A MISCELLANY OF MEN

By G. K. Chesterton

Contents

 THE SUFFRAGIST

 THE POET AND THE CHEESE

 THE THING

 THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS

 THE NAMELESS MAN

 THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA

 THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES

 THE MAD OFFICIAL

 THE ENCHANTED MAN

 THE SUN WORSHIPPER

 THE WRONG INCENDIARY

 THE FREE MAN

 THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER

 THE PRIEST OF SPRING

 THE REAL JOURNALIST

 THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT

 THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY

 THE FOOL

 THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS

 THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS

 THE MYSTAGOGUE

 THE RED REACTIONARY

 THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS

 THE MUMMER

 THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY

 THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

 THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN

 THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER

 THE SULTAN

 THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS

 THE MAN ON TOP

 THE OTHER KIND OF MAN

 THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN

 THE DIVINE DETECTIVE

 THE ELF OF JAPAN

 THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE

 THE CONTENTED MAN

 THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL

THE SUFFRAGIST

Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric, can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touchingthose political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popularsentiments, it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt. One part of it can be put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts upher fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in whichhe is not afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still moreof her silence; but force reminds him of a rusted but very real weaponof which he has grown ashamed. But these crude summaries are never quiteaccurate in any matter of the instincts. For the things which are thesimplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlestwhen once they are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose, when he said, "It is not hard to believe in God if one does not defineHim. " When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor, "Let them eat grass, " the good and Christian instincts of the poormade them hang him on a lamppost with his mouth stuffed full of thatvegetation. But if a modern vegetarian aristocrat were to say to thepoor, "But why don't you like grass?" their intelligences would be muchmore taxed to find such an appropriate repartee. And this matter of thefunctions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sex andbreathing are about the only two things that generally work bestwhen they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the samesophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is alsopolluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forestof false analogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man orwoman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quite differentfrom anything else in the world. 

There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man andwoman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slaveand master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which theSuffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon;these other alien groups never came into contact until they came intocollision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwardsmelted into amity. But the very first fact about the sexes is that theylike each other. They seek each other: and awful as are the sins andsorrows that often come of their mating, it was not such things thatmade them meet. It is utterly astounding to note the way in which modernwriters and talkers miss this plain, wide, and overwhelming fact: onewould suppose woman a victim and nothing else. By this account ideal, emancipated woman has, age after age, been knocked silly with a stoneaxe. But really there is no fact to show that ideal, emancipated womanwas ever knocked silly; except the fact that she is silly. And thatmight have arisen in so many other ways. Real responsible woman hasnever been silly; and any one wishing to knock her would be wise (likethe streetboys) to knock and run away. It is ultimately idiotic tocompare this prehistoric participation with any royalties or rebellions. Genuine royalties wish to crush rebellions. Genuine rebels wish todestroy kings. The sexes cannot wish to abolish each other; and if weallow them any sort of permanent opposition it will sink into somethingas base as a party system. 

As marriage, therefore, is rooted in an aboriginal unity of instincts, you cannot compare it, even in its quarrels, with any of the merecollisions of separate institutions. You could compare it with theemancipation of negroes from planters—if it were true that a whiteman in early youth always dreamed of the abstract beauty of a blackman. You could compare it with the revolt of tenants against alandlord—if it were true that young landlords wrote sonnets toinvisible tenants. You could compare it to the fighting policy of theFenians—if it were true that every normal Irishman wanted anEnglishman to come and live with him. But as we know there are noinstincts in any of these directions, these analogies are not onlyfalse but false on the cardinal fact. I do not speak of the comparativecomfort or merit of these different things: I say they are different. Itmay be that love turned to hate is terribly common in sexual matters: itmay be that hate turned to love is not uncommon in the rivalries of raceor class. But any philosophy about the sexes that begins with anythingbut the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a fallacy; and allits historical comparisons are as irrelevant and impertinent as puns. 

But to expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to expressor even half express the instincts is very hard. The instincts are verymuch concerned with what literary people call "style" in letters or morevulgar people call "style" in dress. They are much concerned with howa thing is done, as well as whether one may do it: and the deepestelements in their attraction or aversion can often only be conveyedby stray examples or sudden images. When Danton was defending himselfbefore the Jacobin tribunal he spoke so loud that his voice was heardacross the Seine, in quite remote streets on the other side of theriver. He must have bellowed like a bull of Bashan. Yet none of us wouldthink of that prodigy except as something poetical and appropriate. Noneof us would instinctively feel that Danton was less of a man or evenless of a gentleman, for speaking so in such an hour. But suppose weheard that Marie Antoinette, when tried before the same tribunal, had howled so that she could be heard in the Faubourg St. Germain—well, I leave it to the instincts, if there are any left. It is not wrong to howl. Neither is it right. It is simply a questionof the instant impression on the artistic and even animal parts ofhumanity, if the noise were heard suddenly like a gun. 

Perhaps the nearest verbal analysis of the instinct may be found inthe gestures of the orator addressing a crowd. For the true orator mustalways be a demagogue: even if the mob be a small mob, like the Frenchcommittee or the English House of Lords. And "demagogue, " in the goodGreek meaning, does not mean one who pleases the populace, but one wholeads it: and if you will notice, you will see that all the instinctivegestures of oratory are gestures of military leadership; pointing thepeople to a path or waving them on to an advance. Notice that longsweep of the arm across the body and outward, which great orators usenaturally and cheap orators artificially. It is almost the exact gestureof the drawing of a sword. 

The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even thatvotes are unworthy of women. It is that votes are unworthy of men, solong as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancientmilitarism of democracy. The only crowd worth talking to is the crowdthat is ready to go somewhere and do something; the only demagogue worthhearing is he who can point at something to be done: and, if he pointswith a sword, will only feel it familiar and useful like an elongatedfinger. Now, except in some mystical exceptions which prove the rule, these are not the gestures, and therefore not the instincts, of women. No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike thepolitical woman; an entirely different thing. The instinct has nothingto do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such adesire exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crownand proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oraclesfrom the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mysticalmotherhood before the procession of some great religious order. But thatshe should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands;leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouthopen a little longer and wider than is dignified—well, I onlywrite here of the facts of natural history; and the fact is that it isthis, and not publicity or importance, that hurts. It is for the modernworld to judge whether such instincts are indeed danger signals; andwhether the hurting of moral as of material nerves is a tocsin and awarning of nature. 

THE POET AND THE CHEESE

There is something creepy in the flat Eastern Counties; a brush of thewhite feather. There is a stillness, which is rather of the mind than ofthe bodily senses. Rapid changes and sudden revelations of scenery, evenwhen they are soundless, have something in them analogous to a movementof music, to a crash or a cry. Mountain hamlets spring out on us witha shout like mountain brigands. Comfortable valleys accept us with openarms and warm words, like comfortable innkeepers. But travelling in thegreat level lands has a curiously still and lonely quality; lonely evenwhen there are plenty of people on the road and in the market-place. One's voice seems to break an almost elvish silence, and somethingunreasonably weird in the phrase of the nursery tales, "And he went alittle farther and came to another place, " comes back into the mind. 

In some such mood I came along a lean, pale road south of the fens, andfound myself in a large, quiet, and seemingly forgotten village. It wasone of those places that instantly produce a frame of mind which, it maybe, one afterwards decks out with unreal details. I dare say that grassdid not really grow in the streets, but I came away with a curiousimpression that it did. I dare say the marketplace was not literallylonely and without sign of life, but it left the vague impression ofbeing so. The place was large and even loose in design, yet it had theair of something hidden away and always overlooked. It seemed shy, likea big yokel; the low roofs seemed to be ducking behind the hedges andrailings; and the chimneys holding their breath. I came into it in thatdead hour of the afternoon which is neither after lunch nor before tea, nor anything else even on a half-holiday; and I had a fantastic feelingthat I had strayed into a lost and extra hour that is not numbered inthe twenty-four. 

I entered an inn which stood openly in the market-place yet was almostas private as a private house. Those who talk of "public-houses" as ifthey were all one problem would have been both puzzled and pleased withsuch a place. In the front window a stout old lady in black with anelaborate cap sat doing a large piece of needlework. She had a kind ofcomfortable Puritanism about her; and might have been (perhaps she was)the original Mrs. Grundy. A little more withdrawn into the parlour sata tall, strong, and serious girl, with a face of beautiful honesty anda pair of scissors stuck in her belt, doing a small piece of needlework. Two feet behind them sat a hulking labourer with a humorous face likewood painted scarlet, with a huge mug of mild beer which he had nottouched, and probably would not touch for hours. On the hearthrug therewas an equally motionless cat; and on the table a copy of 'HouseholdWords'. 

I was conscious of some atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I hadmet somewhere in literature. There was poetry in it as well as piety;and yet it was not poetry after my particular taste. It was somehow atonce solid and airy. Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere insome of Wordsworth's rural poems; which are full of genuine freshnessand wonder, and yet are in some incurable way commonplace. This wascurious; for Wordsworth's men were of the rocks and fells, and not ofthe fenlands or flats. But perhaps it is the clearness of still waterand the mirrored skies of meres and pools that produces this crystallinevirtue. Perhaps that is why Wordsworth is called a Lake Poet insteadof a mountain poet. Perhaps it is the water that does it. Certainly thewhole of that town was like a cup of water given at morning. 

After a few sentences exchanged at long intervals in the manner ofrustic courtesy, I inquired casually what was the name of the town. Theold lady answered that its name was Stilton, and composedly continuedher needlework. But I had paused with my mug in air, and was gazing ather with a suddenly arrested concern. "I suppose, " I said, "that it hasnothing to do with the cheese of that name. " "Oh, yes, " she answered, with a staggering indifference, "they used to make it here. "

I put down my mug with a gravity far greater than her own. "But thisplace is a Shrine!" I said. "Pilgrims should be pouring into it fromwherever the English legend has endured alive. There ought to be acolossal statue in the market-place of the man who invented Stiltoncheese. There ought to be another colossal statue of the first cow whoprovided the foundations of it. There should be a burnished tablet letinto the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stiltoncheese, and survived. On the top of a neighbouring hill (if thereare any neighbouring hills) there should be a huge model of a Stiltoncheese, made of some rich green marble and engraven with some haughtymotto: I suggest something like 'Ver non semper viret; sed Stiltoniasemper virescit. '" The old lady said, "Yes, sir, " and continued herdomestic occupations. 

After a strained and emotional silence, I said, "If I take a meal heretonight can you give me any Stilton?"

"No, sir; I'm afraid we haven't got any Stilton, " said the immovableone, speaking as if it were something thousands of miles away. 

"This is awful, " I said: for it seemed to me a strange allegory ofEngland as she is now; this little town that had lost its glory; andforgotten, so to speak, the meaning of its own name. And I thought ityet more symbolic because from all that old and full and virile life, the great cheese was gone; and only the beer remained. And even thatwill be stolen by the Liberals or adulterated by the Conservatives. Politely disengaging myself, I made my way as quickly as possible tothe nearest large, noisy, and nasty town in that neighbourhood, where Isought out the nearest vulgar, tawdry, and avaricious restaurant. 

There (after trifling with beef, mutton, puddings, pies, and so on) Igot a Stilton cheese. I was so much moved by my memories that I wrotea sonnet to the cheese. Some critical friends have hinted to me that mysonnet is not strictly new; that it contains "echoes" (as they expressit) of some other poem that they have read somewhere. Here, at least, are the lines I wrote:

 SONNET TO A STILTON CHEESE

 Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I— She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour, League after grassy league from Lincoln tower To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen. Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men, Like a tall green volcano rose in power. 

 Plain living and long drinking are no more, And pure religion reading 'Household Words', And sturdy manhood sitting still all day Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core; While my digestion, like the House of Lords, The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay. 

I confess I feel myself as if some literary influence, something thathas haunted me, were present in this otherwise original poem; but it ishopeless to disentangle it now. 

THE THING

The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was likethe war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had brokenfree. For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full andphysical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thingitself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests ofbeech. 

Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom havebeen due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time fromits enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisationstend to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of thiswe hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from thespirit of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases ofthe same stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom remindedthat just as church-going is not religion, so reading and writing arenot knowledge, and voting is not self-government. It would be easy tofind people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough tobe clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements of thesun and moon. 

The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as onewatches it for the first time in a country district. Self-governmentarose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among theancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood. The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foesof it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to beconsulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be askeda lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellowsare to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives. They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, ofthe spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether thevalley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; themen of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches orsplendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gatherunder a patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And incase the word "man" be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moralatmosphere, this original soul of self-government, the women always havequite as much influence as the men. But in modern England neither themen nor the women have any influence at all. In this primary matter, themoulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the peopleare utterly impotent. They stand and stare at imperial and economicprocesses going on, as they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show. 

Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking placewhich really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether forgood or evil. The first is that the urban civilisation (or whateverit is) is advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and thevillas advance in red battalions. The other is that the vast estatesinto which England has long been divided are passing out of the handsof the English gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts andoften actually foreigners. 

Now, these are just the sort of things with which self-government wasreally supposed to grapple. People were supposed to be able to indicatewhether they wished to live in town or country, to be represented by agentleman or a cad. I do not presume to prejudge their decision; perhapsthey would prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say thatthe filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his roofover his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some sayin, if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the strangetrend of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to pass overand treat as private trivialities. In theory the building of a villais as incidental as the buying of a hat. In reality it is as if allLancashire were laid waste for deer forests; or as if all Belgiumwere flooded by the sea. In theory the sale of a squire's land to amoneylender is a minor and exceptional necessity. In reality it is athing like a German invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion. 

Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comesround about every five years a thing called a General Election. Itis believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system ofself-government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questionsabout everything except what he understands. The examination paper ofthe Election generally consists of some such queries as these: "I. Arethe green biscuits eaten by the peasants of Eastern Lithuania in youropinion fit for human food? II. Are the religious professions of thePresident of the Orange Free State hypocritical or sincere? III. Do youthink that the savages in Prusso-Portuguese East Bunyipland are as happyand hygienic as the fortunate savages in Franco-British West Bunyipland?IV. Did the lost Latin Charter said to have been exacted from Henry IIIreserve the right of the Crown to create peers? V. What do you think ofwhat America thinks of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks of what Sir Eldon Gorstthinks of the state of the Nile? VI. Detect some difference between thetwo persons in frock-coats placed before you at this election. "

Now, it never was supposed in any natural theory of self-government thatthe ordinary man in my neighbourhood need answer fantastic questionslike these. He is a citizen of South Bucks, not an editor of 'Notes andQueries'. He would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whetherfarmsteads or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whetherstupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village. Butthese are precisely the things which the oligarchs will not allow him totouch with his finger. Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny anddivine mission to alter, under their guidance, all the things that heknows nothing about. The name of self-government is noisy everywhere:the Thing is throttled. 

The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through;in scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordancesof martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums ofNapoleon and all the tongues of terror with which the Thing has goneforth: the spirit of our race alive. But when I came down in the morningonly a branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none ofthe great country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as wouldhave happened if the Thing had really been abroad. 

THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS

The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day: indeed, if he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent. It is he who writesnearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientificor skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolutionand Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. Butespecially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of thewriting about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. Forthe man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman. 

Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly; and, perhaps, the simplest method is to take some object, as plain aspossible, and from it illustrate the two modes of thought: the rightmode in which all real results have been rooted; the wrong mode, whichis confusing all our current discussions, especially our discussionsabout the relations of the sexes. Casting my eye round the room, Inotice an object which is often mentioned in the higher and subtler ofthese debates about the sexes: I mean a poker. I will take a poker andthink about it; first forwards and then backwards; and so, perhaps, showwhat I mean. 

The sage desiring to think well and wisely about a poker will beginsomewhat as follows: Among the live creatures that crawl about this starthe queerest is the thing called Man. This plucked and plumeless bird, comic and forlorn, is the butt of all the philosophies. He is the onlynaked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now hisshame. He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants. Hemight almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gonebathing and left his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hatupon the beaver and his coat upon the sheep. The rabbit has white warmthfor a waistcoat, and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head. But man hasno heat in his hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he mustlook for light and warmth in the wild, cold universe in which he iscast. This is equally true of his soul and of his body; he is the onecreature that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide. In aspiritual sense he has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literalsense he has been unable to keep his hair on. And just as this externalneed of his has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion, so it has lit in his hand the only adequate symbol of it: I mean the redflower called Fire. Fire, the most magic and startling of all materialthings, is a thing known only to man and the expression of his sublimeexternalism. It embodies all that is human in his hearths and all thatis divine on his altars. It is the most human thing in the world; seenacross wastes of marsh or medleys of forest, it is veritably the purpleand golden flag of the sons of Eve. But there is about this generous andrejoicing thing an alien and awful quality: the quality of torture. Itspresence is life; its touch is death. Therefore, it is always necessaryto have an intermediary between ourselves and this dreadful deity; tohave a priest to intercede for us with the god of life and death; tosend an ambassador to the fire. That priest is the poker. Made ofa material more merciless and warlike than the other instruments ofdomesticity, hammered on the anvil and born itself in the flame, thepoker is strong enough to enter the burning fiery furnace, and, likethe holy children, not be consumed. In this heroic service it is oftenbattered and twisted, but is the more honourable for it, like any othersoldier who has been under fire. 

Now all this may sound very fanciful and mystical, but it is the rightview of pokers, and no one who takes it will ever go in for any wrongview of pokers, such as using them to beat one's wife or torture one'schildren, or even (though that is more excusable) to make a policemanjump, as the clown does in the pantomime. He who has thus gone back tothe beginning, and seen everything as quaint and new, will always seethings in their right order, the one depending on the other in degree ofpurpose and importance: the poker for the fire and the fire for the manand the man for the glory of God. 

This is thinking forwards. Now our modern discussions about everything, Imperialism, Socialism, or Votes for Women, are all entangled inan opposite train of thought, which runs as follows:—A modernintellectual comes in and sees a poker. He is a positivist; he will notbegin with any dogmas about the nature of man, or any day-dreams aboutthe mystery of fire. He will begin with what he can see, the poker; andthe first thing he sees about the poker is that it is crooked. He says, "Poor poker; it's crooked. " Then he asks how it came to be crooked; andis told that there is a thing in the world (with which his temperamenthas hitherto left him unacquainted)—a thing called fire. He pointsout, very kindly and clearly, how silly it is of people, if they wanta straight poker, to put it into a chemical combustion which will veryprobably heat and warp it. "Let us abolish fire, " he says, "and thenwe shall have perfectly straight pokers. Why should you want a fireat all?" They explain to him that a creature called Man wants a fire, because he has no fur or feathers. He gazes dreamily at the embers fora few seconds, and then shakes his head. "I doubt if such an animal isworth preserving, " he says. "He must eventually go under in the cosmicstruggle when pitted against well-armoured and warmly protected species, who have wings and trunks and spires and scales and horns and shaggyhair. If Man cannot live without these luxuries, you had better abolishMan. " At this point, as a rule, the crowd is convinced; it heaves up allits clubs and axes, and abolishes him. At least, one of him. 

Before we begin discussing our various new plans for the people'swelfare, let us make a kind of agreement that we will argue in astraightforward way, and not in a tail-foremost way. The typical modernmovements may be right; but let them be defended because they are right, not because they are typical modern movements. Let us begin with theactual woman or man in the street, who is cold; like mankind before thefinding of fire. Do not let us begin with the end of the last red-hotdiscussion—like the end of a red hot poker. Imperialism may beright. But if it is right, it is right because England has some divineauthority like Israel, or some human authority like Rome; not because wehave saddled ourselves with South Africa, and don't know how to get ridof it. Socialism may be true. But if it is true, it is true because thetribe or the city can really declare all land to be common land, notbecause Harrod's Stores exist and the commonwealth must copy them. Female suffrage may be just. But if it is just, it is just because womenare women, not because women are sweated workers and white slaves andall sorts of things that they ought never to have been. Let not theImperialist accept a colony because it is there, nor the Suffragistseize a vote because it is lying about, nor the Socialist buy up anindustry merely because it is for sale. 

Let us ask ourselves first what we really do want, not what recent legaldecisions have told us to want, or recent logical philosophies provedthat we must want, or recent social prophecies predicted that we shallsome day want. If there must be a British Empire, let it be British, andnot, in mere panic, American or Prussian. If there ought to be femalesuffrage, let it be female, and not a mere imitation as coarse asthe male blackguard or as dull as the male clerk. If there is to beSocialism, let it be social; that is, as different as possible from allthe big commercial departments of to-day. The really good journeymantailor does not cut his coat according to his cloth; he asks for morecloth. The really practical statesman does not fit himself to existingconditions, he denounces the conditions as unfit. History is like somedeeply planted tree which, though gigantic in girth, tapers away atlast into tiny twigs; and we are in the topmost branches. Each of us istrying to bend the tree by a twig: to alter England through a distantcolony, or to capture the State through a small State department, or todestroy all voting through a vote. In all such bewilderment he is wisewho resists this temptation of trivial triumph or surrender, and happy(in an echo of the Roman poet) who remembers the roots of things. 

THE NAMELESS MAN

There are only two forms of government the monarchy or personalgovernment, and the republic or impersonal government. England is not agovernment; England is an anarchy, because there are so many kings. But there is one real advantage (among many real disadvantages) in themethod of abstract democracy, and that is this: that under impersonalgovernment politics are so much more personal. In France and America, where the State is an abstraction, political argument is quite fullof human details—some might even say of inhuman details. But inEngland, precisely because we are ruled by personages, these personagesdo not permit personalities. In England names are honoured, andtherefore names are suppressed. But in the republics, in Franceespecially, a man can put his enemies' names into his article and hisown name at the end of it. 

This is the essential condition of such candour. If we merely made ouranonymous articles more violent, we should be baser than we are now. Weshould only be arming masked men with daggers instead of cudgels. And I, for one, have always believed in the more general signing of articles, and have signed my own articles on many occasions when, heaven knows, I had little reason to be vain of them. I have heard many arguments foranonymity; but they all seem to amount to the statement that anonymityis safe, which is just what I complain of. In matters of truth the factthat you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, aproof that you ought to publish it. 

But there is one answer to my perpetual plea for a man putting his nameto his writing. There is one answer, and there is only one answer, andit is never given. It is that in the modern complexity very often aman's name is almost as false as his pseudonym. The prominent persontoday is eternally trying to lose a name, and to get a title. Forinstance, we all read with earnestness and patience the pages of the'Daily Mail', and there are times when we feel moved to cry, "Bring tous the man who thought these strange thoughts! Pursue him, capturehim, take great care of him. Bring him back to us tenderly, like someprecious bale of silk, that we may look upon the face of the man whodesires such things to be printed. Let us know his name; his socialand medical pedigree. " But in the modern muddle (it might be said)how little should we gain if those frankly fatuous sheets were indeedsubscribed by the man who had inspired them. Suppose that after everyarticle stating that the Premier is a piratical Socialist there wereprinted the simple word "Northcliffe. " What does that simple wordsuggest to the simple soul? To my simple soul (uninstructed otherwise)it suggests a lofty and lonely crag somewhere in the wintry seas towardsthe Orkheys or Norway; and barely clinging to the top of this crag thefortress of some forgotten chieftain. As it happens, of course, Iknow that the word does not mean this; it means another Fleet Streetjournalist like myself or only different from myself in so far as he hassought to secure money while I have sought to secure a jolly time. 

A title does not now even serve as a distinction: it does notdistinguish. A coronet is not merely an extinguisher: it is ahiding-place. 

But the really odd thing is this. This false quality in titles does notmerely apply to the new and vulgar titles, but to the old and historictitles also. For hundreds of years titles in England have beenessentially unmeaning; void of that very weak and very human instinct inwhich titles originated. In essential nonsense of application there isnothing to choose between Northcliffe and Norfolk. The Duke of Norfolkmeans (as my exquisite and laborious knowledge of Latin informs me) theLeader of Norfolk. It is idle to talk against representative governmentor for it. All government is representative government until it beginsto decay. Unfortunately (as is also evident) all government begins todecay the instant it begins to govern. All aristocrats were first meantas envoys of democracy; and most envoys of democracy lose no time inbecoming aristocrats. By the old essential human notion, the Duke ofNorfolk ought simply to be the first or most manifest of Norfolk men. 

I see growing and filling out before me the image of an actual Duke ofNorfolk. For instance, Norfolk men all make their voices run up veryhigh at the end of a sentence. The Duke of Norfolk's voice, therefore, ought to end in a perfect shriek. They often (I am told) end sentenceswith the word "together"; entirely irrespective of its meaning. ThusI shall expect the Duke of Norfolk to say: "I beg to second the motiontogether"; or "This is a great constitutional question together. " Ishall expect him to know much about the Broads and the sluggish riversabove them; to know about the shooting of water-fowl, and not toknow too much about anything else. Of mountains he must be wildly andludicrously ignorant. He must have the freshness of Norfolk; nay, eventhe flatness of Norfolk. He must remind me of the watery expanses, thegreat square church towers and the long level sunsets of East England. If he does not do this, I decline to know him. 

I need not multiply such cases; the principle applies everywhere. Thus Ilose all interest in the Duke of Devonshire unless he can assure me thathis soul is filled with that strange warm Puritanism, Puritanism shotwith romance, which colours the West Country. He must eat nothing butclotted cream, drink nothing but cider, reading nothing but 'LornaDoone', and be unacquainted with any town larger than Plymouth, which hemust regard with some awe, as the Central Babylon of the world. Again, Ishould expect the Prince of Wales always to be full of the mysticism anddreamy ardour of the Celtic fringe. 

Perhaps it may be thought that these demands are a little extreme; andthat our fancy is running away with us. Nevertheless, it is not my Dukeof Devonshire who is funny; but the real Duke of Devonshire. The pointis that the scheme of titles is a misfit throughout: hardly anywhere dowe find a modern man whose name and rank represent in any way his type, his locality, or his mode of life. As a mere matter of social comedy, the thing is worth noticing. You will meet a man whose name suggests agouty admiral, and you will find him exactly like a timid organist:you will hear announced the name of a haughty and almost heathen grandedame, and behold the entrance of a nice, smiling Christian cook. Theseare light complications of the central fact of the falsification of allnames and ranks. Our peers are like a party of mediaeval knights whoshould have exchanged shields, crests, and pennons. For the present ruleseems to be that the Duke of Sussex may lawfully own the whole of Essex;and that the Marquis of Cornwall may own all the hills and valleys solong as they are not Cornish. 

The clue to all this tangle is as simple as it is terrible. If Englandis an aristocracy, England is dying. If this system IS the country, as some say, the country is stiffening into more than the pomp andparalysis of China. It is the final sign of imbecility in a people thatit calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon—and is veryparticular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, andto be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The diseasecalled aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they meancoffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort isthe chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seemstraining to keep things in rather than to let things out. For the kingsof finance speechlessness is counted a way of being strong, though itshould rather be counted a way of being sly. By this time the Parliamentdoes not parley any more than the Speaker speaks. Even the newspapereditors and proprietors are more despotic and dangerous by what they donot utter than by what they do. We have all heard the expression "goldensilence. " The expression "brazen silence" is the only adequate phrasefor our editors. If we wake out of this throttled, gaping, and wordlessnightmare, we must awake with a yell. The Revolution that releasesEngland from the fixed falsity of its present position will be not lessnoisy than other revolutions. It will contain, I fear, a great deal ofthat rude accomplishment described among little boys as "calling names";but that will not matter much so long as they are the right names. 

THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an English Peasant. Indeed, the type can only exist in community, so much does it depend oncooperation and common laws. One must not think primarily of a FrenchPeasant; any more than of a German Measle. The plural of the word is itsproper form; you cannot have a Peasant till you have a peasantry. Theessence of the Peasant ideal is equality; and you cannot be equal all byyourself. 

Nevertheless, because human nature always craves and half createsthe things necessary to its happiness, there are approximations andsuggestions of the possibility of such a race even here. The nearestapproach I know to the temper of a Peasant in England is that of thecountry gardener; not, of course, the great scientific gardener attachedto the great houses; he is a rich man's servant like any other. I meanthe small jobbing gardener who works for two or three moderate-sizedgardens; who works on his own; who sometimes even owns his house; andwho frequently owns his tools. This kind of man has really some of thecharacteristics of the true Peasant—especially the characteristicsthat people don't like. He has none of that irresponsible mirth whichis the consolation of most poor men in England. The gardener is evendisliked sometimes by the owners of the shrubs and flowers; because(like Micaiah) he prophesies not good concerning them, but evil. TheEnglish gardener is grim, critical, self-respecting; sometimes eveneconomical. Nor is this (as the reader's lightning wit will flash backat me) merely because the English gardener is always a Scotch gardener. The type does exist in pure South England blood and speech; I havespoken to the type. I was speaking to the type only the other evening, when a rather odd little incident occurred. 

It was one of those wonderful evenings in which the sky was warm andradiant while the earth was still comparatively cold and wet. But itis of the essence of Spring to be unexpected; as in that heroic andhackneyed line about coming "before the swallow dares. " Spring never isSpring unless it comes too soon. And on a day like that one might pray, without any profanity, that Spring might come on earth as it was inheaven. The gardener was gardening. I was not gardening. It is needlessto explain the causes of this difference; it would be to tell thetremendous history of two souls. It is needless because there is a moreimmediate explanation of the case: the gardener and I, if not equal inagreement, were at least equal in difference. It is quite certain thathe would not have allowed me to touch the garden if I had gone downon my knees to him. And it is by no means certain that I should haveconsented to touch the garden if he had gone down on his knees to me. His activity and my idleness, therefore, went on steadily side by sidethrough the long sunset hours. 

And all the time I was thinking what a shame it was that he was notsticking his spade into his own garden, instead of mine: he knew aboutthe earth and the underworld of seeds, the resurrection of Spring andthe flowers that appear in order like a procession marshalled by aherald. He possessed the garden intellectually and spiritually, whileI only possessed it politically. I know more about flowers thancoal-owners know about coal; for at least I pay them honour when theyare brought above the surface of the earth. I know more about gardensthan railway shareholders seem to know about railways: for at least Iknow that it needs a man to make a garden; a man whose name is Adam. Butas I walked on that grass my ignorance overwhelmed me—and yet thatphrase is false, because it suggests something like a storm from the skyabove. It is truer to say that my ignorance exploded underneath me, likea mine dug long before; and indeed it was dug before the beginning ofthe ages. Green bombs of bulbs and seeds were bursting underneath meeverywhere; and, so far as my knowledge went, they had been laid bya conspirator. I trod quite uneasily on this uprush of the earth; theSpring is always only a fruitful earthquake. With the land all aliveunder me I began to wonder more and more why this man, who had made thegarden, did not own the garden. If I stuck a spade into the ground, Ishould be astonished at what I found there. .. And just as I thought thisI saw that the gardener was astonished too. 

Just as I was wondering why the man who used the spade did not profit bythe spade, he brought me something he had found actually in my soil. Itwas a thin worn gold piece of the Georges, of the sort which are called, I believe, Spade Guineas. Anyhow, a piece of gold. 

If you do not see the parable as I saw it just then, I doubt if I canexplain it just now. He could make a hundred other round yellow fruits:and this flat yellow one is the only sort that I can make. How it camethere I have not a notion—unless Edmund Burke dropped it in hishurry to get back to Butler's Court. But there it was: this is a coldrecital of facts. There may be a whole pirate's treasure lying underthe earth there, for all I know or care; for there is no interest in atreasure without a Treasure Island to sail to. If there is a treasure itwill never be found, for I am not interested in wealth beyond the dreamsof avarice since I know that avarice has no dreams, but only insomnia. And, for the other party, my gardener would never consent to dig up thegarden. 

Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed with intellectual emotions when I sawthat answer to my question; the question of why the garden did notbelong to the gardener. No better epigram could be put in reply thansimply putting the Spade Guinea beside the Spade. This was the onlyunderground seed that I could understand. Only by having a little moreof that dull, battered yellow substance could I manage to be idle whilehe was active. I am not altogether idle myself; but the fact remainsthat the power is in the thin slip of metal we call the Spade Guinea, not in the strong square and curve of metal which we call the Spade. And then I suddenly remembered that as I had found gold on my ground byaccident, so richer men in the north and west counties had found coal intheir ground, also by accident. 

I told the gardener that as he had found the thing he ought to keep it, but that if he cared to sell it to me it could be valued properly, andthen sold. He said at first, with characteristic independence, that hewould like to keep it. He said it would make a brooch for his wife. Buta little later he brought it back to me without explanation. I could notget a ray of light on the reason of his refusal; but he looked loweringand unhappy. Had he some mystical instinct that it is just suchaccidental and irrational wealth that is the doom of all peasantries?Perhaps he dimly felt that the boy's pirate tales are true; and thatburied treasure is a thing for robbers and not for producers. Perhapshe thought there was a curse on such capital: on the coal of thecoal-owners, on the gold of the gold-seekers. Perhaps there is. 

THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES

The real evil of our Party System is commonly stated wrong. It wasstated wrong by Lord Rosebery, when he said that it prevented the bestmen from devoting themselves to politics, and that it encouraged afanatical conflict. I doubt whether the best men ever would devotethemselves to politics. The best men devote themselves to pigs andbabies and things like that. And as for the fanatical conflict inparty politics, I wish there was more of it. The real danger of the twoparties with their two policies is that they unduly limit the outlook ofthe ordinary citizen. They make him barren instead of creative, becausehe is never allowed to do anything except prefer one existing policy toanother. We have not got real Democracy when the decision depends uponthe people. We shall have real Democracy when the problem depends uponthe people. The ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, butwhat he is going to vote about. 

It is this which involves some weakness in many current aspirationstowards the extension of the suffrage; I mean that, apart from allquestions of abstract justice, it is not the smallness or largeness ofthe suffrage that is at present the difficulty of Democracy. It is notthe quantity of voters, but the quality of the thing they are votingabout. A certain alternative is put before them by the powerful housesand the highest political class. Two roads are opened to them; but theymust go down one or the other. They cannot have what they choose, butonly which they choose. To follow the process in practice we may put itthus. The Suffragettes—if one may judge by their frequent ringingof his bell—want to do something to Mr. Asquith. I have no notionwhat it is. Let us say (for the sake of argument) that they want topaint him green. We will suppose that it is entirely for that simplepurpose that they are always seeking to have private interviews withhim; it seems as profitable as any other end that I can imagine to suchan interview. Now, it is possible that the Government of the day mightgo in for a positive policy of painting Mr. Asquith green; might givethat reform a prominent place in their programme. Then the party inopposition would adopt another policy, not a policy of leaving Mr. Asquith alone (which would be considered dangerously revolutionary), butsome alternative course of action, as, for instance, painting him red. Then both sides would fling themselves on the people, they would bothcry that the appeal was now to the Caesar of Democracy. A dark anddramatic air of conflict and real crisis would arise on both sides;arrows of satire would fly and swords of eloquence flame. The Greenswould say that Socialists and free lovers might well want to paint Mr. Asquith red; they wanted to paint the whole town red. Socialists wouldindignantly reply that Socialism was the reverse of disorder, and thatthey only wanted to paint Mr. Asquith red so that he might resemblethe red pillar-boxes which typified State control. The Greens wouldpassionately deny the charge so often brought against them by the Reds;they would deny that they wished Mr. Asquith green in order that hemight be invisible on the green benches of the Commons, as certainterrified animals take the colour of their environment. 

There would be fights in the street perhaps, and abundance of ribbons, flags, and badges, of the two colours. One crowd would sing, "Keep theRed Flag Flying, " and the other, "The Wearing of the Green. " But whenthe last effort had been made and the last moment come, when twocrowds were waiting in the dark outside the public building to hear thedeclaration of the poll, then both sides alike would say that it was nowfor democracy to do exactly what it chose. England herself, lifting herhead in awful loneliness and liberty, must speak and pronounce judgment. Yet this might not be exactly true. England herself, lifting her head inawful loneliness and liberty, might really wish Mr. Asquith to be paleblue. The democracy of England in the abstract, if it had been allowedto make up a policy for itself, might have desired him to be blackwith pink spots. It might even have liked him as he is now. But a hugeapparatus of wealth, power, and printed matter has made it practicallyimpossible for them to bring home these other proposals, even if theywould really prefer them. No candidates will stand in the spottedinterest; for candidates commonly have to produce money either fromtheir own pockets or the party's; and in such circles spots are notworn. No man in the social position of a Cabinet Minister, perhaps, will commit himself to the pale-blue theory of Mr. Asquith; therefore itcannot be a Government measure, therefore it cannot pass. 

Nearly all the great newspapers, both pompous and frivolous, willdeclare dogmatically day after day, until every one half believesit, that red and green are the only two colours in the paint-box. THEOBSERVER will say: "No one who knows the solid framework of politics orthe emphatic first principles of an Imperial people can suppose fora moment that there is any possible compromise to be made in such amatter; we must either fulfil our manifest racial destiny and crown theedifice of ages with the august figure of a Green Premier, or we mustabandon our heritage, break our promise to the Empire, fling ourselvesinto final anarchy, and allow the flaming and demoniac image of a RedPremier to hover over our dissolution and our doom. " The DAILY MAILwould say: "There is no halfway house in this matter; it must be greenor red. We wish to see every honest Englishman one colour or the other. "And then some funny man in the popular Press would star the sentencewith a pun, and say that the DAILY MAIL liked its readers to be greenand its paper to be read. But no one would even dare to whisper thatthere is such a thing as yellow. 

For the purposes of pure logic it is clearer to argue with sillyexamples than with sensible ones: because silly examples are simple. ButI could give many grave and concrete cases of the kind of thing to whichI refer. In the later part of the Boer War both parties perpetuallyinsisted in every speech and pamphlet that annexation was inevitable andthat it was only a question whether Liberals or Tories should do it. Itwas not inevitable in the least; it would have been perfectly easy tomake peace with the Boers as Christian nations commonly make peace withtheir conquered enemies. Personally I think that it would have beenbetter for us in the most selfish sense, better for our pocket andprestige, if we had never effected the annexation at all; but that is amatter of opinion. What is plain is that it was not inevitable; it wasnot, as was said, the only possible course; there were plenty of othercourses; there were plenty of other colours in the box. Again, in thediscussion about Socialism, it is repeatedly rubbed into the public mindthat we must choose between Socialism and some horrible thing that theycall Individualism. I don't know what it means, but it seems to meanthat anybody who happens to pull out a plum is to adopt the moralphilosophy of the young Horner—and say what a good boy he is forhelping himself. 

It is calmly assumed that the only two possible types of society are aCollectivist type of society and the present society that exists at thismoment and is rather like an animated muck-heap. It is quite unnecessaryto say that I should prefer Socialism to the present state of things. Ishould prefer anarchism to the present state of things. But it is simplynot the fact that Collectivism is the only other scheme for a more equalorder. A Collectivist has a perfect right to think it the only soundscheme; but it is not the only plausible or possible scheme. We mighthave peasant proprietorship; we might have the compromise of HenryGeorge; we might have a number of tiny communes; we might haveco-operation; we might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundredthings. I am not saying that any of these are right, though I cannotimagine that any of them could be worse than the present socialmadhouse, with its top-heavy rich and its tortured poor; but I say thatit is an evidence of the stiff and narrow alternative offered to thecivic mind, that the civic mind is not, generally speaking, conscious ofthese other possibilities. The civic mind is not free or alert enoughto feel how much it has the world before it. There are at least tensolutions of the Education question, and no one knows which Englishmenreally want. For Englishmen are only allowed to vote about the twowhich are at that moment offered by the Premier and the Leader of theOpposition. There are ten solutions of the drink question; and no oneknows which the democracy wants; for the democracy is only allowed tofight about one Licensing Bill at a time. 

So that the situation comes to this: The democracy has a right to answerquestions, but it has no right to ask them. It is still the politicalaristocracy that asks the questions. And we shall not be unreasonablycynical if we suppose that the political aristocracy will always berather careful what questions it asks. And if the dangerous comfort andself-flattery of modern England continues much longer there will be lessdemocratic value in an English election than in a Roman saturnalia ofslaves. For the powerful class will choose two courses of action, bothof them safe for itself, and then give the democracy the gratificationof taking one course or the other. The lord will take two things so muchalike that he would not mind choosing from them blindfold—and thenfor a great jest he will allow the slaves to choose. 

THE MAD OFFICIAL

Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world. I have verynearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly allmy friends, born under the general doom of mortals, but especially ofmoderns; I mean the doom that makes a man come almost to the end ofthinking before he comes to the first chance of living. 

But the process of going mad is dull, for the simple reason that a mandoes not know that it is going on. Routine and literalism and acertain dry-throated earnestness and mental thirst, these are the veryatmosphere of morbidity. If once the man could become conscious of hismadness, he would cease to be man. He studies certain texts in Danielor cryptograms in Shakespeare through monstrously magnifying spectacles, which are on his nose night and day. If once he could take off thespectacles he would smash them. He deduces all his fantasies about theSixth Seal or the Anglo-Saxon Race from one unexamined and invisiblefirst principle. If he could once see the first principle, he would seethat it is not there. 

This slow and awful self-hypnotism of error is a process that can occurnot only with individuals, but also with whole societies. It is hardto pick out and prove; that is why it is hard to cure. But this mentaldegeneration may be brought to one test, which I truly believe to be areal test. A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. Crusaders not cuttingtheir beards till they found Jerusalem, Jacobins calling each otherHarmodius and Epaminondas when their names were Jacques and Jules, theseare wild things, but they were done in wild spirits at a wild moment. 

But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the Stateis growing insane. For instance, I have a gun license. For all I know, this would logically allow me to fire off fifty-nine enormous field-gunsday and night in my back garden. I should not be surprised at a mandoing it; for it would be great fun. But I should be surprised at theneighbours putting up with it, and regarding it as an ordinary thingmerely because it might happen to fulfill the letter of my license. 

Or, again, I have a dog license; and I may have the right (for all Iknow) to turn ten thousand wild dogs loose in Buckinghamshire. I shouldnot be surprised if the law were like that; because in modern Englandthere is practically no law to be surprised at. I should not besurprised even at the man who did it; for a certain kind of man, if helived long under the English landlord system, might do anything. But Ishould be surprised at the people who consented to stand it. I should, in other words, think the world a little mad if the incident, werereceived in silence. 

Now things every bit as wild as this are being received in silence everyday. All strokes slip on the smoothness of a polished wall. All blowsfall soundless on the softness of a padded cell. For madness is apassive as well as an active state: it is a paralysis, a refusal ofthe nerves to respond to the normal stimuli, as well as an unnaturalstimulation. There are commonwealths, plainly to be distinguished hereand there in history, which pass from prosperity to squalor, or fromglory to insignificance, or from freedom to slavery, not only insilence, but with serenity. The face still smiles while the limbs, literally and loathsomely, are dropping from the body. These are peoplesthat have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When theygive birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not startor stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown usedto their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is thebreath of their nostrils. These nations are really in danger of goingoff their heads en masse; of becoming one vast vision of imbecility, with toppling cities and crazy country-sides, all dotted withindustrious lunatics. One of these countries is modern England. 

Now here is an actual instance, a small case of how our socialconscience really works: tame in spirit, wild in result, blank inrealisation; a thing without the light of mind in it. I take thisparagraph from a daily paper:—"At Epping, yesterday, ThomasWoolbourne, a Lambourne labourer, and his wife were summoned forneglecting their five children. Dr. Alpin said he was invited by theinspector of the N. S. P. C. C. To visit defendants' cottage. Both thecottage and the children were dirty. The children looked exceedinglywell in health, but the conditions would be serious in case of illness. Defendants were stated to be sober. The man was discharged. The woman, who said she was hampered by the cottage having no water supply andthat she was ill, was sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment. The sentencecaused surprise, and the woman was removed crying, 'Lord save me!'"

I know no name for this but Chinese. It calls up the mental picture ofsome archaic and changeless Eastern Court, in which men with dried facesand stiff ceremonial costumes perform some atrocious cruelty to theaccompaniment of formal proverbs and sentences of which the very meaninghas been forgotten. In both cases the only thing in the whole farragothat can be called real is the wrong. If we apply the lightest touch ofreason to the whole Epping prosecution it dissolves into nothing. 

I here challenge any person in his five wits to tell me what that womanwas sent to prison for. Either it was for being poor, or it was forbeing ill. Nobody could suggest, nobody will suggest, nobody, as amatter of fact, did suggest, that she had committed any other crime. The doctor was called in by a Society for the Prevention of Crueltyto Children. Was this woman guilty of cruelty to children? Not in theleast. Did the doctor say she was guilty of cruelty to children? Not inthe least. Was these any evidence even remotely bearing on the sin ofcruelty? Not a rap. The worse that the doctor could work himself upto saying was that though the children were "exceedingly" well, theconditions would be serious in case of illness. If the doctor will tellme any conditions that would be comic in case of illness, I shall attachmore weight to his argument. 

Now this is the worst effect of modern worry. The mad doctor hasgone mad. He is literally and practically mad; and still he is quiteliterally and practically a doctor. The only question is the old one, Quis docebit ipsum doctorem? Now cruelty to children is an utterlyunnatural thing; instinctively accursed of earth and heaven. But neglectof children is a natural thing; like neglect of any other duty, it isa mere difference of degree that divides extending arms and legs incalisthenics and extending them on the rack. It is a mere difference ofdegree that separates any operation from any torture. The thumb-screwcan easily be called Manicure. Being pulled about by wild horses caneasily be called Massage. The modern problem is not so much what peoplewill endure as what they will not endure. But I fear I interrupt. .. . Theboiling oil is boiling; and the Tenth Mandarin is already reciting the"Seventeen Serious Principles and the Fifty-three Virtues of the SacredEmperor. "

THE ENCHANTED MAN

When I arrived to see the performance of the Buckinghamshire Players, who acted Miss Gertrude Robins's POT LUCK at Naphill a short time ago, it is the distressing, if scarcely surprising, truth that I entered verylate. This would have mattered little, I hope, to any one, but that latecomers had to be forced into front seats. For a real popular Englishaudience always insists on crowding in the back part of the hall; and(as I have found in many an election) will endure the most unendurabletaunts rather than come forward. The English are a modest people; thatis why they are entirely ruled and run by the few of them that happen tobe immodest. In theatrical affairs the fact is strangely notable; and inmost playhouses we find the bored people in front and the eager peoplebehind. 

As far as the performance went I was quite the reverse of a boredperson; but I may have been a boring person, especially as I was thusrequired to sit in the seats of the scornful. It will be a happy day inthe dramatic world when all ladies have to take off their hats and allcritics have to take off their heads. The people behind will have achance then. And as it happens, in this case, I had not so much takenoff my head as lost it. I had lost it on the road; on that strangejourney that was the cause of my coming in late. I have a troubledrecollection of having seen a very good play and made a very bad speech;I have a cloudy recollection of talking to all sorts of nice peopleafterwards, but talking to them jerkily and with half a head, as a mantalks when he has one eye on a clock. 

And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock, hung uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figurefor such bemused folly. In the true sense of an ancient phrase, Iwas moonstruck. A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight hadinexplicably got in between me and all other scenes. If any one hadasked me I could not have said what it was; I cannot say now. Nothinghad occurred to me; except the breakdown of a hired motor on the ridgeof a hill. It was not an adventure; it was a vision. 

I had started in wintry twilight from my own door; and hired a smallcar that found its way across the hills towards Naphill. But asnight blackened and frost brightened and hardened it I found the wayincreasingly difficult; especially as the way was an incessant ascent. Whenever we topped a road like a staircase it was only to turn into ayet steeper road like a ladder. 

At last, when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Towerof Babel in a dream, I was brought to fact by alarming noises, stoppage, and the driver saying that "it couldn't be done. " I got out of the carand suddenly forgot that I had ever been in it. 

From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, whichI am now going to describe. When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered hisgreat patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch partsof South Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt. "The word "veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch. But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave hima sense of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England. Well, if he never found it in England it was because he never looked forit in England. In England there is an illimitable number of illimitableveldts. I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as manydifferent hills. One cannot find anything more infinite than a finitehorizon, free and lonely and innocent. The Dutch veldt may be a littlemore desolate than Birmingham. But I am sure it is not so desolate asthat English hill was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe. 

I looked across a vast and voiceless valley straight at the moon, as ifat a round mirror. It may have been the blue moon of the proverb; for onthat freezing night the very moon seemed blue with cold. A deathly frostfastened every branch and blade to its place. The sinking and softeningforests, powdered with a gray frost, fell away underneath me into anabyss which seemed unfathomable. One fancied the world was soundlessonly because it was bottomless: it seemed as if all songs and crieshad been swallowed in some unresisting stillness under the roots of thehills. I could fancy that if I shouted there would be no echo; that ifI hurled huge stones there would be no noise of reply. A dumb devil hadbewitched the landscape: but that again does not express the best orworst of it. All those hoary and frosted forests expressed something soinhuman that it has no human name. A horror of unconsciousness lay onthem; that is the nearest phrase I know. It was as if one were lookingat the back of the world; and the world did not know it. I had taken theuniverse in the rear. I was behind the scenes. I was eavesdropping uponan unconscious creation. 

I shall not express what the place expressed. I am not even sure that itis a thing that ought to be expressed. There was something heathen aboutits union of beauty and death; sorrow seemed to glitter, as it does insome of the great pagan poems. I understood one of the thousand poeticalphrases of the populace, "a God-forsaken place. " Yet something waspresent there; and I could not yet find the key to my fixed impression. Then suddenly I remembered the right word. It was an enchanted place. Ithad been put to sleep. In a flash I remembered all the fairy-tales aboutprinces turned to marble and princesses changed to snow. We were in aland where none could strive or cry out; a white nightmare. The moonlooked at me across the valley like the enormous eye of a hypnotist; theone white eye of the world. 

There was never a better play than POT LUCK; for it tells a tale with apoint and a tale that might happen any day among English peasants. Therewere never better actors than the local Buckinghamshire Players: forthey were acting their own life with just that rise into exaggerationwhich is the transition from life to art. But all the time I wasmesmerised by the moon; I saw all these men and women as enchantedthings. The poacher shot pheasants; the policeman tracked pheasants; thewife hid pheasants; they were all (especially the policeman) as trueas death. But there was something more true to death than true to lifeabout it all: the figures were frozen with a magic frost of sleep orfear or custom such as does not cramp the movements of the poor men ofother lands. I looked at the poacher and the policeman and the gun; thenat the gun and the policeman and the poacher; and I could find no namefor the fancy that haunted and escaped me. The poacher believed in theGame Laws as much as the policeman. The poacher's wife not only believedin the Game Laws, but protected them as well as him. She got a promisefrom her husband that he would never shoot another pheasant. Whether hekept it I doubt; I fancy he sometimes shot a pheasant even after that. But I am sure he never shot a policeman. For we live in an enchantedland. 

THE SUN WORSHIPPER

There is a shrewd warning to be given to all people who are in revolt. And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting inthat sense; except a few who are revolting in the other sense. But thewarning to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this: that as sure asfate, if they use any argument which is atheist or materialistic, thatargument will always be turned against them at last by the tyrant andthe slave. To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory, so to speak, in a manner quite startling and insane. I mean that moderndoctrine, taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl Marx, which iscalled the materialist theory of history. The theory is, roughly, this:that all the important things in history are rooted in an economicmotive. In short, history is a science; a science of the search forfood. 

Now I desire, in passing only, to point out that this is not merelyuntrue, but actually the reverse of the truth. It is putting it toofeebly to say that the history of man is not only economic. Man wouldnot have any history if he were only economic. The need for food iscertainly universal, so universal that it is not even human. Cowshave an economic motive, and apparently (I dare not say what etherealdelicacies may be in a cow) only an economic motive. The cow eats grassanywhere and never eats anything else. In short, the cow does fulfillthe materialist theory of history: that is why the cow has no history. "A History of Cows" would be one of the simplest and briefest ofstandard works. But if some cows thought it wicked to eat long grassand persecuted all who did so; if the cow with the crumpled horn wereworshipped by some cows and gored to death by others; if cows began tohave obvious moral preferences over and above a desire for grass, thencows would begin to have a history. They would also begin to have ahighly unpleasant time, which is perhaps the same thing. 

The economic motive is not merely not inside all history; it is actuallyoutside all history. It belongs to Biology or the Science of Life; thatis, it concerns things like cows, that are not so very much alive. Menare far too much alive to get into the science of anything; for them wehave made the art of history. To say that human actions have dependedon economic support is like saying that they have depended on having twolegs. It accounts for action, but not for such varied action; it is acondition, but not a motive; it is too universal to be useful. Certainlya soldier wins the Victoria Cross on two legs; he also runs away on twolegs. But if our object is to discover whether he will become a V. C. Ora coward the most careful inspection of his legs will yield us little orno information. In the same way a man will want food if he is a dreamyromantic tramp, and will want food if he is a toiling and sweatingmillionaire. A man must be supported on food as he must be supportedon legs. But cows (who have no history) are not only furnished moregenerously in the matter of legs, but can see their food on a muchgrander and more imaginative scale. A cow can lift up her eyes to thehills and see uplands and peaks of pure food. Yet we never see thehorizon broken by crags of cake or happy hills of cheese. 

So far the cow (who has no history) seems to have every other advantage. But history—the whole point of history—precisely is thatsome two legged soldiers ran away while others, of similar anatomicalstructure, did not. The whole point of history precisely is: some people(like poets and tramps) chance getting money by disregarding it, whileothers (such as millionaires) will absolutely lose money for the funof bothering about it. There would be no history if there were onlyeconomic history. All the historical events have been due to thetwists and turns given to the economic instinct by forces that were noteconomic. For instance, this theory traces the French war of EdwardIII to a quarrel about the French wines. Any one who has even smelt theMiddle Ages must feel fifty answers spring to his lips; but in this caseone will suffice. There would have been no such war, then, if we alldrank water like cows. But when one is a man one enters the worldof historic choice. The act of drinking wine is one that requiresexplanation. So is the act of not drinking wine. 

But the capitalist can get much more fun out of the doctrine. 

When strikes were splitting England right and left a little while ago, an ingenious writer, humorously describing himself as a Liberal, saidthat they were entirely due to the hot weather. The suggestion waseagerly taken up by other creatures of the same kind, and I really donot see why it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentableuprisings in history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather isgenerally rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light onthe sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape fromcaptivity. The English strikers used some barren republican formula(arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academicshibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except fora wage accepted by them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egyptemployed some dry scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty ofmaking bricks with nothing to make them of. But whatever fantasticintellectual excuses they may have put forward for their strange andunnatural conduct in walking out when the prison door was open, therecan be no doubt that the real cause was the warm weather. Such a climatenotoriously also produces delusions and horrible fancies, such as Mr. Kipling describes. And it was while their brains were disordered by theheat that the Jews fancied that they were founding a nation, that theywere led by a prophet, and, in short, that they were going to be of someimportance in the affairs of the world. 

Nor can the historical student fail to note that the French monarchy waspulled down in August; and that August is a month in summer. 

In spite of all this, however, I have some little difficulty myselfin accepting so simple a form of the Materialist Theory of History (atthese words all Marxian Socialists will please bow their heads threetimes), and I rather think that exceptions might be found to theprinciple. Yet it is not chiefly such exceptions that embarrass mybelief in it. 

No; my difficulty is rather in accounting for the strange coincidence bywhich the shafts of Apollo split us exclusively along certain lines ofclass and of economics. I cannot understand why all solicitors did notleave off soliciting, all doctors leave off doctoring, all judges leaveoff judging, all benevolent bankers leave off lending money at highinterest, and all rising politicians leave off having nothing to add towhat their right honourable friend told the House about eight yearsago. The quaint theoretic plea of the workers, that they were strikingbecause they were ill paid, seems to receive a sort of wild and hazyconfirmation from the fact that, throughout the hottest weather, judgesand other persons who are particularly well paid showed no dispositionto strike. I have to fall back therefore on metaphysical fancies of myown; and I continue to believe that the anger of the English poor (tosteal a phrase from Sir Thomas Browne) came from something in man thatis other than the elements and that owes no homage unto the sun. 

When comfortable people come to talking stuff of that sort, it is reallytime that the comfortable classes made a short summary and confessionof what they have really done with the very poor Englishman. The dawn ofthe mediaeval civilisation found him a serf; which is a different thingfrom a slave. He had security; although the man belonged to the landrather than the land to the man. He could not be evicted; his rent couldnot be raised. In practice, it came to something like this: that if thelord rode down his cabbages he had not much chance of redress; but hehad the chance of growing more cabbages. He had direct access to themeans of production. 

Since then the centuries in England have achieved something different;and something which, fortunately, is perfectly easy to state. There isno doubt about what we have done. We have kept the inequality, but wehave destroyed the security. The man is not tied to the land, as inserfdom; nor is the land tied to the man, as in a peasantry. The richman has entered into an absolute ownership of farms and fields; and (inthe modern industrial phrase) he has locked out the English people. Theycan only find an acre to dig or a house to sleep in by accepting suchcompetitive and cruel terms as he chooses to impose. 

Well, what would happen then, over the larger parts of the planet, partsinhabited by savages? Savages, of course, would hunt and fish. Thatretreat for the English poor was perceived; and that retreat was cutoff. Game laws were made to extend over districts like the Arctic snowsor the Sahara. The rich man had property over animals he had no moredreamed of than a governor of Roman Africa had dreamed of a giraffe. He owned all the birds that passed over his land: he might as well haveowned all the clouds that passed over it. If a rabbit ran from Smith'sland to Brown's land, it belonged to Brown, as if it were his pet dog. The logical answer to this would be simple: Any one stung on Brown'sland ought to be able to prosecute Brown for keeping a dangerous waspwithout a muzzle. 

Thus the poor man was forced to be a tramp along the roads and to sleepin the open. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off. A landless man in England can be punished for behaving in the only waythat a landless man can behave: for sleeping under a hedge in Surrey oron a seat on the Embankment. His sin is described (with a hideous senseof fun) as that of having no visible means of subsistence. 

The last possibility, of course, is that upon which all human beingswould fall back if they were sinking in a swamp or impaled on a spikeor deserted on an island. It is that of calling out for pity to thepasserby. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off. Aman in England can be sent to prison for asking another man for help inthe name of God. 

You have done all these things, and by so doing you have forced the poorto serve the rich, and to serve them on the terms of the rich. They havestill one weapon left against the extremes of insult and unfairness:that weapon is their numbers and the necessity of those numbers to theworking of that vast and slavish machine. And because they still hadthis last retreat (which we call the Strike), because this retreatwas also perceived, there was talk of this retreat being also cut off. Whereupon the workmen became suddenly and violently angry; and struck atyour Boards and Committees here, there, and wherever they could. And youopened on them the eyes of owls, and said, "It must be the sunshine. "You could only go on saying, "The sun, the sun. " That was what the manin Ibsen said, when he had lost his wits. 

THE WRONG INCENDIARY

I stood looking at the Coronation Procession—I mean the onein Beaconsfield; not the rather elephantine imitation of it which, Ibelieve, had some success in London—and I was seriously impressed. Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deathly surprise thatI was quite right. Never before have I realised how right I was inmaintaining that the small area expresses the real patriotism: thesmaller the field the taller the tower. There were things in our localprocession that did not (one might even reverently say, could not) occurin the London procession. One of the most prominent citizens in ourprocession (for instance) had his face blacked. Another rode on a ponywhich wore pink and blue trousers. I was not present at the Metropolitanaffair, and therefore my assertion is subject to such correction as theeyewitness may always offer to the absentee. But I believe with somefirmness that no such features occurred in the London pageant. 

But it is not of the local celebration that I would speak, but ofsomething that occurred before it. In the field beyond the end of mygarden the materials for a bonfire had been heaped; a hill of every kindof rubbish and refuse and things that nobody wants; broken chairs, deadtrees, rags, shavings, newspapers, new religions, in pamphlet form, reports of the Eugenic Congress, and so on. All this refuse, materialand mental, it was our purpose to purify and change to holy flame on theday when the King was crowned. The following is an account of the ratherstrange thing that really happened. I do not know whether it was anysort of symbol; but I narrate it just as it befell. 

In the middle of the night I woke up slowly and listened to what Isupposed to be the heavy crunching of a cart-wheel along a road of loosestones. Then it grew louder, and I thought somebody was shooting outcartloads of stones; then it seemed as if the shock was breaking bigstones into pieces. Then I realised that under this sound there was alsoa strange, sleepy, almost inaudible roar; and that on top of it everynow and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols. Then I knewwhat it was. I went to the window; and a great firelight flung acrosstwo meadows smote me where I stood. "Oh, my holy aunt, " I thought, "they've mistaken the Coronation Day. "

And yet when I eyed the transfigured scene it did not seem exactly likea bonfire or any ritual illumination. It was too chaotic, and too closeto the houses of the town. All one side of a cottage was painted pinkwith the giant brush of flame; the next side, by contrast, was paintedas black as tar. Along the front of this ran a blackening rim or rampartedged with a restless red ribbon that danced and doubled and devouredlike a scarlet snake; and beyond it was nothing but a deathly fulness oflight. 

I put on some clothes and went down the road; all the dull or startlingnoises in that din of burning growing louder and louder as I walked. Theheaviest sound was that of an incessant cracking and crunching, as ifsome giant with teeth of stone was breaking up the bones of the world. Ihad not yet come within sight of the real heart and habitat of the fire;but the strong red light, like an unnatural midnight sunset, powderedthe grayest grass with gold and flushed the few tall trees up to thelast fingers of their foliage. Behind them the night was black andcavernous; and one could only trace faintly the ashen horizon beyond thedark and magic Wilton Woods. As I went, a workman on a bicycle shot arood past me; then staggered from his machine and shouted to me to tellhim where the fire was. I answered that I was going to see, but thoughtit was the cottages by the wood-yard. He said, "My God!" and vanished. 

A little farther on I found grass and pavement soaking and flooded, andthe red and yellow flames repainted in pools and puddles. Beyond weredim huddles of people and a small distant voice shouting out orders. Thefire-engines were at work. I went on among the red reflections, whichseemed like subterranean fires; I had a singular sensation of being in avery important dream. Oddly enough, this was increased when I found thatmost of my friends and neighbours were entangled in the crowd. Only indreams do we see familiar faces so vividly against a black background ofmidnight. I was glad to find (for the workman cyclist's sake) thatthe fire was not in the houses by the wood-yard, but in the wood-yarditself. There was no fear for human life, and the thing was seeminglyaccidental; though there were the usual ugly whispers about rivalry andrevenge. But for all that I could not shake off my dream-drugged soul aswollen, tragic, portentous sort of sensation, that it all had somethingto do with the crowning of the English King, and the glory or the endof England. It was not till I saw the puddles and the ashes in broaddaylight next morning that I was fundamentally certain that my midnightadventure had not happened outside this world. 

But I was more arrogant than the ancient Emperors Pharaoh orNebuchadnezzar; for I attempted to interpret my own dream. The fire wasfeeding upon solid stacks of unused beech or pine, gray and white pilesof virgin wood. It was an orgy of mere waste; thousands of goodthings were being killed before they had ever existed. Doors, tables, walking-sticks, wheelbarrows, wooden swords for boys, Dutch dolls forgirls I could hear the cry of each uncreated thing as it expired in theflames. And then I thought of that other noble tower of needless thingsthat stood in the field beyond my garden; the bonfire, the mountain ofvanities, that is meant for burning; and how it stood dark and lonely inthe meadow, and the birds hopped on its corners and the dew touched andspangled its twigs. And I remembered that there are two kinds of fires, the Bad Fire and the Good Fire the last must surely be the meaning ofBonfire. And the paradox is that the Good Fire is made of bad things, ofthings that we do not want; but the Bad Fire is made of good things, of things that we do want; like all that wealth of wood that might havemade dolls and chairs and tables, but was only making a hueless ash. 

And then I saw, in my vision, that just as there are two fires, so thereare two revolutions. And I saw that the whole mad modern world is a racebetween them. Which will happen first—the revolution in whichbad things shall perish, or that other revolution, in which good thingsshall perish also? One is the riot that all good men, even the mostconservative, really dream of, when the sneer shall be struck from theface of the well-fed; when the wine of honour shall be poured down thethroat of despair; when we shall, so far as to the sons of flesh ispossible, take tyranny and usury and public treason and bind them intobundles and burn them. And the other is the disruption that may comeprematurely, negatively, and suddenly in the night; like the fire in mylittle town. 

It may come because the mere strain of modern life is unbearable; and init even the things that men do desire may break down; marriage andfair ownership and worship and the mysterious worth of man. The tworevolutions, white and black, are racing each other like two railwaytrains; I cannot guess the issue. .. But even as I thought of it, thetallest turret of the timber stooped and faltered and came down in acataract of noises. And the fire, finding passage, went up with a spoutlike a fountain. It stood far up among the stars for an instant, ablazing pillar of brass fit for a pagan conqueror, so high that onecould fancy it visible away among the goblin trees of Burnham or alongthe terraces of the Chiltern Hills. 

THE FREE MAN

The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why menfind it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finallyto the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to savetheir lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice. Ruskin rebukedColeridge for praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sunto be free. It seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be thesun. Speaking as a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea ofJoshua stopping the sun in heaven than with the idea of Ruskin trottinghis daily round in imitation of its regularity. Joshua was a Radical, and his astronomical act was distinctly revolutionary. For allrevolution is the mastering of matter by the spirit of man, theemergence of that human authority within us which, in the noble words ofSir Thomas Browne, "owes no homage unto the sun. "

Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meantmerely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like atree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure inselecting and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaningof the trade of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the realidea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use theword "make" about most of the things in which freedom is essential, asa country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man "makes hisway" through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like theRomans. When a man "makes a friend, " he makes a man. And in the thirdcase we talk of a man "making love, " as if he were (as, indeed, he is)creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful formof manufacture. In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god inman, or, if you like the word, the artist. 

In its secondary political sense liberty is the living influence of thecitizen on the State in the direction of moulding or deflecting it. Menare the only creatures that evidently possess it. On the one hand, theeagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness. On the other hand, ants, bees, and beavers exhibit the highest miracle of the State influencingthe citizen; but no perceptible trace of the citizen influencing theState. You may, if you like, call the ants a democracy as you maycall the bees a despotism. But I fancy that the architectural ant whoattempted to introduce an art nouveau style of ant-hill would have acareer as curt and fruitless as the celebrated bee who wanted to swarmalone. The isolation of this idea in humanity is akin to its religiouscharacter; but it is not even in humanity by any means equallydistributed. The idea that the State should not only be supported byits children, like the ant-hill, but should be constantly criticised andreconstructed by them, is an idea stronger in Christendom than anyother part of the planet; stronger in Western than Eastern Europe. Andtouching the pure idea of the individual being free to speak and actwithin limits, the assertion of this idea, we may fairly say, has beenthe peculiar honour of our own country. For my part I greatly prefer theJingoism of Rule Britannia to the Imperialism of The Recessional. I haveno objection to Britannia ruling the waves. I draw the line whenshe begins to rule the dry land—and such damnably dry landtoo—as in Africa. And there was a real old English sincerityin the vulgar chorus that "Britons never shall be slaves. " We had noequality and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of. And I think just now it is worth while to draw attention to the oldoptimistic prophecy that "Britons never shall be slaves. "

The mere love of liberty has never been at a lower ebb in England thanit has been for the last twenty years. Never before has it been so easyto slip small Bills through Parliament for the purpose of locking peopleup. Never was it so easy to silence awkward questions, or to protecthigh-placed officials. Two hundred years ago we turned out the Stuartsrather than endanger the Habeas Corpus Act. Two years ago we abolishedthe Habeas Corpus Act rather than turn out the Home Secretary. We passeda law (which is now in force) that an Englishman's punishment shall notdepend upon judge and jury, but upon the governors and jailers who havegot hold of him. But this is not the only case. The scorn of libertyis in the air. A newspaper is seized by the police in Trafalgar Squarewithout a word of accusation or explanation. The Home Secretary saysthat in his opinion the police are very nice people, and there is an endof the matter. A Member of Parliament attempts to criticise a peerage. The Speaker says he must not criticise a peerage, and there the matterdrops. 

Political liberty, let us repeat, consists in the power ofcriticising those flexible parts of the State which constantly requirereconsideration, not the basis, but the machinery. In plainer words, it means the power of saying the sort of things that a decent butdiscontented citizen wants to say. He does not want to spit on theBible, or to run about without clothes, or to read the worst page inZola from the pulpit of St. Paul's. Therefore the forbidding of thesethings (whether just or not) is only tyranny in a secondary and specialsense. It restrains the abnormal, not the normal man. But the normalman, the decent discontented citizen, does want to protest againstunfair law courts. He does want to expose brutalities of the police. He does want to make game of a vulgar pawnbroker who is made a Peer. Hedoes want publicly to warn people against unscrupulous capitalists andsuspicious finance. If he is run in for doing this (as he will be)he does want to proclaim the character or known prejudices of themagistrate who tries him. If he is sent to prison (as he will be) hedoes want to have a clear and civilised sentence, telling him when hewill come out. And these are literally and exactly the things thathe now cannot get. That is the almost cloying humour of the presentsituation. I can say abnormal things in modern magazines. It is thenormal things that I am not allowed to say. I can write in some solemnquarterly an elaborate article explaining that God is the devil; I canwrite in some cultured weekly an aesthetic fancy describing how Ishould like to eat boiled baby. The thing I must not write is rationalcriticism of the men and institutions of my country. 

The present condition of England is briefly this: That no Englishman cansay in public a twentieth part of what he says in private. One cannotsay, for instance, that—But I am afraid I must leave outthat instance, because one cannot say it. I cannot prove mycase—because it is so true. 

THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER

We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-mindedthat he paid a call at his own house. My own absent-mindedness isextreme, and my philosophy, of course, is the marvel of men and angels. But I never quite managed to be so absent-minded as that. Some yards atleast from my own door, something vaguely familiar has always caughtmy eye; and thus the joke has been spoiled. Of course I have quiteconstantly walked into another man's house, thinking it was my ownhouse; my visits became almost monotonous. But walking into my own houseand thinking it was another man's house is a flight of poetic detachmentstill beyond me. Something of the sensations that such an absent-mindedman must feel I really felt the other day; and very pleasant sensationsthey were. The best parts of every proper romance are the first chapterand the last chapter; and to knock at a strange door and find a nicewife would be to concentrate the beginning and end of all romance. 

Mine was a milder and slighter experience, but its thrill was of thesame kind. For I strolled through a place I had imagined quite virginand unvisited (as far as I was concerned), and I suddenly found I wastreading in my own footprints, and the footprints were nearly twentyyears old. 

It was one of those stretches of country which always suggests an almostunnatural decay; thickets and heaths that have grown out of what wereonce great gardens. Garden flowers still grow there as wild flowers, as it says in some good poetic couplet which I forget; and there issomething singularly romantic and disastrous about seeing things thatwere so long a human property and care fighting for their own hand inthe thicket. One almost expects to find a decayed dog-kennel; with thedog evolved into a wolf. 

This desolate garden-land had been even in my youth scrappily plannedout for building. The half-built or empty houses had appeared quitethreateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it yearsago and almost as a boy. I was astonished that the building had goneno farther; I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else dislikedbuilding. But I remember, especially along one side of this tangle orcoppice, that there had once been a row of half-built houses. The brickof which they were built was a sort of plain pink; everything else was ablinding white; the houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust;and on many of the windows were rubbed those round rough disks of whitewhich always delighted me as a child. They looked like the white eyes ofsome blind giant. 

I could see the crude, parched pink-and-white villas still; though I hadnot thought at all of them for a quarter of my life; and had not thoughtmuch of them even when I saw them. Then I was an idle, but eager youthwalking out from London; now I was a most reluctantly busy middle-agedperson, coming in from the country. Youth, I think, seems farther offthan childhood, for it made itself more of a secret. Like a prenatalpicture, distant, tiny, and quite distinct, I saw this heath on which Istood; and I looked around for the string of bright, half-baked villas. They still stood there; but they were quite russet and weather-stained, as if they had stood for centuries. 

I remembered exactly what I had done on that day long ago. I had halfslid on a miry descent; it was still there; a little lower I had knockedoff the top of a thistle; the thistles had not been discouraged, butwere still growing. I recalled it because I had wondered why one knocksoff the tops of thistles; and then I had thought of Tarquin; and then Ihad recited most of Macaulay's VIRGINIA to myself, for I was young. Andthen I came to a tattered edge where the very tuft had whitened withthe sawdust and brick-dust from the new row of houses; and two or threegreen stars of dock and thistle grew spasmodically about the blindingroad. 

I remembered how I had walked up this new one-sided street all thoseyears ago; and I remembered what I had thought. I thought that thisred and white glaring terrace at noon was really more creepy and morelonesome than a glimmering churchyard at midnight. The churchyard couldonly be full of the ghosts of the dead; but these houses were full ofthe ghosts of the unborn. And a man can never find a home in the futureas he can find it in the past. I was always fascinated by that mediaevalnotion of erecting a rudely carpentered stage in the street, and actingon it a miracle play of the Holy Family or the Last Judgment. And Ithought to myself that each of these glaring, gaping, new jerry-builtboxes was indeed a rickety stage erected for the acting of a realmiracle play; that human family that is almost the holy one, and thathuman death that is near to the last judgment. 

For some foolish reason the last house but one in that imperfect rowespecially haunted me with its hollow grin and empty window-eyes. Something in the shape of this brick-and-mortar skeleton was attractive;and there being no workmen about, I strolled into it for curiosity andsolitude. I gave, with all the sky-deep gravity of youth, a benedictionupon the man who was going to live there. I even remember that for theconvenience of meditation I called him James Harrogate. 

As I reflected it crawled back into my memory that I had mildly playedthe fool in that house on that distant day. I had some red chalk inmy pocket, I think, and I wrote things on the unpapered plaster walls;things addressed to Mr. Harrogate. A dim memory told me that I hadwritten up in what I supposed to be the dining-room:

 James Harrogate, thank God for meat, Then eat and eat and eat and eat, or something of that kind. I faintly feel that some longer lyricwas scrawled on the walls of what looked like a bedroom, somethingbeginning:

 When laying what you call your head, O Harrogate, upon your bed, and there all my memory dislimns and decays. But I could still see quitevividly the plain plastered walls and the rude, irregular writing, and the places where the red chalk broke. I could see them, I mean, inmemory; for when I came down that road again after a sixth of a centurythe house was very different. 

I had seen it before at noon, and now I found it in the dusk. But itswindows glowed with lights of many artificial sorts; one of its lowsquare windows stood open; from this there escaped up the road a streamof lamplight and a stream of singing. Some sort of girl, at least, was standing at some sort of piano, and singing a song of healthysentimentalism in that house where long ago my blessing had died on thewind and my poems been covered up by the wallpaper. I stood outside thatlamplit house at dusk full of those thoughts that I shall never expressif I live to be a million any better than I expressed them in redchalk upon the wall. But after I had hovered a little, and was about towithdraw, a mad impulse seized me. I rang the bell. I said in distinctaccents to a very smart suburban maid, "Does Mr. James Harrogate livehere?"

She said he didn't; but that she would inquire, in case I was lookingfor him in the neighbourhood; but I excused her from such exertion. Ihad one moment's impulse to look for him all over the world; and thendecided not to look for him at all. 

THE PRIEST OF SPRING

The sun has strengthened and the air softened just before Easter Day. But it is a troubled brightness which has a breath not only of noveltybut of revolution, There are two great armies of the human intellectwho will fight till the end on this vital point, whether Easter is tobe congratulated on fitting in with the Spring—or the Spring onfitting in with Easter. 

The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and astory; and even a story must be about a person. There are indeedvery voluptuous appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions likemathematics, logic, or chess. But these mere pleasures of the mindare like mere pleasures of the body. That is, they are mere pleasures, though they may be gigantic pleasures; they can never by a mere increaseof themselves amount to happiness. A man just about to be hanged mayenjoy his breakfast; especially if it be his favourite breakfast; andin the same way he may enjoy an argument with the chaplain about heresy, especially if it is his favourite heresy. But whether he can enjoyeither of them does not depend on either of them; it depends upon hisspiritual attitude towards a subsequent event. And that event is reallyinteresting to the soul; because it is the end of a story and (as somehold) the end of a person. 

Now it is this simple truth which, like many others, is too simple forour scientists to see. This is where they go wrong, not only abouttrue religion, but about false religions too; so that their account ofmythology is more mythical than the myth itself. I do not confine myselfto saying that they are quite incorrect when they state (for instance)that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation, like Adonisor Persephone. I say that even if Adonis was a god of vegetation, they have got the whole notion of him wrong. Nobody, to begin with, issufficiently interested in decaying vegetables, as such, to make anyparticular mystery or disguise about them; and certainly not enough todisguise them under the image of a very handsome young man, which is avastly more interesting thing. If Adonis was connected with the fallof leaves in autumn and the return of flowers in spring, the process ofthought was quite different. It is a process of thought which springsup spontaneously in all children and young artists; it springs upspontaneously in all healthy societies. It is very difficult to explainin a diseased society. 

The brain of man is subject to short and strange snatches of sleep. Acloud seals the city of reason or rests upon the sea of imagination; adream that darkens as much, whether it is a nightmare of atheism or adaydream of idolatry. And just as we have all sprung from sleep with astart and found ourselves saying some sentence that has no meaning, savein the mad tongues of the midnight; so the human mind starts from itstrances of stupidity with some complete phrase upon its lips; a completephrase which is a complete folly. Unfortunately it is not like the dreamsentence, generally forgotten in the putting on of boots or the puttingin of breakfast. This senseless aphorism, invented when man's mind wasasleep, still hangs on his tongue and entangles all his relations torational and daylight things. All our controversies are confused bycertain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue, but werealways unmeaning; which are not merely inapplicable, but were alwaysintrinsically useless. We recognise them wherever a man talks of "thesurvival of the fittest, " meaning only the survival of the survivors; orwherever a man says that the rich "have a stake in the country, " asif the poor could not suffer from misgovernment or military defeat; orwhere a man talks about "going on towards Progress, " which only meansgoing on towards going on; or when a man talks about "government by thewise few, " as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons. "The wisefew" must mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the veryfoolish who think themselves wise. 

There is one piece of nonsense that modern people still find themselvessaying, even after they are more or less awake, by which I amparticularly irritated. It arose in the popularised science of thenineteenth century, especially in connection with the study of myths andreligions. The fragment of gibberish to which I refer generally takesthe form of saying "This god or hero really represents the sun. " Or"Apollo killing the Python MEANS that the summer drives out the winter. "Or "The King dying in a western battle is a SYMBOL of the sun settingin the west. " Now I should really have thought that even the skepticalprofessors, whose skulls are as shallow as frying-pans, might havereflected that human beings never think or feel like this. Consider whatis involved in this supposition. It presumes that primitive man went outfor a walk and saw with great interest a big burning spot on the sky. Hethen said to primitive woman, "My dear, we had better keep this quiet. We mustn't let it get about. The children and the slaves are so verysharp. They might discover the sun any day, unless we are very careful. So we won't call it 'the sun, ' but I will draw a picture of a mankilling a snake; and whenever I do that you will know what I mean. The sun doesn't look at all like a man killing a snake; so nobody canpossibly know. It will be a little secret between us; and while theslaves and the children fancy I am quite excited with a grand tale ofa writhing dragon and a wrestling demigod, I shall really MEAN thisdelicious little discovery, that there is a round yellow disc up in theair. " One does not need to know much mythology to know that this is amyth. It is commonly called the Solar Myth. 

Quite plainly, of course, the case was just the other way. The godwas never a symbol or hieroglyph representing the sun. The sun was ahieroglyph representing the god. Primitive man (with whom my friendDombey is no doubt well acquainted) went out with his head full of godsand heroes, because that is the chief use of having a head. Then he sawthe sun in some glorious crisis of the dominance of noon on the distressof nightfall, and he said, "That is how the face of the god would shinewhen he had slain the dragon, " or "That is how the whole world wouldbleed to westward, if the god were slain at last. "

No human being was ever really so unnatural as to worship Nature. Noman, however indulgent (as I am) to corpulency, ever worshipped a manas round as the sun or a woman as round as the moon. No man, howeverattracted to an artistic attenuation, ever really believed that theDryad was as lean and stiff as the tree. We human beings have neverworshipped Nature; and indeed, the reason is very simple. It is that allhuman beings are superhuman beings. We have printed our own image uponNature, as God has printed His image upon us. We have told the enormoussun to stand still; we have fixed him on our shields, caring no morefor a star than for a starfish. And when there were powers of Nature wecould not for the time control, we have conceived great beings in humanshape controlling them. Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means themarch and victory of Jupiter. Neptune does not mean the sea; the sea ishis, and he made it. In other words, what the savage really said aboutthe sea was, "Only my fetish Mumbo could raise such mountains out ofmere water. " What the savage really said about the sun was, "Only mygreat great-grandfather Jumbo could deserve such a blazing crown. "

About all these myths my own position is utterly and even sadly simple. I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found thatone of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there areno real ghosts. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no realbank-notes. Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, tothose of us that deny the Christian God. When once a god is admitted, even a false god, the Cosmos begins to know its place: which is thesecond place. When once it is the real God the Cosmos falls down beforeHim, offering flowers in spring as flames in winter. "My love is like ared, red rose" does not mean that the poet is praising roses under theallegory of a young lady. "My love is an arbutus" does not mean that theauthor was a botanist so pleased with a particular arbutus tree that hesaid he loved it. "Who art the moon and regent of my sky" does not meanthat Juliet invented Romeo to account for the roundness of the moon. "Christ is the Sun of Easter" does not mean that the worshipper ispraising the sun under the emblem of Christ. Goddess or god can clothethemselves with the spring or summer; but the body is more than raiment. Religion takes almost disdainfully the dress of Nature; and indeedChristianity has done as well with the snows of Christmas as with thesnow-drops of spring. And when I look across the sun-struck fields, Iknow in my inmost bones that my joy is not solely in the spring, forspring alone, being always returning, would be always sad. There issomebody or something walking there, to be crowned with flowers: and mypleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the resurrection of thedead. 

THE REAL JOURNALIST

Our age which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack ofreality. Never, I fancy, has there been so grave and startling a divorcebetween the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it isdone. I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper. Nothing looks more neat and regular than a newspaper, with its parallelcolumns, its mechanical printing, its detailed facts and figures, itsresponsible, polysyllabic leading articles. Nothing, as a matterof fact, goes every night through more agonies of adventure, morehairbreadth escapes, desperate expedients, crucial councils, randomcompromises, or barely averted catastrophes. Seen from the outside, itseems to come round as automatically as the clock and as silently as thedawn. Seen from the inside, it gives all its organisers a gasp of reliefevery morning to see that it has come out at all; that it has come outwithout the leading article upside down or the Pope congratulated ondiscovering the North Pole. 

I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality)from the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a littleepisode in the life of a journalist, which may be amusing andinstructive: the tale of how I made a great mistake in quotation. Thereare really two stories: the story as seen from the outside, by aman reading the paper; and the story seen from the inside, by thejournalists shouting and telephoning and taking notes in shorthandthrough the night. 

This is the outside story; and it reads like a dreadful quarrel. Thenotorious G. K. Chesterton, a reactionary Torquemada whose one gloomypleasure was in the defence of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics, long calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliantleader of the New Theology which he hated with all the furnace of hisfanatic soul. In this document Chesterton darkly, deliberately, and nothaving the fear of God before his eyes, asserted that Shakespeare wrotethe line "that wreathes its old fantastic roots so high. " This he saidbecause he had been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, becausehe thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious andforgotten rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, thatorthodox gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-fiveletters and post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out themistake. 

But the odd thing is that scarcely any of them could conceive that itwas a mistake. The first wrote in the tone of one wearied of epigrams, and cried, "What is the joke NOW?" Another professed (and practised, forall I know, God help him) that he had read through all Shakespeare andfailed to find the line. A third wrote in a sort of moral distress, asking, as in confidence, if Gray was really a plagiarist. They were anoble collection; but they all subtly assumed an element of leisure andexactitude in the recipient's profession and character which is far fromthe truth. Let us pass on to the next act of the external tragedy. 

In Monday's issue of the same paper appeared a letter from the sameculprit. He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong toShakespeare, but to a poet whom he called Grey. Which was anothercropper—or whopper. This strange and illiterate outbreak wasprinted by the editor with the justly scornful title, "Mr. Chesterton'Explains'?" Any man reading the paper at breakfast saw at once themeaning of the sarcastic quotation marks. They meant, of course, "Hereis a man who doesn't know Gray from Shakespeare; he tries to patch it upand he can't even spell Gray. And that is what he calls an Explanation. "That is the perfectly natural inference of the reader from the letter, the mistake, and the headline—as seen from the outside. Thefalsehood was serious; the editorial rebuke was serious. The sterneditor and the sombre, baffled contributor confront each other as thecurtain falls. 

And now I will tell you exactly what really happened. It is honestlyrather amusing; it is a story of what journals and journalists reallyare. A monstrously lazy man lives in South Bucks partly by writing acolumn in the Saturday Daily News. At the time he usually writes it(which is always at the last moment) his house is unexpectedly invadedby infants of all shapes and sizes. His Secretary is called away; andhe has to cope with the invading pigmies. Playing with children is aglorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understoodwhy it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, notof watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours withgigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrouscomplexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awfuleyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother'sbricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of histurn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling onthe sister's picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify thesister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lighted match. 

Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highestmorality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturdayarticle; and that there is only about an hour to do it in. He wildlycalls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to somewhere fora messenger; he barricades himself in another room and tears his hair, wondering what on earth he shall write about. A drumming of fists onthe door outside and a cheerful bellowing encourage and clarify histhoughts; and he is able to observe some newspapers and circulars inwrappers lying on the table. One is a dingy book catalogue; the secondis a shiny pamphlet about petrol; the third is a paper called TheChristian Commonwealth. He opens it anyhow, and sees in the middle of apage a sentence with which he honestly disagrees. It says that the senseof beauty in Nature is a new thing, hardly felt before Wordsworth. Astream of images and pictures pour through his head, like skies chasingeach other or forests running by. "Not felt before Wordsworth!" hethinks. "Oh, but this won't do. .. Bare ruined choirs where late thesweet birds sang. .. Night's candles are burnt out. .. Glowed with livingsapphires. .. Leaving their moon-loved maze. .. Antique roots fantastic. .. Antique roots wreathed high. .. What is it in As You Like It?"

He sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the childrendrum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say themessenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, makingthe world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words, and makingShakespeare a present of a portion of Gray's Elegy; putting "fantasticroots wreathed high" instead of "antique roots peep out. " Then thejournalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigmaof whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because thesister pinched him at Littlehampton. That is the first scene; that ishow an article is really written. 

The scene now changes to the newspaper office. The writer of the articlehas discovered his mistake and wants to correct it by the next day:but the next day is Sunday. He cannot post a letter, so he rings up thepaper and dictates a letter by telephone. He leaves the title to hisfriends at the other end; he knows that they can spell "Gray, " as nodoubt they can: but the letter is put down by journalistic custom in apencil scribble and the vowel may well be doubtful. The friend writesat the top of the letter "'G. K. C. ' Explains, " putting the initials inquotation marks. The next man passing it for press is bored with theseinitials (I am with him there) and crosses them out, substituting withaustere civility, "Mr. Chesterton Explains. " But and now he hearsthe iron laughter of the Fates, for the blind bolt is about tofall—but he neglects to cross out the second "quote" (as we callit) and it goes up to press with a "quote" between the last words. Another quotation mark at the end of "explains" was the work of onemerry moment for the printers upstairs. So the inverted commas werelifted entirely off one word on to the other and a totally innocenttitle suddenly turned into a blasting sneer. But that would havemattered nothing so far, for there was nothing to sneer at. In the samedark hour, however, there was a printer who was (I suppose) so devotedto this Government that he could think of no Gray but Sir Edward Grey. He spelt it "Grey" by a mere misprint, and the whole tale was complete:first blunder, second blunder, and final condemnation. 

That is a little tale of journalism as it is; if you call it egotisticand ask what is the use of it I think I could tell you. You mightremember it when next some ordinary young workman is going to be hangedby the neck on circumstantial evidence. 

THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT

Of all the great nations of Christendom, the Scotch are by far the mostromantic. I have just enough Scotch experience and just enough Scotchblood to know this in the only way in which a thing can really be known;that is, when the outer world and the inner world are at one. I know itis always said that the Scotch are practical, prosaic, and puritan; thatthey have an eye to business. I like that phrase "an eye" to business. 

Polyphemus had an eye for business; it was in the middle of hisforehead. It served him admirably for the only two duties which aredemanded in a modern financier and captain of industry: the two dutiesof counting sheep and of eating men. But when that one eye was put outhe was done for. But the Scotch are not one-eyed practical men, thoughtheir best friends must admit that they are occasionally business-like. They are, quite fundamentally, romantic and sentimental, and thisis proved by the very economic argument that is used to prove theirharshness and hunger for the material. The mass of Scots have acceptedthe industrial civilisation, with its factory chimneys and its famineprices, with its steam and smoke and steel—and strikes. The massof the Irish have not accepted it. The mass of the Irish have clung toagriculture with claws of iron; and have succeeded in keeping it. Thatis because the Irish, though far inferior to the Scotch in art andliterature, are hugely superior to them in practical politics. You doneed to be very romantic to accept the industrial civilisation. It doesreally require all the old Gaelic glamour to make men think that Glasgowis a grand place. Yet the miracle is achieved; and while I was inGlasgow I shared the illusion. I have never had the faintest illusionabout Leeds or Birmingham. The industrial dream suited the Scots. Herewas a really romantic vista, suited to a romantic people; a vision ofhigher and higher chimneys taking hold upon the heavens, of fiercerand fiercer fires in which adamant could evaporate like dew. Here weretaller and taller engines that began already to shriek and gesticulatelike giants. Here were thunderbolts of communication which alreadyflashed to and fro like thoughts. It was unreasonable to expect therapt, dreamy, romantic Scot to stand still in such a whirl of wizardryto ask whether he, the ordinary Scot, would be any the richer. 

He, the ordinary Scot, is very much the poorer. Glasgow is not a richcity. It is a particularly poor city ruled by a few particularly richmen. It is not, perhaps, quite so poor a city as Liverpool, London, Manchester, Birmingham, or Bolton. It is vastly poorer than Rome, Rouen, Munich, or Cologne. A certain civic vitality notable in Glasgow may, perhaps, be due to the fact that the high poetic patriotism of the Scotshas there been reinforced by the cutting common sense and independenceof the Irish. In any case, I think there can be no doubt of the mainhistorical fact. The Scotch were tempted by the enormous but unequalopportunities of industrialism, because the Scotch are romantic. TheIrish refused those enormous and unequal opportunities, because theIrish are clear-sighted. They would not need very clear sight by thistime to see that in England and Scotland the temptation has been abetrayal. The industrial system has failed. 

I was coming the other day along a great valley road that strikes out ofthe westland counties about Glasgow, more or less towards the east andthe widening of the Forth. It may, for all I know (I amused myself withthe fancy), be the way along which Wallace came with his crude army, when he gave battle before Stirling Brig; and, in the midst of mediaevaldiplomacies, made a new nation possible. Anyhow, the romantic quality ofScotland rolled all about me, as much in the last reek of Glasgow as inthe first rain upon the hills. The tall factory chimneys seemed tryingto be taller than the mountain peaks; as if this landscape were full(as its history has been full) of the very madness of ambition. Thewageslavery we live in is a wicked thing. But there is nothing in whichthe Scotch are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect, than in their Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master ofBallantrae the most thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is whatmakes the Master of Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains. It is poetry. It is an intensity which is on the edge of madness or(what is worse) magic. Well, the Scotch have managed to apply somethingof this fierce romanticism even to the lowest of all lordships andserfdoms; the proletarian inequality of today. You do meet now and then, in Scotland, the man you never meet anywhere else but in novels; I meanthe self-made man; the hard, insatiable man, merciless to himself aswell as to others. It is not "enterprise"; it is kleptomania. He isquite mad, and a much more obvious public pest than any other kind ofkleptomaniac; but though he is a cheat, he is not an illusion. He doesexist; I have met quite two of him. Him alone among modern merchantswe do not weakly flatter when we call him a bandit. Something of theirresponsibility of the true dark ages really clings about him. Ourscientific civilisation is not a civilisation; it is a smoke nuisance. Like smoke it is choking us; like smoke it will pass away. Only of oneor two Scotsmen, in my experience, was it true that where there is smokethere is fire. 

But there are other kinds of fire; and better. The one great advantageof this strange national temper is that, from the beginning of allchronicles, it has provided resistance as well as cruelty. In Scotlandnearly everything has always been in revolt—especially loyalty. If these people are capable of making Glasgow, they are also capable ofwrecking it; and the thought of my many good friends in that city makesme really doubtful about which would figure in human memories as themore huge calamity of the two. In Scotland there are many rich men soweak as to call themselves strong. But there are not so many poor menweak enough to believe them. 

As I came out of Glasgow I saw men standing about the road. They hadlittle lanterns tied to the fronts of their caps, like the fairieswho used to dance in the old fairy pantomimes. They were not, however, strictly speaking, fairies. They might have been called gnomes, sincethey worked in the chasms of those purple and chaotic hills. They workedin the mines from whence comes the fuel of our fires. Just at the momentwhen I saw them, moreover, they were not dancing; nor were they working. They were doing nothing. Which, in my opinion (and I trust yours), wasthe finest thing they could do. 

THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY

A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom. For while men areand should be various, there must be some communication between them ifthey are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectualformula is the only thing that can create a communication that does notdepend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy. If we all startwith the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about ourdifferent visions of them. The strong-eyed man can boast that he seesthe sun as a perfect circle. The shortsighted man may say (or if he isan impressionist, boast) that he sees the moon as a silver blur. Thecolour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him tolive under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held thatthere is nothing but a silver blur in one man's eye or a bright circle(like a monocle) in the other man's, then neither is free, for each isshut up in the cell of a separate universe. 

But, indeed, an even worse fate, practically considered, follows fromthe denim of the original intellectual formula. Not only does theindividual become narrow, but he spreads narrowness across the worldlike a cloud; he causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed. For what happens is this: that all the shortsighted people come togetherand build a city called Myopia, where they take short-sightedness forgranted and paint short-sighted pictures and pursue very short-sightedpolicies. Meanwhile all the men who can stare at the sun get together onSalisbury Plain and do nothing but stare at the sun; and all the men whosee a blue moon band themselves together and assert the blue moon, notonce in a blue moon, but incessantly. So that instead of a small andvaried group, you have enormous monotonous groups. Instead of theliberty of dogma, you have the tyranny of taste. 

Allegory apart, instances of what I mean will occur to every one;perhaps the most obvious is Socialism. Socialism means the ownershipby the organ of government (whatever it is) of all things necessary toproduction. If a man claims to be a Socialist in that sense he can beany kind of man he likes in any other sense—a bookie, a Mahatma, a man about town, an archbishop, a Margate nigger. Without recallingat the moment clear-headed Socialists in all of these capacities, itis obvious that a clear-headed Socialist (that is, a Socialist with acreed) can be a soldier, like Mr. Blatchford, or a Don, like Mr. Ball, or a Bathchairman like Mr. Meeke, or a clergyman like Mr. Conrad Noel, or an artistic tradesman like the late Mr. William Morris. 

But some people call themselves Socialists, and will not be bound bywhat they call a narrow dogma; they say that Socialism means far, farmore than this; all that is high, all that is free, all that is, etc. , etc. Now mark their dreadful fate; for they become totally unfit to betradesmen, or soldiers, or clergymen, or any other stricken human thing, but become a particular sort of person who is always the same. When onceit has been discovered that Socialism does not mean a narrow economicformula, it is also discovered that Socialism does mean wearing oneparticular kind of clothes, reading one particular kind of books, hanging up one particular kind of pictures, and in the majority of caseseven eating one particular kind of food. For men must recognise eachother somehow. These men will not know each other by a principle, likefellow citizens. They cannot know each other by a smell, like dogs. Sothey have to fall back on general colouring; on the fact that a man oftheir sort will have a wife in pale green and Walter Crane's "Triumph ofLabour" hanging in the hall. 

There are, of course, many other instances; for modern society is almostmade up of these large monochrome patches. Thus I, for one, regretthe supersession of the old Puritan unity, founded on theology, butembracing all types from Milton to the grocer, by that newer Puritanunity which is founded rather on certain social habits, certain commonnotions, both permissive and prohibitive, in connection with Particularsocial pleasures. 

Thus I, for one, regret that (if you are going to have an aristocracy)it did not remain a logical one founded on the science of heraldry; athing asserting and defending the quite defensible theory that physicalgenealogy is the test; instead of being, as it is now, a mere machine ofEton and Oxford for varnishing anybody rich enough with one monotonousvarnish. 

And it is supremely so in the case of religion. As long as you have acreed, which every one in a certain group believes or is supposed tobelieve, then that group will consist of the old recurring figures ofreligious history, who can be appealed to by the creed and judged by it;the saint, the hypocrite, the brawler, the weak brother. These peopledo each other good; or they all join together to do the hypocrite good, with heavy and repeated blows. But once break the bond of doctrine whichalone holds these people together and each will gravitate to his ownkind outside the group. The hypocrites will all get together andcall each other saints; the saints will get lost in a desert and callthemselves weak brethren; the weak brethren will get weaker and weakerin a general atmosphere of imbecility; and the brawler will go offlooking for somebody else with whom to brawl. 

This has very largely happened to modern English religion; I have beenin many churches, chapels, and halls where a confident pride in havinggot beyond creeds was coupled with quite a paralysed incapacity toget beyond catchwords. But wherever the falsity appears it comes fromneglect of the same truth: that men should agree on a principle, thatthey may differ on everything else; that God gave men a law that theymight turn it into liberties. 

There was hugely more sense in the old people who said that a wifeand husband ought to have the same religion than there is in all thecontemporary gushing about sister souls and kindred spirits and auras ofidentical colour. As a matter of fact, the more the sexes are in violentcontrast the less likely they are to be in violent collision. The moreincompatible their tempers are the better. Obviously a wife's soulcannot possibly be a sister soul. It is very seldom so much as a firstcousin. There are very few marriages of identical taste and temperament;they are generally unhappy. But to have the same fundamental theory, tothink the same thing a virtue, whether you practise or neglect it, tothink the same thing a sin, whether you punish or pardon or laugh atit, in the last extremity to call the same thing duty and the same thingdisgrace—this really is necessary to a tolerably happy marriage;and it is much better represented by a common religion than it is byaffinities and auras. And what applies to the family applies to thenation. A nation with a root religion will be tolerant. A nation with noreligion will be bigoted. Lastly, the worst effect of all is this:that when men come together to profess a creed, they come courageously, though it is to hide in catacombs and caves. But when they come togetherin a clique they come sneakishly, eschewing all change or disagreement, though it is to dine to a brass band in a big London hotel. For birds ofa feather flock together, but birds of the white feather most of all. 

THE FOOL

For many years I had sought him, and at last I found him in a club. Ihad been told that he was everywhere; but I had almost begun to thinkthat he was nowhere. I had been assured that there were millions of him;but before my late discovery I inclined to think that there were none ofhim. After my late discovery I am sure that there is one; and I inclineto think that there are several, say, a few hundreds; but unfortunatelymost of them occupying important positions. When I say "him, " I mean theentire idiot. 

I have never been able to discover that "stupid public" of which so manyliterary men complain. The people one actually meets in trains or at teaparties seem to me quite bright and interesting; certainly quite enoughso to call for the full exertion of one's own wits. And even when I haveheard brilliant "conversationalists" conversing with other people, theconversation had much more equality and give and take than this age ofintellectual snobs will admit. I have sometimes felt tired, like otherpeople; but rather tired with men's talk and variety than with theirstolidity or sameness; therefore it was that I sometimes longed to findthe refreshment of a single fool. 

But it was denied me. Turn where I would I found this monotonousbrilliancy of the general intelligence, this ruthless, ceaseless sparkleof humour and good sense. The "mostly fools" theory has been used in ananti-democratic sense; but when I found at last my priceless ass, Idid not find him in what is commonly called the democracy; nor in thearistocracy either. The man of the democracy generally talks quiterationally, sometimes on the anti-democratic side, but always with anidea of giving reasons for what he says and referring to the realitiesof his experience. Nor is it the aristocracy that is stupid; at least, not that section of the aristocracy which represents it in politics. They are often cynical, especially about money, but even theirboredom tends to make them a little eager for any real information ororiginality. If a man like Mr. Winston Churchill or Mr. Wyndham made uphis mind for any reason to attack Syndicalism he would find out what itwas first. Not so the man I found in the club. 

He was very well dressed; he had a heavy but handsome face; his blackclothes suggested the City and his gray moustaches the Army; but thewhole suggested that he did not really belong to either, but was oneof those who dabble in shares and who play at soldiers. There was somethird element about him that was neither mercantile nor military. Hismanners were a shade too gentlemanly to be quite those of a gentleman. They involved an unction and over-emphasis of the club-man: then Isuddenly remembered feeling the same thing in some old actors or oldplaygoers who had modelled themselves on actors. As I came in he said, "If I was the Government, " and then put a cigar in his mouth which helit carefully with long intakes of breath. Then he took the cigar outof his mouth again and said, "I'd give it 'em, " as if it were quite aseparate sentence. But even while his mouth was stopped with the cigarhis companion or interlocutor leaped to his feet and said with greatheartiness, snatching up a hat, "Well, I must be off. Tuesday!". Idislike these dark suspicions, but I certainly fancied I recognised thesudden geniality with which one takes leave of a bore. 

When, therefore, he removed the narcotic stopper from his mouth it wasto me that he addressed the belated epigram. "I'd give it 'em. "

"What would you give them, " I asked, "the minimum wage?"

"I'd give them beans, " he said. "I'd shoot 'em down shoot 'em down, every man Jack of them. I lost my best train yesterday, and here'sthe whole country paralysed, and here's a handful of obstinate fellowsstanding between the country and coal. I'd shoot 'em down!"

"That would surely be a little harsh, " I pleaded. "After all, theyare not under martial law, though I suppose two or three of them havecommissions in the Yeomanry. "

"Commissions in the Yeomanry!" he repeated, and his eyes and face, whichbecame startling and separate, like those of a boiled lobster, made mefeel sure that he had something of the kind himself. 

"Besides, " I continued, "wouldn't it be quite enough to confiscate theirmoney?"

"Well, I'd send them all to penal servitude, anyhow, " he said, "and I'dconfiscate their funds as well. "

"The policy is daring and full of difficulty, " I replied, "but I do notsay that it is wholly outside the extreme rights of the republic. Butyou must remember that though the facts of property have becomequite fantastic, yet the sentiment of property still exists. Thesecoal-owners, though they have not earned the mines, though they couldnot work the mines, do quite honestly feel that they own the mines. Hence your suggestion of shooting them down, or even of confiscatingtheir property, raises very—"

"What do you mean?" asked the man with the cigar, with a bullying eye. "Who yer talking about?"

"I'm talking about what you were talking about, " I replied; "as you putit so perfectly, about the handful of obstinate fellows who are standingbetween the country and the coal. I mean the men who are selling theirown coal for fancy prices, and who, as long as they can get thoseprices, care as little for national starvation as most merchant princesand pirates have cared for the provinces that were wasted or the peoplesthat were enslaved just before their ships came home. But though I am abit of a revolutionist myself, I cannot quite go with you in the extremeviolence you suggest. You say—"

"I say, " he cried, bursting through my speech with a really splendidenergy like that of some noble beast, "I say I'd take all these blastedminers and—"

I had risen slowly to my feet, for I was profoundly moved; and I stoodstaring at that mental monster. 

"Oh, " I said, "so it is the miners who are all to be sent to penalservitude, so that we may get more coal. It is the miners who are to beshot dead, every man Jack of them; for if once they are all shot deadthey will start mining again. .. You must forgive me, sir; I know I seemsomewhat moved. The fact is, I have just found something. Something Ihave been looking for for years. "

"Well, " he asked, with no unfriendly stare, "and what have you found?"

"No, " I answered, shaking my head sadly, "I do not think it would bequite kind to tell you what I have found. "

He had a hundred virtues, including the capital virtue of good humour, and we had no difficulty in changing the subject and forgetting thedisagreement. He talked about society, his town friends and his countrysports, and I discovered in the course of it that he was a countymagistrate, a Member of Parliament, and a director of several importantcompanies. He was also that other thing, which I did not tell him. 

The moral is that a certain sort of person does exist, to whose glorythis article is dedicated. He is not the ordinary man. He is not theminer, who is sharp enough to ask for the necessities of existence. Heis not the mine-owner, who is sharp enough to get a great deal more, byselling his coal at the best possible moment. He is not the aristocraticpolitician, who has a cynical but a fair sympathy with both economicopportunities. But he is the man who appears in scores of public placesopen to the upper middle class or (that less known but more powerfulsection) the lower upper class. Men like this all over the country arereally saying whatever comes into their heads in their capacities ofjustice of the peace, candidate for Parliament, Colonel of the Yeomanry, old family doctor, Poor Law guardian, coroner, or above all, arbiter intrade disputes. He suffers, in the literal sense, from softening of thebrain; he has softened it by always taking the view of everything mostcomfortable for his country, his class, and his private personality. He is a deadly public danger. But as I have given him his name at thebeginning of this article there is no need for me to repeat it at theend. 

THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS

Very few of us ever see the history of our own time happening. AndI think the best service a modern journalist can do to society is torecord as plainly as ever he can exactly what impression was produced onhis mind by anything he has actually seen and heard on the outskirts ofany modern problem or campaign. Though all he saw of a railway strikewas a flat meadow in Essex in which a train was becalmed for an hour ortwo, he will probably throw more light on the strike by describing thiswhich he has seen than by describing the steely kings of commerce andthe bloody leaders of the mob whom he has never seen—nor any oneelse either. If he comes a day too late for the battle of Waterloo (ashappened to a friend of my grandfather) he should still remember that atrue account of the day after Waterloo would be a most valuable thing tohave. Though he was on the wrong side of the door when Rizzio was beingmurdered, we should still like to have the wrong side described inthe right way. Upon this principle I, who know nothing of diplomacy ormilitary arrangements, and have only held my breath like the rest ofthe world while France and Germany were bargaining, will tell quitetruthfully of a small scene I saw, one of the thousand scenes that were, so to speak, the anterooms of that inmost chamber of debate. 

In the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squaresof a small French town and found its cathedral. It was one of those grayand rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden, like the solid blue-gray lead of the spires and the jewelled windows;the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks droopingwith damp; and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls werescoured with old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch withmany doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain. I also found a notice of services, etc. , and among these I found theannouncement that at 11. 30 (that is about half an hour later) therewould be a special service for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draftof young men who were being taken from their homes in that little townand sent to serve in the French Army; sent (as it happened) at an awfulmoment, when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways. There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only ofall kinds, but in all attitudes, kneeling, sitting, or standingabout. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from aProtestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere orlikes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was "going on all thetime"; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if itwere a sort of mystical inn. 

Several tricolours were hung quite near to the altar, and the young men, when they came in, filed up the church and sat right at the front. They were, of course, of every imaginable social grade; for the Frenchconscription is really strict and universal. Some looked like youngcriminals, some like young priests, some like both. Some were soobviously prosperous and polished that a barrack-room must seem tothem like hell; others (by the look of them) had hardly ever been in sodecent a place. But it was not so much the mere class variety that mostsharply caught an Englishman's eye. It was the presence of just thoseone or two kinds of men who would never have become soldiers in anyother way. 

There are many reasons for becoming a soldier. It may be a matter ofhereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice; itmay be an interest in the work or a lack of interest in any other work. But there would always be two or three kinds of people who would nevertend to soldiering; all those kinds of people were there. A lad with redhair, large ears, and very careful clothing, somehow conveyed acrossthe church that he had always taken care of his health, not even fromthinking about it, but simply because he was told, and that he was oneof those who pass from childhood to manhood without any shock of being aman. In the row in front of him there was a very slight and vivid littleJew, of the sort that is a tailor and a Socialist. By one of thoseaccidents that make real life so unlike anything else, he was the oneof the company who seemed especially devout. Behind these stiff orsensitive boys were ranged the ranks of their mothers and fathers, withknots and bunches of their little brothers and sisters. 

The children kicked their little legs, wriggled about the seats, andgaped at the arched roof while their mothers were on their knees prayingtheir own prayers, and here and there crying. The gray clouds ofrain outside gathered, I suppose, more and more; for the deep churchcontinuously darkened. The lads in front began to sing a military hymnin odd, rather strained voices; I could not disentangle the words, butonly one perpetual refrain; so that it sounded like

 Sacrarterumbrrar pour la patrie, Valdarkararump pour la patrie. 

Then this ceased; and silence continued, the coloured windows growinggloomier and gloomier with the clouds. In the dead stillness a childstarted crying suddenly and incoherently. In a city far to the north aFrench diplomatist and a German aristocrat were talking. 

I will not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outlineof its almost cruel actuality. I will not talk nor allow any one else totalk about "clericalism" and "militarism. " Those who talk like that aremade of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate"Socialism. " The women who were calling in the gloom around me on Godand the Mother of God were not "clericalists"; or, if they were, they had forgotten it. And I will bet my boots the young men were not"militarists"—quite the other way just then. The priest made ashort speech; he did not utter any priestly dogmas (whatever they are), he uttered platitudes. In such circumstances platitudes are the onlypossible things to say; because they are true. He began by saying thathe supposed a large number of them would be uncommonly glad not to go. They seemed to assent to this particular priestly dogma with evenmore than their alleged superstitious credulity. He said that war washateful, and that we all hated it; but that "in all things reasonable"the law of one's own commonwealth was the voice of God. He spoke aboutJoan of Arc; and how she had managed to be a bold and successful soldierwhile still preserving her virtue and practising her religion; then hegave them each a little paper book. To which they replied (after a briefinterval for reflection):

 Pongprongperesklang pour la patrie, Tambraugtararronc pour la patrie. 

which I feel sure was the best and most pointed reply. 

While all this was happening feelings quite indescribable crowdedabout my own darkening brain, as the clouds crowded above the darkeningchurch. They were so entirely of the elements and the passions that Icannot utter them in an idea, but only in an image. It seemed to methat we were barricaded in this church, but we could not tell what washappening outside the church. The monstrous and terrible jewels of thewindows darkened or glistened under moving shadow or light, but thenature of that light and the shapes of those shadows we did not know andhardly dared to guess. The dream began, I think, with a dim fancy thatenemies were already in the town, and that the enormous oaken doors weregroaning under their hammers. Then I seemed to suppose that the townitself had been destroyed by fire, and effaced, as it may be thousandsof years hence, and that if I opened the door I should come out on awilderness as flat and sterile as the sea. Then the vision behind theveil of stone and slate grew wilder with earthquakes. I seemed tosee chasms cloven to the foundations of all things, and letting up aninfernal dawn. Huge things happily hidden from us had climbed out ofthe abyss, and were striding about taller than the clouds. And when thedarkness crept from the sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments ofSt. John I fancied that some hideous giant was walking round the churchand looking in at each window in turn. 

Sometimes, again, I thought of that church with coloured windows as aship carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night. SometimesI thought of it as a great coloured lantern itself, hung on an ironchain out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings, thewings of the princes of the air. But I never thought of it or the youngmen inside it save as something precious and in peril, or of the thingsoutside but as something barbaric and enormous. 

I know there are some who cannot sympathise with such sentiments oflimitation; I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroictenderness if some day a young man, with red hair, large ears, andhis mother's lozenges in his pocket, were found dead in uniform in thepasses of the Vosges. But on this subject I have heard many philosophiesand thought a good deal for myself; and the conclusion I have come to isSacrarterumbrrar pour la Pattie, and it is not likely that I shall alterit now. 

But when I came out of the church there were none of these things, but only a lot of Shops, including a paper-shop, on which the postersannounced that the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily. 

THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS

It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led bysome special sort of lunatic. A mild touch of madness may even keep aman sane; for it may keep him modest. So some exaggerations in the Statemay remind it of its own normal. But it is bad when the head is cracked;when the roof of the commonwealth has a tile loose. 

The two or three cases of this that occur in history have always beengibbeted gigantically. Thus Nero has become a black proverb, notmerely because he was an oppressor, but because he was also anaesthete—that is, an erotomaniac. He not only tortured otherpeople's bodies; he tortured his own soul into the same red revoltingshapes. Though he came quite early in Roman Imperial history and wasfollowed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the RomanEmpire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman. Thepopulace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour whenthey came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal ofthe earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and sawa statue without a head. 

It is the same with that ugly entanglement before the Renaissance, fromwhich, alas, most memories of the Middle Ages are derived. Louis XIwas a very patient and practical man of the world; but (like manygood business men) he was mad. The morbidity of the intriguer and thetorturer clung about everything he did, even when it was right. And justas the great Empire of Antoninus and Aurelius never wiped out Nero, soeven the silver splendour of the latter saints, such as Vincent de Paul, has never painted out for the British public the crooked shadow of LouisXI. Whenever the unhealthy man has been on top, he has left a horriblesavour that humanity finds still in its nostrils. Now in our time theunhealthy man is on top; but he is not the man mad on sex, like Nero; ormad on statecraft, like Louis XI; he is simply the man mad on money. Ourtyrant is not the satyr or the torturer; but the miser. 

The modern miser has changed much from the miser of legend and anecdote;but only because he has grown yet more insane. The old miser hadsome touch of the human artist about him in so far that he collectedgold—a substance that can really be admired for itself, like ivoryor old oak. An old man who picked up yellow pieces had something of thesimple ardour, something of the mystical materialism, of a child whopicks out yellow flowers. Gold is but one kind of coloured clay, butcoloured clay can be very beautiful. The modern idolater of riches iscontent with far less genuine things. The glitter of guineas is likethe glitter of buttercups, the chink of pelf is like the chime of bells, compared with the dreary papers and dead calculations which make thehobby of the modern miser. 

The modern millionaire loves nothing so lovable as a coin. He is contentsometimes with the dead crackle of notes; but far more often with themere repetition of noughts in a ledger, all as like each other as eggsto eggs. And as for comfort, the old miser could be comfortable, as manytramps and savages are, when he was once used to being unclean. A mancould find some comfort in an unswept attic or an unwashed shirt. Butthe Yankee millionaire can find no comfort with five telephones at hisbed-head and ten minutes for his lunch. The round coins in the miser'sstocking were safe in some sense. The round noughts in the millionaire'sledger are safe in no sense; the same fluctuation which excites him withtheir increase depresses him with their diminution. The miser at leastcollects coins; his hobby is numismatics. The man who collects noughtscollects nothings. 

It may be admitted that the man amassing millions is a bit of an idiot;but it may be asked in what sense does he rule the modern world. Theanswer to this is very important and rather curious. The evil enigmafor us here is not the rich, but the Very Rich. The distinction isimportant; because this special problem is separate from the old generalquarrel about rich and poor that runs through the Bible and all strongbooks, old and new. The special problem to-day is that certain powersand privileges have grown so world-wide and unwieldy that they are outof the power of the moderately rich as well as of the moderatelypoor. They are out of the power of everybody except a fewmillionaires—that is, misers. In the old normal friction of normalwealth and poverty I am myself on the Radical side. I think that aBerkshire squire has too much power over his tenants; that a Bromptonbuilder has too much power over his workmen; that a West London doctorhas too much power over the poor patients in the West London Hospital. 

But a Berkshire squire has no power over cosmopolitan finance, forinstance. A Brompton builder has not money enough to run a NewspaperTrust. A West End doctor could not make a corner in quinine and freezeeverybody out. The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modernmarket. The things that change modern history, the big national andinternational loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections—these are getting toobig for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthlyfortunes and the smallest of earthly aims. 

There are two other odd and rather important things to be said aboutthem. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have thechance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looseraristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people evengood people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers aresometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing theirpatients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known tosell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generousman, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they willnever give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as oldbones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enoughto want it. 

Lastly, the most serious point about them is this: that the new miseris flattered for his meanness and the old one never was. It was nevercalled self-denial in the old miser that he lived on bones. It is calledself-denial in the new millionaire if he lives on beans. A man likeDancer was never praised as a Christian saint for going in rags. Aman like Rockefeller is praised as a sort of pagan stoic for hisearly rising or his unassuming dress. His "simple" meals, his "simple"clothes, his "simple" funeral, are all extolled as if they werecreditable to him. They are disgraceful to him: exactly as disgracefulas the tatters and vermin of the old miser were disgraceful to him. Tobe in rags for charity would be the condition of a saint; to be in ragsfor money was that of a filthy old fool. Precisely in the same way, to be "simple" for charity is the state of a saint; to be "simple" formoney is that of a filthy old fool. Of the two I have more respect forthe old miser, gnawing bones in an attic: if he was not nearer to God, he was at least a little nearer to men. His simple life was a littlemore like the life of the real poor. 

THE MYSTAGOGUE

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable andimpalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate youraristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It isperfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyondall speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in allgood things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment;and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt isalways made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances arethat it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word. 

Thus Giotto or Fra Angelico would have at once admitted theologicallythat God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paintHim. And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a ratherquaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard, like a king of theelves, was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Himin some way. That is why the Christian world is full of gaudypictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, moreblasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of goodis always towards Incarnation. But, on the other hand, those refinedthinkers who worship the Devil, whether in the swamps of Jamaica or thesalons of Paris, always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness, the unutterable character of the abomination. They call him "horrorof emptiness, " as did the black witch in Stevenson's Dynamiter; theyworship him as the unspeakable name; as the unbearable silence. Theythink of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind; the cloud onthe brain of the maniac; the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endlesscorridors of nightmare. It was the Christians who gave the Devil agrotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. Itwas the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanistsnever drew him at all. 

And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarityand mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we mayseparate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revoltfrom mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks hehas an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who hasno idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much toosubtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outree orspecialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinarypeople. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probablethat there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who isalways trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable;but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing tocome out of it. 

Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of thething called Art, and the people called Art Critics. It is obvious thatan attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holycunning that has made them what they are. It is equally obvious thata landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape; a portraitpainter only half of the person; they are lucky if they express so much. And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of thepictures can only express half of them, and that the less importanthalf. Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken thatconnects God With Nature, or Nature with men, or men with critics. The"Mona Lisa" was in some respects (not all, I fancy) what God meant herto be. Leonardo's picture was, in some respects, like the lady. AndWalter Pater's rich description was, in some respects, like the picture. Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature, in thelast resort, can express something other than its own unhappy self. 

Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirelyinarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of beingspeechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. But if there is any good inBotticelli (there is much good, and much evil too) it is emphaticallythe critic's business to explain it: to translate it from terms ofpainting into terms of diction. Of course, the rendering will beinadequate—but so is Botticelli. It is a fact he would be thefirst to admit. But anything which has been intelligently received canat least be intelligently suggested. Pater does suggest an intelligentcause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli's "Venus Rising from theSea. " Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for Turner destroyingforests and falsifying landscapes. These two great critics were far toofastidious for my taste; they urged to excess the idea that a senseof art was a sort of secret; to be patiently taught and slowly learnt. Still, they thought it could be taught: they thought it could be learnt. They constrained themselves, with considerable creative fatigue, to findthe exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has beenclone in Italian painting. The same is true of Whistler and R. A. M. Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez. They hadsomething to say about the pictures; they knew it was unworthy of thepictures, but they said it. 

Now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and PostImpressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. Theyare not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attemptto translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it isuntranslatable—that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is theirbanner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paperon which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and triedto dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the goodold anti-democratic muddlements: that "the public" does not understandthese things; that "the likes of us" cannot dare to question the darkdecisions of our lords. 

I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simpletest mentioned above. If there were anything intelligent in such art, something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature. Manis made with one head, not with two or three. No criticism of Rembrandtis as good as Rembrandt; but it can be so written as to make a man goback and look at his pictures. If there is a curious and fantastic art, it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantasticliterary expression for it; inferior to it, doubtless, but still akin toit. If they cannot do this, as they cannot; if there is nothing in theireulogies, as there is nothing except eulogy—then they are quacksor the high-priests of the unutterable. If the art critics can saynothing about the artists except that they are good it is becausethe artists are bad. They can explain nothing because they have foundnothing; and they have found nothing because there is nothing to befound. 

THE RED REACTIONARY

The one case for Revolution is that it is the only quite clean andcomplete road to anything—even to restoration. Revolution alonecan be not merely a revolt of the living, but also a resurrection of thedead. 

A friend of mine (one, in fact, who writes prominently on this paper)was once walking down the street in a town of Western France, situatedin that area that used to be called La Vendee; which in that greatcreative crisis about 1790 formed a separate and mystical soul of itsown, and made a revolution against a revolution. As my friend went downthis street he whistled an old French air which he had found, like Mr. Gandish, "in his researches into 'istry, " and which had somehow takenhis fancy; the song to which those last sincere loyalists went intobattle. I think the words ran:

 Monsieur de Charette. Dit au gens d'ici. Le roi va remettre. Le fleur de lys. 

My friend was (and is) a Radical, but he was (and is) an Englishman, andit never occurred to him that there could be any harm in singing archaiclyrics out of remote centuries; that one had to be a Catholic to enjoythe "Dies Irae, " or a Protestant to remember "Lillibullero. " Yet he wasstopped and gravely warned that things so politically provocative mightget him at least into temporary trouble. 

A little time after I was helping King George V to get crowned, bywalking round a local bonfire and listening to a local band. Just as abonfire cannot be too big, so (by my theory of music) a band cannotbe too loud, and this band was so loud, emphatic, and obvious, that Iactually recognised one or two of the tunes. And I noticed that quite aformidable proportion of them were Jacobite tunes; that is, tunes thathad been primarily meant to keep George V out of his throne for ever. Some of the real airs of the old Scottish rebellion were played, suchas "Charlie is My Darling, " or "What's a' the steer, kimmer?" songs thatmen had sung while marching to destroy and drive out the monarchy underwhich we live. They were songs in which the very kinsmen of the presentKing were swept aside as usurpers. They were songs in which the actualwords "King George" occurred as a curse and a derision. Yet theywere played to celebrate his very Coronation; played as promptly andinnocently as if they had been "Grandfather's Clock" or "Rule Britannia"or "The Honeysuckle and the Bee. "

That contrast is the measure, not only between two nations, but betweentwo modes of historical construction and development. For there is notreally very much difference, as European history goes, in the time thathas elapsed between us and the Jacobite and between us and the Jacobin. When George III was crowned the gauntlet of the King's Champion waspicked up by a partisan of the Stuarts. When George III was still on thethrone the Bourbons were driven out of France as the Stuarts had beendriven out of England. Yet the French are just sufficiently aware thatthe Bourbons might possibly return that they will take a little troubleto discourage it; whereas we are so certain that the Stuarts will neverreturn that we actually play their most passionate tunes as a complimentto their rivals. And we do not even do it tauntingly. I examined thefaces of all the bandsmen; and I am sure they were devoid of irony:indeed, it is difficult to blow a wind instrument ironically. We do itquite unconsciously; because we have a huge fundamental dogma, which theFrench have not. We really believe that the past is past. It is a verydoubtful point. 

Now the great gift of a revolution (as in France) is that it makes menfree in the past as well as free in the future. Those who have clearedaway everything could, if they liked, put back everything. But we whohave preserved everything—we cannot restore anything. Take, for the sake of argument, the complex and many coloured ritual of theCoronation recently completed. That rite is stratified with the separatecenturies; from the first rude need of discipline to the last fine shadeof culture or corruption, there is nothing that cannot be detected oreven dated. The fierce and childish vow of the lords to serve their lord"against all manner of folk" obviously comes from the real Dark Ages;no longer confused, even by the ignorant, with the Middle Ages. It comesfrom some chaos of Europe, when there was one old Roman road across fourof our counties; and when hostile "folk" might live in the next village. The sacramental separation of one man to be the friend of the fatherlessand the nameless belongs to the true Middle Ages; with their greatattempt to make a moral and invisible Roman Empire; or (as theCoronation Service says) to set the cross for ever above the ball. Elaborate local tomfooleries, such as that by which the Lord of theManor of Work-sop is alone allowed to do something or other, theseprobably belong to the decay of the Middle Ages, when that greatcivilisation died out in grotesque literalism and entangled heraldry. Things like the presentation of the Bible bear witness to theintellectual outburst at the Reformation; things like the Declarationagainst the Mass bear witness to the great wars of the Puritans; andthings like the allegiance of the Bishops bear witness to the wordy andparenthetical political compromises which (to my deep regret) ended thewars of religion. 

But my purpose here is only to point out one particular thing. In allthat long list of variations there must be, and there are, thingswhich energetic modern minds would really wish, with the reasonablemodification, to restore. Dr. Clifford would probably be glad to seeagain the great Puritan idealism that forced the Bible into an antiqueand almost frozen formality. Dr. Horton probably really regrets theold passion that excommunicated Rome. In the same way Mr. Bellocwould really prefer the Middle Ages; as Lord Rosebery would preferthe Erastian oligarchy of the eighteenth century. The Dark Ages wouldprobably be disputed (from widely different motives) by Mr. RudyardKipling and Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But Mr. Cunninghame Graham wouldwin. 

But the black case against Conservative (or Evolutionary) politics isthat none of these sincere men can win. Dr. Clifford cannot get backto the Puritans; Mr. Belloc cannot get back to the mediaevals; because(alas) there has been no Revolution to leave them a clear space forbuilding or rebuilding. Frenchmen have all the ages behind them, and canwander back and pick and choose. But Englishmen have all the ages on topof them, and can only lie groaning under that imposing tower, withoutbeing able to take so much as a brick out of it. If the French decidethat their Republic is bad they can get rid of it; but if we decide thata Republic was good, we should have much more difficulty. If the Frenchdemocracy actually desired every detail of the mediaeval monarchy, theycould have it. I do not think they will or should, but they could. Ifanother Dauphin were actually crowned at Rheims; if another Joan of Arcactually bore a miraculous banner before him; if mediaeval swords shookand blazed in every gauntlet; if the golden lilies glowed from everytapestry; if this were really proved to be the will of France and thepurpose of Providence—such a scene would still be the lasting andfinal justification of the French Revolution. 

For no such scene could conceivably have happened under Louis XVI. 

THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS

In the very laudable and fascinating extensions of our interest inAsiatic arts or faiths, there are two incidental injustices which wetend nowadays to do to our own records and our own religion. The firstis a tendency to talk as if certain things were not only present in thehigher Orientals, but were peculiar to them. Thus our magazines willfall into a habit of wondering praise of Bushido, the Japanese chivalry, as if no Western knights had ever vowed noble vows, or as if no Easternknights had ever broken them. Or again, our drawing-rooms will be fullof the praises of Indian renunciation and Indian unworldliness, as if noChristians had been saints, or as if all Buddhists had been. But if thefirst injustice is to think of human virtues as peculiarly Eastern, theother injustice is a failure to appreciate what really is peculiarlyEastern. It is too much taken for granted that the Eastern sort ofidealism is certainly superior and convincing; whereas in truth it isonly separate and peculiar. All that is richest, deepest, and subtlestin the East is rooted in Pantheism; but all that is richest, deepest, and subtlest in us is concerned with denying passionately that Pantheismis either the highest or the purest religion. 

Thus, in turning over some excellent books recently written on thespirit of Indian or Chinese art and decoration, I found it quietly andcuriously assumed that the artist must be at his best if he flows withthe full stream of Nature; and identifies himself with all things; sothat the stars are his sleepless eyes and the forests his far-flungarms. Now in this way of talking both the two injustices will be found. In so far as what is claimed is a strong sense of the divine in allthings, the Eastern artists have no more monopoly of it than they haveof hunger and thirst. 

I have no doubt that the painters and poets of the Far East do exhibitthis; but I rebel at being asked to admit that we must go to the FarEast to find it. Traces of such sentiments can be found, I fancy, evenin other painters and poets. I do not question that the poet Wo Wo (thatornament of the eighth dynasty) may have written the words: "Even themost undignified vegetable is for this person capable of producingmeditations not to be exhibited by much weeping. " But, I do nottherefore admit that a Western gentleman named Wordsworth (who madea somewhat similar remark) had plagiarised from Wo Wo, or was a mereOccidental fable and travesty of that celebrated figure. I do not denythat Tinishona wrote that exquisite example of the short Japanese poementitled "Honourable Chrysanthemum in Honourable Hole in Wall. " But I donot therefore admit that Tennyson's little verse about the flower in thecranny was not original and even sincere. 

It is recorded (for all I know) of the philanthropic Emperor Bo, thatwhen engaged in cutting his garden lawn with a mower made of alabasterand chrysoberyl, he chanced to cut down a small flower; whereupon, beingmuch affected, he commanded his wise men immediately to take down upontablets of ivory the lines beginning: "Small and unobtrusive blossomwith ruby extremities. " But this incident, touching as it is, does notshake my belief in the incident of Robert Burns and the daisy; and I amleft with an impression that poets are pretty much the same everywherein their poetry—and in their prose. 

I have tried to convey my sympathy and admiration for Eastern art andits admirers, and if I have not conveyed them I must give it up and goon to more general considerations. I therefore proceed to say—withthe utmost respect, that it is Cheek, a rarefied and etherealised formof Cheek, for this school to speak in this way about the mother thatbore them, the great civilisation of the West. The West also has itsmagic landscapes, only through our incurable materialism they looklike landscapes as well as like magic. The West also has its symbolicfigures, only they look like men as well as symbols. It will be answered(and most justly) that Oriental art ought to be free to follow its owninstinct and tradition; that its artists are concerned to suggest onething and our artists another; that both should be admired in theirdifference. Profoundly true; but what is the difference? It is certainlynot as the Orientalisers assert, that we must go to the Far East for asympathetic and transcendental interpretation of Nature. We have paida long enough toll of mystics and even of madmen to be quit of thatdisability. 

Yet there is a difference, and it is just what I suggested. The Easternmysticism is an ecstasy of unity; the Christian mysticism is an ecstasyof creation, that is of separation and mutual surprise. The latter says, like St. Francis, "My brother fire and my sister water"; the formersays, "Myself fire and myself water. " Whether you call the Easternattitude an extension of oneself into everything or a contraction ofoneself into nothing is a matter of metaphysical definition. Theeffect is the same, an effect which lives and throbs throughout all theexquisite arts of the East. This effect is the Sing called rhythm, apulsation of pattern, or of ritual, or of colours, or of cosmic theory, but always suggesting the unification of the individual with the world. But there is quite another kind of sympathy the sympathy with athing because it is different. No one will say that Rembrandt did notsympathise with an old woman; but no one will say that Rembrandt paintedlike an old woman. No one will say that Reynolds did not appreciatechildren; but no one will say he did it childishly. The supreme instanceof this divine division is sex, and that explains (what I could neverunderstand in my youth) why Christendom called the soul the bride ofGod. For real love is an intense realisation of the "separateness" ofall our souls. The most heroic and human love-poetry of the world isnever mere passion; precisely because mere passion really is a meltingback into Nature, a meeting of the waters. And water is plungingand powerful; but it is only powerful downhill. The high and humanlove-poetry is all about division rather than identity; and in the greatlove-poems even the man as he embraces the woman sees her, in the sameinstant, afar off; a virgin and a stranger. 

For the first injustice, of which we have spoken, still recurs; and ifwe grant that the East has a right to its difference, it is not realisedin what we differ. That nursery tale from nowhere about St. George andthe Dragon really expresses best the relation between the West and theEast. There were many other differences, calculated to arrest eventhe superficial eye, between a saint and a dragon. But the essentialdifference was simply this: that the Dragon did want to eat St. George;whereas St. George would have felt a strong distaste for eating theDragon. In most of the stories he killed the Dragon. In many of thestories he not only spared, but baptised it. But in neither case did theChristian have any appetite for cold dragon. The Dragon, however, really has an appetite for cold Christian—and especially for coldChristianity. This blind intention to absorb, to change the shape ofeverything and digest it in the darkness of a dragon's stomach; this iswhat is really meant by the Pantheism and Cosmic Unity of the East. TheCosmos as such is cannibal; as old Time ate his children. The Easternsaints were saints because they wanted to be swallowed up. The Westernsaint, like St. George, was sainted by the Western Church preciselybecause he refused to be swallowed. The same process of thought that hasprevented nationalities disappearing in Christendom has prevented thecomplete appearance of Pantheism. All Christian men instinctively resistthe idea of being absorbed into an Empire; an Austrian, a Spanish, aBritish, or a Turkish Empire. But there is one empire, much larger andmuch more tyrannical, which free men will resist with even strongerpassion. The free man violently resists being absorbed into the empirewhich is called the Universe. He demands Home Rule for his nationality, but still more Home Rule for his home. Most of all he demands HomeRule for himself. He claims the right to be saved, in spite of Moslemfatalism. He claims the right to be damned in spite of theosophicaloptimism. He refuses to be the Cosmos; because he refuses to forget it. 

THE MUMMER

The night before Christmas Eve I heard a burst of musical voices soclose that they might as well have been inside the house instead ofjust outside; so I asked them inside, hoping that they might then seemfarther away. Then I realised that they were the Christmas Mummers, whocome every year in country parts to enact the rather rigid fragments ofthe old Christmas play of St. George, the Turkish Knight, and the VeryVenal Doctor. I will not describe it; it is indescribable; but I willdescribe my parallel sentiments as it passed. 

One could see something of that half-failure that haunts our artisticrevivals of mediaeval dances, carols, or Bethlehem Plays. There areelements in all that has come to us from the more morally simplesociety of the Middle Ages: elements which moderns, even when they aremediaevalists, find it hard to understand and harder to imitate. Thefirst is the primary idea of Mummery itself. If you will observe a childjust able to walk, you will see that his first idea is not to dress upas anybody—but to dress up. Afterwards, of course, the ideaof being the King or Uncle William will leap to his lips. But it isgenerally suggested by the hat he has already let fall over his nose, from far deeper motives. Tommy does not assume the hat primarily becauseit is Uncle William's hat, but because it is not Tommy's hat. It is aritual investiture; and is akin to those Gorgon masks that stiffened thedances of Greece or those towering mitres that came from the mysteriesof Persia. For the essence of such ritual is a profound paradox: theconcealment of the personality combined with the exaggeration of theperson. The man performing a rite seeks to be at once invisible andconspicuous. It is part of that divine madness which all other creatureswonder at in Man, that he alone parades this pomp of obliteration andanonymity. Man is not, perhaps, the only creature who dresses himself, but he is the only creature who disguises himself. Beasts and birds doindeed take the colours of their environment; but that is not in orderto be watched, but in order not to be watched; it is not the formalismof rejoicing, but the formlessness of fear. It is not so with men, whosenature is the unnatural. Ancient Britons did not stain themselves bluebecause they lived in blue forests; nor did Georgian beaux and bellespowder their hair to match an Arctic landscape; the Britons were notdressing up as kingfishers nor the beaux pretending to be polar bears. Nay, even when modern ladies paint their faces a bright mauve, it isdoubted by some naturalists whether they do it with the idea of escapingnotice. So merry-makers (or Mummers) adopt their costume to heightenand exaggerate their own bodily presence and identity; not to sink it, primarily speaking, in another identity. It is not Acting—thatcomparatively low profession-comparatively I mean. It is Mummery;and, as Mr. Kensit would truly say, all elaborate religious ritual isMummery. That is, it is the noble conception of making Man somethingother and more than himself when he stands at the limit of human things. It is only careful faddists and feeble German philosophers who want towear no clothes; and be "natural" in their Dionysian revels. Naturalmen, really vigorous and exultant men, want to wear more and moreclothes when they are revelling. They want worlds of waistcoats andforests of trousers and pagodas of tall hats toppling up to the stars. 

Thus it is with the lingering Mummers at Christmas in the country. Ifour more refined revivers of Miracle Plays or Morrice Dances tried toreconstruct the old Mummers' Play of St. George and the Turkish Knight(I do not know why they do not) they would think at once of picturesqueand appropriate dresses. St. George's panoply would be pictured fromthe best books of armour and blazonry: the Turkish Knight's arms andornaments would be traced from the finest Saracenic arabesques. When mygarden door opened on Christmas Eve and St. George of England entered, the appearance of that champion was slightly different. His face wasenergetically blacked all over with soot, above which he wore anaged and very tall top hat; he wore his shirt outside his coat like asurplice, and he flourished a thick umbrella. Now do not, I beg you, talk about "ignorance"; or suppose that the Mummer in question (he is avery pleasant Ratcatcher, with a tenor voice) did this because he knewno better. Try to realise that even a Ratcatcher knows St. George ofEngland was not black, and did not kill the Dragon with an umbrella. The Rat-catcher is not under this delusion; any more than Paul Veronesethought that very good men have luminous rings round their heads; anymore than the Pope thinks that Christ washed the feet of the twelve ina Cathedral; any more than the Duke of Norfolk thinks the lions on atabard are like the lions at the Zoo. These things are denaturalisedbecause they are symbols; because the extraordinary occasion must hideor even disfigure the ordinary people. Black faces were to mediaevalmummeries what carved masks were to Greek plays: it was called being"vizarded. " My Rat-catcher is not sufficiently arrogant to suppose fora moment that he looks like St. George. But he is sufficiently humble tobe convinced that if he looks as little like himself as he can, he willbe on the right road. 

This is the soul of Mumming; the ostentatious secrecy of men indisguise. There are, of course, other mediaeval elements in it whichare also difficult to explain to the fastidious mediaevalists of to-day. There is, for instance, a certain output of violence into the void. Itcan best be defined as a raging thirst to knock men down without thefaintest desire to hurt them. All the rhymes with the old ring have thetrick of turning on everything in which the rhymsters most sincerelybelieved, merely for the pleasure of blowing off steam in startlingyet careless phrases. When Tennyson says that King Arthur "drew all thepetty princedoms under him, " and "made a realm and ruled, " his graveRoyalism is quite modern. Many mediaevals, outside the mediaevalrepublics, believed in monarchy as solemnly as Tennyson. But that olderverse

 When good King Arthur ruled this land He was a goodly King— He stole three pecks of barley-meal To make a bag-pudding. 

is far more Arthurian than anything in The Idylls of the King. There areother elements; especially that sacred thing that can perhaps be calledAnachronism. All that to us is Anachronism was to mediaevals merelyEternity. But the main excellence of the Mumming Play lies still, I think, in its uproarious secrecy. If we cannot hide our hearts inhealthy darkness, at least we can hide our faces in healthy blacking. If you cannot escape like a philosopher into a forest, at least you cancarry the forest with you, like a Jack-in-the-Green. It is well to walkunder universal ensigns; and there is an old tale of a tyrant to whoma walking forest was the witness of doom. That, indeed, is the veryintensity of the notion: a masked man is ominous; but who shall face amob of masks?

THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY

The Cheap Tripper, pursued by the curses of the aesthetes and theantiquaries, really is, I suppose, a symptom of the strange and almostunearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customsof a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness doesnot necessarily follow from mere poverty, or mere democracy, or mereunlettered simplicity of mind. 

But though the tripper, artistically considered, is a sign of ourdecadence, he is not one of its worst signs, but relatively one of itsbest; one of its most innocent and most sincere. Compared with manyof the philosophers and artists who denounce him; he looks like a Godfearing fisher or a noble mountaineer. His antics with donkeys andconcertinas, crowded charabancs, and exchanged hats, though clumsy, arenot so vicious or even so fundamentally vulgar as many of the amusementsof the overeducated. People are not more crowded on a char-a-banc thanthey are at a political "At Home, " or even an artistic soiree; and ifthe female trippers are overdressed, at least they are not overdressedand underdressed at the same time. It is better to ride a donkey than tobe a donkey. It is better to deal with the Cockney festival which asksmen and women to change hats, rather than with the modern Utopia thatwants them to change heads. 

But the truth is that such small, but real, element of vulgarity asthere is indeed in the tripper, is part of a certain folly and falsitywhich is characteristic of much modernity, and especially of the verypeople who persecute the poor tripper most. There is something in thewhole society, and even especially in the cultured part of it, that doesthings in a clumsy and unbeautiful way. 

A case occurs to me in the matter of Stonehenge, which I happened tovisit yesterday. Now to a person really capable of feeling the poetry ofStonehenge it is almost a secondary matter whether he sees Stonehengeat all. The vast void roll of the empty land towards Salisbury, the graytablelands like primeval altars, the trailing rain-clouds, the vapourof primeval sacrifices, would all tell him of a very ancient andvery lonely Britain. It would not spoil his Druidic mood if hemissed Stonehenge. But it does spoil his mood to findStonehenge—surrounded by a brand-new fence of barbed wire, with apoliceman and a little shop selling picture post-cards. 

Now if you protest against this, educated people will instantly answeryou, "Oh, it was done to prevent the vulgar trippers who chip stones andcarve names and spoil the look of Stonehenge. " It does not seem tooccur to them that barbed wire and a policeman rather spoil the look ofStonehenge. The scratching of a name, particularly when performedwith blunt penknife or pencil by a person of imperfect School Boardeducation, can be trusted in a little while to be indistinguishable fromthe grayest hieroglyphic by the grandest Druid of old. But nobody couldget a modern policeman into the same picture with a Druid. This reallyvital piece of vandalism was done by the educated, not the uneducated;it was done by the influence of the artists or antiquaries who wantedto preserve the antique beauty of Stonehenge. It seems to me curious topreserve your lady's beauty from freckles by blacking her face all over;or to protect the pure whiteness of your wedding garment by dyeing itgreen. 

And if you ask, "But what else could any one have done, what could themost artistic age have done to save the monument?" I reply, "There arehundreds of things that Greeks or Mediaevals might have done; and I haveno notion what they would have chosen; but I say that by an instinct intheir whole society they would have done something that was decent andserious and suitable to the place. Perhaps some family of knights orwarriors would have the hereditary duty of guarding such a place. If sotheir armour would be appropriate; their tents would be appropriate;not deliberately—they would grow like that. Perhaps some religiousorder such as normally employ nocturnal watches and the relieving ofguard would protect such a place. Perhaps it would be protected by allsorts of rituals, consecrations, or curses, which would seem to youmere raving superstition and silliness. But they do not seem to me onetwentieth part so silly, from a purely rationalist point of view, ascalmly making a spot hideous in order to keep it beautiful. "

The thing that is really vulgar, the thing that is really vile, is tolive in a good place Without living by its life. Any one who settlesdown in a place without becoming part of it is (barring peculiarpersonal cases, of course) a tripper or wandering cad. For instance, the Jew is a genuine peculiar case. The Wandering Jew is not a wanderingcad. He is a highly civilised man in a highly difficult position; theworld being divided, and his own nation being divided, about whether hecan do anything else except wander. 

The best example of the cultured, but common, tripper is the educatedEnglishman on the Continent. We can no longer explain the quarrel bycalling Englishmen rude and foreigners polite. Hundreds of Englishmenare extremely polite, and thousands of foreigners are extremely rude. The truth of the matter is that foreigners do not resent the rudeEnglishman. What they do resent, what they do most justly resent, isthe polite Englishman. He visits Italy for Botticellis or Flandersfor Rembrandts, and he treats the great nations that made these thingscourteously—as he would treat the custodians of any museum. Itdoes not seem to strike him that the Italian is not the custodian of thepictures, but the creator of them. He can afford to look down on suchnations—when he can paint such pictures. 

That is, in matters of art and travel, the psychology of the cad. If, living in Italy, you admire Italian art while distrusting Italiancharacter, you are a tourist, or cad. If, living in Italy, you admireItalian art while despising Italian religion, you are a tourist, or cad. It does not matter how many years you have lived there. Tourists willoften live a long time in hotels without discovering the nationalityof the waiters. Englishmen will often live a long time in Italy withoutdiscovering the nationality of the Italians. But the test is simple. Ifyou admire what Italians did without admiring Italians—you are acheap tripper. 

The same, of course, applies much nearer home. I have remarked elsewherethat country shopkeepers are justly offended by London people, who, coming among them, continue to order all their goods from London. It iscaddish to wink and squint at the colour of a man's wine, like a winetaster; and then refuse to drink it. It is equally caddish to wink andsquint at the colour of a man's orchard, like a landscape painter; andthen refuse to buy the apples. It is always an insult to admire a thingand not use it. But the main point is that one has no right to seeStonehenge without Salisbury Plain and Salisbury: One has no right torespect the dead Italians without respecting the live ones. One has noright to visit a Christian society like a diver visiting the deep-seafishes—fed along a lengthy tube by another atmosphere, and seeingthe sights without breathing the air. It is very real bad manners. 

THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

It is an old story that names do not fit things; it is an old storythat the oldest forest is called the New Forest, and that Irish stew isalmost peculiar to England. But these are traditional titles that tend, of their nature, to stiffen; it is the tragedy of to-day that evenphrases invented for to-day do not fit it. The forest has remained newwhile it is nearly a thousand years old; but our fashions have grown oldwhile they were still new. 

The extreme example of this is that when modern wrongs are attacked, they are almost always attacked wrongly. People seem to have a positiveinspiration for finding the inappropriate phrase to apply to anoffender; they are always accusing a man of theft when he has beenconvicted of murder. They must accuse Sir Edward Carson of outrageousrebellion, when his offence has really been a sleek submission tothe powers that be. They must describe Mr. Lloyd George as using hiseloquence to rouse the mob, whereas he has really shown considerablecleverness in damping it down. It was probably under the same impulsetowards a mysterious misfit of names that people denounced Dr. Inge as"the Gloomy Dean. "

Now there is nothing whatever wrong about being a Dean; nor is thereanything wrong about being gloomy. The only question is what dark butsincere motives have made you gloomy. What dark but sincere motiveshave made you a Dean. Now the address of Dr. Inge which gained himthis erroneous title was mostly concerned with a defence of the moderncapitalists against the modern strikers, from whose protest he appearedto anticipate appalling results. Now if we look at the facts about thatgentleman's depression and also about his Deanery, we shall find a verycurious state of things. 

When Dr. Inge was called "the Gloomy Dean" a great injustice was donehim. He had appeared as the champion of our capitalist community againstthe forces of revolt; and any one who does that exceeds in optimismrather than pessimism. A man who really thinks that strikers havesuffered no wrong, or that employers have done no wrong—such a manis not a Gloomy Dean, but a quite wildly and dangerously happy Dean. Aman who can feel satisfied with modern industrialism must be a man witha mysterious fountain of high spirits. And the actual occasion is notless curious; because, as far as I can make out, his title to gloomreposes on his having said that our worker's demand high wages, whilethe placid people of the Far East will quite cheerfully work for less. 

This is true enough, of course, and there does not seem to be muchdifficulty about the matter. Men of the Far East will submit to very lowwages for the same reason that they will submit to "the punishment knownas Li, or Slicing"; for the same reason that they will praise polygamyand suicide; for the same reason that they subject the wife utterly tothe husband or his parents; for the same reason that they serve theirtemples with prostitutes for priests; for the same reason that theysometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexualperversion. They do it, that is, because they are Heathens; men withtraditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and thegestures of self-respect. They may be very much better than we are inhundreds of other ways; and I can quite understand a man (thoughhardly a Dean) really preferring their historic virtues to those ofChristendom. A man may perhaps feel more comfortable among his Asiaticcoolies than among his European comrades: and as we are to allow theBroadest Thought in the Church, Dr. Inge has as much right to his heresyas anybody else. It is true that, as Dr. Inge says, there are numberlessOrientals who will do a great deal of work for very little money; andit is most undoubtedly true that there are several high-placed andprosperous Europeans who like to get work done and pay as little aspossible for it. 

But I cannot make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits andtraditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas whichhe has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands ofyears of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Ingeadmires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have producedthe sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obviousdeduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathenChinese. Instead of supporting Christian missions to Korea or Japan, heought to be at the head of a great mission in London for converting theEnglish to Taoism or Buddhism. There his passion for the moral beautiesof paganism would have free and natural play; his style would improve;his mind would begin slowly to clear; and he would be free from allsorts of little irritating scrupulosities which must hamper even themost Conservative Christian in his full praise of sweating and the sack. 

In Christendom he will never find rest. The perpetual public criticismand public change which is the note of all our history springs from acertain spirit far too deep to be defined. It is deeper than democracy;nay, it may often appear to be non-democratic; for it may often be thespecial defence of a minority or an individual. It will often leave theninety-and-nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost. Itwill often risk the State itself to right a single wrong; and do justicethough the heavens fall. Its highest expression is not even in theformula of the great gentlemen of the French Revolution who said thatall men were free and equal. Its highest expression is rather in theformula of the peasant who said that a man's a man for a' that. If therewere but one slave in England, and he did all the work while the restof us made merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud toGod night and day. Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearlyworks with, a creed which postulates a humanised God and a vividlypersonal immortality. Men must not be busy merely like a swarm, or evenhappy merely like a herd; for it is not a question of men, but of aman. A man's meals may be poor, but they must not be bestial; there mustalways be that about the meal which permits of its comparison tothe sacrament. A man's bed may be hard, but it must not be abject orunclean: there must always be about the bed something of the decency ofthe death-bed. 

This is the spirit which makes the Christian poor begin their terriblemurmur whenever there is a turn of prices or a deadlock of toilthat threatens them with vagabondage or pauperisation; and we cannotencourage the Dean with any hope that this spirit can be cast out. Christendom will continue to suffer all the disadvantages of beingChristian: it is the Dean who must be gently but firmly altered. He hadabsent-mindedly strayed into the wrong continent and the wrong creed. Iadvise him to chuck it. 

But the case is more curious still. To connect the Dean with Confuciantemples or traditions may have appeared fantastic; but it is not. Dr. Inge is not a stupid old Tory Rector, strict both on Church and State. Such a man might talk nonsense about the Christian Socialists being"court chaplains of King Demos" or about his own superb valour indefying the democracy that rages in the front pews of Anglican churches. We should not expect a mere old-fashioned country clergyman to know thatDemos has never been king in England and precious seldom anywhere else;we should not expect him to realise that if King Demos had any chaplainsthey would be uncommonly poorly paid. But Dr. Inge is not old-fashioned;he considers himself highly progressive and advanced. He is a NewTheologian; that is, he is liberal in theology—and nothing else. He is apparently in sober fact, and not as in any fantasy, in sympathywith those who would soften the superior claim of our creed by urgingthe rival creeds of the East; with those who would absorb the virtues ofBuddhism or of Islam. He holds a high seat in that modern Parliament ofReligions where all believers respect each other's unbelief. 

Now this has a very sharp moral for modern religious reformers. Whennext you hear the "liberal" Christian say that we should take what isbest in Oriental faiths, make quite sure what are the things that peoplelike Dr. Inge call best; what are the things that people like Dr. Ingepropose to take. You will not find them imitating the military valour ofthe Moslem. You will not find them imitating the miraculous ecstasy ofthe Hindoo. The more you study the "broad" movement of today, the moreyou will find that these people want something much less like Chinesemetaphysics, and something much more like Chinese Labour. You will findthe levelling of creeds quite unexpectedly close to the lowering ofwages. Dr. Inge is the typical latitudinarian of to-day; and was nevermore so than when he appeared not as the apostle of the blacks, but asthe apostle of the blacklegs. Preached, as it is, almost entirelyamong the prosperous and polite, our brotherhood with Buddhism orMohammedanism practically means this—that the poor must be as meekas Buddhists, while the rich may be as ruthless as Mohammedans. That iswhat they call the reunion of all religions. 

THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN

The middle classes of modern England are quite fanatically fond ofwashing; and are often enthusiastic for teetotalism. I cannot thereforecomprehend why it is that they exhibit a mysterious dislike of rain. Rain, that inspiring and delightful thing, surely combines the qualitiesof these two ideals with quite a curious perfection. Our philanthropistsare eager to establish public baths everywhere. Rain surely is a publicbath; it might almost be called mixed bathing. The appearance of personscoming fresh from this great natural lustration is not perhaps polishedor dignified; but for the matter of that, few people are dignified whencoming out of a bath. But the scheme of rain in itself is one of anenormous purification. It realises the dream of some insane hygienist:it scrubs the sky. Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starryrafters and Starless corners of the cosmos; it is a cosmic springcleaning. 

If the Englishman is really fond of cold baths, he ought not to grumbleat the English climate for being a cold bath. In these days we areconstantly told that we should leave our little special possessions andjoin in the enjoyment of common social institutions and a common socialmachinery. I offer the rain as a thoroughly Socialistic institution. Itdisregards that degraded delicacy which has hitherto led each gentlemanto take his shower-bath in private. It is a better shower-bath, becauseit is public and communal; and, best of all, because somebody else pullsthe string. 

As for the fascination of rain for the water drinker, it is a fact theneglect of which I simply cannot comprehend. The enthusiastic waterdrinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet anddebauch of his own favourite beverage. Think of the imaginativeintoxication of the wine drinker if the crimson clouds sent down claretor the golden clouds hock. Paint upon primitive darkness some suchscenes of apocalypse, towering and gorgeous skyscapes in which champagnefalls like fire from heaven or the dark skies grow purple and tawny withthe terrible colours of port. All this must the wild abstainer feel, ashe rolls in the long soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven, and listens to the roaring rain. It is he, the water drinker, whoought to be the true bacchanal of the forests; for all the forests aredrinking water. Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it: thetrees rave and reel to and fro like drunken giants; they clash boughsas revellers clash cups; they roar undying thirst and howl the health ofthe world. 

All around me as I write is a noise of Nature drinking: and Nature makesa noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined. If I countit Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall Icomplain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to allliving things; a cup of water for every shrub; a cup of water for everyweed? I would be ashamed to grumble at it. As Sir Philip Sidney said, their need is greater than mine—especially for water. 

There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wildHighland clan: a elan come from those hills where rain is not so much anincident as an atmosphere. Surely every man of imagination must feela tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever heputs on a mackintosh. I could never reconcile myself to carrying allumbrella; it is a pompous Eastern business, carried over the heads ofdespots in the dry, hot lands. Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageablewalking stick; open, it is an inadequate tent. For my part, I have notaste for pretending to be a walking pavilion; I think nothing of myhat, and precious little of my head. If I am to be protected againstwet, it must be by some closer and more careless protection, somethingthat I can forget altogether. It might be a Highland plaid. It might bethat yet more Highland thing, a mackintosh. 

And there is really something in the mackintosh of the militaryqualities of the Highlander. The proper cheap mackintosh has a blue andwhite sheen as of steel or iron; it gleams like armour. I like to thinkof it as the uniform of that ancient clan in some of its old and mistyraids. I like to think of all the Macintoshes, in their mackintoshes, descending on some doomed Lowland village, their wet waterproofsflashing in the sun or moon. For indeed this is one of the real beautiesof rainy weather, that while the amount of original and direct lightis commonly lessened, the number of things that reflect light isunquestionably increased. There is less sunshine; but there are moreshiny things; such beautifully shiny things as pools and puddles andmackintoshes. It is like moving in a world of mirrors. 

And indeed this is the last and not the least gracious of the casualworks of magic wrought by rain: that while it decreases light, yet itdoubles it. If it dims the sky, it brightens the earth. It gives theroads (to the sympathetic eye) something of the beauty of Venice. Shallow lakes of water reiterate every detail of earth and sky; wedwell in a double universe. Sometimes walking upon bare and lustrouspavements, wet under numerous lamps, a man seems a black blot on allthat golden looking-glass, and could fancy he was flying in a yellowsky. But wherever trees and towns hang head downwards in a pigmy puddle, the sense of Celestial topsy-turvydom is the same. This bright, wet, dazzling confusion of shape and shadow, of reality and reflection, willappeal strongly to any one with the transcendental instinct about thisdreamy and dual life of ours. It will always give a man the strangesense of looking down at the skies. 

THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER

When, as lately, events have happened that seem (to the fancy, at least)to test if not stagger the force of official government, it isamusing to ask oneself what is the real weakness of civilisation, oursespecially, when it contends with the one lawless man. I was reminded ofone weakness this morning in turning over an old drawerful of pictures. 

This weakness in civilisation is best expressed by saying that it caresmore for science than for truth. It prides itself on its "methods"more than its results; it is satisfied with precision, discipline, goodcommunications, rather than with the sense of reality. But there areprecise falsehoods as well as precise facts. Discipline may only meana hundred men making the same mistake at the same minute. And goodcommunications may in practice be very like those evil communicationswhich are said to corrupt good manners. Broadly, we have reached a"scientific age, " which wants to know whether the train is in thetimetable, but not whether the train is in the station. I take oneinstance in our police inquiries that I happen to have come across: thecase of photography. 

Some years ago a poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared, and the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him, sothat he might be identified. The photograph, as I remember it, depictedor suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his headthrown back, with long distinguished features, colourless thin hair andslight moustache, and though conveyed merely by the head and shoulders, a definite impression of height. If I had gone by that photograph Ishould have gone about looking for a long soldierly but listless man, with a profile rather like the Duke of Connaught's. 

Only, as it happened, I knew the poet personally; I had seen him a greatmany times, and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget, if seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate WestlandScotch, who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes anddark emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelicor whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity; and he lookedlike some swarthy elf. He was small, with a big head and a crescent ofcoal-black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediatelyunder his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might havebeen painted scarlet; three black tufts, two on the upper lip and oneunder the lower, seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustachesof Mephistopheles. His eyes had that "dancing madness" in them whichStevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck; but he sometimesdistorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one ofthem. A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find. You couldhave picked him out in any crowd—so long as you had not seen hisphotograph. 

But in this scientific picture of him twenty causes, accidental andconventional, had combined to obliterate him altogether. The limitsof photography forbade the strong and almost melodramatic colouringof cheek and eyebrow. The accident of the lighting took nearly all thedarkness out of the hair and made him look almost like a fair man. Theframing and limitation of the shoulders made him look like a big man;and the devastating bore of being photographed when you want to writepoetry made him look like a lazy man. Holding his head back, as peopledo when they are being photographed (or shot), but as he certainly neverheld it normally, accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominatedhis slight figure. Here we have a clockwork picture, begun and finishedby a button and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting featurehas been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they couldhave been by the most namby-pamby flatterer, painting in the weakestwater-colours, on the smoothest ivory. 

I happen to possess a book of Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricatures, one ofwhich depicts the unfortunate poet in question. To say it representsan utterly incredible hobgoblin is to express in faint and inadequatelanguage the license of its sprawling lines. The authorities thought itstrictly safe and scientific to circulate the poet's photograph. Theywould have clapped me in an asylum if I had asked them to circulateMax's caricature. But the caricature would have been far more likely tofind the man. 

This is a small but exact symbol of the failure of scientificcivilisation. It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a manthat it never asks whether it has a likeness of him. Thus declarations, seemingly most detailed, have flashed along the wires of the world eversince I was a boy. We were told that in some row Boer policemen hadshot an Englishman, a British subject, an English citizen. A long timeafterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen wasquite black. Well, it makes no difference to the moral question; blackmen should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men. Butit makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted sostartling an alteration of the photograph. I am sorry we got hold of aphotographic negative in which a black man came out white. Later we weretold that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag, which would have been a disgusting thing to do. Later, it was admittedthat he was an Irishman; which is exactly as different as if he had beena Pole. Common sense, with all the facts before it, does see that blackis not white, and that a nation that has never submitted has a right tomoral independence. But why does it so seldom have all the facts beforeit? Why are the big aggressive features, such as blackness or the Celticwrath, always left out in such official communications, as they wereleft out in the photograph? My friend the poet had hair as black as anAfrican and eyes as fierce as an Irishman; why does our civilisationdrop all four of the facts? Its error is to omit the arrestingthing—which might really arrest the criminal. It strikes first thechilling note of science, demanding a man "above the middle height, chinshaven, with gray moustache, " etc. , which might mean Mr. Balfour or SirRedvers Buller. It does not seize the first fact of impression, as thata man is obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or anigger or an albino or a prize-fighter or an imbecile or an American. These are the realities by which the people really recognise each other. They are almost always left out of the inquiry. 

THE SULTAN

There is one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and Imperialcultures. That is, that in most human things if you spread your butterfar you spread it thin. But there is an odder fact yet: rooted insomething dark and irrational in human nature. That is, that when youfind your butter thin, you begin to spread it. And it is just when youfind your ideas wearing thin in your own mind that you begin to spreadthem among your fellow-creatures. It is a paradox; but not my paradox. There are numerous cases in history; but I think the strongest case isthis. That we have Imperialism in all our clubs at the very time when wehave Orientalism in all our drawing-rooms. 

I mean that the colonial ideal of such men as Cecil Rhodes did not ariseout of any fresh creative idea of the Western genius, it was a fad, and like most fads an imitation. For what was wrong with Rhodes was notthat, like Cromwell or Hildebrand, he made huge mistakes, nor even thathe committed great crimes. It was that he committed these crimes anderrors in order to spread certain ideas. And when one asked for theideas they could not be found. Cromwell stood for Calvinism, Hildebrandfor Catholicism: but Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to theworld. He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading theprinciples that he hadn't got. What he called his ideals were the dregsof a Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous. That the fittest must survive, and that any one like himself must be thefittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he couldnot understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy whichhe lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic oldbachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverentlyquoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of histime. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hillsomewhere in South Africa "his church. " It was not his fault, I mean, that he could not see that a church all to oneself is not a church atall. It is a madman's cell. It was not his fault that he "figured outthat God meant as much of the planet to be Anglo-Saxon as possible. "Many evolutionists much wiser had "figured out" things even morebabyish. He was an honest and humble recipient of the plodding popularscience of his time; he spread no ideas that any cockney clerk inStreatham could not have spread for him. But it was exactly because hehad no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, andruined republics to spread them. 

But the case is even stronger and stranger. Fashionable Imperialism notonly has no ideas of its own to extend; but such ideas as it has areactually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks toextend them. The Crusading kings and knights might be representedas seeking to spread Western ideas in the East. But all that ourImperialist aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in theEast. For that very governing class which urges Occidental Imperialismhas been deeply discoloured with Oriental mysticism and Cosmology. 

The same society lady who expects the Hindoos to accept her view ofpolitics has herself accepted their view of religion. She wants firstto steal their earth, and then to share their heaven. The same Imperialcynic who wishes the Turks to submit to English science has himselfsubmitted to Turkish philosophy, to a wholly Turkish view of despotismand destiny. 

There is an obvious and amusing proof of this in a recent life ofRhodes. The writer admits with proper Imperial gloom the fact thatAfrica is still chiefly inhabited by Africans. He suggests Rhodes inthe South confronting savages and Kitchener in the North facing Turks, Arabs, and Soudanese, and then he quotes this remark of Cecil Rhodes:"It is inevitable fate that all this should be changed; and I shouldlike to be the agent of fate. " That was Cecil Rhodes's one small genuineidea; and it is an Oriental idea. 

Here we have evident all the ultimate idiocy of the present Imperialposition. Rhodes and Kitchener are to conquer Moslem bedouins andbarbarians, in order to teach them to believe only in inevitable fate. We are to wreck provinces and pour blood like Niagara, all in order toteach a Turk to say "Kismet"; which he has said since his cradle. Weare to deny Christian justice and destroy international equality, all inorder to teach an Arab to believe he is "an agent of fate, " when he hasnever believed anything else. If Cecil Rhodes's vision could come true(which fortunately is increasingly improbable), such countries as Persiaor Arabia would simply be filled with ugly and vulgar fatalists inbillycocks, instead of with graceful and dignified fatalists in turbans. The best Western idea, the idea of spiritual liberty and danger, of adoubtful and romantic future in which all things may happen—thisessential Western idea Cecil Rhodes could not spread, because (as hesays himself) he did not believe in it. 

It was an Oriental who gave to Queen Victoria the crown of an Empressin addition to that of a Queen. He did not understand that the title ofKing is higher than that of Emperor. For in the East titles are meantto be vast and wild; to be extravagant poems: the Brother of the Sun andMoon, the Caliph who lives for ever. But a King of England (at least inthe days of real kings) did not bear a merely poetical title; but rathera religious one. He belonged to his people and not merely they to him. He was not merely a conqueror, but a father—yes, even when he wasa bad father. But this sort of solid sanctity always goes with localaffections and limits: and the Cecil Rhodes Imperialism set up not theKing, but the Sultan; with all the typically Eastern ideas of the magicof money, of luxury without uproar; of prostrate provinces and a chosenrace. Indeed Cecil Rhodes illustrated almost every quality essential tothe Sultan, from the love of diamonds to the scorn of woman. 

THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS

The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusionwhich accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothicarchitecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explainedin most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothiceclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at oncelively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equallyrich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. Noman ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from acathedral tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and Indiathere is the presence of something stiff and heartless, of somethingtortured and silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowersand hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast oftheir colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like thevision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happensto dislike it. Or, again, some will say that it is the liberty of theMiddle Ages in the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes theGothic more interesting than the Greek. There is more truth in this;indeed, there is real truth in it. Few of the old Christian cathedralswould have passed the Censor of Plays. We talk of the inimitablegrandeur of the old cathedrals; but indeed it is rather their gaietythat we do not dare to imitate. We should be rather surprised if achorister suddenly began singing "Bill Bailey" in church. Yet that wouldbe only doing in music what the mediaevals did in sculpture. They putinto a Miserere seat the very scenes that we put into a music hallsong: comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and thehanging out of the washing. But though the gaiety of Gothic is one ofits features, it also is not the secret of its unique effect. We seea domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese sketches. But delightfulas these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper houses, and toddling, infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of a kind quitedifferent from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some have even beenso shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure in medievalbuilding is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is rough, shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed after thesame fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating bristles, are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all thesame way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and almostequally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in mediaevalism;and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and simplicity, asof a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here, again, the uniquenessis missed. There are Renaissance things (such as the ethereal silverydrawings of Raphael), there are even pagan things (such as thePraying Boy) which express as fresh and austere a piety. None of theseexplanations explain. And I never saw what was the real point aboutGothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw it behind a row offurniture-vans. 

I did not know they were furniture-vans; at the first glance and in thesmoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wallcut off the wheels, and the vans were somewhat of the same colour as theyellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come acrossthat interminable Eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all themore so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in itlike a light-house. I had climbed the sharp, crooked streets up to thisecclesiastical citadel; just in front of me was a flourishing and richlycoloured kitchen garden; beyond that was the low stone wall; beyondthat the row of vans that looked like houses; and beyond and above that, straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds, and terrible asthe Tower of Babel, Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight. 

As I looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here;what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was notvariety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical, but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a manof our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid oran Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I hadmistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start thisgave to my eye and mind I really fancied that the Cathedral was movingtowards the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding acrossthe plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered withthe clouds. Then I saw what it was. 

The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, thatit is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fightingarchitecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones arestones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hearthe arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mightyand numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet ofimperial elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like bannersgoing into battle; the silence was deafening with all the mingled noisesof a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook upits thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets fromall the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern inthe core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed hiswings of brass. 

And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting inthe midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight;the voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect ofspears. I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church;and I knew indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne ineither hand the trowel and the sword. 

I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life hadmarched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army. Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle ofthe desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and beenwoke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of thetall pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night everysnake or sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or cornerof the architecture. And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternallyin the flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles liketorches across dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain ofmusic and darkness and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincolnhill. So for some hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty ofthe Gothic; then the last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I sawonly a church tower in a quiet English town, round which the Englishbirds were floating. 

THE MAN ON TOP

There is a fact at the root of all realities to-day which cannot bestated too simply. It is that the powers of this world are now nottrusted simply because they are not trustworthy. This can be quiteclearly seen and said without any reference to our several passions orpartisanships. It does not follow that we think such a distrust a wisesentiment to express; it does not even follow that we think it a goodsentiment to entertain. But such is the sentiment, simply because suchis the fact. The distinction can be quite easily defined in an example. I do not think that private workers owe an indefinite loyalty to theiremployer. But I do think that patriotic soldiers owe a more or lessindefinite loyalty to their leader in battle. But even if they ought totrust their captain, the fact remains that they often do not trust him;and the fact remains that he often is not fit to be trusted. 

Most of the employers and many of the Socialists seem to have got a verymuddled ethic about the basis of such loyalty; and perpetually try toput employers and officers upon the same disciplinary plane. I shouldhave thought myself that the difference was alphabetical enough. It hasnothing to do with the idealising of war or the materialising of trade;it is a distinction in the primary purpose. There might be much moreelegance and poetry in a shop under William Morris than in a regimentunder Lord Kitchener. But the difference is not in the persons or theatmosphere, but in the aim. The British Army does not exist in orderto pay Lord Kitchener. William Morris's shop, however artistic andphilanthropic, did exist to pay William Morris. If it did not pay theshopkeeper it failed as a shop; but Lord Kitchener does not fail if heis underpaid, but only if he is defeated. The object of the Army is thesafety of the nation from one particular class of perils; therefore, since all citizens owe loyalty to the nation, all citizens who aresoldiers owe loyalty to the Army. But nobody has any obligation to makesome particular rich man richer. A man is bound, of course, to considerthe indirect results of his action in a strike; but he is bound toconsider that in a swing, or a giddy-go-round, or a smoking concert;in his wildest holiday or his most private conversation. But directresponsibility like that of a soldier he has none. He need not aimsolely and directly at the good of the shop; for the simple reason thatthe shop is not aiming solely and directly at the good of the nation. The shopman is, under decent restraints, let us hope, trying to get whathe can out of the nation; the shop assistant may, under the same decentrestraints, get what he can out of the shopkeeper. All this distinctionis very obvious. At least I should have thought so. 

But the primary point which I mean is this. That even if we do take themilitary view of mercantile service, even if we do call the rebelliousshop assistant "disloyal"—that leaves exactly where it was thequestion of whether he is, in point of fact, in a good or bad shop. Granted that all Mr. Poole's employees are bound to follow for ever thecloven pennon of the Perfect Pair of Trousers, it is all the more truethat the pennon may, in point of fact, become imperfect. Granted thatall Barney Barnato's workers ought to have followed him to death orglory, it is still a Perfectly legitimate question to ask which he waslikely to lead them to. Granted that Dr. Sawyer's boy ought to die forhis master's medicines, we may still hold an inquest to find out if hedied of them. While we forbid the soldier to shoot the general, we maystill wish the general were shot. 

The fundamental fact of our time is the failure of the successful man. Somehow we have so arranged the rules of the game that the winners areworthless for other purposes; they can secure nothing except the prize. The very rich are neither aristocrats nor self-made men; they areaccidents—or rather calamities. All revolutionary language isa generation behind the times in talking of their futility. Arevolutionist would say (with perfect truth) that coal-owners know nextto nothing about coal-mining. But we are past that point. Coal-ownersknow next to nothing about coal-owning. They do not develop and defendthe nature of their own monopoly with any consistent and courageouspolicy, however wicked, as did the old aristocrats with the monopoly ofland. They have not the virtues nor even the vices of tyrants; they haveonly their powers. It is the same with all the powerful of to-day; it isthe same, for instance, with the high-placed and high-paid official. Notonly is the judge not judicial, but the arbiter is not even arbitrary. The arbiter decides, not by some gust of justice or injustice in hissoul like the old despot dooming men under a tree, but by the permanentclimate of the class to which he happens to belong. The ancient wig ofthe judge is often indistinguishable from the old wig of the flunkey. 

To judge about success or failure one must see things very simply; onemust see them in masses, as the artist, half closing his eyes againstdetails, sees light and shade. That is the only way in which a justjudgment can be formed as to whether any departure or development, suchas Islam or the American Republic, has been a benefit upon the whole. Seen close, such great erections always abound in ingenious detail andimpressive solidity; it is only by seeing them afar off that one cantell if the Tower leans. 

Now if we thus take in the whole tilt or posture of our modern state, we shall simply see this fact: that those classes who have on the wholegoverned, have on the whole failed. If you go to a factory you willsee some very wonderful wheels going round; you will be told that theemployer often comes there early in the morning; that he has greatorganising power; that if he works over the colossal accumulation ofwealth he also works over its wise distribution. All this may be true ofmany employers, and it is practically said of all. 

But if we shade our eyes from all this dazzle of detail; if we simplyask what has been the main feature, the upshot, the final fruit of thecapitalist system, there is no doubt about the answer. The special andsolid result of the reign of the employers has been—unemployment. Unemployment not only increasing, but becoming at last the very pivotupon which the whole process turns. 

Or, again, if you visit the villages that depend on one of the greatsquires, you will hear praises, often just, of the landlord's good senseor good nature; you will hear of whole systems of pensions or of carefor the sick, like those of a small and separate nation; you will seemuch cleanliness, order, and business habits in the offices and accountsof the estate. But if you ask again what has been the upshot, what hasbeen the actual result of the reign of landlords, again the answer isplain. At the end of the reign of landlords men will not live on theland. The practical effect of having landlords is not having tenants. The practical effect of having employers is that men are not employed. The unrest of the populace is therefore more than a murmur againsttyranny; it is against a sort of treason. It is the suspicion thateven at the top of the tree, even in the seats of the mighty, our verysuccess is unsuccessful. 

THE OTHER KIND OF MAN

There are some who are conciliated by Conciliation Boards. There aresome who, when they hear of Royal Commissions, breathe again—orsnore again. There are those who look forward to Compulsory ArbitrationCourts as to the islands of the blest. These men do not understand theday that they look upon or the sights that their eyes have seen. 

The almost sacramental idea of representation, by which the few mayincarnate the many, arose in the Middle Ages, and has done great thingsfor justice and liberty. It has had its real hours of triumph, as whenthe States General met to renew France's youth like the eagle's; orwhen all the virtues of the Republic fought and ruled in the figure ofWashington. It is not having one of its hours of triumph now. Thereal democratic unrest at this moment is not an extension of therepresentative process, but rather a revolt against it. It is no goodgiving those now in revolt more boards and committees and compulsoryregulations. It is against these very things that they are revolting. Men are not only rising against their oppressors, but against theirrepresentatives or, as they would say, their misrepresentatives. The inner and actual spirit of workaday England is coming out not inapplause, but in anger, as a god who should come out of his tabernacleto rebuke and confound his priests. 

There is a certain kind of man whom we see many times in a day, but whomwe do not, in general, bother very much about. He is the kind of man ofwhom his wife says that a better husband when he's sober you couldn'thave. She sometimes adds that he never is sober; but this is in angerand exaggeration. Really he drinks much less and works much more thanthe modern legend supposes. But it is quite true that he has not thehorror of bodily outbreak, natural to the classes that contain ladies;and it is quite true that he never has that alert and inventive sortof industry natural to the classes from which men can climb into greatwealth. He has grown, partly by necessity, but partly also by temper, accustomed to have dirty clothes and dirty hands normally and withoutdiscomfort. He regards cleanliness as a kind of separate and specialcostume; to be put on for great festivals. He has several really curiouscharacteristics, which would attract the eyes of sociologists, if theyhad any eyes. For instance, his vocabulary is coarse and abusive, inmarked contrast to his actual spirit, which is generally patient andcivil. He has an odd way of using certain words of really horriblemeaning, but using them quite innocently and without the most distanttaint of the evils to which they allude. He is rather sentimental; and, like most sentimental people, not devoid of snobbishness. At thesame time, he believes the ordinary manly commonplaces of freedom andfraternity as he believes most of the decent traditions of Christianmen: he finds it very difficult to act according to them, but thisdifficulty is not confined to him. He has a strong and individual senseof humour, and not much power of corporate or militant action. He is nota Socialist. Finally, he bears no more resemblance to a Labour Memberthan he does to a City Alderman or a Die-Hard Duke. This is the CommonLabourer of England; and it is he who is on the march at last. 

See this man in your mind as you see him in the street, realise that itis his open mind we wish to influence or his empty stomach we wish tocure, and then consider seriously (if you can) the five men, includingtwo of his own alleged oppressors, who were summoned as a RoyalCommission to consider his claims when he or his sort went out on strikeupon the railways. I knew nothing against, indeed I knew nothing about, any of the gentlemen then summoned, beyond a bare introduction toMr. Henderson, whom I liked, but whose identity I was in no danger ofconfusing with that of a railway-porter. I do not think that any oldgentleman, however absent-minded, would be likely on arriving at Euston, let us say, to hand his Gladstone-bag to Mr. Henderson or to attempt toreward that politician with twopence. Of the others I can only judgeby the facts about their status as set forth in the public Press. TheChairman, Sir David Harrell, appeared to be an ex-official distinguishedin (of all things in the world) the Irish Constabulary. I have noearthly reason to doubt that the Chairman meant to be fair; but I am nottalking about what men mean to be, but about what they are. The policein Ireland are practically an army of occupation; a man serving in themor directing them is practically a soldier; and, of course, he mustdo his duty as such. But it seems truly extraordinary to select as onelikely to sympathise with the democracy of England a man whose wholebusiness in life it has been to govern against its will the democracyof Ireland. What should we say if Russian strikers were offered thesympathetic arbitration of the head of the Russian Police in Finlandor Poland? And if we do not know that the whole civilised world seesIreland with Poland as a typical oppressed nation, it is time we did. The Chairman, whatever his personal virtues, must be by instinctand habit akin to the capitalists in the dispute. Two more of theCommissioners actually were the capitalists in the dispute. Thencame Mr. Henderson (pushing his trolley and cheerily crying, "By yourleave. "), and then another less known gentleman who had "corresponded"with the Board of Trade, and had thus gained some strange claim torepresent the very poor. 

Now people like this might quite possibly produce a rational enoughreport, and in this or that respect even improve things. Men ofthat kind are tolerably kind, tolerably patriotic, and tolerablybusiness-like. But if any one supposes that men of that kind canconceivably quiet any real 'quarrel with the Man of the Other Kind, theman whom I first described, it is frantic. The common worker is angryexactly because he has found out that all these boards consist of thesame well-dressed Kind of Man, whether they are called Governmental orCapitalist. If any one hopes that he will reconcile the poor, I say, asI said at the beginning, that such a one has not looked on the light ofday or dwelt in the land of the living. 

But I do not criticise such a Commission except for one most practicaland urgent purpose. It will be answered to me that the first Kind of Manof whom I spoke could not really be on boards and committees, as modernEngland is managed. His dirt, though necessary and honourable, wouldbe offensive: his speech, though rich and figurative, would be almostincomprehensible. Let us grant, for the moment, that this is so. ThisKind of Man, with his sooty hair or sanguinary adjectives, cannot berepresented at our committees of arbitration. Therefore, the other Kindof Man, fairly prosperous, fairly plausible, at home at least with themiddle class, capable at least of reaching and touching the upper class, he must remain the only Kind of Man for such councils. 

Very well. If then, you give at any future time any kind of compulsorypowers to such councils to prevent strikes, you will be driving thefirst Kind of Man to work for a particular master as much as if youdrove him with a whip. 

THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN

I see that there have been more attempts at the whitewashing of KingJohn. 

But the gentleman who wrote has a further interest in the matter; for hebelieves that King John was innocent, not only on this point, but as awhole. He thinks King John has been very badly treated; though I am notsure whether he would attribute to that Plantagenet a saintly merit ormerely a humdrum respectability. 

I sympathise with the whitewashing of King John, merely because it isa protest against our waxwork style of history. Everybody is in aparticular attitude, with particular moral attributes; Rufus is alwayshunting and Coeur-de-Lion always crusading; Henry VIII always marrying, and Charles I always having his head cut off; Alfred rapidly and inrotation making his people's clocks and spoiling their cakes; andKing John pulling out Jews' teeth with the celerity and industry ofan American dentist. Anything is good that shakes all this stiffsimplification, and makes us remember that these men were once alive;that is, mixed, free, flippant, and inconsistent. It gives the minda healthy kick to know that Alfred had fits, that Charles I preventedenclosures, that Rufus was really interested in architecture, that HenryVIII was really interested in theology. 

And as these scraps of reality can startle us into more solidimagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they areon the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I aPuritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that theywere people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself thinkthat John was a nice gentleman; but for all that the popular picture ofhim is all wrong. Whether he had any generous qualities or not, he hadwhat commonly makes them possible, dare-devil courage, for instance, andhotheaded decision. But, above all, he had a morality which he broke, but which we misunderstand. 

The mediaeval mind turned centrally upon the pivot of Free Will. Intheir social system the mediaevals were too much PARTI-PER-PALE, astheir heralds would say, too rigidly cut up by fences and quarteringsof guild or degree. But in their moral philosophy they always thought ofman as standing free and doubtful at the cross-roads in a forest. Whilethey clad and bound the body and (to some extent) the mind too stifflyand quaintly for our taste, they had a much stronger sense than we haveof the freedom of the soul. For them the soul always hung poised like aneagle in the heavens of liberty. Many of the things that strike a modernas most fantastic came from their keen sense of the power of choice. 

For instance, the greatest of the Schoolmen devotes folios to the minutedescription of what the world would have been like if Adam had refusedthe apple; what kings, laws, babies, animals, planets would have beenin an unfallen world. So intensely does he feel that Adam might havedecided the other way that he sees a complete and complex vision ofanother world, a world that now can never be. 

This sense of the stream of life in a man that may turn either waycan be felt through all their popular ethics in legend, chronicle, andballad. It is a feeling which has been weakened among us by two heavyintellectual forces. The Calvinism of the seventeenth century and thephysical science of the nineteenth, whatever other truths they may havetaught, have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom. We think ofbad men as something like black men, a separate and incurable kind ofpeople. The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism. Itbrought the villain upon the stage; the lost soul; the modern versionof King John. But the contemporaries of King John did not feel like thatabout him, even when they detested him. They instinctively felt him tobe a man of mixed passions like themselves, who was allowing his evilpassions to have much too good a time of it. They might have spoken ofhim as a man in considerable danger of going to hell; but they wouldhave not talked of him as if he had come from there. In the ballads ofPercy or Robin Hood it frequently happens that the King comes upon thescene, and his ultimate decision makes the climax of the tale. But wedo not feel, as we do in the Byronic or modern romance, that there isa definite stage direction "Enter Tyrant. " Nor do we behold a deus exmachina who is certain to do all that is mild and just. The King in theballad is in a state of virile indecision. Sometimes he will pass froma towering passion to the most sweeping magnanimity and friendliness;sometimes he will begin an act of vengeance and be turned from it bya jest. Yet this august levity is not moral indifference; it is moralfreedom. It is the strong sense in the writer that the King, beingthe type of man with power, will probably sometimes use it badly andsometimes well. In this sense John is certainly misrepresented, for heis pictured as something that none of his own friends or enemies saw. Inthat sense he was certainly not so black as he is painted, for he livedin a world where every one was piebald. 

King John would be represented in a modern play or novel as a kindof degenerate; a shifty-eyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul'sbackbone and green blood in his veins. The mediaevals were quite capableof boiling him in melted lead, but they would have been quite incapableof despairing of his soul in the modern fashion. A striking a fortioricase is that of the strange mediaeval legend of Robert the Devil. Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to an embittered womanactually in answer to prayers to Satan, and his earlier actions aresimply those of the infernal fire let loose upon earth. Yet though hecan be called almost literally a child of hell, yet the climax of thestory is his repentance at Rome and his great reparation. That is theparadox of mediaeval morals: as it must appear to the moderns. We musttry to conceive a race of men who hated John, and sought his blood, andbelieved every abomination about him, who would have been quite capableof assassinating or torturing him in the extremity of their anger. Andyet we must admit that they would not really have been fundamentallysurprised if he had shaved his head in humiliation, given all his goodsto the poor, embraced the lepers in a lazar-house, and been canonisedas a saint in heaven. So strongly did they hold that the pivot of Willshould turn freely, which now is rusted, and sticks. 

For we, whatever our political opinions, certainly never think of ourpublic men like that. If we hold the opinion that Mr. Lloyd George is anoble tribune of the populace and protector of the poor, we do not admitthat he can ever have paltered with the truth or bargained with thepowerful. If we hold the equally idiotic opinion that he is a red andrabid Socialist, maddening mobs into mutiny and theft, then we expecthim to go on maddening them—and us. We do not expect him, letus say, suddenly to go into a monastery. We have lost the idea ofrepentance; especially in public things; that is why we cannotreally get rid of our great national abuses of economic tyranny andaristocratic avarice. Progress in the modern sense is a very dismaldrudge; and mostly consists of being moved on by the police. We move onbecause we are not allowed to move back. But the really ragged prophets, the real revolutionists who held high language in the palaces of kings, they did not confine themselves to saying, "Onward, Christian soldiers, "still less, "Onward, Futurist soldiers"; what they said to high emperorsand to whole empires was, "Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?"

THE DIVINE DETECTIVE

Every person of sound education enjoys detective stories, and thereare even several points on which they have a hearty superiority tomost modern books. A detective story generally describes six livingmen discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic storygenerally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly bealive. But those who have enjoyed the roman policier must have notedone thing, that when the murderer is caught he is hardly ever hanged. "That, " says Sherlock Holmes, "is the advantage of being a privatedetective"; after he has caught he can set free. The Christian Churchcan best be defined as an enormous private detective, correctingthat official detective—the State. This, indeed, is one of theinjustices done to historic Christianity; injustices which arise fromlooking at complex exceptions and not at the large and simple fact. Weare constantly being told that theologians used racks and thumbscrews, and so they did. Theologians used racks and thumbscrews just as theyused thimbles and three-legged stools, because everybody else used them. Christianity no more created the mediaeval tortures than it did theChinese tortures; it inherited them from any empire as heathen as theChinese. 

The Church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth andemploy cruelty. But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture, if we look at the general shape and colour of the thing, the realdifference between the Church and the State is huge and plain. TheState, in all lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment, more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutaleverywhere. The Church is the only institution that ever attempted tocreate a machinery of pardon. The Church is the only thing that everattempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order toavenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely theweaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to theworld. Its speciality—or, if you like, its oddity—was thismerciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and notslay. 

I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to two popular playson somewhat parallel topics, which have been successful here and inAmerica. The Passing of the Third Floor Back is a humane and reverentexperiment, dealing with the influence of one unknown but divine figureas he passes through a group of Squalid characters. I have no desire tomake cheap fun of the extremely abrupt conversions of all these people;that is a point of art, not of morals; and, after all, many conversionshave been abrupt. This saviour's method of making people good is to tellthem how good they are already; and in the case of suicidal outcasts, whose moral backs are broken, and who are soaked with sincereself-contempt, I can imagine that this might be quite the right way. I should not deliver this message to authors or members of Parliament, because they would so heartily agree with it. 

Still, it is not altogether here that I differ from the moral of Mr. Jerome's play. I differ vitally from his story because it is not adetective story. There is in it none of this great Christian idea oftearing their evil out of men; it lacks the realism of the saints. Redemption should bring truth as well as peace; and truth is a finething, though the materialists did go mad about it. Things must befaced, even in order to be forgiven; the great objection to "lettingsleeping dogs lie" is that they lie in more senses than one. But in Mr. Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back the redeemer is not a divinedetective, pitiless in his resolve to know and pardon. Rather he is asort of divine dupe, who does not pardon at all, because he does notsee anything that is going on. It may, or may not, be true to say, "Toutcomprendre est tout pardonner. " But it is much more evidently true tosay, "Rien comprendre est rien Pardonner, " and the "Third Floor Back"does not seem to comprehend anything. He might, after all, be a quiteselfish sentimentalist, who found it comforting to think well of hisneighbours. There is nothing very heroic in loving after you have beendeceived. The heroic business is to love after you have been undeceived. 

When I saw this play it was natural to compare it with another playwhich I had not seen, but which I have read in its printed version. I mean Mr. Rann Kennedy's Servant in the House, the success of whichsprawls over so many of the American newspapers. This also is concernedwith a dim, yet evidently divine, figure changing the destinies of awhole group of persons. It is a better play structurally than the other;in fact, it is a very fine play indeed; but there is nothingaesthetic or fastidious about it. It is as much or more than the othersensational, democratic, and (I use the word in a sound and good sense)Salvationist. 

But the difference lies precisely in this—that the Christ of Mr. Kennedy's play insists on really knowing all the souls that he loves;he declines to conquer by a kind of supernatural stupidity. He pardonsevil, but he will not ignore it. In other words, he is a Christian, andnot a Christian Scientist. The distinction doubtless is partly explainedby the problems severally selected. Mr. Jerome practically supposesChrist to be trying to save disreputable people; and that, of course, is naturally a simple business. Mr. Kennedy supposes Him to be tryingto save the reputable people, which is a much larger affair. The chiefcharacters in The Servant in the House are a popular and strenuousvicar, universally respected, and his fashionable and forcible wife. It would have been no good to tell these people they had some good inthem—for that was what they were telling themselves all day long. They had to be reminded that they had some bad in them—instinctiveidolatries and silent treasons which they always tried to forget. It isin connection with these crimes of wealth and culture that we face thereal problem of positive evil. The whole of Mr. Blatchford's controversyabout sin was vitiated throughout by one's consciousness that wheneverhe wrote the word "sinner" he thought of a man in rags. But here, again, we can find truth merely by referring to vulgar literature—itsunfailing fountain. Whoever read a detective story about poor people?The poor have crimes; but the poor have no secrets. And it is becausethe proud have secrets that they need to be detected before they areforgiven. 

THE ELF OF JAPAN

There are things in this world of which I can say seriously that Ilove them but I do not like them. The point is not merely verbal, butpsychologically quite valid. Cats are the first things that occur to meas examples of the principle. Cats are so beautiful that a creature fromanother star might fall in love with them, and so incalculable that hemight kill them. Some of my friends take quite a high moral line aboutcats. Some, like Mr. Titterton, I think, admire a cat for its moralindependence and readiness to scratch anybody "if he does not behavehimself. " Others, like Mr. Belloe, regard the cat as cruel and secret, afit friend for witches; one who will devour everything, except, indeed, poisoned food, "so utterly lacking is it in Christian simplicity andhumility. " For my part, I have neither of these feelings. I admire catsas I admire catkins; those little fluffy things that hang on trees. Theyare both pretty and both furry, and both declare the glory of God. Andthis abstract exultation in all living things is truly to be calledLove; for it is a higher feeling than mere affectional convenience; itis a vision. It is heroic, and even saintly, in this: that it asks fornothing in return. I love all the eats in the street as St. Francis ofAssisi loved all the birds in the wood or all the fishes in the sea; notso much, of course, but then I am not a saint. But he did not wish tobridle a bird and ride on its back, as one bridles and rides on a horse. He did not wish to put a collar round a fish's neck, marked with thename "Francis, " and the address "Assisi"—as one does with a dog. He did not wish them to belong to him or himself to belong to them;in fact, it would be a very awkward experience to belong to a lot offishes. But a man does belong to his dog, in another but an equallyreal sense with that in which the dog belongs to him. The two bonds ofobedience and responsibility vary very much with the dogs and the men;but they are both bonds. In other words, a man does not merely love adog; as he might (in a mystical moment) love any sparrow that perchedon his windowsill or any rabbit that ran across his path. A man likes adog; and that is a serious matter. 

To me, unfortunately perhaps (for I speak merely of individual taste), acat is a wild animal. A cat is Nature personified. Like Nature, it isso mysterious that one cannot quite repose even in its beauty. But likeNature again, it is so beautiful that one cannot believe that it isreally cruel. Perhaps it isn't; and there again it is like Nature. Menof old time worshipped cats as they worshipped crocodiles; and thosemagnificent old mystics knew what they were about. The moment in whichone really loves cats is the same as that in which one (moderately andwithin reason) loves crocodiles. It is that divine instant when a manfeels himself—no, not absorbed into the unity of all things (aloathsome fancy)—but delighting in the difference of all things. At the moment when a man really knows he is a man he will feel, howeverfaintly, a kind of fairy-tale pleasure in the fact that a crocodile isa crocodile. All the more will he exult in the things that are moreevidently beautiful than crocodiles, such as flowers and birds andeats—which are more beautiful than either. But it does not followthat he will wish to pick all the flowers or to cage all the birds or toown all the cats. 

No one who still believes in democracy and the rights of man will admitthat any division between men and men can be anything but a fancifulanalogy to the division between men and animals. But in the sphere ofsuch fanciful analogy there are even human beings whom I feel to be likeeats in this respect: that I can love them without liking them. Ifeel it about certain quaint and alien societies, especially about theJapanese. The exquisite old Japanese draughtsmanship (of which we shallsee no more, now Japan has gone in for Progress and Imperialism) had aquality that was infinitely attractive and intangible. Japanese pictureswere really rather like pictures made by cats. They were full offeathery softness and of sudden and spirited scratches. If any one willwander in some gallery fortunate enough to have a fine collection ofthose slight water-colour sketches on rice paper which come from theremote East, he will observe many elements in them which a fancifulperson might consider feline. There is, for instance, that odd enjoymentof the tops of trees; those airy traceries of forks and fading twigs, upto which certainly no artist, but only a cat could climb. There is thatelvish love of the full moon, as large and lucid as a Chinese lantern, hung in these tenuous branches. That moon is so large and luminousthat one can imagine a hundred cats howling under it. Then there is theexhaustive treatment of the anatomy of birds and fish; subjects in whichcats are said to be interested. Then there is the slanting cat-like eyeof all these Eastern gods and men—but this is getting altogethertoo coincident. We shall have another racial theory in no time(beginning "Are the Japs Cats?"), and though I shall not believe inmy theory, somebody else might. There are people among my esteemedcorrespondents who might believe anything. It is enough for me to sayhere that in this small respect Japs affect me like cats. I mean that Ilove them. I love their quaint and native poetry, their instinct of easycivilisation, their unique unreplaceable art, the testimony they bearto the bustling, irrepressible activities of nature and man. If I werea real mystic looking down on them from a real mountain, I am sure Ishould love them more even than the strong winged and unwearied birdsor the fruitful, ever multiplying fish. But, as for liking them, as onelikes a dog—that is quite another matter. That would mean trustingthem. 

In the old English and Scotch ballads the fairies are regarded very muchin the way that I feel inclined to regard Japs and cats. They are notspecially spoken of as evil; they are enjoyed as witching and wonderful;but they are not trusted as good. You do not say the wrong words or givethe wrong gifts to them; and there is a curious silence about what wouldhappen to you if you did. Now to me, Japan, the Japan of Art, was alwaysa fairyland. What trees as gay as flowers and peaks as white aswedding cakes; what lanterns as large as houses and houses as frail aslanterns!… but. .. But. .. The missionary explained (I read in thepaper) that the assertion and denial about the Japanese use of torturewas a mere matter of verbal translation. "The Japanese would not calltwisting the thumbs back 'torture. '"

THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE

I find myself in agreement with Mr. Robert Lynd for his most just remarkin connection with the Malatesta case, that the police are becominga peril to society. I have no attraction to that sort of atheistasceticism to which the purer types of Anarchism tend; but both anatheist and an ascetic are better men than a spy; and it is ignominiousto see one's country thus losing her special point of honour aboutasylum and liberty. It will be quite a new departure if we begin toprotect and whitewash foreign policemen. I always understood it wasonly English policemen who were absolutely spotless. A good many of us, however, have begun to feel with Mr. Lynd, and on all sides authoritiesand officials are being questioned. But there is one most graphic andextraordinary fact, which it did not lie in Mr. Lynd's way to touchupon, but which somebody really must seize and emphasise. It isthis: that at the very time when we are all beginning to doubt theseauthorities, we are letting laws pass to increase their most capriciouspowers. All our commissions, petitions, and letters to the papersare asking whether these authorities can give an account of theirstewardship. And at the same moment all our laws are decreeing that theyshall not give any account of their stewardship, but shall become yetmore irresponsible stewards. Bills like the Feeble-Minded Bill andthe Inebriate Bill (very appropriate names for them) actually arm withscorpions the hand that has chastised the Malatestas and Maleckas withwhips. The inspector, the doctor, the police sergeant, the well-paidperson who writes certificates and "passes" this, that, or the other;this sort of man is being trusted with more authority, apparentlybecause he is being doubted with more reason. In one room we are askingwhy the Government and the great experts between them cannot sail aship. In another room we are deciding that the Government and expertsshall be allowed, without trial or discussion, to immure any one's body, damn any one's soul, and dispose of unborn generations with the levityof a pagan god. We are putting the official on the throne while he isstill in the dock. 

The mere meaning of words is now strangely forgotten and falsified; aswhen people talk of an author's "message, " without thinking whom itis from; and I have noted in these connections the strange misuse ofanother word. It is the excellent mediaeval word "charter. " I rememberthe Act that sought to save gutter-boys from cigarettes was called"The Children's Charter. " Similarly the Act which seeks to lock up aslunatics people who are not lunatics was actually called a "charter" ofthe feeble-minded. Now this terminology is insanely wrong, even if theBills are right. Even were they right in theory they would be appliedonly to the poor, like many better rules about education and cruelty. A woman was lately punished for cruelty because her children were notwashed when it was proved that she had no water. From that it will be aneasy step in Advanced Thought to punishing a man for wine-bibbing whenit is proved that he had no wine. Rifts in right reason widen down theages. And when we have begun by shutting up a confessedly kindperson for cruelty, we may yet come to shutting up Mr. Tom Mann forfeeblemindedness. 

But even if such laws do good to children or idiots, it is wrong to usethe word "charter. " A charter does not mean a thing that does good topeople. It means a thing that grants people more rights and liberties. It may be a good thing for gutter-boys to be deprived of theircigarettes: it might be a good thing for aldermen to be deprived oftheir cigars. But I think the Goldsmiths' Company would be very muchsurprised if the King granted them a new charter (in place of theirmediaeval charter), and it only meant that policemen might pull thecigars out of their mouths. It may be a good thing that all drunkardsshould be locked up: and many acute statesmen (King John, for instance)would certainly have thought it a good thing if all aristocrats couldbe locked up. But even that somewhat cynical prince would scarcely havegranted to the barons a thing called "the Great Charter" and then lockedthem all up on the strength of it. If he had, this interpretation of theword "charter" would have struck the barons with considerable surprise. I doubt if their narrow mediaeval minds could have taken it in. 

The roots of the real England are in the early Middle Ages, and noEnglishman will ever understand his own language (or even his ownconscience) till he understands them. And he will never understand themtill he understands this word "charter. " I will attempt in a momentto state in older, more suitable terms, what a charter was. In modern, practical, and political terms, it is quite easy to state what a charterwas. A charter was the thing that the railway workers wanted lastChristmas and did not get; and apparently will never get. It is calledin the current jargon "recognition"; the acknowledgment in so many wordsby society of the immunities or freedoms of a certain set of men. Ifthere had been railways in the Middle Ages there would probably havebeen a railwaymen's guild; and it would have had a charter from theKing, defining their rights. A charter is the expression of an ideastill true and then almost universal: that authority is necessaryfor nothing so much as for the granting of liberties. Like everythingmediaeval, it ramified back to a root in religion; and was a sort ofsmall copy of the Christian idea of man's creation. Man was free, notbecause there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free. By authority he was free. By authority the craftsmen of the guilds werefree. Many other great philosophers took and take the other view:the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists anddeterminists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gaveman a law. The mediaeval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter. Modern feeling may not sympathise with its list of liberties, whichincluded the liberty to be damned; but that has nothing to do with thefact that it was a gift of liberties and not of laws. This was mirrored, however dimly, in the whole system. There was a great deal of grossinequality; and in other aspects absolute equality was takenfor granted. But the point is that equality and inequality wereranks—or rights. There were not only things one was forbiddento do; but things one was forbidden to forbid. A man was not onlydefinitely responsible, but definitely irresponsible. The holidays ofhis soul were immovable feasts. All a charter really meant lingers alivein that poetic phrase that calls the wind a "chartered" libertine. 

Lie awake at night and hear the wind blowing; hear it knock at everyman's door and shout down every man's chimney. Feel how it takesliberties with everything, having taken primary liberty for itself; feelthat the wind is always a vagabond and sometimes almost a housebreaker. But remember that in the days when free men had charters, they held thatthe wind itself was wild by authority; and was only free because it hada father. 

THE CONTENTED MAN

The word content is not inspiring nowadays; rather it is irritatingbecause it is dull. It prepares the mind for a little sermon in thestyle of the Vicar of Wakefield about how you and I should be satisfiedwith our countrified innocence and our simple village sports. The word, however, has two meanings, somewhat singularly connected; the "sweetcontent" of the poet and the "cubic content" of the mathematician. Somedistinguish these by stressing the different syllables. Thus, it mighthappen to any of us, at some social juncture, to remark gaily, "Of thecontent of the King of the Cannibal Islands' Stewpot I am content to beignorant"; or "Not content with measuring the cubic content of my safe, you are stealing the spoons. " And there really is an analogy between themathematical and the moral use of the term, for lack of the observationof which the latter has been much weakened and misused. 

The preaching of contentment is in disrepute, well deserved in so farthat the moral is really quite inapplicable to the anarchy and insaneperil of our tall and toppling cities. Content suggests some kind ofsecurity; and it is not strange that our workers should often thinkabout rising above their position, since they have so continually tothink about sinking below it. The philanthropist who urges the poor tosaving and simple pleasures deserves all the derision that he gets. Toadvise people to be content with what they have got may or may not besound moral philosophy. 

But to urge people to be content with what they haven't got is a pieceof impudence hard for even the English poor to pardon. But though thecreed of content is unsuited to certain special riddles and wrongs, it remains true for the normal of mortal life. We speak of divinediscontent; discontent may sometimes be a divine thing, but content mustalways be the human thing. It may be true that a particular man, in hisrelation to his master or his neighbour, to his country or his enemies, will do well to be fiercely unsatisfied or thirsting for an angryjustice. But it is not true, no sane person can call it true, that manas a whole in his general attitude towards the world, in his posturetowards death or green fields, towards the weather or the baby, will bewise to cultivate dissatisfaction. In a broad estimate of our earthlyexperience, the great truism on the tablet remains: he must not covethis neighbour's ox nor his ass nor anything that is his. In highlycomplex and scientific civilisations he may sometimes find himselfforced into an exceptional vigilance. But, then, in highly complex andscientific civilisations, nine times out of ten, he only wants his ownass back. 

But I wish to urge the case for cubic content; in which (even more thanin moral content) I take a personal interest. Now, moral content hasbeen undervalued and neglected because of its separation from the othermeaning. It has become a negative rather than a positive thing. In someaccounts of contentment it seems to be little more than a meek despair. 

But this is not the true meaning of the term; it should stand for theidea of a positive and thorough appreciation of the content of anything;for feeling the substance and not merely the surface of experience. "Content" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased;placidly, perhaps, but still positively pleased. Being contented withbread and cheese ought not to mean not caring what you eat. It oughtto mean caring for bread and cheese; handling and enjoying the cubiccontent of the bread and cheese and adding it to your own. Beingcontent with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it andresigned to living in it. It ought to mean appreciating what there isto appreciate in such a position; such as the quaint and elvish slope ofthe ceiling or the sublime aerial view of the opposite chimney-pots. Andin this sense contentment is a real and even an active virtue; it is notonly affirmative, but creative. The poet in the attic does not forgetthe attic in poetic musings; he remembers whatever the attic has ofpoetry; he realises how high, how starry, how cool, how unadorned andsimple—in short, how Attic is the attic. 

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power ofgetting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous andit is rare. The absence of this digestive talent is what makes socold and incredible the tales of so many people who say they have been"through" things; when it is evident that they have come out on theother side quite unchanged. A man might have gone "through" a plumpudding as a bullet might go through a plum pudding; it depends on thesize of the pudding—and the man. But the awful and sacred questionis "Has the pudding been through him?" Has he tasted, appreciated, andabsorbed the solid pudding, with its three dimensions and its threethousand tastes and smells? Can he offer himself to the eyes of men asone who has cubically conquered and contained a pudding?

In the same way we may ask of those who profess to have passed throughtrivial or tragic experiences whether they have absorbed the contentof them; whether they licked up such living water as there was. It is apertinent question in connection with many modern problems. 

Thus the young genius says, "I have lived in my dreary and squalidvillage before I found success in Paris or Vienna. " The soundphilosopher will answer, "You have never lived in your village, or youwould not call it dreary and squalid. "

Thus the Imperialist, the Colonial idealist (who commonly speaks andalways thinks with a Yankee accent) will say, "I've been right away fromthese little muddy islands, and seen God's great seas and prairies. " Thesound philosopher will reply, "You have never been in these islands; youhave never seen the weald of Sussex or the plain of Salisbury; otherwiseyou could never have called them either muddy or little. "

Thus the Suffragette will say, "I have passed through the paltry dutiesof pots and pans, the drudgery of the vulgar kitchen; but I have comeout to intellectual liberty. " The sound philosopher will answer, "Youhave never passed through the kitchen, or you never would call itvulgar. Wiser and stronger women than you have really seen a poetryin pots and pans; naturally, because there is a poetry in them. " It isright for the village violinist to climb into fame in Paris or Vienna;it is right for the stray Englishman to climb across the high shoulderof the world; it is right for the woman to climb into whatever cathedraeor high places she can allow to her sexual dignity. But it is wrong thatany of these climbers should kick the ladder by which they have climbed. But indeed these bitter people who record their experiences reallyrecord their lack of experiences. It is the countryman who has notsucceeded in being a countryman who comes up to London. It is theclerk who has not succeeded in being a clerk who tries (on vegetarianprinciples) to be a countryman. And the woman with a past is generally awoman angry about the past she never had. 

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence andlove it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and reallybeen through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have themback again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, becausewe have drunk them dry. 

THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL

I have republished all these old articles of mine because they covera very controversial period, in which I was in nearly all thecontroversies, whether I was visible there or no. And I wish to gatherup into this last article a valedictory violence about all such things;and then pass to where, beyond these voices, there is peace—or inother words, to the writing of Penny Dreadfuls; a noble and much-neededwork. But before I finally desert the illusions of rationalism forthe actualities of romance, I should very much like to write one lastroaring, raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterlyirrational. The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, likethe Ten Commandments. I would call it "Don'ts for Dogmatists; or ThingsI am Tired Of. "

This book of intellectual etiquette, like most books of etiquette, wouldbegin with superficial things; but there would be, I fancy, a wailingimprecation in the words that could not be called artificial; it mightbegin thus:—

(1) Don't use a noun and then an adjective that crosses out the noun. An adjective qualifies, it cannot contradict. Don't say, "Give me apatriotism that is free from all boundaries. " It is like saying, "Giveme a pork pie with no pork in it. " Don't say, "I look forward to thatlarger religion that shall have no special dogmas. " It is like saying, "I look forward to that larger quadruped who shall have no feet. " Aquadruped means something with four feet; and a religion means somethingthat commits a man to some doctrine about the universe. Don't letthe meek substantive be absolutely murdered by the joyful, exuberantadjective. 

(2) Don't say you are not going to say a thing, and then say it. Thispractice is very flourishing and successful with public speakers. Thetrick consists of first repudiating a certain view in unfavourableterms, and then repeating the same view in favourable terms. Perhaps thesimplest form of it may be found in a landlord of my neighbourhood, whosaid to his tenants in an election speech, "Of course I'm not going tothreaten you, but if this Budget passes the rents will go up. " The thingcan be done in many forms besides this. "I am the last man tomention party politics; but when I see the Empire rent in pieces byirresponsible Radicals, " etc. "In this hall we welcome all creeds. Wehave no hostility against any honest belief; but only against that blackpriestcraft and superstition which can accept such a doctrine as, " etc. "I would not say one word that could ruffle our relations with Germany. But this I will say; that when I see ceaseless and unscrupulousarmament, " etc. Please don't do it. Decide to make a remark or not tomake a remark. But don't fancy that you have somehow softened the sayingof a thing by having just promised not to say it. 

(3) Don't use secondary words as primary words. "Happiness" (let us say)is a primary word. You know when you have the thing, and you jolly wellknow when you haven't. "Progress" is a secondary word; it means thedegree of one's approach to happiness, or to some such solid ideal. Butmodern controversies constantly turn on asking, "Does Happiness helpProgress?" Thus, I see in the New Age this week a letter from Mr. Egerton Swann, in which he warns the world against me and my friend Mr. Belloc, on the ground that our democracy is "spasmodic" (whatever thatmeans); while our "reactionism is settled and permanent. " It neverstrikes Mr. Swann that democracy means something in itself; while"reactionism" means nothing—except in connection with democracy. You cannot react except from something. If Mr. Swann thinks I have everreacted from the doctrine that the people should rule, I wish he wouldgive me the reference. 

(4) Don't say, "There is no true creed; for each creed believes itselfright and the others wrong. " Probably one of the creeds is right andthe others are wrong. Diversity does show that most of the views mustbe wrong. It does not by the faintest logic show that they all must bewrong. I suppose there is no subject on which opinions differ with moredesperate sincerity than about which horse will win the Derby. These arecertainly solemn convictions; men risk ruin for them. The man who putshis shirt on Potosi must believe in that animal, and each of the othermen putting their last garments upon other quadrupeds must believe inthem quite as sincerely. They are all serious, and most of them arewrong. But one of them is right. One of the faiths is justified; one ofthe horses does win; not always even the dark horse which might standfor Agnosticism, but often the obvious and popular horse of Orthodoxy. Democracy has its occasional victories; and even the Favourite has beenknown to come in first. But the point here is that something comes infirst. That there were many beliefs does not destroy the fact that therewas one well-founded belief. I believe (merely upon authority) that theworld is round. That there may be tribes who believe it to be triangularor oblong does not alter the fact that it is certainly some shape, andtherefore not any other shape. Therefore I repeat, with the wail ofimprecation, don't say that the variety of creeds prevents you fromaccepting any creed. It is an unintelligent remark. 

(5) Don't (if any one calls your doctrine mad, which is likely enough), don't answer that madmen are only the minority and the sane only themajority. The sane are sane because they are the corporate substance ofmankind; the insane are not a minority because they are not a mob. Theman who thinks himself a man thinks the next man a man; he reckons hisneighbour as himself. But the man who thinks he is a chicken does nottry to look through the man who thinks he is glass. The man who thinkshimself Jesus Christ does not quarrel with the man who thinks himselfRockefeller; as would certainly happen if the two had ever met. Butmadmen never meet. It is the only thing they cannot do. They can talk, they can inspire, they can fight, they can found religions; but theycannot meet. Maniacs can never be the majority; for the simple reasonthat they can never be even a minority. If two madmen had ever agreedthey might have conquered the world. 

(6) Don't say that the idea of human equality is absurd, because somemen are tall and some short, some clever and some stupid. At the heightof the French Revolution it was noticed that Danton was tall and Muratshort. In the wildest popular excitement of America it is known thatRockefeller is stupid and that Bryan is clever. The doctrine of humanequality reposes upon this: That there is no man really clever who hasnot found that he is stupid. That there is no big man who has not feltsmall. Some men never feel small; but these are the few men who are. 

(7) Don't say (O don't say) that Primitive Man knocked down a womanwith a club and carried her away. Why on earth should he? Does the malesparrow knock down the female sparrow with a twig? Does the male giraffeknock down the female giraffe with a palm tree? Why should the malehave had to use any violence at any time in order to make the female afemale? Why should the woman roll herself in the mire lower than thesow or the she-bear; and profess to have been a slave where all thesecreatures were creators; where all these beasts were gods? Do nottalk such bosh. I implore you, I supplicate you not to talk such bosh. Utterly and absolutely abolish all such bosh—and we may yetbegin to discuss these public questions properly. But I fear my list ofprotests grows too long; and I know it could grow longer for ever. Thereader must forgive my elongations and elaborations. I fancied for themoment that I was writing a book.