come to the point. A pun or a riddle can never be in that sense a
fraud. Real wisdom may be better than real wit, but there is much more
sham wisdom than there is sham wit.

This is the immediate point about Rostand, who had very real wit,
but wit of a very poetic and sometimes epic order. It is very
characteristic of him, and very puzzling to his critics, that he was
witty even in repudiating wit. In the scene of _Cyrano de Bergerac_,
in which the hero pleads in his friend’s name against the preciosity
of the heroine, he quite naturally uses the phrase touching the
evaporation of truth in artificial terminology, “Et que le fin du
fin ne soit la fin des fins.” That involves a pun and also involves
a point; and it is a subject on which it would be quite easy to be
earnest and pointless. A philosopher need never come to an end in
talking about ends; precisely because he is not required to amuse
anybody, he is not really required to mean anything. Every page,
every paragraph, almost every line of Rostand’s plays bristles with
these points, which are both verbal and vital. If any critic thinks
it was easy to produce them by the hundred, there is an exceedingly
easy test; let him try to produce one. In attempting to joke in this
fashion, he will probably find himself thinking for the first time.
For that matter, merely to make one of the better puns of _Punch_ or
_Hood’s Annual_ would be enough to stump most of the sceptics who have
been taught in the Teutonic schools to think a thing creative because
it is chaotic, and vast because it is vague. A modern “thinker” will
find it easier to make up a hundred problems than to make up one
riddle. For in the case of the riddle he has to make up the answer.

The drama of Rostand was full of answers, if they seem to the
superficial merely to be ringing repartees. In the ballade of the duel
the hero says that the sword-thrust shall come at the end of the envoi,
but something like it seems to come continually at the end of the line.
But these retorts are really much more than superficial, because they
have the ring of dogma, of affirmation and certainty, and therefore of
triumph. The wit is heroic wit; and his sub-title was strictly correct
when he called _Cyrano_ a heroic comedy. It was written in a literary
period which was far too pessimistic to rise even to heroic Tragedy.
It will grow in value in a more virile time, when the air has been
cleared by a great crusade. Rostand’s poetry will certainly remain.
It may not remain among the very greatest poetry, for the very reason
that he fulfilled the office rather of the trumpet than the lyre. But
he himself may well have shared the spirited taste of his own hero, and
have preferred that something even more noble than the laurel should
remain as a feather in his cap.




Wishes


Most of us, I suppose, have amused ourselves with the old and flippant
fancy of what poets or orators would feel like if their wild wishes
came true. The poet would be not a little surprised if the (somewhat
inadequate) wings of a dove suddenly sprouted from his shoulder-blades.
And I suspect that even the baby who cries for the moon would be rather
frightened if it fell out of the sky, crushing forests and cities like
a colossal snowball, shutting out the stars and darkening the earth
it had illuminated. Shelley was magnificently moved when he wished to
be a cloud driven before the wild West Wind: but even Shelley would
have been not a little disconcerted if he had found himself turning
head-over-heels in mid-air the instant he had written the line. He
would even be somewhat relieved, I fancy, to fall upon the thorns of
life and bleed a little more. When Keats, the human nightingale, lay
listening to the feathered one, he expressed a strong desire for a long
drink of red wine. In this I believe him to have accurately analysed
his own sentiments. But when he proceeds to explain that he is strongly
inclined at that moment to wish himself dead, I entertain strong doubts
as to whether he is equally exact, and am by no means certain that he
would really like “to cease upon the midnight” even “with no pain.”
Such sceptical fantasies, I say, have occurred to most of us; they do
not spoil fine poetry for those who really like it; they only salt
it with humour and human fellowship. Things seriously beautiful are,
perhaps, the only things that we can jest about with complete spiritual
safety. One cannot insult the poem except by being afraid of the parody.

But I think there is another and more curious cause for this common
human fancy of a wild wish which is disappointed by being fulfilled.
The idea is very common, of course, in popular tradition: in the tale
of King Midas; in the tale of the Black Pudding; in the tale of the
Goloshes of Fortune. My own personal feeling about it, I think, is that
a world in which all one’s wishes were fulfilled would, quite apart
from disappointments, be an unpleasant world to live in. The world
would be too like a dream, and the dream too like a nightmare. The Ego
would be too big for the Cosmos; it would be a bore to be so important
as that. I believe a great part of such poetic pleasure as I have
comes from a certain disdainful indifference in actual things. Demeter
withered up the cornfields: I like the cornfields because they grow in
spite of me. At least, I can lay my hand on my heart and say that no
cornfield ever grew with my assistance. Ajax defied the lightning; but
I like the lightning because it defies me. I enjoy stars and the sun
or trees and the sea, because they exist in spite of me; and I believe
the sentiment to be at the root of all that real kind of romance
which makes life not a delusion of the night, but an adventure of the
morning. It is, indeed, in the clash of circumstances that men are
most alive. When we break a lance with an opponent the whole romance is
in the fact that the lance does break. It breaks because it is real: it
does not vanish like an elfin spear. And even when there is an element
of the marvellous or impossible in true poetry, there is always also
this element of resistance, of actuality and shock. The most really
poetical impossibility is an irresistible force colliding with an
immovable post. When that happens it will be the end of the world.

It is true, of course, that marvels, even marvels of transformation,
illustrate the noblest histories and traditions. But we should notice
a rather curious difference which the instinct of popular legend has
in almost all cases kept. The wonder-working done by good people,
saints and friends of man, is almost always represented in the form
of restoring things or people to their proper shapes. St. Nicholas,
the Patron Saint of Children, finds a boiling pot in which two
children have been reduced to a sort of Irish stew. He restores them
miraculously to life; because they ought to be children and ought not
to be Irish stew. But he does not turn them into angels; and I can
remember no case in hagiology of such an official promotion. If a woman
were blind, the good wonder-workers would give her back her eyes; if
a man were halt, they would give him back his leg. But they did not,
I think, say to the man: “You are so good that you really ought to be
a woman”; or to the woman: “You are so bothered it is time you had
a holiday as a man.” I do not say there are no exceptions; but this
is the general tone of the tales about good magic. But, on the other
hand, the popular tales about bad magic are specially full of the idea
that evil alters and destroys the personality. The black witch turns a
child into a cat or a dog; the bad magician keeps the Prince captive
in the form of a parrot, or the Princess in the form of a hind; in
the gardens of the evil spirits human beings are frozen into statues
or tied to the earth as trees. In all such instinctive literature the
denial of identity is the very signature of Satan. In that sense it is
true that the true God is the God of things as they are--or, at least,
as they were meant to be. And I think that something of this healthy
fear of losing self through the supernatural is behind the widespread
sentiment of the Three Wishes; the sentiment which says, in the words
of Thackeray:

    Fairy roses, fairy rings
    Turn out sometimes troublesome things.

Now the transition may seem queer; but this power of seeing that a tree
is _there_, in spite of you and me, that it holds of God and its own
treeishness, is of great importance just now in practical politics. We
are in sharp collision with a large number of things, some of which are
real facts and all of which are real faiths. We must see these things
objectively, as we do a tree; and understand that they exist whether
we like them or not. We must not try and turn them into something
different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches.
I happen to think, for instance, that it is silly of Orangemen to think
they would be persecuted under Home Rule. But I think it is sillier to
think that the Orangemen do not think so. It is sillier not to see
that a man can fire off a gun for a prejudice as well as he can for
an ideal. I disagree with the Orangemen; I don’t disagree with the
Nationalists; but I deny neither. I sympathize with the Labour revolt;
I don’t sympathize with the Feminist revolt; but I deny neither.
Then, again, both these latter tendencies have succeeded in colliding
violently with another reality, the priests of the ancient popular
creed of Ireland. They achieved that catastrophe, not because they did
not believe the creed, but because they could not even believe that it
was believed.

Now you can, if you choose, pass your life in a wizard dream, in which
all your enemies are turned into something else. You can insist that a
priest is only a parrot, or a Suffragette always a wandering hind: but
if you do, you will sooner or later get into your head what is meant by
an immovable post.




The Futurists


There are still people talking about Futurism, though I should have
thought it was now a thing of the past, exploded by its own silly
gunpowder train of progressive theory. If a man only believed the world
was round because his grandmother said it was flat, another man had
only to say it was spiral in order to be a more advanced idiot than
either of them. But, after all, the world is one shape and not another
(I don’t care which myself, but certainly one), and will be when we
all die, and would have been if no worm or weed had ever lived. And it
amuses me to notice that the very Agnostics who still quote Galileo’s
phrase about the earth, “And yet it moves!” are the very people who
talk as if truth could be different from age to age--as if the whole
world was a different shape when you or I were in a different frame of
mind. Progressives of this kind _cannot_ say “And yet it moves” save
in the sense that their own foot can roll it about like a football, or
that their own finger can stop it as Joshua’s stopped the moon. They
may control Nature like witches; but they cannot appeal to Nature like
Galileo. They have no abiding objective fact to which to appeal. On
the mere progressive theory there is no more immortality about the
astronomy of Galileo than the medicine of Galen.

But one or two interesting ideas can be found in Futurist speculations,
essays, lectures, books, etc.--indeed, the Futurists can be interesting
everywhere but in their pictures. And this is the difficulty of all
such movements--the lack of the final fulfilment. I will not put it
offensively, as by saying that they write a beautiful prospectus,
but there are no funds. I do not mean it like that. I will put it
poetically by saying that there are beautiful leaves and flowers,
but there is no fruit. There are leaves of learning enough to fill a
library; there are flowers of rhetoric enough to last a session. They
are all about a picture: and there is no picture. Thus Mr. Nevinson,
the eminent English Futurist, has explained that pictorial art should
be as independent of natural facts as music is: it should not imitate,
but utter. Of music, of course, the remark is true, and fairly
familiar. Certainly three notes on a piano can bring tears to the eyes
by reminding us of a dead friend: though certainly the first noise
is not the noise he made when whistling to his dog, nor the second
the noise he made when kicking his boots off, nor the third the noise
he made when blowing his nose. Perhaps the three notes are noises he
could never have made: perhaps he was unmusical, like many magnificent
people--I am unmusical myself. Perhaps, I say, he was unmusical: yet
music can express him. This is an interesting fact; but it is only one
fact, and the examination of a few others would have shown Mr. Nevinson
the shallowness of his artistic philosophy.

But Mr. Nevinson and the Futurists, having never seen a fact before in
their lives, clutch hold of this one and rush after the car of progress
like poor baby-laden charwomen after a motor-bus. Their deduction is
this: As his favourite song recalls the friend, though it contains none
of his grunts, snorts, or sneezes, so his portrait would better recall
his appearance if it contained no trace of his eyes, nose, mouth,
hair (if any), masculine sex, anthropoid or erect posture, or any
other oddity by which his friends were in the habit of distinguishing
him from a lamp-post or a large whale, or from the works of Creation
in general. Mr. Nevinson says that the most pungent and passionate
emotions (such, presumably, as we have about friendship and even about
love) can be conveyed by planes, mathematical proportions, arbitrary or
abstract colours, arrangements of line, and all the things we most of
us instinctively associate with carpets, if not with oilcloth. “It is
possible,” he says. It is. It is not a contradiction in terms. But if I
say, “It is possible by arranging a tomato, ten pearl buttons, a copy
of the second and last number of a Tariff Reform weekly, one wooden
leg, three odd boots, and a bag with a hole in it, to induce your worst
enemy to burst into tears and give you a million pounds in conscience
money,” then, if you are a Monist and a fool, you will answer that it
could not happen. But if you are an Agnostic and a Christian, you will
answer that you tried it on with your worst creditor, and it didn’t
work with him. Nor would the planes, angles, abstract colours work with
him. They don’t work with you; they don’t work with me; they don’t work
with anybody. And the reason simply is that these philosophers, like
so many modern philosophers, do not possess the patience to see what
they are taking for granted. Have you ever seen a fellow fail at the
high jump because he had not gone far enough back for his run? That is
Modern Thought. It is so confident of where it is going to that it does
not know where it comes from.

The quite simple fallacy is this. The only thing we know about the
things we call the Arts is that when they are good they all stir the
soul in a somewhat similar way. Their roots in savagery or civilization
are so different and so dark, their relations to utility or practical
life are so prodigiously contrasted, the mere time or space they occupy
is so unequal in every case, the psychological explanations of their
very existence are so inconsistent and anarchic, that we simply do not
know whether in one single point we can argue from one art to another.
We do not know enough about it, and there is an end of the matter. For
instance, many have compared classic poetry with classic architecture;
and anyone who has ever felt the virginity and dignity of either will
know what such a comparison means. Milton spoke of “building” a line
of poetry; and nobody seems able to talk about sonnets without talking
about marble. But in technical fact the analogy is only a fancy,
after all. Treat it for one moment as Mr. Nevinson treats the analogy
between music and painting, and it is pure, preposterous nonsense--like
Futurism.

Who will deny that height, or the appearance of height, is one of the
effects of architecture? Who has not read or said or felt that some
wall seemed too enormous for any mortals to have made, that some domes
seemed to occupy heaven, or that some spire seemed to strike him out
of the sky? But who, on the other hand, ever said that his sonnet was
printed higher up on the page than somebody else’s sonnet? Who ever
either praised or disliked a piece of verse according to its vertical
longitude? Who ever said, “My sonnet occupied five volumes of the
_Times_, but you _should_ see it pasted all in one piece”? Who ever
said, “I have written the tallest triolet on earth”?

Mr. Nevinson will bring a tear to my eye by exhibiting a pattern
and calling it a picture on the same day when he induces me to read
two hundred leading articles in the _Times_ simply by calling them
a tower. They have many of the qualities of a tower: they are long;
they are symmetrical; they are all built out of the same old bricks;
they sometimes stand upright, like the Tower of Giotto; they more
often lean very much, like the Tower of Pisa; they most frequently
fall down altogether, and fall on the wrong people, like the Tower
of Siloam. One could pursue such abstract fancies for ever, but the
simple fact remains--and it is a fact of the senses. The thing is not
a tower, because it does not tower. And the Futurist picture is not a
picture, because it does not depict. Why one art can do without shapes,
and another without words, and another without movement, and another
without massiveness, and why each of these is necessary to one or other
of them separately--all this we shall know when we know what art means.
And I cannot say that the Futurists have helped us much in finding out.




The Evolution of Emma


Among the many good critical tributes to the genius of Jane Austen, to
the fine distinction of her humour, the sympathetic intimacy of her
satire, the easy exactitude of her unpretentious style, which have
appeared in celebration of her centenary, there is one criticism that
is naturally recurrent: the remark that she was quite untouched by the
towering politics of her time. This is intrinsically true; nevertheless
it may easily be used to imply the reverse of the truth. It is true
that Jane Austen did not attempt to teach any history or politics;
but it is not true that we cannot learn any history or politics from
Jane Austen. Any work so piercingly intelligent of its own kind, and
especially any work of so wise and humane a kind, is sure to tell us
much more than shallower studies covering a larger surface. I will
not say much of the mere formality of some of the conventions and
conversational forms; for in such things it is not only not certain
that change is important, but it is not even certain that it is final.
The view that a thing is old-fashioned is itself a fashion; and may
soon be an old fashion. We have seen this in many recurrences of female
dress; but it has a deeper basis in human nature. The truth is that
a phrase can be falsified by use without being false in fact; it can
seem stale without being really stilted. Those who see a word as
merely worn out, fail to look forward as well as back. I know of two
poems by two Irish poets of two different centuries, essentially on
the same theme; the lover declaring that his love will outlast the
mere popularity of the beauty. One is by Mr. Yeats and begins: “Though
you are in your shining days.” The other is by Tom Moore and begins:
“Believe me, if all those endearing young charms.” The latter language
strikes us as ridiculously florid and over-ripe; but Moore was far from
being ridiculous. Believe me (as he would say), it was no poetaster who
wrote those hackneyed words about the silent harp and the heart that
breaks for liberty. And if English were read some day by strangers as
a classic language, I am not sure that “endearing” would not endure
as a better word than “shining”; or even that (after some repetition
and reaction) it might not seem as strained to say “shining” as to say
“shiny.” Yet Mr. Yeats also is a great poet, as I called him last week;
only the printer or somebody altered it to a “good” one--a mysteriously
moderate emendation. Similarly, when one of Jane Austen’s heroines
wants to say that the hero is a good fellow, she expresses confidence
in what she calls “his worth.” This goads her younger modern readers
to madness; yet in truth the term is far more philosophic and eternal
than the terms they would use themselves. They would probably say he
was “nice,” and Jane Austen would indeed be avenged. For the best of
her heroes, Henry Tilney, himself foresaw and fulminated against the
unmeaning ubiquity of that word, a prophet of the pure reason of his
age, seeing in a vision of the future the fall of the human mind.

Negatively, of course, the historic lesson from Jane Austen is
enormous. She is perhaps most typical of her time in being supremely
irreligious. Her very virtues glitter with the cold sunlight of the
great secular epoch between mediæval and modern mysticism. In that
small masterpiece, _Northanger Abbey_, her unconsciousness of history
is itself a piece of history. For Catherine Morland was right, as
young and romantic people often are. A real crime _had_ been committed
in Northanger Abbey. It is implied in the very name of Northanger
Abbey. It was the crucial crime of the sixteenth century, when all
the institutions of the poor were savagely seized to be the private
possessions of the rich. It is strange that the name remains; it is
stranger still that it remains unrealized. We should think it odd to
go to tea at a man’s house and find it was still called a church. We
should be surprised if a gentleman’s shooting box at Claybury were
referred to as Claybury Cathedral. But the irony of the eighteenth
century is that Catherine was healthily interested in crimes and yet
never found the real crime; and that she never really thought of it as
an abbey, even when she thought of it most as an antiquity.

But there is a positive as well as a negative way in which her
greatness, like Shakespeare’s, illuminates history and politics,
because it illuminates everything. She understood every intricacy of
the upper middle class and the minor gentry, which were to make so much
of the mental life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is
said that she ignored the poor and disregarded their opinions. She did,
but not more than all our Governments and all our Acts of Parliaments
have done. And at least she did consistently ignore them; she ignored
where she was ignorant. Well it would have been for the world if others
had ignored the working-class until they understood it as well as she
did the middle class. She was not a student of sociology; she did
not study the poor. But she did study the students--or at least the
social types which were to become the students of the poor. She knew
her own class, and knew it without illusions; and there is much light
on later problems to be found in her delicate delineation of vanities
and snobberies and patronage. She had to do with the human heart;
and it is that which cometh out of the heart that defileth a nation,
philanthropy, efficiency, organization, social reform. And if the
weaker brethren still wonder why we should find in Baby Week or Welfare
Work a dangerous spirit, from which its best adherents find it hard
to free themselves, if they doubt how such a danger can be reconciled
with the personal delicacy and idealism of many of the women who work
such things, if they think that fine words or even fine feelings will
guarantee a respect for the personality of the poor, I really do not
know that they could do better than sit down, I trust not for the first
time, to the reading of _Emma_.

For all this that has happened since might well be called the Evolution
of Emma. That unique and formidable institution, the English Lady, has,
indeed, become much more of a public institution; that is, she has made
the same mistakes on a much larger scale. The softer fastidiousness
and finer pride of the more gracious eighteenth-century heroine may
seem to make her a shadow by comparison. It seems cruel to say that
the breaking off of Harriet’s humbler engagement foreshadows the
indiscriminate development of Divorce for the Poor. It seems horrible
to say that Emma’s small matchmaking has in it the seed of the
pestilence of Eugenics. But it is true. With a gentleness and justice
and sympathy with good intentions, which clear her from the charge
of common cynicism, the great novelist does find the spring of her
heroine’s errors, and of many of ours. That spring is a philanthropy,
and even a generosity, secretly founded on gentility. Emma Woodhouse
was a wit, she was a good woman, she was an individual with a right
to her own opinion; but it was because she was a lady that she acted
as she did, and thought she had a right to act as she did. She is the
type in fiction of a whole race of English ladies, in fact, for whom
refinement is religion. Her claim to oversee and order the social
things about her consisted in being refined; she would not have
admitted that being rich had anything to do with it; but as a fact it
had everything to do with it. If she had been very much richer, if she
had had one of the great modern fortunes, if she had had the wider
modern opportunities (for the rich) she would have thought it her duty
to act on the wider modern scale; she would have had public spirit and
political grasp. She would have dealt with a thousand Robert Martins
and a thousand Harriet Smiths, and made the same muddle about all of
them. That is what we mean about things like Baby Week--and if there
had been a baby in the story, Miss Woodhouse would certainly have seen
all its educational needs with a brilliant clearness. And we do not
mean that the work is done entirely by Mrs. Pardiggle; we mean that
much of it is done by Miss Woodhouse. But it is done because she _is_
Miss Woodhouse and not Martha Muggins or Jemina Jones; because the Lady
Bountiful is a lady first, and will bestow every bounty but freedom.

It is noted that there are few traces of the French Revolution in Miss
Austen’s novels; but, indeed, there have been few traces of it in Miss
Austen’s country. The peculiarity which has produced the situation I
describe is really this: that the new sentiment of humanitarianism
has come, when the old sentiment of aristocracy has not gone. Social
superiors have not really lost any old privileges; they have gained
new privileges, including that of being superior in philosophy and
philanthropy as well as in riches and refinement. No revolution has
shaken their secret security or menaced them with the awful peril of
becoming no more than men. Therefore their social reform is but their
social refinement grown restless. And in this old teacup comedy can be
found, far more clearly appreciated than in more ambitious books about
problems and politics, the psychology of this mere restlessness in the
rich, when it first stirred upon its cushions. Jane Austen described a
narrow class, but so truthfully that she has much to teach about its
after adventures, when it remained narrow as a class and broadened only
as a sect.




The Pseudo-Scientific Books ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


There is a certain kind of modern book which must, if possible, be
destroyed. It ought to be blown to pieces with the dynamite of some
great satirist like Swift or Dickens. As it is, it must be patiently
hacked into pieces even by some plodding person like myself. I will
do it, as George Washington said, with my little hatchet; though it
might take a long time to do it properly. The kind of book I mean is
the pseudo-scientific book. And by this I do not mean that the man
who writes it is a conscious quack or that he knows nothing; I mean
that he proves nothing; he simply gives you all his cocksure, and
yet shaky, modern opinions and calls it science. Books are coming
out with so-called scientific conclusions--books in which there is
actually no scientific argument at all. They simply affirm all the
notions that happen to be fashionable in loose “intellectual” clubs,
and call them the conclusions of research. But I am no more awed by
the flying fashions among prigs than I am by the flying fashions among
snobs. Snobs say they have the right kind of hat; prigs say they have
the right kind of head. But in both cases I should like some evidence
beyond their own habit of staring at themselves in the glass. Suppose
I were to write about the current fashions in dress something like
this: “Our ignorant and superstitious ancestors had straight hat-brims;
but the advance of reason and equality has taught us to have curly
hat-brims; in early times shirt-fronts are triangular, but science has
shown that they ought to be round; barbaric peoples had loose trousers,
but enlightened and humane peoples have tight trousers,” and so on, and
so on. You would naturally rebel at this simple style of argument. You
would say--“But, hang it all, give us some facts. Prove that the new
fashions are more enlightened. Prove that men think better in the new
hats. Prove that men run faster in the new trousers.”

I have just read a book which has been widely recommended, which is
introduced to the public by Dr. Saleeby, and which is, I understand,
written by a Swiss scientist of great distinction. It is called _Sexual
Ethics_, by Professor Forel. I began to read the book, therefore, with
respect. I finished reading it with stupefaction. The Swiss Professor
is obviously an honest man, though too Puritanical to my taste, and I
am told that he does really know an enormous lot about insects. But as
for the conception of proving a case, as for any notion that a “new”
opinion needs proof, and that it is not enough, when you knock down
great institutions, to say that you don’t like them--it is clear that
no such conceptions have ever crossed his mind. Science says that man
has no conscience. Science says that man and woman must have the same
political powers. Science says that sterile unions are morally free and
without rule. Science says that it is wrong to drink fermented liquor.
And all this with a splendid indifference to the two facts--first,
that “Science” does not say these things at all, for numbers of great
scientists say exactly the opposite; and second, that if Science did
say these things, a person reading a book of rationalistic ethics might
be permitted to ask why. Professor Forel may have mountains of evidence
which he has no space to exhibit. We will give him the benefit of that
doubt, and pass on to points where any thinking man is capable of
judging him.

Where this sort of scientific writer is seen in all his glory is in his
first abstract arguments about the nature of morality. He is immense;
he is at once simple and monstrous, like a whale. He always has one
dim principle or prejudice: to prove that there is nothing separate
or sacred about the moral sense. Professor Forel holds this prejudice
with all possible decorum and propriety. He always trots out three
arguments to prove it; like three old broken-kneed elephants. Professor
Forel duly trots them out. They are supposed to show that there is no
such thing positively existing as the conscience; and they might just
as easily be used to show that there are no such things as wings or
whiskers, or toes or teeth, or boots or books, or Swiss Professors.

The first argument is that man has no conscience because some men are
quite mad, and therefore not particularly conscientious. The second
argument is that man has no conscience because some men are more
conscientious than others. And the third is that man has no conscience
because conscientious men in different countries and quite different
circumstances often do very different things. Professor Forel applies
these arguments eloquently to the question of human consciences; and
I really cannot see why I should not apply them to the question of
human noses. Man has no nose because now and then a man has no nose--I
believe that Sir William Davenant, the poet, had none. Man has no nose
because some noses are longer than others or can smell better than
others. Man has no nose because not only are noses of different shapes,
but (oh, piercing sword of scepticism!) some men use their noses and
find the smell of incense nice, while some use their noses and find it
nasty. Science therefore declares that man is normally noseless; and
will take this for granted for the next four or five hundred pages, and
will treat all the alleged noses of history as the quaint legends of a
credulous age.

I do not mention these views because they are original, but exactly
because they are not. They are only dangerous in Professor Forel’s
book because they can be found in a thousand books of our epoch. This
writer solemnly asserts that Kant’s idea of an ultimate conscience
is a fable because Mohammedans think it wrong to drink wine, while
English officers think it right. Really he might just as well say
that the instinct of self-preservation is a fable because some people
avoid brandy in order to live long, and some people drink brandy in
order to save their lives. Does Professor Forel believe that Kant, or
anybody else, thought that our consciences gave us direct commands
about the details of diet or social etiquette? Did Kant maintain that,
when we had reached a certain stage of dinner, a supernatural voice
whispered in our ear “Asparagus”; or that the marriage between almonds
and raisins was a marriage that was made in heaven? Surely it is
plain enough that all these social duties are deduced from primary
moral duties--and may be deduced wrong. Conscience does not suggest
“asparagus,” but it does suggest amiability, and it is thought by some
to be an amiable act to accept asparagus when it is offered to you.
Conscience does not respect fish and sherry; but it does respect any
innocent ritual that will make men feel alike. Conscience does not tell
you not to drink your hock after your port. But it does tell you not to
commit suicide; and your mere naturalistic reason tells you that the
first act may easily approximate to the second.

Christians encourage wine as something which will benefit men.
Teetotallers discourage wine as something that will destroy men. Their
conscientious conclusions are different, but their consciences are
just the same. Teetotallers say that wine is bad because they think
it moral to say what they think. Christians will not say that wine is
bad because they think it immoral to say what they don’t think. And a
triangle is a three-sided figure. And a dog is a four-legged animal.
And Queen Anne is dead. We have, indeed, come back to alphabetical
truths. But Professor Forel has not yet even come to them. He goes on
laboriously repeating that there cannot be a fixed moral sense, because
some people drink wine and some people don’t. I cannot imagine how it
was that he forgot to mention that France and England cannot have the
same moral sense, because Frenchmen drive cabs on the right side of the
road and Englishmen on the left.




The Humour of King Herod


If I say that I have just been very much amused with a Nativity
play of the fourteenth century it is still possible that I may be
misunderstood. What is more important, some thousand years of very
heroic history will be misunderstood too. It was one of the Coventry
cycle of mediæval plays, loosely called the Coventry Mysteries, similar
to the Chester Mysteries and the Towneley Mysteries.

And I was not amused at the blasphemy of something badly done, but at
a buffoonery uncommonly well done. But, as I said at the time, the
educated seem to be very ignorant of this fine mediæval fun. When I
mentioned the Coventry Mystery many ladies and gentlemen thought it was
a murder in the police news. At the best, they supposed it to be the
title of a detective story. Even upon a hint of history they could only
recall the story of Godiva; which might be called rather a revelation
than a mystery.

Now I always read police news and I sometimes write detective stories;
nor am I at all ashamed of doing either. But I think the popular art of
the past was perhaps a little more cheerful than that of the present.
And in seeing this Bethlehem drama I felt that good news might perhaps
be as dramatic as bad news; and that it was possibly as thrilling to
hear that a child is born as to hear that a man is murdered.

Doubtless there are some sentimental people who like these old plays
merely because they are old. My own sentiment could be more truly
stated by saying that I like them because they are new. They are new in
the imaginative sense, making us feel as if the first star were leading
us to the first child.

But they are also new in the historical sense, to most people, owing to
that break in our history which makes the Elizabethans seem not merely
to have discovered the new world but invented the old one. Nobody could
see this mediæval play without realizing that the Elizabethan was
rather the end than the beginning of a tradition; the crown and not the
cradle of the drama.

Many things that modern critics call peculiarly Elizabethan are in
fact peculiarly mediæval. For instance, that the same stage could be
the place where meet the extremes of tragedy and comedy, or rather
farce. That daring mixture is always made a point of contrast between
the Shakespearean play and the Greek play or the French classical
play. But it is a point of similarity, or rather identity, between the
Shakespearean play and the miracle play.

Nothing could be more bitterly tragic than the scene in this Nativity
drama, in which the mothers sing a lullaby to the children they think
they have brought into safety the moment before the soldiers of Herod
rush in and butcher them screaming on the stage. Nothing could be more
broadly farcical than the scene in which King Herod himself pretends
that he has manufactured the thunderstorm.

In one sense, indeed, the old religious play was far bolder in its
burlesque than the more modern play. Shakespeare did not express the
unrest of King Claudius by making him fall over his own cloak. He did
not convey his disdain for tyranny by letting Macbeth appear with his
crown on one side. This was partly no doubt an improvement in dramatic
art; but it was partly also, I think, a weakening of democratic satire.

Shakespeare’s clowns are philosophers, geniuses, demigods; but
Shakespeare’s clowns are clowns. Shakespeare’s kings may be usurpers,
murderers, monsters; but Shakespeare’s kings are kings. But in this
old devotional drama the king is the clown. He is treated not so much
with disdain as with derision; not so much with a bitter smile as with
a broad grin. A cat may not only look at a king but laugh at a king;
like the mythical Cheshire cat, an ancient cat as terrible as a tiger
and grinning like a gargoyle. But that Cheshire cat has presumably
vanished with the Chester Mysteries, the counterpart of these Coventry
Mysteries; it has vanished with the age and art of gargoyles.

In other words, that popular simplicity that could see wrongful power
as something pantomimically absurd, a thing for practical jokes, has
since been sophisticated by a process none the less sad because it
is slow and subtle. It begins in the Elizabethans in an innocent and
indefinable form. It is merely the sense that, though Macbeth may get
his crown crookedly, he must not actually wear it crooked. It is the
sense that, though Claudius may fall from his throne, he must not
actually fall over his footstool.

It ended in the nineteenth century in many refined and ingenuous forms;
in a tendency to find all fun in the ignorant or criminal classes;
in dialect or the dropping of aitches. It was a sort of satirical
slumming. There was a new shade in the comparison of the coster with
the cat; a coster could look at a king and might conceivably laugh at a
king; but most contemporary art and literature was occupied in laughing
at the coster.

Even in the long lifetime of a good comic paper like _Punch_ we can
trace the change from jokes against the palace to jokes against the
public-house. The difference is perhaps more delicate; it is rather
that the refined classes are a subject for refined comedy; and only the
common people a subject for common farce. It is correct to call this
refinement modern; yet it is not quite correct to call it contemporary.
All through the Victorian time the joke was pointed more against the
poor and less against the powerful; but the revolution which ended the
long Victorian peace has shaken this Victorian patronage. The great
war which has brought so many ancient realities to the surface has
re-enacted before our eyes the Miracle Play of Coventry.

We have seen a real King Herod claiming the thunders of the throne
of God, and answered by the thunder not merely of human wrath but of
primitive human laughter. He has done murder by proclamations, and he
has been answered by caricatures. He has made a massacre of children,
and been made a figure of fun in a Christmas pantomime for the
pleasure of other children. Precisely because his crime is tragic, his
punishment is comic; the old popular paradox has returned.




The Silver Goblets


It was reported that at the sumptuous performance of _Henry VIII_
at His Majesty’s Theatre, the urns and goblets of the banquet were
specially wrought in real and solid silver and in the style of the
sixteenth century. This bombastic literalism is at least very much the
fashion in our modern theatricals. Mr. Vincent Crummles considered it a
splendid piece of thoroughness on the part of an actor that he should
black himself all over to perform Othello. But Mr. Crummles’s ideal
falls far short of the theoretic thoroughness of the late Sir Herbert
Tree; who would consider blacking oneself all over as comparatively a
mere sham, compromise, and veneer. Sir Herbert Tree would, I suppose,
send for a real negro to act Othello; and perhaps for a real Jew to
act Shylock--though that, in the present condition of the English
stage, might possibly be easier. The strict principle of the silver
goblets might be a little more arduous and unpleasant if applied,
let us say, to _The Arabian Nights_, if the manager of His Majesty’s
Theatre presented _Aladdin_, and had to produce not one real negro but
a hundred real negroes, carrying a hundred baskets of gigantic and
genuine jewels. In the presence of this proposal even Sir Herbert might
fall back on a simpler philosophy of the drama. For the principle
in itself admits of no limit. If once it be allowed that what looks
like silver behind the footlights is better also for really being
silver, there seems no reason why the wildest developments should not
ensue. The priests in _Henry VIII_ might be specially ordained in the
green-room before they come on. Nay, if it comes to that, the head of
Buckingham might really be cut off; as in the glad old days lamented by
Swinburne, before the coming of an emasculate mysticism removed real
death from the arena. We might re-establish the goriness as well as the
gorgeousness of the amphitheatre. If real wine-cups, why not real wine?
If real wine, why not real blood?

Nor is this an illegitimate or irrelevant deduction. This and a hundred
other fantasies might follow if once we admit the first principle that
we need to realize on the stage not merely the beauty of silver, but
the value of silver. Shakespeare’s famous phrase that art should hold
the mirror up to nature is always taken as wholly realistic; but it is
really idealistic and symbolic--at least, compared with the realism
of His Majesty’s. Art is a mirror not because it is the same as the
object, but because it is different. A mirror selects as much as art
selects; it gives the light of flames, but not their heat; the colour
of flowers, but not their fragrance; the faces of women, but not their
voices; the proportions of stockbrokers, but not their solidity. A
mirror is a vision of things, not a working model of them. And the
silver seen in a mirror is not for sale.

But the results of the thing in practice are worse than its wildest
results in theory. This Arabian extravagance in the furniture and
decoration of a play has one very practical disadvantage--that it
narrows the number of experiments, confines them to a small and wealthy
class, and makes those which are made exceptional, erratic, and
unrepresentative of any general dramatic activity. One or two insanely
expensive works prove nothing about the general state of art in a
country. To take the parallel of a performance somewhat less dignified,
perhaps, than Sir Herbert Tree’s, there has lately been in America an
exhibition not unanalogous to a conflict in the arena, and one for
which a real negro actually was procured by the management. The negro
happened to beat the white man, and both before and after this event
people went about wildly talking of “the White Man’s champion” and “the
representative of the Black Race.” All black men were supposed to have
triumphed over all white men in a sort of mysterious Armageddon because
one specialist met another specialist and tapped his claret or punched
him in the bread-basket.

Now the fact is, of course, that these two prize-fighters were so
specially picked and trained--the business of producing such men is so
elaborate, artificial, and expensive--that the result proves nothing
whatever about the general condition of white men or black. If you go
in for heroes or monsters it is obvious that they may be born anywhere.
If you took the two tallest men on earth, one might be born in Corea
and the other in Camberwell, but this would not make Camberwell a land
of giants inheriting the blood of Anak. If you took the two thinnest
men in the world, one might be a Parisian and the other a Red Indian.
And if you take the two most scientifically developed pugilists, it is
not surprising that one of them should happen to be white and the other
black. Experiments of so special and profuse a kind have the character
of monstrosities, like black tulips or blue roses. It is absurd to make
them representative of races and causes that they do not represent.
You might as well say that the Bearded Lady at a fair represents the
masculine advance of modern woman; or that all Europe was shaking under
the banded armies of Asia, because of the co-operation of the Siamese
Twins.

So the plutocratic tendency of such performances as _Henry VIII_ is to
prevent rather than to embody any movement of historical or theatrical
imagination. If the standard of expenditure is set so high by custom,
the number of competitors must necessarily be small, and will probably
be of a restricted and unsatisfactory type. Instead of English history
and English literature being as cheap as silver paper, they will be as
dear as silver plate. The national culture, instead of being spread out
everywhere like gold leaf, will be hardened into a few costly lumps
of gold--and kept in very few pockets. The modern world is full of
things that are theoretically open and popular, but practically private
and even corrupt. In theory any tinker can be chosen to speak for his
fellow-citizens among the English Commons. In practice he may have to
spend a thousand pounds on getting elected--a sum which many tinkers do
not happen to have to spare. In theory it ought to be possible for any
moderately successful actor with a sincere and interesting conception
of Wolsey to put that conception on the stage. In practice it looks
as if he would have to ask himself, not whether he was as clever as
Wolsey, but whether he was as rich. He has to reflect, not whether he
can enter into Wolsey’s soul, but whether he can pay Wolsey’s servants,
purchase Wolsey’s plate, and own Wolsey’s palaces.

Now people with Wolsey’s money and people with Wolsey’s mind are
both rare; and even with him the mind came before the money. The
chance of their being combined a second time is manifestly small and
decreasing. The result will obviously be that thousands and millions
may be spent on a theatrical misfit, and inappropriate and unconvincing
impersonation; and all the time there may be a man outside who could
have put on a red dressing-gown and made us feel in the presence of
the most terrible of the Tudor statesmen. The modern method is to sell
Shakespeare for thirty pieces of silver.




The Duty of the Historian


We most of us suffer much from having learnt all our lessons in history
from those little abridged history-books in use in most public and
private schools. These lessons are insufficient--especially when
you don’t learn them. The latter was indeed my own case; and the
little history I know I have picked up since by rambling about in
authentic books and countrysides. But the bald summaries of the small
history-books still master and, in many cases, mislead us. The root of
the difficulty is this: that there are two quite distinct purposes of
history--the superior purpose, which is its use for children, and the
secondary or inferior purpose, which is its use for historians. The
highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story. Then it
appeals to the heroic heart of all generations, the eternal infancy of
mankind. Such a story as that of William Tell could literally be told
of any epoch; no barbarian implements could be too rude, no scientific
instruments could be too elaborate for the pride and terror of the
tale. It might be told of the first flint-headed arrow or the last
model machine-gun; the point of it is the same: it is as eternal as
tyranny and fatherhood. Now, wherever there is this function of the
fine story in history we tell it to children only because it is a fine
story. David and the cup of water, Regulus and the _atque sciebat_,
Jeanne d’Arc kissing the cross of spear-wood, or Nelson shot with all
his stars--these stir in every child the ancient heart of his race;
and that is all that they need do. Changes of costume and local colour
are nothing: it did not matter that in the illustrated Bibles of our
youth David was dressed rather like Regulus, in a Roman cuirass and
sandals, any more than it mattered that in the illuminated Bibles of
the Middle Ages he was dressed rather like Jeanne d’Arc, in a hood or
a visored helmet. It will not matter to future ages if the pictures
represent Jeanne d’Arc cremated in an asbestos stove or Nelson dying
in a top-hat. For the childish and eternal use of history, the history
will still be heroic.

But the historians have quite a different business. It is their affair,
not merely to remember that humanity has been wise and great, but to
understand the special ways in which it has been weak and foolish.
Historians have to explain the horrible mystery of how fashions were
ever fashionable. They have to analyse that statuesque instinct of the
South that moulds the Roman cuirass to the muscles of the human torso,
or that element of symbolic extravagance in the later Middle Ages which
let loose a menagerie upon breast and casque and shield. They have to
explain, as best they can, how anyone ever came to have a top-hat, how
anyone ever endured an asbestos stove.

Now the mere tales of the heroes are a part of religious education;
they are meant to teach us that we have souls. But the inquiries of the
historians into the eccentricities of every epoch are merely a part of
political education; they are meant to teach us to avoid certain perils
or solve certain problems in the complexity of practical affairs. It
is the first duty of a boy to admire the glory of Trafalgar. It is the
first duty of a grown man to question its utility. It is one question
whether it was a good thing as an episode in the struggle between Pitt
and the French Revolution. It is quite another matter that it was
certainly a good thing in that immortal struggle between the son of
man and all the unclean spirits of sloth and cowardice and despair.
For the wisdom of man alters with every age; his prudence has to fit
perpetually shifting shapes of inconvenience or dilemma. But his folly
is immortal: a fire stolen from heaven.

Now, the little histories that we learnt as children were partly meant
simply as inspiring stories. They largely consisted of tales like
Alfred and the cakes or Eleanor and the poisoned wound. They ought to
have entirely consisted of them. Little children ought to learn nothing
but legends; they are the beginnings of all sound morals and manners.
I would not be severe on the point: I would not exclude a story solely
because it was true. But the essential on which I should insist would
be, not that the tale must be true, but that the tale must be fine.

The attempts in the little school-histories to introduce older and
subtler elements, to talk of the atmosphere of Puritanism or the
evolution of our Constitution, is quite irrelevant and vain. It is
impossible to convey to a barely breeched imp who does not yet know
his own community, the exquisite divergence between it and some other
community. What is the good of talking about the Constitution carefully
balanced on three estates to a creature only quite recently balanced on
two legs? What is the sense of explaining the Puritan shade of morality
to a creature who is still learning with difficulty that there is any
morality at all? We may put on one side the possibility that some of us
may think the Puritan atmosphere an unpleasant one or the Constitution
a trifle rickety on its three legs. The general truth remains that we
should teach, to the young, men’s enduring truths, and let the learned
amuse themselves with their passing errors.

It is often said nowadays that in great crises and moral revolutions we
need one strong man to decide; but it seems to me that that is exactly
when we do not need him. We do not need a great man for a revolution,
for a true revolution is a time when all men are great. Where despotism
really is successful is in very small matters. Every one must have
noticed how essential a despot is to arranging the things in which
every one is doubtful, because every one is indifferent: the boats in
a water picnic or the seats at a dinner-party. Here the man who knows
his own mind is really wanted, for no one else ever thinks his own mind
worth knowing. No one knows where to go to precisely, because no one
cares where he goes. It is for trivialities that the great tyrant is
meant.

But when the depths are stirred in a society, and all men’s souls grow
taller in a transfiguring anger or desire, then I am by no means
so certain that the great man has been a benefit even when he has
appeared. I am sure that Cromwell and Napoleon managed the mere pikes
and bayonets, boots and knapsacks better than most other people could
have managed them. But I am by no means sure that Napoleon gave a
better turn to the whole French Revolution. I am by no means so sure
that Cromwell has really improved the religion of England.

As it is in politics with the specially potent man, so it is in history
with the specially learned. We do not need the learned man to teach
us the important things. We all know the important things, though we
all violate and neglect them. Gigantic industry, abysmal knowledge,
are needed for the discovery of the tiny things--the things that seem
hardly worth the trouble. Generally speaking, the ordinary man should
be content with the terrible secret that men are men--which is another
way of saying that they are brothers. He had better think of Cæsar as
a man and not as a Roman, for he will probably think of a Roman as a
statue and not as a man. He had better think of Coeur-de-Lion as a man
and not as a Crusader, or he will think of him as a stage Crusader. For
every man knows the inmost core of every other man. It is the trappings
and externals erected for an age and a fashion that are forgotten and
unknown. It is all the curtains that are curtained, all the masks
that are masked, all the disguises that are now disguised in dust and
featureless decay. But though we cannot reach the outside of history,
we all start from the inside. Some day, if I ransack whole libraries, I
may know the outermost aspects of King Stephen, and almost see him in
his habit as he lived; but the inmost I know already. The symbols are
mouldered and the manner of the oath forgotten; the secret society may
even be dissolved; but we all know the secret.




Questions of Divorce


I have just picked up a little book that is not only brightly and
suggestively written, but is somewhat unique, in this sense--that it
enunciates the modern and advanced view of Woman in such language as a
sane person can stand. It is written by Miss Florence Farr, is called
_Modern Woman: her Intentions_, and is published by Mr. Frank Palmer.
This style of book I confess to commonly finding foolish and vain. The
New Woman’s monologue wearies, not because it is unwomanly, but because
it is inhuman. It exhibits the most exhausting of combinations: the
union of fanaticism of speech with frigidity of soul--the things that
made Robespierre seem a monster. The worst example I remember was once
trumpeted in a Review: a lady doctor, who has ever afterwards haunted
me as a sort of nightmare of spiritual imbecility. I forget her exact
words, but they were to the effect that sex and motherhood should be
treated neither with ribaldry nor reverence: “It is too serious a
subject for ribaldry, and I myself cannot understand reverence towards
anything that is physical.” There, in a few words, is the whole twisted
and tortured priggishness which poisons the present age. The person
who cannot laugh at sex ought to be kicked; and the person who cannot
reverence pain ought to be killed. Until that lady doctor gets a little
ribaldry and a little reverence into her soul, she has no right to have
any opinion at all about the affairs of humanity. I remember there was
another lady, trumpeted in the same Review, a French lady who broke off
her engagement with the excellent gentleman to whom she was attached on
the ground that affection interrupted the flow of her thoughts. It was
a thin sort of flow in any case, to judge by the samples; and no doubt
it was easily interrupted.

The author of _Modern Woman_ is bitten a little by the mad dog of
modernity, the habit of dwelling disproportionally on the abnormal
and the diseased; but she writes rationally and humorously, like a
human being; she sees that there are two sides to the case; and she
even puts in a fruitful suggestion that, with its subconsciousness and
its virtues of the vegetable, the new psychology may turn up on the
side of the old womanhood. One may say indeed that in such a book as
this our amateur philosophizing of to-day is seen at its fairest; and
even at its fairest it exhibits certain qualities of bewilderment and
disproportion which are somewhat curious to note.

I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they
are always talking of things as problems, they have hardly any notion
of what a real problem is. A real problem only occurs when there are
admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. If it is
discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the Bishop is locked
up in the coal-cellar, that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone
but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the Bishop must
be let out of the coal-cellar. But suppose the Bishop has been locked
up in the wine-cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds as of song
and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the
vintages round him; then, indeed, we may properly say that there has
arisen a _problem_; for, upon the one hand, it is awkward to keep
the wedding waiting, while, upon the other, any hasty opening of the
door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen
description.

An incident like this (which must constantly happen in our gay
and varied social life) is a true problem because there are in it
incompatible advantages. Now if woman is simply the domestic slave that
many of these writers represent, if man has bound her by brute force,
if he has simply knocked her down and sat on her--then there is no
problem about the matter. She has been locked in the kitchen, like the
Bishop in the coal-cellar; and they both of them ought to be let out.
If there is any problem of sex, it must be because the case is not so
simple as that; because there is something to be said for the man as
well as for the woman; and because there are evils in unlocking the
kitchen door, in addition to the obvious good of it. Now, I will take
two instances from Miss Farr’s own book of problems that are really
problems, and which she entirely misses because she will not admit that
they are problematical.

The writer asks the substantial question squarely enough: “Is
indissoluble marriage good for mankind?” and she answers it squarely
enough: “For the great mass of mankind, yes.” To those like myself,
who move in the old-world dream of Democracy, that admission ends the
whole question. There may be exceptional people who would be happier
without Civil Government; sensitive souls who really feel unwell when
they see a policeman. But we have surely the right to impose the State
on everybody if it suits nearly everybody; and if so, we have the right
to impose the Family on everybody if it suits nearly everybody. But the
queer and cogent point is this; that Miss Farr does not see the real
difficulty about allowing exceptions--the real difficulty that has made
most legislators reluctant to allow them. I do not say there should be
no exceptions, but I do say that the author has not seen the painful
problem of permitting any.

The difficulty is simply this: that if it comes to claiming exceptional
treatment, the very people who will claim it will be those who least
deserve it. The people who are quite convinced they are superior
are the very inferior people; the men who really think themselves
extraordinary are the most ordinary rotters on earth. If you say,
“Nobody must steal the Crown of England,” then probably it will not
be stolen. After that, probably the next best thing would be to say,
“Anybody may steal the Crown of England,” for then the Crown might find
its way to some honest and modest fellow. But if you say, “Those who
feel themselves to have Wild and Wondrous Souls, and they only, may
steal the Crown of England,” then you may be sure there will be a rush
for it of all the rag, tag, and bobtail of the universe, all the quack
doctors, all the sham artists, all the demireps and drunken egotists,
all the nationless adventurers and criminal monomaniacs of the world.

So, if you say that marriage is for common people, but divorce for free
and noble spirits, all the weak and selfish people will dash for the
divorce; while the few free and noble spirits you wish to help will
very probably (because they are free and noble) go on wrestling with
the marriage. For it is one of the marks of real dignity of character
not to wish to separate oneself from the honour and tragedy of the
whole tribe. All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those
who know it.

The weakness of the proposition that marriage is good for the common
herd, but can be advantageously violated by special “experimenters” and
pioneers, is that it takes no account of the problem of the disease
of pride. It is easy enough to say that weaker souls had better
be guarded, but that we must give freedom to Georges Sand or make
exceptions for George Eliot. The practical puzzle is this: that it is
precisely the weakest sort of lady novelist who thinks she is Georges
Sand; it is precisely the silliest woman who is sure she is George
Eliot. It is the small soul that is sure it is an exception; the large
soul is only too proud to be the rule. To advertise for exceptional
people is to collect all the sulks and sick fancies and futile
ambitions of the earth. The good artist is he who can be understood; it
is the bad artist who is always “misunderstood.” In short, the great
man is a man; it is always the tenth-rate man who is the Superman.

Miss Farr disposes of the difficult question of vows and bonds in love
by leaving out altogether the one extraordinary fact of experience
on which the whole matter turns. She again solves the problem by
assuming that it is not a problem. Concerning oaths of fidelity, etc.,
she writes: “We cannot trust ourselves to make a real love-knot unless
money or custom forces us to 'bear and forbear.’ There is always the
lurking fear that we shall not be able to keep faith unless we swear
upon the Book. This is, of course, not true of young lovers. Every
first love is born free of tradition; indeed, not only is first love
innocent and valiant, but it sweeps aside all the wise laws it has been
taught, and burns away experience in its own light. The revelation is
so extraordinary, so unlike anything told by the poets, so absorbing,
that it is impossible to believe that the feeling can die out.”

Now this is exactly as if some old naturalist settled the bat’s place
in nature by saying boldly, “Bats do not fly.” It is as if he solved
the problem of whales by bluntly declaring that whales live on land.
There is a problem of vows, as of bats and whales. What Miss Farr
says about it is quite lucid and explanatory; it simply happens to be
flatly untrue. It is not the fact that young lovers have no desire to
swear on the Book. They are always at it. It is not the fact that every
young love is born free of traditions about binding and promising,
about bonds and signatures and seals. On the contrary, lovers wallow
in the wildest pedantry and precision about these matters. They do
the craziest things to make their love legal and irrevocable. They
tattoo each other with promises; they cut into rocks and oaks with
their names and vows; they bury ridiculous things in ridiculous places
to be a witness against them; they bind each other with rings, and
inscribe each other in Bibles; if they are raving lunatics (which is
not untenable), they are mad solely on this idea of binding and on
nothing else. It is quite true that the tradition of their fathers and
mothers is in favour of fidelity; but it is emphatically not true that
the lovers merely follow it; they invent it anew. It is quite true
that the lovers feel their love eternal, and independent of oaths;
but it is emphatically not true that they do not desire to take the
oaths. They have a ravening thirst to take as many oaths as possible.
Now this is the paradox; this is the whole problem. It is not true, as
Miss Farr would have it, that young people feel free of vows, being
confident of constancy; while old people invent vows, having lost that
confidence. That would be much too simple; if that were so there would
be no problem at all. The startling but quite solid fact is that young
people are especially fierce in making fetters and final ties at the
very moment when they think them unnecessary. The time when they want
the vow is exactly the time when they do not need it. That is worth
thinking about.

Nearly all the fundamental facts of mankind are to be found in its
fables. And there is a singularly sane truth in all the old stories of
the monsters--such as centaurs, mermaids, sphinxes, and the rest. It
will be noted that in each of these the humanity, though imperfect in
its extent, is perfect in its quality. The mermaid is half a lady and
half a fish; but there is nothing fishy about the lady. A centaur is
half a gentleman and half a horse. But there is nothing horsey about
the gentleman. The centaur is a manly sort of man--up to a certain
point. The mermaid is a womanly woman--so far as she goes. The human
parts of these monsters are handsome, like heroes, or lovely, like
nymphs; their bestial appendages do not affect the full perfection of
their humanity--what there is of it. There is nothing humanly wrong
with the centaur, except that he rides a horse without a head. There
is nothing humanly wrong with the mermaid; Hood put a good comic
motto to his picture of a mermaid: “All’s well that ends well.” It
is, perhaps, quite true; it all depends which end. Those old wild
images included a crucial truth. Man is a monster. And he is all the
more a monster because one part of him is perfect. It is not true,
as the evolutionists say, that man moves perpetually up a slope from
imperfection to perfection, changing ceaselessly, so as to be suitable.
The immortal part of a man and the deadly part are jarringly distinct,
and have always been. And the best proof of this is in such a case as
we have considered--the case of the oaths of love.

A man’s soul is as full of voices as a forest; there are ten thousand
tongues there like all the tongues of the trees: fancies, follies,
memories, madnesses, mysterious fears, and more mysterious hopes. All
the settlement and sane government of life consists in coming to the
conclusion that some of those voices have authority and others not.
You may have an impulse to fight your enemy or an impulse to run away
from him; a reason to serve your country or a reason to betray it; a
good idea for making sweets or a better idea for poisoning them. The
only test I know by which to judge one argument or inspiration from
another is ultimately this: that all the noble necessities of man talk
the language of eternity. When man is doing the three or four things
that he was sent on this earth to do, then he speaks like one who shall
live for ever. A man dying for his country does not talk as if local
preferences could change. Leonidas does not say, “In my present mood,
I prefer Sparta to Persia.” William Tell does not remark, “The Swiss
civilization, so far as I can yet see, is superior to the Austrian.”
When men are making commonwealths, they talk in terms of the absolute,
and so they do when they are making (however unconsciously) those
smaller commonwealths which are called families. There are in life
certain immortal moments, moments that have authority. Lovers are right
to tattoo each other’s skins and cut each other’s names about the
world; they do belong to each other, in a more awful sense than they
know.




Mormonism


There is inevitably something comic (comic in the broad and vulgar
style which all men ought to appreciate in its place) about the panic
aroused by the presence of the Mormons and their supposed polygamous
campaign in this country. It calls up the absurd image of an enormous
omnibus, packed inside with captive English ladies, with an Elder on
the box, controlling his horses with the same patriarchal gravity as
his wives, and another Elder as conductor calling out “Higher up,”
with an exalted and allegorical intonation. And there is something
highly fantastic to the ordinary healthy mind in the idea of any
precaution being proposed; in the idea of locking the Duchess in the
boudoir and the governess in the nursery, lest they should make a
dash for Utah, and become the ninety-third Mrs. Abraham Nye, or the
hundredth Mrs. Hiram Boke. But these frankly vulgar jokes, like most
vulgar jokes, cover a popular prejudice which is but the bristly hide
of a living principle. Elder Ward, recently speaking at Nottingham,
strongly protested against these rumours, and asserted absolutely
that polygamy had never been practised with the consent of the Mormon
Church since 1890. I think it only just that this disclaimer should be
circulated; but though it is most probably sincere, I do not find it
very soothing. The year 1890 is not very long ago, and a society that
could have practised so recently a custom so alien to Christendom must
surely have a moral attitude which might be repellent to us in many
other respects. Moreover, the phrase about the consent of the Church
(if correctly reported) has a little the air of an official repudiating
responsibility for unofficial excesses. It sounds almost as if Mr.
Abraham Nye might, on his own account, come into church with a hundred
and fourteen wives, but people were supposed not to notice them. It
might amount to little more than this, that the chief Elder may allow
the hundred and fourteen wives to walk down the street like a girls’
school, but he is not officially expected to take off his hat to each
of them in turn. Seriously speaking, however, I have little doubt that
Elder Ward speaks the substantial truth, and that polygamy is dying, or
has died, among the Mormons. My reason for thinking this is simple: it
is that polygamy always tends to die out. Even in the East I believe
that, counting heads, it is by this time the exception rather than the
rule. Like slavery, it is always being started, because of its obvious
conveniences. It has only one small inconvenience, which is that it is
intolerable.

Our real error in such a case is that we do not know or care about
the creed itself, from which a people’s customs, good or bad, will
necessarily flow. We talk much about “respecting” this or that person’s
religion; but the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a
religion: to ask what are its tenets and what are their consequences.
But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance. The old religious
authorities, at least, defined a heresy before they condemned it, and
read a book before they burned it. But we are always saying to a Mormon
or a Moslem--“Never mind about your religion, come to my arms.” To
which he naturally replies--“But I do mind about my religion, and I
advise you to mind your eye.”

About half the history now taught in schools and colleges is made
windy and barren by this narrow notion of leaving out the theological
theories. The wars and Parliaments of the Puritans made absolutely
no sense if we leave out the fact that Calvinism appeared to them to
be the absolute metaphysical truth, unanswerable, unreplaceable, and
the only thing worth having in the world. The Crusades and dynastic
quarrels of the Norman and Angevin Kings make absolutely no sense
if we leave out the fact that these men (with all their vices)
were enthusiastic for the doctrine, discipline, and endowment of
Catholicism. Yet I have read a history of the Puritans by a modern
Nonconformist in which the name of Calvin was not even mentioned,
which is like writing a history of the Jews without mentioning either
Abraham or Moses. And I have never read any popular or educational
history of England that gave the slightest hint of the motives in the
human mind that covered England with abbeys and Palestine with banners.
Historians seem to have completely forgotten the two facts--first,
that men act from ideas; and second, that it might, therefore, be as
well to discover which ideas. The mediævals did not believe primarily
in “chivalry,” but in Catholicism, as producing chivalry among other
things. The Puritans did not believe primarily in “righteousness,”
but in Calvinism, as producing righteousness among other things. It
was the creed that held the coarse or cunning men of the world at both
epochs. William the Conqueror was in some ways a cynical and brutal
soldier, but he did attach importance to the fact that the Church
upheld his enterprise; that Harold had sworn falsely on the bones of
saints, and that the banner above his own lances had been blessed by
the Pope. Cromwell was in some ways a cynical and brutal soldier; but
he did attach importance to the fact that he had gained assurance from
on high in the Calvinistic scheme; that the Bible seemed to support
him--in short, the most important moment in his own life, for him, was
not when Charles I lost his head, but when Oliver Cromwell did not lose
his soul. If you leave these things out of the story, you are leaving
out the story itself. If William Rufus was only a red-haired man who
liked hunting, why did he force Anselm’s head under a mitre, instead
of forcing his head under a headsman’s axe? If John Bunyan only cared
for “righteousness,” why was he in terror of being damned, when he knew
he was rationally righteous? We shall never make anything of moral
and religious movements in history until we begin to look at their
theory as well as their practice. For their practice (as in the case
of the Mormons) is often so unfamiliar and frantic that it is quite
unintelligible without their theory.

I have not the space, even if I had the knowledge, to describe the
fundamental theories of Mormonism about the universe. But they are
extraordinarily interesting; and a proper understanding of them would
certainly enable us to see daylight through the more perplexing or
menacing customs of this community; and therefore to judge how far
polygamy was in their scheme a permanent and self-renewing principle
or (as is quite probable) a personal and unscrupulous accident. The
basic Mormon belief is one that comes out of the morning of the earth,
from the most primitive and even infantile attitude. Their chief dogma
is that God is material, not that He was materialized once, as all
Christians believe; nor that He is materialized specially, as all
Catholics believe; but that He was materially embodied from all time;
that He has a local habitation as well as a name. Under the influence
of this barbaric but violently vivid conception, these people crossed
a great desert with their guns and oxen, patiently, persistently, and
courageously, as if they were following a vast and visible giant who
was striding across the plains. In other words, this strange sect, by
soaking itself solely in the Hebrew Scriptures, had really managed
to reproduce the atmosphere of those Scriptures as they are felt by
Hebrews rather than by Christians. A number of dull, earnest, ignorant,
black-coated men with chimney-pot hats, chin beards or mutton-chop
whiskers, managed to reproduce in their own souls the richness and the
peril of an ancient Oriental experience. If we think from this end we
may possibly guess how it was that they added polygamy.




Pageants and Dress ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


The only objection to the excellent series of Pageants that has adorned
England of late is that they are made too expensive. The mass of the
common people cannot afford to see the Pageant; so they are obliged
to put up with the inferior function of acting in it. I myself got in
with the rabble in this way. It was to the Church Pageant; and I was
much impressed with certain illuminations which such an experience
makes possible. A Pageant exhibits all the fun of a Fancy Dress Ball,
with this great difference: that its motive is reverent instead of
irreverent. In the one case a man dresses up as his great-grandfather
in order to make game of his great-grandfather; in the other case, in
order to do him honour. What the great-grandfather himself would think
of either of them we fortunately have not to conjecture. The alteration
is important and satisfactory. All natural men regard their ancestors
as dignified because they are dead; it was a great pity and folly that
we had fallen into the habit of regarding the Middle Ages as a mere
second-hand shop for comic costumes. Mediæval costume and heraldry had
been meant as the very manifestation of courage and publicity and a
decent pride. Colours were worn that they might be conspicuous across
a battle-field; an animal was rampant on a helmet that he might stand
up evident against the sky. The mediæval time has been talked of too
much as if it were full of twilight and secrecies. It was a time of
avowal and of what many modern people call vulgarity. A man’s dress was
that of his family or his trade or his religion; and these are exactly
the three things which we now think it bad taste to discuss. Imagine a
modern man being dressed in green and orange because he was a Robinson.
Or imagine him dressed in blue and gold because he was an auctioneer.
Or imagine him dressed in purple and silver because he was an agnostic.
He is now dressed only in the ridiculous disguise of a gentleman;
which tells one nothing at all, not even whether he is one. If ever he
dresses up as a cavalier or a monk it is only as a joke--very often
as a disreputable and craven joke, a joke in a mask. That vivid and
heraldic costume which was meant to show everybody who a man was is now
chiefly worn by people at Covent Garden masquerades who wish to conceal
who they are. The clerk dresses up as a monk in order to be absurd. If
the monk dressed up as a clerk in order to be absurd I could understand
it; though the escapade might disturb his monastic superiors. A man in
a sensible gown and hood might possibly put on a top-hat and a pair of
trousers in order to cover himself with derision, in some extravagance
of mystical humility. But that a man who calmly shows himself to the
startled sky every morning in a top-hat and trousers should think it
comic to put on a simple and dignified robe and hood is a situation
which almost splits the brain. Things like the Church Pageant may do
something towards snubbing this silly and derisive view of the past.
Hitherto the young stockbroker, when he wanted to make a fool of
himself, dressed up as Cardinal Wolsey. It may now begin to dawn on him
that he ought rather to make a wise man of himself before attempting
the impersonation.

Nevertheless, the truth which the Pageant has to tell the British
public is rather more special and curious than one might at first
assume. It is easy enough to say in the rough that modern dress
is dingy, and that the dress of our fathers was more bright and
picturesque. But that is not really the point. At Fulham Palace one can
compare the huge crowd of people acting in the Pageant with the huge
crowd of people looking at it. There is a startling difference, but
it is not a mere difference between gaiety and gloom. There is many a
respectable young woman in the audience who has on her own hat more
colours than the whole Pageant put together. There are belts of brown
and black in the Pageant itself: the Puritans round the scaffold of
Laud, or the black-robed doctors of the eighteenth century. There are
patches of purple and yellow in the audience: the more select young
ladies and the less select young gentlemen. It is not that our age has
no appetite for the gay or the gaudy--it is a very hedonistic age. It
is not that past ages--even the rich symbolic Middle Ages--did not feel
any sense of safety in what is sombre or restrained. A friar in a brown
coat is much more severe than an 'Arry in a brown bowler. Why is it
that he is also much more pleasant?

I think the whole difference is in this: that the first man is brown
with a reason and the second without a reason. If a hundred monks
wore one brown habit it was because they felt that their toil and
brotherhood were well expressed in being clad in the coarse, dark
colour of the earth. I do not say that they said so, or even clearly
thought so; but their artistic instinct went straight when they chose
the mud-colour for laborious brethren or the flame-colour for the
first princes of the Church. But when 'Arry puts on a brown bowler he
does not either with his consciousness or his subconsciousness (that
rich soil) feel that he is crowning his brows with the brown earth,
clasping round his temples a strange crown of clay. He does not wear
a dust-coloured hat as a form of strewing dust upon his head. He
wears a dust-coloured hat because the nobility and gentry who are his
models discourage him from wearing a crimson hat or a golden hat or a
peacock-green hat. He is not thinking of the brownness of brown. It
is not to him a symbol of the roots, of realism, or of autochthonous
humility; on the contrary, he thinks it looks rather “classy.”

The modern trouble is not that the people do not see splendid colours
or striking effects. The trouble is that they see too much of them
and see them divorced from all reason. It is a misfortune of modern
language that the word “insignificant” is vaguely associated with the
words “small” or “slight.” But a thing is insignificant when we do
not know what it signifies. An African elephant lying dead in Ludgate
Circus would be insignificant. That is, one could not recognize it
as the sign or message of anything. One could not regard it as an
allegory or a love-token. One could not even call it a hint. In the
same way the solar system is insignificant. Unless you have some
special religious theory of what it means, it is merely big and silly,
like the elephant in Ludgate Circus. And similarly, modern life, with
its vastness, its energy, its elaboration, its wealth, is, in the
exact sense, insignificant. Nobody knows what we mean; we do not know
ourselves. Nobody could explain intelligently why a coat is black,
why a waistcoat is white, why asparagus is eaten with the fingers, or
why Hammersmith omnibuses are painted red. The mediævals had a much
stronger idea of crowding all possible significance into things. If
they had consented to waste red paint on a large and ugly Hammersmith
omnibus it would have been in order to suggest that there was some sort
of gory magnanimity about Hammersmith. A heraldic lion is no more like
a real lion than a chimney-pot hat is like a chimney-pot. But the lion
was meant to be a lion. And the chimney-pot hat was not meant to be
like a chimney-pot or like anything else. The resemblance only struck
certain philosophers (probably gutter-boys) afterwards. The top-hat
was not intended as a high uncastellated tower; it was not intended
at all. This is the real baseness of modernity. This is, for example,
the only real vulgarity of advertisements. It is not that the colours
on the posters are bad. It is that they are much too good for the
meaningless work which they serve. When at last people see--as at the
Pageant--crosses and dragons, leopards and lilies, there is scarcely
one of the things that they now see as a symbol which they have not
already seen as a trade-mark. If the great “Assumption of the Virgin”
were painted in front of them they might remember Blank’s Blue. If the
Emperor of China were buried before them, the yellow robes might remind
them of Dash’s Mustard. We have not the task of preaching colour and
gaiety to a people that has never had it, to Puritans who have neither
seen nor appreciated it. We have a harder task. We have to teach those
to appreciate it who have always seen it.




On Stage Costume ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


While watching the other evening a very well-managed reproduction of
_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, I had the sudden conviction that the play
would be much better if it were acted in modern costume, or, at any
rate, in English costume. We all remember hearing in our boyhood about
the absurd conventionality of Garrick and Mrs. Siddons, when he acted
Macbeth in a tie-wig and a tail-coat, and she acted Lady Macbeth in a
crinoline as big and stiff as a cartwheel. This has always been talked
of as a piece of comic ignorance or impudent modernity; as if Rosalind
appeared in rational dress with a bicycle; as if Portia appeared with
a horsehair wig and side-whiskers. But I am not so sure that the great
men and women who founded the English stage in the eighteenth century
were quite such fools as they looked; especially as they looked to the
romantic historians and eager archæologists of the nineteenth century.
I have a queer suspicion that Garrick and Siddons knew nearly as much
about dressing as they did about acting.

One distinction can at least be called obvious. Garrick did not care
much for the historical costume of Macbeth; but he cared as much as
Shakespeare did. He did not know much about that prehistoric and
partly mythical Celtic chief; but he knew more than Shakespeare;
and he could not conceivably have cared less. Now the Victorian age
was honestly interested in the dark and epic origins of Europe; was
honestly interested in Picts and Scots, in Celts and Saxons; in
the blind drift of the races and the blind drive of the religions.
Ossian and the Arthurian revival had interested people in distant
dark-headed men who probably never existed. Freeman, Carlyle, and the
other Teutonists had interested them in distant fair-headed men who
almost certainly never existed. Pusey and Pugin and the first High
Churchmen had interested them in shaven-headed men, dark or fair,
men who did undoubtedly exist, but whose real merits and defects
would have startled their modern admirers very considerably. Under
these circumstances it is not strange that our age should have felt
a curiosity about the solid but mysterious Macbeth of the Dark Ages.
But all this does not alter the ultimate fact: that the only Macbeth
that mankind will ever care about is the Macbeth of Shakespeare,
and not the Macbeth of history. When England was romantic it was
interested in Macbeth’s kilt and claymore. In the same way, if
England becomes a Republic, it will be specially interested in the
Republicans in _Julius Cæsar_. If England becomes Roman Catholic, it
will be specially interested in the theory of chastity in _Measure
for Measure_. But being interested in these things will never be the
same as being interested in Shakespeare. And for a man interested in
Shakespeare, a man merely concerned about what Shakespeare meant, a
Macbeth in powdered hair and knee-breeches is perfectly satisfactory.
For Macbeth, as Shakespeare shows him, is much more like a man in
knee-breeches than a man in a kilt. His subtle hesitations and his
suicidal impenitence belong to the bottomless speculations of a
highly civilized society. The “Out, out, brief candle” is far more
appropriate to the last wax taper after a ball of powder and patches
than to the smoky but sustained fires in iron baskets which probably
flared and smouldered over the swift crimes of the eleventh century.
The real Macbeth probably killed Duncan with the nearest weapon, and
then confessed it to the nearest priest. Certainly, he may never have
had any such doubts about the normal satisfaction of being alive.
However regrettably negligent of the importance of Duncan’s life, he
had, I fancy, few philosophical troubles about the importance of his
own. The men of the Dark Ages were all optimists, as all children and
all animals are. The madness of Shakespeare’s Macbeth goes along with
candles and silk stockings. That madness only appears in the age of
reason.

So far, then, from Garrick’s anachronism being despised, I should like
to see it imitated. Shakespeare got the tale of Theseus from Athens,
as he got the tale of Macbeth from Scotland; and having reluctantly
seen the names of those two countries in the record, I am convinced
that he never gave them another thought. Macbeth is not a Scotchman; he
is a man. But Theseus is not only not an Athenian; he is actually and
unmistakably an Englishman. He is the Super-Squire; the best version
of the English country gentleman; better than Wardle in _Pickwick_.
The Duke of Athens is a duke (that is, a dook), but not of Athens. That
free city is thousands of miles away.

If Theseus came on the stage in gaiters or a shooting-jacket, if
Bottom the Weaver wore a smock-frock, if Hermia and Helena were
dressed as two modern English schoolgirls, we should not be departing
from Shakespeare, but rather returning to him. The cold, classical
draperies (of which he probably never dreamed, but with which we drape
Ægisthus or Hippolyta) are not only a nuisance, but a falsehood. They
misrepresent the whole meaning of the play. For the meaning of the
play is that the little things of life as well as the great things
stray on the borderland of the unknown. That as a man may fall among
devils for a morbid crime, or fall among angels for a small piece of
piety or pity, so also he may fall among fairies through an amiable
flirtation or a fanciful jealousy. The fact that a back door opens into
elfland is all the more reason for keeping the foreground familiar, and
even prosaic. For even the fairies are very neighbourly and firelight
fairies; therefore the human beings ought to be very human in order
to effect the fantastic contrast. And in Shakespeare they are very
human. Hermia the vixen and Helena the maypole are obviously only two
excitable and quite modern girls. Hippolyta has never been an Amazon;
she may perhaps have once been a Suffragette. Theseus is a gentleman, a
thing entirely different from a Greek oligarch. That golden good-nature
which employs culture itself to excuse the clumsiness of the uncultured
is a thing quite peculiar to those lazier Christian countries where
the Christian gentleman has been evolved:

    For nothing in this world can be amiss
    When simpleness and duty tender it.

Or, again, in that noble scrap of sceptical magnanimity which was
unaccountably cut out in the last performance:

 The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse if
 imagination amend them.

These are obviously the easy and reconciling comments of some kindly
but cultivated squire, who will not pretend to his guests that the
play is good, but who will not let the actors see that he thinks it
bad. But this is certainly not the way in which an Athenian Tory like
Aristophanes would have talked about a bad play.

But as the play is dressed and acted at present, the whole idea is
inverted. We do not seem to creep out of a human house into a natural
wood and there find the superhuman and supernatural. The mortals, in
their tunics and togas, seem more distant from us than the fairies
in their hoods and peaked caps. It is an anticlimax to meet the
English elves when we have already encountered the Greek gods. The
same mistake, oddly enough, was made in the only modern play worth
mentioning in the same street with _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Peter
Pan_. Sir James Barrie ought to have left out the fairy dog who puts
the children to bed. If children had such dogs as that they would never
wish to go to fairyland.

This fault or falsity in _Peter Pan_ is, of course, repeated in the
strange and ungainly incident of the father being chained up in the
dog’s kennel. Here, indeed, it is much worse: for the manlike dog was
pretty and touching: the doglike man was ignominious and repulsive. But
the fallacy is the same; it is the fallacy that weakens the otherwise
triumphant poetry and wit of Sir James Barrie’s play; and weakens
all our treatment of fairy plays at present. Fairyland is a place of
positive realities, plain laws, and a decisive story. The actors of _A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_ seemed to think that the play was meant to
be chaotic. The clowns thought they must be always clowning. But in
reality it is the solemnity--nay, the conscientiousness--of the yokels
that is akin to the mystery of the landscape and the tale.




The Yule Log and the Democrat


A blasting sneer has stricken me from time to time, to the effect
that I believe in the Fireside Woman. For that matter, in the present
season, I believe very much in the Fireside Man. But the very word
selected for this withering insinuation shows the shallowness of the
philosophy which prompts it. Surely there could not be a more stunted
stupidity than the suggestion that a thing must be mild and monotonous
because it has to do with fire. Why should the woman be tame because
she is nearest to the wildest thing in the world? It is much more
absurd to say it is prosaic to live by the fireside, than to say it
is prosaic to live upon the edge of a precipice. It is tenable that
some people would be prosaic anywhere; but it is not the fault of the
precipice. It would sound paradoxical even in a fairy-tale to say that
a princess was always yawning with ennui because she was introduced to
a golden griffin or a crimson dragon; and in the round of daily fact,
fire is about the nearest thing to a dragon that we know. Those who
cannot get a fairy-tale out of the fire will not get it out of anything
else. It may be affirmed, with fair certainty, that the people who talk
most scornfully about the Fireside Woman do not get it at all, and do
not wish her to get it at all. Herein lies all the absurdity of the
alternatives to domesticity paraded by our progressive friends.

I am not speaking, of course, of work that must be done, especially
in abnormal times; I am speaking of the psychology of tedium and of
the romance of life. It is apparently demanded that the fire should be
concealed in the entrails of an engine; that it should work through a
labyrinth of bolts and bars; that it should litter around it numberless
dreary offices, and leave behind it a train of indirect and mechanical
servants, each further than the last from the least faint vibration
of the original energy. Then, if in some outlying shed a woman has to
stand counting tickets, or tying up parcels from morning till night,
that woman is supposed to be free. She has Burst the Fetters. She is
Living Her Own Life. But there is supposed to be nothing but dullness
for the woman who is face to face with that elemental fury which drives
and fashions the whole. There is nothing poetical (as compared with the
tickets and labels) in the woman who repeats the primordial adventure
of Prometheus. And there is nothing artistic (as compared with the
shed) about the terrestrial light which turns the greyest room to gold;
which reclothes the woman’s raggedest children round the hearth with
the colours of a company of Fra Angelico, so that the mere reflections
of the flame can conquer the solid hues of drab and dust, and all her
household is clothed with scarlet.

The fire is in this, perhaps, the finest and simplest symbol of a
truth persistently misunderstood. These elementary things, the land,
the roof, the family, may seem mean and miserable; and in a cynical
civilization very probably will seem mean and miserable. But the
things themselves are not mean or miserable; and any reformer who
says they are is not only taking hold of the stick by the wrong end,
he is cutting off the branch by which he is hanging. The stamp of
social failure is not that men have these simple things, but, rather,
that they do not have them; or even when they do, do not know that
they have them. If the Fireside Woman is dull, it is because she
never looks at the fire. It is because she is not, in the wise and
philosophical sense, enough of a fire-worshipper. And she lacks this
faculty because the whole drift of the modern world discourages that
creative concentration, that intensive cultivation of the fancy, which
filled the lives of our fathers with crowds of little household gods,
and which created all the lesser and lighter sanctities that surround
Christmas.

Amid the wild and wandering adventures of the fireside are some which
made possible the very scientific progress which is prone to carp at
it. The engine, of which I spoke recently, was (we have all been told)
suggested because James Watt looked at the kettle. I will not conceal a
suspicion that our society might have evolved better if he had looked
at the fire. I mean, of course, if he had not only looked at it, but
seen it, which is not always the same thing. If he had seen what there
is to be seen, he might possibly have done many things. He might, for
instance, have revived the Trade Guilds of Glasgow, which failed to
grasp his discovery; he might have taught them to take hold of the
new energy and turn it towards democracy, instead of going off and
handing over his invention to the Capitalists. For the defect which
betrayed all Watt’s school and generation, full as it was of a virile
and thrifty Radicalism, was precisely that it did not draw from these
primal sources of piety and poetry. It was not sufficiently religious,
and, therefore, not sufficiently domestic; and the rich rode it down
at last. For the hearth is the only possible altar of insurrection,
as even the pagans knew; from that fire alone are taken the flaming
brands which can really lay waste the wicked cities. The truth can
be told well enough by saying that James Watt would not really have
comprehended the word Christmas; and would have been much annoyed
if told to consider the Yule log instead of the kettle. He was the
Fireside Man; but he was not domestic enough to be dangerous. For it
is the domestic man and not the wild man, just as it is the domestic
dog and not the wild dog, who really fights with thieves and dies at
his post. There has not been a genuine popular war in England since the
war of Wat Tyler, and the origin of that, it will be remembered, was
strictly domestic. It was so domestic that it would not happen at all
in the modern world: Wat Tyler would simply be automatically shot into
prison for resisting a rational and necessary scientific inspection. It
was the growth of an unhuman and unhomelike philosophy that made all
the difference between the Wat of the fourteenth century and the Watt
of the nineteenth. And the spirit of real democracy will not re-emerge
until it rises from the fireside and comes forth in the red reality of
fire; the giant of Christmas brandishing the Yule log for a club.

But there is another feature in the flaming hearth which illustrates
its natural kinship with Christmas. It is a _place_, as Christmas is a
time; and these vivid limitations are vital to man as a mystic. It is
not merely that the idea of everything being in its right place makes
all the difference between a fire in a house and a house on fire. It
is that the fireplace is a frame; and it is the frame that creates the
picture. By being tied to a special spot the sacred dragon becomes
more powerful and, in the high imaginative sense, more free. This is
that link between hearths and altars which the heathen felt, and of
which I have already spoken. If the household be the heart of politics,
the fire is the heart of the household; and the vital organ is spread
equally everywhere only in the very low organisms. The universe of the
mere universalist is one of the very low organisms. The theosophic
generalizations about Nirvana and the All may be compared to the
American fashion of abolishing the fireplace altogether and heating
the whole house artificially to the same temperature--a depressing
habit. I can imagine that a system of hot-water pipes might satisfy a
Pantheist; the notion suggests a rather dreary parody of Pan and his
pipes. I can imagine that a Buddhist might want his whole house warmed
like the palm-house at Kew; but, I think, a limited and localized fire
will always be as much associated with Christians as it has always been
associated with Christmas.

Shakespeare, himself like a large and liberal fire round which winter
tales are told, has hit the mark in this matter exactly, as it concerns
the poet or maker of fictive things. Shakespeare does not say that the
poet loses himself in the All, that he dissipates concrete things into
a cloudy twilight, that he turns this home of ours into a vista or any
vaguer thing. He says the exact opposite. It is “a local habitation
and a name” that the poet gives to what would otherwise be nothing.
This seeming narrowness which men complain of in the altar and the
hearth is as broad as Shakespeare and the whole human imagination,
and should command the respect even of those who think the cult of
Christmas really is all imagination. Even those who can only regard
the great story of Bethlehem as a fairy-tale told by the fire will
yet agree that such narrowness is the first artistic necessity even
of a good fairy-tale. But there are others who think, at least, that
their thought strikes deeper and pierces to a more subtle truth in the
mind. There are others for whom all our fairy-tales, and even all our
appetite for fairy-tales, draw their fire from one central fairy-tale,
as all forgeries draw their significance from a signature. They believe
that this fable is a fact, and that the other fables cannot really
be appreciated even as fables until we know it is a fact. For them,
personality is a step beyond universality; one might almost call it an
escape from universality. And what they follow is as much something
more than Pantheism as a flame is something more than a temperature.
For them, God is not bound down and limited by being merely everything;
He is also at liberty to be something. And for them Christmas will
always deal with a reality exactly as Shakespeare’s poetry deals with
an unreality; it will give, not to airy nothing, but to the enormous
and overwhelming everything, a local habitation and a Name.




More Thoughts on Christmas


Most sensible people say that adults cannot be expected to appreciate
Christmas as much as children appreciate it. At least, Mr. G. S. Street
said so, who is the most sensible man now writing in the English
language. But I am not sure that even sensible people are always right;
and this has been my principal reason for deciding to be silly--a
decision that is now irrevocable. It may be only because I am silly,
but I rather think that, relatively to the rest of the year, I enjoy
Christmas more than I did when I was a child. Of course, children do
enjoy Christmas--they enjoy almost everything except actually being
smacked: from which truth the custom no doubt arose. But the real point
is not whether a schoolboy would enjoy Christmas. The point is that
he would also enjoy No Christmas. Now I say most emphatically that I
should denounce, detest, abominate, and abjure the insolent institution
of No Christmas. The child is glad to find a new ball, let us say,
which Uncle William (dressed as St. Nicholas in everything except the
halo) has put in his stocking. But if he had no new ball, he would make
a hundred new balls out of the snow. And for them he would be indebted
not to Christmas, but to winter. I suppose snowballing is being put
down by the police, like every other Christian custom. No more will
a prosperous and serious City man have a large silver star splashed
suddenly on his waistcoat, veritably investing him with the Order of
the Star of Bethlehem. For it is the star of innocence and novelty,
and should remind him that a child can still be born. But indeed, in
one sense, we may truly say the children enjoy no seasons, because
they enjoy all. I myself am of the physical type that greatly prefers
cold weather to hot; and I could more easily believe that Eden was
at the North Pole than anywhere in the Tropics. It is hard to define
the effect of weather: I can only say that all the rest of the year
I am untidy, but in summer I feel untidy. Yet although (according to
the modern biologists) my hereditary human body must have been of the
same essential type in my boyhood as in my present decrepitude, I
can distinctly remember hailing the idea of freedom and even energy
on days that were quite horribly hot. It was the excellent custom at
my school to give the boys a half-holiday when it seemed too hot for
working. And I can well remember the gigantic joy with which I left off
reading Virgil and began to run round and round a field. My tastes in
this matter have changed. Nay, they have been reversed. If I now found
myself (by some process I cannot easily conjecture) on a burning summer
day running round and round a field, I hope I shall not appear pedantic
if I say I should prefer to be reading Virgil.

And thus it is really possible, from one point of view, for elderly
gentlemen to frolic at Christmas more than children can. They may
really come to find Christmas more entertaining, as they have come
to find Virgil more entertaining. And, in spite of all the talk about
the coldness of classicism, the poet who wrote about the man who in
his own country home fears neither King nor crowd was not by any
means incapable of understanding Mr. Wardle. And it is exactly those
sentiments, and similar ones, that the adult does appreciate better
than the child. The adult, for instance, appreciates domesticity
better than the child. And one of the pillars and first principles of
domesticity, as Mr. Belloc has rightly pointed out, is the institution
of private property. The Christmas pudding represents the mature
mystery of property; and the proof of it is in the eating.

I have always held that Peter Pan was wrong. He was a charming boy,
and sincere in his adventurousness; but though he was brave like a
boy, he was also a coward--like a boy. He admitted it would be a great
adventure to die; but it did not seem to occur to him that it would
be a great adventure to live. If he had consented to march with the
fraternity of his fellow-creatures, he would have found that there
were solid experiences and important revelations even in growing up.
They are realities which could not possibly have been made real to him
without wrecking the real good in his own juvenile point of view. But
that is exactly why he ought to have done as he was told. That is the
only argument for parental authority. In dealing with childhood, we
have a right to command it--because we should kill the childhood if we
convinced it.

Now the mistake of Peter Pan is the mistake of the new theory of life.
I might call it Peter Pantheism. It is the notion that there is _no_
advantage in striking root. Yet, if you talk intelligently to the
nearest tree, the tree will tell you that you are an unobservant ass.
There is an advantage in root; and the name of it is fruit. It is not
true that the nomad is even freer than the peasant. The Bedouin may
rush past on his camel, leaving a whirl of dust; but dust is not free
because it flies. Neither is the nomad free because he flies. You
cannot grow cabbages on a camel, any more than in a condemned cell.
Moreover, I believe camels commonly walk in a comparatively leisurely
manner. Anyhow, most merely nomadic creatures do, for it is a great
nuisance to “carry one’s house with one.” Gipsies do it; so do snails;
but neither of them travel very fast. I inhabit one of the smallest
houses that can be conceived by the cultivated classes; but I frankly
confess I should be sorry to carry it with me whenever I went out for a
walk. It is true that some motorists almost live in their motor-cars.
But it gratifies me to state that these motorists generally die in
their motor-cars too. They perish, I am pleased to say, in a startling
and horrible manner, as a judgment on them for trying to outstrip
creatures higher than themselves--such as the gipsy and the snail. But,
broadly speaking, a house is a thing that stands still. And a thing
that stands still is a thing that strikes root. One of the things that
strike root is Christmas: and another is middle-age. The other great
pillar of private life besides property is marriage; but I will not
deal with it here. Suppose a man has neither wife nor child: suppose he
has only a good servant, or only a small garden, or only a small house,
or only a small dog. He will still find he has struck unintentional
root. He realizes there is something in his own garden that was not
even in the Garden of Eden; and therefore is not (I kiss my hand to
the Socialists) in Kew Gardens or in Kensington Gardens. He realizes,
what Peter Pan could not be made to realize, that a plain human house
of one’s own, standing in one’s own backyard, is really quite as
romantic as a rather cloudy house at the top of a tree or a highly
conspiratorial house underneath the roots of it. But this is because
he has explored his own house, which Peter Pan and such discontented
children seldom do. All the same, the children ought to think of the
Never-Never Land--the world that is outside. But we ought to think of
the Ever-Ever Land--the world which is inside, and the world which will
last. And that is why, wicked as we are, we know most about Christmas.




Dickens Again


I am sorry that the comic costume festival which was organized for
Christmas by one of the chief Dickensian societies has unavoidably
fallen through. It is not for me to reproach those traitors who found
it impossible to turn up: for I was one of those traitors myself.
Whatever character it was that I was expected to appear in--Jingle, I
suppose, or possibly Uriah Heep--was, under a final press of business,
refused by me. These Dickensian enthusiasts were going to have a
Christmas party at Rochester, where they would brew punch and drink
punch, and drive coaches and fall off coaches, and do all the proper
Pickwickian things. How many of them were ready to make a hole in the
ice, to be wheeled about in a wheelbarrow, or to wait all night outside
a ladies’ school, the official documents have not informed me. But
I would gladly take a moderate part. I could not brew punch for the
Pickwick Club; but I could drink it. I could not drive the coach for
the Pickwick Club--or, indeed, for any club except the Suicide Club;
but I could fall off the coach amid repeated applause and enthusiastic
encores. I should be only too proud if it could be said of me, as of
Sam’s hyperbolical old gentleman who was tipped into the hyperbolical
canal, that “'is 'at was found, but I can’t be certain 'is 'ead was in
it.” It seems to me like a euthanasia: more beautiful than the passing
of Arthur.

But though the failure of this particular festivity was merely
accidental (like my own unfortunate fall off the coach), it is not
without its parallel in the present position of Dickensians and
Christmas. For the truth is that we simply cannot recreate the Pickwick
Club--unless we have a moral basis as sturdy as that of Dickens, and
even a religious basis as sturdy as that of Christmas. Men at such a
time turn their backs to the solemn thing they are celebrating, as
the horses turn their backs to the coach. But they are pulling the
coach. And the best of it is this: that so long as the Christmas feast
had some kind of assumed and admitted meaning, it was praised, and
praised sympathetically, by the great men whom we should call most
unsympathetic with it. That Shakespeare and Dickens and Walter Scott
should write of it seems quite natural. They were people who would be
as welcome at Christmas as Santa Claus. But I do not think many people
have ever wished they could ask Milton to eat the Christmas pudding.
Nevertheless, it is quite certain that his Christmas ode is not only
one of the richest but one of the most human of his masterpieces.
I do not think that anyone specially wanting a rollicking article
on Christmas would desire, by mere instinct, the literary style of
Addison. Yet it is quite certain that the somewhat difficult task of
really liking Addison is rendered easier by his account of the Coverley
Christmas than by anything else he wrote. I even go so far as to
doubt whether one of the little Cratchits (who stuffed their spoons in
their mouths lest they should scream for goose) would have removed the
spoon to say, “Oh, that Tennyson were here!” Yet certainly Tennyson’s
spirits do seem to revive in a more or less real way at the ringing
of the Christmas bells in the most melancholy part of _In Memoriam_.
These great men were not trying to be merry: some of them, indeed, were
trying to be miserable. But the day itself was too strong for them; the
time was more than their temperaments; the tradition was alive. The
festival was roaring in the streets, so that prigs and even prophets
(who are sometimes worse still) were honestly carried off their feet.

The difficulty with Dickens is not any failure in Dickens, nor even
in the popularity of Dickens. On the contrary, he has recaptured his
creative reputation and fascination far more than any of the other
great Victorians. Macaulay, who was really great in his way, is
rejected; Cobbett, who was much greater, is forgotten. Dickens is not
merely alive: he is risen from the dead. But the difficulty is in the
failing under his feet, as it were, of that firm historic platform on
which he had performed his Christmas pantomimes: a platform of which
he was quite as unconscious as we, most of us, are of the floor we
walk about on. The fact is that the fun of Christmas is founded on the
seriousness of Christmas; and to pull away the latter support even from
under a Christmas clown is to let him down through a trap-door. And
even clowns do not like the trap-doors that they do not expect. Thus
it is unfortunately true that so glorious a thing as a Pickwick party
tends to lose the splendid quality of a mere Mummery, and become that
much more dull and conventional thing, a Covent Garden Ball. We are not
ourselves living in the proper spirit of Pickwick. We are pretending to
be old Dickens characters, when we ought to be new Dickens characters
in reality.

The conditions are further complicated by the fact that while reading
Dickens may make a man Dickensian, studying Dickens makes him quite
the reverse. One might as well expect the aged custodian of a museum
of sculpture to look (and dress) like the Apollo Belvedere, as expect
the Pickwickian qualities in those literary critics who are attracted
by the Dickens fiction as the materials for a biography or the subject
of a controversy; as a mass of detail; as a record and a riddle. Those
who study such things are a most valuable class of the community, and
they do good service to Dickens in their own way. But their type and
temperament are not, in the nature of things, likely to be full of
the festive magic of their master. Take, for example, these endless
discussions about the proper ending of _Edwin Drood_. I thought
Mr. William Archer’s contributions to the query some time ago were
particularly able and interesting; but I could not, with my hand on my
heart, call Mr. William Archer a festive gentleman, or one supremely
fitted to follow Mr. Swiveller as Perpetual Grand of the Glorious
Apollos. Or again, I see that Sir William Robertson Nicoll has been
writing on the same Drood mystery; and I know that his knowledge of
Victorian literature is both vast and exact. But I hardly think that a
Puritan Scot with a sharp individualistic philosophy would be the right
person to fall off the coach. Sir William Nicoll, if I remember right,
once forcibly described his individualist philosophy as “firing out the
fools.” And certainly the spirit of Dickens could be best described
as the delight in firing them in. It is exactly because Christmas is
not only a feast of children, but in some sense a feast of fools, that
Dickens is in touch with its mystery.




Taffy


I do not understand Welshmen. When we say we do not understand
such-and-such a person, we usually mean that he has been making himself
a nuisance. He has been bothering us in some way; and the puzzle of his
motives and further intentions has become a practical one. I do not
mean anything of the kind here: I mean barely what I say. The distant
Trojans never injured me. Taffy never came to my house or stole any
part of the provisions. On the contrary, historically speaking, I went
to Taffy’s house and took away a good deal of what belonged to him. I
do not think that Taffy is a thief; I do not even know enough about him
to be sure of the preliminary statement that he is a Welshman. I mean,
quite simply and ingenuously, that I know nothing about Wales--not even
(for certain) that there is such a place. I went, indeed, a few weeks
ago to a curious place full of rocks; and the people there _said_ it
was Wales. But, then, other people said that these people were very
sly, and that you could not believe anything they said. But, then,
as I did not believe the second people who did not believe the first
people, it all came back to the same comfortable condition as before,
which is one of blank and disinterested nescience. It is a condition I
am in with regard to a large number of things in this world. I keep my
faith for the things of another world. About this world I am a complete
agnostic.

But in this particular case of ignorance I rather fancy that I am
not alone. I think that the great majority of Englishmen have no
real notion of the Welsh type or spirit, whatever it is. They have
conceptions of the Scot and the Irishman, false conceptions, but always
containing some lines of a true tradition. The Englishman does, so
to speak, understand the Scotchman even when he misunderstands him.
The Englishman does know what the Irish are, even while he demands
indignantly of heaven why they are. The stingy Puritan in plaid
trousers is a very crude and unjust version of that queer blend that
makes the Scot--the combination of a certain coarseness of fibre with
great intellectual keenness for abstract and even mystical things.
Still, it is a version; the prose and poetry of the Scot remain in
the caricature. The picture of Paddy at Donnybrook leaves out all the
subtlety and self-tormenting irony that are mixed up with the pugnacity
of the Irish. Still, the Irish are pugnacious; the Englishman has got
the leading feature right. He knows that, for all his economics, the
Scotchman often has a bee in his bonnet, and he knows that the Irishman
generally has a wasp in his--a thing that will sting itself or anyone
else merely for fun or glory.

In these cases, the caricature, though stiff, highly coloured,
antiquated, and largely false, tells the remains of several truths. But
who on earth has ever seen a caricature of a Welshman? In _Punch_ and
such papers we never see anything but pictures of a Welshwoman--as
if there were no males in that peculiar country with the rocks. Even
the woman is only marked as Welsh by wearing an extraordinary costume,
rather like that of Cinderella’s supernatural godmother. Without the
artist suggesting any costume at all, one would recognize the very
silly portraits of Irishmen with long upper lips, in the style of apes.
Without any plaid trousers to assist the mind, one could spot the stiff
beards and rocky cheek-bones of the Scotchmen of Charles Keene. But
if you took away the Welshwoman’s extraordinary hat, there would be
nothing whatever to show that she was a Welshwoman. We have not in our
minds a Welsh type to make fun of. It is interesting to remember that
apparently Shakespeare had.

This state of entire non-understanding (as distinct from
misunderstanding) of the Welsh seems to me just now to be not only
unique, but important and rather serious. For, unless I am very much
mistaken, Wales is going to play some peculiar, and perhaps dominant,
part in the developments of our extraordinary time. If the Welsh begin
to influence us without our having yet even begun to imagine them,
we shall have the whole Irish business over again; the gradual or
imperfect understanding of a thing in the process of wrestling with it
in the dark. The indications of such a movement in Wales (wherever it
is), the suggestion of the growing influence of Welshmen (whoever they
may be), is something that comes to us rather by widely distributed
happenings and hints than in any theatrical example. Some, however,
would call Mr. Lloyd George a theatrical example; he has been called
even more extraordinary things. And in that degree the thing is true.
Mr. Lloyd George is very much more genuine and sincere and formidable
in his capacity as leader of the little Welsh nation than he is in
any of the other capacities in which he is foolishly praised and
ridiculously reviled. But to anyone who really has an eye for history
in action, the smallest strike secretary in a Welsh railway or colliery
bulks much bigger in the present picture than Mr. Lloyd George. And it
has been in Wales that many of the most dramatic and effective labour
revolts have happened: above all it was in Wales that they presented
peculiar features of their own, bad or good, which marked them out
from the whole temper and habit of England in recent times. The modern
theory of animals was challenged in the episode of the ponies in
the mines. The modern theory of Jews was challenged in the violent
Anti-Semite riots of the last few weeks. Things fierce and unfamiliar,
things lost since the Middle Ages, are coming upon us out of the West.

As the curious incident of the quarrels between Welshmen and Jews
has been mentioned, I will take the opportunity here of correcting
a curious mistake that clings to the minds of numbers of my
correspondents. There is in particular a gloomy gentleman in America
who keeps on asking me how my Anti-Semite prejudice is getting on, and
generally displaying a curiosity about how many Hebrew teeth I have
pulled out this week, and how often a Pogrom is held in front of my
house. He appears to base it all on some statement of mine that Jews
were tyrants and traitors. Upon this basis his indignation is eloquent,
lengthy and (in my opinion) just. The only weakness affecting this
superstructure is the curious detail that I never did say that Jews
were tyrants and traitors. I said that a particular kind of Jew tended
to be a tyrant and another particular kind of Jew tended to be a
traitor. I say it again. Patent facts of this kind are permitted in
the criticism of every other nation on the planet: it is not counted
illiberal to say that a certain kind of Frenchman tends to be sensual.
It is as plain as a pikestaff that the Parisian tradition of life and
letters has a marked element of sensuality. It is also as plain as a
pikestaff that those who are creditors will always have a temptation
to be tyrants, and that those who are cosmopolitans will always have
a temptation to be spies. This has nothing to do with alleging that
the majority of any people falls into its typical temptations. In this
respect I should imagine that Jews varied in their moral proportions
as much as the rest of mankind. Rehoboam was a tyrant; Jehoshaphat was
not. In what is perhaps the most celebrated collection of Jews in human
history, the proportion of traitors was one in twelve. But I cannot see
why the tyrants should not be called tyrants and the traitors traitors;
why Rehoboam should not cause a rebellion or Judas become an object of
dislike, merely because they happen to be members of a race persecuted
for other reasons and on other occasions. Those are my views on Jews.
They are more reasonable than those of the people that wreck their
shops; and much more reasonable than those of the people who justify
them on all occasions.




“Ego et Shavius Meus”


Accident has cut me off this week from many current publications; and
left me much to my own devices. It is therefore my immutable purpose to
write an article about myself, under the thin pretence of noticing a
book about Mr. Bernard Shaw.

This is all the more fun because it is exactly what Mr. Bernard Shaw
would do himself; nor should I blame him. I like Mr. Shaw’s type of
Egoism; because, if he talks big, it is at least about big things;
things bound to be bigger than himself.

I revolt, not against the loud egoist, but the gentle egoist; who
talks tenderly of trifles; who says, “A sunbeam gilds the amber of my
cigarette-holder; I find I cannot live without a cigarette-holder.”
I resist this arrogance simply because it is more arrogant. For even
so complete a fool cannot really suppose we are interested in his
cigarette-holder; and therefore must suppose that we are interested
in him. But I defend a dogmatic egoist precisely because he deals in
dogmas.

The Apostles’ Creed is not regarded as a pose of foppish vanity; yet
the word “I” comes before even the word “God.” The believer comes
first; but he is soon dwarfed by his beliefs, swallowed in the
creative whirlwind and the trumpets of the resurrection. And if a man
says he believes in the Superman or the Socialist State, I think him
equally modest; only not so sensible.

Mr. Herbert Skimpole’s book, _Bernard Shaw: the Man and His Work_,
contains many suggestive and valuable things to which I cannot do
justice, including allusions to myself mostly only too flattering,
and in one case both amusing and mystifying. The passage suggests
that all the active figures in my idle fictions are made as fat as I
am; though I cannot recall that any of them are fat at all; except
a semi-supernatural monster in a nightmare called _The Man Who Was
Thursday_.

Let there be no alarm, however, that I shall talk about such
nightmares, or any of my own tales; like Shaw, I am egoistic about
things that matter. Mr. Skimpole says that while Shaw and I agree
that the world should be adapted to the man, “Chesterton includes our
present institutions among the parts of a man’s soul which cannot be
altered.” Now there is here a potential mistake, which I will not
apologize for taking more seriously than any fancy about the figures in
my very amateurish romances.

I need not say I do not mind being called fat; for deprived of that
jest, I should be almost a serious writer. I do not even mind being
supposed to mind being called fat. But being supposed to be contented,
and contented with the present institutions of modern society, is a
mortal slander I will not take from any man.

Whatever are the institutions I defend, they are not primarily those of
the present. They have been attempted in the past; and I hope they may
be achieved in the future; but they are not present, but conspicuous by
their absence. Mr. Skimpole truly says that I defend domesticity and
piety and patriotism, but these are not the typical institutions of
to-day.

The typical institutions of to-day are a Divorce Court cutting up
families with the speed of a sausage machine; a Science which preaches
the destiny without the divinity of Calvinism; and a Finance that
crosses all frontiers with the same enlightened indifference that is
shown by cholera.

These are the institutions of the instant, and even Mr. Skimpole has
realized them as those of the immediate future. In a somewhat innocent
passage he says that “it is of no use for Shaw to point out” to me
the hope of a cosmopolitan future; “that Internationalism, social
class-feeling, and Imperialism all point the same way he refuses to
see.”

It is indeed useless for Shaw to point out to me that I should follow
the lead of these things; since I happen to detest Imperialism,
disbelieve in Internationalism and distrust “social class-feeling,”
so far as I know what it means. I am well aware that an Imperial
Chancellor in Berlin, an international money-lender in Johannesburg,
and an anarchist spy in Petrograd, are “all pointing the same way”; and
that is why I feel pretty safe in going the other.

I warmly apologize to Mr. Skimpole for writing a personal explanation
instead of a review of his book, which contains many things well worth
writing and reviewing; notably the shrewd remark about Shaw’s style;
in which what is a paradox in spirit is seldom an epigram in form.
It takes our breath away rather by taking itself for granted than
by defining itself like a defiance. But I fancy Mr. Skimpole will
sympathize with me if I am primarily concerned with his convictions, as
he is with mine, and as we both are with Shaw’s.

And he has gone to the vital point in emphasizing this matter of the
things permanent in man. When I say that religion and marriage and
local loyalty are permanent in humanity, I mean that they recur when
humanity is most human; and only comparatively decline when society is
comparatively inhuman.

They have declined in the modern world. They may return through the
war; but anyhow, where we have the small farm and the free man and the
fighting spirit, there we shall have the salute to the soil and the
roof and to the altar.

To take a more casual case: I believe that when men are happy, they
sing; not only at the piano but at the plough, or at least in the
intervals of ploughing; at their work and in their walks abroad. I am
well aware that modern men do not sing in the street very much. I am
well aware that cosmopolitan money-lenders never sing, but die with all
their music in them. I know that the Song of the Happy Meat-Contractor
is not one of “our present institutions.”

I know that one can seldom come at dawn upon some solitary London
banker carolling more sweetly than the lark; and even his clerks do not
often sing in chorus over their ledgers. But I still think it is more
human to sing than not to sing; and that, being more human, it is more
permanent in humanity.

Some righteous revolution will teach the bankers and contractors that
little birds who can sing and won’t sing must be made to sing--or at
any rate made to squeal. In the interlude, the instinct of song takes
refuge in the lesser thing called poetry, or even prose; and to-morrow
the fever of personal sincerity may have passed; and I shall return,
with a lowly air, to literature.




The Plan for a New Universe


There is one theory of the Origin of Species which I have never seen
suggested. Probably this is because I have never read the numberless
and voluminous works in which it has been suggested. For I have read
much madder things, and nothing mad is likely to have been missed by
the modern mind. But since it shocked the respectability of agnostics
to suggest that all creatures had been made different by God, why did
nobody suggest that they had been made different by Man? Why not trace
the vast variety of animals as we can really trace the vast variety
of dogs? The dog is already almost a world in himself, with all the
appearance of distinct orders and types. A St. Bernard approaches the
size and surpasses the legendary virtues of a lion; while there is
a sort of Pekinese which a man might almost tread on as a somewhat
unpleasing insect. Yet all this world of evolution has presumably
had Man for its god. Suppose our sphere in space has itself been the
Island of Dr. Moreau. Suppose Man had some prehistoric civilization
so colossal and complete that all beasts were beasts of burden, or
all animals were domestic animals; that all rabbits were pet rabbits
or all fleas performing fleas. Suppose the tame bird came first, and
what we know as the wild bird afterwards. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of
his early anti-domestic diatribes, compared a woman in the home to a
parrot in the cage, saying that mere custom made us think the connexion
natural. The answer, it has always seemed to me, is strangely obvious.
It is surely plain that the housewife is not the bird in the cage, but
the bird in the nest. But if, in that age of wild sceptics, anyone had
wished to outdo Mr. Shaw in paradox, he could have done it brilliantly
by this hypothesis that the colours of a parrot were actually produced
in a cage; and that an exiled bird only built himself a rude den of
sticks and mud as an outlaw does when driven from his home. Suppose,
in short, that Man has not only been a dog-fancier, but a wolf-fancier
and a hyena-fancier. Suppose he really fancied a rhinoceros. Suppose
some prehistoric squire kept a stud of giraffes; or his money-lender
got a peerage on the plea that he had improved the breed of crocodiles.
Then we have only to suppose this universal Zoo broken up like the
Roman Empire; and all we see is its neglect and riot. The tiger is a
stray cat; a specially large and handsome cat who took the prize (and
the prize-giver) and escaped to the jungle. A whale was some sort of
hornless cow sent into the sea like a Newfoundland dog, who suddenly
refused to come back again. This thesis accounts for the comparative
rapidity of the differentiation, over which the geologists fight with
the biologists. It accounts rationalistically for those evidences of
a creative purpose which are so distressing to a refined mind. It
accounts for the camel, who seems always to have been in captivity;
and accounting for a camel is something. Above all, it accounts for
that very vivid impression of something in various species at once
outrageous and exact. Jefferies found in the farcical outlines of fish
or bird the notion that they must have been produced without design.
To me this sounds like saying that the caricatures of Max Beerbohm
must have been produced without design. I could as easily believe, so
far as this mere æsthetic impression goes, that the face on a gargoyle
was merely moulded by the pouring rain. Artistically, the sun-fish or
the hornbill do not look in the least like accidents; but it might be
maintained that they look like fashions. There are some tropical birds
and fruits that really have the cut and colours of novelties in a shop
window. We might fancy that an elephant was designed in the same taste
as Babylonian architecture; or the leopard and the tiger to match the
tapestries of the East. There is probably somewhere a bird as sinister
and terrifying as a top-hat; and in some luxuriant jungle a plant as
preposterous as a pair of trousers. The monsters may be only antiquated
fashion-plates. For this is one of the numberless neglected fallacies
in the clotted folly of Eugenics. Even if we could in the abstract
breed humanity well, there would be a flutter of modes and crazes about
what was considered well-bred. The dog is bred with design; but surely
not always with discretion. The dachshund appears to have been pulled
out on the rack of some demoniac vivisectionist; and somebody seems to
have cut off the bull-dog’s nose, most emphatically to spite his face.
On the analogy of the things we do breed, the Eugenist may be expected
to produce a brood of hunchbacks or a pure race of Albinos.

It is, I hope, unnecessary to remark that I do not believe in this
theory; but there have been people who might well have believed in it.
There were people who could believe in Swinburne’s sentiment, “Glory
to Man in the highest; for Man is the master of things”; and it would
surely have completed this consciousness in the poet if he could have
thought that the birds of Putney Heath, where he walked, or the fishes
in the sea, where he was so fond of swimming, were doing tricks taught
to them as to performing dogs. Suppose that such a fancy had fitted in
with one of the humanitarian religions of that time, how far would it
have satisfied what was often called the religious sentiment? It would
not have satisfied any religious sentiment, not even Swinburne’s. He
would have cared as little as Shelley to claim the birds when he could
not claim the sky. He certainly would have been much annoyed with the
notion of loving the fishes, if he were not allowed to go on loving
the sea. And though he poisoned paganism with pessimism, a thing not
only more false but more frivolous, though he tried to love the sea as
a wanton or admire the sky as a tyrant, though this morbidity weakened
his love of Nature not only as compared with Virgil or Dante, but
as compared with Wordsworth or Whitman, yet he was like every poet
elemental, and what he loved were the elementary things. And this is an
essential of any poetry and any religion. It must appeal to the origins
and deal with the first things, however much or little it may say about
them. It must be at home in the homeless void, before the first star
was made. The one thing every man knows about the unknowable is that
it is the Indispensable.

Now, if any reader thinks that the scientific heresy I sketched above
is too irrational for moderns to have held, I have the pleasure of
informing him that moderns are now about to announce, or have already
announced, a new heresy somewhat analogous but much less rationalistic
and much less rational. There is a new religion; that is a new fault
being found with the old religion. There is a new plan for a new
universe, which may be expected to last for many a long month to come.
It is the view that seems to have satisfied Mr. Wells, or, at any rate,
Mr. Britling. It is the view which has been more than once suggested
by Mr. Shaw, and is repeated in the skeleton of certain lectures he
is delivering. It is much more supernatural and even superstitious
than my imaginary thesis; for instead of giving to man more of the
powers of God, it arbitrarily imagines a God and then limits him with
the impotence of man. He is not limited, as in the theologies, by his
own reason or justice or desire for the freedom of man. He is limited
by unreason and injustice and the impossibility of freedom even for
himself. But I do not make this note upon the new development with any
intention of discussing it thoroughly in its theological aspect; though
there is one aspect of that aspect which may respectfully be called
amusing. When I was a boy, Christianity was blamed by the freethinkers
for its anthropomorphic demigod, substituted by savages for the Unknown
God who made all things. Now Christianity is blamed for the flat
contrary; because its God is unknown and not anthropomorphic enough.
Thirty years ago we only needed the First Person of the Trinity; and
thirty years later we have discovered that we only need the Second.
This sort of fashion-plate philosophy will no doubt go on as usual. In
a few decades we may be told that our fathers were profoundly right
when they believed in the Archangel Gabriel, but made an inexplicable
mistake when they believed in the Archangel Raphael. We shall learn
that the Seraphim are an exploded superstition, but the Cherubim a
most valuable and novel discovery. And as my note is not concerned
with the theological, neither is it directly concerned with the purely
logical side of it. Here again, it seems obvious that all the doubts
which legitimately attach to the idea of a progressive humanity are
absolutely fatal to the idea of a progressive divinity. A man may be
progressing towards God; but what is a God progressing towards? And
how does he know which of two developments in consciousness is the
better (_e.g._, an imaginative compassion or an imaginative cruelty)
if there be no aboriginal standard in his own nature? I am here only
concerned to note the failure of this fancy where it is parallel to the
failure of the fancy I mentioned first. And it is the weakness which
would instantly be discovered in both of them, not only by every poet
but by every child. It is that unless the sky is beautiful, nothing
is beautiful. Unless the background of all things is good, it is no
substitute to make the foreground better: it may be right to do so for
other reasons, but not for the reason that is the root of religion.
Materialism says the universe is mindless; and faith says it is ruled
by the highest mind. Neither will be satisfied with the new progressive
creed, which declares hopefully that the universe is half-witted.




George Wyndham ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


I believe more and more that there are no trivialities but only truths
neglected; but the things I myself neglect accumulate in mountains.
I have made a note of one of them found in turning over the recent
files of the _Nation_. Elsewhere was a reminder about a book I had
long admired and enjoyed, but which had been crowded out of my mind by
less pleasant things; the book of recollections about George Wyndham,
recently written by Mr. Charles Gatty and published by Mr. Murray.[1]
Even now I cannot do justice to the book; but I know Mr. Gatty will
approve of my saying a word to correct an injustice to the subject of
the book.

[Footnote 1: _George Wyndham: Recognita_, by C. T. Gatty. Murray. 7s.
6d. net.]

Some time ago the _Nation_ dismissed Mr. Gatty’s volume, not with
disrespect, but with a certain distance and indifference evidently
founded on a very mistaken idea. It implied that Wyndham was after all
an intellectual aristocrat, whose culture was that of a clique, and who
did not test it enough in popular and practical politics. The point is
interesting; chiefly because it is the precise reverse of the truth.
If anything could narrow a man like Wyndham, it was being political
like the _Nation_; what broadened him to a universal brotherhood was
getting far from politics--like the nation. His private life was much
larger than his public life; though that in turn was larger than most
public lives in the parliamentary decline. Being a politician, he
had to be a parliamentarian; and being a parliamentarian, he had to
be an oligarch. In so far as he did hold the aristocratic theory, it
was exactly that aristocratic theory that forced him into political
practice. He knew well enough, I think, that the English parliament
is an aristocracy. He took the high ground of the responsibility of
privilege; but he was far too sincere to deny that it was privilege. He
said to a friend of mine, who thus lamented his laborious parliamentary
botherations, “You see, I was born paid.” It was the aristocracy the
_Nation_ reproves that necessitated the parliamentarism the _Nation_
desires or demands. Personally, I should not desire either; and I
think the real Wyndham was in a larger world outside both. It was
precisely where he was most domestic that he was most democratic. He
was a poet among poets exactly as he might have been a pedestrian
among pedestrians or, as he would have preferred to put it, a tramp
among tramps. The sympathy with tramps might be taken literally; for I
remember him defending the gipsies, when a more modern spirit wanted
them taught the meaning of progress by being moved on by the police.
He may have been right to work in cabinets and committees; but it was
there, if anywhere, that he was in a clique. He may have been right
not to follow his tastes, but it was his tastes that were popular and
what many cliques would call vulgar. He may have been right not to be
one of the idle rich, but he might have been even more superior to the
limits of the rich, if he had been idler.

The beauty of Mr. Gatty’s book is that it is a brilliant scrap-book,
the very variegated nature of which expresses this almost vagabond
liberality. Even when it merely notes down such things as single lines
of Shakespeare over which Wyndham lingered, or reproduces corners of
carving or painting which arrested his eye, the method seems to me to
work rightly; it seems somehow natural to talk of every other subject
besides the subject himself; as he was always ready to talk of every
other subject. And this aspect, by itself, accentuates the feeling
that his holidays were his most useful days. In this mood one may well
wish that he had never been near what he himself called the cesspool
of politics; and one might well accept the _Nation’s_ suggestion of
his aloofness from its own favourite parliamentary business with a
somewhat dry assent. Wyndham certainly had little to do with the
internal constructive legislation praised in progressive papers. He can
claim none of the glory of the great social reforms of the period just
before the War. He is not responsible for the permission to drag away
a poor man’s child as a raving maniac, if his teacher thinks he is a
little too stupid to learn, or his teacher is a little too stupid to
teach him. He has not the honour of having abolished the Habeas Corpus
Act, in order to allow amateur criminologists to keep a tramp in prison
until they have invented a science of criminology. He did not establish
the Labour Exchanges, and probably did not want to establish them,
any more than the Labour Exchanges vividly described in _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_. It was not he who created by statute a servant class, of men
made to spend their own wages on doctors they might never want, instead
of on tools or tram-tickets they urgently wanted. He was largely
detached from all this; and when reading a real record like Mr. Gatty’s
one is moved to wish that he had been even more detached from it.
Considering the liberty of his philosophical friendships, one respects
but regrets the loyalty of his political friendships; and is sorry that
common sense must be sacrificed to practical politics.

But when a book like Mr. Gatty’s has moved a reviewer to this mood of
mere regret for a poet wasted in politics, there returns upon him after
all one answer which is itself unanswerable. Judged by one ultimate
test, he was after all right to remain in politics; even in the last
putrefaction of parliamentary politics. At the price of nobody knows
what pain and patience and contempt and concessions, he alone among
modern politicians did leave not merely a name but a thing, that will
remain after him as a scientific engine or a geographical discovery
remains. He achieved a work which has changed the whole destiny of
Western Europe; the resurrection of Ireland. There he established
the free peasant; a work organically different from all the modern
reforms that are merely imposed, whether right or wrong, whether
servile or socialist. It is the difference between planting a tree and
building a tower; once planted, the tree lives by its own life. He
and his admirers, myself among the number, might well be content to
contemplate such a work without afterthoughts; if there were not laid
upon us like a load of memories, and almost like a living chain, the
love of England.

For England, alas! has made to-day the worst possible compromise
between aristocracy and democracy. It has kept the aristocracy and lost
the aristocrats. The country is still as much ruled by squires, but
not so much by country gentlemen; and the reform of the House of Lords
seems to mean eliminating gentlemen and carefully preserving noblemen.
It is as if there were a complaint of martial law; and it were met by
keeping the whole machinery of militarism, but giving the arbitrary
power to spies instead of soldiers. Or it is as if reactionaries
erected a despotism, and then called themselves reformers because they
did not care what dirty fellow was despot. But remote as Wyndham was
from the sham gentry of the twentieth century, it would also be an
error merely to merge him with the genuine gentry of the eighteenth.
It would be to mark the type so as to miss the man. What distinguished
him, as an individual, from good and bad squires, was something far
older than squirarchy; the true sense of the squire expectant, eager
to spring into the saddle of knighthood. His courage was far less
static than that of a country gentleman. It was the thing in which a
philologist might recognize that “courage” really means rushing; or
from which a professor will probably some day prove that courage really
means running away. He had that spiritual ambition which is itself the
ascending flame of humility; and which has been wanting to the English
since the squire grew greater than the knight. He seemed to await an
adventure that never quite came to him on earth; and his life and death
were swift, as if he were struck by lightning as with an accolade, or
had won spurs that were wings upon the wind.




Four Stupidities ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


I have just seen a newspaper paragraph which, whether it refers to a
fact or merely a suggestion, seems to me to go down pretty well into
that depth of mindlessness which calls itself the modern mind. It is
said that influence is being brought to bear on the American Government
to induce them to break a bottle of water instead of a bottle of
champagne when they christen a battleship. Now it is not easy to deal
adequately with the rich stupidity of that. It is about five follies
thick, stupidity obscuring stupidity until one reader can hardly
see more than one of the jokes at a time. There is something almost
fascinating in the idea of trying to disentangle them.

First Stupidity. Note the notion that there is something so
intrinsically and supernaturally evil about an intoxicant that the
pure temperance man will not touch it even when it cannot intoxicate
anybody. It is as if a man were to insist on having a teetotal
boot-polish or a teetotal printing-ink. A cup of tea, or even of hot
milk, becomes diabolic if you have boiled the kettle with methylated
spirit. Eau-de-Cologne is a blackguard indulgence, though you use it
only to scent your handkerchief. A liquor containing alcohol (such as
ginger-beer) is simply and superstitiously an accursed thing, which
is not only not to be touched with the lips, but not to be touched
with the hands. After this case, the more intemperate “Temperance”
people cannot pretend any longer that their proposal is merely a social
reform; it is obviously and literally a mystical taboo. I do not see
what right such people have to mock at the savage’s fear of a fetish,
still less at the peasant’s respect for the relic of a saint. There
might surely be such a thing as holy water, if it be so certain that
there is such a thing as unholy water.

Second Stupidity. The extraordinary confusion by which it becomes not
only wicked to possess wine (though you never drink it), but becomes
wicked even to destroy it. This goes, I think, much further than this
queer materialist madness has yet gone. If a champagne bottle is
smashed to smithereens over the prow of a ship, I should have thought
the most logical teetotaller would merely have been glad that there
was one champagne bottle less in the world. As he would probably not
be a person with any special sympathy with the old ceremonials of
revelry, that is the only possible way in which I can imagine the
thing affecting him. We in England used to think we could trace a
slight streak of fanaticism in good Mrs. Carrie Nation, who used to go
about breaking other people’s wine and spirit bottles with her little
hatchet. But now it would appear that Mrs. Carrie Nation was a wobbler,
one weakly compromising with the fiend of fermented drink, perhaps
nobbled by the Liquor Trade--or, worse still, verging on the loathly
state of a moderate drinker. She ought to have been summoned before a
tribunal of these New Teetotallers and condemned for ever having gone
near enough to a bottle to touch it, even with a hatchet; condemned for
having so much as hung about the hellish tavern, where the very fumes
of its fiery poisons might have mounted to her head. The principle is
an interesting one, and might be extended to many cases. Thus, when the
common hangman burned a book of treason or heresy, he may be supposed
to have been infected by the intellectual errors it contained. Thus
when a censor blacks out a paragraph in a newspaper, he may be held
to have sinned even in looking to see where the paragraph was. This,
apparently, is the new barbaric fancy: that certain vegetable drinks
are so demonic that we not only are wrong when we drink them, but are
wrong when we do our best to render them undrinkable.

Third Stupidity. The curious deadness of the mind in such men is
illustrated at the next stage; that of clinging convulsively to a mere
form; and not only not knowing, but not so much as wondering--first,
whether the idea is worth preserving; and, secondly, whether they are
preserving it. The mark of this dead and broken traditionalism is
always two-fold. It can be seen in these two facts: that men alter a
thing as if it had no sense in it; and yet they never have the sense to
abolish what is for them a senseless thing. I can see much dignity in
absolute austerity and the refusal of symbol; I can see some dignity
even in dingy utilitarianism and the refusal of art. I could respect
the perfect plainness of an early Quaker like Penn when he would not
take his hat off in the palace, because it was an idle form. I do
not despise him because he came afterwards (I believe) to see that
keeping your hat on is just as much of a form as taking it off; and
took off his hat like other people. But if Penn had strictly confined
himself, say, to taking off his hatband with laborious care, every
time he entered the Royal presence, I should say that he had lost both
his Quakerism and his sociability. He would have lost the independence
that refuses recognition to the world, and he would not have gained
the disputable substitute of good manners. Similarly, I could respect
(though I could not envy) the flinty old Manchester manufacturers
who regarded all expenditure on arms, especially on drums, flags, or
trumpets, as so much babyish waste of money. But I should not even
have respected them if they had proposed that the British Army should
fly the White Flag in every battle because it was cheaper than a
coloured one. Why have a flag at all, if it comes to that? Or, again,
I can understand the unconverted Scrooge with his bowl of gruel; and I
like the converted Scrooge with his bowl of punch. But if Scrooge had
insisted every Christmas on having a punch-bowl with no punch in it, I
should not understand at all.

Fourth Stupidity. Besides this general deadness, there is a strange
special deadness to the human sentiment behind that special sort
of ceremony. Don’t express the sentiment if you think it a silly
sentiment; but don’t so express it as to prove that you haven’t got
it. That sentiment is the ancient sentiment of sacrifice. The thing
sacrificed may be anything: wine, as on the battleship; gold, as when
the Doge threw his ring into the sea; an ox or a sheep, as among the
ancient pagans; and very occasionally, when tribes savage or civilized
are seized with Satanist panic, a man. But it must be something
_valuable_, or the particular thrill, wholesome or unwholesome, is
not obtained. It was generally the best sheep or the best ox; and
in the rare cases of human sacrifice, generally somebody like the
King’s daughter. Like all human appetites, it is both good and evil;
it has many roots, a gesture of generosity, an appeal to the unknown,
a guarantee against arrogance, a dim idea of not taking all one’s
advantage from fortune: but they all depend on the _value_, and these
men evidently understand none of them, when they fill the bottle with
water.




On Historical Novels ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


It is very easy, of course, to smile at such schoolboy fiction as the
novels of Mr. Henty, in which the same very English and modern young
gentleman from Rugby or Harrow turns up again and again as a Young
Greek, a Young Carthaginian, a Young Scandinavian, a Young Gaul, a
Young Visigoth, a Young Ancient Briton, and almost everything short
of a Young Negro. But Mr. Henty had the merits of his industry and
fecundity; and one of them was that he did take a boy’s imagination
into many and varied parts of human history, however conventional the
figure he followed through them might be. The English boy will not find
out as much about the soul of Carthage from the _Young Carthaginian_ as
a lover of letters may from _Salammbô_; but at least he will know that
Carthage was conquered--and that is (for various reasons) a good thing
for English people to know. And since the Henty period our historical
novels have fallen with terrible sameness into two or three grooves. We
might almost say that a man is not allowed to write an historical novel
except about four different historical periods, about six different
historical characters; and even about them he is not allowed to take
any view except that taken by the other romances on the same subject.
Now, considering the countless millions of marvellous, amusing, unique,
and picturesque things that have thronged on top of each other through
all our wonderful three thousand years of European history, this state
of affairs is as Byzantine and benighted as if no landscape painter
ever painted anything but a larch tree, or as if none of our sculptors
could model anything except the left leg.

You may write a novel about the time of Henry of Navarre--in fact, it
might almost be said that you must write a novel about the time of
Henry of Navarre. If you go in for writing historical novels at all,
somebody--the publisher or the office-boy--makes you do this. In this
novel, Huguenots must be gallant gentlemen, with a touch of bluffness;
Catholics must also be gallant gentlemen, with a touch of slyness. All
important political questions must be settled by duels fought with long
rapiers at wayside inns. You must stick to one side of the quarrel;
but even in that you must not bring any of the charges that a person
of the period might really have brought. For instance, the Court must
be perpetually engaged in plotting to stab the bluff Huguenot: but you
must not insist that the Huguenot was a Puritan, and his objection
to the Court would largely be that it was a Renaissance Court. You
must not, however delicately, bring in that presence of florid pagan
sensuality and princely indecorum which we feel in Brantome or the
Tales of the Queen of Navarre. The Latins must stick to assassination.
There must be no people to speak of in Paris, though it was the people
of Paris who, for good or evil, changed the whole course of the
history. Men like Sully may be introduced; but their talents must be
entirely occupied in serving the Prince in his personal love-affairs
and in his duels in inns. Above all, slap in the very middle of the
Wars of Religion, nobody must seem to have any clear idea of what his
own religion is about. You may also write a novel about the time of
Richelieu. But it must be governed by the same principles. Richelieu
must be a sinister yet magnanimous enemy of the hero. He must try to
kill the hero, and unaccountably fail. At this stage of the writing of
historical novels, it is important to be an imitator of Dumas. There
are critics who maintain that Dumas was largely written by imitators
of Dumas. This is an exaggeration; but, at the worst, they were good
imitators. There are chapters in the triple tale of the Musketeers
of which I can only say that, if anyone but he wrote them, he could
hire hearts and heads as well as hands. But my warning to the young
writer of entirely useless historical novels is this: He must not go
outside France, or treat that country otherwise than as an insulated
elfland. He must not carry off General Monk in a box. Think what a
frightful mistake would have been made--from the English Puritan point
of view--if d’Artagnan had carried off General Cromwell by mistake!
All this happened in the time of Mazarin and not Richelieu, but the
principle will be found reliable. The principle is that neither
Richelieu nor anybody else should show the faintest interest in the
future of France.

You may write a novel about the French Revolution. You may do it
on your head, as the jolly habitual criminals say. The essential
principles of this sort of novel are: (1) That the populace of Paris
from 1790 to 1794 never had any meals, nor even sat down in a café.
They stood about in the street all night and all day, sufficiently
sustained by the sight of Blood, especially Blue Blood. (2) All power
during the Terror was in the hands of the public executioner and of
Robespierre; and these persons were subject to abrupt changes of mind,
and frequently redeemed their habit of killing people for no apparent
reason by letting them off at the last moment, for no apparent reason
either. (3) Aristocrats are of two kinds--the very wicked and the
entirely blameless; and both are invariably good-looking. Both also
appear rather to prefer being guillotined. (4) Such things as the
invasion of France, the idea of a Republic, the influence of Rousseau,
the nearness of national bankruptcy, the work of Carnot with the
armies, the policy of Pitt, the policy of Austria, the ineradicable
habit of protecting one’s property against foreigners, and the presence
of persons carrying guns at the Battle of Valmy--all these things had
nothing to do with the French Revolution, and should be omitted.

Now, considering the number of picturesque struggles there have been in
the world, it seems to me that these subjects might be given a rest.
There has been next to nothing written, for instance, about the other
Wars of Religion, those that accompanied the construction of Catholic
Europe, rather than its breaking up. There was the Iconoclast invasion
of Italy, which ends with the entrance of Charlemagne. There has been
next to nothing written about riots other than the Parisian; the many
riots of Edinburgh, especially of those few days when it was almost as
dangerous to be a doctor as to be a mad dog. Another advantage would
be that, coming fresh to his historical problem, the writer might even
read a little history.




On Monsters ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


I once saw in the newspapers this paragraph, of which I made a note:

 “LEPRECHAUN” CAUGHT

 Great excitement has been caused in Mullingar, in the west of Ireland,
 by the report that the supposed “Leprechaun,” which several children
 stated they had seen at Killough, near Delvin, during the past two
 months, was captured. Two policemen found a creature of dwarfish
 proportions in a wood near the town, and brought the little man to
 Mullingar Workhouse, where he is now an inmate. He eats greedily, but
 all attempts to interview him have failed, his only reply being a
 peculiar sound between a growl and a squeal. The inmates regard him
 with interest mixed with awe.

This seems like the beginning of an important era of research; it
seems as if the world of experiments had at last touched the world
of reality. It is as if one read: “Great excitement has been caused
in Rotten Row, in the west of London, by the fact that the centaur,
previously seen by several colonels and young ladies, has at last been
stopped in his lawless gallop.” Or it is as if one saw in a newspaper:
“Slight perturbation has been caused at the west end of Margate by the
capture of a mermaid,” or “A daring fowler, climbing the crags of the
Black Mountains for a nest of eagles, found, somewhat unexpectedly,
that it was a nest of angels.” It is wonderful to have the calm
admission in cold print of such links between the human world and other
worlds. It is interesting to know that they took the Leprechaun to a
workhouse. It settles, and settles with a very sound instinct, the
claim of humanity in such sublime curiosities. If a centaur were really
found in Rotten Row, would they take him to a workhouse or to a stable?
If a mermaid were really fished up at Margate, would they take her to a
workhouse or to an aquarium? If people caught an angel unawares, would
they put the angel in a workhouse? Or in an aviary?

The idea of the Missing Link was not at all new with Darwin; it was
not invented merely by those vague but imaginative minor poets to whom
we owe most of our ideas about evolution. Men had always played about
with the idea of a possible link between human and bestial life; and
the very existence--or, if you will, the very non-existence--of the
centaur or the mermaid proves it. All the mythologies had dreamed
of a half-human monster. The only objection to the centaur and the
mermaid was that they could not be found. In every other respect their
merits were of the most solid sort. So it is with the Darwinian ideal
of a link between man and the brutes. There is no objection to it
except that there is no evidence for it. The only objection to the
Missing Link is that he is apparently fabulous, like the centaur and
the mermaid, and all the other images under which man has imagined a
bridge between himself and brutality. In short, the only objection to
the Missing Link is that he is missing.

But there is also another very elementary difference. The Greeks
and the Mediævals invented monstrosities. But they treated them as
monstrosities--that is, they treated them as exceptions. They did not
deduce any law from such lawless things as the centaur or the merman,
the griffin or the hippogriff. But modern people did try to make a law
out of the Missing Link. They made him a lawgiver, though they were
hunting for him like a criminal. They built on the foundation of him
before he was found. They made this unknown monster, the mixture of
the man and ape, the founder of society and the accepted father of
mankind. The ancients had a fancy that there was a mongrel of horse and
man, a mongrel of fish and man. But they did not make it the father
of anything; they did not ask the mad mongrel to breed. The ancients
did not draw up a system of ethics based upon the centaur, showing how
man in a civilized society must take care of his hands, but must not
wholly forget his hooves. They never reminded woman that, although
she had the golden hair of a goddess, she had the tail of a fish. But
the moderns did talk to man as if he were the Missing Link; they did
remind him that he must allow for apish imbecility and bestial tricks.
The moderns did tell the woman that she was half a brute, for all her
beauty; you can find the thing said again and again in Schopenhauer
and other prophets of the modern spirit. That is the real difference
between the two monsters. The Missing Link is still missing and so is
the merman. On the top of all this we have the Leprechaun, apparently
an actual monster at present in the charge of the police. It is
unnecessary to say that numbers of learned people have proved again and
again that it could not exist. It is equally unnecessary to say that
numbers of unlearned people--children, mothers of children, workers,
common people who grow corn or catch fish--had seen them existing.
Almost every other simple type of our working population had seen a
Leprechaun. A fisherman had seen a Leprechaun. A farmer had seen a
Leprechaun. Even a postman had probably seen one. But there was one
simple son of the people whose path had never before been crossed by
the prodigy. Never until then had a policeman seen a Leprechaun. It was
only a question of whether the monster should take the policeman away
with him into Elfland (where such a policeman as he would certainly
have been fettered by the fatal love of the fairy queen), or whether
the policeman should take away the monster to the police-station.
The forces of this earth prevailed; the constable captured the elf,
instead of the elf capturing the constable. The officer took him to
the workhouse, and opened a new epoch in the study of tradition and
folk-lore.

What will the modern world do if it finds (as very likely it will)
that the wildest fables have had a basis in fact; that there are
creatures of the border land, that there are oddities on the fringe
of fixed laws, that there are things so unnatural as easily to be
called preternatural? I do not know what the modern world will do about
these things; I only know what I hope. I hope the modern world will
be as sane about these things as the mediæval world was about them.
Because I believe that an ogre can have two heads, that is no reason
why I should lose the only head that I have. Because the mediæval man
thought that some man had the head of a dog, that was no reason why he
himself should have the head of a donkey. The mediæval man was never
essentially weak or stupid about any of his beliefs, however unfounded
they were. He did not lack judgment; he only lacked the opportunities
of judgment. He had superstitions; but he was not superstitious about
them. He was wrong about Africa; but then, to do him justice, he did
not care whether he was right. He had got that particular thing which
some modern people call “the love of truth,” but which is really
simply the power of taking one’s own mistakes seriously. He thought
that ordinary men were a serious matter; as they are. He thought that
extraordinary men were a fantastic fairy-tale; and he thought (very
rightly) that the fairy-tale was all the more fantastic if it was true.
He did not let dog-faced men affect his conception of mankind; he
regarded them as a joke, the best as a practical joke. But in our time,
I am sorry to say, we have seen some signs of the possibility that such
aberrations or monstrosities as spiritual science may discover will
be taken as real tests of, or keys to, the human lot. For instance,
the psychological phenomenon called “dual personality” is certainly a
thing so extraordinary that any old-fashioned rationalist or agnostic
would simply have called it a miracle and disbelieved it. But nowadays
those who do believe it will not treat it as a miracle--that is, as
an exception. They try to make deductions from it, theories about
identity and metempsychosis and psychical evolution, and God knows
what. If it is true that one particular body has two souls, it is a
joke, as if it had two noses. It must not be permitted to upset the
actualities of our human happiness. If some one says, “Jones blew
his nose,” and Jones is of so peculiar a formation that one may with
logical propriety ask, “Which nose?” that is no reason why the ordinary
formula should lose its ordinary human utility. This is, I think, one
of the most real dangers that lie in front of the civilization that has
just discovered the Leprechaun. We are going to find all the gods and
fairies all over again, all the spiritual hybrids and all the jests
of eternity. But we are not going to find them, as the pagans found
them, in our youth, in an atmosphere in which gods can be jested with
or giants slapped on the back. We are going to find them, in the old
age of our society, in a mood dangerously morbid, in a spirit only too
ready to take the exception instead of the rule. If we find creatures
that are half human, we may only too possibly make them an excuse for
being half-human ourselves. I should not be very painfully concerned
about the Leprechaun if people had thrown stones at him as a bad fairy,
or given him milk and fire as a good one. But there is something
menacing about taking away a monster in order to study him. There is
something sinister about putting a Leprechaun in the workhouse. The
only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work.




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Transcriber’s Notes:

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.

Obvious printer’s errors corrected.

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible, including obsolete and variant spellings, non-standard
punctuation, inconsistently hyphenated words, and other inconsistencies.

For example: on p.116: George Sand’s name is misprinted as “Georges
Sand”. Left as printed.





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