ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS

By G. K. Chesterton

CONTENTS

 1: INTRODUCTORY: ON GARGOYLES

 2: THE SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY

 3: THE NIGHTMARE

 4: THE TELEGRAPH POLES

 5: A DRAMA OF DOLLS

 6: THE MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER

 7: THE APPETITE OF EARTH

 8: SIMMONS AND THE SOCIAL TIE

 9: CHEESE

10: THE RED TOWN

11: THE FURROWS

12: THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING

13: A CRIMINAL HEAD

14: THE WRATH OF THE ROSES

15: THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY

16: THE FUTURISTS

17: DUKES

18: THE GLORY OF GREY

19: THE ANARCHIST

20: HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN

21: THE NEW HOUSE

22: THE WINGS OF STONE

23: THE THREE KINDS OF MEN

24: THE STEWARD OF THE CHILTERN HUNDREDS

25: THE FIELD OF BLOOD

26: THE STRANGENESS OF LUXURY

27: THE TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY

28: THE WHEEL

29: FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE

30: ETHANDUNE

31: THE FLAT FREAK

32: THE GARDEN OF THE SEA

33: THE SENTIMENTALIST

34: THE WHITE HORSES

35: THE LONG BOW

36: THE MODERN SCROOGE

37: THE HIGH PLAINS

38: THE CHORUS

39: A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES

Introductory: On Gargoyles

Alone at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused abbey I foundhalf sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of thosegraven monsters that made the ornamental water-spouts in the cathedralsof the Middle Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or striped byrecent fungus, but still looking like the head of some huge dragon slainby a primeval hero. And as I looked at it, I thought of the meaning ofthe grotesque, and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three greatstages of art. 

I

Once upon a time there lived upon an island a merry and innocent people, mostly shepherds and tillers of the earth. They were republicans, likeall primitive and simple souls; they talked over their affairs under atree, and the nearest approach they had to a personal ruler was asort of priest or white witch who said their prayers for them. Theyworshipped the sun, not idolatrously, but as the golden crown of the godwhom all such infants see almost as plainly as the sun. 

Now this priest was told by his people to build a great tower, pointingto the sky in salutation of the Sun-god; and he pondered long andheavily before he picked his materials. For he was resolved to usenothing that was not almost as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself;he would use nothing that was not washed as white as the rain can washthe heavens, nothing that did not sparkle as spotlessly as that crown ofGod. He would have nothing grotesque or obscure; he would not have evenanything emphatic or even anything mysterious. He would have all thearches as light as laughter and as candid as logic. He built the templein three concentric courts, which were cooler and more exquisite insubstance each than the other. For the outer wall was a hedge of whitelilies, ranked so thick that a green stalk was hardly to be seen;and the wall within that was of crystal, which smashed the sun into amillion stars. And the wall within that, which was the tower itself, wasa tower of pure water, forced up in an everlasting fountain; and uponthe very tip and crest of that foaming spire was one big and blazingdiamond, which the water tossed up eternally and caught again as a childcatches a ball. 

"Now, " said the priest, "I have made a tower which is a little worthy ofthe sun. "

II

But about this time the island was caught in a swarm of pirates; and theshepherds had to turn themselves into rude warriors and seamen; and atfirst they were utterly broken down in blood and shame; and the piratesmight have taken the jewel flung up for ever from their sacred fount. And then, after years of horror and humiliation, they gained a littleand began to conquer because they did not mind defeat. And the pride ofthe pirates went sick within them after a few unexpected foils; and atlast the invasion rolled back into the empty seas and the island wasdelivered. And for some reason after this men began to talk quitedifferently about the temple and the sun. Some, indeed, said, "You mustnot touch the temple; it is classical; it is perfect, since it admitsno imperfections. " But the others answered, "In that it differs fromthe sun, that shines on the evil and the good and on mud and monsterseverywhere. The temple is of the noon; it is made of white marble cloudsand sapphire sky. But the sun is not always of the noon. The sun diesdaily, every night he is crucified in blood and fire. " Now the priesthad taught and fought through all the war, and his hair had grown white, but his eyes had grown young. And he said, "I was wrong and they areright. The sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all thoseearthly things that are full of ugliness and energy. All theexaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let uspoint to heaven with tusks and horns and fins and trunks and tails solong as they all point to heaven. The ugly animals praise God as muchas the beautiful. The frog's eyes stand out of his head because he isstaring at heaven. The giraffe's neck is long because he is stretchingtowards heaven. The donkey has ears to hear--let him hear. "

And under the new inspiration they planned a gorgeous cathedral in theGothic manner, with all the animals of the earth crawling over it, andall the possible ugly things making up one common beauty, because theyall appealed to the god. The columns of the temple were carved like thenecks of giraffes; the dome was like an ugly tortoise; and the highestpinnacle was a monkey standing on his head with his tail pointing at thesun. And yet the whole was beautiful, because it was lifted up in oneliving and religious gesture as a man lifts his hands in prayer. 

III

But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had broughtup on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone, and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity, the owlsand the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideousby themselves might have been magnificent if reared in one definiteproportion and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, this wasromantic, this was Christian art; this was the whole advance ofShakespeare upon Sophocles. And that symbol which was to crown it all, the ape upside down, was really Christian; for man is the ape upsidedown. 

But the rich, who had grown riotous in the long peace, obstructed thething, and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head andhe lost his memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants, monkeys and giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things of theuniverse which he had collected to do honour to God. But he forgot whyhe had collected them. He could not remember the design or the object. He piled them all wildly into one heap fifty feet high; and when he haddone it all the rich and influential went into a passion of applause andcried, "This is real art! This is Realism! This is things as they reallyare!"

That, I fancy, is the only true origin of Realism. Realism is simplyRomanticism that has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the senseof insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reasonfor existing. The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship theirgod. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon allthese million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god forthem to worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters ofugliness; and that in my belief was the zenith and the noon. Modernart and science practically mean having the million monsters and beingunable to control them; and I will venture to call that the disruptionand the decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist splendidhouses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with its gargoylesand grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey couldgo before all the horses of the world when it was really going to thetemple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple. Realism means alost donkey going nowhere. 

The fragments of futile journalism or fleeting impression which are herecollected are very like the wrecks and riven blocks that were piled in aheap round my imaginary priest of the sun. They are very like that greyand gaping head of stone that I found overgrown with the grass. Yet Iwill venture to make even of these trivial fragments the high boast thatI am a medievalist and not a modern. That is, I really have a notion ofwhy I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have notthe patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state theconnecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could bestated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I nowset before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut outcapriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters aremeant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve thegargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others theangels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style ofthe architecture, and of the consecration of the church. 

The Surrender of a Cockney

Evert man, though he were born in the very belfry of Bow and spent hisinfancy climbing among chimneys, has waiting for him somewhere a countryhouse which he has never seen; but which was built for him in the veryshape of his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found, knee-deep inorchards of Kent or mirrored in pools of Lincoln; and when the man seesit he remembers it, though he has never seen it before. Even I have beenforced to confess this at last, who am a Cockney, if ever there was one, a Cockney not only on principle, but with savage pride. I have alwaysmaintained, quite seriously, that the Lord is not in the wind or thunderof the waste, but if anywhere in the still small voice of Fleet Street. I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally dangerousthan the most vulgar man-worship of the cities; since it can easily beperverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, orcruelty. Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devotedhimself to a greengrocer instead of to greens. Swinburne would havebeen a better moralist if he had worshipped a fishmonger instead ofworshipping the sea. I prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar tothe philosophy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may be playful, but isseldom respectful. But when we wish to pay emphatic honour to a man, topraise the firmness of his nature, the squareness of his conduct, thestrong humility with which he is interlocked with his equals in silentmutual support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney metaphor, and call hima brick. 

But, despite all these theories, I have surrendered; I have struck mycolours at sight; at a mere glimpse through the opening of a hedge. Ishall come down to living in the country, like any common Socialist orSimple Lifer. I shall end my days in a village, in the character ofthe Village Idiot, and be a spectacle and a judgment to mankind. I havealready learnt the rustic manner of leaning upon a gate; and I was thusgymnastically occupied at the moment when my eye caught the house thatwas made for me. It stood well back from the road, and was built of agood yellow brick; it was narrow for its height, like the tower of someBorder robber; and over the front door was carved in large letters, "1908. " That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquariansentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind ofecstasy. My friend (who was helping me to lean on the gate) asked mewith some curiosity what I was doing. 

"My dear fellow, " I said, with emotion, "I am bidding farewell toforty-three hansom cabmen. "

"Well, " he said, "I suppose they would think this county rather outsidethe radius. "

"Oh, my friend, " I cried brokenly, "how beautiful London is! Why do theyonly write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry intoCockney. 

 "'My heart leaps up when I behold A sky-sign in the sky, '

"as I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on theolder English poets. You never saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded; or, TheClassics Made Cockney'--it contained some fine lines. 

 "'O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being, '

"or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning

 "'City of smuts and mellow fogfulness. ';

"I have written many such lines on the beauty of London; yet I neverrealized that London was really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why?It is because I have left it for ever. "

"If you will take my advice, " said my friend, "you will humbly endeavournot to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that everyliterary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys andthe squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London;Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quiteenough of the country. And as for trumpery topical journalists like you, why, they would cut their throats in the country. You have confessedit yourself in your own last words. You hunger and thirst after thestreets; you think London the finest place on the planet. And if by somemiracle a Bayswater omnibus could come down this green country lane youwould utter a yell of joy. "

Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terriblesternness. 

"Why, miserable aesthete, " I said in a voice of thunder, "that is thetrue country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rusticdoes utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The realrustic does think London the finest place on the planet. In the fewmoments that I have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here likean ancient tree; I have been here for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am thereal rustic. I believe that the streets of London are paved with gold;and I mean to see it before I die. "

The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of thatlane, and the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind myCountry Seat, the house that belonged to me, making, by contrast, itsyellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend said: "To cut it short, then, you mean that you will live in the country because you won't likeit. What on earth will you do here; dig up the garden?"

"Dig!" I answered, in honourable scorn. "Dig! Do work at my CountrySeat; no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit in it. And foryour other objection, you are quite wrong. I do not dislike the country, but I like the town more. Therefore the art of happiness certainlysuggests that I should live in the country and think about the town. Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to bethe ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. Iam on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go toLondon. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wantsto go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I amthat sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as rusticslove it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney version of TheGolden Treasury)--

 "'Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos? stoves, Forbode not any severing of our loves. I have relinquished but your earthly sight, To hold you dear in a more distant way. I'll love the 'buses lumbering through the wet, Even more than when I lightly tripped as they. The grimy colour of the London clay Is lovely yet, '

"because I have found the house where I was really born; the tall andquiet house from which I can see London afar off, as the miracle of manthat it is. "

The Nightmare

A sunset of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces inthe west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth andheaven; also a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger uponflesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to whisperlike conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I wastrying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem ofthe decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal faces. 

 "Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plagued the Hebrews and was splashed With wine unto the waist, or Pasht who had green beryls for her eyes?"

I read this poem because I had to review it for the Daily News; stillit was genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out an atmosphere, a fragrant and suffocating smoke that seemed really to come from theBondage of Egypt or the Burden of Tyre There is not much in common(thank God) between my garden with the grey-green English sky-linebeyond it, and these mad visions of painted palaces huge, headlessidols and monstrous solitudes of red or golden sand. Nevertheless (asI confessed to myself) I can fancy in such a stormy twilight some suchsmell of death and fear. The ruined sunset really looks like one oftheir ruined temples: a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A blackflapping thing detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and fluttersto another. I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could fancy itwas a black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wingsof a bird and the head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin and thewings of a bat. I think, if there were light enough, I could sit hereand write some very creditable creepy tale, about how I went up thecrooked road beyond the church and met Something--say a dog, a dog withone eye. Then I should meet a horse, perhaps, a horse without a rider, the horse also would have one eye. Then the inhuman silence would bebroken; I should meet a man (need I say, a one-eyed man?) who would askme the way to my own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was burnt to theground. I could tell a very cosy little tale along some such lines. Or Imight dream of climbing for ever the tall dark trees above me. They areso tall that I feel as if I should find at their tops the nests of theangels; but in this mood they would be dark and dreadful angels; angelsof death. 

Only, you see, this mood is all bosh. I do not believe in it in theleast. That one-eyed universe, with its one-eyed men and beasts, wasonly created with one universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees Ishould not find the Angel's Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest;the dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the Mare's Nest I shalldiscover that dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched theNightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare--when youknow it is a nightmare. 

That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon allartists touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentallyfrivolous. Sanity may play with insanity; but insanity must not beallowed to play with sanity. Let such poets as the one I was reading inthe garden, by all means, be free to imagine what outrageous deities andviolent landscapes they like. By all means let them wander freely amidtheir opium pinnacles and perspectives. But these huge gods, thesehigh cities, are toys; they must never for an instant be allowed tobe anything else. Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon andNineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of theBondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By all means let himtake up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But theold gods must be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, histrue possessions, should be Christian and simple. And just as a childwould cherish most a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross ofwood, so man, the great child, must cherish most the old plain things ofpoetry and piety; that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, orthat cross of wood that redeemed and conquered the world. 

In one of Stevenson's letters there is a characteristically humorousremark about the appalling impression produced on him in childhoodby the beasts with many eyes in the Book of Revelations: "If that washeaven, what in the name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in sobertruth there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse. It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or moreuniversal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused. Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex andmore staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude ofeyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne very much. But I likethem beneath the throne. It is when one of them goes wandering indeserts and finds a throne for himself that evil faiths begin, andthere is (literally) the devil to pay--to pay in dancing girls or humansacrifice. As long as those misshapen elemental powers are around thethrone, remember that the thing that they worship is the likeness of theappearance of a man. 

That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terrorand such things, which unless a man of letters do well and trulybelieve, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or bywriting badly. Man, the central pillar of the world must be upright andstraight; around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devilsmay crook and curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginativeliterature is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature andthe straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes ifhe is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak thatthey will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chainedto the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to thebrink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when youlook up at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made. 

Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; shewhinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I willcatch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are aliketugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to flywith us over the moon, like that wild amorous cow whose child was theMoon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither upnor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will answer thecall of chaos and old night. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shallnot ride on me. 

The Telegraph Poles

My friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine-wood whichmake inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe; which havethe true terror of a desert, since they are uniform, and so one may loseone's way in them. Stiff, straight, and similar, stood up all aroundus the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a silent mutiny. There is atruth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature oftenshows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird rhythm inthis very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat asingle shape until the shape shall turn terrible. 

Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as"dog, " thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like"snark" or "pobble. " It does not become tame, it becomes wild, byrepetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherableas Leviathan or Croquemitaine. 

It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be forthis reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles. Perhapsthey are not repeated so that they may grow familiar. Perhaps they arerepeated only in the hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar. Perhapsa man is not startled at the first cat he sees, but jumps into the airwith surprise at the seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass throughthousands of pine trees before he finds the one that is really a pinetree. However this may be, there is something singularly thrilling, evensomething urgent and intolerant, about the endless forest repetitions;there is the hint of something like madness in that musical monotony ofthe pines. 

I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with sardonictruth, "Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post. "

My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions, especially upon points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest by oneof its paths which happened to follow the wires of the provincialtelegraphy; and though the poles occurred at long intervals they made adifference when they came. The instant we came to the straight pole wecould see that the pines were not really straight. It was like a hundredstraight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all brought to judgmentsuddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler. All the amateur linesseemed to reel to right and left. A moment before I could have swornthey stood as straight as lances; now I could see them curve and wavereverywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Compared with the telegraphpost the pines were crooked--and alive. That lonely vertical rod at oncedeformed and enfranchised the forest. It tangled it all together and yetmade it free, like any grotesque undergrowth of oak or holly. 

"Yes, " said my gloomy friend, answering my thoughts. "You don't knowwhat a wicked shameful thing straightness is if you think these treesare straight. You never will know till your precious intellectualcivilization builds a forty-mile forest of telegraph poles. "

We had started walking from our temporary home later in the day than weintended; and the long afternoon was already lengthening itself out intoa yellow evening when we came out of the forest on to the hills abovea strange town or village, of which the lights had already begun toglitter in the darkening valley. The change had already happened whichis the test and definition of evening. I mean that while the sky seemedstill as bright, the earth was growing blacker against it, especiallyat the edges, the hills and the pine-tops. This brought out yet moreclearly the owlish secrecy of pine-woods; and my friend cast a regretfulglance at them as he came out under the sky. Then he turned to the viewin front; and, as it happened, one of the telegraph posts stood up infront of him in the last sunlight. It was no longer crossed and softenedby the more delicate lines of pine wood; it stood up ugly, arbitrary, and angular as any crude figure in geometry. My friend stopped, pointinghis stick at it, and all his anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips. 

"Demon, " he said to me briefly, "behold your work. That palace ofproud trees behind us is what the world was before you civilized men, Christians or democrats or the rest, came to make it dull with yourdreary rules of morals and equality. In the silent fight of that forest, tree fights speechless against tree, branch against branch. And theupshot of that dumb battle is inequality--and beauty. Now lift up youreyes and look at equality and ugliness. See how regularly the whitebuttons are arranged on that black stick, and defend your dogmas if youdare. "

"Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of democracy?" I asked. "Ifancy that while three men have made the telegraph to get dividends, about a thousand men have preserved the forest to cut wood. But if thetelegraph pole is hideous (as I admit) it is not due to doctrinebut rather to commercial anarchy. If any one had a doctrine about atelegraph pole it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold. Modernthings are ugly, because modern men are careless, not because they arecareful. "

"No, " answered my friend with his eye on the end of a splendid andsprawling sunset, "there is something intrinsically deadening aboutthe very idea of a doctrine. A straight line is always ugly. Beauty isalways crooked. These rigid posts at regular intervals are ugly becausethey are carrying across the world the real message of democracy. "

"At this moment, " I answered, "they are probably carrying across theworld the message, 'Buy Bulgarian Rails. ' They are probably the promptcommunication between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of Hischildren with whom God has ever had patience. No; these telegraphpoles are ugly and detestable, they are inhuman and indecent. But theirbaseness lies in their privacy, not in their publicity. That black stickwith white buttons is not the creation of the soul of a multitude. It isthe mad creation of the souls of two millionaires. "

"At least you have to explain, " answered my friend gravely, "how it isthat the hard democratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic outline haveappeared together; you have. .. But bless my soul, we must be gettinghome. I had no idea it was so late. Let me see, I think this is ourway through the wood. Come, let us both curse the telegraph post forentirely different reasons and get home before it is dark. "

We did not get home before it was dark. For one reason or another we hadunderestimated the swiftness of twilight and the suddenness of night, especially in the threading of thick woods. When my friend, after thefirst five minutes' march, had fallen over a log, and I, ten minutesafter, had stuck nearly to the knees in mire, we began to have somesuspicion of our direction. At last my friend said, in a low, huskyvoice:

"I'm afraid we're on the wrong path. It's pitch dark. "

"I thought we went the right way, " I said, tentatively. 

"Well, " he said; and then, after a long pause, "I can't see anytelegraph poles. I've been looking for them. "

"So have I, " I said. "They're so straight. "

We groped away for about two hours of darkness in the thick of thefringe of trees which seemed to dance round us in derision. Here andthere, however, it was possible to trace the outline of something justtoo erect and rigid to be a pine tree. By these we finally felt our wayhome, arriving in a cold green twilight before dawn. 

A Drama of Dolls

In a small grey town of stone in one of the great Yorkshire dales, whichis full of history, I entered a hall and saw an old puppet-playexactly as our fathers saw it five hundred years ago. It was admirablytranslated from the old German, and was the original tale of Faust. Thedolls were at once comic and convincing; but if you cannot at once laughat a thing and believe in it, you have no business in the Middle Ages. Or in the world, for that matter. 

The puppet-play in question belongs, I believe, to the fifteenthcentury; and indeed the whole legend of Dr. Faustus has the colour ofthat grotesque but somewhat gloomy time. It is very unfortunate thatwe so often know a thing that is past only by its tail end. We rememberyesterday only by its sunsets. There are many instances. One isNapoleon. We always think of him as a fat old despot, ruling Europe witha ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord Rosebery would say, was only "The Last Phase"; or at least the last but one. During thestrongest and most startling part of his career, the time that made himimmortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy, and not a bad sort of boy either, bullet-headed and ambitious, but honestly in love with a woman, andhonestly enthusiastic for a cause, the cause of French justice andequality. 

Another instance is the Middle Ages, which we also remember only by theodour of their ultimate decay. We think of the life of the Middle Agesas a dance of death, full of devils and deadly sins, lepers and burningheretics. But this was not the life of the Middle Ages, but the deathof the Middle Ages. It is the spirit of Louis XI and Richard III, not ofLouis IX and Edward I. 

This grim but not unwholesome fable of Dr. Faustus, with its rebuke tothe mere arrogance of learning, is sound and stringent enough; but it isnot a fair sample of the mediaeval soul at its happiest and sanest. Theheart of the true Middle Ages might be found far better, for instance, in the noble tale of Tannhauser, in which the dead staff broke into leafand flower to rebuke the pontiff who had declared even one human beingbeyond the strength of sorrow and pardon. 

But there were in the play two great human ideas which the mediaevalmind never lost its grip on, through the heaviest nightmares of itsdissolution. They were the two great jokes of mediaevalism, as they arethe two eternal jokes of mankind. Wherever those two jokes existthere is a little health and hope; wherever they are absent, pride andinsanity are present. The first is the idea that the poor man ought toget the better of the rich man. The other is the idea that the husbandis afraid of the wife. 

I have heard that there is a place under the knee which, when struck, should produce a sort of jump; and that if you do not jump, you are mad. I am sure that there are some such places in the soul. When the humanspirit does not jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, thehuman spirit must be struck with incurable paralysis. There is hopefor people who have gone down into the hells of greed and economicoppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are such a peopleourselves), but there is no hope for a people that does not exult in theabstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There is hope forthe idle and the adulterous, for the men that desert their wives and themen that beat their wives. But there is no hope for men who do not boastthat their wives bully them. 

The first idea, the idea about the man at the bottom coming out on top, is expressed in this puppet-play in the person of Dr. Faustus' servant, Caspar. Sentimental old Tones, regretting the feudal times, sometimescomplain that in these days Jack is as good as his master. But most ofthe actual tales of the feudal times turn on the idea that Jack is muchbetter than his master, and certainly it is so in the case of Caspar andFaust. The play ends with the damnation of the learned and illustriousdoctor, followed by a cheerful and animated dance by Caspar, who hasbeen made watchman of the city. 

But there was a much keener stroke of mediaeval irony earlier in theplay. The learned doctor has been ransacking all the libraries of theearth to find a certain rare formula, now almost unknown, by which hecan control the infernal deities. At last he procures the one preciousvolume, opens it at the proper page, and leaves it on the table whilehe seeks some other part of his magic equipment. The servant comesin, reads off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor ofthe elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons anddismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working athigh speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and theirown more unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue. There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea of the greatlevellers, luck and laughter; the idea of a sense of humour defying anddominating hell. 

One of the best points in the play as performed in this Yorkshire townwas that the servant Caspar was made to talk Yorkshire, instead of theGerman rustic dialect which he talked in the original. That also smacksof the good air of that epoch. In those old pictures and poems theyalways made things living by making them local. Thus, queerly enough, the one touch that was not in the old mediaeval version was the mostmediaeval touch of all. 

That other ancient and Christian jest, that a wife is a holy terror, occurs in the last scene, where the doctor (who wears a fur coatthroughout, to make him seem more offensively rich and refined) isattempting to escape from the avenging demons, and meets his old servantin the street. The servant obligingly points out a house with a bluedoor, and strongly recommends Dr. Faustus to take refuge in it. "My oldwoman lives there, " he says, "and the devils are more afraid of herthan you are of them. " Faustus does not take this advice, but goes onmeditating and reflecting (which had been his mistake all along) untilthe clock strikes twelve, and dreadful voices talk Latin in heaven. So Faustus, in his fur coat, is carried away by little black imps; andserve him right for being an Intellectual. 

The Man and His Newspaper

At a little station, which I decline to specify, somewhere betweenOxford and Guildford, I missed a connection or miscalculated a routein such manner that I was left stranded for rather more than an hour. I adore waiting at railway stations, but this was not a very sumptuousspecimen. There was nothing on the platform except a chocolate automaticmachine, which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no correspondingchocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few remaining copies of acheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire. It does notmatter which imperial organ it was, as they all say the same thing. 

Though I knew it quite well already, I read it with gravity as Istrolled out of the station and up the country road. It opened with thestriking phrase that the Radicals were setting class against class. Itwent on to remark that nothing had contributed more to make our Empirehappy and enviable, to create that obvious list of glories which you cansupply for yourself, the prosperity of all classes in our great cities, our populous and growing villages, the success of our rule in Ireland, etc. , etc. , than the sound Anglo-Saxon readiness of all classes in theState "to work heartily hand-in-hand. " It was this alone, the paperassured me, that had saved us from the horrors of the French Revolution. "It is easy for the Radicals, " it went on very solemnly, "to make jokesabout the dukes. Very few of these revolutionary gentlemen have givento the poor one half of the earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, andtruly Christian patience that are given to them by the great landlordsof this country. We are very sure that the English people, with theirsturdy common sense, will prefer to be in the hands of English gentlemenrather than in the miry claws of Socialistic buccaneers. "

Just when I had reached this point I nearly ran into a man. Despite thepopulousness and growth of our villages, he appeared to be the only manfor miles, but the road up which I had wandered turned and narrowed withequal abruptness, and I nearly knocked him off the gate on which hewas leaning. I pulled up to apologize, and since he seemed ready forsociety, and even pathetically pleased with it, I tossed the DailyWire over a hedge and fell into speech with him. He wore a wreck ofrespectable clothes, and his face had that plebeian refinement which onesees in small tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of sedentary trades. Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt andtattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy that hesymbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood. There was a fixedlook in his face which told that he was one of those who in keeping bodyand soul together have difficulties not only with the body, but alsowith the soul. 

He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent of thosestreets from which I am an exile; but he had lived nearly all his lifein this countryside; and he began to tell me the affairs of it in thatformless, tail-foremost way in which the poor gossip about their greatneighbours. Names kept coming and going in the narrative like charms orspells, unaccompanied by any biographical explanation. In particularthe name of somebody called Sir Joseph multiplied itself with theomnipresence of a deity. I took Sir Joseph to be the principal landownerof the district; and as the confused picture unfolded itself, I began toform a definite and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph. He wasspoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child mightspeak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate, butby no means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own bedand board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that, with acaprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not appear thatSir Joseph was popular, but he was "a household word. " He was notso much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence. Theparticular man to whom I spoke said he had "been in trouble, " and thatSir Joseph had been "pretty hard on him. "

And under that grey and silver cloudland, with a background of thosefrost-bitten and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me a talewhich, true or false, was as heartrending as Romeo and Juliet. 

He had slowly built up in the village a small business as aphotographer, and he was engaged to a girl at one of the lodges, whom heloved with passion. "I'm the sort that 'ad better marry, " he said;and for all his frail figure I knew what he meant. But Sir Joseph, and especially Sir Joseph's wife, did not want a photographer inthe village; it made the girls vain, or perhaps they disliked thisparticular photographer. He worked and worked until he had just enoughto marry on honestly; and almost on the eve of his wedding the leaseexpired, and Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory. He refused torenew the lease; and the man went wildly elsewhere. But Sir Joseph wasubiquitous; and the whole of that place was barred against him. In allthat country he could not find a shed to which to bring home his bride. The man appealed and explained; but he was disliked as a demagogue, aswell as a photographer. Then it was as if a black cloud came across thewinter sky; for I knew what was coming. I forget even in what wordshe told of Nature maddened and set free. But I still see, as in aphotograph, the grey muscles of the winter trees standing out like tightropes, as if all Nature were on the rack. 

"She 'ad to go away, " he said. 

"Wouldn't her parents, " I began, and hesitated on the word "forgive. "

"Oh, her people forgave her, " he said. "But Her Ladyship. .. "

"Her Ladyship made the sun and moon and stars, " I said, impatiently. "Soof course she can come between a mother and the child of her body. "

"Well, it does seem a bit 'ard. .. " he began with a break in his voice. 

"But, good Lord, man, " I cried, "it isn't a matter of hardness! It's amatter of impious and indecent wickedness. If your Sir Joseph knewthe passions he was playing with, he did you a wrong for which in manyChristian countries he would have a knife in him. "

The man continued to look across the frozen fields with a frown. Hecertainly told his tale with real resentment, whether it was true orfalse, or only exaggerated. He was certainly sullen and injured; but hedid not seem to think of any avenue of escape. At last he said:

"Well, it's a bad world; let's 'ope there's a better one. "

"Amen, " I said. "But when I think of Sir Joseph, I understand how menhave hoped there was a worse one. "

Then we were silent for a long time and felt the cold of the daycrawling up, and at last I said, abruptly:

"The other day at a Budget meeting, I heard. "

He took his elbows off the stile and seemed to change from head to footlike a man coming out of sleep with a yawn. He said in a totallynew voice, louder but much more careless, "Ah yes, sir, . .. This 'ereBudget. .. The Radicals are doing a lot of 'arm. "

I listened intently, and he went on. He said with a sort of carefulprecision, "Settin' class against class; that's what I call it. Why, what's made our Empire except the readiness of all classes to work'eartily 'and-in-'and. "

He walked a little up and down the lane and stamped with the cold. Then he said, "What I say is, what else kept us from the 'errors of theFrench Revolution?"

My memory is good, and I waited in tense eagerness for the phrase thatcame next. "They may laugh at Dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf as kindand Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are. Let me tell you, sir, " he said, facing round at me with the final air of one launching aparadox. "The English people 'ave some common sense, and they'd ratherbe in the 'ands of gentlemen than in the claws of a lot of Socialistthieves. "

I had an indescribable sense that I ought to applaud, as if I were apublic meeting. The insane separation in the man's soul between hisexperience and his ready-made theory was but a type of what covers aquarter of England. As he turned away, I saw the Daily Wire stickingout of his shabby pocket. He bade me farewell in quite a blaze ofcatchwords, and went stumping up the road. I saw his figure grow smallerand smaller in the great green landscape; even as the Free Man has grownsmaller and smaller in the English countryside. 

The Appetite of Earth

I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find hassomehow got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it. After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion thatI like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat. I do not meanthat a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is muchsubtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashingof yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant forornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautifulas an orchard; but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautifulas the word "flower-garden, " and yet also sounds more satisfactory? Isuggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery: that itcontains things to eat. 

The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once; itcan be realized by all senses at once. Compared with that the sunflower, which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flatwall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity of things that can only beuttered by the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of aturnip, you must be all round it at once. The only way to get all rounda turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that hasloved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, thefirmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were thingsto eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only whitefirwood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: butthere are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles, certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth werestronger. 

Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite declaredthat the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiouslyaccept the full doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moonis made of cheese I have believed from childhood; and in the course ofevery month a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out ofit. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contraryto it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree actuallycontradicted by the senses and the reason; first because if the moonwere made of green cheese it would be inhabited; and second because ifit were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon is said tobe an unusual sight; but I cannot think that a green one is much morecommon. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every othersort of cheese except a green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like acream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky abovea cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese, rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur. I have seen it look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in anordinary sensible Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so nakedand ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyerecheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it, asif it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthlycattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green; and Iincline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon, likeeverything else, will ripen by the end of the world; and in the lastdays we shall see it taking on those volcanic sunset colours, andleaping with that enormous and fantastic life. 

But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaicactuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations, thephrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example of thisimagery of eating and drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancyis in the phrase "if all the trees were bread and cheese, " which I havecited elsewhere in this connection; and in that noble nightmare of aScandinavian legend, in which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry outof a horn. In an essay like the present (first intended as a paper tobe read before the Royal Society) one cannot be too exact; and I willconcede that my theory of the gradual vire-scence of our satellite isto be regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law finallydemonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world. It is ahypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists say of a theory whenthere is no evidence for it so far. 

But the reader need be under no apprehension that I have suddenly gonemad, and shall start biting large pieces out of the trunks of trees;or seriously altering (by large semicircular mouthfuls) the exquisiteoutline of the mountains. This feeling for expressing a fresh solidityby the image of eating is really a very old one. So far from being aparadox of perversity, it is one of the oldest commonplaces of religion. If any one wandering about wants to have a good trick or test forseparating the wrong idealism from the right, I will give him one on thespot. It is a mark of false religion that it is always trying toexpress concrete facts as abstract; it calls sex affinity; it calls winealcohol; it calls brute starvation the economic problem. The test oftrue religion is that its energy drives exactly the other way; it isalways trying to make men feel truths as facts; always trying to makeabstract things as plain and solid as concrete things; always trying tomake men, not merely admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear, and devour the truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of theinvitation not to test, but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Theirphrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious mannaand dreadful wine. Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, hasdespised this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it. When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do notsuggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal. But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for someone else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it; the grass thatgrows upon its top is devouring it silently, but, doubtless, with anuproarious appetite. 

Simmons and the Social Tie

It is a platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need tohave an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities. But it isequally true, and less noted, that we need a reality with which to testideals. Thus I have selected Mrs. Buttons, a charwoman in Battersea, asthe touchstone of all modern theories about the mass of women. Her nameis not Buttons; she is not in the least a contemptible nor entirely acomic figure. She has a powerful stoop and an ugly, attractive face, alittle like that of Huxley--without the whiskers, of course. The couragewith which she supports the most brutal bad luck has something quitecreepy about it. Her irony is incessant and inventive; her practicalcharity very large; and she is wholly unaware of the philosophical useto which I put her. 

But when I hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides Isimply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When onthe one side the mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman be content tobe dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domesticornament, " then I merely repeat it to myself in the "other form, " "LetMrs. Buttons be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece ofsocial art, etc. " It is extraordinary what a difference the substitutionseems to make. And on the other hand, when some of the Suffragettes sayin their pamphlets and speeches, "Woman, leaping to life at the trumpetcall of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to graspthe sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought"--inorder to understand such a sentence I say it over again in the amendedform: "Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen andShaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre ofempire and the firebrand of speculative thought. " Somehow it soundsquite different. And yet when you say Woman I suppose you mean theaverage woman; and if most women are as capable and critical and morallysound as Mrs. Buttons, it is as much as we can expect, and a great dealmore than we deserve. 

But this study is not about Mrs. Buttons; she would require manystudies. I will take a less impressive case of my principle, theprinciple of keeping in the mind an actual personality when we aretalking about types or tendencies or generalized ideals. Take, forexample, the question of the education of boys. Almost every postbrings me pamphlets expounding some advanced and suggestive scheme ofeducation; the pupils are to be taught separate; the sexes are tobe taught together; there should be no prizes; there should be nopunishments; the master should lift the boys to his level; the mastershould descend to their level; we should encourage the heartiestcomradeship among boys, and also the tenderest spiritual intimacy withmasters; toil must be pleasant and holidays must be instructive; withall these things I am daily impressed and somewhat bewildered. But onthe great Buttons' principle I keep in my mind and apply to all theseideals one still vivid fact; the face and character of a particularschoolboy whom I once knew. I am not taking a mere individual oddity, asyou will hear. He was exceptional, and yet the reverse of eccentric;he was (in a quite sober and strict sense of the words) exceptionallyaverage. He was the incarnation and the exaggeration of a certain spiritwhich is the common spirit of boys, but which nowhere else became soobvious and outrageous. And because he was an incarnation he was, in hisway, a tragedy. 

I will call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but alittle slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slightswagger and a seaman's roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets. His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and his face, if onesaw it after his figure, was something of a surprise. For while the formmight be called big and braggart, the face might have been called weak, and was certainly worried. It was a hesitating face, which seemed toblink doubtfully in the daylight. He had even the look of one who hasreceived a buffet that he cannot return. In all occupations he was theaverage boy; just sufficiently good at sports, just sufficiently bad atwork to be universally satisfactory. But he was prominent in nothing, for prominence was to him a thing like bodily pain. He could not endure, without discomfort amounting to desperation, that any boy should benoticed or sensationally separated from the long line of boys; for him, to be distinguished was to be disgraced. 

Those who interpret schoolboys as merely wooden and barbarous, unmovedby anything but a savage seriousness about tuck or cricket, make themistake of forgetting how much of the schoolboy life is public andceremonial, having reference to an ideal; or, if you like, to anaffectation. Boys, like dogs, have a sort of romantic ritual which isnot always their real selves. And this romantic ritual is generally theritual of not being romantic; the pretence of being much moremasculine and materialistic than they are. Boys in themselves are verysentimental. The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide yourfeelings; it is making too much of them. Stoicism is the direct productof sentimentalism; and schoolboys are sentimental individually, butstoical collectively. 

For example, there were numbers of boys at my school besides myselfwho took a private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not haveinduced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat poetrywith the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence. That would havebeen anti-social egoism; we called it "showing off. " I myself rememberrunning to school (an extraordinary thing to do) with mere internalecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott about the taunts of Marmionor the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then repeating the same lines inclass with the colourless decorum of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to beinvisible in our uniformity; a mere pattern of Eton collars and coats. 

But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherlyequality if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track wasdiscovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy; orif a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confessfeebly that he had read "The Mill on the Floss"--then Simmons was in aperspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less anypetty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame. Hehated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it made him want tohide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy which most of ushave when some one betrays indecent ignorance, Simmons had when some onebetrayed special knowledge. He writhed and went red in the face; he usedto put up the lid of his desk to hide his blushes for human dignity, and from behind this barrier would whisper protests which had the hoarseemphasis of pain. "O, shut up, I say. .. O, I say, shut up. .. . O, shutit, can't you?" Once when a little boy admitted that he had heard of theHighland claymore, Simmons literally hid his head inside his desk anddropped the lid upon it in desperation; and when I was for a momenttransferred from the bottom of the form for knowing the name of CardinalNewman, I thought he would have rushed from the room. 

His psychological eccentricity increased; if one can call that aneccentricity which was a wild worship of the ordinary. At last he grewso sensitive that he could not even bear any question answered correctlywithout grief. He felt there was a touch of disloyalty, of unfraternalindividualism, even about knowing the right answer to a sum. If askedthe date of the battle of Hastings, he considered it due to social tactand general good feeling to answer 1067. This chivalrous exaggerationled to bad feeling between him and the school authority, which endedin a rupture unexpectedly violent in the case of so good-humoured acreature. He fled from the school, and it was discovered upon inquirythat he had fled from his home also. 

I never expected to see him again; yet it is one of the two or threeodd coincidences of my life that I did see him. At some public sports orrecreation ground I saw a group of rather objectless youths, one of whomwas wearing the dashing uniform of a private in the Lancers. Inside thatuniform was the tall figure, shy face, and dark, stiff hair of Simmons. He had gone to the one place where every one is dressed alike--aregiment. I know nothing more; perhaps he was killed in Africa. But whenEngland was full of flags and false triumphs, when everybody was talkingmanly trash about the whelps of the lion and the brave boys in red, Ioften heard a voice echoing in the under-caverns of my memory, "Shutup. .. O, shut up. .. O, I say, shut it. "

Cheese

My forthcoming work in five volumes, "The Neglect of Cheese in EuropeanLiterature" is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that itis doubtful if I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from sucha fountain of information may therefore be permitted to springle thesepages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poetshave been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if Iremember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Romanrestraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poetI can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on thepoint was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: "If allthe trees were bread and cheese"--which is, indeed a rich and giganticvision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheesethere would be considerable deforestation in any part of England whereI was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before meas rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymousrhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every qualitywhich we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; itrhymes to "breeze" and "seas" (an essential point); that it is emphaticin sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. Fortheir citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will oftensay, "Cheese it!" or even "Quite the cheese. " The substance itself isimaginative. It is ancient--sometimes in the individual case, alwaysin the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted withsoda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thoughtof it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall. 

But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made aneccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and evenillogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successivedays in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn theyhad nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man shouldwant more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it. In each innthe cheese was good; and in each inn it was different. There was a nobleWensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and soon. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from thatpaltry and mechanical civilization which holds us all in bondage. Badcustoms are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customsare universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Boththe good and bad civilization cover us as with a canopy, and protect usfrom all that is outside. But a good civilization spreads over usfreely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. Abad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like anumbrella--artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, butuniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary andthe substances that are the same wherever they penetrate. By a wise doomof heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley. But if, let ussay, we compare cheese with soap (that vastly inferior substance), weshall see that soap tends more and more to be merely Smith's Soap orBrown's Soap, sent automatically all over the world. If the Red Indianshave soap it is Smith's Soap. If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown'ssoap. There is nothing subtly and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderlyTibetan, about his soap. I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (heis not worthy), but if he does it is probably a local cheese, havingsome real relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches, tinnedfoods, patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are notproduced all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere deadidentity, never that soft play of slight variation which exists inthings produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at everyoutpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire-builders go mad. Butyou are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider ofDevonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature inone of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese. 

When I had done my pilgrimage in the four wayside public-houses Ireached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded, withgreat rapidity and complete inconsistency, to a large and elaboraterestaurant, where I knew I could get many other things besides bread andcheese. I could get that also, however; or at least I expected to getit; but I was sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon, and leftEngland behind. The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut upinto contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that, insteadof Christian bread, he brought me biscuits. Biscuits--to one who hadeaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits--to one who hadproved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding betweencheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. Iasked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity hadjoined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid butyielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yieldingsubstance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it offslates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so superciliousas to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understandthat he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have thereforeresolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against ModernSociety, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong. 

The Red Town

When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid, there are several courses which the philosopher may pursue. The mostobvious is to hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of thenose. But if you have scruples (moral or physical) about this course, you may proceed to employ Reason, which in this case has all the savagesolidity of a blow with the fist. It is stupid to say that "most people"are stupid. It is like saying "most people are tall, " when it is obviousthat "tall" can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd todenounce the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind. 

Should the man have been hammered on the nose and brained with logic, and should he still remain cold, a third course opens: lead him by thehand (himself half-willing) towards some sunlit and yet secret meadowand ask him who made the names of the common wild flowers. They wereordinary people, so far as any one knows, who gave to one flower thename of the Star of Bethlehem and to another and much commoner flowerthe tremendous title of the Eye of Day. If you cling to the snobbishnotion that common people are prosaic, ask any common person for thelocal names of the flowers, names which vary not only from county tocounty, but even from dale to dale. 

But, curiously enough, the case is much stronger than this. It will besaid that this poetry is peculiar to the country populace, and thatthe dim democracies of our modern towns at least have lost it. For someextraordinary reason they have not lost it. Ordinary London slang isfull of witty things said by nobody in particular. True, the creedof our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed of the oldcountryside; but the people are just as clever in giving names to theirsins in the city as in giving names to their joys in the wilderness. One could not better sum up Christianity than by calling a small whiteinsignificant flower "The Star of Bethlehem. " But then, again, one couldnot better sum up the philosophy deduced from Darwinism than in the oneverbal picture of "having your monkey up. "

Who first invented these violent felicities of language? Who first spokeof a man "being off his head"? The obvious comment on a lunatic is thathis head is off him; yet the other phrase is far more fantasticallyexact. There is about every madman a singular sensation that his bodyhas walked off and left the important part of him behind. 

But the cases of this popular perfection in phrase are even strongerwhen they are more vulgar. What concentrated irony and imagination thereis for instance, in the metaphor which describes a man doing a midnightflitting as "shooting the moon"? It expresses everything about the runaway: his eccentric occupation, his improbable explanations, his furtiveair as of a hunter, his constant glances at the blank clock in the sky. 

No; the English democracy is weak enough about a number of things; forinstance, it is weak in politics. But there is no doubt that democracyis wonderfully strong in literature. Very few books that the culturedclass has produced of late have been such good literature as theexpression "painting the town red. "

Oddly enough, this last Cockney epigram clings to my memory. For as Iwas walking a little while ago round a corner near Victoria I realizedfor the first time that a familiar lamp-post was painted all over witha bright vermilion just as if it were trying (in spite of the obviousbodily disqualification) to pretend that it was a pillar-box. I havesince heard official explanations of these startling and scarletobjects. But my first fancy was that some dissipated gentleman on hisway home at four o'clock in the morning had attempted to paint the townred and got only as far as one lamp-post. 

I began to make a fairy tale about the man; and, indeed, this phrasecontains both a fairy tale and a philosophy; it really states almost thewhole truth about those pure outbreaks of pagan enjoyment to which allhealthy men have often been tempted. It expresses the desire to havelevity on a large scale which is the essence of such a mood. The rowdyyoung man is not content to paint his tutor's door green: he would liketo paint the whole city scarlet. The word which to us best recallssuch gigantesque idiocy is the word "mafficking. " The slaves of thatsaturnalia were not only painting the town red; they thought that theywere painting the map red--that they were painting the world red. But, indeed, this Imperial debauch has in it something worse than themere larkiness which is my present topic; it has an element of realself-flattery and of sin. The Jingo who wants to admire himself isworse than the blackguard who only wants to enjoy himself. In a very oldninth-century illumination which I have seen, depicting the war of therebel angels in heaven, Satan is represented as distributing to hisfollowers peacock feathers--the symbols of an evil pride. Satan alsodistributed peacock feathers to his followers on Mafeking Night. .. 

But taking the case of ordinary pagan recklessness and pleasure seeking, it is, as we have said, well expressed in this image. First, becauseit conveys this notion of filling the world with one private folly; andsecondly, because of the profound idea involved in the choice of colour. Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; itis the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place wherethe walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burnsthrough. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire whichdestroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of ourreligion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or infirst love. 

Now, the profligate is he who wishes to spread this crimson of consciousjoy over everything; to have excitement at every moment; to painteverything red. He bursts a thousand barrels of wine to incarnadine thestreets; and sometimes (in his last madness) he will butcher beastsand men to dip his gigantic brushes in their blood. For it marksthe sacredness of red in nature, that it is secret even when it isubiquitous, like blood in the human body, which is omnipresent, yetinvisible. As long as blood lives it is hidden; it is only dead bloodthat we see. But the earlier parts of the rake's progress are verynatural and amusing. Painting the town red is a delightful thing untilit is done. It would be splendid to see the cross of St. Paul's as redas the cross of St. George, and the gallons of red paint running downthe dome or dripping from the Nelson Column. But when it is done, whenyou have painted the town red, an extraordinary thing happens. Youcannot see any red at all. 

I can see, as in a sort of vision, the successful artist standing in themidst of that frightful city, hung on all sides with the scarlet of hisshame. And then, when everything is red, he will long for a red rosein a green hedge and long in vain; he will dream of a red leaf and beunable even to imagine it. He has desecrated the divine colour, and hecan no longer see it, though it is all around. I see him, a single blackfigure against the red-hot hell that he has kindled, where spires andturrets stand up like immobile flames: he is stiffened in a sort ofagony of prayer. Then the mercy of Heaven is loosened, and I see one ortwo flakes of snow very slowly begin to fall. 

The Furrows

As I see the corn grow green all about my neighbourhood, there rushes onme for no reason in particular a memory of the winter. I say "rushes, "for that is the very word for the old sweeping lines of the ploughedfields. From some accidental turn of a train-journey or a walking tour, I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows. The furrows are likearrows; they fly along an arc of sky. They are like leaping animals;they vault an inviolable hill and roll down the other side. They arelike battering battalions; they rush over a hill with flying squadronsand carry it with a cavalry charge. They have all the air of Arabssweeping a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping awatercourse. Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines as theyshot sheer from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl of thevalley. They were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotousand rejoicing than rockets. And yet they were only thin straight linesdrawn with difficulty, like a diagram, by painful and patient men. Themen that ploughed tried to plough straight; they had no notion of givinggreat sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts of cloven earth;they were done by the grace of God. I had always rejoiced in them; but Ihad never found any reason for my joy. There are some very clever peoplewho cannot enjoy the joy unless they understand it. There are other andeven cleverer people who say that they lose the joy the moment they dounderstand it. Thank God I was never clever, and I could always enjoythings when I understood them and when I didn't. I can enjoy theorthodox Tory, though I could never understand him. I can also enjoy theorthodox Liberal, though I understand him only too well. 

But the splendour of furrowed fields is this: that like all brave thingsthey are made straight, and therefore they bend. In everything that bowsgracefully there must be an effort at stiffness. Bows arc beautiful whenthey bend only because they try to remain rigid; and sword-bladescan curl like silver ribbons only because they are certain to springstraight again. But the same is true of every tough curve of thetree-trunk, of every strong-backed bend of the bough; there is hardlyany such thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity yieldinga little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of theearth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out of shape. Everything tries to be straight; and everything just fortunately fails. 

The foil may curve in the lunge, but there is nothing beautiful aboutbeginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strongdoctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts: but that isno reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do not bean opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities; fate canbe trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to bend, any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight, and life willbend you. 

Alas! I am giving the moral before the fable; and yet I hardly thinkthat otherwise you could see all that I mean in that enormous visionof the ploughed hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldestarchitecture of man: the oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldestbotany his object. And for geometry, the mere word proves my case. 

But when I looked at those torrents of ploughed parallels, that greatrush of rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achievement ofdemocracy, Here was mere equality: but equality seen in bulk is moresuperb than any supremacy. Equality free and flying, equality rushingover hill and dale, equality charging the world--that was the meaningof those military furrows, military in their identity, military in theirenergy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong curves merely becausethey did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong lines oflandscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not onlynonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt the country. Man hascreated the country; it was his business, as the image of God. No hill, covered with common scrub or patches of purple heath, could have been sosublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked furrows rose likeaspiring angels. No valley, confused with needless cottages andtowns, can have been so utterly valleyish as that abyss into which thedown-rushing furrows raged like demons into the swirling pit. 

It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out alandscape and give it all its mould and meaning. It is just because thelines of the furrow arc ugly and even that the landscape is living andsuperb. As I think I have remarked elsewhere, the Republic is founded onthe plough. 

The Philosophy of Sight-seeing

It would be really interesting to know exactly why an intelligentperson--by which I mean a person with any sort of intelligence--can anddoes dislike sight-seeing. Why does the idea of a char-a-banc full oftourists going to see the birth-place of Nelson or the death-scene ofSimon de Montfort strike a strange chill to the soul? I can tell quiteeasily what this dim aversion to tourists and their antiquities does notarise from--at least, in my case. Whatever my other vices (and they are, of course, of a lurid cast), I can lay my hand on my heart and say thatit does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yetfrom the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is onething more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, itis irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-colouredprocession of life, which includes the char-a-banc among its manychariots and triumphal cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that contemptfor vulgarity which sneers at the clerks on a Bank Holiday or theCockneys on Margate sands. The man who notices nothing about the clerkexcept his Cockney accent would have noticed nothing about Simon deMontfort except his French accent. The man who jeers at Jones for havingdropped an "h" might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped an arm. Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar-minded, and it is as easyto gibe at Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple, as to gibeat the struggling speech and the maimed bodies of the mass of our comicand tragic race. If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists andtombs, it is certainly not because I am so profane as to think lightlyeither of the tombs or the tourists. I reverence those great men whohad the courage to die; I reverence also these little men who have thecourage to live. 

Even if this be conceded, another suggestion may be made. It may be saidthat antiquities and commonplace crowds are indeed good things, likeviolets and geraniums; but they do not go together. A billycock is abeautiful object (it may be eagerly urged), but it is not in the samestyle of architecture as Ely Cathedral; it is a dome, a small rococodome in the Renaissance manner, and does not go with the pointed archesthat assault heaven like spears. A char-a-banc is lovely (it may besaid) if placed upon a pedestal and worshipped for its own sweetsake; but it does not harmonize with the curve and outline of the oldthree-decker on which Nelson died; its beauty is quite of another sort. Therefore (we will suppose our sage to argue) antiquity and democracyshould be kept separate, as inconsistent things. Things may beinconsistent in time and space which are by no means inconsistent inessential value and idea. Thus the Catholic Church has water for thenew-born and oil for the dying: but she never mixes oil and water. 

This explanation is plausible; but I do not find it adequate. The firstobjection is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul in thecase of all deliberate and elaborate visits to "beauty spots, " evenby persons of the most elegant position or the most protected privacy. Specially visiting the Coliseum by moonlight always struck me as beingas vulgar as visiting it by limelight. One millionaire standing on thetop of Mont Blanc, one millionaire standing in the desert by the Sphinx, one millionaire standing in the middle of Stonehenge, is just as comicas one millionaire is anywhere else; and that is saying a good deal. Onthe other hand, if the billycock had come privately and naturally intoEly Cathedral, no enthusiast for Gothic harmony would think of objectingto the billycock--so long, of course, as it was not worn on the head. But there is indeed a much deeper objection to this theory of the twoincompatible excellences of antiquity and popularity. For the truthis that it has been almost entirely the antiquities that have normallyinterested the populace; and it has been almost entirely the populacewho have systematically preserved the antiquities. The Oldest Inhabitanthas always been a clodhopper; I have never heard of his being agentleman. It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sitesof battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so faras any one remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders ofsaints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by thesupercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which saysthat "where there is no vision the people perish. " But it is equallytrue in practice that where there is no people the visions perish. 

The idea must be abandoned, then, that this feeling of faint disliketowards popular sight-seeing is due to any inherent incompatibilitybetween the idea of special shrines and trophies and the idea of largemasses of ordinary men. On the contrary, these two elements of sanctityand democracy have been specially connected and allied throughouthistory. The shrines and trophies were often put up by ordinary men. They were always put up for ordinary men. To whatever things thefastidious modern artist may choose to apply his theory of specialistjudgment, and an aristocracy of taste, he must necessarily find itdifficult really to apply it to such historic and monumental art. Obviously, a public building is meant to impress the public. The mostaristocratic tomb is a democratic tomb, because it exists to be seen;the only aristocratic thing is the decaying corpse, not the undecayingmarble; and if the man wanted to be thoroughly aristocratic, he shouldbe buried in his own back-garden. The chapel of the most narrow andexclusive sect is universal outside, even if it is limited inside, itswalls and windows confront all points of the compass and all quarters ofthe cosmos. It may be small as a dwelling-place, but it is universalas a monument; if its sectarians had really wished to be private theyshould have met in a private house. Whenever and wherever we erect anational or municipal hall, pillar, or statue, we are speaking to thecrowd like a demagogue. 

The statue of every statesman offers itself for election as much as thestatesman himself. Every epitaph on a church slab is put up for the mobas much as a placard in a General Election. And if we follow this trackof reflection we shall, I think, really find why it is that modernsight-seeing jars on something in us, something that is not a caddishcontempt for graves nor an equally caddish contempt for cads. For, afterall, there is many a--churchyard which consists mostly of dead cads; butthat does not make it less sacred or less sad. 

The real explanation, I fancy, is this: that these cathedrals andcolumns of triumph were meant, not for people more cultured andself-conscious than modern tourists, but for people much rougher andmore casual. Those leaps of live stone like frozen fountains, were soplaced and poised as to catch the eye of ordinary inconsiderate mengoing about their daily business; and when they are so seen theyare never forgotten. The true way of reviving the magic of our greatminsters and historic sepulchres is not the one which Ruskin was alwaysrecommending. It is not to be more careful of historic buildings. Nay, it is rather to be more careless of them. Buy a bicycle in Maidstone tovisit an aunt in Dover, and you will see Canterbury Cathedral as it wasbuilt to be seen. Go through London only as the shortest way betweenCroydon and Hampstead, and the Nelson Column will (for the first time inyour life) remind you of Nelson. You will appreciate Hereford Cathedralif you have come for cider, not if you have come for architecture. Youwill really see the Place Vendome if you have come on business, notif you have come for art. For it was for the simple and laboriousgenerations of men, practical, troubled about many things, that ourfathers reared those portents. There is, indeed, another element, notunimportant: the fact that people have gone to cathedrals to pray. Butin discussing modern artistic cathedral-lovers, we need not considerthis. 

A Criminal Head

When men of science (or, more often, men who talk about science) speakof studying history or human society scientifically they always forgetthat there are two quite distinct questions involved. It may be thatcertain facts of the body go with certain facts of the soul, but itby no means follows that a grasp of such facts of the body goes witha grasp of the things of the soul. A man may show very learnedly thatcertain mixtures of race make a happy community, but he may be quitewrong (he generally is) about what communities are happy. A man mayexplain scientifically how a certain physical type involves a really badman, but he may be quite wrong (he generally is) about which sort of manis really bad. Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understandsonly one half of the equation. 

The drearier kind of don may come to me and say, "Celts areunsuccessful; look at Irishmen, for instance. " To which I should reply, "You may know all about Celts; but it is obvious that you know nothingabout Irishmen. The Irish are not in the least unsuccessful, unless itis unsuccessful to wander from their own country over a great part ofthe earth, in which case the English are unsuccessful too. " A man witha bumpy head may say to me (as a kind of New Year greeting), "Fools havemicrocephalous skulls, " or what not. To which I shall reply, "In orderto be certain of that, you must be a good judge both of the physicaland of the mental fact. It is not enough that you should know amicrocephalous skull when you see it. It is also necessary that youshould know a fool when you see him; and I have a suspicion that youdo not know a fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong andintimate of all forms of acquaintanceship. "

The trouble with most sociologists, criminologists, etc. , is that whiletheir knowledge of their own details is exhaustive and subtle, theirknowledge of man and society, to which these are to be applied, is quiteexceptionally superficial and silly. They know everything about biology, but almost nothing about life. Their ideas of history, for instance, are simply cheap and uneducated. Thus some famous and foolish professormeasured the skull of Charlotte Corday to ascertain the criminal type;he had not historical knowledge enough to know that if there is any"criminal type, " certainly Charlotte Corday had not got it. The skull, Ibelieve, afterwards turned out not to be Charlotte Corday's at all; butthat is another story. The point is that the poor old man was trying tomatch Charlotte Corday's mind with her skull without knowing anythingwhatever about her mind. 

But I came yesterday upon a yet more crude and startling example. 

In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles aboutcriminology; about whether wicked men could be made good if their headswere taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know of are much toorich and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation leavesme cold. I always notice with pain, however, a curious absence of theportraits of living millionaires from such galleries of awful examples;most of the portraits in which we are called upon to remark the lineof the nose or the curve of the forehead appear to be the portraits ofordinary sad men, who stole because they were hungry or killed becausethey were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely;sometimes it is the remarkable square head, sometimes it is theunmistakable round head; sometimes the learned draw attention to theabnormal development, sometimes to the striking deficiency of the backof the head. I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor, the one permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustiveclassification I have to come to the conclusion that it consists inbeing poor. 

But it was among the pictures in this article that I received the finalshock; the enlightenment which has left me in lasting possession of thefact that criminologists are generally more ignorant than criminals. Among the starved and bitter, but quite human, faces was one head, neatbut old-fashioned, with the powder of the 18th century and a certainalmost pert primness in the dress which marked the conventions of theupper middle-class about 1790. The face was lean and lifted stiffly up, the eyes stared forward with a frightful sincerity, the lip was firmwith a heroic firmness; all the more pathetic because of a certaindelicacy and deficiency of male force, Without knowing who it was, onecould have guessed that it was a man in the manner of Shakespeare'sBrutus, a man of piercingly pure intentions, prone to use governmentas a mere machine for morality, very sensitive to the charge ofinconsistency and a little too proud of his own clean and honourablelife. I say I should have known this almost from the face alone, even ifI had not known who it was. 

But I did know who it was. It was Robespierre. And underneath theportrait of this pale and too eager moralist were written theseremarkable words: "Deficiency of ethical instincts, " followed bysomething to the effect that he knew no mercy (which is certainlyuntrue), and by some nonsense about a retreating forehead, a peculiaritywhich he shared with Louis XVI and with half the people of his time andours. 

Then it was that I measured the staggering distance between theknowledge and the ignorance of science. Then I knew that all criminologymight be worse than worthless, because of its utter ignorance of thathuman material of which it is supposed to be speaking. The man who couldsay that Robespierre was deficient in ethical instincts is a man utterlyto be disregarded in all calculations of ethics. He might as well saythat John Bunyan was deficient in ethical instincts. You may say thatRobespierre was morbid and unbalanced, and you may say the same ofBunyan. But if these two men were morbid and unbalanced they were morbidand unbalanced by feeling too much about morality, not by feeling toolittle. You may say if you like that Robespierre was (in a negative sortof way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics. He and a company ofkeen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of unreason andwrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked up in every channelby oligarchies and state secrets that already stank. The work was thegreatest that was ever given to men to do except that which Christianitydid in dragging Europe out of the abyss of barbarism after the DarkAges. But they did it, and no one else could have done it. 

Certainly we could not do it. We are not ready to fight all Europe on apoint of justice. We are not ready to fling our most powerful classas mere refuse to the foreigner; we are not ready to shatter the greatestates at a stroke; we are not ready to trust ourselves in anawful moment of utter dissolution in order to make all things seemintelligible and all men feel honourable henceforth. We are not strongenough to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong enough to be as weakas Robespierre. There is only one thing, it seems, that we can do. Likea mob of children, we can play games upon this ancient battlefield;we can pull up the bones and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs ofthat unimaginable war; and we can chatter to each other childishly andinnocently about skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal. I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know whose areimbecile. 

The Wrath of the Roses

The position of the rose among flowers is like that of the dog amonganimals. It is so much that both are domesticated as that have some dimfeeling that they were always domesticated. There are wild roses andthere are wild dogs. I do not know the wild dogs; wild roses are verynice. But nobody ever thinks of either of them if the name is abruptlymentioned in a gossip or a poem. On the other hand, there are tametigers and tame cobras, but if one says, "I have a cobra in my pocket, "or "There is a tiger in the music-room, " the adjective "tame" has to besomewhat hastily added. If one speaks of beasts one thinks first of wildbeasts; if of flowers one thinks first of wild flowers. 

But there are two great exceptions; caught so completely into thewheel of man's civilization, entangled so unalterably with his ancientemotions and images, that the artificial product seems more naturalthan the natural. The dog is not a part of natural history, but ofhuman history; and the real rose grows in a garden. All must regard theelephant as something tremendous, but tamed; and many, especially in ourgreat cultured centres, regard every bull as presumably a mad bull. In the same way we think of most garden trees and plants as fiercecreatures of the forest or morass taught at last to endure the curb. 

But with the dog and the rose this instinctive principle is reversed. With them we think of the artificial as the archetype; the earth-born asthe erratic exception. We think vaguely of the wild dog as if he had runaway, like the stray cat. And we cannot help fancying that the wonderfulwild rose of our hedges has escaped by jumping over the hedge. Perhapsthey fled together, the dog and the rose: a singular and (on the whole)an imprudent elopement. Perhaps the treacherous dog crept from thekennel, and the rebellious rose from the flower-bed, and they foughttheir way out in company, one with teeth and the other with thorns. Possibly this is why my dog becomes a wild dog when he sees roses, andkicks them anywhere. Possibly this is why the wild rose is called adog-rose. Possibly not. 

But there is this degree of dim barbaric truth in the quaint old-worldlegend that I have just invented. That in these two cases the civilizedproduct is felt to be the fiercer, nay, even the wilder. Nobody seems tobe afraid of a wild dog: he is classed among the jackals and the servilebeasts. The terrible cave canem is written over man's creation. When weread "Beware of the Dog, " it means beware of the tame dog: for it is thetame dog that is terrible. He is terrible in proportion as he is tame:it is his loyalty and his virtues that are awful to the stranger, eventhe stranger within your gates; still more to the stranger halfway overyour gates. He is alarmed at such deafening and furious docility; heflees from that great monster of mildness. 

Well, I have much the same feeling when I look at the roses ranked redand thick and resolute round a garden; they seem to me bold and evenblustering. I hasten to say that I know even less about my own gardenthan about anybody else's garden. I know nothing about roses, not eventheir names. I know only the name Rose; and Rose is (in every senseof the word) a Christian name. It is Christian in the one absoluteand primordial sense of Christian--that it comes down from the ageof pagans. The rose can be seen, and even smelt, in Greek, Latin, Provencal, Gothic, Renascence, and Puritan poems. Beyond this mere wordRose, which (like wine and other noble words) is the same in all thetongues of white men, I know literally nothing. I have heard the moreevident and advertised names. I know there is a flower which callsitself the Glory of Dijon--which I had supposed to be its cathedral. Inany case, to have produced a rose and a cathedral is to have producednot only two very glorious and humane things, but also (as I maintain)two very soldierly and defiant things. I also know there is a rosecalled Marechal Niel--note once more the military ring. 

And when I was walking round my garden the other day I spoke to mygardener (an enterprise of no little valour) and asked him the name ofa strange dark rose that had somehow oddly taken my fancy. It was almostas if it reminded me of some turbid element in history and the soul. Itsred was not only swarthy, but smoky; there was something congested andwrathful about its colour. It was at once theatrical and sulky. Thegardener told me it was called Victor Hugo. 

Therefore it is that I feel all roses to have some secret power aboutthem; even their names may mean something in connexion with themselves, in which they differ from nearly all the sons of men. But the roseitself is royal and dangerous; long as it has remained in the rich houseof civilization, it has never laid off its armour. A rose always lookslike a mediaeval gentleman of Italy, with a cloak of crimson and asword: for the thorn is the sword of the rose. 

And there is this real moral in the matter; that we have to rememberthat civilization as it goes on ought not perhaps to grow morefighting--but ought to grow more ready to fight. The more valuable andreposeful is the order we have to guard, the more vivid should be ourultimate sense of vigilance and potential violence. And when I walkround a summer garden, I can understand how those high mad lords atthe end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords clashed, caught atroses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry. For to me anysuch garden is full of the wars of the roses. 

The Gold of Glastonbury

One silver morning I walked into a small grey town of stone, like twentyother grey western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury; andsaw the magic thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open airas casually as any bush in my garden. 

In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is moreimportant than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of thestrange old tale of St. Joseph and the Thorn than that it dwarfs St. Dunstan. Standing among the actual stones and shrubs one thinks of thefirst century and not of the tenth; one's mind goes back beyond theSaxons and beyond the greatest statesman of the Dark Ages. The tale thatJoseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend. Butit is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend as manymodern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quitecomic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine aslittle, localized and very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk, astricti globis, rooted to their towns or trades; and we think of vastroutes of travel and constant world-communications as things of recentand scientific origin. But this is wrong; at least, the last part of itis. It is part of that large and placid lie that the rationaliststell when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism. Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling cosmopolitancivilization. Long sea-voyages were not so quick, but were quite asincessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ had notmany rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had some. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with ayacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed withthe same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John;which critics say could not have been written by one of the first fewChristians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic tone. I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a divinelyappointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to me toprove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians;it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts ofpeople of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel: suppose somegreat prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa. The prophet himselfmight be a simple or unlettered man. But no one who knows the modernworld would be surprised if one of his closest followers were aProfessor from Heidelberg or an M. A. From Oxford. 

All this is not urged here with any notion of proving that the tale ofthe thorn is not a myth; as I have said, it probably is a myth. It isurged with the much more important object of pointing out the properattitude towards such myths. . The proper attitude is one of doubtand hope and of a kind of light mystery. The tale is certainly notimpossible; as it is certainly not certain. And through all the agessince the Roman Empire men have fed their healthy fancies and theirhistorical imagination upon the very twilight condition of such tales. But to-day real agnosticism has declined along with real theology. People cannot leave a creed alone; though it is the essence of a creedto be clear. But neither can they leave a legend alone; though it isthe essence of a legend to be vague. That sane half scepticism which wasfound in all rustics, in all ghost tales and fairy tales, seems to bea lost secret. Modern people must make scientifically certain that St. Joseph did or did not go to Glastonbury, despite the fact that it isnow quite impossible to find out; and that it does not, in a religioussense, very much matter. But it is essential to feel that he may havegone to Glastonbury: all songs, arts, and dedications branching andblossoming like the thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt. Takenthus, not heavily like a problem but lightly like an old tale, the thingdoes lead one along the road of very strange realities, and the thorn isfound growing in the heart of a very secret maze of the soul. Somethingis really present in the place; some closer contact with the thing whichcovers Europe but is still a secret. Somehow the grey town and the greenbush touch across the world the strange small country of the garden andthe grave; there is verily some communion between the thorn tree and thecrown of thorns. 

A man never knows what tiny thing will startle him to such ancestral andimpersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a commonpanorama; and on this grey and silver morning the ruined towers of thecathedral stood about me somewhat vaguely like grey clouds. But down ina hollow where the local antiquaries are making a fruitful excavation, amagnificent old ruffian with a pickaxe (whom I believe to have been St. Joseph of Arimathea) showed me a fragment of the old vaulted roof whichhe had found in the earth; and on the whitish grey stone there was justa faint brush of gold. There seemed a piercing and swordlike pathos, anunexpected fragrance of all forgotten or desecrated things, in the baresurvival of that poor little pigment upon the imperishable rock. To thestrong shapes of the Roman and the Gothic I had grown accustomed; butthat weak touch of colour was at once tawdry and tender, like somepopular keepsake. Then I knew that all my fathers were men like me;for the columns and arches were grave, and told of the gravity of thebuilders; but here was one touch of their gaiety. I almost expected itto fade from the stone as I stared. It was as if men had been able topreserve a fragment of a sunset. 

And then I remembered how the artistic critics have always praised thegrave tints and the grim shadows of the crumbling cloisters and abbeytowers, and how they themselves often dress up like Gothic ruins in thesombre tones of dim grey walls or dark green ivy. I remembered how theyhated almost all primary things, but especially primary colours. I knewthey were appreciating much more delicately and truly than I the sublimeskeleton and the mighty fungoids of the dead Glastonbury. But I stoodfor an instant alive in the living Glastonbury, gay with gold andcoloured like the toy-book of a child. 

The Futurists

It was a warm golden evening, fit for October, and I was watching (withregret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden, whenthe postman handed to me, with a perfunctory haste which doubtlessmasked his emotion, the Declaration of Futurism. If you ask me whatFuturism is, I cannot tell you; even the Futurists themselves seem alittle doubtful; perhaps they are waiting for the future to find out. But if you ask me what its Declaration is, I answer eagerly; for Ican tell you quite a lot about that. It is written by an Italiannamed Marinetti, in a magazine which is called Poesia. It is headed"Declaration of Futurism" in enormous letters; it is divided off withlittle numbers; and it starts straight away like this: "1. We intend toglorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strengt of daring. 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, andrevolt. 3. Literature having up to now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and slumber, we wish to exalt the aggressive movement, thefeverish insomnia, running, the perilous leap, the cuff and the blow. "While I am quite willing to exalt the cuff within reason, it scarcelyseems such an entirely new subject for literature as the Futuristsimagine. It seems to me that even through the slumber which fills theSiege of Troy, the Song of Roland, and the Orlando Furioso, and in spiteof the thoughtful immobility which marks "Pantagruel, " "Henry V, " andthe Ballad of Chevy Chase, there are occasional gleams of an admirationfor courage, a readiness to glorify the love of danger, and even the"strengt of daring, " I seem to remember, slightly differently spelt, somewhere in literature. 

The distinction, however, seems to be that the warriors of the past wentin for tournaments, which were at least dangerous for themselves, whilethe Futurists go in for motor-cars, which are mainly alarming forother people. It is the Futurist in his motor who does the "aggressivemovement, " but it is the pedestrians who go in for the "running" and the"perilous leap. " Section No. 4 says, "We declare that the splendour ofthe world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty ofspeed. A race-automobile adorned with great pipes like serpentswith explosive breath. .. . A race-automobile which seems to rush overexploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. " Itis also much easier, if you have the money. It is quite clear, however, that you cannot be a Futurist at all unless you are frightfully rich. Then follows this lucid and soul-stirring sentence: "5. We will singthe praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal steering-posttraverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its ownorbit. " What a jolly song it would be--so hearty, and with such a simpleswing in it! I can imagine the Futurists round the fire in a taverntrolling out in chorus some ballad with that incomparable refrain;shouting over their swaying flagons some such words as these:

 A notion came into my head as new as it was bright That poems might be written on the subject of a fight; No praise was given to Lancelot, Achilles, Nap or Corbett, But we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the idealsteering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit ofits own orbit. 

Then lest it should be supposed that Futurism would be so weak as topermit any democratic restraints upon the violence and levity of theluxurious classes, there would be a special verse in honour of themotors also:

 My fathers scaled the mountains in their pilgrimages far, But I feel full of energy while sitting in a car; And petrol is the perfect wine, I lick it and absorb it, So we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the idealsteering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit ofits own orbit. 

Yes, it would be a rollicking catch. I wish there were space to finishthe song, or to detail all the other sections in the Declaration. Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both ofLiberal politics and Christian morals; I say gratifying because, howeverunfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarrelled, they arealways united in the feeble hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these. They will "glorify war--the only true hygiene of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of Anarchism, the beautiful ideaswhich kill, and the scorn of woman. " They will "destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitariancowardice. " The proclamation ends with an extraordinary passage which Icannot understand at all, all about something that is going to happen toMr. Marinetti when he is forty. As far as I can make out he will then bekilled by other poets, who will be overwhelmed with love and admirationfor him. "They will come against us from far away, from everywhere, leaping on the cadence of their first poems, clawing the air withcrooked fingers and scenting at the Academy gates the good smell of ourdecaying minds. " Well, it is satisfactory to be told, however obscurely, that this sort of thing is coming to an end some day, to be replaced bysome other tomfoolery. And though I commonly refrain from clawing theair with crooked fingers, I can assure Mr. Marinetti that this omissiondoes not disqualify me, and that I scent the good smell of his decayingmind all right. 

I think the only other point of Futurism is contained in this sentence:"It is in Italy that we hurl this overthrowing and inflammatoryDeclaration, with which to-day we found Futurism, for we will free Italyfrom her numberless museums which cover her with countless cemeteries. "I think that rather sums it up. The best way, one would think, offreeing oneself from a museum would be not to go there. Mr. Marinetti'sfathers and grandfathers freed Italy from prisons and torture chambers, places where people were held by force. They, being in the bondage of"moralism, " attacked Governments as unjust, real Governments, withreal guns. Such was their utilitarian cowardice that they would diein hundreds upon the bayonets of Austria. I can well imagine why Mr. Marinetti in his motor-car does not wish to look back at the past. Ifthere was one thing that could make him look smaller even than before itis that roll of dead men's drums and that dream of Garibaldi going by. The old Radical ghosts go by, more real than the living men, to assaultI know not what ramparted city in hell. And meanwhile the Futuriststands outside a museum in a warlike attitude, and defiantly tells theofficial at the turnstile that he will never, never come in. 

There is a certain solid use in fools. It is not so much that they rushin where angels fear to tread, but rather that they let out what devilsintend to do. Some perversion of folly will float about namelessand pervade a whole society; then some lunatic gives it a name, andhenceforth it is harmless. With all really evil things, when thedanger has appeared the danger is over. Now it may be hoped that theself-indulgent sprawlers of Poesia have put a name once and for all totheir philosophy. In the case of their philosophy, to put a name to itis to put an end to it. Yet their philosophy has been very widespread inour time; it could hardly have been pointed and finished except by thisperfect folly. The creed of which (please God) this is the flowerand finish consists ultimately in this statement: that it is boldand spirited to appeal to the future. Now, it is entirely weak andhalf-witted to appeal to the future. A brave man ought to ask for whathe wants, not for what he expects to get. A brave man who wants Atheismin the future calls himself an Atheist; a brave man who wants Socialism, a Socialist; a brave man who wants Catholicism, a Catholic. But aweak-minded man who does not know what he wants in the future callshimself a Futurist. 

They have driven all the pigs away. Oh that they had driven away theprigs, and left the pigs! The sky begins to droop with darkness and allbirds and blossoms to descend unfaltering into the healthy underworldwhere things slumber and grow. There was just one true phrase of Mr. Marinetti's about himself: "the feverish insomnia. " The whole universeis pouring headlong to the happiness of the night. It is only the madmanwho has not the courage to sleep. 

Dukes

The Duc de Chambertin-Pommard was a small but lively relic of a reallyaristocratic family, the members of which were nearly all Atheists up tothe time of the French Revolution, but since that event (beneficialin such various ways) had been very devout. He was a Royalist, aNationalist, and a perfectly sincere patriot in that particular stylewhich consists of ceaselessly asserting that one's country is not somuch in danger as already destroyed. He wrote cheery little articles forthe Royalist Press entitled "The End of France" or "The Last Cry, "or what not, and he gave the final touches to a picture of the Kaiserriding across a pavement of prostrate Parisians with a glow of patrioticexultation. He was quite poor, and even his relations had no money. Hewalked briskly to all his meals at a little open cafe, and he lookedjust like everybody else. 

Living in a country where aristocracy does not exist, he had a highopinion of it. He would yearn for the swords and the stately manners ofthe Pommards before the Revolution--most of whom had been (in theory)Republicans. But he turned with a more practical eagerness to the onecountry in Europe where the tricolour has never flown and men have neverbeen roughly equalized before the State. The beacon and comfort ofhis life was England, which all Europe sees clearly as the one purearistocracy that remains. He had, moreover, a mild taste for sport andkept an English bulldog, and he believed the English to be a race ofbulldogs, of heroic squires, and hearty yeomen vassals, because he readall this in English Conservative papers, written by exhausted littleLevantine clerks. But his reading was naturally for the most part in theFrench Conservative papers (though he knew English well), and it was inthese that he first heard of the horrible Budget. There he read of theconfiscatory revolution planned by the Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer, the sinister Georges Lloyd. He also read how chivalrously Prince ArthurBalfour of Burleigh had defied that demagogue, assisted by Austen theLord Chamberlain and the gay and witty Walter Lang. And being a briskpartisan and a capable journalist, he decided to pay England a specialvisit and report to his paper upon the struggle. 

He drove for an eternity in an open fly through beautiful woods, with aletter of introduction in his pocket to one duke, who was to introducehim to another duke. The endless and numberless avenues of bewilderingpine woods gave him a queer feeling that he was driving through thecountless corridors of a dream. Yet the vast silence and freshnesshealed his irritation at modern ugliness and unrest. It seemed abackground fit for the return of chivalry. In such a forest a king andall his court might lose themselves hunting or a knight errant mightperish with no companion but God. The castle itself when he reached itwas somewhat smaller than he had expected, but he was delighted withits romantic and castellated outline. He was just about to alight whensomebody opened two enormous gates at the side and the vehicle drovebriskly through. 

"That is not the house?" he inquired politely of the driver. 

"No, sir, " said the driver, controlling the corners of his mouth. "Thelodge, sir. "

"Indeed, " said the Duc de Chambertin-Pommard, "that is where the Duke'sland begins?"

"Oh no, sir, " said the man, quite in distress. "We've been in hisGrace's land all day. "

The Frenchman thanked him and leant back in the carriage, feeling as ifeverything were incredibly huge and vast, like Gulliver in the countryof the Brobdingnags. 

He got out in front of a long facade of a somewhat severe building, anda little careless man in a shooting jacket and knickerbockers ran downthe steps. He had a weak, fair moustache and dull, blue, babyish eyes;his features were insignificant, but his manner extremely pleasantand hospitable, This was the Duke of Aylesbury, perhaps the largestlandowner in Europe, and known only as a horsebreeder until he beganto write abrupt little letters about the Budget. He led the French Dukeupstairs, talking trivialties in a hearty way, and there presentedhim to another and more important English oligarch, who got up from awriting-desk with a slightly senile jerk. He had a gleaming bald headand glasses; the lower part of his face was masked with a short, dark beard, which did not conceal a beaming smile, not unmixed withsharpness. He stooped a little as he ran, like some sedentary head clerkor cashier; and even without the cheque-book and papers on his deskwould have given the impression of a merchant or man of business. He wasdressed in a light grey check jacket. He was the Duke of Windsor, thegreat Unionist statesman. Between these two loose, amiable men, thelittle Gaul stood erect in his black frock coat, with the monstrousgravity of French ceremonial good manners. This stiffness led the Dukeof Windsor to put him at his ease (like a tenant), and he said, rubbinghis hands:

"I was delighted with your letter. .. Delighted. I shall be very pleasedif I can give you--er--any details. "

"My visit, " said the Frenchman, "scarcely suffices for the scientificexhaustion of detail. I seek only the idea. The idea, that is always theimmediate thing. "

"Quite so, " said the other rapidly; "quite so. .. The idea. "

Feeling somehow that it was his turn (the English Duke having done allthat could be required of him) Pommard had to say: "I mean the ideaof aristocracy. I regard this as the last great battle for the idea. Aristocracy, like any other thing, must justify itself to mankind. Aristocracy is good because it preserves a picture of human dignity ina world where that dignity is often obscured by servile necessities. Aristocracy alone can keep a certain high reticence of soul and body, acertain noble distance between the sexes. "

The Duke of Aylesbury, who had a clouded recollection of having squirtedsoda-water down the neck of a Countess on the previous evening, lookedsomewhat gloomy, as if lamenting the theoretic spirit of the Latin race. The elder Duke laughed heartily, and said: "Well, well, you know; weEnglish are horribly practical. With us the great question is the land. Out here in the country . .. Do you know this part?"

"Yes, yes, " cried the Frenchmen eagerly. "I See what you mean. Thecountry! the old rustic life of humanity! A holy war upon the bloatedand filthy towns. What right have these anarchists to attack yourbusy and prosperous countrysides? Have they not thriven under yourmanagement? Are not the English villages always growing larger and gayerunder the enthusiastic leadership of their encouraging squires? Have younot the Maypole? Have you not Merry England?"

The Duke of Aylesbury made a noise in his throat, and then said veryindistinctly: "They all go to London. "

"All go to London?" repeated Pommard, with a blank stare. "Why?"

This time nobody answered, and Pommard had to attack again. 

"The spirit of aristocracy is essentially opposed to the greed of theindustrial cities. Yet in France there are actually one or two nobles sovile as to drive coal and gas trades, and drive them hard. " The Duke ofWindsor looked at the carpet. The Duke of Aylesbury went and lookedout of the window. At length the latter said: "That's rather stiff, youknow. One has to look after one's own business in town as well. "

"Do not say it, " cried the little Frenchman, starting up. "I tell youall Europe is one fight between business and honour. If we do not fightfor honour, who will? What other right have we poor two-legged sinnersto titles and quartered shields except that we staggeringly support someidea of giving things which cannot be demanded and avoiding things whichcannot be punished? Our only claim is to be a wall across Christendomagainst the Jew pedlars and pawnbrokers, against the Goldsteins andthe--"

The Duke of Aylesbury swung round with his hands in his pockets. 

"Oh, I say, " he said, "you've been readin' Lloyd George. Nobody butdirty Radicals can say a word against Goldstein. "

"I certainly cannot permit, " said the elder Duke, rising rather shakily, "the respected name of Lord Goldstein--"

He intended to be impressive, but there was something in the Frenchman'seye that is not so easily impressed; there shone there that steel whichis the mind of France. 

"Gentlemen, " he said, "I think I have all the details now. You haveruled England for four hundred years. By your own account you have notmade the countryside endurable to men. By your own account you havehelped the victory of vulgarity and smoke. And by your own account youare hand and glove with those very money-grubbers and adventurers whomgentlemen have no other business but to keep at bay. I do not know whatyour people will do; but my people would kill you. "

Some seconds afterwards he had left the Duke's house, and some hoursafterwards the Duke's estate. 

The Glory of Grey

I suppose that, taking this summer as a whole, people will not call itan appropriate time for praising the English climate. But for my part Iwill praise the English climate till I die--even if I die of the Englishclimate. There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a realsense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France youhave much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds;in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in Americayou have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokesvaried by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad and brutalscale, and you settle down into contentment or despair. Only in our ownromantic country do you have the strictly romantic thing called Weather;beautiful and changing as a woman. The great English landscape painters(neglected now like everything that is English) have this salientdistinction: that the Weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures;it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of theWeather. The Weather sat to Constable. The Weather posed for Turner, anda deuce of a pose it was. This cannot truly be said of the greatest oftheir continental models or rivals. Poussin and Claude painted objects, ancient cities or perfect Arcadian shepherds through a clear mediumof the climate. But in the English painters Weather is the hero; withTurner an Adelphi hero, taunting, flashing and fighting, melodramaticbut really magnificent. The English climate, a tall and terribleprotagonist, robed in rain and thunder and snow and sunlight, fills thewhole canvas and the whole foreground. I admit the superiority of manyother French things besides French art. But I will not yield an inch onthe superiority of English weather and weather-painting. Why, the Frenchhave not even got a word for Weather: and you must ask for the weatherin French as if you were asking for the time in English. 

Then, again, variety of climate should always go with stability ofabode. The weather in the desert is monotonous; and as a naturalconsequence the Arabs wander about, hoping it may be differentsomewhere. But an Englishman's house is not only his castle; it ishis fairy castle. Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve areperpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold toivory. There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden whichis literally different on every one of the three hundred and sixty-fivedays. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far as afaint and fiery evening cloud. The same principle (by the way) appliesto the difficult problem of wives. Variability is one of the virtuesof a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as youhave one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem. 

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit ofcalling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be avery powerful and pleasing colour. There is also an insulting style ofspeech about "one grey day just like another" You might as well talkabout one green tree just like another. A grey clouded sky is indeed acanopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style andshape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, andanother grey like dove's plumage. One may seem grey like the deathlyfrost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens. Nothings could seem further apart than the doubt of grey and the decisionof scarlet. Yet grey and red can mingle, as they do in the morningclouds: and also in a sort of warm smoky stone of which they build thelittle towns in the west country. In those towns even the houses thatare wholly grey have a glow in them; as if their secret firesides weresuch furnaces of hospitality as faintly to transfuse the walls likewalls of cloud. And wandering in those westland parts I did once reallyfind a sign-post pointing up a steep crooked path to a town that wascalled Clouds. I did not climb up to it; I feared that either the townwould not be good enough for the name, or I should not be good enoughfor the town. Anyhow, the little hamlets of the warm grey stone havea geniality which is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of thesuburbs; as if it were better to warm one's hands at the ashes ofGlastonbury than at the painted flames of Croydon. 

Again, the enemies of grey (those astute, daring and evil-minded men)are fond of bringing forward the argument that colours suffer in greyweather, and that strong sunlight is necessary to all the hues ofheaven and earth. Here again there are two words to be said; and it isessential to distinguish. It is true that sun is needed to burnish andbring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colours; the colour of peat, pea-soup, Impressionist sketches, brown velvet coats, olives, grey andblue slates, the complexions of vegetarians, the tints of volcanic rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots; the delicate shades ofthese do need the sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that oftenclings to them. But if you have a healthy negro taste in colour, if youchoke your garden with poppies and geraniums, if you paint your housesky-blue and scarlet, if you wear, let us say, a golden top-hat and acrimson frock-coat, you will not only be visible on the greyest day, but you will notice that your costume and environment produce a certainsingular effect. You will find, I mean, that rich colours actually lookmore luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a sombrebackground and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Againsta dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strangeabout them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in thephantasmal garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily thehigh light of the picture; and its brightness kills all the bright blueflowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; thered daisies are really the red lost eyes of day; and the sunflower isthe vice-regent of the sun. 

Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless;that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average ofexistence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation andpromise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing tosome other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white orbursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of theindefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weatherin our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remindus of the morning. 

The Anarchist

I have now lived for about two months in the country, and have gatheredthe last rich autumnal fruit of a rural life, which is a strong desireto see London. Artists living in my neighbourhood talk rapturously ofthe rolling liberty of the landscape, the living peace of woods. ButI say to them (with a slight Buckinghamshire accent), "Ah, that is howCockneys feel. For us real old country people the country is reality; itis the town that is romance. Nature is as plain as one of her pigs, as commonplace, as comic, and as healthy. But civilization is full ofpoetry, even if it be sometimes an evil poetry. The streets of Londonare paved with gold; that is, with the very poetry of avarice. " Withthese typically bucolic words I touch my hat and go ambling away on astick, with a stiffness of gait proper to the Oldest Inhabitant; whilein my more animated moments I am taken for the Village Idiot. Exchangingheavy but courteous salutations with other gaffers, I reach the station, where I ask for a ticket for London where the king lives. Such ajourney, mingled of provincial fascination and fear, did I successfullyperform only a few days ago; and alone and helpless in the capital, found myself in the tangle of roads around the Marble Arch. 

A faint prejudice may possess the mind that I have slightly exaggeratedmy rusticity and remoteness. And yet it is true as I came to that cornerof the Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all Londonas a strange city and the civilization itself as one enormous whim. TheMarble Arch itself, in its new insular position, with traffic turningdizzily all about it, struck me as a placid monstrosity. What could bewilder than to have a huge arched gateway, with people going everywhereexcept under it? If I took down my front door and stood it up all byitself in the middle of my back garden, my village neighbours (in theirsimplicity) would probably stare. Yet the Marble Arch is now preciselythat; an elaborate entrance and the only place by which no one canenter. By the new arrangement its last weak pretence to be a gate hasbeen taken away. The cabman still cannot drive through it, but he canhave the delights of riding round it, and even (on foggy nights) therapture of running into it. It has been raised from the rank of afiction to the dignity of an obstacle. 

As I began to walk across a corner of the Park, this sense of what isstrange in cities began to mingle with some sense of what is stern aswell as strange. It was one of those queer-coloured winter days when awatery sky changes to pink and grey and green, like an enormous opal. The trees stood up grey and angular, as if in attitudes of agony; andhere and there on benches under the trees sat men as grey and angularas they. It was cold even for me, who had eaten a large breakfast andpurposed to eat a perfectly Gargantuan lunch; it was colder for the menunder the trees. And to eastward through the opalescent haze, the warmerwhites and yellows of the houses in Park-lane shone as unsubstantiallyas if the clouds themselves had taken on the shape of mansions to mockthe men who sat there in the cold. But the mansions were real--like themockery. 

No one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions;but it is by moods that we understand other men's convictions. The bigotis not he who knows he is right; every sane man knows he is right. Thebigot is he whose emotions and imagination are too cold and weak to feelhow it is that other men go wrong. At that moment I felt vividly how menmight go wrong, even unto dynamite. If one of those huddled men underthe trees had stood up and asked for rivers of blood, it would have beenerroneous--but not irrelevant. It would have been appropriate and in thepicture; that lurid grey picture of insolence on one side and impotenceon the other. It may be true (on the whole it is) that this socialmachine we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a machine; andwe have made it. It does hold those poor men helpless: and it does liftthose rich men high. .. And such men--good Lord! By the time I flungmyself on a bench beside another man I was half inclined to try anarchyfor a change. 

The other was of more prosperous appearance than most of the men on suchseats; still, he was not what one calls a gentleman, and had probablyworked at some time like a human being. He was a small, sharp-faced man, with grave, staring eyes, and a beard somewhat foreign. His clotheswere black; respectable and yet casual; those of a man who dressedconventionally because it was a bore to dress unconventionally--as itis. Attracted by this and other things, and wanting an outburst for mybitter social feelings, I tempted him into speech, first about thecold, and then about the General Election. To this the respectable manreplied:

"Well, I don't belong to any party myself. I'm an Anarchist. "

I looked up and almost expected fire from heaven. This coincidence waslike the end of the world. I had sat down feeling that somehow or otherPark-lane must be pulled down; and I had sat down beside the man whowanted to pull it down. I bowed in silence for an instant under theapproaching apocalypse; and in that instant the man turned sharply andstarted talking like a torrent. 

"Understand me, " he said. "Ordinary people think an Anarchist means aman with a bomb in his pocket. Herbert Spencer was an Anarchist. Butfor that fatal admission of his on page 793, he would be a completeAnarchist. Otherwise, he agrees wholly with Pidge. "

This was uttered with such blinding rapidity of syllabification as tobe a better test of teetotalism than the Scotch one of saying "Biblicalcriticism" six times. I attempted to speak, but he began again with thesame rippling rapidity. 

"You will say that Pidge also admits government in that tenth chapterso easily misunderstood. Bolger has attacked Pidge on those lines. ButBolger has no scientific training. Bolger is a psychometrist, but nosociologist. To any one who has combined a study of Pidge with theearlier and better discoveries of Kruxy, the fallacy is quite clear. Bolger confounds social coercion with coercional social action. "

His rapid rattling mouth shut quite tight suddenly, and he lookedsteadily and triumphantly at me, with his head on one side. I opened mymouth, and the mere motion seemed to sting him to fresh verbal leaps. 

"Yes, " he said, "that's all very well. The Finland Group has acceptedBolger. But, " he said, suddenly lifting a long finger as if to stop me, "but--Pidge has replied. His pamphlet is published. He has proved thatPotential Social Rebuke is not a weapon of the true Anarchist. He hasshown that just as religious authority and political authority havegone, so must emotional authority and psychological authority. He hasshown--"

I stood up in a sort of daze. "I think you remarked, " I saidfeebly, "that the mere common populace do not quite understandAnarchism"--"Quite so, " he said with burning swiftness; "as I said, theythink any Anarchist is a man with a bomb, whereas--"

"But great heavens, man!" I said; "it's the man with the bomb thatI understand! I wish you had half his sense. What do I care how manyGerman dons tie themselves in knots about how this society began? Myonly interest is about how soon it will end. Do you see those fat whitehouses over in Park-lane, where your masters live?"

He assented and muttered something about concentrations of capital. 

"Well, " I said, "if the time ever comes when we all storm thosehouses, will you tell me one thing? Tell me how we shall do itwithout authority? Tell me how you will have an army of revolt withoutdiscipline?"

For the first instant he was doubtful; and I had bidden him farewell, and crossed the street again, when I saw him open his mouth and begin torun after me. He had remembered something out of Pidge. 

I escaped, however, and as I leapt on an omnibus I saw again theenormous emblem of the Marble Arch. I saw that massive symbol of themodern mind: a door with no house to it; the gigantic gate of Nowhere. 

How I found the Superman

Readers of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other modern writers may be interestedto know that the Superman has been found. I found him; he lives inSouth Croydon. My success will be a great blow to Mr. Shaw, who has beenfollowing quite a false scent, and is now looking for the creature inBlackpool; and as for Mr. Wells's notion of generating him out of gasesin a private laboratory, I always thought it doomed to failure. I assureMr. Wells that the Superman at Croydon was born in the ordinary way, though he himself, of course, is anything but ordinary. 

Nor are his parents unworthy of the wonderful being whom they have givento the world. The name of Lady Hypatia Smythe-Browne (now Lady HypatiaHagg) will never be forgotten in the East End, where she did suchsplendid social work. Her constant cry of "Save the children!" referredto the cruel neglect of children's eyesight involved in allowing themto play with crudely painted toys. She quoted unanswerable statisticsto prove that children allowed to look at violet and vermilion oftensuffered from failing eyesight in their extreme old age; and itwas owing to her ceaseless crusade that the pestilence of theMonkey-on-the-Stick was almost swept from Hoxton. The devoted workerwould tramp the streets untiringly, taking away the toys from all thepoor children, who were often moved to tears by her kindness. Hergood work was interrupted, partly by a new interest in the creedof Zoroaster, and partly by a savage blow from an umbrella. It wasinflicted by a dissolute Irish apple-woman, who, on returning from someorgy to her ill-kept apartment, found Lady Hypatia in the bedroom takingdown an oleograph, which, to say the least of it, could not reallyelevate the mind. At this the ignorant and partly intoxicated Celt dealtthe social reformer a severe blow, adding to it an absurd accusation oftheft. The lady's exquisitely balanced mind received a shock, and it wasduring a short mental illness that she married Dr. Hagg. 

Of Dr. Hagg himself I hope there is no need to speak. Any one evenslightly acquainted with those daring experiments in Neo-IndividualistEugenics, which are now the one absorbing interest of the Englishdemocracy, must know his name and often commend it to the personalprotection of an impersonal power. Early in life he brought to bear thatruthless insight into the history of religions which he had gained inboyhood as an electrical engineer. Later he became one of our greatestgeologists; and achieved that bold and bright outlook upon the future ofSocialism which only geology can give. At first there seemed somethinglike a rift, a faint, but perceptible, fissure, between his views andthose of his aristocratic wife. For she was in favour (to use her ownpowerful epigram) of protecting the poor against themselves; while hedeclared pitilessly, in a new and striking metaphor, that the weakestmust go to the wall. Eventually, however, the married pair perceivedan essential union in the unmistakably modern character of both theirviews, and in this enlightening and intelligible formula their soulsfound peace. The result is that this union of the two highest types ofour civilization, the fashionable lady and the all but vulgar medicalman, has been blessed by the birth of the Superman, that being whom allthe labourers in Battersea are so eagerly expecting night and day. 

I found the house of Dr. And Lady Hypatia Hagg without much difficulty;it is situated in one of the last straggling streets of Croydon, and overlooked by a line of poplars. I reached the door towards thetwilight, and it was natural that I should fancifully see something darkand monstrous in the dim bulk of that house which contained the creaturewho was more marvellous than the children of men. When I entered thehouse I was received with exquisite courtesy by Lady Hypatia and herhusband; but I found much greater difficulty in actually seeing theSuperman, who is now about fifteen years old, and is kept by himself ina quiet room. Even my conversation with the father and mother did notquite clear up the character of this mysterious being. Lady Hypatia, who has a pale and poignant face, and is clad in those impalpable andpathetic greys and greens with which she has brightened so many homes inHoxton, did not appear to talk of her offspring with any of the vulgarvanity of an ordinary human mother. I took a bold step and asked if theSuperman was nice looking. 

"He creates his own standard, you see, " she replied, with a slight sigh. "Upon that plane he is more than Apollo. Seen from our lower plane, ofcourse--" And she sighed again. 

I had a horrible impulse, and said suddenly, "Has he got any hair?"

There was a long and painful silence, and then Dr. Hagg said smoothly:"Everything upon that plane is different; what he has got is not. .. Well, not, of course, what we call hair. .. But--"

"Don't you think, " said his wife, very softly, "don't you think thatreally, for the sake of argument, when talking to the mere public, onemight call it hair?"

"Perhaps you are right, " said the doctor after a few moments'reflection. "In connexion with hair like that one must speak inparables. "

"Well, what on earth is it, " I asked in some irritation, "if it isn'thair? Is it feathers?"

"Not feathers, as we understand feathers, " answered Hagg in an awfulvoice. 

I got up in some irritation. "Can I see him, at any rate?" I asked. "I am a journalist, and have no earthly motives except curiosity andpersonal vanity. I should like to say that I had shaken hands with theSuperman. "

The husband and wife had both got heavily to their feet, and stood, embarrassed. "Well, of course, you know, " said Lady Hypatia, with thereally charming smile of the aristocratic hostess. "You know he can'texactly shake hands. .. Not hands, you know. .. . The structure, ofcourse--"

I broke out of all social bounds, and rushed at the door of the roomwhich I thought to contain the incredible creature. I burst it open; theroom was pitch dark. But from in front of me came a small sad yelp, andfrom behind me a double shriek. 

"You have done it, now!" cried Dr. Hagg, burying his bald brow in hishands. "You have let in a draught on him; and he is dead. "

As I walked away from Croydon that night I saw men in black carryingout a coffin that was not of any human shape. The wind wailed above me, whirling the poplars, so that they drooped and nodded like the plumes ofsome cosmic funeral. "It is, indeed, " said Dr. Hagg, "the whole universeweeping over the frustration of its most magnificent birth. " But Ithought that there was a hoot of laughter in the high wail of the wind. 

The New House

Within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house. I amglad they are building it, and I am glad it is within a stone's throw;quite well within it, with a good catapult. Nevertheless, I have notyet cast the first stone at the new house--not being, strictly speaking, guiltless myself in the matter of new houses. And, indeed, in suchcases there is a strong protest to be made. The whole curse of the lastcentury has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is theidea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is ashameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignityof mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he isdead that he swings. But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as oneoften does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, oninquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from anothermadhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because theyhave tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have triedIndividualism and found it particularly nasty. Thus, many embraceChristian Science solely because they are quite sick of heathen science;they are so tired of believing that everything is matter that they willeven take refuge in the revolting fable that everything is mind. Manought to march somewhere. But modern man (in his sick reaction) is readyto march nowhere--so long as it is the Other End of Nowhere. 

The case of building houses is a strong instance of this. Early inthe nineteenth century our civilization chose to abandon the Greek andmedieval idea of a town, with walls, limited and defined, with a templefor faith and a market-place for politics; and it chose to let the citygrow like a jungle with blind cruelty and bestial unconsciousness; sothat London and Liverpool are the great cities we now see. Well, peoplehave reacted against that; they have grown tired of living in a citywhich is as dark and barbaric as a forest only not as beautiful, andthere has been an exodus into the country of those who could afford it, and some I could name who can't. Now, as soon as this quite rationalrecoil occurred, it flew at once to the opposite extreme. People wentabout with beaming faces, boasting that they were twenty-three milesfrom a station. Rubbing their hands, they exclaimed in rollickingasides that their butcher only called once a month, and that their bakerstarted out with fresh hot loaves which were quite stale before theyreached the table. A man would praise his little house in a quietvalley, but gloomily admit (with a slight shake of the head) that ahuman habitation on the distant horizon was faintly discernible ona clear day. Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the mostcompletely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealousheartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation whichthe other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked. 

In the feverish summer of this fanaticism there arose the phrase thatthis or that part of England is being "built over. " Now, there is notthe slightest objection, in itself, to England being built over by men, any more than there is to its being (as it is already) built over bybirds, or by squirrels, or by spiders. But if birds' nests were so thickon a tree that one could see nothing but nests and no leaves at all, I should say that bird civilization was becoming a bit decadent. Ifwhenever I tried to walk down the road I found the whole thoroughfareone crawling carpet of spiders, closely interlocked, I should feela distress verging on distaste. If one were at every turn crowded, elbowed, overlooked, overcharged, sweated, rack-rented, swindled, and sold up by avaricious and arrogant squirrels, one might at lastremonstrate. But the great towns have grown intolerable solely becauseof such suffocating vulgarities and tyrannies. It is not humanity thatdisgusts us in the huge cities; it is inhumanity. It is not that thereare human beings; but that they are not treated as such. We do not, Ihope, dislike men and women; we only dislike their being made into asort of jam: crushed together so that they are not merely powerless butshapeless. It is not the presence of people that makes London appalling. It is merely the absence of The People. 

Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England is beingbuilt over, so long as it is being built over in a human way at humanintervals and in a human proportion. So long, in short, as I am notmyself built over, like a pagan slave buried in the foundations of atemple, or an American clerk in a star-striking pagoda of flats, I amdelighted to see the faces and the homes of a race of bipeds, to whichI am not only attracted by a strange affection, but to which also (by atouching coincidence) I actually happen to belong. I am not one desiringdeserts. I am not Timon of Athens; if my town were Athens I would stayin it. I am not Simeon Stylites; except in the mournful sense that everySaturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column. I am not inthe desert repenting of some monstrous sins; at least, I am repenting ofthem all right, but not in the desert. I do not want the nearest humanhouse to be too distant to see; that is my objection to the wilderness. But neither do I want the nearest human house to be too close to see;that is my objection to the modern city. I love my fellow-man; I do notwant him so far off that I can only observe anything of him through atelescope, nor do I want him so close that I can examine parts of himwith a microscope. I want him within a stone's throw of me; so thatwhenever it is really necessary, I may throw the stone. 

Perhaps, after all, it may not be a stone. Perhaps, after all, it may bea bouquet, or a snowball, or a firework, or a Free Trade Loaf; perhapsthey will ask for a stone and I shall give them bread. But it isessential that they should be within reach: how can I love my neighbouras myself if he gets out of range for snowballs? There should be noinstitution out of the reach of an indignant or admiring humanity. Icould hit the nearest house quite well with the catapult; but thetruth is that the catapult belongs to a little boy I know, and, withcharacteristic youthful 'selfishness, he has taken it away. 

The Wings of Stone

The preceding essay is about a half-built house upon my private horizon;I wrote it sitting in a garden-chair; and as, though it was a weekago, I have scarcely moved since then (to speak of), I do not see whyI should not go on writing about it. Strictly speaking, I have moved; Ihave even walked across a field--a field of turf all fiery in our earlysummer sunlight--and studied the early angular red skeleton which hasturned golden in the sun. It is odd that the skeleton of a house ischeerful when the skeleton of a man is mournful, since we only see itafter the man is destroyed. At least, we think the skeleton is mournful;the skeleton himself does not seem to think so. Anyhow, there issomething strangely primary and poetic about this sight of thescaffolding and main lines of a human building; it is a pity there isno scaffolding round a human baby. One seems to see domestic life asthe daring and ambitious thing that it is, when one looks at those openstaircases and empty chambers, those spirals of wind and open halls ofsky. Ibsen said that the art of domestic drama was merely to knock onewall out of the four walls of a drawing-room. I find the drawing-roomeven more impressive when all four walls are knocked out. 

I have never understood what people mean by domesticity being tame; itseems to me one of the wildest of adventures. But if you wish to seehow high and harsh and fantastic an adventure it is, consider only theactual structure of a house itself. A man may march up in a rather boredway to bed; but at least he is mounting to a height from which he couldkill himself. Every rich, silent, padded staircase, with banisters ofoak, stair-rods of brass, and busts and settees on every landing, everysuch staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up intothe Infinite to a deadly height. The millionaire who stumps up insidethe house is really doing the same thing as the tiler or roof-mender whoclimbs up outside the house; they are both mounting up into the void. They are both making an escalade of the intense inane. Each is a sortof domestic mountaineer; he is reaching a point from which mere idlefalling will kill a man; and life is always worth living while men feelthat they may die. 

I cannot understand people at present making such a fuss about flyingships and aviation, when men ever since Stonehenge and the Pyramidshave done something so much more wild than flying. A grasshopper can goastonishingly high up in the air, his biological limitation and weaknessis that he cannot stop there. Hosts of unclean birds and crapulousinsects can pass through the sky, but they cannot pass any communicationbetween it and the earth. But the army of man has advanced verticallyinto infinity, and not been cut off. It can establish outposts in theether, and yet keep open behind it its erect and insolent road. It wouldbe grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannon-ball at the moon; butwould it not be grander to build a railway to the moon? Yet everybuilding of brick or wood is a hint of that high railroad; every chimneypoints to some star, and every tower is a Tower of Babel. Man rising onthese awful and unbroken wings of stone seems to me more majestic andmore mystic than man fluttering for an instant on wings of canvas andsticks of steel. How sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought ofthese veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many ablack-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb byreflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm. Manya wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile of mansions should lookforth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like an eagle whosenest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff. How sad that theword "giddy" is used to imply wantonness or levity! It should be a highcompliment to a man's exalted spirituality and the imagination to say heis a little giddy. 

I strolled slowly back across the stretch of turf by the sunset, a fieldof the cloth of gold. As I drew near my own house, its huge size beganto horrify me; and when I came to the porch of it I discovered with anincredulity as strong as despair that my house was actually bigger thanmyself. A minute or two before there might well have seemed to be amonstrous and mythical competition about which of the two should swallowthe other. But I was Jonah; my house was the huge and hungry fish; andeven as its jaws darkened and closed about me I had again this dreadfulfancy touching the dizzy altitude of all the works of man. I climbed thestairs stubbornly, planting each foot with savage care, as if ascendinga glacier. When I got to a landing I was wildly relieved, and waved myhat. The very word "landing" has about it the wild sound of some onewashed up by the sea. I climbed each flight like a ladder in naked sky. The walls all round me failed and faded into infinity; I went up theladder to my bedroom as Montrose went up the ladder to the gallows; sicitur ad astro. Do you think this is a little fantastic--even a littlefearful and nervous? Believe me, it is only one of the wild andwonderful things that one can learn by stopping at home. 

The Three Kinds of Men

Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. Thefirst kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably themost valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we cometo think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The secondclass may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisanceto their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimesdescribed as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and adesolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, theclassification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some goodpeople are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. Butthe division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do notoffer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes ofearnest reflection and research. 

The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride, attach ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions, whichare called "commonplaces, " as that children are charming, or thattwilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting three is afine sight. Now, these feelings are not crude; they are not even simple. The charm of children is very subtle; it is even complex, to the extentof being almost contradictory. It is, at its very plainest, mingled ofa regard for hilarity and a regard for helplessness. The sentiment oftwilight, in the vulgarest drawing-room song or the coarsest pair ofsweethearts, is, so far as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It is strangelybalanced between pain and pleasure; it might also be called pleasuretempting pain. The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire aman fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it meansmany things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight inexperiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really verysubtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly. In fact, it doesnot express them at all, except on those occasions (now only too rare)when it indulges in insurrection and massacre. 

Now, this accounts for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existenceof Poets. Poets are those who share these popular sentiments, but can soexpress them that they prove themselves the strange and delicate thingsthat they really are. Poets draw out the shy refinement of the rabble. Where the common man covers the queerest emotions by saying, "Rumlittle kid, " Victor Hugo will write "L'art d'etre grand-pere"; where thestockbroker will only say abruptly, "Evenings closing in now, " Mr. Yeats will write "Into the twilight"; where the navvy can only muttersomething about pluck and being "precious game, " Homer will show you thehero in rags in his own hall defying the princes at their banquet. ThePoets carry the popular sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch;but let it always be remembered that it is the popular sentimentsthat they are carrying. No man ever wrote any good poetry to show thatchildhood was shocking, or that twilight was gay and farcical, or that aman was contemptible because he had crossed his single sword with three. The people who maintain this are the Professors, or Prigs. 

The Poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them. Ofcourse, most of the Poets wrote in prose--Rabelais, for instance, andDickens. The Prigs rise above the people by refusing to understand them:by saying that all their dim, strange preferences are prejudices andsuperstitions. The Prigs make the people feel stupid; the Poets make thepeople feel wiser than they could have imagined that they were. Thereare many weird elements in this situation. The oddest of all perhaps isthe fate of the two factors in practical politics. The Poets who embraceand admire the people are often pelted with stones and crucified. ThePrigs who despise the people are often loaded with lands and crowned. Inthe House of Commons, for instance, there are quite a number of prigs, but comparatively few poets. There are no People there at all. 

By poets, as I have said, I do not mean people who write poetry, orindeed people who write anything. I mean such people as, having cultureand imagination, use them to understand and share the feelings of theirfellows; as against those who use them to rise to what they call ahigher plane. Crudely, the poet differs from the mob by his sensibility;the professor differs from the mob by his insensibility. He has notsufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob. His only notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut across it, inaccordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell himself that, whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong. He forgets thatignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of innocence. 

Let me take one example which may mark out the outline of thecontention. Open the nearest comic paper and let your eye rest lovinglyupon a joke about a mother-in-law. Now, the joke, as presented for thepopulace, will probably be a simple joke; the old lady will be tall andstout, the hen-pecked husband will be small and cowering. But for allthat, a mother-in-law is not a simple idea. She is a very subtle idea. The problem is not that she is big and arrogant; she is frequentlylittle and quite extraordinarily nice. The problem of the mother-in-lawis that she is like the twilight: half one thing and half another. Now, this twilight truth, this fine and even tender embarrassment, might berendered, as it really is, by a poet, only here the poet would have tobe some very penetrating and sincere novelist, like George Meredith, or Mr. H. G. Wells, whose "Ann Veronica" I have just been reading withdelight. I would trust the fine poets and novelists because they followthe fairy clue given them in Comic Cuts. But suppose the Professorappears, and suppose he says (as he almost certainly will), "Amother-in-law is merely a fellow-citizen. Considerations of sex shouldnot interfere with comradeship. Regard for age should not influencethe intellect. A mother-in-law is merely Another Mind. We should freeourselves from these tribal hierarchies and degrees. " Now, when theProfessor says this (as he always does), I say to him, "Sir, you arecoarser than Comic Cuts. You are more vulgar and blundering than themost elephantine music-hall artiste. You are blinder and grosser thanthe mob. These vulgar knockabouts have, at least, got hold of a socialshade and real mental distinction, though they can only express itclumsily. You are so clumsy that you cannot get hold of it at all. Ifyou really cannot see that the bridegroom's mother and the bride haveany reason for constraint or diffidence, then you are neither polite norhumane: you have no sympathy in you for the deep and doubtful hearts ofhuman folk. " It is better even to put the difficulty as the vulgar putit than to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty altogether. 

The same question might be considered well enough in the old proverbthat two is company and three is none. This proverb is the truth putpopularly: that is, it is the truth put wrong. Certainly it is untruethat three is no company. Three is splendid company: three is the idealnumber for pure comradeship: as in the Three Musketeers. But if youreject the proverb altogether; if you say that two and three are thesame sort of company; if you cannot see that there is a wider abyssbetween two and three than between three and three million--then Iregret to inform you that you belong to the Third Class of human beings;that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall bealone in a howling desert till you die. 

The Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds

The other day on a stray spur of the Chiltern Hills I climbed up uponone of those high, abrupt, windy churchyards from which the dead seemto look down upon all the living. It was a mountain of ghosts as Olympuswas a mountain of gods. In that church lay the bones of great Puritanlords, of a time when most of the power of England was Puritan, even ofthe Established Church. And below these uplifted bones lay the hugeand hollow valleys of the English countryside, where the motors went byevery now and then like meteors, where stood out in white squares andoblongs in the chequered forest many of the country seats even ofthose same families now dulled with wealth or decayed with Toryism. Andlooking over that deep green prospect on that luminous yellow evening, alovely and austere thought came into my mind, a thought as beautiful asthe green wood and as grave as the tombs. The thought was this: thatI should like to go into Parliament, quarrel with my party, accept theStewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, and then refuse to give it up. 

We are so proud in England of our crazy constitutional anomalies thatI fancy that very few readers indeed will need to be told about theSteward of the Chiltern Hundreds. But in case there should be here orthere one happy man who has never heard of such twisted tomfooleries, I will rapidly remind you what this legal fiction is. As it is quite avoluntary, sometimes even an eager, affair to get into Parliament, youwould naturally suppose that it would be also a voluntary matter to getout again. You would think your fellow-members would be indifferent, oreven relieved to see you go; especially as (by another exercise of theshrewd, illogical old English common sense) they have carefully builtthe room too small for the people who have to sit in it. But not so, my pippins, as it says in the "Iliad. " If you are merely a member ofParliament (Lord knows why) you can't resign. But if you are a Ministerof the Crown (Lord knows why) you can. It is necessary to get into theMinistry in order to get out of the House; and they have to give yousome office that doesn't exist or that nobody else wants and thusunlock the door. So you go to the Prime Minister, concealing your air offatigue, and say, "It has been the ambition of my life to be Steward ofthe Chiltern Hundreds. " The Prime Minister then replies, "I can imagineno man more fitted both morally and mentally for that high office. " Hethen gives it you, and you hurriedly leave, reflecting how the republicsof the Continent reel anarchically to and fro for lack of a little solidEnglish directness and simplicity. 

Now, the thought that struck me like a thunderbolt as I sat on theChiltern slope was that I would like to get the Prime Minister to giveme the Chiltern Hundreds, and then startle and disturb him by showingthe utmost interest in my work. I should profess a general knowledge ofmy duties, but wish to be instructed in the details. I should ask to seethe Under-Steward and the Under-Under-Steward, and all the fine staffof experienced permanent officials who are the glory of this department. And, indeed, my enthusiasm would not be wholly unreal. For as far as Ican recollect the original duties of a Steward of the Chiltern Hundredswere to put down the outlaws and brigands in that part of the world. Well, there are a great many outlaws and brigands in that part of theworld still, and though their methods have so largely altered as torequire a corresponding alteration in the tactics of the Steward, I donot see why an energetic and public-spirited Steward should not nab themyet. 

For the robbers have not vanished from the old high forests to the westof the great city. The thieves have not vanished; they have grown solarge that they are invisible. You do not see the word "Asia" writtenacross a map of that neighbourhood; nor do you see the word "Thief"written across the countrysides of England; though it is really writtenin equally large letters. I know men governing despotically greatstretches of that country, whose every step in life has been such that aslip would have sent them to Dartmoor; but they trod along the highhard wall between right and wrong, the wall as sharp as a swordedge, assoftly and craftily and lightly as a cat. The vastness of their silentviolence itself obscured what they were at; if they seem to stand forthe rights of property it is really because they have so often invadedthem. And if they do not break the laws, it is only because they makethem. 

But after all we only need a Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds who reallyunderstands cats and thieves. Men hunt one animal differently fromanother; and the rich could catch swindlers as dexterously as they catchotters or antlered deer if they were really at all keen upon doing it. But then they never have an uncle with antlers; nor a personal friendwho is an otter. When some of the great lords that lie in the churchyardbehind me went out against their foes in those deep woods beneath Iwager that they had bows against the bows of the outlaws, and spearsagainst the spears of the robber knights. They knew what they wereabout; they fought the evildoers of their age with the weapons oftheir age. If the same common sense were applied to commercial law, inforty-eight hours it would be all over with the American Trusts andthe African forward finance. But it will not be done: for the governingclass either does not care, or cares very much, for the criminals, and as for me, I had a delusive opportunity of being Constable ofBeaconsfield (with grossly inadequate powers), but I fear I shall neverreally be Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. 

The Field of Blood

In my daily paper this morning I read the following interestingparagraphs, which take my mind back to an England which I do notremember and which, therefore (perhaps), I admire. 

"Nearly sixty years ago--on 4 September, 1850--the Austrian GeneralHaynau, who had gained an unenviable fame throughout the world by hisferocious methods in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849, whileon a visit to this country, was belaboured in the streets of London bythe draymen of Messrs. Barclay, Perkins and Co. , whose brewery he hadjust inspected in company of an adjutant. Popular delight was sogreat that the Government of the time did not dare to prosecute theassailants, and the General--the 'women-flogger, ' as he was called bythe people--had to leave these shores without remedy. 

"He returned to his own country and settled upon his estate at Szekeres, which is close to the commune above-mentioned. By his will the estatepassed to his daughter, after whose death it was to be presented to thecommune. This daughter has just died, but the Communal Council, aftermuch deliberation, has declined to accept the gift, and ordered thatthe estate should be left to fall out of cultivation, and be called the'Bloody Meadow. '"

Now that is an example of how things happen under an honest democraticalimpulse. I do not dwell specially on the earlier part of the story, though the earlier part of the story is astonishingly interesting. It recalls the days when Englishmen were potential lighters; that is, potential rebels. It is not for lack of agonies of intellectual anger:the Sultan and the late King Leopold have been denounced as heartily asGeneral Haynau. But I doubt if they would have been physically thrashedin the London streets. 

It is not the tyrants that are lacking, but the draymen. Nevertheless, it is not upon the historic heroes of Barclay, Perkins and Co. ThatI build all my hope. Fine as it was, it was not a full and perfectrevolution. A brewer's drayman beating an eminent European Generalwith a stick, though a singularly bright and pleasing vision, is nota complete one. Only when the brewer's drayman beats the brewer witha stick shall we see the clear and radiant sunrise of Britishself-government. The fun will really start when we begin to thump theoppressors of England as well as the oppressors of Hungary. It is, however, a definite decline in the spiritual character of draymen thatnow they can thump neither one nor the other. 

But, as I have already suggested, my real quarrel is not about the firstpart of the extract, but about the second. Whether or no the draymenof Barclay and Perkins have degenerated, the Commune which includesSzekeres has not degenerated. By the way, the Commune which includesSzekeres is called Kissekeres; I trust that this frank avowal willexcuse me from the necessity of mentioning either of these places againby name. The Commune is still capable of performing direct democraticactions, if necessary, with a stick. 

I say with a stick, not with sticks, for that is the whole argumentabout democracy. A people is a soul; and if you want to know what a soulis, I can only answer that it is something that can sin and that cansacrifice itself. A people can commit theft; a people can confess theft;a people can repent of theft. That is the idea of the republic. Now, most modern people have got into their heads the idea that democraciesare dull, drifting things, a mere black swarm or slide of clerks totheir accustomed doom. In most modern novels and essays it is insisted(by way of contrast) that a walking gentleman may have ad-ventures as hewalks. It is insisted that an aristocrat can commit crimes, because anaristocrat always cultivates liberty. But, in truth, a people can haveadventures, as Israel did crawling through the desert to the promisedland. A people can do heroic deeds; a people can commit crimes; theFrench people did both in the Revolution; the Irish people have doneboth in their much purer and more honourable progress. 

But the real answer to this aristocratic argument which seeks toidentify democracy with a drab utilitarianism may be found in actionsuch as that of the Hungarian Commune--whose name I decline to repeat. This Commune did just one of those acts that prove that a separatepeople has a separate personality; it threw something away. A man canthrow a bank note into the fire. A man can fling a sack of corn into theriver. The bank-note may be burnt as a satisfaction of some scruple; thecorn may be destroyed as a sacrifice to some god. But whenever there issacrifice we know there is a single will. Men may be disputatious anddoubtful, may divide by very narrow majorities in their debate abouthow to gain wealth. But men have to be uncommonly unanimous in order torefuse wealth. It wants a very complete committee to burn a bank note inthe office grate. It needs a highly religious tribe really to throwcorn into the river. This self-denial is the test and definition ofself-government. 

I wish I could feel certain that any English County Council or ParishCouncil would be single enough to make that strong gesture of a romanticrefusal; could say, "No rents shall be raised from this spot; no grainshall grow in this spot; no good shall come of this spot; it shallremain sterile for a sign. " But I am afraid they might answer, like theeminent sociologist in the story, that it was "wiste of spice. "

The Strangeness of Luxury

It is an English misfortune that what is called "public spirit" is sooften a very private spirit; the legitimate but strictly individualideals of this or that person who happens to have the power to carrythem out. When these private principles are held by very rich people, the result is often the blackest and most repulsive kind of despotism, which is benevolent despotism. Obviously it is the public which oughtto have public spirit. But in this country and at this epoch this isexactly what it has not got. We shall have a public washhouse and apublic kitchen long before we have a public spirit; in fact, if we had apublic spirit we might very probably do without the other things. But ifEngland were properly and naturally governed by the English, one of thefirst results would probably be this: that our standard of excess ordefect in property would be changed from that of the plutocrat to thatof the moderately needy man. That is, that while property might bestrictly respected, everything that is necessary to a clerk would befelt and considered on quite a different plane from anything which is avery great luxury to a clerk. This sane distinction of sentiment isnot instinctive at present, because our standard of life is that of thegoverning class, which is eternally turning luxuries into necessitiesas fast as pork is turned into sausages; and which cannot remember thebeginning of its needs and cannot get to the end of its novelties. 

Take, for the sake of argument, the case of the motor. Doubtless theduke now feels it as necessary to have a motor as to have a roof, and ina little while he may feel it equally necessary to have a flying ship. But this does not prove (as the reactionary sceptics always argue) thata motor really is just as necessary as a roof. It only proves that a mancan get used to an artificial life: it does not prove that there is nonatural life for him to get used to. In the broad bird's-eye view ofcommon sense there abides a huge disproportion between the need for aroof and the need for an aeroplane; and no rush of inventions can everalter it. The only difference is that things are now judged by theabnormal needs, when they might be judged merely by the normal needs. The best aristocrat sees the situation from an aeroplane. The goodcitizen, in his loftiest moments, goes no further than seeing it fromthe roof. 

It is not true that luxury is merely relative. It is not true that itis only an expensive novelty which we may afterwards come to think anecessity. Luxury has a firm philosophical meaning; and where there isa real public spirit luxury is generally allowed for, sometimes rebuked, but always recognized instantly. To the healthy soul there is somethingin the very nature of certain pleasures which warns us that theyare exceptions, and that if they become rules they will become verytyrannical rules. 

Take a harassed seamstress out of the Harrow Road and give her onelightning hour in a motorcar, and she will probably feel it assplendid, but strange, rare, and even terrible. But this is not (as therelativists say) merely because she has never been in a car before. Shehas never been in the middle of a Somerset cowslip meadow before; but ifyou put her there she does not think it terrifying or extraordinary, but merely pleasant and free and a little lonely. She does not think themotor monstrous because it is new. She thinks it monstrous because shehas eyes in her head; she thinks it monstrous because it is monstrous. That is, her mothers and grandmothers, and the whole race by whose lifeshe lives, have had, as a matter of fact, a roughly recognizable mode ofliving; sitting in a green field was a part of it; travelling as quickas a cannon ball was not. And we should not look down on the seamstressbecause she mechanically emits a short sharp scream whenever the motorbegins to move. On the contrary, we ought to look up to the seamstress, and regard her cry as a kind of mystic omen or revelation of nature, asthe old Goths used to consider the howls emitted by chance females whenannoyed. For that ritual yell is really a mark of moral health--of swiftresponse to the stimulations and changes of life. The seamstress iswiser than all the learned ladies, precisely because she can still feelthat a motor is a different sort of thing from a meadow. By the accidentof her economic imprisonment it is even possible that she may haveseen more of the former than the latter. But this has not shaken hercyclopean sagacity as to which is the natural thing and which theartificial. If not for her, at least for humanity as a whole, thereis little doubt about which is the more normally attainable. It isconsiderably cheaper to sit in a meadow and see motors go by than to sitin a motor and see meadows go by. 

To me personally, at least, it would never seem needful to own a motor, any more than to own an avalanche. An avalanche, if you have luck, I amtold, is a very swift, successful, and thrilling way of coming down ahill. It is distinctly more stirring, say, than a glacier, which movesan inch in a hundred years. But I do not divide these pleasures eitherby excitement or convenience, but by the nature of the thing itself. Itseems human to have a horse or bicycle, because it seems human to potterabout; and men cannot work horses, nor can bicycles work men, enormouslyfar afield of their ordinary haunts and affairs. 

But about motoring there is something magical, like going to the moon;and I say the thing should be kept exceptional and felt as somethingbreathless and bizarre. My ideal hero would own his horse, but wouldhave the moral courage to hire his motor. Fairy tales are the only soundguidebooks to life; I like the Fairy Prince to ride on a white ponyout of his father's stables, which are of ivory and gold. But if in thecourse of his adventures he finds it necessary to travel on a flamingdragon, I think he ought to give the dragon back to the witch at the endof the story. It is a mistake to have dragons about the place. 

For there is truly an air of something weird about luxury; and it is bythis that healthy human nature has always smelt and suspected it. Allromances that deal in extreme luxury, from the "Arabian Nights" to thenovels of Ouida and Disraeli, have, it may be noted, a singular air ofdream and occasionally of nightmare. In such imaginative debauches thereis something as occasional as intoxication; if that is still countedoccasional. Life in those preposterous palaces would be an agony ofdullness; it is clear we are meant to visit them only as in a flyingvision. And what is true of the old freaks of wealth, flavour and fiercecolour and smell, I would say also of the new freak of wealth, which isspeed. I should say to the duke, when I entered his house at the head ofan armed mob, "I do not object to your having exceptional pleasures, ifyou have them exceptionally. I do not mind your enjoying the strange andalien energies of science, if you feel them strange and alien, and notyour own. But in condemning you (under the Seventeenth Section of theEighth Decree of the Republic) to hire a motor-car twice a year atMargate, I am not the enemy of your luxuries, but, rather, the protectorof them. "

That is what I should say to the duke. As to what the duke would say tome, that is another matter, and may well be deferred. 

The Triumph of the Donkey

Doubtless the unsympathetic might state my doctrine that one should notown a motor like a horse, but rather use it like a flying dragon in thesimpler form that I will always go motoring in somebody else's car. Myfavourite modern philosopher (Mr. W. W. Jacobs) describes a similar caseof spiritual delicacy misunderstood. I have not the book at hand, butI think that Job Brown was reproaching Bill Chambers for wastefuldrunkenness, and Henery Walker spoke up for Bill, and said he scarcelyever had a glass but what somebody else paid for it, and there was"unpleasantness all round then. "

Being less sensitive than Bill Chambers (or whoever it was) I willrisk this rude perversion of my meaning, and concede that I was in amotor-car yesterday, and the motor-car most certainly was not my own, and the journey, though it contained nothing that is specially unusualon such journeys, had running through it a strain of the grotesque whichwas at once wholesome and humiliating. The symbol of that influence wasthat ancient symbol of the humble and humorous--a donkey. 

When first I saw the donkey I saw him in the sunlight as the unearthlygargoyle that he is. My friend had met me in his car (I repeat firmly, in his car) at the little painted station in the middle of the warm wetwoods and hop-fields of that western country. He proposed to drive mefirst to his house beyond the village before starting for a longer spinof adventure, and we rattled through those rich green lanes which havein them something singularly analogous to fairy tales: whether the lanesproduced the fairies or (as I believe) the fairies produced the lanes. All around in the glimmering hop-yards stood those little hop-kilns likestunted and slanting spires. They look like dwarfish churches--in fact, rather like many modern churches I could mention, churches all of themsmall and each of them a little crooked. In this elfin atmosphere weswung round a sharp corner and half-way up a steep, white hill, andsaw what looked at first like a tall, black monster against the sun. Itappeared to be a dark and dreadful woman walking on wheels and wavinglong ears like a bat's. A second glance told me that she was not thelocal witch in a state of transition; she was only one of the milliontricks of perspective. She stood up in a small wheeled cart drawn by adonkey; the donkey's ears were just set behind her head, and the wholewas black against the light. 

Perspective is really the comic element in everything. It has a pompousLatin name, but it is incurably Gothic and grotesque. One simple proofof this is that it is always left out of all dignified and decorativeart. There is no perspective in the Elgin Marbles, and even theessentially angular angels in mediaeval stained glass almost always (asit says in "Patience") contrive to look both angular and flat. There issomething intrinsically disproportionate and outrageous in the idea ofthe distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objectsswelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in thenotion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by ablast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the fancy thatNature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number of sizes, according towhere he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers;all bears in rout into toy bears; as if on the ultimate horizon ofthe world everything was sardonically doomed to stand up laughable andlittle against heaven. 

It was for this reason that the old woman and her donkey struck usfirst when seen from behind as one black grotesque. I afterwards hadthe chance of seeing the old woman, the cart, and the donkey fairly, in flank and in all their length. I saw the old woman and the donkeyPASSANT, as they might have appeared heraldically on the shield of someheroic family. I saw the old woman and the donkey dignified, decorative, and flat, as they might have marched across the Elgin Marbles. Seen thusunder an equal light, there was nothing specially ugly about them; thecart was long and sufficiently comfortable; the donkey was stolidand sufficiently respectable; the old woman was lean but sufficientlystrong, and even smiling in a sour, rustic manner. But seen from behindthey looked like one black monstrous animal; the dark donkey cars seemedlike dreadful wings, and the tall dark back of the woman, erect like atree, seemed to grow taller and taller until one could almost scream. 

Then we went by her with a blasting roar like a railway train, and fledfar from her over the brow of the hill to my friend's home. 

There we paused only for my friend to stock the car with some kind ofpicnic paraphernalia, and so started again, as it happened, by the waywe had come. Thus it fell that we went shattering down that short, sharphill again before the poor old woman and her donkey had managed to crawlto the top of it; and seeing them under a different light, I saw themvery differently. Black against the sun, they had seemed comic; butbright against greenwood and grey cloud, they were not comic but tragic;for there are not a few things that seem fantastic in the twilight, and in the sunlight are sad. I saw that she had a grand, gaunt mask ofancient honour and endurance, and wide eyes sharpened to two shiningpoints, as if looking for that small hope on the horizon of human life. I also saw that her cart contained carrots. 

"Don't you feel, broadly speaking, a beast, " I asked my friend, "whenyou go so easily and so fast?" For we had crashed by so that the crazycart must have thrilled in every stick of it. 

My friend was a good man, and said, "Yes. But I don't think it would doher any good if I went slower. "

"No, " I assented after reflection. "Perhaps the only pleasure we cangive to her or any one else is to get out of their sight very soon. "

My friend availed himself of this advice in no niggard spirit; I felt asif we were fleeing for our lives in throttling fear after some frightfulatrocity. In truth, there is only one difference left between thesecrecy of the two social classes: the poor hide themselves in darknessand the rich hide themselves in distance. They both hide. 

As we shot like a lost boat over a cataract down into a whirlpool ofwhite roads far below, I saw afar a black dot crawling like an insect. I looked again: I could hardly believe it. There was the slow old woman, with her slow old donkey, still toiling along the main road. I asked myfriend to slacken, but when he said of the car, "She's wanting to go, " Iknew it was all up with him. For when you have called a thing female youhave yielded to it utterly. We passed the old woman with a shock thatmust have shaken the earth: if her head did not reel and her heartquail, I know not what they were made of. And when we had fledperilously on in the gathering dark, spurning hamlets behind us, Isuddenly called out, "Why, what asses we are! Why, it's She that isbrave--she and the donkey. We are safe enough; we are artillery andplate-armour: and she stands up to us with matchwood and a snail! If youhad grown old in a quiet valley, and people began firing cannon-balls asbig as cabs at you in your seventieth year, wouldn't you jump--and shenever moved an eyelid. Oh! we go very fast and very far, no doubt--"

As I spoke came a curious noise, and my friend, instead of going fast, began to go very slow; then he stopped; then he got out. Then he said, "And I left the Stepney behind. "

The grey moths came out of the wood and the yellow stars came out tocrown it, as my friend, with the lucidity of despair, explained to me(on the soundest scientific principles, of course) that nothing would beany good at all. We must sleep the night in the lane, except in the veryunlikely event of some one coming by to carry a message to some town. Twice I thought I heard some tiny sound of such approach, and it diedaway like wind in the trees, and the motorist was already asleep whenI heard it renewed and realized. Something certainly was approaching. I ran up the road--and there it was. Yes, It--and She. Thrice had shecome, once comic and once tragic and once heroic. And when she cameagain it was as if in pardon on a pure errand of prosaic pity andrelief. I am quite serious. I do not want you to laugh. It is not thefirst time a donkey has been received seriously, nor one riding a donkeywith respect. 

The Wheel

In a quiet and rustic though fairly famous church in my neighbourhoodthere is a window supposed to represent an Angel on a Bicycle. It doesdefinitely and indisputably represent a nude youth sitting on a wheel;but there is enough complication in the wheel and sanctity (I suppose)in the youth to warrant this working description. It is a thing offlorid Renascence outline, and belongs to the highly pagan period whichintroduced all sorts of objects into ornament: personally I can believein the bicycle more than in the angel. Men, they say, are now imitatingangels; in their flying-machines, that is: not in any other respect thatI have heard of. So perhaps the angel on the bicycle (if he is an angeland if it is a bicycle) was avenging himself by imitating man. If so, heshowed that high order of intellect which is attributed to angels in themediaeval books, though not always (perhaps) in the mediaeval pictures. 

For wheels are the mark of a man quite as much as wings are the mark ofan angel. Wheels are the things that are as old as mankind and yet arestrictly peculiar to man, that are prehistoric but not pre-human. 

A distinguished psychologist, who is well acquainted with physiology, has told me that parts of himself are certainly levers, while otherparts are probably pulleys, but that after feeling himself carefully allover, he cannot find a wheel anywhere. The wheel, as a mode of movement, is a purely human thing. On the ancient escutcheon of Adam (which, like much of the rest of his costume, has not yet been discovered) theheraldic emblem was a wheel--passant. As a mode of progress, I say, itis unique. Many modern philosophers, like my friend before mentioned, are ready to find links between man and beast, and to show that man hasbeen in all things the blind slave of his mother earth. Some, of avery different kind, are even eager to show it; especially if it can betwisted to the discredit of religion. But even the most eager scientistshave often admitted in my hearing that they would be surprised if somekind of cow approached them moving solemnly on four wheels. Wings, fins, flappers, claws, hoofs, webs, trotters, with all these the fantasticfamilies of the earth come against us and close around us, flutteringand flapping and rustling and galloping and lumbering and thundering;but there is no sound of wheels. 

I remember dimly, if, indeed, I remember aright, that in some of thosedark prophetic pages of Scripture, that seem of cloudy purple and duskygold, there is a passage in which the seer beholds a violent dreamof wheels. Perhaps this was indeed the symbolic declaration of thespiritual supremacy of man. Whatever the birds may do above or thefishes beneath his ship, man is the only thing to steer; the only thingto be conceived as steering. He may make the birds his friends, if hecan. He may make the fishes his gods, if he chooses. But most certainlyhe will not believe a bird at the masthead; and it is hardly likelythat he will even permit a fish at the helm. He is, as Swinburne says, helmsman and chief: he is literally the Man at the Wheel. 

The wheel is an animal that is always standing on its head; only "itdoes it so rapidly that no philosopher has ever found out which is itshead. " Or if the phrase be felt as more exact, it is an animal that isalways turning head over heels and progressing by this principle. Somefish, I think, turn head over heels (supposing them, for the sake ofargument, to have heels); I have a dog who nearly did it; and I didit once myself when I was very small. It was an accident, and, asdelightful novelist, Mr. De Morgan, would say, it never can happenagain. Since then no one has accused me of being upside down exceptmentally: and I rather think that there is something to be said forthat; especially as typified by the rotary symbol. A wheel is thesublime paradox; one part of it is always going forward and the otherpart always going back. Now this, as it happens, is highly similar tothe proper condition of any human soul or any political state. Everysane soul or state looks at once backwards and forwards; and even goesbackwards to come on. 

For those interested in revolt (as I am) I only say meekly that onecannot have a Revolution without revolving. The wheel, being a logicalthing, has reference to what is behind as well as what is before. It has(as every society should have) a part that perpetually leaps helplesslyat the sky and a part that perpetually bows down its head into the dust. Why should people be so scornful of us who stand on our heads? Bowingdown one's head in the dust is a very good thing, the humble beginningof all happiness. When we have bowed our heads in the dust for a littletime the happiness comes; and then (leaving our heads' in the humble andreverent position) we kick up our heels behind in the air. That isthe true origin of standing on one's head; and the ultimate defenceof paradox. The wheel humbles itself to be exalted; only it does it alittle quicker than I do. 

Five Hundred and Fifty-five

Life is full of a ceaseless shower of small coincidences: too small tobe worth mentioning except for a special purpose, often too triflingeven to be noticed, any more than we notice one snowflake falling onanother. It is this that lends a frightful plausibility to all falsedoctrines and evil fads. There are always such crowds of accidentalarguments for anything. If I said suddenly that historical truth isgenerally told by red-haired men, I have no doubt that ten minutes'reflection (in which I decline to indulge) would provide me with ahandsome list of instances in support of it. I remember a riotousargument about Bacon and Shakespeare in which I offered quite at randomto show that Lord Rosebery had written the works of Mr. W. B. Yeats. Nosooner had I said the words than a torrent of coincidences rushed uponmy mind. I pointed out, for instance, that Mr. Yeats's chief work was"The Secret Rose. " This may easily be paraphrased as "The Quiet orModest Rose"; and so, of course, as the Primrose. A second after I sawthe same suggestion in the combination of "rose" and "bury. " If I hadpursued the matter, who knows but I might have been a raving maniac bythis time. 

We trip over these trivial repetitions and exactitudes at every turn, only they are too trivial even for conversation. A man named Williamsdid walk into a strange house and murder a man named Williamson; itsounds like a sort of infanticide. A journalist of my acquaintancedid move quite unconsciously from a place called Overstrand to a placecalled Overroads. When he had made this escape he was very properlypursued by a voting card from Battersea, on which a political agentnamed Burn asked him to vote for a political candidate named Burns. Andwhen he did so another coincidence happened to him: rather a spiritualthan a material coincidence; a mystical thing, a matter of a magicnumber. 

For a sufficient number of reasons, the man I know went up to vote inBattersea in a drifting and even dubious frame of mind. As the trainslid through swampy woods and sullen skies there came into his emptymind those idle and yet awful questions which come when the mind isempty. Fools make cosmic systems out of them; knaves make profane poemsout of them; men try to crush them like an ugly lust. Religion isonly the responsible reinforcement of common courage and common sense. Religion only sets up the normal mood of health against the hundredmoods of disease. 

But there is this about such ghastly empty enigmas, that they alwayshave an answer to the obvious answer, the reply offered by daily reason. Suppose a man's children have gone swimming; suppose he is suddenlythrottled by the senseless--fear that they are drowned. The obviousanswer is, "Only one man in a thousand has his children drowned. " Buta deeper voice (deeper, being as deep as hell) answers, "And why shouldnot you--be the thousandth man?" What is true of tragic doubt is truealso of trivial doubt. The voter's guardian devil said to him, "If youdon't vote to-day you can do fifteen things which will quite certainlydo some good somewhere, please a friend, please a child, please amaddened publisher. And what good do you expect to do by voting? Youdon't think your man will get in by one vote, do you?" To this he knewthe answer of common sense, "But if everybody said that, nobody wouldget in at all. " And then there came that deeper voice from Hades, "Butyou are not settling what everybody shall do, but what one person on oneoccasion shall do. If this afternoon you went your way about more solidthings, how would it matter and who would ever know?" Yet somehow thevoter drove on blindly through the blackening London roads, and foundsomewhere a tedious polling station and recorded his tiny vote. 

The politician for whom the voter had voted got in by five hundred andfifty-five votes. The voter read this next morning at breakfast, being in a more cheery and expansive mood, and found something veryfascinating not merely in the fact of the majority, but even in the formof it. There was something symbolic about the three exact figures; onefelt it might be a sort of motto or cipher. In the great book of sealsand cloudy symbols there is just such a thundering repetition. Sixhundred and sixty-six was the Mark of the Beast. Five hundred andfifty-five is the Mark of the Man; the triumphant tribune and citizen. Anumber so symmetrical as that really rises out of the region of scienceinto the region of art. It is a pattern, like the egg-and-dart ornamentor the Greek key. One might edge a wall-paper or fringe a robe witha recurring decimal. And while the voter luxuriated in this lightexactitude of the numbers, a thought crossed his mind and he almostleapt to his feet. "Why, good heavens!" he cried. "I won thatelection; and it was won by one vote! But for me it would have been thedespicable, broken-backed, disjointed, inharmonious figure five hundredand fifty-four. The whole artistic point would have vanished. The Markof the Man would have disappeared from history. It was I who with amasterful hand seized the chisel and carved the hieroglyph--complete andperfect. I clutched the trembling hand of Destiny when it was about tomake a dull square four and forced it to make a nice curly five. Why, but for me the Cosmos would have lost a coincidence!" After thisoutburst the voter sat down and finished his breakfast. 

Ethandune

Perhaps you do not know where Ethandune is. Nor do I; nor does anybody. That is where the somewhat sombre fun begins. I cannot even tell you forcertain whether it is the name of a forest or a town or a hill. I canonly say that in any case it is of the kind that floats and is unfixed. If it is a forest, it is one of those forests that march with a millionlegs, like the walking trees that were the doom of Macbeth. If it is atown, it is one of those towns that vanish, like a city of tents. If itis a hill, it is a flying hill, like the mountain to which faith lendswings. Over a vast dim region of England this dark name of Ethandunefloats like an eagle doubtful where to swoop and strike, and, indeed, there were birds of prey enough over Ethandune, wherever it was. But nowEthandune itself has grown as dark and drifting as the black drifts ofthe birds. 

And yet without this word that you cannot fit with a meaning and hardlywith a memory, you would be sitting in a very different chair at thismoment and looking at a very different tablecloth. As a practical modernphrase I do not commend it; if my private critics and correspondentsin whom I delight should happen to address me "G. K. Chesterton, PosteRestante, Ethandune, " I fear their letters would not come to hand. Iftwo hurried commercial travellers should agree to discuss a businessmatter at Ethandune from 5 to 5. 15, I am afraid they would grow old inthe district as white-haired wanderers. To put it plainly, Ethandune isanywhere and nowhere in the western hills; it is an English mirage. Andyet but for this doubtful thing you would have probably no Daily News onSaturday and certainly no church on Sunday. I do not say that either ofthese two things is a benefit; but I do say that they are customs, andthat you would not possess them except through this mystery. You wouldnot have Christmas puddings, nor (probably) any puddings; you wouldnot have Easter eggs, probably not poached eggs, I strongly suspect notscrambled eggs, and the best historians are decidedly doubtful aboutcurried eggs. To cut a long story short (the longest of allstories), you would not have any civilization, far less any Christiancivilization. And if in some moment of gentle curiosity you wish to knowwhy you are the polished sparkling, rounded, and wholly satisfactorycitizen which you obviously are, then I can give you no more definiteanswer geographical or historical; but only toll in your ears the toneof the uncaptured name--Ethandune. 

I will try to state quite sensibly why it is as important as it is. Andyet even that is not easy. If I were to state the mere fact from thehistory books, numbers of people would think it equally trivial andremote, like some war of the Picts and Scots. The points perhaps mightbe put in this way. There is a certain spirit in the world which breakseverything off short. There may be magnificence in the smashing; but thething is smashed. There may be a certain splendour; but the splendour issterile: it abolishes all future splendours. I mean (to take a workingexample), York Minster covered with flames might happen to be quiteas beautiful as York Minster covered with carvings. But the carvingsproduce more carvings. The flames produce nothing but a little blackheap. When any act has this cul-de-sac quality it matters little whetherit is done by a book or a sword, by a clumsy battle-axe or a chemicalbomb. The case is the same with ideas. The pessimist may be a proudfigure when he curses all the stars; the optimist may be an even prouderfigure when he blesses them all. But the real test is not in theenergy, but in the effect. When the optimist has said, "All thingsare interesting, " we are left free; we can be interested as much oras little as we please. But when the pessimist says, "No things areinteresting, " it may be a very witty remark: but it is the last wittyremark that can be made on the subject. He has burnt his cathedral; hehas had his blaze and the rest is ashes. The sceptics, like bees, givetheir one sting and die. The pessimist must be wrong, because he saysthe last word. 

Now, this spirit that denies and that destroys had at one period ofhistory a dreadful epoch of military superiority. They did burn YorkMinster, or at least, places of the same kind. Roughly speaking, fromthe seventh century to the tenth, a dense tide of darkness, of chaos andbrainless cruelty, poured on these islands and on the western coastsof the Continent, which well-nigh cut them off from all the white man'sculture for ever. And this is the final human test; that the variedchiefs of that vague age were remembered or forgotten according to howthey had resisted this almost cosmic raid. Nobody thought of the modernnonsense about races; everybody thought of the human race and itshighest achievements. Arthur was a Celt, and may have been a fabulousCelt; but he was a fable on the right side. Charlemagne may have been aGaul or a Goth, but he was not a barbarian; he fought for the traditionagainst the barbarians, the nihilists. And for this reason also, forthis reason, in the last resort, only, we call the saddest and in someways the least successful of the Wessex kings by the title of Alfredthe Great. Alfred was defeated by the barbarians again and again, hedefeated the barbarians again and again; but his victories were almostas vain as his defeats. Fortunately he did not believe in the TimeSpirit or the Trend of Things or any such modern rubbish, and thereforekept pegging away. But while his failures and his fruitless successeshave names still in use (such as Wilton, Basing, and Ashdown), thatlast epic battle which really broke the barbarian has remained withouta modern place or name. Except that it was near Chippenham, wherethe Danes gave up their swords and were baptized, no one can pick outcertainly the place where you and I were saved from being savages forever. 

But the other day under a wild sunset and moonrise I passed the placewhich is best reputed as Ethandune, a high, grim upland, partly bareand partly shaggy; like that savage and sacred spot in those greatimaginative lines about the demon lover and the waning moon. Thedarkness, the red wreck of sunset, the yellow and lurid moon, the longfantastic shadows, actually created that sense of monstrous incidentwhich is the dramatic side of landscape. The bare grey slopes seemed torush downhill like routed hosts; the dark clouds drove across like rivenbanners; and the moon was like a golden dragon, like the Golden Dragonof Wessex. 

As we crossed a tilt of the torn heath I saw suddenly between myself andthe moon a black shapeless pile higher than a house. The atmospherewas so intense that I really thought of a pile of dead Danes, with somephantom conqueror on the top of it. Fortunately I was crossing thesewastes with a friend who knew more history than I; and he told methat this was a barrow older than Alfred, older than the Romans, olderperhaps than the Britons; and no man knew whether it was a wall or atrophy or a tomb. Ethandune is still a drifting name; but it gave me aqueer emotion to think that, sword in hand, as the Danes poured withthe torrents of their blood down to Chippenham, the great king may havelifted up his head and looked at that oppressive shape, suggestive ofsomething and yet suggestive of nothing; may have looked at it as wedid, and understood it as little as we. 

The Flat Freak

Some time ago a Sub-Tropical Dinner was given by some South Africanmillionaire. I forget his name; and so, very likely, does he. The humourof this was so subtle and haunting that it has been imitated by anothermillionaire, who has given a North Pole Dinner in a grand hotel, onwhich he managed to spend gigantic sums of money. I do not know how hedid it; perhaps they had silver for snow and great sapphires for lumpsof ice. Anyhow, it seems to have cost rather more to bring the Pole toLondon than to take Peary to the Pole. All this, one would say, does notconcern us. We do not want to go to the Pole--or to the hotel. I, forone, cannot imagine which would be the more dreary and disgusting--thereal North Pole or the sham one. But as a mere matter of psychology(that merry pastime) there is a question that is not unentertaining. 

Why is it that all this scheme of ice and snow leaves us cold? Why isit that you and I feel that we would (on the whole) rather spend theevening with two or three stable boys in a pot-house than take partin that pallid and Arctic joke? Why does the modern millionaire'sjest--bore a man to death with the mere thought of it? That it does borea man to death I take for granted, and shall do so until somebody writesto me in cold ink and tells me that he really thinks it funny. 

Now, it is not a sufficient explanation to say that the joke is silly. All jokes are silly; that is what they are for. If you ask some sincereand elemental person, a woman, for instance, what she thinks of a goodsentence from Dickens, she will say that it is "too silly. " When Mr. Weller, senior, assured Mr. Weller, junior, that "circumvented" was "amore tenderer word" than "circumscribed, " the remark was at least assilly as it was sublime. It is vain, then, to object to "senselessjokes. " The very definition of a joke is that it need have no sense;except that one wild and supernatural sense which we call the sense ofhumour. Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; thatis, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game. It is meant to remind us human beings that we have things about us asungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the elephant or the neck of thegiraffe. If laughter does not touch a sort of fundamental folly, itdoes not do its duty in bringing us back to an enormous and originalsimplicity. Nothing has been worse than the modern notion that a cleverman can make a joke without taking part in it; without sharing in thegeneral absurdity that such a situation creates. It is unpardonableconceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that iswhy it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached witand avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester youmust be the Court Fool. 

Whatever it is, therefore, that wearies us in these wealthy jokes(like the North Pole Dinner) it is not merely that men make fools ofthemselves. When Dickens described Mr. Chuckster, Dickens was, strictlyspeaking, making a fool of himself; for he was making a fool out ofhimself. And every kind of real lark, from acting a charade to makinga pun, does consist in restraining one's nine hundred and ninety-nineserious selves and letting the fool loose. The dullness of themillionaire joke is much deeper. It is not silly at all; it is solelystupid. It does not consist of ingenuity limited, but merely of inanityexpanded. There is considerable difference between a wit making a foolof himself and a fool making a wit of himself. 

The true explanation, I fancy, may be stated thus. We can all rememberit in the case of the really inspiriting parties and fooleries of ouryouth. The only real fun is to have limited materials and a good idea. This explains the perennial popularity of impromptu private theatricals. These fascinate because they give such a scope for invention and varietywith the most domestic restriction of machinery. A tea-cosy may have todo for an Admiral's cocked hat; it all depends on whether the amateuractor can swear like an Admiral. A hearth-rug may have to do for abear's fur; it all depends on whether the wearer is a polished andversatile man of the world and can grunt like a bear. A clergyman's hat(to my own private and certain knowledge) can be punched and thumpedinto the exact shape of a policeman's helmet; it all depends on theclergyman. I mean it depends on his permission; his imprimatur; hisnihil obstat. Clergymen can be policemen; rugs can rage like wildanimals; tea-cosies can smell of the sea; if only there is at the backof them all one bright and amusing idea. What is really funny aboutChristmas charades in any average home is that there is a contrastbetween commonplace resources and one comic idea. What is deadly dullabout the millionaire-banquets is that there is a contrast betweencolossal resources and no idea. 

That is the abyss of inanity in such feasts--it may be literally calleda yawning abyss. The abyss is the vast chasm between the money poweremployed and the thing it is employed on. To make a big joke out of abroomstick, a barrow and an old hat--that is great. But to make a smalljoke out of mountains of emeralds and tons of gold--surely that ishumiliating! The North Pole is not a very good joke to start with. Anicicle hanging on one's nose is a simple sort of humour in any case. Ifa set of spontaneous mummers got the effect cleverly with cut crystalsfrom the early Victorian chandelier there might really be somethingsuddenly funny in it. But what should we say of hanging diamonds on ahundred human noses merely to make that precious joke about icicles?

What can be more abject than the union of elaborate and recherchearrangements with an old and obvious point? The clown with the red-hotpoker and the string of sausages is all very well in his way. But thinkof a string of pate de foie gras sausages at a guinea a piece! Think ofa red-hot poker cut out of a single ruby! Imagine such fantasticalitiesof expense with such a tameness and staleness of design. 

We may even admit the practical joke if it is domestic and simple. Wemay concede that apple-pie beds and butter-slides are sometimes usefulthings for the education of pompous persons living the Higher Life. Butimagine a man making a butter-slide and telling everybody it was madewith the most expensive butter. Picture an apple-pie bed of purpleand cloth of gold. It is not hard to see that such schemes would leadsimultaneously to a double boredom; weariness of the costly and complexmethod and of the meagre and trivial thought. This is the true analysis, I think of that chill of tedium that strikes to the soul of anyintelligent man when he hears of such elephantine pranks. That is why wefeel that Freak Dinners would not even be freakish. That is why we feelthat expensive Arctic feasts would probably be a frost. 

If it be said that such things do no harm, I hasten, in one sense, atleast, to agree. Far from it; they do good. They do good in the mostvital matter of modern times; for they prove and print in huge lettersthe truth which our society must learn or perish. They prove that wealthin society as now constituted does not tend to get into the hands ofthe thrifty or the capable, but actually tends to get into the hands ofwastrels and imbeciles. And it proves that the wealthy class of to-dayis quite as ignorant about how to enjoy itself as about how to ruleother people. That it cannot make its government govern or its educationeducate we may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy; but pleasurewe do look to see in such a class; and it has surely come to itsdecrepitude when it cannot make its pleasures please. 

The Garden of the Sea

One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture theremark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty ofthe country. This is an error rooted in the intellectual pride ofmediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the ideathat extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob one musteither be on a level with it (as I am) or be really high up, like thesaints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and rude dialectcan be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely bookishtaste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk ofNature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not talkin a bookish way. They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones, or pigs or slugs, or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishlyabout pigs; and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshinglyhorsy about horses. They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak ina cloudy way of clouds; and this is surely the right way. And if by anychance a simple intelligent person from the country comes in contactwith any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting, such a person'scomment is always worth remark. It is sometimes an epigram, and at worstit is never a quotation. 

Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy imitation and ambiguity theordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the subjectof the sea. A country girl I know in the county of Buckingham had neverseen the sea in her life until the other day. When she was asked whatshe thought of it she said it was like cauliflowers. Now that is apiece of pure literature--vivid, entirely independent and original, and perfectly true. I had always been haunted with an analogous kinshipwhich I could never locate; cabbages always remind me of the sea andthe sea always reminds me of cabbages. It is partly, perhaps, the veinedmingling of violet and green, as in the sea a purple that is almost darkred may mix with a green that is almost yellow, and still be the bluesea as a whole. But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage thatcurl over cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamyrepetition, as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus andShakespeare, use a word like "multitudinous" of the ocean. But justwhere my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed (so tospeak) to my imaginative rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times betterthan cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as well as curling, andthe efflorescence of the branching foam, blind bubbling, and opaque. Moreover, the strong lines of life are suggested; the arches of therushing waves have all the rigid energy of green stalks, as if the wholesea were one great green plant with one immense white flower rooted inthe abyss. 

Now, a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse to seethe force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not connectedwith any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books andsongs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large andphilosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep. He wouldsay that he was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens. Towhich I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of a parallel profession, "Iwould you were so honest a man. " The mention of "Hamlet" reminds me, bythe way, that besides the girl who had never seen the sea, I knew a girlwho had never seen a stage-play. She was taken to "Hamlet, " and she saidit was very sad. There is another case of going to the primordial pointwhich is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions. We are so usedto thinking of "Hamlet" as a problem that we sometimes quite forget thatit is a tragedy, just as we are so used to thinking of the sea as vastand vague, that we scarcely notice when it is white and green. 

But there is another quarrel involved in which the young gentlemanof culture comes into violent collision with the young lady of thecauliflowers. The first essential of the merely bookish view of the seais that it is boundless, and gives a sentiment of infinity. Now it isquite certain, I think, that the cauliflower simile was partly createdby exactly the opposite impression, the impression of boundary and ofbarrier. The girl thought of it as a field of vegetables, even as a yardof vegetables. The girl was right. The ocean only suggests infinity whenyou cannot see it; a sea mist may seem endless, but not a sea. So farfrom being vague and vanishing, the sea is the one hard straight line inNature. It is the one plain limit; the only thing that God has made thatreally looks like a wall. Compared to the sea, not only sun and cloudare chaotic and doubtful, but solid mountains and standing forests maybe said to melt and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely ironline. The old naval phrase, that the seas are England's bulwarks, is nota frigid and artificial metaphor; it came into the head of some genuinesea-dog, when he was genuinely looking at the sea. For the edge of thesea is like the edge of a sword; it is sharp, military, and decisive; itreally looks like a bolt or bar, and not like a mere expansion. It hangsin heaven, grey, or green, or blue, changing in colour, but changelessin form, behind all the slippery contours of the land and all the savagesoftness of the forests, like the scales of God held even. It hangs, aperpetual reminder of that divine reason and justice which abides behindall compromises and all legitimate variety; the one straight line; thelimit of the intellect; the dark and ultimate dogma of the world. 

The Sentimentalist

"Sentimentalism is the most broken reed on which righteousness canlean"; these were, I think, the exact words of a distinguished Americanvisitor at the Guildhall, and may Heaven forgive me if I do him a wrong. It was spoken in illustration of the folly of supporting Egyptian andother Oriental nationalism, and it has tempted me to some reflections onthe first word of the sentence. 

The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat hiscake and have it. He has no sense of honour about ideas; he will not seethat one must pay for an idea as for anything else. He will not seethat any worthy idea, like any honest woman, can only be won on its ownterms, and with its logical chain of loyalty. One idea attracts him;another idea really inspires him; a third idea flatters him; a fourthidea pays him. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectualharem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other. TheSentimentalist is a philosophic profligate, who tries to capture everymental beauty without reference to its rival beauties; who will not evenbe off with the old love before he is on with the new. Thus if a manwere to say, "I love this woman, but I may some day find my affinity insome other woman, " he would be a Sentimentalist. He would be saying, "Iwill eat my wedding-cake and keep it. " Or if a man should say, "I ama Republican, believing in the equality of citizens; but when theGovernment has given me my peerage I can do infinite good as akind landlord and a wise legislator"; then that man would be aSentimentalist. He would be trying to keep at the same time the classicausterity of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an aristocrat. Or if a man should say, "I am in favour of religious equality; but Imust preserve the Protestant Succession, " he would be a Sentimentalistof a grosser and more improbable kind. 

This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy everyidea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence. 

Now it would really be hard to find a worse case of this inconsequentsentimentalism than the theory of the British Empire advanced by Mr. Roosevelt himself in his attack on Sentimentalists. For the Imperialtheory, the Roosevelt and Kipling theory, of our relation to Easternraces is simply one of eating the Oriental cake (I suppose a SultanaCake) and at the same time leaving it alone. 

Now there are two sane attitudes of a European statesman towards Easternpeoples, and there are only two. 

First, he may simply say that the less we have to do with them thebetter; that whether they are lower than us or higher they are socatastrophically different that the more we go our way and they gotheirs the better for all parties concerned. I will confess to sometenderness for this view. There is much to be said for letting that calmimmemorial life of slave and sultan, temple and palm tree flow on as ithas always flowed. The best reason of all, the reason that affects memost finally, is that if we left the rest of the world alone we mighthave some time for attending to our own affairs, which are urgent tothe point of excruciation. All history points to this; that intensivecultivation in the long run triumphs over the widest extensivecultivation; or, in other words, that making one's own field superior isfar more effective than reducing other people's fields to inferiority. If you cultivate your own garden and grow a specially large cabbage, people will probably come to see it. Whereas the life of one sellingsmall cabbages round the whole district is often forlorn. 

Now, the Imperial Pioneer is essentially a commercial traveller; anda commercial traveller is essentially a person who goes to see peoplebecause they don't want to see him. As long as empires go about urgingtheir ideas on others, I always have a notion that the ideas are nogood. If they were really so splendid, they would make the countrypreaching them a wonder of the world. That is the true ideal; a greatnation ought not to be a hammer, but a magnet. Men went to the mediaevalSorbonne because it was worth going to. Men went to old Japan becauseonly there could they find the unique and exquisite old Japanese art. Nobody will ever go to modern Japan (nobody worth bothering about, Imean), because modern Japan has made the huge mistake of going to theother people: becoming a common empire. The mountain has condescended toMahomet; and henceforth Mahomet will whistle for it when he wants it. 

That is my political theory: that we should make England worth copyinginstead of telling everybody to copy her. 

But it is not the only possible theory. There is another view of ourrelations to such places as Egypt and India which is entirely tenable. It may be said, "We Europeans are the heirs of the Roman Empire; whenall is said we have the largest freedom, the most exact science, themost solid romance. We have a deep though undefined obligation togive as we have received from God; because the tribes of men are trulythirsting for these things as for water. All men really want clearlaws: we can give clear laws. All men really want hygiene: we cangive hygiene. We are not merely imposing Western ideas. We are simplyfulfilling human ideas--for the first time. "

On this line, I think, it is possible to justify the forts of Africa andthe railroads of Asia; but on this line we must go much further. If itis our duty to give our best, there can be no doubt about what is ourbest. The greatest thing our Europe has made is the Citizen: the ideaof the average man, free and full of honour, voluntarily invoking on hisown sin the just vengeance of his city. All else we have done is meremachinery for that: railways exist only to carry the Citizen; forts onlyto defend him; electricity only to light him, medicine only to heal him. Popularism, the idea of the people alive and patiently feeding history, that we cannot give; for it exists everywhere, East and West. Butdemocracy, the idea of the people fighting and governing--that is theonly thing we have to give. 

Those are the two roads. But between them weakly wavers theSentimentalist--that is, the Imperialist of the Roosevelt school. Hewants to have it both ways, to have the splendours of success withoutthe perils. Europe may enslave Asia, because it is flattering: butEurope must not free Asia, because that is responsible. It tickleshis Imperial taste that Hindoos should have European hats: it is toodangerous if they have European heads. He cannot leave Asia Asiatic: yethe dare not contemplate Asia as European. Therefore he proposes to havein Egypt railway signals, but not flags; despatch boxes, but not ballotboxes. 

In short, the Sentimentalist decides to spread the body of Europewithout the soul. 

The White Horses

It is within my experience, which is very brief and occasional in thismatter, that it is not really at all easy to talk in a motor-car. Thisis fortunate; first, because, as a whole, it prevents me from motoring;and second because, at any given moment, it prevents me from talking. The difficulty is not wholly due to the physical conditions, thoughthese are distinctly unconversational. FitzGerald's Omar, being apessimist, was probably rich, and being a lazy fellow, was almostcertainly a motorist. If any doubt could exist on the point, it isenough to say that, in speaking of the foolish profits, Omar has definedthe difficulties of colloquial motoring with a precision which cannotbe accidental. "Their words to wind are scattered; and their mouths arestopped with dust. " From this follows not (as many of the cut-and-driedphilosophers would say) a savage silence and mutual hostility, butrather one of those rich silences that make the mass and bulk of allfriendship; the silence of men rowing the same boat or fighting in thesame battle-line. 

It happened that the other day I hired a motor-car, because I wanted tovisit in very rapid succession the battle-places and hiding-placesof Alfred the Great; and for a thing of this sort a motor is reallyappropriate. It is not by any means the best way of seeing the beautyof the country; you see beauty better by walking, and best of all bysitting still. But it is a good method in any enterprise that involves aparody of the military or governmental quality--anything which needsto know quickly the whole contour of a county or the rough, relativeposition of men and towns. On such a journey, like jagged lightning, I sat from morning till night by the side of the chauffeur; and wescarcely exchanged a word to the hour. But by the time the yellow starscame out in the villages and the white stars in the skies, I think Iunderstood his character; and I fear he understood mine. 

He was a Cheshire man with a sour, patient, and humorous face; he wasmodest, though a north countryman, and genial, though an expert. Hespoke (when he spoke at all) with a strong northland accent; and heevidently was new to the beautiful south country, as was clear both fromhis approval and his complaints. But though he came from the north hewas agricultural and not commercial in origin; he looked at the landrather than the towns, even if he looked at it with a somewhat moresharp and utilitarian eye. His first remark for some hours was utteredwhen we were crossing the more coarse and desolate heights of SalisburyPlain. He remarked that he had always thought that Salisbury Plain wasa plain. This alone showed that he was new to the vicinity. But he alsosaid, with a critical frown, "A lot of this land ought to be good landenough. Why don't they use it?" He was then silent for some more hours. 

At an abrupt angle of the slopes that lead down from what is called(with no little humour) Salisbury Plain, I saw suddenly, as by accident, something I was looking for--that is, something I did not expect to see. We are all supposed to be trying to walk into heaven; but we should beuncommonly astonished if we suddenly walked into it. As I was leavingSalisbury Plain (to put it roughly) I lifted up my eyes and saw theWhite Horse of Britain. 

One or two truly fine poets of the Tory and Protestant type, such asSwinburne and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, have eulogized England under theimage of white horses, meaning the white-maned breakers of the Channel. This is right and natural enough. The true philosophical Tory goes backto ancient things because he thinks they will be anarchic things. Itwould startle him very much to be told that there are white horses ofartifice in England that may be older than those wild white horses ofthe elements. Yet it is truly so. Nobody knows how old are those strangegreen and white hieroglyphics, those straggling quadrupeds of chalk, that stand out on the sides of so many of the Southern Downs. They arepossibly older than Saxon and older than Roman times. They may well beolder than British, older than any recorded times. They may go back, forall we know, to the first faint seeds of human life on this planet. Menmay have picked a horse out of the grass long before they scratched ahorse on a vase or pot, or messed and massed any horse out of clay. Thismay be the oldest human art--before building or graving. And if so, itmay have first happened in another geological age, before the sea burstthrough the narrow Straits of Dover. The White Horse may have begun inBerkshire when there were no white horses at Folkestone or Newhaven. That rude but evident white outline that I saw across the valley mayhave been begun when Britain was not an island. We forget that there aremany places where art is older than nature. 

We took a long detour through somewhat easier roads, till we came to abreach or chasm in the valley, from which we saw our friend the WhiteHorse once more. At least, we thought it was our friend the White Horse;but after a little inquiry we discovered to our astonishment that it wasanother friend and another horse. Along the leaning flanks of the samefair valley there was (it seemed) another white horse; as rude and asclean, as ancient and as modern, as the first. This, at least, I thoughtmust be the aboriginal White Horse of Alfred, which I had always heardassociated with his name. And yet before we had driven into Wantageand seen King Alfred's quaint grey statue in the sun, we had seen yet athird white horse. And the third white horse was so hopelessly unlikea horse that we were sure that it was genuine. The final and originalwhite horse, the white horse of the White Horse Vale, has that big, babyish quality that truly belongs to our remotest ancestors. It reallyhas the prehistoric, preposterous quality of Zulu or New Zealand nativedrawings. This at least was surely made by our fathers when they werebarely men; long before they were civilized men. 

But why was it made? Why did barbarians take so much trouble to make ahorse nearly as big as a hamlet; a horse who could bear no hunter, whocould drag no load? What was this titanic, sub-conscious instinct forspoiling a beautiful green slope with a very ugly white quadruped?What (for the matter of that) is this whole hazardous fancy of humanityruling the earth, which may have begun with white horses, which may byno means end with twenty horse-power cars? As I rolled away out of thatcountry, I was still cloudily considering how ordinary men ever came towant to make such strange chalk horses, when my chauffeur startled me byspeaking for the first time for nearly two hours. He suddenly let go oneof the handles and pointed at a gross green bulk of down that happenedto swell above us. "That would be a good place, " he said. 

Naturally I referred to his last speech of some hours before; andsupposed he meant that it would be promising for agriculture. As a fact, it was quite unpromising; and this made me suddenly understand the quietardour in his eye. All of a sudden I saw what he really meant. He reallymeant that this would be a splendid place to pick out another whitehorse. He knew no more than I did why it was done; but he was in someunthinkable prehistoric tradition, because he wanted to do it. He becameso acute in sensibility that he could not bear to pass any broad breezyhill of grass on which there was not a white horse. He could hardly keephis hands off the hills. He could hardly leave any of the living grassalone. 

Then I left off wondering why the primitive man made so many whitehorses. I left off troubling in what sense the ordinary eternal man hadsought to scar or deface the hills. I was content to know that he didwant it; for I had seen him wanting it. 

The Long Bow

I find myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G. Wells, I say stunned with admiration, my family says sleepy withfatigue. I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells's book whichI agree with; and I still feel vividly the one thing that I deny. I denythat biology can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can even desirebiology. No truth which I find can deny that I am seeking the truth. Mymind cannot find anything which denies my mind. .. But what is all this?This is no sort of talk for a genial essay. Let us change the subject;let us have a romance or a fable or a fairy tale. 

Come, let us tell each other stories. There was once a king who was veryfond of listening to stories, like the king in the Arabian Nights. The only difference was that, unlike that cynical Oriental, this kingbelieved all the stories that he heard. It is hardly necessary to addthat he lived in England. His face had not the swarthy secrecy of thetyrant of the thousand tales; on the contrary, his eyes were as big andinnocent as two blue moons; and when his yellow beard turned totallywhite he seemed to be growing younger. Above him hung still his heavysword and horn, to remind men that he had been a tall hunter and warriorin his time: indeed, with that rusted sword he had wrecked armies. But he was one of those who will never know the world, even when theyconquer it. Besides his love of this old Chaucerian pastime of thetelling of tales, he was, like many old English kings, speciallyinterested in the art of the bow. He gathered round him great archers ofthe stature of Ulysses and Robin Hood, and to four of these he gavethe whole government of his kingdom. They did not mind governing hiskingdom; but they were sometimes a little bored with the necessityof telling him stories. None of their stories were true; but the kingbelieved all of them, and this became very depressing. They created themost preposterous romances; and could not get the credit of creatingthem. Their true ambition was sent empty away. They were praised asarchers; but they desired to be praised as poets. They were trusted asmen, but they would rather have been admired as literary men. 

At last, in an hour of desperation, they formed themselves into a clubor conspiracy with the object of inventing some story which even theking could not swallow. They called it The League of the Long Bow; thusattaching themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England, which has been steadily celebrated since the Norman Conquest for itsheroic archery and for the extraordinary credulity of its people. 

At last it seemed to the four archers that their hour had come. The kingcommonly sat in a green curtained chamber, which opened by four doors, and was surmounted by four turrets. Summoning his champions to him on anApril evening, he sent out each of them by a separate door, telling himto return at morning with the tale of his journey. Every champion bowedlow, and, girding on great armour as for awful adventures, retired tosome part of the garden to think of a lie. They did not want to think ofa lie which would deceive the king; any lie would do that. They wantedto think of a lie so outrageous that it would not deceive him, and thatwas a serious matter. 

The first archer who returned was a dark, quiet, clever fellow, verydexterous in small matters of mechanics. He was more interested in thescience of the bow than in the sport of it. Also he would only shoot ata mark, for he thought it cruel to kill beasts and birds, and atrociousto kill men. When he left the king he had gone out into the wood andtried all sorts of tiresome experiments about the bending of branchesand the impact of arrows; when even he found it tiresome he returned tothe house of the four turrets and narrated his adventure. "Well, " saidthe king, "what have you been shooting?" "Arrows, " answered the archer. "So I suppose, " said the king smiling; "but I mean, I mean what wildthings have you shot?" "I have shot nothing but arrows, " answered thebowman obstinately. "When I went out on to the plain I saw in a crescentthe black army of the Tartars, the terrible archers whose bows are ofbended steel, and their bolts as big as javelins. They spied me afaroff, and the shower of their arrows shut out the sun and made a rattlingroof above me. You know, I think it wrong to kill a bird, or worm, oreven a Tartar. But such is the precision and rapidity of perfect sciencethat, with my own arrows, I split every arrow as it came against me. Istruck every flying shaft as if it were a flying bird. Therefore, Sire, I may say truly, that I shot nothing but arrows. " The king said, "I knowhow clever you engineers are with your fingers. " The archer said, "Oh, "and went out. 

The second archer, who had curly hair and was pale, poetical, and rathereffeminate, had merely gone out into the garden and stared at the moon. When the moon had become too wide, blank, and watery, even for his ownwide, blank, and watery eyes, he came in again. And when the king said"What have you been shooting?" he answered with great volubility, "Ihave shot a man; not a man from Tartary, not a man from Europe, Asia, Africa, or America; not a man on this earth at all. I have shot theMan in the Moon. " "Shot the Man in the Moon?" repeated the king withsomething like a mild surprise. "It is easy to prove it, " saidthe archer with hysterical haste. "Examine the moon through thisparticularly powerful telescope, and you will no longer find anytraces of a man there. " The king glued his big blue idiotic eye to thetelescope for about ten minutes, and then said, "You are right: asyou have often pointed out, scientific truth can only be tested by thesenses. I believe you. " And the second archer went out, and being of amore emotional temperament burst into tears. 

The third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled hairand dreamy eyes, and he came in without any preface, saying, "I havelost all my arrows. They have turned into birds. " Then as he saw thatthey all stared at him, he said "Well, you know everything changes onthe earth; mud turns into marigolds, eggs turn into chickens; one caneven breed dogs into quite different shapes. Well, I shot my arrowsat the awful eagles that clash their wings round the Himalayas; greatgolden eagles as big as elephants, which snap the tall trees by perchingon them. My arrows fled so far over mountain and valley that they turnedslowly into fowls in their flight. See here, " and he threw down a deadbird and laid an arrow beside it. "Can't you see they are the samestructure. The straight shaft is the backbone; the sharp point is thebeak; the feather is the rudimentary plumage. It is merely modificationand evolution. " After a silence the king nodded gravely and said, "Yes;of course everything is evolution. " At this the third archer suddenlyand violently left the room, and was heard in some distant part of thebuilding making extraordinary noises either of sorrow or of mirth. 

The fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as dead as wood, but with wicked little eyes close together, and very much alive. Hiscomrades dissuaded him from going in because they said that they hadsoared up into the seventh heaven of living lies, and that there wasliterally nothing which the old man would not believe. The face of thelittle archer became a little more wooden as he forced his way in, andwhen he was inside he looked round with blinking bewilderment. "Ha, thelast, " said the king heartily, "welcome back again!" There was a longpause, and then the stunted archer said, "What do you mean by 'again'?I have never been here before. " The king stared for a few seconds, andsaid, "I sent you out from this room with the four doors last night. "After another pause the little man slowly shook his head. "I never sawyou before, " he said simply; "you never sent me out from anywhere. I only saw your four turrets in the distance, and strayed in here byaccident. I was born in an island in the Greek Archipelago; I am byprofession an auctioneer, and my name is Punk. " The king sat on histhrone for seven long instants like a statue; and then there awoke inhis mild and ancient eyes an awful thing; the complete conviction ofuntruth. Every one has felt it who has found a child obstinately false. He rose to his height and took down the heavy sword above him, pluckedit out naked, and then spoke. "I will believe your mad tales about theexact machinery of arrows; for that is science. I will believe yourmad tales about traces of life in the moon; for that is science. Iwill believe your mad tales about jellyfish turning into gentlemen, andeverything turning into anything; for that is science. But I willnot believe you when you tell me what I know to be untrue. I willnot believe you when you say that you did not all set forth under myauthority and out of my house. The other three may conceivably have toldthe truth; but this last man has certainly lied. Therefore I will killhim. " And with that the old and gentle king ran at the man with upliftedsword; but he was arrested by the roar of happy laughter, which told theworld that there is, after all, something which an Englishman will notswallow. 

The Modern Scrooge

Mr. Vernon-Smith, of Trinity, and the Social Settlement, Tooting, author of "A Higher London" and "The Boyg System at Work, " came to theconclusion, after looking through his select and even severe library, that Dickens's "Christmas Carol" was a very suitable thing to be read tocharwomen. Had they been men they would have been forcibly subjectedto Browning's "Christmas Eve" with exposition, but chivalry sparedthe charwomen, and Dickens was funny, and could do no harm. His fellowworker Wimpole would read things like "Three Men in a Boat" to the poor;but Vernon-Smith regarded this as a sacrifice of principle, or (what wasthe same thing to him) of dignity. He would not encourage them in theirvulgarity; they should have nothing from him that was not literature. Still Dickens was literature after all; not literature of a high order, of course, not thoughtful or purposeful literature, but literature quitefitted for charwomen on Christmas Eve. 

He did not, however, let them absorb Dickens without due antidotes ofwarning and criticism. He explained that Dickens was not a writer of thefirst rank, since he lacked the high seriousness of Matthew Arnold. He also feared that they would find the characters of Dickens terriblyexaggerated. But they did not, possibly because they were meeting themevery day. For among the poor there are still exaggerated characters;they do not go to the Universities to be universified. He told thecharwomen, with progressive brightness, that a mad wicked old miserlike Scrooge would be really quite impossible now; but as each of thecharwomen had an uncle or a grandfather or a father-in-law who wasexactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was not shared. Indeed, thelecture as a whole lacked something of his firm and elastic touch, andtowards the end he found himself rambling, and in a sort of abstraction, talking to them as if they were his fellows. He caught himself sayingquite mystically that a spiritual plane (by which he meant his plane)always looked to those on the sensual or Dickens plane, not merelyaustere, but desolate. He said, quoting Bernard Shaw, that we could allgo to heaven just as we can all go to a classical concert, but if wedid it would bore us. Realizing that he was taking his flock far out oftheir depth, he ended somewhat hurriedly, and was soon receiving thatgenerous applause which is a part of the profound ceremonialism of theworking classes. As he made his way to the door three people stoppedhim, and he answered them heartily enough, but with an air of hurrywhich he would not have dreamed of showing to people of his own class. One was a little schoolmistress who told him with a sort of feverishmeekness that she was troubled because an Ethical Lecturer had said thatDickens was not really Progressive; but she thought he was Progressive;and surely he was Progressive. Of what being Progressive was she hadno more notion than a whale. The second person implored him for asubscription to some soup kitchen or cheap meal; and his refinedfeatures sharpened; for this, like literature, was a matter of principlewith him. "Quite the wrong method, " he said, shaking his head andpushing past. "Nothing any good but the Boyg system. " The thirdstranger, who was male, caught him on the step as he came out into thesnow and starlight; and asked him point blank for money. It was apart of Vernon-Smith's principles that all such persons are prosperousimpostors; and like a true mystic he held to his principles in defianceof his five senses, which told him that the night was freezing and theman very thin and weak. "If you come to the Settlement between four andfive on Friday week, " he said, "inquiries will be made. " The man steppedback into the snow with a not ungraceful gesture as of apology; he hadfrosty silver hair, and his lean face, though in shadow, seemed to wearsomething like a smile. As Vernon-Smith stepped briskly into the street, the man stooped down as if to do up his bootlace. He was, however, guiltless of any such dandyism; and as the young philanthropist stoodpulling on his gloves with some particularity, a heavy snowball wassuddenly smashed into his face. He was blind for a black instant; thenas some of the snow fell, saw faintly, as in a dim mirror of ice ordreamy crystal, the lean man bowing with the elegance of a dancingmaster, and saying amiably, "A Christmas box. " When he had quite clearedhis face of snow the man had vanished. 

For three burning minutes Cyril Vernon-Smith was nearer to the peopleand more their brother than he had been in his whole high-steppingpedantic existence; for if he did not love a poor man, he hated one. Andyou never really regard a labourer as your equal until you can quarrelwith him. "Dirty cad!" he muttered. "Filthy fool! Mucking with snow likea beastly baby! When will they be civilized? Why, the very state of thestreet is a disgrace and a temptation to such tomfools. Why isn't allthis snow cleared away and the street made decent?"

To the eye of efficiency, there was, indeed, something to complain ofin the condition of the road. Snow was banked up on both sides in whitewalls and towards the other and darker end of the street even rose intoa chaos of low colourless hills. By the time he reached them he wasnearly knee deep, and was in a far from philanthropic frame of mind. The solitude of the little streets was as strange as their whiteobstruction, and before he had ploughed his way much further he wasconvinced that he had taken a wrong turning, and fallen upon someformless suburb unvisited before. There was no light in any of the low, dark houses; no light in anything but the blank emphatic snow. He wasmodern and morbid; hellish isolation hit and held him suddenly; anythinghuman would have relieved the strain, if it had been only the leap of agarotter. Then the tender human touch came indeed; for another snowballstruck him, and made a star on his back. He turned with fierce joy, andran after a boy escaping; ran with dizzy and violent speed, he knew notfor how long. He wanted the boy; he did not know whether he loved orhated him. He wanted humanity; he did not know whether he loved or hatedit. 

As he ran he realized that the landscape around him was changing inshape though not in colour. The houses seemed to dwindle and disappearin hills of snow as if buried; the snow seemed to rise in tatteredoutlines of crag and cliff and crest, but he thought nothing of allthese impossibilities until the boy turned to bay. When he did he sawthe child was queerly beautiful, with gold red hair, and a face asserious as complete happiness. And when he spoke to the boy his ownquestion surprised him, for he said for the first time in his life, "What am I doing here?" And the little boy, with very grave eyes, answered, "I suppose you are dead. "

He had (also for the first time) a doubt of his spiritual destiny. Helooked round on a towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains, andsaid, "Is this hell?" And as the child stared, but did not answer, heknew it was heaven. 

All over that colossal country, white as the world round the Pole, little boys were playing, rolling each other down dreadful slopes, crushing each other under falling cliffs; for heaven is a place whereone can fight for ever without hurting. Smith suddenly remembered howhappy he had been as a child, rolling about on the safe sandhills aroundConway. 

Right above Smith's head, higher than the cross of St. Paul's, butcurving over him like the hanging blossom of a harebell, was a cavernouscrag of snow. A hundred feet below him, like a landscape seen from aballoon, lay snowy flats as white and as far away. He saw a littleboy stagger, with many catastrophic slides, to that toppling peak; andseizing another little boy by the leg, send him flying away down to thedistant silver plains. There he sank and vanished in the snow as if inthe sea; but coming up again like a diver rushed madly up the steep oncemore, rolling before him a great gathering snowball, gigantic at last, which he hurled back at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy andthe mountain down in one avalanche to the level of the vale. The otherboy also sank like a stone, and also rose again like a bird, but Smithhad no leisure to concern himself with this. For the collapse of thatcelestial crest had left him standing solitary in the sky on a peak likea church spire. 

He could see the tiny figures of the boys in the valley below, and heknew by their attitudes that they were eagerly telling him to jump. Thenfor the first time he knew the nature of faith, as he had just knownthe fierce nature of charity. Or rather for the second time, for heremembered one moment when he had known faith before. It was n when hisfather had taught him to swim, and he had believed he could float onwater not only against reason, but (what is so much harder) againstinstinct. Then he had trusted water; now he must trust air. 

He jumped. He went through air and then through snow with the sameblinding swiftness. But as he buried himself in solid snow like a bullethe seemed to learn a million things and to learn them all too fast. He knew that the whole world is a snowball, and that all the stars aresnowballs. He knew that no man will be fit for heaven till he lovessolid whiteness as a little boy loves a ball of snow. 

He sank and sank and sank. .. And then, as usually happens in such cases, woke up, with a start--in the street. True, he was taken up for a commondrunk, but (if you properly appreciate his conversion) you will realizethat he did not mind; since the crime of drunkenness is infinitely lessthan that of spiritual pride, of which he had really been guilty. 

The High Plains

By high plains I do not mean table-lands; table-lands do not interestone very much. They seem to involve the bore of a climb without thepleasure of a peak. Also they arc vaguely associated with Asia and thoseenormous armies that eat up everything like locusts, as did the armyof Xerxes; with emperors from nowhere spreading their battalionseverywhere; with the white elephants and the painted horses, the darkengines and the dreadful mounted bowmen of the moving empires of theEast, with all that evil insolence in short that rolled into Europe inthe youth of Nero, and after having been battered about and abandoned byone Christian nation after another, turned up in England with Disraeliand was christened (or rather paganed) Imperialism. 

Also (it may be necessary to explain) I do not mean "high planes" suchas the Theosophists and the Higher Thought Centres talk about. Theyspell theirs differently; but I will not have theirs in any spelling. They, I know, are always expounding how this or that person is on alower plane, while they (the speakers) are on a higher plane: sometimesthey will almost tell you what plane, as "5994" or "Plane F, sub-plane304. " I do not mean this sort of height either. My religion says nothingabout such planes except that all men are on one plane and that by nomeans a high one. There are saints indeed in my religion: but a saintonly means a man who really knows he is a sinner. 

Why then should I talk of the plains as high? I do it for a rathersingular reason, which I will illustrate by a parallel. When I was atschool learning all the Greek I have ever forgotten, I was puzzled bythe phrase OINON MELAN that is "black wine, " which continually occurred. I asked what it meant, and many most interesting and convincing answerswere given. It was pointed out that we know little of the actual liquiddrunk by the Greeks; that the analogy of modern Greek wines may suggestthat it was dark and sticky, perhaps a sort of syrup always taken withwater; that archaic language about colour is always a little dubious, aswhere Homer speaks of the "wine-dark sea" and so on. I was very properlysatisfied, and never thought of the matter again; until one day, havinga decanter of claret in front of me, I happened to look at it. I thenperceived that they called wine black because it is black. Very thin, diluted, or held-up abruptly against a flame, red wine is red; but seenin body in most normal shades and semi-lights red wine is black, andtherefore was called so. 

On the same principles I call the plains high because the plains alwaysare high; they are always as high as we are. We talk of climbing amountain crest and looking down at the plain; but the phrase is anillusion of our arrogance. It is impossible even to look down at theplain. For the plain itself rises as we rise. It is not merely truethat the higher we climb the wider and wider is spread out below usthe wealth of the world; it is not merely that the devil or some otherrespectable guide for tourists takes us to the top of an exceeding highmountain and shows us all the kingdoms of the earth. It is more thanthat, in our real feeling of it. It is that in a sense the wholeworld rises with us roaring, and accompanies us to the crest like someclanging chorus of eagles. The plains rise higher and higher like swiftgrey walls piled up against invisible invaders. And however high a peakyou climb, the plain is still as high as the peak. 

The mountain tops are only noble because from them we are privileged tobehold the plains. So the only value in any man being superior is thathe may have a superior admiration for the level and the common. If thereis any profit in a place craggy and precipitous it is only because fromthe vale it is not easy to see all the beauty of the vale; becausewhen actually in the flats one cannot see their sublime and satisfyingflatness. If there is any value in being educated or eminent (which isdoubtful enough) it is only because the best instructed man may feelmost swiftly and certainly the splendour of the ignorant and the simple:the full magnificence of that mighty human army in the plains. Thegeneral goes up to the hill to look at his soldiers, not to look down athis soldiers. He withdraws himself not because his regiment is too smallto be touched, but because it is too mighty to be seen. The chief climbswith submission and goes higher with great humility; since in order totake a bird's eye view of everything, he must become small and distantlike a bird. 

The most marvellous of those mystical cavaliers who wrote intricateand exquisite verse in England in the seventeenth century, I meanHenry Vaughan, put the matter in one line, intrinsically immortal andpractically forgotten--

"Oh holy hope and high humility. "

That adjective "high" is not only one of the sudden and stunninginspirations of literature; it is also one of the greatest and gravestdefinitions of moral science. However far aloft a man may go, he isstill looking up, not only at God (which is obvious), but in a mannerat men also: seeing more and more all that is towering and mysterious inthe dignity and destiny of the lonely house of Adam. I wrote some partof these rambling remarks on a high ridge of rock and turf overlooking astretch of the central counties; the rise was slight enough in reality, but the immediate ascent had been so steep and sudden that one could notavoid the fancy that on reaching the summit one would look down at thestars. But one did not look down at the stars, but rather up at thecities; seeing as high in heaven the palace town of Alfred like a litsunset cloud, and away in the void spaces, like a planet in eclipse, Salisbury. So, it may be hoped, until we die you and I will always lookup rather than down at the labours and the habitations of our race; wewill lift up our eyes to the valleys from whence cometh our help. Forfrom every special eminence and beyond every sublime landmark, it isgood for our souls to see only vaster and vaster visions of that dizzyand divine level; and to behold from our crumbling turrets the tallplains of equality. 

The Chorus

One of the most marked instances of the decline of true popular sympathyis the gradual disappearance in our time of the habit of singingin chorus. Even when it is done nowadays it is done tentatively andsometimes inaudibly; apparently upon some preposterous principle(which I have never clearly grasped) that singing is an art. In the newaristocracy of the drawing-room a lady is actually asked whether shesings. In the old democracy of the dinner table a man was simply told tosing, and he had to do it. I like the atmosphere of those old banquets. I like to think of my ancestors, middle-aged or venerable gentlemen, allsitting round a table and explaining that they would never forget olddays or friends with a rumpty-iddity-iddity, or letting it be known thatthey would die for England's glory with their tooral ooral, etc. Eventhe vices of that society (which 'sometimes, I fear, rendered thenarrative portions of the song almost as cryptic and inarticulate as thechorus) were displayed with a more human softening than the samevices in the saloon bars of our own time. I greatly prefer Mr. RichardSwiveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris. I prefer the man who exceeded in rosywine in order that the wing of friendship might never moult a featherto the man who exceeds quite as much in whiskies and sodas, but declaresall the time that he's for number one, and that you don't catch himpaying for other men's drinks. The old men of pleasure (with theirtooral ooral) got at least some social and communal virtue out ofpleasure. The new men of pleasure (without the slightest vestige ofa tooral ooral) are simply hermits of irreligion instead of religion, anchorites of atheism, and they might as well be drugging themselveswith hashish or opium in a wilderness. 

But the chorus of the old songs had another use besides this obvious oneof asserting the popular element in the arts. The chorus of a song, evenof a comic song, has the same purpose as the chorus in a Greek tragedy. It reconciles men to the gods. It connects this one particular tale withthe cosmos and the philosophy of common things, Thus we constantly findin the old ballads, especially the pathetic ballads, some refrain aboutthe grass growing green, or the birds singing, or the woods being merryin spring. These are windows opened in the house of tragedy; momentaryglimpses of larger and quieter scenes, of more ancient and enduringlandscapes. Many of the country songs describing crime and death haverefrains of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the wholecompany were coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a viewof existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad called "The BerkshireTragedy, " about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for theconsummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (whichshould come in a kind of burst) runs:

 "And I'll be true to my love If my love'll be true to me. "

The very reasonable arrangement here suggested is introduced, I think, as a kind of throw back to the normal, a reminder that even "TheBerkshire Tragedy" does not fill the whole of Berkshire. The pooryoung lady is drowned, and the wicked miller (to whom we may have beenaffectionately attached) is hanged; but still a ruby kindles in thevine, and many a garden by the water blows. Not that Omar's type ofhedonistic resignation is at all the same as the breezy impatience ofthe Berkshire refrain; but they are alike in so far as they gaze outbeyond the particular complication to more open plains of peace. Thechorus of the ballad looks past the drowning maiden and the miller'sgibbet, and sees the lanes full of lovers. 

This use of the chorus to humanize and dilute a dark story is stronglyopposed to the modern view of art. Modern art has to be what iscalled "intense. " It is not easy to define being intense; but, roughlyspeaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong. Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote longstories (as the man said of philosophy) cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful. And doubtlessthey bore some resemblance to some lives lived under our successfulscientific civilization; lives which tend in any case to be painful, andin many cases to be brief. But when the artistic people passed beyondthe poignant anecdote and began to write long books full of poignancy, then the reading public began to rebel and to demand the recall ofromance. The long books about the black poverty of cities became quiteinsupportable. The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus; but the Londontragedy has no chorus. Therefore people welcomed the return ofadventurous novels about alien places and times, the trenchant andswordlike stories of Stevenson. But I am not narrowly on the side of theromantics. I think that glimpses of the gloom of our civilization oughtto be recorded. I think that the bewilderments of the solitary andsceptical soul ought to be preserved, if it be only for the pity (yes, and the admiration) of a happier time. But I wish that there were someway in which the chorus could enter. I wish that at the end of eachchapter of stiff agony or insane terror the choir of humanity could comein with a crash of music and tell both the reader and the author thatthis is not the whole of human experience. Let them go on recording hardscenes or hideous questions, but let there be a jolly refrain. 

Thus we might read: "As Honoria laid down the volume of Ibsen and wentwearily to her window, she realized that life must be to her not onlyharsher, but colder than it was to the comfortable and the weak. Withher tooral ooral, etc. ;" or, again: "The young curate smiled grimly ashe listened to his great-grandmother's last words. He knew only toowell that since Phogg's discovery of the hereditary hairiness of goatsreligion stood on a very different basis from that which it had occupiedin his childhood. With his rumpty-iddity, rumpty-iddity;" and so on. Orwe might read: "Uriel Maybloom stared gloomily down at his sandals, ashe realized for the first time how senseless and anti-social are allties between man and woman; how each must go his or her way without anyattempt to arrest the head-long separation of their souls. " And thenwould come in one deafening chorus of everlasting humanity "But I'll betrue to my love, if my love'll be true to me. "

In the records of the first majestic and yet fantastic developmentsof the foundation of St. Francis of Assisi is an account of a certainBlessed Brother Giles. I have forgotten most of it, but I rememberone fact: that certain students of theology came to ask him whetherhe believed in free will, and, if so, how he could reconcile it withnecessity. On hearing the question St. Francis's follower reflected alittle while and then seized a fiddle and began capering and dancingabout the garden, playing a wild tune and generally expressing a violentand invigorating indifference. The tune is not recorded, but it is theeternal chorus of mankind, that modifies all the arts and mocks all theindividualisms, like the laughter and thunder of some distant sea. 

A Romance of the Marshes

In books as a whole marshes are described as desolate and colourless, great fields of clay or sedge, vast horizons of drab or grey. But this, like many other literary associations, is a piece of poetical injustice. Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in itssensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. Thereare no dreary sights; there are only dreary sightseers. It is a matterof taste, that is of personality, whether marshes are monotonous; but itis a matter of fact and science that they are not monochrome. The topsof high mountains (I am told) are all white; the depths of primevalcaverns (I am also told) are all dark. The sea will be grey or bluefor weeks together; and the desert, I have been led to believe, is thecolour of sand. The North Pole (if we found it) would be white withcracks of blue; and Endless Space (if we went there) would, I suppose, be black with white spots. If any of these were counted of a monotonouscolour I could well understand it; but on the contrary, they are alwaysspoken of as if they had the gorgeous and chaotic colours of a cosmickaleidoscope. Now exactly where you can find colours like those of atulip garden or a stained-glass window, is in those sunken and soddenlands which are always called dreary. Of course the great tulip gardensdid arise in Holland; which is simply one immense marsh. There isnothing in Europe so truly tropical as marshes. Also, now I come tothink of it, there are few places so agreeably marshy as tropics. Atany rate swamp and fenlands in England are always especially rich ingay grasses or gorgeous fungoids; and seem sometimes as glorious asa transformation scene; but also as unsubstantial. In these splendidscenes it is always very easy to put your foot through the scenery. Youmay sink up to your armpits; but you will sink up to your armpits inflowers. I do not deny that I myself am of a sort that sinks--exceptin the matter of spirits. I saw in the west counties recently a swampyfield of great richness and promise. If I had stepped on it I have nodoubt at all that I should have vanished; that aeons hence thecomplete fossil of a fat Fleet Street journalist would be found in thatcompressed clay. I only claim that it would be found in some attitude ofenergy, or even of joy. But the last point is the most important of all, for as I imagined myself sinking up to the neck in what looked like asolid green field, I suddenly remembered that this very thing must havehappened to certain interesting pirates quite a thousand years ago. 

For, as it happened, the flat fenland in which I so nearly sunk wasthe fenland round the Island of Athelney, which is now an island in thefields and no longer in the waters. But on the abrupt hillock a stonestill stands to say that this was that embattled islet in the Parrettwhere King Alfred held his last fort against the foreign invaders, inthat war that nearly washed us as far from civilization as the SolomonIslands. Here he defended the island called Athelney as he afterwardsdid his best to defend the island called England. For the hero alwaysdefends an island, a thing beleaguered and surrounded, like the Troyof Hector. And the highest and largest humanitarian can only rise todefending the tiny island called the earth. 

One approaches the island of Athelney along a low long road like aninterminable white string stretched across the flats, and lined withthose dwarfish trees that are elvish in their very dullness. At onepoint of the journey (I cannot conceive why) one is arrested by a tollgate at which one has to pay threepence. Perhaps it is a distortedtradition of those dark ages. Perhaps Alfred, with the superior scienceof comparative civilization, had calculated the economics of Denmarkdown to a halfpenny. Perhaps a Dane sometimes came with twopence, sometimes even with twopence-halfpenny, after the sack of many citieseven with twopence three farthings; but never with threepence. Whetheror no it was a permanent barrier to the barbarians it was only atemporary barrier to me. I discovered three large and complete coppersin various parts of my person, and I passed on along that strangelymonotonous and strangely fascinating path. It is not merely fanciful tofeel that the place expresses itself appropriately as the placewhere the great Christian King hid himself from the heathen. Thougha marshland is always open it is still curiously secret. Fens, likedeserts, are large things very apt to be mislaid. These flats feared tobe overlooked in a double sense; the small trees crouched and the wholeplain seemed lying on its face, as men do when shells burst. Thelittle path ran fearlessly forward; but it seemed to run on all fours. Everything in that strange countryside seemed to be lying low, as if toavoid the incessant and rattling rain of the Danish arrows. There wereindeed hills of no inconsiderable height quite within call; but thosepools and flats of the old Parrett seemed to separate themselves likea central and secret sea; and in the midst of them stood up the rock ofAthelney as isolate as it was to Alfred. And all across this recumbentand almost crawling country there ran the glory of the low wet lands;grass lustrous and living like the plumage of some universal bird; theflowers as gorgeous as bonfires and the weeds more beautiful than theflowers. One stooped to stroke the grass, as if the earth were all onekind beast that could feel. 

Why does no decent person write an historical novel about Alfred and hisfort in Athelney, in the marshes of the Parrett? Not a very historicalnovel. Not about his Truth-telling (please) or his founding the BritishEmpire, or the British Navy, or the Navy League, or whichever it washe founded. Not about the Treaty of Wedmore and whether it ought (asan eminent historian says) to be called the Pact of Chippenham. But anaboriginal romance for boys about the bare, bald, beatific fact thata great hero held his fort in an island in a river. An island is fineenough, in all conscience or piratic unconscientiousness, but an islandin a river sounds like the beginning of the greatest adventure story onearth. "Robinson Crusoe" is really a great tale, but think of RobinsonCrusoe's feelings if he could have actually seen England and Spain fromhis inaccessible isle! "Treasure Island" is a spirit of genius: butwhat treasure could an island contain to compare with Alfred? And thenconsider the further elements of juvenile romance in an island that wasmore of an island than it looked. Athelney was masked with marshes; manya heavy harnessed Viking may have started bounding across a meadow onlyto find himself submerged in a sea. I feel the full fictitious splendourspreading round me; I see glimpses of a great romance that will never bewritten. I see a sudden shaft quivering in one of the short trees. I seea red-haired man wading madly among the tall gold flowers of the marsh, leaping onward and lurching lower. I see another shaft stand quiveringin his throat. I cannot see any more, because, as I have delicatelysuggested, I am a heavy man. This mysterious marshland does not sustainme, and I sink into its depths with a bubbling groan.