[Illustration]




ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

BY
G. K. CHESTERTON




_First Published (Eighth Edition) at IS. net September 2nd 1915_

_Ninth Edition    November  1915_




CONTENTS

 THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL
 COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES
 THE FALLACY OF SUCCESS
 ON RUNNING AFTER ONE’S HAT
 THE VOTE AND THE HOUSE
 CONCEIT AND CARICATURE
 PATRIOTISM AND SPORT
 AN ESSAY ON TWO CITIES
 FRENCH AND ENGLISH
 THE ZOLA CONTROVERSY
 OXFORD FROM WITHOUT
 WOMAN
 THE MODERN MARTYR
 ON POLITICAL SECRECY
 EDWARD VII. AND SCOTLAND
 THOUGHTS AROUND KOEPENICK
 THE BOY
 LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION
 ANONYMITY AND FURTHER COUNSELS
 ON THE CRYPTIC AND THE ELLIPTIC
 THE WORSHIP OF THE WEALTHY
 SCIENCE AND RELIGION
 THE METHUSELAHITE
 SPIRITUALISM
 THE ERROR OF IMPARTIALITY
 PHONETIC SPELLING
 HUMANITARIANISM AND STRENGTH
 WINE WHEN IT IS RED
 DEMAGOGUES AND MYSTAGOGUES
 THE “EATANSWILL GAZETTE”
 FAIRY TALES
 TOM JONES AND MORALITY
 THE MAID OF ORLEANS
 A DEAD POET
 CHRISTMAS




THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL


I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can
love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this
book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or
rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they
stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were
handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that
our commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had
been handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their
imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too
vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think
of, except dynamite.

Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I
had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so
hard to be frivolous. Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few
moments, and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself
whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write
the front page of the _Times_, which is full of long leading articles,
or the front page of _Tit-Bits,_ which is full of short jokes. If the
reader is the fine conscientious fellow I take him for, he will at once
reply that he would rather on the spur of the moment write ten _Times_
articles than one _Tit-Bits_ joke. Responsibility, a heavy and cautious
responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody
can do it. That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in
for politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength
of mind left to be irresponsible. It is more dignified to sit still
than to dance the Barn Dance. It is also easier. So in these easy pages
I keep myself on the whole on the level of the _Times_: it is only
occasionally that I leap upwards almost to the level of _Tit-Bits._

I resume the defence of this indefensible book. These articles have
another disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were
written; they are too long-winded and elaborate. One of the great
disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time. If I have to
start for High-gate this day week, I may perhaps go the shortest way.
If I have to start this minute, I shall almost certainly go the
longest. In these essays (as I read them over) I feel frightfully
annoyed with myself for not getting to the point more quickly; but I
had not enough leisure to be quick. There are several maddening cases
in which I took two or three pages in attempting to describe an
attitude of which the essence could be expressed in an epigram; only
there was no time for epigrams. I do not repent of one shade of opinion
here expressed; but I feel that they might have been expressed so much
more briefly and precisely. For instance, these pages contain a sort of
recurring protest against the boast of certain writers that they are
merely recent. They brag that their philosophy of the universe is the
last philosophy or the new philosophy, or the advanced and progressive
philosophy. I have said much against a mere modernism. When I use the
word “modernism,” I am not alluding specially to the current quarrel in
the Roman Catholic Church, though I am certainly astonished at any
intellectual group accepting so weak and unphilosophical a name. It is
incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a
modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite. But apart
altogether from that particular disturbance, I am conscious of a
general irritation expressed against the people who boast of their
advancement and modernity in the discussion of religion. But I never
succeeded in saying the quite clear and obvious thing that is really
the matter with modernism. The real objection to modernism is simply
that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational
opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting
that one is specially up to date or particularly “in the know.” To
flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is
simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last
bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer
at a creed’s antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady’s age. It
is caddish because it is irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a
snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

Similarly I find that I have tried in these pages to express the real
objection to philanthropists and have not succeeded. I have not seen
the quite simple objection to the causes advocated by certain wealthy
idealists; causes of which the cause called teetotalism is the
strongest case. I have used many abusive terms about the thing, calling
it Puritanism, or superciliousness, or aristocracy; but I have not seen
and stated the quite simple objection to philanthropy; which is that it
is religious persecution. Religious persecution does not consist in
thumbscrews or fires of Smithfield; the essence of religious
persecution is this: that the man who happens to have material power in
the State, either by wealth or by official position, should govern his
fellow-citizens not according to their religion or philosophy, but
according to his own. If, for instance, there is such a thing as a
vegetarian nation; if there is a great united mass of men who wish to
live by the vegetarian morality, then I say in the emphatic words of
the arrogant French marquis before the French Revolution, “Let them eat
grass.” Perhaps that French oligarch was a humanitarian; most oligarchs
are. Perhaps when he told the peasants to eat grass he was recommending
to them the hygienic simplicity of a vegetarian restaurant. But that is
an irrelevant, though most fascinating, speculation. The point here is
that if a nation is really vegetarian let its government force upon it
the whole horrible weight of vegetarianism. Let its government give the
national guests a State vegetarian banquet. Let its government, in the
most literal and awful sense of the words, give them beans. That sort
of tyranny is all very well; for it is the people tyrannising over all
the persons. But “temperance reformers” are like a small group of
vegetarians who should silently and systematically act on an ethical
assumption entirely unfamiliar to the mass of the people. They would
always be giving peerages to greengrocers. They would always be
appointing Parliamentary Commissions to enquire into the private life
of butchers. Whenever they found a man quite at their mercy, as a
pauper or a convict or a lunatic, they would force him to add the final
touch to his inhuman isolation by becoming a vegetarian. All the meals
for school children will be vegetarian meals. All the State public
houses will be vegetarian public houses. There is a very strong case
for vegetarianism as compared with teetotalism. Drinking one glass of
beer cannot by any philosophy be drunkenness; but killing one animal
can, by this philosophy, be murder. The objection to both processes is
not that the two creeds, teetotal and vegetarian, are not admissible;
it is simply that they are not admitted. The thing is religious
persecution because it is not based on the existing religion of the
democracy. These people ask the poor to accept in practice what they
know perfectly well that the poor would not accept in theory. That is
the very definition of religious persecution. I was against the Tory
attempt to force upon ordinary Englishmen a Catholic theology in which
they do not believe. I am even more against the attempt to force upon
them a Mohamedan morality which they actively deny.

Again, in the case of anonymous journalism I seem to have said a great
deal without getting out the point very clearly. Anonymous journalism
is dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it
is so rapidly becoming an anonymous life. That is the horrible thing
about our contemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret
society. The modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness. He is
more nameless than his slave. He is not more of a bully than the
tyrants of the past; but he is more of a coward. The rich publisher may
treat the poor poet better or worse than the old master workman treated
the old apprentice. But the apprentice ran away and the master ran
after him. Nowadays it is the poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix
the fact of responsibility. It is the publisher who runs away. The
clerk of Mr. Solomon gets the sack: the beautiful Greek slave of the
Sultan Suliman also gets the sack; or the sack gets her. But though she
is concealed under the black waves of the Bosphorus, at least her
destroyer is not concealed. He goes behind golden trumpets riding on a
white elephant. But in the case of the clerk it is almost as difficult
to know where the dismissal comes from as to know where the clerk goes
to. It may be Mr. Solomon or Mr. Solomon’s manager, or Mr. Solomon’s
rich aunt in Cheltenham, or Mr. Soloman’s rich creditor in Berlin. The
elaborate machinery which was once used to make men responsible is now
used solely in order to shift the responsibility. People talk about the
pride of tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride
of tyrants. We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the
shrinking modesty of tyrants. Therefore we must not encourage
leader-writers to be shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated
modesty. Rather we must attempt to lure them to be vain and
ostentatious; so that through ostentation they may at last find their
way to honesty.

The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply
this: that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish.
For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their
nature accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of
such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most
of the philosophies that it attacks. In the end it will not matter to
us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or
reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.




COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES


A writer in the _Yorkshire Evening Post_ is very angry indeed with my
performances in this column. His precise terms of reproach are, “Mr. G.
K. Chesterton is not a humourist: not even a Cockney humourist.” I do
not mind his saying that I am not a humourist—in which (to tell the
truth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I am
not a Cockney. That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home. If a French
writer said of me, “He is no metaphysician: not even an English
metaphysician,” I could swallow the insult to my metaphysics, but I
should feel angry about the insult to my country. So I do not urge that
I am a humourist; but I do insist that I am a Cockney. If I were a
humourist, I should certainly be a Cockney humourist; if I were a
saint, I should certainly be a Cockney saint. I need not recite the
splendid catalogue of Cockney saints who have written their names on
our noble old City churches. I need not trouble you with the long list
of the Cockney humourists who have discharged their bills (or failed to
discharge them) in our noble old City taverns. We can weep together
over the pathos of the poor Yorkshireman, whose county has never
produced some humour not intelligible to the rest of the world. And we
can smile together when he says that somebody or other is “not even” a
Cockney humourist like Samuel Johnson or Charles Lamb. It is surely
sufficiently obvious that all the best humour that exists in our
language is Cockney humour. Chaucer was a Cockney; he had his house
close to the Abbey. Dickens was a Cockney; he said he could not think
without the London streets. The London taverns heard always the
quaintest conversation, whether it was Ben Johnson’s at the Mermaid or
Sam Johnson’s at the Cock. Even in our own time it may be noted that
the most vital and genuine humour is still written about London. Of
this type is the mild and humane irony which marks Mr. Pett Ridge’s
studies of the small grey streets. Of this type is the simple but
smashing laughter of the best tales of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, telling of the
smoke and sparkle of the Thames. No; I concede that I am not a Cockney
humourist. No; I am not worthy to be. Some time, after sad and
strenuous after-lives; some time, after fierce and apocalyptic
incarnations; in some strange world beyond the stars, I may become at
last a Cockney humourist. In that potential paradise I may walk among
the Cockney humourists, if not an equal, at least a companion. I may
feel for a moment on my shoulder the hearty hand of Dryden and thread
the labyrinths of the sweet insanity of Lamb. But that could only be if
I were not only much cleverer, but much better than I am. Before I
reach that sphere I shall have left behind, perhaps, the sphere that is
inhabited by angels, and even passed that which is appropriated
exclusively to the use of Yorkshiremen.

No; London is in this matter attacked upon its strongest ground. London
is the largest of the bloated modern cities; London is the smokiest;
London is the dirtiest; London is, if you will, the most sombre; London
is, if you will, the most miserable. But London is certainly the most
amusing and the most amused. You may prove that we have the most
tragedy; the fact remains that we have the most comedy, that we have
the most farce. We have at the very worst a splendid hypocrisy of
humour. We conceal our sorrow behind a screaming derision. You speak of
people who laugh through their tears; it is our boast that we only weep
through our laughter. There remains always this great boast, perhaps
the greatest boast that is possible to human nature. I mean the great
boast that the most unhappy part of our population is also the most
hilarious part. The poor can forget that social problem which we (the
moderately rich) ought never to forget. Blessed are the poor; for they
alone have not the poor always with them. The honest poor can sometimes
forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of
vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be
certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. The men
who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express
except by something silly and emphatic. They saw something delicate
which they could only express by something indelicate. I remember that
Mr. Max Beerbohm (who has every merit except democracy) attempted to
analyse the jokes at which the mob laughs. He divided them into three
sections: jokes about bodily humiliation, jokes about things alien,
such as foreigners, and jokes about bad cheese. Mr. Max Beerbohm
thought he understood the first two forms; but I am not sure that he
did. In order to understand vulgar humour it is not enough to be
humorous. One must also be vulgar, as I am. And in the first case it is
surely obvious that it is not merely at the fact of something being
hurt that we laugh (as I trust we do) when a Prime Minister sits down
on his hat. If that were so we should laugh whenever we saw a funeral.
We do not laugh at the mere fact of something falling down; there is
nothing humorous about leaves falling or the sun going down. When our
house falls down we do not laugh. All the birds of the air might drop
around us in a perpetual shower like a hailstorm without arousing a
smile. If you really ask yourself why we laugh at a man sitting down
suddenly in the street you will discover that the reason is not only
recondite, but ultimately religious. All the jokes about men sitting
down on their hats are really theological jokes; they are concerned
with the Dual Nature of Man. They refer to the primary paradox that man
is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

Quite equally subtle and spiritual is the idea at the back of laughing
at foreigners. It concerns the almost torturing truth of a thing being
like oneself and yet not like oneself. Nobody laughs at what is
entirely foreign; nobody laughs at a palm tree. But it is funny to see
the familiar image of God disguised behind the black beard of a
Frenchman or the black face of a Negro. There is nothing funny in the
sounds that are wholly inhuman, the howling of wild beasts or of the
wind. But if a man begins to talk like oneself, but all the syllables
come out different, then if one is a man one feels inclined to laugh,
though if one is a gentleman one resists the inclination.

Mr. Max Beerbohm, I remember, professed to understand the first two
forms of popular wit, but said that the third quite stumped him. He
could not see why there should be anything funny about bad cheese. I
can tell him at once. He has missed the idea because it is subtle and
philosophical, and he was looking for something ignorant and foolish.
Bad cheese is funny because it is (like the foreigner or the man fallen
on the pavement) the type of the transition or transgression across a
great mystical boundary. Bad cheese symbolises the change from the
inorganic to the organic. Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy
of matter taking on vitality. It symbolises the origin of life itself.
And it is only about such solemn matters as the origin of life that the
democracy condescends to joke. Thus, for instance, the democracy jokes
about marriage, because marriage is a part of mankind. But the
democracy would never deign to joke about Free Love, because Free Love
is a piece of priggishness.

As a matter of fact, it will be generally found that the popular joke
is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The vulgar joke
is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact. For
instance, it is not in the least true that mothers-in-law are as a
class oppressive and intolerable; most of them are both devoted and
useful. All the mothers-in-law I have ever had were admirable. Yet the
legend of the comic papers is profoundly true. It draws attention to
the fact that it is much harder to be a nice mother-in-law than to be
nice in any other conceivable relation of life. The caricatures have
drawn the worst mother-in-law a monster, by way of expressing the fact
that the best mother-in-law is a problem. The same is true of the
perpetual jokes in comic papers about shrewish wives and henpecked
husbands. It is all a frantic exaggeration, but it is an exaggeration
of a truth; whereas all the modern mouthings about oppressed women are
the exaggerations of a falsehood. If you read even the best of the
intellectuals of to-day you will find them saying that in the mass of
the democracy the woman is the chattel of her lord, like his bath or
his bed. But if you read the comic literature of the democracy you will
find that the lord hides under the bed to escape from the wrath of his
chattel. This is not the fact, but it is much nearer the truth. Every
man who is married knows quite well, not only that he does not regard
his wife as a chattel, but that no man can conceivably ever have done
so. The joke stands for an ultimate truth, and that is a subtle truth.
It is one not very easy to state correctly. It can, perhaps, be most
correctly stated by saying that, even if the man is the head of the
house, he knows he is the figurehead.

But the vulgar comic papers are so subtle and true that they are even
prophetic. If you really want to know what is going to happen to the
future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological
prophecies, do not read even Mr. Wells’s Utopias for this purpose,
though you should certainly read them if you are fond of good honesty
and good English. If you want to know what will happen, study the pages
of _Snaps_ or _Patchy Bits_ as if they were the dark tablets graven
with the oracles of the gods. For, mean and gross as they are, in all
seriousness, they contain what is entirely absent from all Utopias and
all the sociological conjectures of our time: they contain some hint of
the actual habits and manifest desires of the English people. If we are
really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself,
we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the
people, but in the literature which the people studies.

I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was a
much better prophecy than the careful observations of the most cultured
observer. When England was agitated, previous to the last General
Election, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a distinct
difference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of the
populace. The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were most
careful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of
Chinese. According to them, it was a pure question of legal propriety,
of whether certain clauses in the contract of indenture were not
inconsistent with our constitutional traditions: according to them, the
case would have been the same if the people had been Kaffirs or
Englishmen. It all sounded wonderfully enlightened and lucid; and in
comparison the popular joke looked, of course, very poor. For the
popular joke against the Chinese labourers was simply that they were
Chinese; it was an objection to an alien type; the popular papers were
full of gibes about pigtails and yellow faces. It seemed that the
Liberal politicians were raising an intellectual objection to a
doubtful document of State; while it seemed that the Radical populace
were merely roaring with idiotic laughter at the sight of a Chinaman’s
clothes. But the popular instinct was justified, for the vices revealed
were Chinese vices.

But there is another case more pleasant and more up to date. The
popular papers always persisted in representing the New Woman or the
Suffragette as an ugly woman, fat, in spectacles, with bulging clothes,
and generally falling off a bicycle. As a matter of plain external
fact, there was not a word of truth in this. The leaders of the
movement of female emancipation are not at all ugly; most of them are
extraordinarily good-looking. Nor are they at all indifferent to art or
decorative costume; many of them are alarmingly attached to these
things. Yet the popular instinct was right. For the popular instinct
was that in this movement, rightly or wrongly, there was an element of
indifference to female dignity, of a quite new willingness of women to
be grotesque. These women did truly despise the pontifical quality of
woman. And in our streets and around our Parliament we have seen the
stately woman of art and culture turn into the comic woman of _Comic
Bits_. And whether we think the exhibition justifiable or not, the
prophecy of the comic papers is justified: the healthy and vulgar
masses were conscious of a hidden enemy to their traditions who has now
come out into the daylight, that the scriptures might be fulfilled. For
the two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell
are a woman who is not dignified and a man who is.




THE FALLACY OF SUCCESS


There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles
which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever
known among men. They are much more wild than the wildest romances of
chivalry and much more dull than the dullest religious tract. Moreover,
the romances of chivalry were at least about chivalry; the religious
tracts are about religion. But these things are about nothing; they are
about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine,
you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books
showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who
cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there
is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is
nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means
that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a
donkey in being a donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any
dead man may have succeeded in committing suicide. But, passing over
the bad logic and bad philosophy in the phrase, we may take it, as
these writers do, in the ordinary sense of success in obtaining money
or worldly position. These writers profess to tell the ordinary man how
he may succeed in his trade or speculation—how, if he is a builder, he
may succeed as a builder; how, if he is a stockbroker, he may succeed
as a stockbroker. They profess to show him how, if he is a grocer, he
may become a sporting yachtsman; how, if he is a tenth-rate journalist,
he may become a peer; and how, if he is a German Jew, he may become an
Anglo-Saxon. This is a definite and business-like proposal, and I
really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy
them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back.
Nobody would dare to publish a book about electricity which literally
told one nothing about electricity; no one would dare to publish an
article on botany which showed that the writer did not know which end
of a plant grew in the earth. Yet our modern world is full of books
about Success and successful people which literally contain no kind of
idea, and scarcely any kind of verbal sense.

It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as
bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special
sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by
cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation.
If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else,
or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to
succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked
cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about
whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want
a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success
such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the
book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want
to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or
that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said
anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: “The
jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to
jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He
must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little
Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to _do his best_. He
must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive,
and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE
WALL.” That is the kind of thing the book would say, and very useful it
would be, no doubt, if read out in a low and tense voice to a young man
just about to take the high jump. Or suppose that in the course of his
intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other
case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run—“In playing
cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by
maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to
win the game. You must have grit and snap and go _in to win_. The days
of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science and
hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any
game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL.” It is
all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing
cards I would rather have some decent little book which told me the
rules of the game. Beyond the rules of the game it is all a question
either of talent or dishonesty; and I will undertake to provide either
one or the other—which, it is not for me to say.

Turning over a popular magazine, I find a queer and amusing example.
There is an article called “The Instinct that Makes People Rich.” It is
decorated in front with a formidable portrait of Lord Rothschild. There
are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people
rich; the only “instinct” I know of which does it is that instinct
which theological Christianity crudely describes as “the sin of
avarice.” That, however, is beside the present point. I wish to quote
the following exquisite paragraphs as a piece of typical advice as to
how to succeed. It is so practical; it leaves so little doubt about
what should be our next step—

“The name of Vanderbilt is synonymous with wealth gained by modern
enterprise. ‘Cornelius,’ the founder of the family, was the first of
the great American magnates of commerce. He started as the son of a
poor farmer; he ended as a millionaire twenty times over.

“He had the money-making instinct. He seized his opportunities, the
opportunities that were given by the application of the steam-engine to
ocean traffic, and by the birth of railway locomotion in the wealthy
but undeveloped United States of America, and consequently he amassed
an immense fortune.

“Now it is, of course, obvious that we cannot all follow exactly in the
footsteps of this great railway monarch. The precise opportunities that
fell to him do not occur to us. Circumstances have changed. But,
although this is so, still, in our own sphere and in our own
circumstances, we _can_ follow his general methods; we can seize those
opportunities that are given us, and give ourselves a very fair chance
of attaining riches.”

In such strange utterances we see quite clearly what is really at the
bottom of all these articles and books. It is not mere business; it is
not even mere cynicism. It is mysticism; the horrible mysticism of
money. The writer of that passage did not really have the remotest
notion of how Vanderbilt made his money, or of how anybody else is to
make his. He does, indeed, conclude his remarks by advocating some
scheme; but it has nothing in the world to do with Vanderbilt. He
merely wished to prostrate himself before the mystery of a millionaire.
For when we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but
its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility. Thus, for instance,
when a man is in love with a woman he takes special pleasure in the
fact that a woman is unreasonable. Thus, again, the very pious poet,
celebrating his Creator, takes pleasure in saying that God moves in a
mysterious way. Now, the writer of the paragraph which I have quoted
does not seem to have had anything to do with a god, and I should not
think (judging by his extreme unpracticality) that he had ever been
really in love with a woman. But the thing he does
worship—Vanderbilt—he treats in exactly this mystical manner. He really
revels in the fact his deity Vanderbilt is keeping a secret from him.
And it fills his soul with a sort of transport of cunning, an ecstasy
of priestcraft, that he should pretend to be telling to the multitude
that terrible secret which he does not know.

Speaking about the instinct that makes people rich, the same writer
remarks—

“In olden days its existence was fully understood. The Greeks enshrined
it in the story of Midas, of the ‘Golden Touch.’ Here was a man who
turned everything he laid his hands upon into gold. His life was a
progress amidst riches. Out of everything that came in his way he
created the precious metal. ‘A foolish legend,’ said the wiseacres of
the Victorian age. ‘A truth,’ say we of to-day. We all know of such
men. We are ever meeting or reading about such persons who turn
everything they touch into gold. Success dogs their very footsteps.
Their life’s pathway leads unerringly upwards. They cannot fail.”

Unfortunately, however, Midas could fail; he did. His path did not lead
unerringly upward. He starved because whenever he touched a biscuit or
a ham sandwich it turned to gold. That was the whole point of the
story, though the writer has to suppress it delicately, writing so near
to a portrait of Lord Rothschild. The old fables of mankind are,
indeed, unfathomably wise; but we must not have them expurgated in the
interests of Mr. Vanderbilt. We must not have King Midas represented as
an example of success; he was a failure of an unusually painful kind.
Also, he had the ears of an ass. Also (like most other prominent and
wealthy persons) he endeavoured to conceal the fact. It was his barber
(if I remember right) who had to be treated on a confidential footing
with regard to this peculiarity; and his barber, instead of behaving
like a go-ahead person of the Succeed-at-all-costs school and trying to
blackmail King Midas, went away and whispered this splendid piece of
society scandal to the reeds, who enjoyed it enormously. It is said
that they also whispered it as the winds swayed them to and fro. I look
reverently at the portrait of Lord Rothschild; I read reverently about
the exploits of Mr. Vanderbilt. I know that I cannot turn everything I
touch to gold; but then I also know that I have never tried, having a
preference for other substances, such as grass, and good wine. I know
that these people have certainly succeeded in something; that they have
certainly overcome somebody; I know that they are kings in a sense that
no men were ever kings before; that they create markets and bestride
continents. Yet it always seems to me that there is some small domestic
fact that they are hiding, and I have sometimes thought I heard upon
the wind the laughter and whisper of the reeds.

At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books
about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not
teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish;
they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are
always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books
that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years
ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that
by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was
fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our
society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it
may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich
man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious
Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues.
But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious
Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly
by his vices?




ON RUNNING AFTER ONE’S HAT


I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been flooded in
my absence, while I am in the mere country. My own Battersea has been,
I understand, particularly favoured as a meeting of the waters.
Battersea was already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of
human localities. Now that it has the additional splendour of great
sheets of water, there must be something quite incomparable in the
landscape (or waterscape) of my own romantic town. Battersea must be a
vision of Venice. The boat that brought the meat from the butcher’s
must have shot along those lanes of rippling silver with the strange
smoothness of the gondola. The greengrocer who brought cabbages to the
corner of the Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with the
unearthly grace of the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly
poetical as an island; and when a district is flooded it becomes an
archipelago.

Some consider such romantic views of flood or fire slightly lacking in
reality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite
as practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things an
opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible
than the ordinary “Indignant Ratepayer” who sees in them an opportunity
for grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield
or having a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be supported, but
scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception, and
as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the very
longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences that make men swear
or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative
inconveniences—things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often
hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway
station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of
having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to
him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder
and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and
the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon.
Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly,
it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and
started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’
habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the
two fifteen. Their meditations may be full of rich and fruitful things.
Many of the most purple hours of my life have been passed at Clapham
Junction, which is now, I suppose, under water. I have been there in
many moods so fixed and mystical that the water might well have come up
to my waist before I noticed it particularly. But in the case of all
such annoyances, as I have said, everything depends upon the emotional
point of view. You can safely apply the test to almost every one of the
things that are currently talked of as the typical nuisance of daily
life.

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to
have to run after one’s hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the
well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and
running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and
sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting
little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an
idea that it is humiliating to run after one’s hat; and when people say
it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic;
but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are
comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are
exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love. A man
running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a
wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat
with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard
himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no
animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that
hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the
future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high
ground on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional
attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever
be the technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest
degree combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that
they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were
inflicting pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who
were looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat
in Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be
filled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffected
pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment
giving to the crowd.

The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic
worry. A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of
cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated.
Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark
pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification
and repose. Again, I have known some people of very modern views driven
by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they
attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed
tight and they could not pull it out. A friend of mine was particularly
afflicted in this way. Every day his drawer was jammed, and every day
in consequence it was something else that rhymes to it. But I pointed
out to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative;
it rested entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should,
and would come out easily. “But if,” I said, “you picture to yourself
that you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the
struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating. Imagine that
you are tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea. Imagine that you are
roping up a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass. Imagine even that
you are a boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and
English.” Shortly after saying this I left him; but I have no doubt at
all that my words bore the best possible fruit. I have no doubt that
every day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a
flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts
to himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding
ring.

So I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible to
suppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyed
poetically. Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been
caused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect,
and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a really
romantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly
considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if
anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For
as the Roman Catholic priest in the story said: “Wine is good with
everything except water,” and on a similar principle, water is good
with everything except wine.




THE VOTE AND THE HOUSE


Most of us will be canvassed soon, I suppose; some of us may even
canvass. Upon which side, of course, nothing will induce me to state,
beyond saying that by a remarkable coincidence it will in every case be
the only side in which a high-minded, public-spirited, and patriotic
citizen can take even a momentary interest. But the general question of
canvassing itself, being a non-party question, is one which we may be
permitted to approach. The rules for canvassers are fairly familiar to
any one who has ever canvassed. They are printed on the little card
which you carry about with you and lose. There is a statement, I think,
that you must not offer a voter food or drink. However hospitable you
may feel towards him in his own house, you must not carry his lunch
about with you. You must not produce a veal cutlet from your tail-coat
pocket. You must not conceal poached eggs about your person. You must
not, like a kind of conjurer, produce baked potatoes from your hat. In
short, the canvasser must not feed the voter in any way. Whether the
voter is allowed to feed the canvasser, whether the voter may give the
canvasser veal cutlets and baked potatoes, is a point of law on which I
have never been able to inform myself. When I found myself canvassing a
gentleman, I have sometimes felt tempted to ask him if there was any
rule against his giving me food and drink; but the matter seemed a
delicate one to approach. His attitude to me also sometimes suggested a
doubt as to whether he would, even if he could. But there are voters
who might find it worth while to discover if there is any law against
bribing a canvasser. They might bribe him to go away.

The second veto for canvassers which was printed on the little card
said that you must not persuade any one to personate a voter. I have no
idea what it means. To dress up as an average voter seems a little
vague. There is no well-recognised uniform, as far as I know, with
civic waistcoat and patriotic whiskers. The enterprise resolves itself
into one somewhat similar to the enterprise of a rich friend of mine
who went to a fancy-dress ball dressed up as a gentleman. Perhaps it
means that there is a practice of personating some individual voter.
The canvasser creeps to the house of his fellow-conspirator carrying a
make-up in a bag. He produces from it a pair of white moustaches and a
single eyeglass, which are sufficient to give the most commonplace
person a startling resemblance to the Colonel at No. 80. Or he
hurriedly affixes to his friend that large nose and that bald head
which are all that is essential to an illusion of the presence of
Professor Budger. I do not undertake to unravel these knots. I can only
say that when I was a canvasser I was told by the little card, with
every circumstance of seriousness and authority, that I was not to
persuade anybody to personate a voter: and I can lay my hand upon my
heart and affirm that I never did.

The third injunction on the card was one which seemed to me, if
interpreted exactly and according to its words, to undermine the very
foundations of our politics. It told me that I must not “threaten a
voter with any consequence whatever.” No doubt this was intended to
apply to threats of a personal and illegitimate character; as, for
instance, if a wealthy candidate were to threaten to raise all the
rents, or to put up a statue of himself. But as verbally and
grammatically expressed, it certainly would cover those general threats
of disaster to the whole community which are the main matter of
political discussion. When a canvasser says that if the opposition
candidate gets in the country will be ruined, he is threatening the
voters with certain consequences. When the Free Trader says that if
Tariffs are adopted the people in Brompton or Bayswater will crawl
about eating grass, he is threatening them with consequences. When the
Tariff Reformer says that if Free Trade exists for another year St.
Paul’s Cathedral will be a ruin and Ludgate Hill as deserted as
Stonehenge, he is also threatening. And what is the good of being a
Tariff Reformer if you can’t say that? What is the use of being a
politician or a Parliamentary candidate at all if one cannot tell the
people that if the other man gets in, England will be instantly invaded
and enslaved, blood be pouring down the Strand, and all the English
ladies carried off into harems. But these things are, after all,
consequences, so to speak.

The majority of refined persons in our day may generally be heard
abusing the practice of canvassing. In the same way the majority of
refined persons (commonly the same refined persons) may be heard
abusing the practice of interviewing celebrities. It seems a very
singular thing to me that this refined world reserves all its
indignation for the comparatively open and innocent element in both
walks of life. There is really a vast amount of corruption and
hypocrisy in our election politics; about the most honest thing in the
whole mess is the canvassing. A man has not got a right to “nurse” a
constituency with aggressive charities, to buy it with great presents
of parks and libraries, to open vague vistas of future benevolence; all
this, which goes on unrebuked, is bribery and nothing else. But a man
has got the right to go to another free man and ask him with civility
whether he will vote for him. The information can be asked, granted, or
refused without any loss of dignity on either side, which is more than
can be said of a park. It is the same with the place of interviewing in
journalism. In a trade where there are labyrinths of insincerity,
interviewing is about the most simple and the most sincere thing there
is. The canvasser, when he wants to know a man’s opinions, goes and
asks him. It may be a bore; but it is about as plain and straight a
thing as he could do. So the interviewer, when he wants to know a man’s
opinions, goes and asks him. Again, it may be a bore; but again, it is
about as plain and straight as anything could be. But all the other
real and systematic cynicisms of our journalism pass without being
vituperated and even without being known—the financial motives of
policy, the misleading posters, the suppression of just letters of
complaint. A statement about a man may be infamously untrue, but it is
read calmly. But a statement by a man to an interviewer is felt as
indefensibly vulgar. That the paper should misrepresent him is nothing;
that he should represent himself is bad taste. The whole error in both
cases lies in the fact that the refined persons are attacking politics
and journalism on the ground of vulgarity. Of course, politics and
journalism are, as it happens, very vulgar. But their vulgarity is not
the worst thing about them. Things are so bad with both that by this
time their vulgarity is the best thing about them. Their vulgarity is
at least a noisy thing; and their great danger is that silence that
always comes before decay. The conversational persuasion at elections
is perfectly human and rational; it is the silent persuasions that are
utterly damnable.

If it is true that the Commons’ House will not hold all the Commons, it
is a very good example of what we call the anomalies of the English
Constitution. It is also, I think, a very good example of how highly
undesirable those anomalies really are. Most Englishmen say that these
anomalies do not matter; they are not ashamed of being illogical; they
are proud of being illogical. Lord Macaulay (a very typical Englishman,
romantic, prejudiced, poetical), Lord Macaulay said that he would not
lift his hand to get rid of an anomaly that was not also a grievance.
Many other sturdy romantic Englishmen say the same. They boast of our
anomalies; they boast of our illogicality; they say it shows what a
practical people we are. They are utterly wrong. Lord Macaulay was in
this matter, as in a few others, utterly wrong. Anomalies do matter
very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities do
matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason
that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself.
All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to
the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law
the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times
before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this
power was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance. It could do
my subjects no harm; it could do me no good. The people of Battersea,
they would say, might safely submit to it. But the people of Battersea
could not safely submit to it, for all that. If I had nodded their
heads for them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at
the end of it with immeasurably greater ease. For there would have
permanently sunk into every man’s mind the notion that it was a natural
thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power. They would have
grown accustomed to insanity.

For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more is
necessary than that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must
think injustice _absurd_; above all, they must think it startling. They
must retain the violence of a virgin astonishment. That is the
explanation of the singular fact which must have struck many people in
the relations of philosophy and reform. It is the fact (I mean) that
optimists are more practical reformers than pessimists. Superficially,
one would imagine that the railer would be the reformer; that the man
who thought that everything was wrong would be the man to put
everything right. In historical practice the thing is quite the other
way; curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who
really makes them better. The optimist Dickens has achieved more
reforms than the pessimist Gissing. A man like Rousseau has far too
rosy a theory of human nature; but he produces a revolution. A man like
David Hume thinks that almost all things are depressing; but he is a
Conservative, and wishes to keep them as they are. A man like Godwin
believes existence to be kindly; but he is a rebel. A man like Carlyle
believes existence to be cruel; but he is a Tory. Everywhere the man
who alters things begins by liking things. And the real explanation of
this success of the optimistic reformer, of this failure of the
pessimistic reformer, is, after all, an explanation of sufficient
simplicity. It is because the optimist can look at wrong not only with
indignation, but with a startled indignation. When the pessimist looks
at any infamy, it is to him, after all, only a repetition of the infamy
of existence. The Court of Chancery is indefensible—like mankind. The
Inquisition is abominable—like the universe. But the optimist sees
injustice as something discordant and unexpected, and it stings him
into action. The pessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the
optimist can be surprised at it.

And it is the same with the relations of an anomaly to the logical
mind. The pessimist resents evil (like Lord Macaulay) solely because it
is a grievance. The optimist resents it also, because it is an anomaly;
a contradiction to his conception of the course of things. And it is
not at all unimportant, but on the contrary most important, that this
course of things in politics and elsewhere should be lucid, explicable
and defensible. When people have got used to unreason they can no
longer be startled at injustice. When people have grown familiar with
an anomaly, they are prepared to that extent for a grievance; they may
think the grievance grievous, but they can no longer think it strange.
Take, if only as an excellent example, the very matter alluded to
before; I mean the seats, or rather the lack of seats, in the House of
Commons. Perhaps it is true that under the best conditions it would
never happen that every member turned up. Perhaps a complete attendance
would never actually be. But who can tell how much influence in keeping
members away may have been exerted by this calm assumption that they
would stop away? How can any man be expected to help to make a full
attendance when he knows that a full attendance is actually forbidden?
How can the men who make up the Chamber do their duty reasonably when
the very men who built the House have not done theirs reasonably? If
the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the
battle? And what if the remarks of the trumpet take this form, “I
charge you as you love your King and country to come to this Council.
And I know you won’t.”




CONCEIT AND CARICATURE


If a man must needs be conceited, it is certainly better that he should
be conceited about some merits or talents that he does not really
possess. For then his vanity remains more or less superficial; it
remains a mere mistake of fact, like that of a man who thinks he
inherits the royal blood or thinks he has an infallible system for
Monte Carlo. Because the merit is an unreal merit, it does not corrupt
or sophisticate his real merits. He is vain about the virtue he has not
got; but he may be humble about the virtues that he has got. His truly
honourable qualities remain in their primordial innocence; he cannot
see them and he cannot spoil them. If a man’s mind is erroneously
possessed with the idea that he is a great violinist, that need not
prevent his being a gentleman and an honest man. But if once his mind
is possessed in any strong degree with the knowledge that he is a
gentleman, he will soon cease to be one.

But there is a third kind of satisfaction of which I have noticed one
or two examples lately—another kind of satisfaction which is neither a
pleasure in the virtues that we do possess nor a pleasure in the
virtues we do not possess. It is the pleasure which a man takes in the
presence or absence of certain things in himself without ever
adequately asking himself whether in his case they constitute virtues
at all. A man will plume himself because he is not bad in some
particular way, when the truth is that he is not good enough to be bad
in that particular way. Some priggish little clerk will say, “I have
reason to congratulate myself that I am a civilised person, and not so
bloodthirsty as the Mad Mullah.” Somebody ought to say to him, “A
really good man would be less bloodthirsty than the Mullah. But you are
less bloodthirsty, not because you are more of a good man, but because
you are a great deal less of a man. You are not bloodthirsty, not
because you would spare your enemy, but because you would run away from
him.” Or again, some Puritan with a sullen type of piety would say, “I
have reason to congratulate myself that I do not worship graven images
like the old heathen Greeks.” And again somebody ought to say to him,
“The best religion may not worship graven images, because it may see
beyond them. But if you do not worship graven images, it is only
because you are mentally and morally quite incapable of graving them.
True religion, perhaps, is above idolatry. But you are below idolatry.
You are not holy enough yet to worship a lump of stone.”

Mr. F. C. Gould, the brilliant and felicitous caricaturist, recently
delivered a most interesting speech upon the nature and atmosphere of
our modern English caricature. I think there is really very little to
congratulate oneself about in the condition of English caricature.
There are few causes for pride; probably the greatest cause for pride
is Mr. F. C. Gould. But Mr. F. C. Gould, forbidden by modesty to adduce
this excellent ground for optimism, fell back upon saying a thing which
is said by numbers of other people, but has not perhaps been said
lately with the full authority of an eminent cartoonist. He said that
he thought “that they might congratulate themselves that the style of
caricature which found acceptation nowadays was very different from the
lampoon of the old days.” Continuing, he said, according to the
newspaper report, “On looking back to the political lampoons of
Rowlandson’s and Gilray’s time they would find them coarse and brutal.
In some countries abroad still, ‘even in America,’ the method of
political caricature was of the bludgeon kind. The fact was we had
passed the bludgeon stage. If they were brutal in attacking a man, even
for political reasons, they roused sympathy for the man who was
attacked. What they had to do was to rub in the point they wanted to
emphasise as gently as they could.” (Laughter and applause.)

Anybody reading these words, and anybody who heard them, will certainly
feel that there is in them a great deal of truth, as well as a great
deal of geniality. But along with that truth and with that geniality
there is a streak of that erroneous type of optimism which is founded
on the fallacy of which I have spoken above. Before we congratulate
ourselves upon the absence of certain faults from our nation or
society, we ought to ask ourselves why it is that these faults are
absent. Are we without the fault because we have the opposite virtue?
Or are we without the fault because we have the opposite fault? It is a
good thing assuredly, to be innocent of any excess; but let us be sure
that we are not innocent of excess merely by being guilty of defect. Is
it really true that our English political satire is so moderate because
it is so magnanimous, so forgiving, so saintly? Is it penetrated
through and through with a mystical charity, with a psychological
tenderness? Do we spare the feelings of the Cabinet Minister because we
pierce through all his apparent crimes and follies down to the dark
virtues of which his own soul is unaware? Do we temper the wind to the
Leader of the Opposition because in our all-embracing heart we pity and
cherish the struggling spirit of the Leader of the Opposition? Briefly,
have we left off being brutal because we are too grand and generous to
be brutal? Is it really true that we are _better_ than brutality? Is it
really true that we have _passed_ the bludgeon stage?

I fear that there is, to say the least of it, another side to the
matter. Is it not only too probable that the mildness of our political
satire, when compared with the political satire of our fathers, arises
simply from the profound unreality of our current politics? Rowlandson
and Gilray did not fight merely because they were naturally pothouse
pugilists; they fought because they had something to fight about. It is
easy enough to be refined about things that do not matter; but men
kicked and plunged a little in that portentous wrestle in which swung
to and fro, alike dizzy with danger, the independence of England, the
independence of Ireland, the independence of France. If we wish for a
proof of this fact that the lack of refinement did not come from mere
brutality, the proof is easy. The proof is that in that struggle no
personalities were more brutal than the really refined personalities.
None were more violent and intolerant than those who were by nature
polished and sensitive. Nelson, for instance, had the nerves and good
manners of a woman: nobody in his senses, I suppose, would call Nelson
“brutal.” But when he was touched upon the national matter, there
sprang out of him a spout of oaths, and he could only tell men to
“Kill! kill! kill the d----d Frenchmen.” It would be as easy to take
examples on the other side. Camille Desmoulins was a man of much the
same type, not only elegant and sweet in temper, but almost tremulously
tender and humanitarian. But he was ready, he said, “to embrace Liberty
upon a pile of corpses.” In Ireland there were even more instances.
Robert Emmet was only one famous example of a whole family of men at
once sensitive and savage. I think that Mr. F.C. Gould is altogether
wrong in talking of this political ferocity as if it were some sort of
survival from ruder conditions, like a flint axe or a hairy man.
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is
certainly the worst kind of cruelty. But there is nothing in the least
barbaric or ignorant about intellectual cruelty. The great Renaissance
artists who mixed colours exquisitely mixed poisons equally
exquisitely; the great Renaissance princes who designed instruments of
music also designed instruments of torture. Barbarity, malignity, the
desire to hurt men, are the evil things generated in atmospheres of
intense reality when great nations or great causes are at war. We may,
perhaps, be glad that we have not got them: but it is somewhat
dangerous to be proud that we have not got them. Perhaps we are hardly
great enough to have them. Perhaps some great virtues have to be
generated, as in men like Nelson or Emmet, before we can have these
vices at all, even as temptations. I, for one, believe that if our
caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is not because they are too
big to hate them, but because their enemies are not big enough to hate.
I do not think we have passed the bludgeon stage. I believe we have not
come to the bludgeon stage. We must be better, braver, and purer men
than we are before we come to the bludgeon stage.

Let us then, by all means, be proud of the virtues that we have not
got; but let us not be too arrogant about the virtues that we cannot
help having. It may be that a man living on a desert island has a right
to congratulate himself upon the fact that he can meditate at his ease.
But he must not congratulate himself on the fact that he is on a desert
island, and at the same time congratulate himself on the self-restraint
he shows in not going to a ball every night. Similarly our England may
have a right to congratulate itself upon the fact that her politics are
very quiet, amicable, and humdrum. But she must not congratulate
herself upon that fact and also congratulate herself upon the
self-restraint she shows in not tearing herself and her citizens into
rags. Between two English Privy Councillors polite language is a mark
of civilisation, but really not a mark of magnanimity.

Allied to this question is the kindred question on which we so often
hear an innocent British boast—the fact that our statesmen are
privately on very friendly relations, although in Parliament they sit
on opposite sides of the House. Here, again, it is as well to have no
illusions. Our statesmen are not monsters of mystical generosity or
insane logic, who are really able to hate a man from three to twelve
and to love him from twelve to three. If our social relations are more
peaceful than those of France or America or the England of a hundred
years ago, it is simply because our politics are more peaceful; not
improbably because our politics are more fictitious. If our statesmen
agree more in private, it is for the very simple reason that they agree
more in public. And the reason they agree so much in both cases is
really that they belong to one social class; and therefore the dining
life is the real life. Tory and Liberal statesmen like each other, but
it is not because they are both expansive; it is because they are both
exclusive.




PATRIOTISM AND SPORT


I notice that some papers, especially papers that call themselves
patriotic, have fallen into quite a panic over the fact that we have
been twice beaten in the world of sport, that a Frenchman has beaten us
at golf, and that Belgians have beaten us at rowing. I suppose that the
incidents are important to any people who ever believed in the
self-satisfied English legend on this subject. I suppose that there are
men who vaguely believe that we could never be beaten by a Frenchman,
despite the fact that we have often been beaten by Frenchmen, and once
by a Frenchwoman. In the old pictures in _Punch_ you will find a
recurring piece of satire. The English caricaturists always assumed
that a Frenchman could not ride to hounds or enjoy English hunting. It
did not seem to occur to them that all the people who founded English
hunting were Frenchmen. All the Kings and nobles who originally rode to
hounds spoke French. Large numbers of those Englishmen who still ride
to hounds have French names. I suppose that the thing is important to
any one who is ignorant of such evident matters as these. I suppose
that if a man has ever believed that we English have some sacred and
separate right to be athletic, such reverses do appear quite enormous
and shocking. They feel as if, while the proper sun was rising in the
east, some other and unexpected sun had begun to rise in the
north-north-west by north. For the benefit, the moral and intellectual
benefit of such people, it may be worth while to point out that the
Anglo-Saxon has in these cases been defeated precisely by those
competitors whom he has always regarded as being out of the running; by
Latins, and by Latins of the most easy and unstrenuous type; not only
by Frenchman, but by Belgians. All this, I say, is worth telling to any
intelligent person who believes in the haughty theory of Anglo-Saxon
superiority. But, then, no intelligent person does believe in the
haughty theory of Anglo-Saxon superiority. No quite genuine Englishman
ever did believe in it. And the genuine Englishman these defeats will
in no respect dismay.

The genuine English patriot will know that the strength of England has
never depended upon any of these things; that the glory of England has
never had anything to do with them, except in the opinion of a large
section of the rich and a loose section of the poor which copies the
idleness of the rich. These people will, of course, think too much of
our failure, just as they thought too much of our success. The typical
Jingoes who have admired their countrymen too much for being conquerors
will, doubtless, despise their countrymen too much for being conquered.
But the Englishman with any feeling for England will know that athletic
failures do not prove that England is weak, any more than athletic
successes proved that England was strong. The truth is that athletics,
like all other things, especially modern, are insanely individualistic.
The Englishmen who win sporting prizes are exceptional among
Englishmen, for the simple reason that they are exceptional even among
men. English athletes represent England just about as much as Mr.
Barnum’s freaks represent America. There are so few of such people in
the whole world that it is almost a toss-up whether they are found in
this or that country.

If any one wants a simple proof of this, it is easy to find. When the
great English athletes are not exceptional Englishmen they are
generally not Englishmen at all. Nay, they are often representatives of
races of which the average tone is specially incompatible with
athletics. For instance, the English are supposed to rule the natives
of India in virtue of their superior hardiness, superior activity,
superior health of body and mind. The Hindus are supposed to be our
subjects because they are less fond of action, less fond of openness
and the open air. In a word, less fond of cricket. And, substantially,
this is probably true, that the Indians are less fond of cricket. All
the same, if you ask among Englishmen for the very best cricket-player,
you will find that he is an Indian. Or, to take another case: it is,
broadly speaking, true that the Jews are, as a race, pacific,
intellectual, indifferent to war, like the Indians, or, perhaps,
contemptuous of war, like the Chinese: nevertheless, of the very good
prize-fighters, one or two have been Jews.

This is one of the strongest instances of the particular kind of evil
that arises from our English form of the worship of athletics. It
concentrates too much upon the success of individuals. It began, quite
naturally and rightly, with wanting England to win. The second stage
was that it wanted some Englishmen to win. The third stage was (in the
ecstasy and agony of some special competition) that it wanted one
particular Englishman to win. And the fourth stage was that when he had
won, it discovered that he was not even an Englishman.

This is one of the points, I think, on which something might really be
said for Lord Roberts and his rather vague ideas which vary between
rifle clubs and conscription. Whatever may be the advantages or
disadvantages otherwise of the idea, it is at least an idea of
procuring equality and a sort of average in the athletic capacity of
the people; it might conceivably act as a corrective to our mere
tendency to see ourselves in certain exceptional athletes. As it is,
there are millions of Englishmen who really think that they are a
muscular race because C.B. Fry is an Englishman. And there are many of
them who think vaguely that athletics must belong to England because
Ranjitsinhji is an Indian.

But the real historic strength of England, physical and moral, has
never had anything to do with this athletic specialism; it has been
rather hindered by it. Somebody said that the Battle of Waterloo was
won on Eton playing-fields. It was a particularly unfortunate remark,
for the English contribution to the victory of Waterloo depended very
much more than is common in victories upon the steadiness of the rank
and file in an almost desperate situation. The Battle of Waterloo was
won by the stubbornness of the common soldier—that is to say, it was
won by the man who had never been to Eton. It was absurd to say that
Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields. But it might have been fairly
said that Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys
played a very clumsy cricket. In a word, it was the average of the
nation that was strong, and athletic glories do not indicate much about
the average of a nation. Waterloo was not won by good cricket-players.
But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had
some minimum of athletic instincts and habits.

It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows
that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation
when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few
experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely
looking on. Suppose that whenever we heard of walking in England it
always meant walking forty-five miles a day without fatigue. We should
be perfectly certain that only a few men were walking at all, and that
all the other British subjects were being wheeled about in Bath-chairs.
But if when we hear of walking it means slow walking, painful walking,
and frequent fatigue, then we know that the mass of the nation still is
walking. We know that England is still literally on its feet.

The difficulty is therefore that the actual raising of the standard of
athletics has probably been bad for national athleticism. Instead of
the tournament being a healthy _mêlée_ into which any ordinary man
would rush and take his chance, it has become a fenced and guarded
tilting-yard for the collision of particular champions against whom no
ordinary man would pit himself or even be permitted to pit himself. If
Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields it was because Eton cricket was
probably much more careless then than it is now. As long as the game
was a game, everybody wanted to join in it. When it becomes an art,
every one wants to look at it. When it was frivolous it may have won
Waterloo: when it was serious and efficient it lost Magersfontein.

In the Waterloo period there was a general rough-and-tumble athleticism
among average Englishmen. It cannot be re-created by cricket, or by
conscription, or by any artificial means. It was a thing of the soul.
It came out of laughter, religion, and the spirit of the place. But it
was like the modern French duel in this—that it might happen to
anybody. If I were a French journalist it might really happen that
Monsieur Clemenceau might challenge me to meet him with pistols. But I
do not think that it is at all likely that Mr. C. B. Fry will ever
challenge me to meet him with cricket-bats.




AN ESSAY ON TWO CITIES


A little while ago I fell out of England into the town of Paris. If a
man fell out of the moon into the town of Paris he would know that it
was the capital of a great nation. If, however, he fell (perhaps off
some other side of the moon) so as to hit the city of London, he would
not know so well that it was the capital of a great nation; at any
rate, he would not know that the nation was so great as it is. This
would be so even on the assumption that the man from the moon could not
read our alphabet, as presumably he could not, unless elementary
education in that planet has gone to rather unsuspected lengths. But it
is true that a great part of the distinctive quality which separates
Paris from London may be even seen in the names. Real democrats always
insist that England is an aristocratic country. Real aristocrats always
insist (for some mysterious reason) that it is a democratic country.
But if any one has any real doubt about the matter let him consider
simply the names of the streets. Nearly all the streets out of the
Strand, for instance, are named after the first name, second name,
third name, fourth, fifth, and sixth names of some particular noble
family; after their relations, connections, or places of
residence—Arundel Street, Norfolk Street, Villiers Street, Bedford
Street, Southampton Street, and any number of others. The names are
varied, so as to introduce the same family under all sorts of different
surnames. Thus we have Arundel Street and also Norfolk Street; thus we
have Buckingham Street and also Villiers Street. To say that this is
not aristocracy is simply intellectual impudence. I am an ordinary
citizen, and my name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton; and I confess that if
I found three streets in a row in the Strand, the first called Gilbert
Street, the second Keith Street, and the third Chesterton Street, I
should consider that I had become a somewhat more important person in
the commonwealth than was altogether good for its health. If Frenchmen
ran London (which God forbid!), they would think it quite as ludicrous
that those streets should be named after the Duke of Buckingham as that
they should be named after me. They are streets out of one of the main
thoroughfares of London. If French methods were adopted, one of them
would be called Shakspere Street, another Cromwell Street, another
Wordsworth Street; there would be statues of each of these persons at
the end of each of these streets, and any streets left over would be
named after the date on which the Reform Bill was passed or the Penny
Postage established.

Suppose a man tried to find people in London by the names of the
places. It would make a fine farce, illustrating our illogicality. Our
hero having once realised that Buckingham Street was named after the
Buckingham family, would naturally walk into Buckingham Palace in
search of the Duke of Buckingham. To his astonishment he would meet
somebody quite different. His simple lunar logic would lead him to
suppose that if he wanted the Duke of Marlborough (which seems
unlikely) he would find him at Marlborough House. He would find the
Prince of Wales. When at last he understood that the Marlboroughs live
at Blenheim, named after the great Marlborough’s victory, he would, no
doubt, go there. But he would again find himself in error if, acting
upon this principle, he tried to find the Duke of Wellington, and told
the cabman to drive to Waterloo. I wonder that no one has written a
wild romance about the adventures of such an alien, seeking the great
English aristocrats, and only guided by the names; looking for the Duke
of Bedford in the town of that name, seeking for some trace of the Duke
of Norfolk in Norfolk. He might sail for Wellington in New Zealand to
find the ancient seat of the Wellingtons. The last scene might show him
trying to learn Welsh in order to converse with the Prince of Wales.

But even if the imaginary traveller knew no alphabet of this earth at
all, I think it would still be possible to suppose him seeing a
difference between London and Paris, and, upon the whole, the real
difference. He would not be able to read the words “Quai Voltaire;” but
he would see the sneering statue and the hard, straight roads; without
having heard of Voltaire he would understand that the city was
Voltairean. He would not know that Fleet Street was named after the
Fleet Prison. But the same national spirit which kept the Fleet Prison
closed and narrow still keeps Fleet Street closed and narrow. Or, if
you will, you may call Fleet Street cosy, and the Fleet Prison cosy. I
think I could be more comfortable in the Fleet Prison, in an English
way of comfort, than just under the statue of Voltaire. I think that
the man from the moon would know France without knowing French; I think
that he would know England without having heard the word. For in the
last resort all men talk by signs. To talk by statues is to talk by
signs; to talk by cities is to talk by signs. Pillars, palaces,
cathedrals, temples, pyramids, are an enormous dumb alphabet: as if
some giant held up his fingers of stone. The most important things at
the last are always said by signs, even if, like the Cross on St.
Paul’s, they are signs in heaven. If men do not understand signs, they
will never understand words.

For my part, I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of
education should be to restore simplicity. If you like to put it so,
the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief
object of education is to unlearn things. The chief object of education
is to unlearn all the weariness and wickedness of the world and to get
back into that state of exhilaration we all instinctively celebrate
when we write by preference of children and of boys. If I were an
examiner appointed to examine all examiners (which does not at present
appear probable), I would not only ask the teachers how much knowledge
they had imparted; I would ask them how much splendid and scornful
ignorance they had erected, like some royal tower in arms. But, in any
case, I would insist that people should have so much simplicity as
would enable them to see things suddenly and to see things as they are.
I do not care so much whether they can read the names over the shops. I
do care very much whether they can read the shops. I do not feel deeply
troubled as to whether they can tell where London is on the map so long
as they can tell where Brixton is on the way home. I do not even mind
whether they can put two and two together in the mathematical sense; I
am content if they can put two and two together in the metaphorical
sense. But all this longer statement of an obvious view comes back to
the metaphor I have employed. I do not care a dump whether they know
the alphabet, so long as they know the dumb alphabet.

Unfortunately, I have noticed in many aspects of our popular education
that this is not done at all. One teaches our London children to see
London with abrupt and simple eyes. And London is far more difficult to
see properly than any other place. London is a riddle. Paris is an
explanation. The education of the Parisian child is something
corresponding to the clear avenues and the exact squares of Paris. When
the Parisian boy has done learning about the French reason and the
Roman order he can go out and see the thing repeated in the shapes of
many shining public places, in the angles of many streets. But when the
English boy goes out, after learning about a vague progress and
idealism, he cannot see it anywhere. He cannot see anything anywhere,
except Sapolio and the _Daily Mail_. We must either alter London to
suit the ideals of our education, or else alter our education to suit
the great beauty of London.




FRENCH AND ENGLISH


It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being
international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international.
Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we
must be national. And it is largely because those who call themselves
the friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinction
that they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which they
belong. International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace
after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the
destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like
the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each
other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be
each other. And in the case of national character this can be seen in a
curious way. It will generally be found, I think, that the more a man
really appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less he
will attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is
something in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate. The
Englishman who has a fancy for France will try to be French; the
Englishman who admires France will remain obstinately English. This is
to be particularly noticed in the case of our relations with the
French, because it is one of the outstanding peculiarities of the
French that their vices are all on the surface, and their extraordinary
virtues concealed. One might almost say that their vices are the flower
of their virtues.

Thus their obscenity is the expression of their passionate love of
dragging all things into the light. The avarice of their peasants means
the independence of their peasants. What the English call their
rudeness in the streets is a phase of their social equality. The
worried look of their women is connected with the responsibility of
their women; and a certain unconscious brutality of hurry and gesture
in the men is related to their inexhaustible and extraordinary military
courage. Of all countries, therefore, France is the worst country for a
superficial fool to admire. Let a fool hate France: if the fool loves
it he will soon be a knave. He will certainly admire it, not only for
the things that are not creditable, but actually for the things that
are not there. He will admire the grace and indolence of the most
industrious people in the world. He will admire the romance and fantasy
of the most determinedly respectable and commonplace people in the
world. This mistake the Englishman will make if he admires France too
hastily; but the mistake that he makes about France will be slight
compared with the mistake that he makes about himself. An Englishman
who professes really to like French realistic novels, really to be at
home in a French modern theatre, really to experience no shock on first
seeing the savage French caricatures, is making a mistake very
dangerous for his own sincerity. He is admiring something he does not
understand. He is reaping where he has not sown, and taking up where he
has not laid down; he is trying to taste the fruit when he has never
toiled over the tree. He is trying to pluck the exquisite fruit of
French cynicism, when he has never tilled the rude but rich soil of
French virtue.

The thing can only be made clear to Englishmen by turning it round.
Suppose a Frenchman came out of democratic France to live in England,
where the shadow of the great houses still falls everywhere, and where
even freedom was, in its origin, aristocratic. If the Frenchman saw our
aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if
he set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all
know that we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive
little gnat. He would be imitating English aristocracy; he would be
imitating the English vice. But he would not even understand the vice
he plagiarised: especially he would not understand that the vice is
partly a virtue. He would not understand those elements in the English
which balance snobbishness and make it human: the great kindness of the
English, their hospitality, their unconscious poetry, their sentimental
conservatism, which really admires the gentry. The French Royalist sees
that the English like their King. But he does not grasp that while it
is base to worship a King, it is almost noble to worship a powerless
King. The impotence of the Hanoverian Sovereigns has raised the English
loyal subject almost to the chivalry and dignity of a Jacobite. The
Frenchman sees that the English servant is respectful: he does not
realise that he is also disrespectful; that there is an English legend
of the humorous and faithful servant, who is as much a personality as
his master; the Caleb Balderstone, the Sam Weller. He sees that the
English do admire a nobleman; he does not allow for the fact that they
admire a nobleman most when he does not behave like one. They like a
noble to be unconscious and amiable: the slave may be humble, but the
master must not be proud. The master is Life, as they would like to
enjoy it; and among the joys they desire in him there is none which
they desire more sincerely than that of generosity, of throwing money
about among mankind, or, to use the noble mediæval word, largesse—the
joy of largeness. That is why a cabman tells you are no gentleman if
you give him his correct fare. Not only his pocket, but his soul is
hurt. You have wounded his ideal. You have defaced his vision of the
perfect aristocrat. All this is really very subtle and elusive; it is
very difficult to separate what is mere slavishness from what is a sort
of vicarious nobility in the English love of a lord. And no Frenchman
could easily grasp it at all. He would think it was mere slavishness;
and if he liked it, he would be a slave. So every Englishman must (at
first) feel French candour to be mere brutality. And if he likes it, he
is a brute. These national merits must not be understood so easily. It
requires long years of plenitude and quiet, the slow growth of great
parks, the seasoning of oaken beams, the dark enrichment of red wine in
cellars and in inns, all the leisure and the life of England through
many centuries, to produce at last the generous and genial fruit of
English snobbishness. And it requires battery and barricade, songs in
the streets, and ragged men dead for an idea, to produce and justify
the terrible flower of French indecency.

When I was in Paris a short time ago, I went with an English friend of
mine to an extremely brilliant and rapid succession of French plays,
each occupying about twenty minutes. They were all astonishingly
effective; but there was one of them which was so effective that my
friend and I fought about it outside, and had almost to be separated by
the police. It was intended to indicate how men really behaved in a
wreck or naval disaster, how they break down, how they scream, how they
fight each other without object and in a mere hatred of everything. And
then there was added, with all that horrible irony which Voltaire
began, a scene in which a great statesman made a speech over their
bodies, saying that they were all heroes and had died in a fraternal
embrace. My friend and I came out of this theatre, and as he had lived
long in Paris, he said, like a Frenchman: “What admirable artistic
arrangement! Is it not exquisite?” “No,” I replied, assuming as far as
possible the traditional attitude of John Bull in the pictures in
_Punch_—“No, it is not exquisite. Perhaps it is unmeaning; if it is
unmeaning I do not mind. But if it has a meaning I know what the
meaning is; it is that under all their pageant of chivalry men are not
only beasts, but even hunted beasts. I do not know much of humanity,
especially when humanity talks in French. But I know when a thing is
meant to uplift the human soul, and when it is meant to depress it. I
know that ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ (where the actors talked even quicker)
was meant to encourage man. And I know that this was meant to
discourage him.” “These sentimental and moral views of art,” began my
friend, but I broke into his words as a light broke into my mind. “Let
me say to you,” I said, “what Jaurès said to Liebknecht at the
Socialist Conference: ‘You have not died on the barricades’. You are an
Englishman, as I am, and you ought to be as amiable as I am. These
people have some right to be terrible in art, for they have been
terrible in politics. They may endure mock tortures on the stage; they
have seen real tortures in the streets. They have been hurt for the
idea of Democracy. They have been hurt for the idea of Catholicism. It
is not so utterly unnatural to them that they should be hurt for the
idea of literature. But, by blazes, it is altogether unnatural to me!
And the worst thing of all is that I, who am an Englishman, loving
comfort, should find comfort in such things as this. The French do not
seek comfort here, but rather unrest. This restless people seeks to
keep itself in a perpetual agony of the revolutionary mood. Frenchmen,
seeking revolution, may find the humiliation of humanity inspiring. But
God forbid that two pleasure-seeking Englishmen should ever find it
pleasant!”




THE ZOLA CONTROVERSY


The difference between two great nations can be illustrated by the
coincidence that at this moment both France and England are engaged in
discussing the memorial of a literary man. France is considering the
celebration of the late Zola, England is considering that of the
recently deceased Shakspere. There is some national significance, it
may be, in the time that has elapsed. Some will find impatience and
indelicacy in this early attack on Zola or deification of him; but the
nation which has sat still for three hundred years after Shakspere’s
funeral may be considered, perhaps, to have carried delicacy too far.
But much deeper things are involved than the mere matter of time. The
point of the contrast is that the French are discussing whether there
shall be any monument, while the English are discussing only what the
monument shall be. In other words, the French are discussing a living
question, while we are discussing a dead one. Or rather, not a dead
one, but a settled one, which is quite a different thing.

When a thing of the intellect is settled it is not dead: rather it is
immortal. The multiplication table is immortal, and so is the fame of
Shakspere. But the fame of Zola is not dead or not immortal; it is at
its crisis, it is in the balance; and may be found wanting. The French,
therefore, are quite right in considering it a living question. It is
still living as a question, because it is not yet solved. But Shakspere
is not a living question: he is a living answer.

For my part, therefore, I think the French Zola controversy much more
practical and exciting than the English Shakspere one. The admission of
Zola to the Panthéon may be regarded as defining Zola’s position. But
nobody could say that a statue of Shakspere, even fifty feet high, on
the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, could define Shakspere’s position. It
only defines our position towards Shakspere. It is he who is fixed; it
is we who are unstable. The nearest approach to an English parallel to
the Zola case would be furnished if it were proposed to put some
savagely controversial and largely repulsive author among the ashes of
the greatest English poets. Suppose, for instance, it were proposed to
bury Mr. Rudyard Kipling in Westminster Abbey. I should be against
burying him in Westminster Abbey; first, because he is still alive (and
here I think even he himself might admit the justice of my protest);
and second, because I should like to reserve that rapidly narrowing
space for the great permanent examples, not for the interesting foreign
interruptions, of English literature. I would not have either Mr.
Kipling or Mr. George Moore in Westminster Abbey, though Mr. Kipling
has certainly caught even more cleverly than Mr. Moore the lucid and
cool cruelty of the French short story. I am very sure that Geoffrey
Chaucer and Joseph Addison get on very well together in the Poets’
Corner, despite the centuries that sunder them. But I feel that Mr.
George Moore would be much happier in Pere-la-Chaise, with a riotous
statue by Rodin on the top of him; and Mr. Kipling much happier under
some huge Asiatic monument, carved with all the cruelties of the gods.

As to the affair of the English monument to Shakspere, every people has
its own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to be
said for ours. There is the French monumental style, which consists in
erecting very pompous statues, very well done. There is the German
monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues,
badly done. And there is the English monumental method, the great
English way with statues, which consists in not erecting them at all. A
statue may be dignified; but the absence of a statue is always
dignified. For my part, I feel there is something national, something
wholesomely symbolic, in the fact that there is no statue of Shakspere.
There is, of course, one in Leicester Square; but the very place where
it stands shows that it was put up by a foreigner for foreigners. There
is surely something modest and manly about not attempting to express
our greatest poet in the plastic arts in which we do not excel. We
honour Shakspere as the Jews honour God—by not daring to make of him a
graven image. Our sculpture, our statues, are good enough for bankers
and philanthropists, who are our curse: not good enough for him, who is
our benediction. Why should we celebrate the very art in which we
triumph by the very art in which we fail?

England is most easily understood as the country of amateurs. It is
especially the country of amateur soldiers (that is, of Volunteers), of
amateur statesmen (that is, of aristocrats), and it is not unreasonable
or out of keeping that it should be rather specially the country of a
careless and lounging view of literature. Shakspere has no academic
monument for the same reason that he had no academic education. He had
small Latin and less Greek, and (in the same spirit) he has never been
commemorated in Latin epitaphs or Greek marble. If there is nothing
clear and fixed about the emblems of his fame, it is because there was
nothing clear and fixed about the origins of it. Those great schools
and Universities which watch a man in his youth may record him in his
death; but Shakspere had no such unifying traditions. We can only say
of him what we can say of Dickens. We can only say that he came from
nowhere and that he went everywhere. For him a monument in any place is
out of place. A cold statue in a certain square is unsuitable to him as
it would be unsuitable to Dickens. If we put up a statue of Dickens in
Portland Place to-morrow we should feel the stiffness as unnatural. We
should fear that the statue might stroll about the street at night.

But in France the question of whether Zola shall go to the Panthéon
when he is dead is quite as practicable as the question whether he
should go to prison when he was alive. It is the problem of whether the
nation shall take one turn of thought or another. In raising a monument
to Zola they do not raise merely a trophy, but a finger-post. The
question is one which will have to be settled in most European
countries; but like all such questions, it has come first to a head in
France; because France is the battlefield of Christendom. That question
is, of course, roughly this: whether in that ill-defined area of verbal
licence on certain dangerous topics it is an extenuation of indelicacy
or an aggravation of it that the indelicacy was deliberate and solemn.
Is indecency more indecent if it is grave, or more indecent if it is
gay? For my part, I belong to an old school in this matter. When a book
or a play strikes me as a crime, I am not disarmed by being told that
it is a serious crime. If a man has written something vile, I am not
comforted by the explanation that he quite meant to do it. I know all
the evils of flippancy; I do not like the man who laughs at the sight
of virtue. But I prefer him to the man who weeps at the sight of virtue
and complains bitterly of there being any such thing. I am not
reassured, when ethics are as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that
they are also as grave and sincere as suicide. And I think there is an
obvious fallacy in the bitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between
the aversion to Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the popularity of some such joke
as “Dear Old Charlie.” Surely there is nothing mysterious or
unphilosophic in the popular preference. The joke of “Dear Old Charlie”
is passed—because it is a joke. “Ghosts” are exorcised—because they
are ghosts.

This is, of course, the whole question of Zola. I am grown up, and I do
not worry myself much about Zola’s immorality. The thing I cannot stand
is his morality. If ever a man on this earth lived to embody the
tremendous text, “But if the light in your body be darkness, how great
is the darkness,” it was certainly he. Great men like Ariosto,
Rabelais, and Shakspere fall in foul places, flounder in violent but
venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are
dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still
speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the best
things in the world: Rabelais, of the instruction of ardent and austere
youth; Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakspere, of the splendid stillness
of mercy. But in Zola even the ideals are undesirable; Zola’s mercy is
colder than justice—nay, Zola’s mercy is more bitter in the mouth than
injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us,
like Rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning. He takes us
into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books
nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass
bottles, and where the rule is taught from the exceptions. Zola’s truth
answers the exact description of the skeleton in the cupboard; that is,
it is something of which a domestic custom forbids the discovery, but
which is quite dead, even when it is discovered. Macaulay said that the
Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but
because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Of such substance also was
this Puritan who had lost his God. A Puritan of this type is worse than
the Puritan who hates pleasure because there is evil in it. This man
actually hates evil because there is pleasure in it. Zola was worse
than a pornographer, he was a pessimist. He did worse than encourage
sin: he encouraged discouragement. He made lust loathsome because to
him lust meant life.




OXFORD FROM WITHOUT


Some time ago I ventured to defend that race of hunted and persecuted
outlaws, the Bishops; but until this week I had no idea of how much
persecuted they were. For instance, the Bishop of Birmingham made some
extremely sensible remarks in the House of Lords, to the effect that
Oxford and Cambridge were (as everybody knows they are) far too much
merely plutocratic playgrounds. One would have thought that an Anglican
Bishop might be allowed to know something about the English University
system, and even to have, if anything, some bias in its favour. But (as
I pointed out) the rollicking Radicalism of Bishops has to be
restrained. The man who writes the notes in the weekly paper called the
_Outlook_ feels that it is his business to restrain it. The passage has
such simple sublimity that I must quote it—

“Dr. Gore talked unworthily of his reputation when he spoke of the
older Universities as playgrounds for the rich and idle. In the first
place, the rich men there are not idle. Some of the rich men are, and
so are some of the poor men. On the whole, the sons of noble and
wealthy families keep up the best traditions of academic life.”

So far this seems all very nice. It is a part of the universal
principle on which Englishmen have acted in recent years. As you will
not try to make the best people the most powerful people, persuade
yourselves that the most powerful people are the best people. Mad
Frenchmen and Irishmen try to realise the ideal. To you belongs the
nobler (and much easier) task of idealising the real. First give your
Universities entirely into the power of the rich; then let the rich
start traditions; and then congratulate yourselves on the fact that the
sons of the rich keep up these traditions. All that is quite simple and
jolly. But then this critic, who crushes Dr. Gore from the high throne
of the _Outlook_, goes on in a way that is really perplexing. “It is
distinctly advantageous,” he says, “that rich and poor—_i. e._, young
men with a smooth path in life before them, and those who have to hew
out a road for themselves—should be brought into association. Each
class learns a great deal from the other. On the one side, social
conceit and exclusiveness give way to the free spirit of competition
amongst all classes; on the other side, angularities and prejudices are
rubbed away.” Even this I might have swallowed. But the paragraph
concludes with this extraordinary sentence: “We get the net result in
such careers as those of Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and Mr. Asquith.”

Those three names lay my intellect prostrate. The rest of the argument
I understand quite well. The social exclusiveness of aristocrats at
Oxford and Cambridge gives way before the free spirit of competition
amongst all classes. That is to say, there is at Oxford so hot and keen
a struggle, consisting of coal-heavers, London clerks, gypsies,
navvies, drapers’ assistants, grocers’ assistants—in short, all the
classes that make up the bulk of England—there is such a fierce
competition at Oxford among all these people that in its presence
aristocratic exclusiveness gives way. That is all quite clear. I am not
quite sure about the facts, but I quite understand the argument. But
then, having been called upon to contemplate this bracing picture of a
boisterous turmoil of all the classes of England, I am suddenly asked
to accept as example of it, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and the present
Chancellor of the Exchequer. What part do these gentlemen play in the
mental process? Is Lord Curzon one of the rugged and ragged poor men
whose angularities have been rubbed away? Or is he one of those whom
Oxford immediately deprived of all kind of social exclusiveness? His
Oxford reputation does not seem to bear out either account of him. To
regard Lord Milner as a typical product of Oxford would surely be
unfair. It would be to deprive the educational tradition of Germany of
one of its most typical products. English aristocrats have their
faults, but they are not at all like Lord Milner. What Mr. Asquith was
meant to prove, whether he was a rich man who lost his exclusiveness,
or a poor man who lost his angles, I am utterly unable to conceive.

There is, however, one mild but very evident truth that might perhaps
be mentioned. And it is this: that none of those three excellent
persons is, or ever has been, a poor man in the sense that that word is
understood by the overwhelming majority of the English nation. There
are no poor men at Oxford in the sense that the majority of men in the
street are poor. The very fact that the writer in the _Outlook_ can
talk about such people as poor shows that he does not understand what
the modern problem is. His kind of poor man rather reminds me of the
Earl in the ballad by that great English satirist, Sir W.S. Gilbert,
whose angles (very acute angles) had, I fear, never been rubbed down by
an old English University. The reader will remember that when the
Periwinkle-girl was adored by two Dukes, the poet added—

“A third adorer had the girl,
    A man of lowly station;
A miserable grovelling Earl
    Besought her approbation.”


Perhaps, indeed, some allusion to our University system, and to the
universal clash in it of all the classes of the community, may be found
in the verse a little farther on, which says—

“He’d had, it happily befell,
    A decent education;
His views would have befitted well
    A far superior station.”


Possibly there was as simple a chasm between Lord Curzon and Lord
Milner. But I am afraid that the chasm will become almost
imperceptible, a microscopic crack, if we compare it with the chasm
that separates either or both of them from the people of this country.

Of course the truth is exactly as the Bishop of Birmingham put it. I am
sure that he did not put it in any unkindly or contemptuous spirit
towards those old English seats of learning, which whether they are or
are not seats of learning, are, at any rate, old and English, and those
are two very good things to be. The Old English University is a
playground for the governing class. That does not prove that it is a
bad thing; it might prove that it was a very good thing. Certainly if
there is a governing class, let there be a playground for the governing
class. I would much rather be ruled by men who know how to play than by
men who do not know how to play. Granted that we are to be governed by
a rich section of the community, it is certainly very important that
that section should be kept tolerably genial and jolly. If the
sensitive man on the _Outlook_ does not like the phrase, “Playground of
the rich,” I can suggest a phrase that describes such a place as Oxford
perhaps with more precision. It is a place for humanising those who
might otherwise be tyrants, or even experts.

To pretend that the aristocrat meets all classes at Oxford is too
ludicrous to be worth discussion. But it may be true that he meets more
different kinds of men than he would meet under a strictly aristocratic
_regime_ of private tutors and small schools. It all comes back to the
fact that the English, if they were resolved to have an aristocracy,
were at least resolved to have a good-natured aristocracy. And it is
due to them to say that almost alone among the peoples of the world,
they have succeeded in getting one. One could almost tolerate the
thing, if it were not for the praise of it. One might endure Oxford,
but not the _Outlook_.

When the poor man at Oxford loses his angles (which means, I suppose,
his independence), he may perhaps, even if his poverty is of that
highly relative type possible at Oxford, gain a certain amount of
worldly advantage from the surrender of those angles. I must confess,
however, that I can imagine nothing nastier than to lose one’s angles.
It seems to me that a desire to retain some angles about one’s person
is a desire common to all those human beings who do not set their
ultimate hopes upon looking like Humpty-Dumpty. Our angles are simply
our shapes. I cannot imagine any phrase more full of the subtle and
exquisite vileness which is poisoning and weakening our country than
such a phrase as this, about the desirability of rubbing down the
angularities of poor men. Reduced to permanent and practical human
speech, it means nothing whatever except the corrupting of that first
human sense of justice which is the critic of all human institutions.

It is not in any such spirit of facile and reckless reassurance that we
should approach the really difficult problem of the delicate virtues
and the deep dangers of our two historic seats of learning. A good son
does not easily admit that his sick mother is dying; but neither does a
good son cheerily assert that she is “all right.” There are many good
arguments for leaving the two historic Universities exactly as they
are. There are many good arguments for smashing them or altering them
entirely. But in either case the plain truth told by the Bishop of
Birmingham remains. If these Universities were destroyed, they would
not be destroyed as Universities. If they are preserved, they will not
be preserved as Universities. They will be preserved strictly and
literally as playgrounds; places valued for their hours of leisure more
than for their hours of work. I do not say that this is unreasonable;
as a matter of private temperament I find it attractive. It is not only
possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible
to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be
maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a
task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure
innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so
good that one can treat everything as a joke—that may be, perhaps, the
real end and final holiday of human souls. When we are really holy we
may regard the Universe as a lark; so perhaps it is not essentially
wrong to regard the University as a lark. But the plain and present
fact is that our upper classes do regard the University as a lark, and
do not regard it as a University. It also happens very often that
through some oversight they neglect to provide themselves with that
extreme degree of holiness which I have postulated as a necessary
preliminary to such indulgence in the higher frivolity.

Humanity, always dreaming of a happy race, free, fantastic, and at
ease, has sometimes pictured them in some mystical island, sometimes in
some celestial city, sometimes as fairies, gods, or citizens of
Atlantis. But one method in which it has often indulged is to picture
them as aristocrats, as a special human class that could actually be
seen hunting in the woods or driving about the streets. And this never
was (as some silly Germans say) a worship of pride and scorn; mankind
never really admired pride; mankind never had any thing but a scorn for
scorn. It was a worship of the spectacle of happiness; especially of
the spectacle of youth. This is what the old Universities in their
noblest aspect really are; and this is why there is always something to
be said for keeping them as they are. Aristocracy is not a tyranny; it
is not even merely a spell. It is a vision. It is a deliberate
indulgence in a certain picture of pleasure painted for the purpose;
every Duchess is (in an innocent sense) painted, like Gainsborough’s
“Duchess of Devonshire.” She is only beautiful because, at the back of
all, the English people wanted her to be beautiful. In the same way,
the lads at Oxford and Cambridge are only larking because England, in
the depths of its solemn soul, really wishes them to lark. All this is
very human and pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no
such things in the world as danger and honour and intellectual
responsibility. But if aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most
unpractical of all visions. It is not a working way of doing things to
put all your happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at
them. It is not a working way of managing education to be entirely
content with the mere fact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the
world) given the luckiest boys the jolliest time. It would be easy
enough, like the writer in the _Outlook_, to enjoy the pleasures and
deny the perils. Oh what a happy place England would be to live in if
only one did not love it!




WOMAN


A correspondent has written me an able and interesting letter in the
matter of some allusions of mine to the subject of communal kitchens.
He defends communal kitchens very lucidly from the standpoint of the
calculating collectivist; but, like many of his school, he cannot
apparently grasp that there is another test of the whole matter, with
which such calculation has nothing at all to do. He knows it would be
cheaper if a number of us ate at the same time, so as to use the same
table. So it would. It would also be cheaper if a number of us slept at
different times, so as to use the same pair of trousers. But the
question is not how cheap are we buying a thing, but what are we
buying? It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a
slave.

My correspondent also says that the habit of dining out in restaurants,
etc., is growing. So, I believe, is the habit of committing suicide. I
do not desire to connect the two facts together. It seems fairly clear
that a man could not dine at a restaurant because he had just committed
suicide; and it would be extreme, perhaps, to suggest that he commits
suicide because he has just dined at a restaurant. But the two cases,
when put side by side, are enough to indicate the falsity and
poltroonery of this eternal modern argument from what is in fashion.
The question for brave men is not whether a certain thing is
increasing; the question is whether we are increasing it. I dine very
often in restaurants because the nature of my trade makes it
convenient: but if I thought that by dining in restaurants I was
working for the creation of communal meals, I would never enter a
restaurant again; I would carry bread and cheese in my pocket or eat
chocolate out of automatic machines. For the personal element in some
things is sacred. I heard Mr. Will Crooks put it perfectly the other
day: “The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.”

My correspondent says, “Would not our women be spared the drudgery of
cooking and all its attendant worries, leaving them free for higher
culture?” The first thing that occurs to me to say about this is very
simple, and is, I imagine, a part of all our experience. If my
correspondent can find any way of preventing women from worrying, he
will indeed be a remarkable man. I think the matter is a much deeper
one. First of all, my correspondent overlooks a distinction which is
elementary in our human nature. Theoretically, I suppose, every one
would like to be freed from worries. But nobody in the world would
always like to be freed from worrying occupations. I should very much
like (as far as my feelings at the moment go) to be free from the
consuming nuisance of writing this article. But it does not follow that
I should like to be free from the consuming nuisance of being a
journalist. Because we are worried about a thing, it does not follow
that we are not interested in it. The truth is the other way. If we are
not interested, why on earth should we be worried? Women are worried
about housekeeping, but those that are most interested are the most
worried. Women are still more worried about their husbands and their
children. And I suppose if we strangled the children and poleaxed the
husbands it would leave women free for higher culture. That is, it
would leave them free to begin to worry about that. For women would
worry about higher culture as much as they worry about everything else.

I believe this way of talking about women and their higher culture is
almost entirely a growth of the classes which (unlike the journalistic
class to which I belong) have always a reasonable amount of money. One
odd thing I specially notice. Those who write like this seem entirely
to forget the existence of the working and wage-earning classes. They
say eternally, like my correspondent, that the ordinary woman is always
a drudge. And what, in the name of the Nine Gods, is the ordinary man?
These people seem to think that the ordinary man is a Cabinet Minister.
They are always talking about man going forth to wield power, to carve
his own way, to stamp his individuality on the world, to command and to
be obeyed. This may be true of a certain class. Dukes, perhaps, are not
drudges; but, then, neither are Duchesses. The Ladies and Gentlemen of
the Smart Set are quite free for the higher culture, which consists
chiefly of motoring and Bridge. But the ordinary man who typifies and
constitutes the millions that make up our civilisation is no more free
for the higher culture than his wife is.

Indeed, he is not so free. Of the two sexes the woman is in the more
powerful position. For the average woman is at the head of something
with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders
and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick on another dull
brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another
dull figure, and do nothing else. The woman’s world is a small one,
perhaps, but she can alter it. The woman can tell the tradesman with
whom she deals some realistic things about himself. The clerk who does
this to the manager generally gets the sack, or shall we say (to avoid
the vulgarism), finds himself free for higher culture. Above all, as I
said in my previous article, the woman does work which is in some small
degree creative and individual. She can put the flowers or the
furniture in fancy arrangements of her own. I fear the bricklayer
cannot put the bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without
disaster to himself and others. If the woman is only putting a patch
into a carpet, she can choose the thing with regard to colour. I fear
it would not do for the office boy dispatching a parcel to choose his
stamps with a view to colour; to prefer the tender mauve of the
sixpenny to the crude scarlet of the penny stamp. A woman cooking may
not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can
introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition
of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and
imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.

The trouble is that the real question I raised is not discussed. It is
argued as a problem in pennies, not as a problem in people. It is not
the proposals of these reformers that I feel to be false so much as
their temper and their arguments. I am not nearly so certain that
communal kitchens are wrong as I am that the defenders of communal
kitchens are wrong. Of course, for one thing, there is a vast
difference between the communal kitchens of which I spoke and the
communal meal (_monstrum horrendum, informe_) which the darker and
wilder mind of my correspondent diabolically calls up. But in both the
trouble is that their defenders will not defend them humanly as human
institutions. They will not interest themselves in the staring
psychological fact that there are some things that a man or a woman, as
the case may be, wishes to do for himself or herself. He or she must do
it inventively, creatively, artistically, individually—in a word,
badly. Choosing your wife (say) is one of these things. Is choosing
your husband’s dinner one of these things? That is the whole question:
it is never asked.

And then the higher culture. I know that culture. I would not set any
man free for it if I could help it. The effect of it on the rich men
who are free for it is so horrible that it is worse than any of the
other amusements of the millionaire—worse than gambling, worse even
than philanthropy. It means thinking the smallest poet in Belgium
greater than the greatest poet of England. It means losing every
democratic sympathy. It means being unable to talk to a navvy about
sport, or about beer, or about the Bible, or about the Derby, or about
patriotism, or about anything whatever that he, the navvy, wants to
talk about. It means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish
thing to do. It means pardoning indecency only when it is gloomy
indecency. Its disciples will call a spade a spade; but only when it is
a grave-digger’s spade. The higher culture is sad, cheap, impudent,
unkind, without honesty and without ease. In short, it is “high.” That
abominable word (also applied to game) admirably describes it.

No; if you were setting women free for something else, I might be more
melted. If you can assure me, privately and gravely, that you are
setting women free to dance on the mountains like mænads, or to worship
some monstrous goddess, I will make a note of your request. If you are
quite sure that the ladies in Brixton, the moment they give up cooking,
will beat great gongs and blow horns to Mumbo-Jumbo, then I will agree
that the occupation is at least human and is more or less entertaining.
Women have been set free to be Bacchantes; they have been set free to
be Virgin Martyrs; they have been set free to be Witches. Do not ask
them now to sink so low as the higher culture.

I have my own little notions of the possible emancipation of women; but
I suppose I should not be taken very seriously if I propounded them. I
should favour anything that would increase the present enormous
authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The
average woman, as I have said, is a despot; the average man is a serf.
I am for any scheme that any one can suggest that will make the average
woman more of a despot. So far from wishing her to get her cooked meals
from outside, I should like her to cook more wildly and at her own will
than she does. So far from getting always the same meals from the same
place, let her invent, if she likes, a new dish every day of her life.
Let woman be more of a maker, not less. We are right to talk about
“Woman;” only blackguards talk about women. Yet all men talk about men,
and that is the whole difference. Men represent the deliberative and
democratic element in life. Woman represents the despotic.




THE MODERN MARTYR


The incident of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron
chains to the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of
most modern martyrdom. It generally consists of a man chaining himself
up and then complaining that he is not free. Some say that such larks
retard the cause of female suffrage, others say that such larks alone
can advance it; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that they have
the smallest effect one way or the other.

The modern notion of impressing the public by a mere demonstration of
unpopularity, by being thrown out of meetings or thrown into jail is
largely a mistake. It rests on a fallacy touching the true popular
value of martyrdom. People look at human history and see that it has
often happened that persecutions have not only advertised but even
advanced a persecuted creed, and given to its validity the public and
dreadful witness of dying men. The paradox was pictorially expressed in
Christian art, in which saints were shown brandishing as weapons the
very tools that had slain them. And because his martyrdom is thus a
power to the martyr, modern people think that any one who makes himself
slightly uncomfortable in public will immediately be uproariously
popular. This element of inadequate martyrdom is not true only of the
Suffragettes; it is true of many movements I respect and some that I
agree with. It was true, for instance, of the Passive Resisters, who
had pieces of their furniture sold up. The assumption is that if you
show your ordinary sincerity (or even your political ambition) by being
a nuisance to yourself as well as to other people, you will have the
strength of the great saints who passed through the fire. Any one who
can be hustled in a hall for five minutes, or put in a cell for five
days, has achieved what was meant by martyrdom, and has a halo in the
Christian art of the future. Miss Pankhurst will be represented holding
a policeman in each hand—the instruments of her martyrdom. The Passive
Resister will be shown symbolically carrying the teapot that was torn
from him by tyrannical auctioneers.

But there is a fallacy in this analogy of martyrdom. The truth is that
the special impressiveness which does come from being persecuted only
happens in the case of extreme persecution. For the fact that the
modern enthusiast will undergo some inconvenience for the creed he
holds only proves that he does hold it, which no one ever doubted. No
one doubts that the Nonconformist minister cares more for Nonconformity
than he does for his teapot. No one doubts that Miss Pankhurst wants a
vote more than she wants a quiet afternoon and an armchair. All our
ordinary intellectual opinions are worth a bit of a row: I remember
during the Boer War fighting an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen’s
Hall, and giving and receiving a bloody nose; but I did not think it
one of the incidents that produce the psychological effect of the Roman
amphitheatre or the stake at Smithfield. For in that impression there
is something more than the mere fact that a man is sincere enough to
give his time or his comfort. Pagans were not impressed by the torture
of Christians merely because it showed that they honestly held their
opinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts of
opinions. The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle. It
is that it gives an appearance of a man having something quite
specially strong to back him up, of his drawing upon some power. And
this can only be proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed;
when all the current of his bodily being is reversed and turned to
pain. If a man is seen to be roaring with laughter all the time that he
is skinned alive, it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere
in the recesses of his mind he had thought of a rather good joke.
Similarly, if men smiled and sang (as they did) while they were being
boiled or torn in pieces, the spectators felt the presence of something
more than mere mental honesty: they felt the presence of some new and
unintelligible kind of pleasure, which, presumably, came from
somewhere. It might be a strength of madness, or a lying spirit from
Hell; but it was something quite positive and extraordinary; as
positive as brandy and as extraordinary as conjuring. The Pagan said to
himself: “If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being
eaten by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still
attached to me and walking down the street?” The Secularists
laboriously explain that martyrdoms do not prove a faith to be true, as
if anybody was ever such a fool as to suppose that they did. What they
did prove, or, rather, strongly suggest, was that something had entered
human psychology which was stronger than strong pain. If a young girl,
scourged and bleeding to death, saw nothing but a crown descending on
her from God, the first mental step was not that her philosophy was
correct, but that she was certainly feeding on something. But this
particular point of psychology does not arise at all in the modern
cases of mere public discomfort or inconvenience. The causes of Miss
Pankhurst’s cheerfulness require no mystical explanations. If she were
being burned alive as a witch, if she then looked up in unmixed rapture
and saw a ballot-box descending out of heaven, then I should say that
the incident, though not conclusive, was frightfully impressive. It
would not prove logically that she ought to have the vote, or that
anybody ought to have the vote. But it would prove this: that there
was, for some reason, a sacramental reality in the vote, that the soul
could take the vote and feed on it; that it was in itself a positive
and overpowering pleasure, capable of being pitted against positive and
overpowering pain.

I should advise modern agitators, therefore, to give up this particular
method: the method of making very big efforts to get a very small
punishment. It does not really go down at all; the punishment is too
small, and the efforts are too obvious. It has not any of the
effectiveness of the old savage martyrdom, because it does not leave
the victim absolutely alone with his cause, so that his cause alone can
support him. At the same time it has about it that element of the
pantomimic and the absurd, which was the cruellest part of the slaying
and the mocking of the real prophets. St. Peter was crucified upside
down as a huge inhuman joke; but his human seriousness survived the
inhuman joke, because, in whatever posture, he had died for his faith.
The modern martyr of the Pankhurst type courts the absurdity without
making the suffering strong enough to eclipse the absurdity. She is
like a St. Peter who should deliberately stand on his head for ten
seconds and then expect to be canonised for it.

Or, again, the matter might be put in this way. Modern martyrdoms fail
even as demonstrations, because they do not prove even that the martyrs
are completely serious. I think, as a fact, that the modern martyrs
generally are serious, perhaps a trifle too serious. But their
martyrdom does not prove it; and the public does not always believe it.
Undoubtedly, as a fact, Dr. Clifford is quite honourably indignant with
what he considers to be clericalism, but he does not prove it by having
his teapot sold; for a man might easily have his teapot sold as an
actress has her diamonds stolen—as a personal advertisement. As a
matter of fact, Miss Pankhurst is quite in earnest about votes for
women. But she does not prove it by being chucked out of meetings. A
person might be chucked out of meetings just as young men are chucked
out of music-halls—for fun. But no man has himself eaten by a lion as a
personal advertisement. No woman is broiled on a gridiron for fun. That
is where the testimony of St. Perpetua and St. Faith comes in.
Doubtless it is no fault of these enthusiasts that they are not
subjected to the old and searching penalties; very likely they would
pass through them as triumphantly as St. Agatha. I am simply advising
them upon a point of policy, things being as they are. And I say that
the average man is not impressed with their sacrifices simply because
they are not and cannot be more decisive than the sacrifices which the
average man himself would make for mere fun if he were drunk. Drunkards
would interrupt meetings and take the consequences. And as for selling
a teapot, it is an act, I imagine, in which any properly constituted
drunkard would take a positive pleasure. The advertisement is not good
enough; it does not tell. If I were really martyred for an opinion
(which is more improbable than words can say), it would certainly only
be for one or two of my most central and sacred opinions. I might,
perhaps, be shot for England, but certainly not for the British Empire.
I might conceivably die for political freedom, but I certainly wouldn’t
die for Free Trade. But as for kicking up the particular kind of shindy
that the Suffragettes are kicking up, I would as soon do it for my
shallowest opinion as for my deepest one. It never could be anything
worse than an inconvenience; it never could be anything better than a
spree. Hence the British public, and especially the working classes,
regard the whole demonstration with fundamental indifference; for,
while it is a demonstration that probably is adopted from the most
fanatical motives, it is a demonstration which might be adopted from
the most frivolous.




ON POLITICAL SECRECY


Generally, instinctively, in the absence of any special reason,
humanity hates the idea of anything being hidden—that is, it hates the
idea of anything being successfully hidden. Hide-and-seek is a popular
pastime; but it assumes the truth of the text, “Seek and ye shall
find.” Ordinary mankind (gigantic and unconquerable in its power of
joy) can get a great deal of pleasure out of a game called “hide the
thimble,” but that is only because it is really a game of “see the
thimble.” Suppose that at the end of such a game the thimble had not
been found at all; suppose its place was unknown for ever: the result
on the players would not be playful, it would be tragic. That thimble
would hag-ride all their dreams. They would all die in asylums. The
pleasure is all in the poignant moment of passing from not knowing to
knowing. Mystery stories are very popular, especially when sold at
sixpence; but that is because the author of a mystery story reveals. He
is enjoyed not because he creates mystery, but because he destroys
mystery. Nobody would have the courage to publish a detective-story
which left the problem exactly where it found it. That would rouse even
the London public to revolution. No one dare publish a detective-story
that did not detect.

There are three broad classes of the special things in which human
wisdom does permit privacy. The first is the case I have mentioned—that
of hide-and-seek, or the police novel, in which it permits privacy only
in order to explode and smash privacy. The author makes first a
fastidious secret of how the Bishop was murdered, only in order that he
may at last declare, as from a high tower, to the whole democracy the
great glad news that he was murdered by the governess. In that case,
ignorance is only valued because being ignorant is the best and purest
preparation for receiving the horrible revelations of high life.
Somewhat in the same way being an agnostic is the best and purest
preparation for receiving the happy revelations of St. John.

This first sort of secrecy we may dismiss, for its whole ultimate
object is not to keep the secret, but to tell it. Then there is a
second and far more important class of things which humanity does agree
to hide. They are so important that they cannot possibly be discussed
here. But every one will know the kind of things I mean. In connection
with these, I wish to remark that though they are, in one sense, a
secret, they are also always a “sécret de Polichinelle.” Upon sex and
such matters we are in a human freemasonry; the freemasonry is
disciplined, but the freemasonry is free. We are asked to be silent
about these things, but we are not asked to be ignorant about them. On
the contrary, the fundamental human argument is entirely the other way.
It is the thing most common to humanity that is most veiled by
humanity. It is exactly because we all know that it is there that we
need not say that it is there.

Then there is a third class of things on which the best civilisation
does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is in
the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be
explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible—caprices, sudden
impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice. A man must not be
asked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he does
not know. A man is not asked (even in Germany) why he walks slow or
quick, simply because he could not answer. A man must take his own road
through a wood, and make his own use of a holiday. And the reason is
this: not because he has a strong reason, but actually because he has a
weak reason; because he has a slight and fleeting feeling about the
matter which he could not explain to a policeman, which perhaps the
very appearance of a policeman out of the bushes might destroy. He must
act on the impulse, because the impulse is unimportant, and he may
never have the same impulse again. If you like to put it so he must act
on the impulse because the impulse is not worth a moment’s thought. All
these fancies men feel should be private; and even Fabians have never
proposed to interfere with them.

Now, for the last fortnight the newspapers have been full of very
varied comments upon the problem of the secrecy of certain parts of our
political finance, and especially of the problem of the party funds.
Some papers have failed entirely to understand what the quarrel is
about. They have urged that Irish members and Labour members are also
under the shadow, or, as some have said, even more under it. The ground
of this frantic statement seems, when patiently considered, to be
simply this: that Irish and Labour members receive money for what they
do. All persons, as far as I know, on this earth receive money for what
they do; the only difference is that some people, like the Irish
members, do it.

I cannot imagine that any human being could think any other human being
capable of maintaining the proposition that men ought not to receive
money. The simple point is that, as we know that some money is given
rightly and some wrongly, an elementary common-sense leads us to look
with indifference at the money that is given in the middle of Ludgate
Circus, and to look with particular suspicion at the money which a man
will not give unless he is shut up in a box or a bathing-machine. In
short, it is too silly to suppose that anybody could ever have
discussed the desirability of funds. The only thing that even idiots
could ever have discussed is the concealment of funds. Therefore, the
whole question that we have to consider is whether the concealment of
political money-transactions, the purchase of peerages, the payment of
election expenses, is a kind of concealment that falls under any of the
three classes I have mentioned as those in which human custom and
instinct does permit us to conceal. I have suggested three kinds of
secrecy which are human and defensible. Can this institution be
defended by means of any of them?

Now the question is whether this political secrecy is of any of the
kinds that can be called legitimate. We have roughly divided legitimate
secrets into three classes. First comes the secret that is only kept in
order to be revealed, as in the detective stories; secondly, the secret
which is kept because everybody knows it, as in sex; and third, the
secret which is kept because it is too delicate and vague to be
explained at all, as in the choice of a country walk. Do any of these
broad human divisions cover such a case as that of secrecy of the
political and party finances? It would be absurd, and even delightfully
absurd, to pretend that any of them did. It would be a wild and
charming fancy to suggest that our politicians keep political secrets
only that they may make political revelations. A modern peer only
pretends that he has earned his peerage in order that he may more
dramatically declare, with a scream of scorn and joy, that he really
bought it. The Baronet pretends that he deserved his title only in
order to make more exquisite and startling the grand historical fact
that he did not deserve it. Surely this sounds improbable. Surely all
our statesmen cannot be saving themselves up for the excitement of a
death-bed repentance. The writer of detective tales makes a man a duke
solely in order to blast him with a charge of burglary. But surely the
Prime Minister does not make a man a duke solely in order to blast him
with a charge of bribery. No; the detective-tale theory of the secrecy
of political funds must (with a sigh) be given up.

Neither can we say that the thing is explained by that second case of
human secrecy which is so secret that it is hard to discuss it in
public. A decency is preserved about certain primary human matters
precisely because every one knows all about them. But the decency
touching contributions, purchases, and peerages is not kept up because
most ordinary men know what is happening; it is kept up precisely
because most ordinary men do not know what is happening. The ordinary
curtain of decorum covers normal proceedings. But no one will say that
being bribed is a normal proceeding.

And if we apply the third test to this problem of political secrecy,
the case is even clearer and even more funny. Surely no one will say
that the purchase of peerages and such things are kept secret because
they are so light and impulsive and unimportant that they must be
matters of individual fancy. A child sees a flower and for the first
time feels inclined to pick it. But surely no one will say that a
brewer sees a coronet and for the first time suddenly thinks that he
would like to be a peer. The child’s impulse need not be explained to
the police, for the simple reason that it could not be explained to
anybody. But does any one believe that the laborious political
ambitions of modern commercial men ever have this airy and
incommunicable character? A man lying on the beach may throw stones
into the sea without any particular reason. But does any one believe
that the brewer throws bags of gold into the party funds without any
particular reason? This theory of the secrecy of political money must
also be regretfully abandoned; and with it the two other possible
excuses as well. This secrecy is one which cannot be justified as a
sensational joke nor as a common human freemasonry, nor as an
indescribable personal whim. Strangely enough, indeed, it violates all
three conditions and classes at once. It is not hidden in order to be
revealed: it is hidden in order to be hidden. It is not kept secret
because it is a common secret of mankind, but because mankind must not
get hold of it. And it is not kept secret because it is too unimportant
to be told, but because it is much too important to bear telling. In
short, the thing we have is the real and perhaps rare political
phenomenon of an occult government. We have an exoteric and an esoteric
doctrine. England is really ruled by priestcraft, but not by priests.
We have in this country all that has ever been alleged against the evil
side of religion; the peculiar class with privileges, the sacred words
that are unpronounceable; the important things known only to the few.
In fact we lack nothing except the religion.




EDWARD VII. AND SCOTLAND


I have received a serious, and to me, at any rate, an impressive
remonstrance from the Scottish Patriotic Association. It appears that I
recently referred to Edward VII. of Great Britain and Ireland, King,
Defender of the Faith, under the horrible description of the King of
England. The Scottish Patriotic Association draws my attention to the
fact that by the provisions of the Act of Union, and the tradition of
nationality, the monarch should be referred to as the King of Britain.
The blow thus struck at me is particularly wounding because it is
particularly unjust. I believe in the reality of the independent
nationalities under the British Crown much more passionately and
positively than any other educated Englishman of my acquaintance
believes in it. I am quite certain that Scotland is a nation; I am
quite certain that nationality is the key of Scotland; I am quite
certain that all our success with Scotland has been due to the fact
that we have in spirit treated it as a nation. I am quite certain that
Ireland is a nation; I am quite certain that nationality is the key to
Ireland; I am quite certain that all our failure in Ireland arose from
the fact that we would not in spirit treat it as a nation. It would be
difficult to find, even among the innumerable examples that exist, a
stronger example of the immensely superior importance of sentiment to
what is called practicality than this case of the two sister nations.
It is not that we have encouraged a Scotchman to be rich; it is not
that we have encouraged a Scotchman to be active; it is not that we
have encouraged a Scotchman to be free. It is that we have quite
definitely encouraged a Scotchman to be Scotch.

A vague, but vivid impression was received from all our writers of
history, philosophy, and rhetoric that the Scottish element was
something really valuable in itself, was something which even
Englishmen were forced to recognise and respect. If we ever admitted
the beauty of Ireland, it was as something which might be loved by an
Englishman but which could hardly be respected even by an Irishman. A
Scotchman might be proud of Scotland; it was enough for an Irishman
that he could be fond of Ireland. Our success with the two nations has
been exactly proportioned to our encouragement of their independent
national emotion; the one that we would not treat nationally has alone
produced Nationalists. The one nation that we would not recognise as a
nation in theory is the one that we have been forced to recognise as a
nation in arms. The Scottish Patriotic Association has no need to draw
my attention to the importance of the separate national sentiment or
the need of keeping the Border as a sacred line. The case is quite
sufficiently proved by the positive history of Scotland. The place of
Scottish loyalty to England has been taken by English admiration of
Scotland. They do not need to envy us our titular leadership, when we
seem to envy them their separation.

I wish to make very clear my entire sympathy with the national
sentiment of the Scottish Patriotic Association. But I wish also to
make clear this very enlightening comparison between the fate of Scotch
and of Irish patriotism. In life it is always the little facts that
express the large emotions, and if the English once respected Ireland
as they respect Scotland, it would come out in a hundred small ways.
For instance, there are crack regiments in the British Army which wear
the kilt—the kilt which, as Macaulay says with perfect truth, was
regarded by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief. The
Highland officers carry a silver-hilted version of the old barbarous
Gaelic broadsword with a basket-hilt, which split the skulls of so many
English soldiers at Killiecrankie and Prestonpans. When you have a
regiment of men in the British Army carrying ornamental silver
shillelaghs you will have done the same thing for Ireland, and not
before—or when you mention Brian Boru with the same intonation as
Bruce.

Let me be considered therefore to have made quite clear that I believe
with a quite special intensity in the independent consideration of
Scotland and Ireland as apart from England. I believe that, in the
proper sense of the words, Scotland is an independent nation, even if
Edward VII. is the King of Scotland. I believe that, in the proper
sense of words, Ireland is an independent nation, even if Edward VII.
is King of Ireland. But the fact is that I have an even bolder and
wilder belief than either of these. I believe that England is an
independent nation. I believe that England also has its independent
colour and history, and meaning. I believe that England could produce
costumes quite as queer as the kilt; I believe that England has heroes
fully as untranslateable as Brian Boru, and consequently I believe that
Edward VII. is, among his innumerable other functions, really King of
England. If my Scotch friends insist, let us call it one of his quite
obscure, unpopular, and minor titles; one of his relaxations. A little
while ago he was Duke of Cornwall; but for a family accident he might
still have been King of Hanover. Nor do I think that we should blame
the simple Cornishmen if they spoke of him in a rhetorical moment by
his Cornish title, nor the well-meaning Hanoverians if they classed him
with Hanoverian Princes.

Now it so happens that in the passage complained of I said the King of
England merely because I meant the King of England. I was speaking
strictly and especially of English Kings, of Kings in the tradition of
the old Kings of England. I wrote as an English nationalist keenly
conscious of the sacred boundary of the Tweed that keeps (or used to
keep) our ancient enemies at bay. I wrote as an English nationalist
resolved for one wild moment to throw off the tyranny of the Scotch and
Irish who govern and oppress my country. I felt that England was at
least spiritually guarded against these surrounding nationalities. I
dreamed that the Tweed was guarded by the ghosts of Scropes and Percys;
I dreamed that St. George’s Channel was guarded by St. George. And in
this insular security I spoke deliberately and specifically of the King
of England, of the representative of the Tudors and Plantagenets. It is
true that the two Kings of England, of whom I especially spoke, Charles
II. and George III., had both an alien origin, not very recent and not
very remote. Charles II. came of a family originally Scotch. George
III. came of a family originally German. But the same, so far as that
goes, could be said of the English royal houses when England stood
quite alone. The Plantagenets were originally a French family. The
Tudors were originally a Welsh family. But I was not talking of the
amount of English sentiment in the English Kings. I was talking of the
amount of English sentiment in the English treatment and popularity of
the English Kings. With that Ireland and Scotland have nothing whatever
to do.

Charles II. may, for all I know, have not only been King of Scotland;
he may, by virtue of his temper and ancestry, have been a Scotch King
of Scotland. There was something Scotch about his combination of
clear-headedness with sensuality. There was something Scotch about his
combination of doing what he liked with knowing what he was doing. But
I was not talking of the personality of Charles, which may have been
Scotch. I was talking of the popularity of Charles, which was certainly
English. One thing is quite certain: whether or no he ever ceased to be
a Scotch man, he ceased as soon as he conveniently could to be a Scotch
King. He had actually tried the experiment of being a national ruler
north of the Tweed, and his people liked him as little as he liked
them. Of Presbyterianism, of the Scottish religion, he left on record
the exquisitely English judgment that it was “no religion for a
gentleman.” His popularity then was purely English; his royalty was
purely English; and I was using the words with the utmost narrowness
and deliberation when I spoke of this particular popularity and royalty
as the popularity and royalty of a King of England. I said of the
English people specially that they like to pick up the King’s crown
when he has dropped it. I do not feel at all sure that this does apply
to the Scotch or the Irish. I think that the Irish would knock his
crown off for him. I think that the Scotch would keep it for him after
they had picked it up.

For my part, I should be inclined to adopt quite the opposite method of
asserting nationality. Why should good Scotch nationalists call Edward
VII. the King of Britain? They ought to call him King Edward I. of
Scotland. What is Britain? Where is Britain? There is no such place.
There never was a nation of Britain; there never was a King of Britain;
unless perhaps Vortigern or Uther Pendragon had a taste for the title.
If we are to develop our Monarchy, I should be altogether in favour of
developing it along the line of local patriotism and of local
proprietorship in the King. I think that the Londoners ought to call
him the King of London, and the Liverpudlians ought to call him the
King of Liverpool. I do not go so far as to say that the people of
Birmingham ought to call Edward VII. the King of Birmingham; for that
would be high treason to a holier and more established power. But I
think we might read in the papers: “The King of Brighton left Brighton
at half-past two this afternoon,” and then immediately afterwards, “The
King of Worthing entered Worthing at ten minutes past three.” Or, “The
people of Margate bade a reluctant farewell to the popular King of
Margate this morning,” and then, “His Majesty the King of Ramsgate
returned to his country and capital this afternoon after his long
sojourn in strange lands.” It might be pointed out that by a curious
coincidence the departure of the King of Oxford occurred a very short
time before the triumphal arrival of the King of Reading. I cannot
imagine any method which would more increase the kindly and normal
relations between the Sovereign and his people. Nor do I think that
such a method would be in any sense a depreciation of the royal
dignity; for, as a matter of fact, it would put the King upon the same
platform with the gods. The saints, the most exalted of human figures,
were also the most local. It was exactly the men whom we most easily
connected with heaven whom we also most easily connected with earth.




THOUGHTS AROUND KOEPENICK


A famous and epigrammatic author said that life copied literature; it
seems clear that life really caricatures it. I suggested recently that
the Germans submitted to, and even admired, a solemn and theatrical
assertion of authority. A few hours after I had sent up my “copy,” I
saw the first announcement of the affair of the comic Captain at
Koepenick. The most absurd part of this absurd fraud (at least, to
English eyes) is one which, oddly enough, has received comparatively
little comment. I mean the point at which the Mayor asked for a
warrant, and the Captain pointed to the bayonets of his soldiery and
said. “These are my authority.” One would have thought any one would
have known that no soldier would talk like that. The dupes were blamed
for not knowing that the man wore the wrong cap or the wrong sash, or
had his sword buckled on the wrong way; but these are technicalities
which they might surely be excused for not knowing. I certainly should
not know if a soldier’s sash were on inside out or his cap on behind
before. But I should know uncommonly well that genuine professional
soldiers do not talk like Adelphi villains and utter theatrical
epigrams in praise of abstract violence.

We can see this more clearly, perhaps, if we suppose it to be the case
of any other dignified and clearly distinguishable profession. Suppose
a Bishop called upon me. My great modesty and my rather distant
reverence for the higher clergy might lead me certainly to a strong
suspicion that any Bishop who called on me was a bogus Bishop. But if I
wished to test his genuineness I should not dream of attempting to do
so by examining the shape of his apron or the way his gaiters were done
up. I have not the remotest idea of the way his gaiters ought to be
done up. A very vague approximation to an apron would probably take me
in; and if he behaved like an approximately Christian gentleman he
would be safe enough from my detection. But suppose the Bishop, the
moment he entered the room, fell on his knees on the mat, clasped his
hands, and poured out a flood of passionate and somewhat hysterical
extempore prayer, I should say at once and without the smallest
hesitation, “Whatever else this man is, he is not an elderly and
wealthy cleric of the Church of England. They don’t do such things.” Or
suppose a man came to me pretending to be a qualified doctor, and
flourished a stethoscope, or what he said was a stethoscope. I am glad
to say that I have not even the remotest notion of what a stethoscope
looks like; so that if he flourished a musical-box or a coffee-mill it
would be all one to me. But I do think that I am not exaggerating my
own sagacity if I say that I should begin to suspect the doctor if on
entering my room he flung his legs and arms about, crying wildly,
“Health! Health! priceless gift of Nature! I possess it! I overflow
with it! I yearn to impart it! Oh, the sacred rapture of imparting
health!” In that case I should suspect him of being rather in a
position to receive than to offer medical superintendence.

Now, it is no exaggeration at all to say that any one who has ever
known any soldiers (I can only answer for English and Irish and Scotch
soldiers) would find it just as easy to believe that a real Bishop
would grovel on the carpet in a religious ecstasy, or that a real
doctor would dance about the drawing-room to show the invigorating
effects of his own medicine, as to believe that a soldier, when asked
for his authority, would point to a lot of shining weapons and declare
symbolically that might was right. Of course, a real soldier would go
rather red in the face and huskily repeat the proper formula, whatever
it was, as that he came in the King’s name.

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are
never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught
severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is
obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what
is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They learn to
obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons on a coat, a
title, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may be unreasonable
things; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but they are weak
things. They are not Force, and they do not look like Force. They are
parts of an idea: of the idea of discipline; if you will, of the idea
of tyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could possibly say that his
own bayonets were his authority. No soldier could possibly say that he
came in the name of his own bayonets. It would be as absurd as if a
postman said that he came inside his bag. I do not, as I have said,
underrate the evils that really do arise from militarism and the
military ethic. It tends to give people wooden faces and sometimes
wooden heads. It tends moreover (both through its specialisation and
through its constant obedience) to a certain loss of real independence
and strength of character. This has almost always been found when
people made the mistake of turning the soldier into a statesman, under
the mistaken impression that he was a strong man. The Duke of
Wellington, for instance, was a strong soldier and therefore a weak
statesman. But the soldier is always, by the nature of things, loyal to
something. And as long as one is loyal to something one can never be a
worshipper of mere force. For mere force, violence in the abstract, is
the enemy of anything we love. To love anything is to see it at once
under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune;
and when a soldier has accepted any nation’s uniform he has already
accepted its defeat.

Nevertheless, it does appear to be possible in Germany for a man to
point to fixed bayonets and say, “These are my authority,” and yet to
convince ordinarily sane men that he is a soldier. If this is so, it
does really seem to point to some habit of high-falutin’ in the German
nation, such as that of which I spoke previously. It almost looks as if
the advisers, and even the officials, of the German Army had become
infected in some degree with the false and feeble doctrine that might
is right. As this doctrine is invariably preached by physical weaklings
like Nietzsche it is a very serious thing even to entertain the
supposition that it is affecting men who have really to do military
work. It would be the end of German soldiers to be affected by German
philosophy. Energetic people use energy as a means, but only very tired
people ever use energy as a reason. Athletes go in for games, because
athletes desire glory. Invalids go in for calisthenics; for invalids
(alone of all human beings) desire strength. So long as the German Army
points to its heraldic eagle and says, “I come in the name of this
fierce but fabulous animal,” the German Army will be all right. If ever
it says, “I come in the name of bayonets,” the bayonets will break like
glass, for only the weak exhibit strength without an aim.

At the same time, as I said before, do not let us forget our own
faults. Do not let us forget them any the more easily because they are
the opposite to the German faults. Modern England is too prone to
present the spectacle of a person who is enormously delighted because
he has not got the contrary disadvantages to his own. The Englishman is
always saying “My house is not damp” at the moment when his house is on
fire. The Englishman is always saying, “I have thrown off all traces of
anæmia” in the middle of a fit of apoplexy. Let us always remember that
if an Englishman wants to swindle English people, he does not dress up
in the uniform of a soldier. If an Englishman wants to swindle English
people he would as soon think of dressing up in the uniform of a
messenger boy. Everything in England is done unofficially, casually, by
conversations and cliques. The one Parliament that really does rule
England is a secret Parliament; the debates of which must not be
published—the Cabinet. The debates of the Commons are sometimes
important; but only the debates in the Lobby, never the debates in the
House. Journalists do control public opinion; but it is not controlled
by the arguments they publish—it is controlled by the arguments between
the editor and sub-editor, which they do not publish. This casualness
is our English vice. It is at once casual and secret. Our public life
is conducted privately. Hence it follows that if an English swindler
wished to impress us, the last thing he would think of doing would be
to put on a uniform. He would put on a polite slouching air and a
careless, expensive suit of clothes; he would stroll up to the Mayor,
be so awfully sorry to disturb him, find he had forgotten his
card-case, mention, as if he were ashamed of it, that he was the Duke
of Mercia, and carry the whole thing through with the air of a man who
could get two hundred witnesses and two thousand retainers, but who was
too tired to call any of them. And if he did it very well I strongly
suspect that he would be as successful as the indefensible Captain at
Koepenick.

Our tendency for many centuries past has been, not so much towards
creating an aristocracy (which may or may not be a good thing in
itself), as towards substituting an aristocracy for everything else. In
England we have an aristocracy instead of a religion. The nobility are
to the English poor what the saints and the fairies are to the Irish
poor, what the large devil with a black face was to the Scotch poor—the
poetry of life. In the same way in England we have an aristocracy
instead of a Government. We rely on a certain good humour and education
in the upper class to interpret to us our contradictory Constitution.
No educated man born of woman will be quite so absurd as the system
that he has to administer. In short, we do not get good laws to
restrain bad people. We get good people to restrain bad laws. And last
of all we in England have an aristocracy instead of an Army. We have an
Army of which the officers are proud of their families and ashamed of
their uniforms. If I were a king of any country whatever, and one of my
officers were ashamed of my uniform, I should be ashamed of my officer.
Beware, then, of the really well-bred and apologetic gentleman whose
clothes are at once quiet and fashionable, whose manner is at once
diffident and frank. Beware how you admit him into your domestic
secrets, for he may be a bogus Earl. Or, worse still, a real one.




THE BOY


I have no sympathy with international aggression when it is taken
seriously, but I have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when it
is quite absurd. Raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they
are human and imaginable as practical jokes. In fact, almost any act of
ragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition—that it is
of no use at all to anybody. If the aggressor gets anything out of it,
then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of
utility or profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does
not steal. A gentleman knocks off his friend’s hat; but he does not
annex his friend’s hat. For this reason (as Mr. Belloc has pointed out
somewhere), the very militant French people have always returned after
their immense raids—the raids of Godfrey the Crusader, the raids of
Napoleon; “they are sucked back, having accomplished nothing but an
epic.”

Sometimes I see small fragments of information in the newspapers which
make my heart leap with an irrational patriotic sympathy. I have had
the misfortune to be left comparatively cold by many of the enterprises
and proclamations of my country in recent times. But the other day I
found in the _Tribune_ the following paragraph, which I may be
permitted to set down as an example of the kind of international
outrage with which I have by far the most instinctive sympathy. There
is something attractive, too, in the austere simplicity with which the
affair is set forth—

“Geneva, Oct. 31.

“The English schoolboy Allen, who was arrested at Lausanne railway
station on Saturday, for having painted red the statue of General
Jomini of Payerne, was liberated yesterday, after paying a fine of £24.
Allen has proceeded to Germany, where he will continue his studies. The
people of Payerne are indignant, and clamoured for his detention in
prison.”

Now I have no doubt that ethics and social necessity require a contrary
attitude, but I will freely confess that my first emotions on reading
of this exploit were those of profound and elemental pleasure. There is
something so large and simple about the operation of painting a whole
stone General a bright red. Of course I can understand that the people
of Payerne were indignant. They had passed to their homes at twilight
through the streets of that beautiful city (or is it a province?), and
they had seen against the silver ending of the sunset the grand grey
figure of the hero of that land remaining to guard the town under the
stars. It certainly must have been a shock to come out in the broad
white morning and find a large vermilion General staring under the
staring sun. I do not blame them at all for clamouring for the
schoolboy’s detention in prison; I dare say a little detention in
prison would do him no harm. Still, I think the immense act has
something about it human and excusable; and when I endeavour to analyse
the reason of this feeling I find it to lie, not in the fact that the
thing was big or bold or successful, but in the fact that the thing was
perfectly useless to everybody, including the person who did it. The
raid ends in itself; and so Master Allen is sucked back again, having
accomplished nothing but an epic.

There is one thing which, in the presence of average modern journalism,
is perhaps worth saying in connection with such an idle matter as this.
The morals of a matter like this are exactly like the morals of
anything else; they are concerned with mutual contract, or with the
rights of independent human lives. But the whole modern world, or at
any rate the whole modern Press, has a perpetual and consuming terror
of plain morals. Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon
merely moral grounds. If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in
the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people
will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact
that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of
a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You
could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew
my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of
it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does
show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious
disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the
revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art,
or æsthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order
to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely
deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is
necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she
was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is
lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good
grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an
individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that
the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be
beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism
has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything
else—mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.

One example can be found in such cases as that of the prank of the boy
and the statue. When some trick of this sort is played, the newspapers
opposed to it always describe it as “a senseless joke.” What is the
good of saying that? Every joke is a senseless joke. A joke is by its
nature a protest against sense. It is no good attacking nonsense for
being successfully nonsensical. Of course it is nonsensical to paint a
celebrated Italian General a bright red; it is as nonsensical as “Alice
in Wonderland.” It is also, in my opinion, very nearly as funny. But
the real answer to the affair is not to say that it is nonsensical or
even to say that it is not funny, but to point out that it is wrong to
spoil statues which belong to other people. If the modern world will
not insist on having some sharp and definite moral law, capable of
resisting the counter-attractions of art and humour, the modern world
will simply be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage to do a
nasty thing in a nice way. Every murderer who can murder entertainingly
will be allowed to murder. Every burglar who burgles in really humorous
attitudes will burgle as much as he likes.

There is another case of the thing that I mean. Why on earth do the
newspapers, in describing a dynamite outrage or any other political
assassination, call it a “dastardly outrage” or a cowardly outrage? It
is perfectly evident that it is not dastardly in the least. It is
perfectly evident that it is about as cowardly as the Christians going
to the lions. The man who does it exposes himself to the chance of
being torn in pieces by two thousand people. What the thing is, is not
cowardly, but profoundly and detestably wicked. The man who does it is
very infamous and very brave. But, again, the explanation is that our
modern Press would rather appeal to physical arrogance, or to anything,
rather than appeal to right and wrong.

In most of the matters of modern England, the real difficulty is that
there is a negative revolution without a positive revolution. Positive
aristocracy is breaking up without any particular appearance of
positive democracy taking its place. The polished class is becoming
less polished without becoming less of a class; the nobleman who
becomes a guinea-pig keeps all his privileges but loses some of his
tradition; he becomes less of a gentleman without becoming less of a
nobleman. In the same way (until some recent and happy revivals) it
seemed highly probable that the Church of England would cease to be a
religion long before it had ceased to be a Church. And in the same way,
the vulgarisation of the old, simple middle class does not even have
the advantage of doing away with class distinctions; the vulgar man is
always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished
is vulgar.

At the same time, it must be remembered that when a class has a
morality it does not follow that it is an adequate morality. The
middle-class ethic was inadequate for some purposes; so is the
public-school ethic, the ethic of the upper classes. On this last
matter of the public schools Dr. Spenser, the Head Master of University
College School, has lately made some valuable observations. But even
he, I think, overstates the claim of the public schools. “The strong
point of the English public schools,” he says, “has always lain in
their efficiency as agencies for the formation of character and for the
inculcation of the great notion of obligation which distinguishes a
gentleman. On the physical and moral sides the public-school men of
England are, I believe, unequalled.” And he goes on to say that it is
on the mental side that they are defective. But, as a matter of fact,
the public-school training is in the strict sense defective upon the
moral side also; it leaves out about half of morality. Its just claim
is that, like the old middle class (and the Zulus), it trains some
virtues and therefore suits some people for some situations. Put an old
English merchant to serve in an army and he would have been irritated
and clumsy. Put the men from English public schools to rule Ireland,
and they make the greatest hash in human history.

Touching the morality of the public schools, I will take one point
only, which is enough to prove the case. People have got into their
heads an extraordinary idea that English public-school boys and English
youth generally are taught to tell the truth. They are taught
absolutely nothing of the kind. At no English public school is it even
suggested, except by accident, that it is a man’s duty to tell the
truth. What is suggested is something entirely different: that it is a
man’s duty not to tell lies. So completely does this mistake soak
through all civilisation that we hardly ever think even of the
difference between the two things. When we say to a child, “You must
tell the truth,” we do merely mean that he must refrain from verbal
inaccuracies. But the thing we never teach at all is the general duty
of telling the truth, of giving a complete and fair picture of anything
we are talking about, of not misrepresenting, not evading, not
suppressing, not using plausible arguments that we know to be unfair,
not selecting unscrupulously to prove an _ex parte_ case, not telling
all the nice stories about the Scotch, and all the nasty stories about
the Irish, not pretending to be disinterested when you are really
angry, not pretending to be angry when you are really only avaricious.
The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of
public schools is exactly that—that there is a whole truth of things,
and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.

If any one has the smallest doubt of this neglect of truth in public
schools he can kill his doubt with one plain question. Can any one on
earth believe that if the seeing and telling of the whole truth were
really one of the ideals of the English governing class, there could
conceivably exist such a thing as the English party system? Why, the
English party system is founded upon the principle that telling the
whole truth does not matter. It is founded upon the principle that half
a truth is better than no politics. Our system deliberately turns a
crowd of men who might be impartial into irrational partisans. It
teaches some of them to tell lies and all of them to believe lies. It
gives every man an arbitrary brief that he has to work up as best he
may and defend as best he can. It turns a room full of citizens into a
room full of barristers. I know that it has many charms and virtues,
fighting and good-fellowship; it has all the charms and virtues of a
game. I only say that it would be a stark impossibility in a nation
which believed in telling the truth.




LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION


It is customary to remark that modern problems cannot easily be
attacked because they are so complex. In many cases I believe it is
really because they are so simple. Nobody would believe in such
simplicity of scoundrelism even if it were pointed out. People would
say that the truth was a charge of mere melodramatic villainy;
forgetting that nearly all villains really are melodramatic. Thus, for
instance, we say that some good measures are frustrated or some bad
officials kept in power by the press and confusion of public business;
whereas very often the reason is simple healthy human bribery. And thus
especially we say that the Yellow Press is exaggerative,
over-emotional, illiterate, and anarchical, and a hundred other long
words; whereas the only objection to it is that it tells lies. We waste
our fine intellects in finding exquisite phraseology to fit a man, when
in a well-ordered society we ought to be finding handcuffs to fit him.

This criticism of the modern type of righteous indignation must have
come into many people’s minds, I think, in reading Dr. Horton’s
eloquent expressions of disgust at the “corrupt Press,” especially in
connection with the Limerick craze. Upon the Limerick craze itself, I
fear Dr. Horton will not have much effect; such fads perish before one
has had time to kill them. But Dr. Horton’s protest may really do good
if it enables us to come to some clear understanding about what is
really wrong with the popular Press, and which means it might be useful
and which permissible to use for its reform. We do not want a
censorship of the Press; but we are long past talking about that. At
present it is not we that silence the Press; it is the Press that
silences us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the
editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the
Commonwealth shall know. If we attack the Press we shall be rebelling,
not repressing. But shall we attack it?

Now it is just here that the chief difficulty occurs. It arises from
the very rarity and rectitude of those minds which commonly inaugurate
such crusades. I have the warmest respect for Dr. Horton’s thirst after
righteousness; but it has always seemed to me that his righteousness
would be more effective without his refinement. The curse of the
Nonconformists is their universal refinement. They dimly connect being
good with being delicate, and even dapper; with not being grotesque or
loud or violent; with not sitting down on one’s hat. Now it is always a
pleasure to be loud and violent, and sometimes it is a duty. Certainly
it has nothing to do with sin; a man can be loudly and violently
virtuous—nay, he can be loudly and violently saintly, though that is
not the type of saintliness that we recognise in Dr. Horton. And as for
sitting on one’s hat, if it is done for any sublime object (as, for
instance, to amuse the children), it is obviously an act of very
beautiful self-sacrifice, the destruction and surrender of the symbol
of personal dignity upon the shrine of public festivity. Now it will
not do to attack the modern editor merely for being unrefined, like the
great mass of mankind. We must be able to say that he is immoral, not
that he is undignified or ridiculous. I do not mind the Yellow Press
editor sitting on his hat. My only objection to him begins to dawn when
he attempts to sit on my hat; or, indeed (as is at present the case),
when he proceeds to sit on my head.

But in reading between the lines of Dr. Horton’s invective one
continually feels that he is not only angry with the popular Press for
being unscrupulous: he is partly angry with the popular Press for being
popular. He is not only irritated with Limericks for causing a mean
money-scramble; he is also partly irritated with Limericks for being
Limericks. The enormous size of the levity gets on his nerves, like the
glare and blare of Bank Holiday. Now this is a motive which, however
human and natural, must be strictly kept out of the way. It takes all
sorts to make a world; and it is not in the least necessary that
everybody should have that love of subtle and unobtrusive perfections
in the matter of manners or literature which does often go with the
type of the ethical idealist. It is not in the least desirable that
everybody should be earnest. It is highly desirable that everybody
should be honest, but that is a thing that can go quite easily with a
coarse and cheerful character. But the ineffectualness of most protests
against the abuse of the Press has been very largely due to the
instinct of democracy (and the instinct of democracy is like the
instinct of one woman, wild but quite right) that the people who were
trying to purify the Press were also trying to refine it; and to this
the democracy very naturally and very justly objected. We are justified
in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are
not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean
our own manners. We have no right to purge the popular Press of all
that we think vulgar or trivial. Dr. Horton may possibly loathe and
detest Limericks just as I loathe and detest riddles; but I have no
right to call them flippant and unprofitable; there are wild people in
the world who like riddles. I am so afraid of this movement passing off
into mere formless rhetoric and platform passion that I will even come
close to the earth and lay down specifically some of the things that,
in my opinion, could be, and ought to be, done to reform the Press.

First, I would make a law, if there is none such at present, by which
an editor, proved to have published false news without reasonable
verification, should simply go to prison. This is not a question of
influences or atmospheres; the thing could be carried out as easily and
as practically as the punishment of thieves and murderers. Of course
there would be the usual statement that the guilt was that of a
subordinate. Let the accused editor have the right of proving this if
he can; if he does, let the subordinate be tried and go to prison. Two
or three good rich editors and proprietors properly locked up would
take the sting out of the Yellow Press better than centuries of Dr.
Horton.

Second, it’s impossible to pass over altogether the most unpleasant,
but the most important part of this problem. I will deal with it as
distantly as possible. I do not believe there is any harm whatever in
reading about murders; rather, if anything, good; for the thought of
death operates very powerfully with the poor in the creation of
brotherhood and a sense of human dignity. I do not believe there is a
pennyworth of harm in the police news, as such. Even divorce news,
though contemptible enough, can really in most cases be left to the
discretion of grown people; and how far children get hold of such
things is a problem for the home and not for the nation. But there is a
certain class of evils which a healthy man or woman can actually go
through life without knowing anything about at all. These, I say,
should be stamped and blackened out of every newspaper with the
thickest black of the Russian censor. Such cases should either be
always tried _in camera_ or reporting them should be a punishable
offence. The common weakness of Nature and the sins that flesh is heir
to we can leave people to find in newspapers. Men can safely see in the
papers what they have already seen in the streets. They may safely find
in their journals what they have already found in themselves. But we do
not want the imaginations of rational and decent people clouded with
the horrors of some obscene insanity which has no more to do with human
life than the man in Bedlam who thinks he is a chicken. And, if this
vile matter is admitted, let it be simply with a mention of the Latin
or legal name of the crime, and with no details whatever. As it is,
exactly the reverse is true. Papers are permitted to terrify and darken
the fancy of the young with innumerable details, but not permitted to
state in clean legal language what the thing is about. They are allowed
to give any fact about the thing except the fact that it is a sin.

Third, I would do my best to introduce everywhere the practice of
signed articles. Those who urge the advantages of anonymity are either
people who do not realise the special peril of our time or they are
people who are profiting by it. It is true, but futile, for instance,
to say that there is something noble in being nameless when a whole
corporate body is bent on a consistent aim: as in an army or men
building a cathedral. The point of modern newspapers is that there is
no such corporate body and common aim; but each man can use the
authority of the paper to further his own private fads and his own
private finances.




ANONYMITY AND FURTHER COUNSELS


The end of the article which I write is always cut off, and,
unfortunately, I belong to that lower class of animals in whom the tail
is important. It is not anybody’s fault but my own; it arises from the
fact that I take such a long time to get to the point. Somebody, the
other day, very reasonably complained of my being employed to write
prefaces. He was perfectly right, for I always write a preface to the
preface, and then I am stopped; also quite justifiably.

In my last article I said that I favoured three things—first, the legal
punishment of deliberately false information; secondly, a distinction,
in the matter of reported immorality, between those sins which any
healthy man can see in himself and those which he had better not see
anywhere; and thirdly, an absolute insistence in the great majority of
cases upon the signing of articles. It was at this point that I was cut
short, I will not say by the law of space, but rather by my own
lawlessness in the matter of space. In any case, there is something
more that ought to be said.

It would be an exaggeration to say that I hope some day to see an
anonymous article counted as dishonourable as an anonymous letter. For
some time to come, the idea of the leading article, expressing the
policy of the whole paper, must necessarily remain legitimate; at any
rate, we have all written such leading articles, and should never think
the worse of any one for writing one. But I should certainly say that
writing anonymously ought to have some definite excuse, such as that of
the leading article. Writing anonymously ought to be the exception;
writing a signed article ought to be the rule. And anonymity ought to
be not only an exception, but an accidental exception; a man ought
always to be ready to say what anonymous article he had written. The
journalistic habit of counting it something sacred to keep secret the
origin of an article is simply part of the conspiracy which seeks to
put us who are journalists in the position of a much worse sort of
Jesuits or Freemasons.

As has often been said, anonymity would be all very well if one could
for a moment imagine that it was established from good motives.
Suppose, for instance, that we were all quite certain that the men on
the _Thunderer_ newspaper were a band of brave young idealists who were
so eager to overthrow Socialism, Municipal and National, that they did
not care to which of them especially was given the glory of striking it
down. Unfortunately, however, we do not believe this. What we believe,
or, rather, what we know, is that the attack on Socialism in the
_Thunderer_ arises from a chaos of inconsistent and mostly evil
motives, any one of which would lose simply by being named. A
jerry-builder whose houses have been condemned writes anonymously and
becomes the _Thunderer_. A Socialist who has quarrelled with the other
Socialists writes anonymously, and he becomes the _Thunderer_. A
monopolist who has lost his monopoly, and a demagogue who has lost his
mob, can both write anonymously and become the same newspaper. It is
quite true that there is a young and beautiful fanaticism in which men
do not care to reveal their names. But there is a more elderly and a
much more common excitement in which men do not dare to reveal them.

Then there is another rule for making journalism honest on which I
should like to insist absolutely. I should like it to be a fixed thing
that the name of the proprietor as well as the editor should be printed
upon every paper. If the paper is owned by shareholders, let there be a
list of shareholders. If (as is far more common in this singularly
undemocratic age) it is owned by one man, let that one man’s name be
printed on the paper, if possible in large red letters. Then, if there
are any obvious interests being served, we shall know that they are
being served. My friends in Manchester are in a terrible state of
excitement about the power of brewers and the dangers of admitting them
to public office. But at least, if a man has controlled politics
through beer, people generally know it: the subject of beer is too
fascinating for any one to miss such personal peculiarities. But a man
may control politics through journalism, and no ordinary English
citizen know that he is controlling them at all. Again and again in the
lists of Birthday Honours you and I have seen some Mr. Robinson
suddenly elevated to the Peerage without any apparent reason. Even the
Society papers (which we read with avidity) could tell us nothing about
him except that he was a sportsman or a kind landlord, or interested in
the breeding of badgers. Now I should like the name of that Mr.
Robinson to be already familiar to the British public. I should like
them to know already the public services for which they have to thank
him. I should like them to have seen the name already on the outside of
that organ of public opinion called _Tootsie’s Tips_, or _The Boy
Blackmailer_, or _Nosey Knows_, that bright little financial paper
which did so much for the Empire and which so narrowly escaped a
criminal prosecution. If they had seen it thus, they would estimate
more truly and tenderly the full value of the statement in the Society
paper that he is a true gentleman and a sound Churchman.

Finally, it should be practically imposed by custom (it so happens that
it could not possibly be imposed by law) that letters of definite and
practical complaint should be necessarily inserted by any editor in any
paper. Editors have grown very much too lax in this respect. The old
editor used dimly to regard himself as an unofficial public servant for
the transmitting of public news. If he suppressed anything, he was
supposed to have some special reason for doing so; as that the material
was actually libellous or literally indecent. But the modern editor
regards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who can
select and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or a
caricaturist. He “makes up” the paper as man “makes up” a fairy tale,
he considers his newspaper solely as a work of art, meant to give
pleasure, not to give news. He puts in this one letter because he
thinks it clever. He puts in these three or four letters because he
thinks them silly. He suppresses this article because he thinks it
wrong. He suppresses this other and more dangerous article because he
thinks it right. The old idea that he is simply a mode of the
expression of the public, an “organ” of opinion, seems to have
entirely vanished from his mind. To-day the editor is not only the
organ, but the man who plays on the organ. For in all our modern
movements we move away from Democracy.

This is the whole danger of our time. There is a difference between the
oppression which has been too common in the past and the oppression
which seems only too probable in the future. Oppression in the past,
has commonly been an individual matter. The oppressors were as simple
as the oppressed, and as lonely. The aristocrat sometimes hated his
inferiors; he always hated his equals. The plutocrat was an
individualist. But in our time even the plutocrat has become a
Socialist. They have science and combination, and may easily inaugurate
a much greater tyranny than the world has ever seen.




ON THE CRYPTIC AND THE ELLIPTIC


Surely the art of reporting speeches is in a strange state of
degeneration. We should not object, perhaps, to the reporter’s making
the speeches much shorter than they are; but we do object to his making
all the speeches much worse than they are. And the method which he
employs is one which is dangerously unjust. When a statesman or
philosopher makes an important speech, there are several courses which
the reporter might take without being unreasonable. Perhaps the most
reasonable course of all would be not to report the speech at all. Let
the world live and love, marry and give in marriage, without that
particular speech, as they did (in some desperate way) in the days when
there were no newspapers. A second course would be to report a small
part of it; but to get that right. A third course, far better if you
can do it, is to understand the main purpose and argument of the
speech, and report that in clear and logical language of your own. In
short, the three possible methods are, first, to leave the man’s speech
alone; second, to report what he says or some complete part of what he
says; and third, to report what he means. But the present way of
reporting speeches (mainly created, I think, by the scrappy methods of
the _Daily Mail_) is something utterly different from both these ways,
and quite senseless and misleading.

The present method is this: the reporter sits listening to a tide of
words which he does not try to understand, and does not, generally
speaking, even try to take down; he waits until something occurs in the
speech which for some reason sounds funny, or memorable, or very
exaggerated, or, perhaps, merely concrete; then he writes it down and
waits for the next one. If the orator says that the Premier is like a
porpoise in the sea under some special circumstances, the reporter gets
in the porpoise even if he leaves out the Premier. If the orator begins
by saying that Mr. Chamberlain is rather like a violoncello, the
reporter does not even wait to hear why he is like a violoncello. He
has got hold of something material, and so he is quite happy. The
strong words all are put in; the chain of thought is left out. If the
orator uses the word “donkey,” down goes the word “donkey.” If the
orator uses the word “damnable,” down goes the word “damnable.” They
follow each other so abruptly in the report that it is often hard to
discover the fascinating fact as to what was damnable or who was being
compared with a donkey. And the whole line of argument in which these
things occurred is entirely lost. I have before me a newspaper report
of a speech by Mr. Bernard Shaw, of which one complete and separate
paragraph runs like this—

“Capital meant spare money over and above one’s needs. Their country
was not really their country at all except in patriotic songs.”

I am well enough acquainted with the whole map of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s
philosophy to know that those two statements might have been related to
each other in a hundred ways. But I think that if they were read by an
ordinary intelligent man, who happened not to know Mr. Shaw’s views, he
would form no impression at all except that Mr. Shaw was a lunatic of
more than usually abrupt conversation and disconnected mind. The other
two methods would certainly have done Mr. Shaw more justice: the
reporter should either have taken down verbatim what the speaker really
said about Capital, or have given an outline of the way in which this
idea was connected with the idea about patriotic songs.

But we have not the advantage of knowing what Mr. Shaw really did say,
so we had better illustrate the different methods from something that
we do know. Most of us, I suppose, know Mark Antony’s Funeral Speech in
“Julius Cæsar.” Now Mark Antony would have no reason to complain if he
were not reported at all; if the _Daily Pilum_ or the _Morning Fasces_,
or whatever it was, confined itself to saying, “Mr. Mark Antony also
spoke,” or “Mr. Mark Antony, having addressed the audience, the meeting
broke up in some confusion.” The next honest method, worthy of a noble
Roman reporter, would be that since he could not report the whole of
the speech, he should report some of the speech. He might say—“Mr. Mark
Antony, in the course of his speech, said—

‘When that the poor have cried Cæsar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.’”


In that case one good, solid argument of Mark Antony would be correctly
reported. The third and far higher course for the Roman reporter would
be to give a philosophical statement of the purport of the speech. As
thus—“Mr. Mark Antony, in the course of a powerful speech, conceded the
high motives of the Republican leaders, and disclaimed any intention of
raising the people against them; he thought, however, that many
instances could be quoted against the theory of Cæsar’s ambition, and
he concluded by reading, at the request of the audience, the will of
Cæsar, which proved that he had the most benevolent designs towards the
Roman people.” That is (I admit) not quite so fine as Shakspere, but it
is a statement of the man’s political position. But if a _Daily Mail_
reporter were sent to take down Antony’s oration, he would simply wait
for any expressions that struck him as odd and put them down one after
another without any logical connection at all. It would turn out
something like this: “Mr. Mark Antony wished for his audience’s ears.
He had thrice offered Cæsar a crown. Cæsar was like a deer. If he were
Brutus he would put a wound in every tongue. The stones of Rome would
mutiny. See what a rent the envious Casca paid. Brutus was Cæsar’s
angel. The right honourable gentleman concluded by saying that he and
the audience had all fallen down.” That is the report of a political
speech in a modern, progressive, or American manner, and I wonder
whether the Romans would have put up with it.

The reports of the debates in the Houses of Parliament are constantly
growing smaller and smaller in our newspapers. Perhaps this is partly
because the speeches are growing duller and duller. I think in some
degree the two things act and re-act on each other. For fear of the
newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for
the newspapers. The speeches in our time are more careful and
elaborate, because they are meant to be read, and not to be heard. And
exactly because they are more careful and elaborate, they are not so
likely to be worthy of a careful and elaborate report. They are not
interesting enough. So the moral cowardice of modern politicians has,
after all, some punishment attached to it by the silent anger of
heaven. Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be
reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are
carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

Thus we may concede that politicians have done something towards
degrading journalism. It was not entirely done by us, the journalists.
But most of it was. It was mostly the fruit of our first and most
natural sin—the habit of regarding ourselves as conjurers rather than
priests, for the definition is that a conjurer is apart from his
audience, while a priest is a part of his. The conjurer despises his
congregation; if the priest despises any one, it must be himself. The
curse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism which
is the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer
than the people for whom we write, whereas, in fact, we are generally
even stupider. But this insolence has its Nemesis; and that Nemesis is
well illustrated in this matter of reporting.

For the journalist, having grown accustomed to talking down to the
public, commonly talks too low at last, and becomes merely barbaric and
unintelligible. By his very efforts to be obvious he becomes obscure.
This just punishment may specially be noticed in the case of those
staggering and staring headlines which American journalism introduced
and which some English journalism imitates. I once saw a headline in a
London paper which ran simply thus: “Dobbin’s Little Mary.” This was
intended to be familiar and popular, and therefore, presumably, lucid.
But it was some time before I realised, after reading about half the
printed matter underneath, that it had something to do with the proper
feeding of horses. At first sight, I took it, as the historical leader
of the future will certainly take it, as containing some allusion to
the little daughter who so monopolised the affections of the Major at
the end of “Vanity Fair.” The Americans carry to an even wilder extreme
this darkness by excess of light. You may find a column in an American
paper headed “Poet Brown Off Orange-flowers,” or “Senator Robinson
Shoehorns Hats Now,” and it may be quite a long time before the full
meaning breaks upon you: it has not broken upon me yet.

And something of this intellectual vengeance pursues also those who
adopt the modern method of reporting speeches. They also become
mystical, simply by trying to be vulgar. They also are condemned to be
always trying to write like George R. Sims, and succeeding, in spite of
themselves, in writing like Maeterlinck. That combination of words
which I have quoted from an alleged speech of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s was
written down by the reporter with the idea that he was being
particularly plain and democratic. But, as a matter of fact, if there
is any connection between the two sentences, it must be something as
dark as the deepest roots of Browning, or something as invisible as the
most airy filaments of Meredith. To be simple and to be democratic are
two very honourable and austere achievements; and it is not given to
all the snobs and self-seekers to achieve them. High above even
Maeterlinck or Meredith stand those, like Homer and Milton, whom no one
can misunderstand. And Homer and Milton are not only better poets than
Browning (great as he was), but they would also have been very much
better journalists than the young men on the _Daily Mail_.

As it is, however, this misrepresentation of speeches is only a part of
a vast journalistic misrepresentation of all life as it is. Journalism
is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and
life seen in the newspapers another; the public enjoys both, but it is
more or less conscious of the difference. People do not believe, for
instance, that the debates in the House of Commons are as dramatic as
they appear in the daily papers. If they did they would go, not to the
daily paper, but to the House of Commons. The galleries would be
crowded every night as they were in the French Revolution; for instead
of seeing a printed story for a penny they would be seeing an acted
drama for nothing. But the people know in their hearts that journalism
is a conventional art like any other, that it selects, heightens, and
falsifies. Only its Nemesis is the same as that of other arts: if it
loses all care for truth it loses all form likewise. The modern who
paints too cleverly produces a picture of a cow which might be the
earthquake at San Francisco. And the journalist who reports a speech
too cleverly makes it mean nothing at all.




THE WORSHIP OF THE WEALTHY


There has crept, I notice, into our literature and journalism a new way
of flattering the wealthy and the great. In more straightforward times
flattery itself was more straightforward; falsehood itself was more
true. A poor man wishing to please a rich man simply said that he was
the wisest, bravest, tallest, strongest, most benevolent and most
beautiful of mankind; and as even the rich man probably knew that he
wasn’t that, the thing did the less harm. When courtiers sang the
praises of a King they attributed to him things that were entirely
improbable, as that he resembled the sun at noonday, that they had to
shade their eyes when he entered the room, that his people could not
breathe without him, or that he had with his single sword conquered
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The safety of this method was its
artificiality; between the King and his public image there was really
no relation. But the moderns have invented a much subtler and more
poisonous kind of eulogy. The modern method is to take the prince or
rich man, to give a credible picture of his type of personality, as
that he is business-like, or a sportsman, or fond of art, or convivial,
or reserved; and then enormously exaggerate the value and importance of
these natural qualities. Those who praise Mr. Carnegie do not say that
he is as wise as Solomon and as brave as Mars; I wish they did. It
would be the next most honest thing to giving their real reason for
praising him, which is simply that he has money. The journalists who
write about Mr. Pierpont Morgan do not say that he is as beautiful as
Apollo; I wish they did. What they do is to take the rich man’s
superficial life and manner, clothes, hobbies, love of cats, dislike of
doctors, or what not; and then with the assistance of this realism make
the man out to be a prophet and a saviour of his kind, whereas he is
merely a private and stupid man who happens to like cats or to dislike
doctors. The old flatterer took for granted that the King was an
ordinary man, and set to work to make him out extraordinary. The newer
and cleverer flatterer takes for granted that he is extraordinary, and
that therefore even ordinary things about him will be of interest.

I have noticed one very amusing way in which this is done. I notice the
method applied to about six of the wealthiest men in England in a book
of interviews published by an able and well-known journalist. The
flatterer contrives to combine strict truth of fact with a vast
atmosphere of awe and mystery by the simple operation of dealing almost
entirely in negatives. Suppose you are writing a sympathetic study of
Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Perhaps there is not much to say about what he
does think, or like, or admire; but you can suggest whole vistas of his
taste and philosophy by talking a great deal about what he does not
think, or like, or admire. You say of him—“But little attracted to the
most recent schools of German philosophy, he stands almost as
resolutely aloof from the tendencies of transcendental Pantheism as
from the narrower ecstasies of Neo-Catholicism.” Or suppose I am called
upon to praise the charwoman who has just come into my house, and who
certainly deserves it much more. I say—“It would be a mistake to class
Mrs. Higgs among the followers of Loisy; her position is in many ways
different; nor is she wholly to be identified with the concrete
Hebraism of Harnack.” It is a splendid method, as it gives the
flatterer an opportunity of talking about something else besides the
subject of the flattery, and it gives the subject of the flattery a
rich, if somewhat bewildered, mental glow, as of one who has somehow
gone through agonies of philosophical choice of which he was previously
unaware. It is a splendid method; but I wish it were applied sometimes
to charwomen rather than only to millionaires.

There is another way of flattering important people which has become
very common, I notice, among writers in the newspapers and elsewhere.
It consists in applying to them the phrases “simple,” or “quiet,” or
“modest,” without any sort of meaning or relation to the person to whom
they are applied. To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be
modest is the next best thing. I am not so sure about being quiet. I am
rather inclined to think that really modest people make a great deal of
noise. It is quite self-evident that really simple people make a great
deal of noise. But simplicity and modesty, at least, are very rare and
royal human virtues, not to be lightly talked about. Few human beings,
and at rare intervals, have really risen into being modest; not one man
in ten or in twenty has by long wars become simple, as an actual old
soldier does by [**Note: Apparent typesetting error here in original.]
long wars become simple. These virtues are not things to fling about as
mere flattery; many prophets and righteous men have desired to see
these things and have not seen them. But in the description of the
births, lives, and deaths of very luxurious men they are used
incessantly and quite without thought. If a journalist has to describe
a great politician or financier (the things are substantially the same)
entering a room or walking down a thoroughfare, he always says, “Mr.
Midas was quietly dressed in a black frock coat, a white waistcoat, and
light grey trousers, with a plain green tie and simple flower in his
button-hole.” As if any one would expect him to have a crimson frock
coat or spangled trousers. As if any one would expect him to have a
burning Catherine wheel in his button-hole.

But this process, which is absurd enough when applied to the ordinary
and external lives of worldly people, becomes perfectly intolerable
when it is applied, as it always is applied, to the one episode which
is serious even in the lives of politicians. I mean their death. When
we have been sufficiently bored with the account of the simple costume
of the millionaire, which is generally about as complicated as any that
he could assume without being simply thought mad; when we have been
told about the modest home of the millionaire, a home which is
generally much too immodest to be called a home at all; when we have
followed him through all these unmeaning eulogies, we are always asked
last of all to admire his quiet funeral. I do not know what else people
think a funeral should be except quiet. Yet again and again, over the
grave of every one of those sad rich men, for whom one should surely
feel, first and last, a speechless pity—over the grave of Beit, over
the grave of Whiteley—this sickening nonsense about modesty and
simplicity has been poured out. I well remember that when Beit was
buried, the papers said that the mourning-coaches contained everybody
of importance, that the floral tributes were sumptuous, splendid,
intoxicating; but, for all that, it was a simple and quiet funeral.
What, in the name of Acheron, did they expect it to be? Did they think
there would be human sacrifice—the immolation of Oriental slaves upon
the tomb? Did they think that long rows of Oriental dancing-girls would
sway hither and thither in an ecstasy of lament? Did they look for the
funeral games of Patroclus? I fear they had no such splendid and pagan
meaning. I fear they were only using the words “quiet” and “modest”
as words to fill up a page—a mere piece of the automatic hypocrisy
which does become too common among those who have to write rapidly and
often. The word “modest” will soon become like the word “honourable,”
which is said to be employed by the Japanese before any word that
occurs in a polite sentence, as “Put honourable umbrella in honourable
umbrella-stand;” or “condescend to clean honourable boots.” We shall
read in the future that the modest King went out in his modest crown,
clad from head to foot in modest gold and attended with his ten
thousand modest earls, their swords modestly drawn. No! if we have to
pay for splendour let us praise it as splendour, not as simplicity.
When next I meet a rich man I intend to walk up to him in the street
and address him with Oriental hyperbole. He will probably run away.




SCIENCE AND RELIGION


In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to
be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor
in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or
ourself. It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to
a watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of
health will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that,
obviously, it is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple
addition: it is either infallible or it is false. To mix science up
with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its
ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. I want
my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me.
It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be
killed. I apologise for stating all these truisms. But the truth is,
that I have just been reading a thick pamphlet written by a mass of
highly intelligent men who seem never to have heard of any of these
truisms in their lives.

Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generally
reduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him “brilliant;”
which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression of
contempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too
much honour. I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from a
shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges upon
imbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that
everybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just
been reading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a
number of men for whom I have a high respect, and called “New Theology
and Applied Religion.” And it is literally true that I have read
through whole columns of the things without knowing what the people
were talking about. Either they must be talking about some black and
bestial religion in which they were brought up, and of which I never
even heard, or else they must be talking about some blazing and
blinding vision of God which they have found, which I have never found,
and which by its very splendour confuses their logic and confounds
their speech. But the best instance I can quote of the thing is in
connection with this matter of the business of physical science on the
earth, of which I have just spoken. The following words are written
over the signature of a man whose intelligence I respect, and I cannot
make head or tail of them—

“When modern science declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of a
historical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary,
the story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite
plain that the Pauline scheme—I mean the argumentative processes of
Paul’s scheme of salvation—had lost its very foundation; for was not
that foundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from
their first parents?.... But now there was no Fall; there was no total
depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the
superstructure followed.”

It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean
something. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove that
man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do
not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of
depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall?
What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a
fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages
would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a
slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is
simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in
themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said
that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls,
one on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent
with everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have
grown morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in
no way have contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science
(not being raving lunatics) never said that there had been “an
incessant rise in the scale of being;” for an incessant rise would mean
a rise without any relapse or failure; and physical evolution is full
of relapse and failure. There were certainly some physical Falls; there
may have been any number of moral Falls. So that, as I have said, I am
honestly bewildered as to the meaning of such passages as this, in
which the advanced person writes that because geologists know nothing
about the Fall, therefore any doctrine of depravity is untrue. Because
science has not found something which obviously it could not find,
therefore something entirely different—the psychological sense of
evil—is untrue. You might sum up this writer’s argument abruptly, but
accurately, in some way like this—“We have not dug up the bones of the
Archangel Gabriel, who presumably had none, therefore little boys, left
to themselves, will not be selfish.” To me it is all wild and whirling;
as if a man said—“The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; so
I suppose that my wife does love me.”

I am not going to enter here into the real doctrine of original sin, or
into that probably false version of it which the New Theology writer
calls the doctrine of depravity. But whatever else the worst doctrine
of depravity may have been, it was a product of spiritual conviction;
it had nothing to do with remote physical origins. Men thought mankind
wicked because they felt wicked themselves. If a man feels wicked, I
cannot see why he should suddenly feel good because somebody tells him
that his ancestors once had tails. Man’s primary purity and innocence
may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows. The only
thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we
have not got it. Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word,
more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by
the vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing
as the human sense of sin. By its nature the evidence of Eden is
something that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is
something that one cannot help finding.

Some statements I disagree with; others I do not understand. If a man
says, “I think the human race would be better if it abstained totally
from fermented liquor,” I quite understand what he means, and how his
view could be defended. If a man says, “I wish to abolish beer because
I am a temperance man,” his remark conveys no meaning to my mind. It is
like saying, “I wish to abolish roads because I am a moderate walker.”
If a man says, “I am not a Trinitarian,” I understand. But if he says
(as a lady once said to me), “I believe in the Holy Ghost in a
spiritual sense,” I go away dazed. In what other sense could one
believe in the Holy Ghost? And I am sorry to say that this pamphlet of
progressive religious views is full of baffling observations of that
kind. What can people mean when they say that science has disturbed
their view of sin? What sort of view of sin can they have had before
science disturbed it? Did they think that it was something to eat? When
people say that science has shaken their faith in immortality, what do
they mean? Did they think that immortality was a gas?

Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new
principle into the matter at all. A man can be a Christian to the end
of the world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an
Atheist from the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the
face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man
who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is
Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has
believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why
our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of
all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that
they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover. My
chief objection to these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they
are not at all revolutionary. They are the party of platitude. They do
not shake religion: rather religion seems to shake them. They can only
answer the great paradox by repeating the truism.




THE METHUSELAHITE


I Saw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertaining
and deeply philosophical incident. A man was enlisting as a soldier at
Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I
suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an
inquiry about what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial
gravity the man wrote down the word “Methuselahite.” Whoever looks over
such papers must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his
time; unless the Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist
knowledge he could not “place” Methuselahism among what Bossuet called
the variations of Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the
tenets and tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it
meant. The soldier replied that it was his religion “to live as long as
he could.”

Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, that
answer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads of
quarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religious
problems and religious books. Every day the daily paper reviews some
new philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the
whole two thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as
or wise as that word “Methuselahite.” The whole meaning of literature
is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of
philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul
of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought,
like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the
paganism of to-day.

Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their new
religions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all the
way down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and be
able to cut them short with a single inspired word. One of them will
begin, “The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy in
Nature....” “Methuselahite,” I shall say sharply; “good morning.”
“Human Life,” another will say, “Human Life, the only ultimate
sanctity, freed from creed and dogma....” “Methuselahite!” I shall
yell. “Out you go!” “My religion is the Religion of Joy,” a third will
explain (a bald old man with a cough and tinted glasses), “the Religion
of Physical Pride and Rapture, and my....” “Methuselahite!” I shall cry
again, and I shall slap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall
down. Then a pale young poet with serpentine hair will come and say to
me (as one did only the other day): “Moods and impressions are the only
realities, and these are constantly and wholly changing. I could hardly
therefore define my religion....” “I can,” I should say, somewhat
sternly. “Your religion is to live a long time; and if you stop here a
moment longer you won’t fulfil it.”

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old
vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it
masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls
it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends
idleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen—it can
almost certainly be prophesied—that in this saturnalia of sophistry
there will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to
idealise cowardice. And when we are once in this unhealthy world of
mere wild words, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice!
“Is not life a lovely thing and worth saving?” the soldier would say as
he ran away. “Should I not prolong the exquisite miracle of
consciousness?” the householder would say as he hid under the table.
“As long as there are roses and lilies on the earth shall I not remain
here?” would come the voice of the citizen from under the bed. It would
be quite as easy to defend the coward as a kind of poet and mystic as
it has been, in many recent books, to defend the emotionalist as a kind
of poet and mystic, or the tyrant as a kind of poet and mystic. When
that last grand sophistry and morbidity is preached in a book or on a
platform, you may depend upon it there will be a great stir in its
favour, that is, a great stir among the little people who live among
books and platforms. There will be a new great Religion, the Religion
of Methuselahism: with pomps and priests and altars. Its devout
crusaders will vow themselves in thousands with a great vow to live
long. But there is one comfort: they won’t.

For, indeed, the weakness of this worship of mere natural life (which
is a common enough creed to-day) is that it ignores the paradox of
courage and fails in its own aim. As a matter of fact, no men would be
killed quicker than the Methuselahites. The paradox of courage is that
a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
And in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little
the theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life. For there is
one riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up. If it was
the man’s religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he
enlisting as a soldier?




SPIRITUALISM


I Have received a letter from a gentleman who is very indignant at what
he considers my flippancy in disregarding or degrading Spiritualism. I
thought I was defending Spiritualism; but I am rather used to being
accused of mocking the thing that I set out to justify. My fate in most
controversies is rather pathetic. It is an almost invariable rule that
the man with whom I don’t agree thinks I am making a fool of myself,
and the man with whom I do agree thinks I am making a fool of him.
There seems to be some sort of idea that you are not treating a subject
properly if you eulogise it with fantastic terms or defend it by
grotesque examples. Yet a truth is equally solemn whatever figure or
example its exponent adopts. It is an equally awful truth that four and
four make eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions or
eight angels, or eight bricks or eight bishops, or eight minor poets or
eight pigs. Similarly, if it be true that God made all things, that
grave fact can be asserted by pointing at a star or by waving an
umbrella. But the case is stronger than this. There is a distinct
philosophical advantage in using grotesque terms in a serious
discussion.

I think seriously, on the whole, that the more serious is the
discussion the more grotesque should be the terms. For this, as I say,
there is an evident reason. For a subject is really solemn and
important in so far as it applies to the whole cosmos, or to some great
spheres and cycles of experience at least. So far as a thing is
universal it is serious. And so far as a thing is universal it is full
of comic things. If you take a small thing, it may be entirely serious:
Napoleon, for instance, was a small thing, and he was serious: the same
applies to microbes. If you isolate a thing, you may get the pure
essence of gravity. But if you take a large thing (such as the Solar
System) it _must_ be comic, at least in parts. The germs are serious,
because they kill you. But the stars are funny, because they give birth
to life, and life gives birth to fun. If you have, let us say, a theory
about man, and if you can only prove it by talking about Plato and
George Washington, your theory may be a quite frivolous thing. But if
you can prove it by talking about the butler or the postman, then it is
serious, because it is universal. So far from it being irreverent to
use silly metaphors on serious questions, it is one’s duty to use silly
metaphors on serious questions. It is the test of one’s seriousness. It
is the test of a responsible religion or theory whether it can take
examples from pots and pans and boots and butter-tubs. It is the test
of a good philosophy whether you can defend it grotesquely. It is the
test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

When I was a very young journalist I used to be irritated at a peculiar
habit of printers, a habit which most persons of a tendency similar to
mine have probably noticed also. It goes along with the fixed belief of
printers that to be a Rationalist is the same thing as to be a
Nationalist. I mean the printer’s tendency to turn the word “cosmic”
into the word “comic.” It annoyed me at the time. But since then I have
come to the conclusion that the printers were right. The democracy is
always right. Whatever is cosmic is comic.

Moreover, there is another reason that makes it almost inevitable that
we should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously. It is that all
grotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness. Unless a
thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified. Why is it funny that a
man should sit down suddenly in the street? There is only one possible
or intelligent reason: that man is the image of God. It is not funny
that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down.
No one sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a
delicate absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road
and roars with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall
of thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and
high buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down
that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter:
it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be
dignified.

The above, which occupies the great part of my article, is a
parenthises. It is time that I returned to my choleric correspondent
who rebuked me for being too frivolous about the problem of
Spiritualism. My correspondent, who is evidently an intelligent man, is
very angry with me indeed. He uses the strongest language. He says I
remind him of a brother of his: which seems to open an abyss or vista
of infamy. The main substance of his attack resolves itself into two
propositions. First, he asks me what right I have to talk about
Spiritualism at all, as I admit I have never been to a _séance_. This
is all very well, but there are a good many things to which I have
never been, but I have not the smallest intention of leaving off
talking about them. I refuse (for instance) to leave off talking about
the Siege of Troy. I decline to be mute in the matter of the French
Revolution. I will not be silenced on the late indefensible
assassination of Julius Cæsar. If nobody has any right to judge of
Spiritualism except a man who has been to a _séance_, the results,
logically speaking, are rather serious: it would almost seem as if
nobody had any right to judge of Christianity who had not been to the
first meeting at Pentecost. Which would be dreadful. I conceive myself
capable of forming my opinion of Spiritualism without seeing spirits,
just as I form my opinion of the Japanese War without seeing the
Japanese, or my opinion of American millionaires without (thank God)
seeing an American millionaire. Blessed are they who have not seen and
yet have believed: a passage which some have considered as a prophecy
of modern journalism.

But my correspondent’s second objection is more important. He charges
me with actually ignoring the value of communication (if it exists)
between this world and the next. I do not ignore it. But I do say
this—That a different principle attaches to investigation in this
spiritual field from investigation in any other. If a man baits a line
for fish, the fish will come, even if he declares there are no such
things as fishes. If a man limes a twig for birds, the birds will be
caught, even if he thinks it superstitious to believe in birds at all.
But a man cannot bait a line for souls. A man cannot lime a twig to
catch gods. All wise schools have agreed that this latter capture
depends to some extent on the faith of the capturer. So it comes to
this: If you have no faith in the spirits your appeal is in vain; and
if you have—is it needed? If you do not believe, you cannot. If you
do—you will not.

That is the real distinction between investigation in this department
and investigation in any other. The priest calls to the goddess, for
the same reason that a man calls to his wife, because he knows she is
there. If a man kept on shouting out very loud the single word “Maria,”
merely with the object of discovering whether if he did it long enough
some woman of that name would come and marry him, he would be more or
less in the position of the modern spiritualist. The old religionist
cried out for his God. The new religionist cries out for some god to be
his. The whole point of religion as it has hitherto existed in the
world was that you knew all about your gods, even before you saw them,
if indeed you ever did. Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on
all its mystical side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite
natural. The incredible part of it seems to me obviously true. But I
think it so far dangerous or unsatisfactory that it is in some degree
scientific. It inquires whether its gods are worth inquiring into. A
man (of a certain age) may look into the eyes of his lady-love to see
that they are beautiful. But no normal lady will allow that young man
to look into her eyes to see whether they are beautiful. The same
vanity and idiosyncrasy has been generally observed in gods. Praise
them; or leave them alone; but do not look for them unless you know
they are there. Do not look for them unless you want them. It annoys
them very much.




THE ERROR OF IMPARTIALITY


The refusal of the jurors in the Thaw trial to come to an agreement is
certainly a somewhat amusing sequel to the frenzied and even fantastic
caution with which they were selected. Jurymen were set aside for
reasons which seem to have only the very wildest relation to the
case—reasons which we cannot conceive as giving any human being a real
bias. It may be questioned whether the exaggerated theory of
impartiality in an arbiter or juryman may not be carried so far as to
be more unjust than partiality itself. What people call impartiality
may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may
simply mean mental activity. It is sometimes made an objection, for
instance, to a juror that he has formed some _primâ-facie_ opinion upon
a case: if he can be forced under sharp questioning to admit that he
has formed such an opinion, he is regarded as manifestly unfit to
conduct the inquiry. Surely this is unsound. If his bias is one of
interest, of class, or creed, or notorious propaganda, then that fact
certainly proves that he is not an impartial arbiter. But the mere fact
that he did form some temporary impression from the first facts as far
as he knew them—this does not prove that he is not an impartial
arbiter—it only proves that he is not a cold-blooded fool.

If we walk down the street, taking all the jurymen who have not formed
opinions and leaving all the jurymen who have formed opinions, it seems
highly probable that we shall only succeed in taking all the stupid
jurymen and leaving all the thoughtful ones. Provided that the opinion
formed is really of this airy and abstract kind, provided that it has
no suggestion of settled motive or prejudice, we might well regard it
not merely as a promise of capacity, but literally as a promise of
justice. The man who took the trouble to deduce from the police reports
would probably be the man who would take the trouble to deduce further
and different things from the evidence. The man who had the sense to
form an opinion would be the man who would have the sense to alter it.

It is worth while to dwell for a moment on this minor aspect of the
matter because the error about impartiality and justice is by no means
confined to a criminal question. In much more serious matters it is
assumed that the agnostic is impartial; whereas the agnostic is merely
ignorant. The logical outcome of the fastidiousness about the Thaw
jurors would be that the case ought to be tried by Esquimaux, or
Hottentots, or savages from the Cannibal Islands—by some class of
people who could have no conceivable interest in the parties, and
moreover, no conceivable interest in the case. The pure and starry
perfection of impartiality would be reached by people who not only had
no opinion before they had heard the case, but who also had no opinion
after they had heard it. In the same way, there is in modern
discussions of religion and philosophy an absurd assumption that a man
is in some way just and well-poised because he has come to no
conclusion; and that a man is in some way knocked off the list of fair
judges because he has come to a conclusion. It is assumed that the
sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of
scepticism. I remember once arguing with an honest young atheist, who
was very much shocked at my disputing some of the assumptions which
were absolute sanctities to him (such as the quite unproved proposition
of the independence of matter and the quite improbable proposition of
its power to originate mind), and he at length fell back upon this
question, which he delivered with an honourable heat of defiance and
indignation: “Well, can you tell me any man of intellect, great in
science or philosophy, who accepted the miraculous?” I said, “With
pleasure. Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Newton, Faraday, Newman, Gladstone,
Pasteur, Browning, Brunetiere—as many more as you please.” To which
that quite admirable and idealistic young man made this astonishing
reply—“Oh, but of course they _had_ to say that; they were Christians.”
First he challenged me to find a black swan, and then he ruled out all
my swans because they were black. The fact that all these great
intellects had come to the Christian view was somehow or other a proof
either that they were not great intellects or that they had not really
come to that view. The argument thus stood in a charmingly convenient
form: “All men that count have come to my conclusion; for if they come
to your conclusion they do not count.”

It did not seem to occur to such controversialists that if Cardinal
Newman was really a man of intellect, the fact that he adhered to
dogmatic religion proved exactly as much as the fact that Professor
Huxley, another man of intellect, found that he could not adhere to
dogmatic religion; that is to say (as I cheerfully admit), it proved
precious little either way. If there is one class of men whom history
has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all
directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men. I would always
prefer to go by the bulk of humanity; that is why I am a democrat. But
whatever be the truth about exceptional intelligence and the masses, it
is manifestly most unreasonable that intelligent men should be divided
upon the absurd modern principle of regarding every clever man who
cannot make up his mind as an impartial judge, and regarding every
clever man who can make up his mind as a servile fanatic. As it is, we
seem to regard it as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has
taken one side or the other. We regard it (in other words) as a
positive objection to a reasoner that he has contrived to reach the
object of his reasoning. We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma
because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite
end. We say that the juryman is not a juryman because he has brought in
a verdict. We say that the judge is not a judge because he gives
judgment. We say that the sincere believer has no right to vote, simply
because he has voted.




PHONETIC SPELLING


A correspondent asks me to make more lucid my remarks about phonetic
spelling. I have no detailed objection to items of spelling-reform; my
objection is to a general principle; and it is this. It seems to me
that what is really wrong with all modern and highly civilised language
is that it does so largely consist of dead words. Half our speech
consists of similes that remind us of no similarity; of pictorial
phrases that call up no picture; of historical allusions the origin of
which we have forgotten. Take any instance on which the eye happens to
alight. I saw in the paper some days ago that the well-known leader of
a certain religious party wrote to a supporter of his the following
curious words: “I have not forgotten the talented way in which you held
up the banner at Birkenhead.” Taking the ordinary vague meaning of the
word “talented,” there is no coherency in the picture. The trumpets
blow, the spears shake and glitter, and in the thick of the purple
battle there stands a gentleman holding up a banner in a talented way.
And when we come to the original force of the word “talent” the matter
is worse: a talent is a Greek coin used in the New Testament as a
symbol of the mental capital committed to an individual at birth. If
the religious leader in question had really meant anything by his
phrases, he would have been puzzled to know how a man could use a Greek
coin to hold up a banner. But really he meant nothing by his phrases.
“Holding up the banner” was to him a colourless term for doing the
proper thing, and “talented” was a colourless term for doing it
successfully.

Now my own fear touching anything in the way of phonetic spelling is
that it would simply increase this tendency to use words as counters
and not as coins. The original life in a word (as in the word
“talent”) burns low as it is: sensible spelling might extinguish it
altogether. Suppose any sentence you like: suppose a man says,
“Republics generally encourage holidays.” It looks like the top line of
a copy-book. Now, it is perfectly true that if you wrote that sentence
exactly as it is pronounced, even by highly educated people, the
sentence would run: “Ripubliks jenrally inkurrij hollidies.” It looks
ugly: but I have not the smallest objection to ugliness. My objection
is that these four words have each a history and hidden treasures in
them: that this history and hidden treasure (which we tend to forget
too much as it is) phonetic spelling tends to make us forget
altogether. Republic does not mean merely a mode of political choice.
Republic (as we see when we look at the structure of the word) means
the Public Thing: the abstraction which is us all.

A Republican is not a man who wants a Constitution with a President. A
Republican is a man who prefers to think of Government as impersonal;
he is opposed to the Royalist, who prefers to think of Government as
personal. Take the second word, “generally.” This is always used as
meaning “in the majority of cases.” But, again, if we look at the shape
and spelling of the word, we shall see that “generally” means something
more like “generically,” and is akin to such words as “generation” or
“regenerate.” “Pigs are generally dirty” does not mean that pigs are,
in the majority of cases, dirty, but that pigs as a race or genus are
dirty, that pigs as pigs are dirty—an important philosophical
distinction. Take the third word, “encourage.” The word “encourage” is
used in such modern sentences in the merely automatic sense of promote;
to encourage poetry means merely to advance or assist poetry. But to
encourage poetry means properly to put courage into poetry—a fine idea.
Take the fourth word, “holidays.” As long as that word remains, it will
always answer the ignorant slander which asserts that religion was
opposed to human cheerfulness; that word will always assert that when a
day is holy it should also be happy. Properly spelt, these words all
tell a sublime story, like Westminster Abbey. Phonetically spelt, they
might lose the last traces of any such story. “Generally” is an exalted
metaphysical term; “jenrally” is not. If you “encourage” a man, you
pour into him the chivalry of a hundred princes; this does not happen
if you merely “inkurrij” him. “Republics,” if spelt phonetically, might
actually forget to be public. “Holidays,” if spelt phonetically, might
actually forget to be holy.

Here is a case that has just occurred. A certain magistrate told
somebody whom he was examining in court that he or she “should always
be polite to the police.” I do not know whether the magistrate noticed
the circumstance, but the word “polite” and the word “police” have the
same origin and meaning. Politeness means the atmosphere and ritual of
the city, the symbol of human civilisation. The policeman means the
representative and guardian of the city, the symbol of human
civilisation. Yet it may be doubted whether the two ideas are commonly
connected in the mind. It is probable that we often hear of politeness
without thinking of a policeman; it is even possible that our eyes
often alight upon a policeman without our thoughts instantly flying to
the subject of politeness. Yet the idea of the sacred city is not only
the link of them both, it is the only serious justification and the
only serious corrective of them both. If politeness means too often a
mere frippery, it is because it has not enough to do with serious
patriotism and public dignity; if policemen are coarse or casual, it is
because they are not sufficiently convinced that they are the servants
of the beautiful city and the agents of sweetness and light. Politeness
is not really a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely
suave and deprecating. Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid
and vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words,
politeness is a policeman. A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a
truncheon: a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of
the accidents of everyday existence. In other words, a policeman is
politeness; a veiled image of politeness—sometimes impenetrably veiled.
But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city,
which is the force and youth of both the words, both the things
actually degenerate. Our politeness loses all manliness because we
forget that politeness is only the Greek for patriotism. Our policemen
lose all delicacy because we forget that a policeman is only the Greek
for something civilised. A policeman should often have the functions of
a knight-errant. A policeman should always have the elegance of a
knight-errant. But I am not sure that he would succeed any the better
in remembering this obligation of romantic grace if his name were spelt
phonetically, supposing that it could be spelt phonetically. Some
spelling-reformers, I am told, in the poorer parts of London do spell
his name phonetically, very phonetically. They call him a “pleeceman.”
Thus the whole romance of the ancient city disappears from the word,
and the policeman’s reverent courtesy of demeanour deserts him quite
suddenly. This does seem to me the case against any extreme revolution
in spelling. If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to
think it wrong.




HUMANITARIANISM AND STRENGTH


Somebody writes complaining of something I said about progress. I have
forgotten what I said, but I am quite certain that it was (like a
certain Mr. Douglas in a poem which I have also forgotten) tender and
true. In any case, what I say now is this. Human history is so rich and
complicated that you can make out a case for any course of improvement
or retrogression. I could make out that the world has been growing more
democratic, for the English franchise has certainly grown more
democratic. I could also make out that the world has been growing more
aristocratic, for the English Public Schools have certainly grown more
aristocratic. I could prove the decline of militarism by the decline of
flogging; I could prove the increase of militarism by the increase of
standing armies and conscription. But I can prove anything in this way.
I can prove that the world has always been growing greener. Only lately
men have invented absinthe and the _Westminster Gazette_. I could prove
the world has grown less green. There are no more Robin Hood foresters,
and fields are being covered with houses. I could show that the world
was less red with khaki or more red with the new penny stamps. But in
all cases progress means progress only in some particular thing. Have
you ever noticed that strange line of Tennyson, in which he confesses,
half consciously, how very _conventional_ progress is?—

“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”


Even in praising change, he takes for a simile the most unchanging
thing. He calls our modern change a groove. And it is a groove; perhaps
there was never anything so groovy.

Nothing would induce me in so idle a monologue as this to discuss
adequately a great political matter like the question of the military
punishments in Egypt. But I may suggest one broad reality to be
observed by both sides, and which is, generally speaking, observed by
neither. Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the
argument that we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever
savages and Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists
use the metaphor, “We must fight them with their own weapons.” Very
well; let those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it
literally. Let us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own
weapons are large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned
gun. Their own weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them
with torture and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if
we fought them with clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole
strength of our Christian civilisation, that it does fight with its own
weapons and not with other people’s. It is not true that superiority
suggests a tit for tat. It is not true that if a small hooligan puts
his tongue out at the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Justice
immediately realises that his only chance of maintaining his position
is to put his tongue out at the little hooligan. The hooligan may or
may not have any respect at all for the Lord Chief Justice: that is a
matter which we may contentedly leave as a solemn psychological
mystery. But if the hooligan has any respect at all for the Lord Chief
Justice, that respect is certainly extended to the Lord Chief Justice
entirely because he does not put his tongue out.

Exactly in the same way the ruder or more sluggish races regard the
civilisation of Christendom. If they have any respect for it, it is
precisely because it does not use their own coarse and cruel
expedients. According to some modern moralists whenever Zulus cut off
the heads of dead Englishmen, Englishmen must cut off the heads of dead
Zulus. Whenever Arabs or Egyptians constantly use the whip to their
slaves, Englishmen must use the whip to their subjects. And on a
similar principle (I suppose), whenever an English Admiral has to fight
cannibals the English Admiral ought to eat them. However unattractive a
menu consisting entirely of barbaric kings may appear to an English
gentleman, he must try to sit down to it with an appetite. He must
fight the Sandwich Islanders with their own weapons; and their own
weapons are knives and forks. But the truth of the matter is, of
course, that to do this kind of thing is to break the whole spell of
our supremacy. All the mystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry
of the white man, so far as it exists in the eyes of these savages,
consists in the fact that we do not do such things. The Zulus point at
us and say, “Observe the advent of these inexplicable demi-gods, these
magicians, who do not cut off the noses of their enemies.” The
Soudanese say to each other, “This hardy people never flogs its
servants; it is superior to the simplest and most obvious human
pleasures.” And the cannibals say, “The austere and terrible race, the
race that denies itself even boiled missionary, is upon us: let us
flee.”

Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the general
proposition I suggest is the plainest common sense. The elements that
make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are
precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For
the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the
same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.
It is imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is
imagination that makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because
this picturing of the other man’s point of view is in the main a thing
in which Christians and Europeans specialise that Christians and
Europeans, with all their faults, have carried to such perfection both
the arts of peace and war.

They alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented
ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for
the same reason for which they have invented machine-guns. Both involve
a vivid calculation of remote events. It is precisely because the East,
with all its wisdom, is cruel, that the East, with all its wisdom, is
weak. And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are
still—merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy’s sufferings
they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the
Englishman’s head they might really borrow it. For if you do not
understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him,
very probably you will not.

When I was about seven years old I used to think that the chief modern
danger was a danger of over-civilisation. I am inclined to think now
that the chief modern danger is that of a slow return towards
barbarism, just such a return towards barbarism as is indicated in the
suggestions of barbaric retaliation of which I have just spoken.
Civilisation in the best sense merely means the full authority of the
human spirit over all externals. Barbarism means the worship of those
externals in their crude and unconquered state. Barbarism means the
worship of Nature; and in recent poetry, science, and philosophy there
has been too much of the worship of Nature. Wherever men begin to talk
much and with great solemnity about the forces outside man, the note of
it is barbaric. When men talk much about heredity and environment they
are almost barbarians. The modern men of science are many of them
almost barbarians. Mr. Blatchford is in great danger of becoming a
barbarian. For barbarians (especially the truly squalid and unhappy
barbarians) are always talking about these scientific subjects from
morning till night. That is why they remain squalid and unhappy; that
is why they remain barbarians. Hottentots are always talking about
heredity, like Mr. Blatchford. Sandwich Islanders are always talking
about environment, like Mr. Suthers. Savages—those that are truly
stunted or depraved—dedicate nearly all their tales and sayings to the
subject of physical kinship, of a curse on this or that tribe, of a
taint in this or that family, of the invincible law of blood, of the
unavoidable evil of places. The true savage is a slave, and is always
talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man and
is always talking about what he may do. Hence all the Zola heredity and
Ibsen heredity that has been written in our time affects me as not
merely evil, but as essentially ignorant and retrogressive. This sort
of science is almost the only thing that can with strict propriety be
called reactionary. Scientific determinism is simply the primal
twilight of all mankind; and some men seem to be returning to it.

Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about
material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked
about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of
Drink—as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call the
problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk about
curing it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dim
stage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; it
is no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle
is a devil. The people who talk about the curse of drink will probably
progress down that dark hill. In a little while we shall have them
calling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit
of housebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade;
and for all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all
the stationers’ shops by Act of Parliament.

I cannot help thinking that there is some shadow of this uncivilised
materialism lying at present upon a much more dignified and valuable
cause. Every one is talking just now about the desirability of
ingeminating peace and averting war. But even war and peace are
physical states rather than moral states, and in talking about them
only we have by no means got to the bottom of the matter. How, for
instance, do we as a matter of fact create peace in one single
community? We do not do it by vaguely telling every one to avoid
fighting and to submit to anything that is done to him. We do it by
definitely defining his rights and then undertaking to avenge his
wrongs. We shall never have a common peace in Europe till we have a
common principle in Europe. People talk of “The United States of
Europe;” but they forget that it needed the very doctrinal “Declaration
of Independence” to make the United States of America. You cannot agree
about nothing any more than you can quarrel about nothing.




WINE WHEN IT IS RED


I suppose that there will be some wigs on the green in connection with
the recent manifesto signed by a string of very eminent doctors on the
subject of what is called “alcohol.” “Alcohol” is, to judge by the
sound of it, an Arabic word, like “algebra” and “Alhambra,” those two
other unpleasant things. The Alhambra in Spain I have never seen; I am
told that it is a low and rambling building; I allude to the far more
dignified erection in Leicester Square. If it is true, as I surmise,
that “alcohol” is a word of the Arabs, it is interesting to realise
that our general word for the essence of wine and beer and such things
comes from a people which has made particular war upon them. I suppose
that some aged Moslem chieftain sat one day at the opening of his tent
and, brooding with black brows and cursing in his black beard over wine
as the symbol of Christianity, racked his brains for some word ugly
enough to express his racial and religious antipathy, and suddenly spat
out the horrible word “alcohol.” The fact that the doctors had to use
this word for the sake of scientific clearness was really a great
disadvantage to them in fairly discussing the matter. For the word
really involves one of those beggings of the question which make these
moral matters so difficult. It is quite a mistake to suppose that, when
a man desires an alcoholic drink, he necessarily desires alcohol.

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty
English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented. The fact
that beer has a very slight stimulating quality will be quite among the
smallest reasons that induce him to ask for it. In short, he will not
be in the least desiring alcohol; he will be desiring beer. But, of
course, the question cannot be settled in such a simple way. The real
difficulty which confronts everybody, and which especially confronts
doctors, is that the extraordinary position of man in the physical
universe makes it practically impossible to treat him in either one
direction or the other in a purely physical way. Man is an exception,
whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a
disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then
we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head. In
neither case can we really argue very much from the body of man simply
considered as the body of an innocent and healthy animal. His body has
got too much mixed up with his soul, as we see in the supreme instance
of sex. It may be worth while uttering the warning to wealthy
philanthropists and idealists that this argument from the animal should
not be thoughtlessly used, even against the atrocious evils of excess;
it is an argument that proves too little or too much.

Doubtless, it is unnatural to be drunk. But then in a real sense it is
unnatural to be human. Doubtless, the intemperate workman wastes his
tissues in drinking; but no one knows how much the sober workman wastes
his tissues by working. No one knows how much the wealthy
philanthropist wastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer
conditions, by thinking. All the human things are more dangerous than
anything that affects the beasts—sex, poetry, property, religion. The
real case against drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but
that it calls up the Devil. It does not call up the beast, and if it
did it would not matter much, as a rule; the beast is a harmless and
rather amiable creature, as anybody can see by watching cattle. There
is nothing bestial about intoxication; and certainly there is nothing
intoxicating or even particularly lively about beasts. Man is always
something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument
from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal
is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented
anything so bad as drunkenness—or so good as drink.

The pronouncement of these particular doctors is very clear and
uncompromising; in the modern atmosphere, indeed, it even deserves some
credit for moral courage. The majority of modern people, of course,
will probably agree with it in so far as it declares that alcoholic
drinks are often of supreme value in emergencies of illness; but many
people, I fear, will open their eyes at the emphatic terms in which
they describe such drink as considered as a beverage; but they are not
content with declaring that the drink is in moderation harmless: they
distinctly declare that it is in moderation beneficial. But I fancy
that, in saying this, the doctors had in mind a truth that runs
somewhat counter to the common opinion. I fancy that it is the
experience of most doctors that giving any alcohol for illness (though
often necessary) is about the most morally dangerous way of giving it.
Instead of giving it to a healthy person who has many other forms of
life, you are giving it to a desperate person, to whom it is the only
form of life. The invalid can hardly be blamed if by some accident of
his erratic and overwrought condition he comes to remember the thing as
the very water of vitality and to use it as such. For in so far as
drinking is really a sin it is not because drinking is wild, but
because drinking is tame; not in so far as it is anarchy, but in so far
as it is slavery. Probably the worst way to drink is to drink
medicinally. Certainly the safest way to drink is to drink carelessly;
that is, without caring much for anything, and especially not caring
for the drink.

The doctor, of course, ought to be able to do a great deal in the way
of restraining those individual cases where there is plainly an evil
thirst; and beyond that the only hope would seem to be in some
increase, or, rather, some concentration of ordinary public opinion on
the subject. I have always held consistently my own modest theory on
the subject. I believe that if by some method the local public-house
could be as definite and isolated a place as the local post-office or
the local railway station, if all types of people passed through it for
all types of refreshment, you would have the same safeguard against a
man behaving in a disgusting way in a tavern that you have at present
against his behaving in a disgusting way in a post-office: simply the
presence of his ordinary sensible neighbours. In such a place the kind
of lunatic who wants to drink an unlimited number of whiskies would be
treated with the same severity with which the post office authorities
would treat an amiable lunatic who had an appetite for licking an
unlimited number of stamps. It is a small matter whether in either case
a technical refusal would be officially employed. It is an essential
matter that in both cases the authorities could rapidly communicate
with the friends and family of the mentally afflicted person. At least,
the postmistress would not dangle a strip of tempting sixpenny stamps
before the enthusiast’s eyes as he was being dragged away with his
tongue out. If we made drinking open and official we might be taking
one step towards making it careless. In such things to be careless is
to be sane: for neither drunkards nor Moslems can be careless about
drink.




DEMAGOGUES AND MYSTAGOGUES


I once heard a man call this age the age of demagogues. Of this I can
only say, in the admirably sensible words of the angry coachman in
“Pickwick,” that “that remark’s political, or what is much the same, it
ain’t true.” So far from being the age of demagogues, this is really
and specially the age of mystagogues. So far from this being a time in
which things are praised because they are popular, the truth is that
this is the first time, perhaps, in the whole history of the world in
which things can be praised because they are unpopular. The demagogue
succeeds because he makes himself understood, even if he is not worth
understanding. But the mystagogue succeeds because he gets himself
misunderstood; although, as a rule, he is not even worth
misunderstanding. Gladstone was a demagogue: Disraeli a mystagogue. But
ours is specially the time when a man can advertise his wares not as a
universality, but as what the tradesmen call “a speciality.” We all
know this, for instance, about modern art. Michelangelo and Whistler
were both fine artists; but one is obviously public, the other
obviously private, or, rather, not obvious at all. Michelangelo’s
frescoes are doubtless finer than the popular judgment, but they are
plainly meant to strike the popular judgment. Whistler’s pictures seem
often meant to escape the popular judgment; they even seem meant to
escape the popular admiration. They are elusive, fugitive; they fly
even from praise. Doubtless many artists in Michelangelo’s day declared
themselves to be great artists, although they were unsuccessful. But
they did not declare themselves great artists because they were
unsuccessful: that is the peculiarity of our own time, which has a
positive bias against the populace.

Another case of the same kind of thing can be found in the latest
conceptions of humour. By the wholesome tradition of mankind, a joke
was a thing meant to amuse men; a joke which did not amuse them was a
failure, just as a fire which did not warm them was a failure. But we
have seen the process of secrecy and aristocracy introduced even into
jokes. If a joke falls flat, a small school of æsthetes only ask us to
notice the wild grace of its falling and its perfect flatness after its
fall. The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company
has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was
not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane
individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and
uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They
have made laughter lonelier than tears.

There is a third thing to which the mystagogues have recently been
applying the methods of a secret society: I mean manners. Men who
sought to rebuke rudeness used to represent manners as reasonable and
ordinary; now they seek to represent them as private and peculiar.
Instead of saying to a man who blocks up a street or the fireplace,
“You ought to know better than that,” the moderns say, “You, of course,
don’t know better than that.”

I have just been reading an amusing book by Lady Grove called “The
Social Fetich,” which is a positive riot of this new specialism and
mystification. It is due to Lady Grove to say that she has some of the
freer and more honourable qualities of the old Whig aristocracy, as
well as their wonderful worldliness and their strange faith in the
passing fashion of our politics. For instance, she speaks of Jingo
Imperialism with a healthy English contempt; and she perceives stray
and striking truths, and records them justly—as, for instance, the
greater democracy of the Southern and Catholic countries of Europe. But
in her dealings with social formulæ here in England she is, it must
frankly be said, a common mystagogue. She does not, like a decent
demagogue, wish to make people understand; she wishes to make them
painfully conscious of not understanding. Her favourite method is to
terrify people from doing things that are quite harmless by telling
them that if they do they are the kind of people who would do other
things, equally harmless. If you ask after somebody’s mother (or
whatever it is), you are the kind of person who would have a
pillow-case, or would not have a pillow-case. I forget which it is; and
so, I dare say, does she. If you assume the ordinary dignity of a
decent citizen and say that you don’t see the harm of having a mother
or a pillow-case, she would say that of course _you_ wouldn’t. This is
what I call being a mystagogue. It is more vulgar than being a
demagogue; because it is much easier.

The primary point I meant to emphasise is that this sort of aristocracy
is essentially a new sort. All the old despots were demagogues; at
least, they were demagogues whenever they were really trying to please
or impress the demos. If they poured out beer for their vassals it was
because both they and their vassals had a taste for beer. If (in some
slightly different mood) they poured melted lead on their vassals, it
was because both they and their vassals had a strong distaste for
melted lead. But they did not make any mystery about either of the two
substances. They did not say, “You don’t like melted lead?.... Ah! no,
of course, _you_ wouldn’t; you are probably the kind of person who
would prefer beer.... It is no good asking you even to imagine the
curious undercurrent of psychological pleasure felt by a refined person
under the seeming shock of melted lead.” Even tyrants when they tried
to be popular, tried to give the people pleasure; they did not try to
overawe the people by giving them something which they ought to regard
as pleasure. It was the same with the popular presentment of
aristocracy. Aristocrats tried to impress humanity by the exhibition of
qualities which humanity admires, such as courage, gaiety, or even mere
splendour. The aristocracy might have more possession in these things,
but the democracy had quite equal delight in them. It was much more
sensible to offer yourself for admiration because you had drunk three
bottles of port at a sitting, than to offer yourself for admiration (as
Lady Grove does) because you think it right to say “port wine” while
other people think it right to say “port.” Whether Lady Grove’s
preference for port wine (I mean for the phrase port wine) is a piece
of mere nonsense I do not know; but at least it is a very good example
of the futility of such tests in the matter even of mere breeding.
“Port wine” may happen to be the phrase used in certain good families;
but numberless aristocrats say “port,” and all barmaids say “port
wine.” The whole thing is rather more trivial than collecting
tram-tickets; and I will not pursue Lady Grove’s further distinctions.
I pass over the interesting theory that I ought to say to Jones (even
apparently if he is my dearest friend), “How is Mrs. Jones?” instead of
“How is your wife?” and I pass over an impassioned declamation about
bedspreads (I think) which has failed to fire my blood.

The truth of the matter is really quite simple. An aristocracy is a
secret society; and this is especially so when, as in the modern world,
it is practically a plutocracy. The one idea of a secret society is to
change the password. Lady Grove falls naturally into a pure perversity
because she feels subconsciously that the people of England can be more
effectively kept at a distance by a perpetual torrent of new tests than
by the persistence of a few old ones. She knows that in the educated
“middle class” there is an idea that it is vulgar to say port wine;
therefore she reverses the idea—she says that the man who would say
“port” is a man who would say, “How is your wife?” She says it because
she knows both these remarks to be quite obvious and reasonable.

The only thing to be done or said in reply, I suppose, would be to
apply the same principle of bold mystification on our own part. I do
not see why I should not write a book called “Etiquette in Fleet
Street,” and terrify every one else out of that thoroughfare by
mysterious allusions to the mistakes that they generally make. I might
say: “This is the kind of man who would wear a green tie when he went
into a tobacconist’s,” or “You don’t see anything wrong in drinking a
Benedictine on Thursday?.... No, of course _you_ wouldn’t.” I might
asseverate with passionate disgust and disdain: “The man who is capable
of writing sonnets as well as triolets is capable of climbing an
omnibus while holding an umbrella.” It seems a simple method; if ever I
should master it perhaps I may govern England.




THE “EATANSWILL GAZETTE”


The other day some one presented me with a paper called the _Eatanswill
Gazette_. I need hardly say that I could not have been more startled if
I had seen a coach coming down the road with old Mr. Tony Weller on the
box. But, indeed, the case is much more extraordinary than that would
be. Old Mr. Weller was a good man, a specially and seriously good man,
a proud father, a very patient husband, a sane moralist, and a reliable
ally. One could not be so very much surprised if somebody pretended to
be Tony Weller. But the _Eatanswill Gazette_ is definitely depicted in
“Pickwick” as a dirty and unscrupulous rag, soaked with slander and
nonsense. It was really interesting to find a modern paper proud to
take its name. The case cannot be compared to anything so simple as a
resurrection of one of the “Pickwick” characters; yet a very good
parallel could easily be found. It is almost exactly as if a firm of
solicitors were to open their offices to-morrow under the name of
Dodson and Fogg.

It was at once apparent, of course, that the thing was a joke. But what
was not apparent, what only grew upon the mind with gradual wonder and
terror, was the fact that it had its serious side. The paper is
published in the well-known town of Sudbury, in Suffolk. And it seems
that there is a standing quarrel between Sudbury and the county town of
Ipswich as to which was the town described by Dickens in his celebrated
sketch of an election. Each town proclaims with passion that it was
Eatanswill. If each town proclaimed with passion that it was not
Eatanswill, I might be able to understand it. Eatanswill, according to
Dickens, was a town alive with loathsome corruption, hypocritical in
all its public utterances, and venal in all its votes. Yet, two highly
respectable towns compete for the honour of having been this particular
cesspool, just as ten cities fought to be the birthplace of Homer. They
claim to be its original as keenly as if they were claiming to be the
original of More’s “Utopia” or Morris’s “Earthly Paradise.” They grow
seriously heated over the matter. The men of Ipswich say warmly, “It
must have been our town; for Dickens says it was corrupt, and a more
corrupt town than our town you couldn’t have met in a month.” The men
of Sudbury reply with rising passion, “Permit us to tell you,
gentlemen, that our town was quite as corrupt as your town any day of
the week. Our town was a common nuisance; and we defy our enemies to
question it.” “Perhaps you will tell us,” sneer the citizens of
Ipswich, “that your politics were ever as thoroughly filthy as----” “As
filthy as anything,” answer the Sudbury men, undauntedly. “Nothing in
politics could be filthier. Dickens must have noticed how disgusting we
were.” “And could he have failed to notice,” the others reason
indignantly, “how disgusting we were? You could smell us a mile off.
You Sudbury fellows may think yourselves very fine, but let me tell you
that, compared to our city, Sudbury was an honest place.” And so the
controversy goes on. It seems to me to be a new and odd kind of
controversy.

Naturally, an outsider feels inclined to ask why Eatanswill should be
either one or the other. As a matter of fact, I fear Eatanswill was
every town in the country. It is surely clear that when Dickens
described the Eatanswill election he did not mean it as a satire on
Sudbury or a satire on Ipswich; he meant it as a satire on England. The
Eatanswill election is not a joke against Eatanswill; it is a joke
against elections. If the satire is merely local, it practically loses
its point; just as the “Circumlocution Office” would lose its point if
it were not supposed to be a true sketch of all Government offices;
just as the Lord Chancellor in “Bleak House” would lose his point if he
were not supposed to be symbolic and representative of all Lord
Chancellors. The whole moral meaning would vanish if we supposed that
Oliver Twist had got by accident into an exceptionally bad workhouse,
or that Mr. Dorrit was in the only debtors’ prison that was not well
managed. Dickens was making game, not of places, but of methods. He
poured all his powerful genius into trying to make the people ashamed
of the methods. But he seems only to have succeeded in making people
proud of the places. In any case, the controversy is conducted in a
truly extraordinary way. No one seems to allow for the fact that, after
all, Dickens was writing a novel, and a highly fantastic novel at that.
Facts in support of Sudbury or Ipswich are quoted not only from the
story itself, which is wild and wandering enough, but even from the yet
wilder narratives which incidentally occur in the story, such as Sam
Weller’s description of how his father, on the way to Eatanswill,
tipped all the voters into the canal. This may quite easily be (to
begin with) an entertaining tarradiddle of Sam’s own invention, told,
like many other even more improbable stories, solely to amuse Mr.
Pickwick. Yet the champions of these two towns positively ask each
other to produce a canal, or to fail for ever in their attempt to prove
themselves the most corrupt town in England. As far as I remember,
Sam’s story of the canal ends with Mr. Pickwick eagerly asking whether
everybody was rescued, and Sam solemnly replying that one old
gentleman’s hat was found, but that he was not sure whether his head
was in it. If the canal is to be taken as realistic, why not the hat
and the head? If these critics ever find the canal I recommend them to
drag it for the body of the old gentleman.

Both sides refuse to allow for the fact that the characters in the
story are comic characters. For instance, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, the
eminent student of Dickens, writes to the _Eatanswill Gazette_ to say
that Sudbury, a small town, could not have been Eatanswill, because one
of the candidates speaks of its great manufactures. But obviously one
of the candidates would have spoken of its great manufactures if it had
had nothing but a row of apple-stalls. One of the candidates might have
said that the commerce of Eatanswill eclipsed Carthage, and covered
every sea; it would have been quite in the style of Dickens. But when
the champion of Sudbury answers him, he does not point out this plain
mistake. He answers by making another mistake exactly of the same kind.
He says that Eatanswill was not a busy, important place. And his odd
reason is that Mrs. Pott said she was dull there. But obviously Mrs.
Pott would have said she was dull anywhere. She was setting her cap at
Mr. Winkle. Moreover, it was the whole point of her character in any
case. Mrs. Pott was that kind of woman. If she had been in Ipswich she
would have said that she ought to be in London. If she was in London
she would have said that she ought to be in Paris. The first disputant
proves Eatanswill grand because a servile candidate calls it grand. The
second proves it dull because a discontented woman calls it dull.

The great part of the controversy seems to be conducted in the spirit
of highly irrelevant realism. Sudbury cannot be Eatanswill, because
there was a fancy-dress shop at Eatanswill, and there is no record of a
fancy-dress shop at Sudbury. Sudbury must be Eatanswill because there
were heavy roads outside Eatanswill, and there are heavy roads outside
Sudbury. Ipswich cannot be Eatanswill, because Mrs. Leo Hunter’s
country seat would not be near a big town. Ipswich must be Eatanswill
because Mrs. Leo Hunter’s country seat would be near a large town.
Really, Dickens might have been allowed to take liberties with such
things as these, even if he had been mentioning the place by name. If I
were writing a story about the town of Limerick, I should take the
liberty of introducing a bun-shop without taking a journey to Limerick
to see whether there was a bun-shop there. If I wrote a romance about
Torquay, I should hold myself free to introduce a house with a green
door without having studied a list of all the coloured doors in the
town. But if, in order to make it particularly obvious that I had not
meant the town for a photograph either of Torquay or Limerick, I had
gone out of my way to give the place a wild, fictitious name of my own,
I think that in that case I should be justified in tearing my hair with
rage if the people of Limerick or Torquay began to argue about
bun-shops and green doors. No reasonable man would expect Dickens to be
so literal as all that even about Bath or Bury St. Edmunds, which do
exist; far less need he be literal about Eatanswill, which didn’t
exist.

I must confess, however, that I incline to the Sudbury side of the
argument. This does not only arise from the sympathy which all healthy
people have for small places as against big ones; it arises from some
really good qualities in this particular Sudbury publication. First of
all, the champions of Sudbury seem to be more open to the sensible and
humorous view of the book than the champions of Ipswich—at least, those
that appear in this discussion. Even the Sudbury champion, bent on
finding realistic clothes, rebels (to his eternal honour) when Mr.
Percy Fitzgerald tries to show that Bob Sawyer’s famous statement that
he was neither Buff nor Blue, “but a sort of plaid,” must have been
copied from some silly man at Ipswich who said that his politics were
“half and half.” Anybody might have made either of the two jokes. But
it was the whole glory and meaning of Dickens that he confined himself
to making jokes that anybody might have made a little better than
anybody would have made them.




FAIRY TALES


Some solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial
people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they
base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents
in the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter
indulged in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The
objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the
facts. The fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being
innocent, but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense
of being moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of
fairyland, but there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the
best official accounts. Mr. W.B. Yeats and other sensitive modern
souls, feeling that modern life is about as black a slavery as ever
oppressed mankind (they are right enough there), have especially
described elfland as a place of utter ease and abandonment—a place
where the soul can turn every way at will like the wind. Science
denounces the idea of a capricious God; but Mr. Yeats’s school suggests
that in that world every one is a capricious god. Mr. Yeats himself has
said a hundred times in that sad and splendid literary style which
makes him the first of all poets now writing in English (I will not say
of all English poets, for Irishmen are familiar with the practice of
physical assault), he has, I say, called up a hundred times the picture
of the terrible freedom of the fairies, who typify the ultimate anarchy
of art—

“Where nobody grows old or weary or wise,
Where nobody grows old or godly or grave.”


But, after all (it is a shocking thing to say), I doubt whether Mr.
Yeats really knows the real philosophy of the fairies. He is not simple
enough; he is not stupid enough. Though I say it who should not, in
good sound human stupidity I would knock Mr. Yeats out any day. The
fairies like me better than Mr. Yeats; they can take me in more. And I
have my doubts whether this feeling of the free, wild spirits on the
crest of hill or wave is really the central and simple spirit of
folk-lore. I think the poets have made a mistake: because the world of
the fairy-tales is a brighter and more varied world than ours, they
have fancied it less moral; really it is brighter and more varied
because it is more moral. Suppose a man could be born in a modern
prison. It is impossible, of course, because nothing human can happen
in a modern prison, though it could sometimes in an ancient dungeon. A
modern prison is always inhuman, even when it is not inhumane. But
suppose a man were born in a modern prison, and grew accustomed to the
deadly silence and the disgusting indifference; and suppose he were
then suddenly turned loose upon the life and laughter of Fleet Street.
He would, of course, think that the literary men in Fleet Street were a
free and happy race; yet how sadly, how ironically, is this the reverse
of the case! And so again these toiling serfs in Fleet Street, when
they catch a glimpse of the fairies, think the fairies are utterly
free. But fairies are like journalists in this and many other respects.
Fairies and journalists have an apparent gaiety and a delusive beauty.
Fairies and journalists seem to be lovely and lawless; they seem to be
both of them too exquisite to descend to the ugliness of everyday duty.
But it is an illusion created by the sudden sweetness of their
presence. Journalists live under law; and so in fact does fairyland.

If you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs
from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can
only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics,
is the core of the nursery-tales. The whole happiness of fairyland
hangs upon a thread, upon one thread. Cinderella may have a dress woven
on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she
must be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies
to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful
results will follow. Bluebeard’s wife may open all doors but one. A
promise is broken to a cat, and the whole world goes wrong. A promise
is broken to a yellow dwarf, and the whole world goes wrong. A girl may
be the bride of the God of Love himself if she never tries to see him;
she sees him, and he vanishes away. A girl is given a box on condition
she does not open it; she opens it, and all the evils of this world
rush out at her. A man and woman are put in a garden on condition that
they do not eat one fruit: they eat it, and lose their joy in all the
fruits of the earth.

This great idea, then, is the backbone of all folk-lore—the idea that
all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one
negative. Now, it is obvious that there are many philosophical and
religious ideas akin to or symbolised by this; but it is not with them
I wish to deal here. It is surely obvious that all ethics ought to be
taught to this fairy-tale tune; that, if one does the thing forbidden,
one imperils all the things provided. A man who breaks his promise to
his wife ought to be reminded that, even if she is a cat, the case of
the fairy-cat shows that such conduct may be incautious. A burglar just
about to open some one else’s safe should be playfully reminded that he
is in the perilous posture of the beautiful Pandora: he is about to
lift the forbidden lid and loosen evils unknown. The boy eating some
one’s apples in some one’s apple tree should be a reminder that he has
come to a mystical moment of his life, when one apple may rob him of
all others. This is the profound morality of fairy-tales; which, so far
from being lawless, go to the root of all law. Instead of finding (like
common books of ethics) a rationalistic basis for each Commandment,
they find the great mystical basis for all Commandments. We are in this
fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the
conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. The
vetoes are indeed extraordinary, but then so are the concessions. The
idea of property, the idea of some one else’s apples, is a rum idea;
but then the idea of there being any apples is a rum idea. It is
strange and weird that I cannot with safety drink ten bottles of
champagne; but then the champagne itself is strange and weird, if you
come to that. If I have drunk of the fairies’ drink it is but just I
should drink by the fairies’ rules. We may not see the direct logical
connection between three beautiful silver spoons and a large ugly
policeman; but then who in fairy tales ever could see the direct
logical connection between three bears and a giant, or between a rose
and a roaring beast? Not only can these fairy-tales be enjoyed because
they are moral, but morality can be enjoyed because it puts us in
fairyland, in a world at once of wonder and of war.




TOM JONES AND MORALITY


The two hundredth anniversary of Henry Fielding is very justly
celebrated, even if, as far as can be discovered, it is only celebrated
by the newspapers. It would be too much to expect that any such merely
chronological incident should induce the people who write about
Fielding to read him; this kind of neglect is only another name for
glory. A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having
read. This is not in itself wholly unjust; it merely implies a certain
respect for the realisation and fixed conclusions of the mass of
mankind. I have never read Pindar (I mean I have never read the Greek
Pindar; Peter Pindar I have read all right), but the mere fact that I
have not read Pindar, I think, ought not to prevent me and certainly
would not prevent me from talking of “the masterpieces of Pindar,” or
of “great poets like Pindar or Æschylus.” The very learned men are
angularly unenlightened on this as on many other subjects; and the
position they take up is really quite unreasonable. If any ordinary
journalist or man of general reading alludes to Villon or to Homer,
they consider it a quite triumphant sneer to say to the man, “You
cannot read mediæval French,” or “You cannot read Homeric Greek.” But
it is not a triumphant sneer—or, indeed, a sneer at all. A man has got
as much right to employ in his speech the established and traditional
facts of human history as he has to employ any other piece of common
human information. And it is as reasonable for a man who knows no
French to assume that Villon was a good poet as it would be for a man
who has no ear for music to assume that Beethoven was a good musician.
Because he himself has no ear for music, that is no reason why he
should assume that the human race has no ear for music. Because I am
ignorant (as I am), it does not follow that I ought to assume that I am
deceived. The man who would not praise Pindar unless he had read him
would be a low, distrustful fellow, the worst kind of sceptic, who
doubts not only God, but man. He would be like a man who could not call
Mount Everest high unless he had climbed it. He would be like a man who
would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he had been there.

But I think there is a limit, and a highly legitimate limit, to this
process. I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a
Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to
abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose
Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and
outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well
perhaps—I think, at any rate, it would do no harm—if he did know a
little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar. And I think the same
situation would be involved if the critic were concerned to point out
that Pindar was scandalously immoral, pestilently cynical, or low and
beastly in his views of life. When people brought such attacks against
the morality of Pindar, I should regret that they could not read Greek;
and when they bring such attacks against the morality of Fielding, I
regret very much that they cannot read English.

There seems to be an extraordinary idea abroad that Fielding was in
some way an immoral or offensive writer. I have been astounded by the
number of the leading articles, literary articles, and other articles
written about him just now in which there is a curious tone of
apologising for the man. One critic says that after all he couldn’t
help it, because he lived in the eighteenth century; another says that
we must allow for the change of manners and ideas; another says that he
was not altogether without generous and humane feelings; another
suggests that he clung feebly, after all, to a few of the less
important virtues. What on earth does all this mean? Fielding described
Tom Jones as going on in a certain way, in which, most unfortunately, a
very large number of young men do go on. It is unnecessary to say that
Henry Fielding knew that it was an unfortunate way of going on. Even
Tom Jones knew that. He said in so many words that it was a very
unfortunate way of going on; he said, one may almost say, that it had
ruined his life; the passage is there for the benefit of any one who
may take the trouble to read the book. There is ample evidence (though
even this is of a mystical and indirect kind), there is ample evidence
that Fielding probably thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than
to be an utter coward and sneak. There is simply not one rag or thread
or speck of evidence to show that Fielding thought that it was better
to be Tom Jones than to be a good man. All that he is concerned with is
the description of a definite and very real type of young man; the
young man whose passions and whose selfish necessities sometimes seemed
to be stronger than anything else in him.

The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad, though not so bad,
_spiritually_ speaking, as the practical morality of Arthur Pendennis
or the practical morality of Pip, and certainly nothing like so bad as
the profound practical immorality of Daniel Deronda. The practical
morality of Tom Jones is bad; but I cannot see any proof that his
theoretical morality was particularly bad. There is no need to tell the
majority of modern young men even to live up to the theoretical ethics
of Henry Fielding. They would suddenly spring into the stature of
archangels if they lived up to the theoretic ethics of poor Tom Jones.
Tom Jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is
walking about the streets; we meet him every day. We meet with him, we
drink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him.
The only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage
to write about him. We split up the supreme and central human being,
Tom Jones, into a number of separate aspects. We let Mr. J.M. Barrie
write about him in his good moments, and make him out better than he
is. We let Zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out
much worse than he is. We let Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of
spiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard
Kipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far
more cowardly. We let obscene writers write about the obscenities of
this ordinary man. We let puritan writers write about the purities of
this ordinary man. We look through one peephole that makes men out as
devils, and we call it the new art. We look through another peephole
that makes men out as angels, and we call it the New Theology. But if
we pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over
some old mildewed leaves, and if in that obscurity and decay we find
some faint traces of a tale about a complete man, such a man as is
walking on the pavement outside, we suddenly pull a long face, and we
call it the coarse morals of a bygone age.

The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the general
view of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown to
associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness;
according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old
idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about
immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth’s “Gin
Lane” or “Stages of Cruelty,” or it recorded, like the popular
broadsheet, “God’s dreadful judgment” against some blasphemer or
murderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homeless
scepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that
morality is somehow merely a matter of human taste—an accident of
psychology. And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man
wishing to praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it
that there is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it
is supreme. Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that
virtue is visionary. Every book which admits that evil is real is felt
in some vague way to be admitting that good is unreal. The modern
instinct is that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that
remains good. But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was
ever so evil, there was something that remained good—goodness remained
good. An actual avenging virtue existed outside the human race; to that
men rose, or from that men fell away. Therefore, of course, this law
itself was as much demonstrated in the breach as in the observance. If
Tom Jones violated morality, so much the worse for Tom Jones. Fielding
did not feel, as a melancholy modern would have done, that every sin of
Tom Jones was in some way breaking the spell, or we may even say
destroying the fiction of morality. Men spoke of the sinner breaking
the law; but it was rather the law that broke him. And what modern
people call the foulness and freedom of Fielding is generally the
severity and moral stringency of Fielding. He would not have thought
that he was serving morality at all if he had written a book all about
nice people. Fielding would have considered Mr. Ian Maclaren extremely
immoral; and there is something to be said for that view. Telling the
truth about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very
elementary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters are not
wicked, the book is. This older and firmer conception of right as
existing outside human weakness and without reference to human error
can be felt in the very lightest and loosest of the works of old
English literature. It is commonly unmeaning enough to call Shakspere a
great moralist; but in this particular way Shakspere is a very typical
moralist. Whenever he alludes to right and wrong it is always with this
old implication. Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is
wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.




THE MAID OF ORLEANS


A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read
Voltaire’s “La Pucelle,” a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of
Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again
for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began
to turn over the leaves of the new “Jeanne d’Arc,” by that great and
graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender
sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a
noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant
girl through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and
even respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of
Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come
to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire’s.

When a man of Voltaire’s school has to explode a saint or a great
religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a
common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a
saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular
fussy little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc,
though it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not
specially Voltaire’s nature. But M. France read M. France’s nature into
Joan of Arc—all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of
the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with
startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned
anywhere; Renan’s “Vie de Jésus.” It has just the same general
intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least
patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite
the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the
loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a
brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to
patronise.

And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively
unreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much
knowledge of reason as Anatole France. And, if anything is irrational,
it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculous
stories is irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this: you
explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by
inventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you are
confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into
the sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think
that he did. It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply
that he may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is
to write like this: “When we consider Jack’s curious and even perilous
heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a
profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and
a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover, there is little
doubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India, who
told him about the tricks of the mango plant, and how it is sent up to
the sky. We can imagine these two friends, the old man and the young,
wandering in the woods together at evening, looking at the red and
level clouds, as on that night when the old man pointed to a small
beanstalk, and told his too imaginative companion that this also might
be made to scale the heavens. And then, when we remember the quite
exceptional psychology of Jack, when we remember how there was in him a
union of the prosaic, the love of plain vegetables, with an almost
irrelevant eagerness for the unattainable, for invisibility and the
void, we shall no longer wonder that it was to him especially that was
sent this sweet, though merely symbolic, dream of the tree uniting
earth and heaven.” That is the way that Renan and France write, only
they do it better. But, really, a rationalist like myself becomes a
little impatient and feels inclined to say, “But, hang it all, what do
you know about the heredity of Jack or the psychology of Jack? You know
nothing about Jack at all, except that some people say that he climbed
up a beanstalk. Nobody would ever have thought of mentioning him if he
hadn’t. You must interpret him in terms of the beanstalk religion; you
cannot merely interpret religion in terms of him. We have the materials
of this story, and we can believe them or not. But we have not got the
materials to make another story.”

It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole
France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible
to his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore
dismiss it and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries
to invent a real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He
produces a scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any
scientific proof. It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and
chemistry) said that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and
argon got into the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most
obvious example, the principal character in M. France’s story is a
person who never existed at all. All Joan’s wisdom and energy, it
seems, came from a certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest
trace in all the multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation
I can find for this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a
peasant girl could not possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very
hard for a freethinker to remain democratic. The writer seems
altogether to forget what is meant by the moral atmosphere of a
community. To say that Joan must have learnt her vision of a virgin
overthrowing evil from _a_ priest, is like saying that some modern girl
in London, pitying the poor, must have learnt it from _a_ Labour
Member. She would learn it where the Labour Member learnt it—in the
whole state of our society.

But that is the modern method: the method of the reverent sceptic. When
you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the
outside, you pretend that you understand the inside. As Renan, the
rationalist, could not make any sense out of Christ’s most public acts,
he proceeded to make an ingenious system out of His private thoughts.
As Anatole France, on his own intellectual principle, cannot believe in
what Joan of Arc did, he professes to be her dearest friend, and to
know exactly what she meant. I cannot feel it to be a very rational
manner of writing history; and sooner or later we shall have to find
some more solid way of dealing with those spiritual phenomena with
which all history is as closely spotted and spangled as the sky is with
stars.

Joan of Arc is a wild and wonderful thing enough, but she is much saner
than most of her critics and biographers. We shall not recover the
common sense of Joan until we have recovered her mysticism. Our wars
fail, because they begin with something sensible and obvious—such as
getting to Pretoria by Christmas. But her war succeeded—because it
began with something wild and perfect—the saints delivering France. She
put her idealism in the right place, and her realism also in the right
place: we moderns get both displaced. She put her dreams and her
sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her
practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is
reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical.
It is our practice that is dreamy.

It is not for us to explain this flaming figure in terms of our tired
and querulous culture. Rather we must try to explain ourselves by the
blaze of such fixed stars. Those who called her a witch hot from hell
were much more sensible than those who depict her as a silly
sentimental maiden prompted by her parish priest. If I have to choose
between the two schools of her scattered enemies, I could take my place
with those subtle clerks who thought her divine mission devilish,
rather than with those rustic aunts and uncles who thought it
impossible.




A DEAD POET


With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since
Browning. His energy was of somewhat the same kind. Browning was
intellectually intricate because he was morally simple. He was too
simple to explain himself; he was too humble to suppose that other
people needed any explanation. But his real energy, and the real energy
of Francis Thompson, was best expressed in the fact that both poets
were at once fond of immensity and also fond of detail. Any common
Imperialist can have large ideas so long as he is not called upon to
have small ideas also. Any common scientific philosopher can have small
ideas so long as he is not called upon to have large ideas as well. But
great poets use the telescope and also the microscope. Great poets are
obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because they are talking about
something too large for any one to understand, and now again because
they are talking about something too small for any one to see. Francis
Thompson possessed both these infinities. He escaped by being too
small, as the microbe escapes; or he escaped by being too large, as the
universe escapes. Any one who knows Francis Thompson’s poetry knows
quite well the truth to which I refer. For the benefit of any person
who does not know it, I may mention two cases taken from memory. I have
not the book by me, so I can only render the poetical passages in a
clumsy paraphrase. But there was one poem of which the image was so
vast that it was literally difficult for a time to take it in; he was
describing the evening earth with its mist and fume and fragrance, and
represented the whole as rolling upwards like a smoke; then suddenly he
called the whole ball of the earth a thurible, and said that some
gigantic spirit swung it slowly before God. That is the case of the
image too large for comprehension. Another instance sticks in my mind
of the image which is too small. In one of his poems, he says that
abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by “Pontifical
death.” There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one
word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a
bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out
after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priests and bridges
both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another
thing—these ideas, and twenty more, are all actually concentrated in
the word “pontifical.” In Francis Thompson’s poetry, as in the poetry
of the universe, you can work infinitely out and out, but yet
infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark of greatness;
and he was a great poet.

Beneath the tide of praise which was obviously due to the dead poet,
there is an evident undercurrent of discussion about him; some charges
of moral weakness were at least important enough to be authoritatively
contradicted in the _Nation_; and, in connection with this and other
things, there has been a continuous stir of comment upon his attraction
to and gradual absorption in Catholic theological ideas. This question
is so important that I think it ought to be considered and understood
even at the present time. It is, of course, true that Francis Thompson
devoted himself more and more to poems not only purely Catholic, but,
one may say, purely ecclesiastical. And it is, moreover, true that (if
things go on as they are going on at present) more and more good poets
will do the same. Poets will tend towards Christian orthodoxy for a
perfectly plain reason; because it is about the simplest and freest
thing now left in the world. On this point it is very necessary to be
clear. When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they
seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing
there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the
world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world
has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has
never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.

Now, poets in our epoch will tend towards ecclesiastical religion
strictly because it is just a little more free than anything else.
Take, for instance, the case of symbol and ritualism. All reasonable
men believe in symbol; but some reasonable men do not believe in
ritualism; by which they mean, I imagine, a symbolism too complex,
elaborate, and mechanical. But whenever they talk of ritualism they
always seem to mean the ritualism of the Church. Why should they not
mean the ritual of the world? It is much more ritualistic. The ritual
of the Army, the ritual of the Navy, the ritual of the Law Courts, the
ritual of Parliament are much more ritualistic. The ritual of a
dinner-party is much more ritualistic. Priests may put gold and great
jewels on the chalice; but at least there is only one chalice to put
them on. When you go to a dinner-party they put in front of you five
different chalices, of five weird and heraldic shapes, to symbolise
five different kinds of wine; an insane extension of ritual from which
Mr. Percy Dearmer would fly shrieking. A bishop wears a mitre; but he
is not thought more or less of a bishop according to whether you can
see the very latest curves in his mitre. But a swell is thought more or
less of a swell according to whether you can see the very latest curves
in his hat. There is more _fuss_ about symbols in the world than in the
Church.

And yet (strangely enough) though men fuss more about the worldly
symbols, they mean less by them. It is the mark of religious forms that
they declare something unknown. But it is the mark of worldly forms
that they declare something which is known, and which is known to be
untrue. When the Pope in an Encyclical calls himself your father, it is
a matter of faith or of doubt. But when the Duke of Devonshire in a
letter calls himself yours obediently, you know that he means the
opposite of what he says. Religious forms are, at the worst, fables;
they might be true. Secular forms are falsehoods; they are not true.
Take a more topical case. The German Emperor has more uniforms than the
Pope. But, moreover, the Pope’s vestments all imply a claim to be
something purely mystical and doubtful. Many of the German Emperor’s
uniforms imply a claim to be something which he certainly is not and
which it would be highly disgusting if he were. The Pope may or may not
be the Vicar of Christ. But the Kaiser certainly is not an English
Colonel. If the thing were reality it would be treason. If it is mere
ritual, it is by far the most unreal ritual on earth.

Now, poetical people like Francis Thompson will, as things stand, tend
away from secular society and towards religion for the reason above
described: that there are crowds of symbols in both, but that those of
religion are simpler and mean more. To take an evident type, the Cross
is more poetical than the Union Jack, because it is simpler. The more
simple an idea is, the more it is fertile in variations. Francis
Thompson could have written any number of good poems on the Cross,
because it is a primary symbol. The number of poems which Mr. Rudyard
Kipling could write on the Union Jack is, fortunately, limited, because
the Union Jack is too complex to produce luxuriance. The same principle
applies to any possible number of cases. A poet like Francis Thompson
could deduce perpetually rich and branching meanings out of two plain
facts like bread and wine; with bread and wine he can expand everything
to everywhere. But with a French menu he cannot expand anything; except
perhaps himself. Complicated ideas do not produce any more ideas.
Mongrels do not breed. Religious ritual attracts because there is some
sense in it. Religious imagery, so far from being subtle, is the only
simple thing left for poets. So far from being merely superhuman, it is
the only human thing left for human beings.




CHRISTMAS


There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating
Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article. It is the
very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and
abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment
the great day is. Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling
ordinary and sad; for it is only Wednesday. At the next moment your
heart leaps up and your soul and body dance together like lovers; for
in one burst and blaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming (of
course) that you are a worshipper of Thor, and that you celebrate his
day once a week, possibly with human sacrifice. If, on the other hand,
you are a modern Christian Englishman, you hail (of course) with the
same explosion of gaiety the appearance of the English Sunday. But I
say that whatever the day is that is to you festive or symbolic, it is
essential that there should be a quite clear black line between it and
the time going before. And all the old wholesome customs in connection
with Christmas were to the effect that one should not touch or see or
know or speak of something before the actual coming of Christmas Day.
Thus, for instance, children were never given their presents until the
actual coming of the appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in
brown-paper parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a
donkey sometimes accidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted
in respect of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications. Especially
it ought to be observed in connection with what are called the
Christmas numbers of magazines. The editors of the magazines bring out
their Christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more
likely to be still lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have
seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which is
to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown
paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration, I should favour the
editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg or arm of an
editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to individual choice.

Of course, all this secrecy about Christmas is merely sentimental and
ceremonial; if you do not like what is sentimental and ceremonial, do
not celebrate Christmas at all. You will not be punished if you don’t;
also, since we are no longer ruled by those sturdy Puritans who won for
us civil and religious liberty, you will not even be punished if you
do. But I cannot understand why any one should bother about a
ceremonial except ceremonially. If a thing only exists in order to be
graceful, do it gracefully or do not do it. If a thing only exists as
something professing to be solemn, do it solemnly or do not do it.
There is no sense in doing it slouchingly; nor is there even any
liberty. I can understand the man who takes off his hat to a lady
because it is the customary symbol. I can understand him, I say; in
fact, I know him quite intimately. I can also understand the man who
refuses to take off his hat to a lady, like the old Quakers, because he
thinks that a symbol is superstition. But what point would there be in
so performing an arbitrary form of respect that it was not a form of
respect? We respect the gentleman who takes off his hat to the lady; we
respect the fanatic who will not take off his hat to the lady. But what
should we think of the man who kept his hands in his pockets and asked
the lady to take his hat off for him because he felt tired?

This is combining insolence and superstition; and the modern world is
full of the strange combination. There is no mark of the immense
weak-mindedness of modernity that is more striking than this general
disposition to keep up old forms, but to keep them up informally and
feebly. Why take something which was only meant to be respectful and
preserve it disrespectfully? Why take something which you could easily
abolish as a superstition and carefully perpetuate it as a bore? There
have been many instances of this half-witted compromise. Was it not
true, for instance, that the other day some mad American was trying to
buy Glastonbury Abbey and transfer it stone by stone to America? Such
things are not only illogical, but idiotic. There is no particular
reason why a pushing American financier should pay respect to
Glastonbury Abbey at all. But if he is to pay respect to Glastonbury
Abbey, he must pay respect to Glastonbury. If it is a matter of
sentiment, why should he spoil the scene? If it is not a matter of
sentiment, why should he ever have visited the scene? To call this kind
of thing Vandalism is a very inadequate and unfair description. The
Vandals were very sensible people. They did not believe in a religion,
and so they insulted it; they did not see any use for certain
buildings, and so they knocked them down. But they were not such fools
as to encumber their march with the fragments of the edifice they had
themselves spoilt. They were at least superior to the modern American
mode of reasoning. They did not desecrate the stones because they held
them sacred.

Another instance of the same illogicality I observed the other day at
some kind of “At Home.” I saw what appeared to be a human being dressed
in a black evening-coat, black dress-waistcoat, and black
dress-trousers, but with a shirt-front made of Jaegar wool. What can be
the sense of this sort of thing? If a man thinks hygiene more important
than convention (a selfish and heathen view, for the beasts that perish
are more hygienic than man, and man is only above them because he is
more conventional), if, I say, a man thinks that hygiene is more
important than convention, what on earth is there to oblige him to wear
a shirt-front at all? But to take a costume of which the only
conceivable cause or advantage is that it is a sort of uniform, and
then not wear it in the uniform way—this is to be neither a Bohemian
nor a gentleman. It is a foolish affectation, I think, in an English
officer of the Life Guards never to wear his uniform if he can help it.
But it would be more foolish still if he showed himself about town in a
scarlet coat and a Jaeger breast-plate. It is the custom nowadays to
have Ritual Commissions and Ritual Reports to make rather unmeaning
compromises in the ceremonial of the Church of England. So perhaps we
shall have an ecclesiastical compromise by which all the Bishops shall
wear Jaeger copes and Jaeger mitres. Similarly the King might insist on
having a Jaeger crown. But I do not think he will, for he understands
the logic of the matter better than that. The modern monarch, like a
reasonable fellow, wears his crown as seldom as he can; but if he does
it at all, then the only point of a crown is that it is a crown. So let
me assure the unknown gentleman in the woollen vesture that the only
point of a white shirt-front is that it is a white shirt-front.
Stiffness may be its impossible defect; but it is certainly its only
possible merit.

Let us be consistent, therefore, about Christmas, and either keep
customs or not keep them. If you do not like sentiment and symbolism,
you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else; I
should suggest the birthday of Mr. M’Cabe. No doubt you could have a
sort of scientific Christmas with a hygienic pudding and highly
instructive presents stuffed into a Jaeger stocking; go and have it
then. If you like those things, doubtless you are a good sort of
fellow, and your intentions are excellent. I have no doubt that you are
really interested in humanity; but I cannot think that humanity will
ever be much interested in you. Humanity is unhygienic from its very
nature and beginning. It is so much an exception in Nature that the
laws of Nature really mean nothing to it. Now Christmas is attacked
also on the humanitarian ground. Ouida called it a feast of slaughter
and gluttony. Mr. Shaw suggested that it was invented by poulterers.
That should be considered before it becomes more considerable.

I do not know whether an animal killed at Christmas has had a better or
a worse time than it would have had if there had been no Christmas or
no Christmas dinners. But I do know that the fighting and suffering
brotherhood to which I belong and owe everything, Mankind, would have a
much worse time if there were no such thing as Christmas or Christmas
dinners. Whether the turkey which Scrooge gave to Bob Cratchit had
experienced a lovelier or more melancholy career than that of less
attractive turkeys is a subject upon which I cannot even conjecture.
But that Scrooge was better for giving the turkey and Cratchit happier
for getting it I know as two facts, as I know that I have two feet.
What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul
of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business. Nothing shall
induce me to darken human homes, to destroy human festivities, to
insult human gifts and human benefactions for the sake of some
hypothetical knowledge which Nature curtained from our eyes. We men and
women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other
a terrible and tragic loyalty. If we catch sharks for food, let them be
killed most mercifully; let any one who likes love the sharks, and pet
the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give them sugar and
teach them to dance. But if once a man suggests that a shark is to be
valued against a sailor, or that the poor shark might be permitted to
bite off a nigger’s leg occasionally; then I would court-martial the
man—he is a traitor to the ship.

And while I take this view of humanitarianism of the anti-Christmas
kind, it is cogent to say that I am a strong anti-vivisectionist. That
is, if there is any vivisection, I am against it. I am against the
cutting-up of conscious dogs for the same reason that I am in favour of
the eating of dead turkeys. The connection may not be obvious; but that
is because of the strangely unhealthy condition of modern thought. I am
against cruel vivisection as I am against a cruel anti-Christmas
asceticism, because they both involve the upsetting of existing
fellowships and the shocking of normal good feelings for the sake of
something that is intellectual, fanciful, and remote. It is not a human
thing, it is not a humane thing, when you see a poor woman staring
hungrily at a bloater, to think, not of the obvious feelings of the
woman, but of the unimaginable feelings of the deceased bloater.
Similarly, it is not human, it is not humane, when you look at a dog to
think about what theoretic discoveries you might possibly make if you
were allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarians’ fancy
about the feelings concealed inside the bloater, and the
vivisectionists’ fancy about the knowledge concealed inside the dog,
are unhealthy fancies, because they upset a human sanity that is
certain for the sake of something that is of necessity uncertain. The
vivisectionist, for the sake of doing something that may or may not be
useful, does something that certainly is horrible. The anti-Christmas
humanitarian, in seeking to have a sympathy with a turkey which no man
can have with a turkey, loses the sympathy he has already with the
happiness of millions of the poor.

It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet.
Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and Tolstoian
non-resistance were not only not opposite, but were the same thing.
They are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be
resisted, looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the
conquered. Thus again teetotalism and the really degraded gin-selling
and dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy. They are both
based on the idea that fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug. But
I am specially certain that the extreme of vegetarian humanity is, as I
have said, akin to the extreme of scientific cruelty—they both permit a
dubious speculation to interfere with their ordinary charity. The sound
moral rule in such matters as vivisection always presents itself to me
in this way. There is no ethical necessity more essential and vital
than this: that casuistical exceptions, though admitted, should be
admitted as exceptions. And it follows from this, I think, that, though
we may do a horrid thing in a horrid situation, we must be quite
certain that we actually and already are in that situation. Thus, all
sane moralists admit that one may sometimes tell a lie; but no sane
moralist would approve of telling a little boy to practise telling
lies, in case he might one day have to tell a justifiable one. Thus,
morality has often justified shooting a robber or a burglar. But it
would not justify going into the village Sunday school and shooting all
the little boys who looked as if they might grow up into burglars. The
need may arise; but the need must have arisen. It seems to me quite
clear that if you step across this limit you step off a precipice.

Now, whether torturing an animal is or is not an immoral thing, it is,
at least, a dreadful thing. It belongs to the order of exceptional and
even desperate acts. Except for some extraordinary reason I would not
grievously hurt an animal; with an extraordinary reason I would
grievously hurt him. If (for example) a mad elephant were pursuing me
and my family, and I could only shoot him so that he would die in
agony, he would have to die in agony. But the elephant would be there.
I would not do it to a hypothetical elephant. Now, it always seems to
me that this is the weak point in the ordinary vivisectionist argument,
“Suppose your wife were dying.” Vivisection is not done by a man whose
wife is dying. If it were it might be lifted to the level of the
moment, as would be lying or stealing bread, or any other ugly action.
But this ugly action is done in cold blood, at leisure, by men who are
not sure that it will be of any use to anybody—men of whom the most
that can be said is that they may conceivably make the beginnings of
some discovery which may perhaps save the life of some one else’s wife
in some remote future. That is too cold and distant to rob an act of
its immediate horror. That is like training the child to tell lies for
the sake of some great dilemma that may never come to him. You are
doing a cruel thing, but not with enough passion to make it a kindly
one.

So much for why I am an anti-vivisectionist; and I should like to say,
in conclusion, that all other anti-vivisectionists of my acquaintance
weaken their case infinitely by forming this attack on a scientific
speciality in which the human heart is commonly on their side, with
attacks upon universal human customs in which the human heart is not at
all on their side. I have heard humanitarians, for instance, speak of
vivisection and field sports as if they were the same kind of thing.
The difference seems to me simple and enormous. In sport a man goes
into a wood and mixes with the existing life of that wood; becomes a
destroyer only in the simple and healthy sense in which all the
creatures are destroyers; becomes for one moment to them what they are
to him—another animal. In vivisection a man takes a simpler creature
and subjects it to subtleties which no one but man could inflict on
him, and for which man is therefore gravely and terribly responsible.

Meanwhile, it remains true that I shall eat a great deal of turkey this
Christmas; and it is not in the least true (as the vegetarians say)
that I shall do it because I do not realise what I am doing, or because
I do what I know is wrong, or that I do it with shame or doubt or a
fundamental unrest of conscience. In one sense I know quite well what I
am doing; in another sense I know quite well that I know not what I do.
Scrooge and the Cratchits and I are, as I have said, all in one boat;
the turkey and I are, to say the most of it, ships that pass in the
night, and greet each other in passing. I wish him well; but it is
really practically impossible to discover whether I treat him well. I
can avoid, and I do avoid with horror, all special and artificial
tormenting of him, sticking pins in him for fun or sticking knives in
him for scientific investigation. But whether by feeding him slowly and
killing him quickly for the needs of my brethren, I have improved in
his own solemn eyes his own strange and separate destiny, whether I
have made him in the sight of God a slave or a martyr, or one whom the
gods love and who die young—that is far more removed from my
possibilities of knowledge than the most abstruse intricacies of
mysticism or theology. A turkey is more occult and awful than all the
angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an
angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has
never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live
turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the
enigma has rather increased than diminished.