ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

Ninth Edition

CONTENTS

THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL

COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES

THE FALLACY OF SUCCESS

ON RUNNING AFTER ONE'S HAT

THE VOTE AND THE HOUSE

CONCEIT AND CARICATURE

PATRIOTISM AND SPORT

AN ESSAY ON TWO CITIES

FRENCH AND ENGLISH

THE ZOLA CONTROVERSY

OXFORD FROM WITHOUT

WOMAN

THE MODERN MARTYR

ON POLITICAL SECRECY

EDWARD VII. AND SCOTLAND

THOUGHTS AROUND KOEPENICK

THE BOY

LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

ANONYMITY AND FURTHER COUNSELS

ON THE CRYPTIC AND THE ELLIPTIC

THE WORSHIP OF THE WEALTHY

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

THE METHUSELAHITE

SPIRITUALISM

THE ERROR OF IMPARTIALITY

PHONETIC SPELLING

HUMANITARIANISM AND STRENGTH

WINE WHEN IT IS RED

DEMAGOGUES AND MYSTAGOGUES

THE "EATANSWILL GAZETTE"

FAIRY TALES

TOM JONES AND MORALITY

THE MAID OF ORLEANS

A DEAD POET

CHRISTMAS

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL

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

Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I hadno time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hardto be frivolous. Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few moments, and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself whether hewould really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the frontpage of the _Times_, which is full of long leading articles, or thefront page of _Tit-Bits, _ which is full of short jokes. If the readeris the fine conscientious fellow I take him for, he will at once replythat he would rather on the spur of the moment write ten _Times_articles than one _Tit-Bits_ joke. Responsibility, a heavy and cautiousresponsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody cando it. That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in forpolitics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength ofmind left to be irresponsible. It is more dignified to sit still than todance the Barn Dance. It is also easier. So in these easy pages I keepmyself on the whole on the level of the _Times_: it is only occasionallythat I leap upwards almost to the level of _Tit-Bits. _

I resume the defence of this indefensible book. These articles haveanother disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were written;they are too long-winded and elaborate. One of the great disadvantagesof hurry is that it takes such a long time. If I have to start forHigh-gate this day week, I may perhaps go the shortest way. If I have tostart this minute, I shall almost certainly go the longest. In theseessays (as I read them over) I feel frightfully annoyed with myself fornot getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure tobe quick. There are several maddening cases in which I took two or threepages in attempting to describe an attitude of which the essence couldbe expressed in an epigram; only there was no time for epigrams. I donot repent of one shade of opinion here expressed; but I feel that theymight have been expressed so much more briefly and precisely. Forinstance, these pages contain a sort of recurring protest against theboast of certain writers that they are merely recent. They brag thattheir philosophy of the universe is the last philosophy or the newphilosophy, or the advanced and progressive philosophy. I have said muchagainst a mere modernism. When I use the word "modernism, " I am notalluding specially to the current quarrel in the Roman Catholic Church, though I am certainly astonished at any intellectual group accepting soweak and unphilosophical a name. It is incomprehensible to me that anythinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well callhimself a Thursdayite. But apart altogether from that particulardisturbance, I am conscious of a general irritation expressed againstthe people who boast of their advancement and modernity in thediscussion of religion. But I never succeeded in saying the quite clearand obvious thing that is really the matter with modernism. The realobjection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. Itis an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by somemystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date orparticularly "in the know. " To flaunt the fact that we have had all thelast books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact thatwe have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce intophilosophical discussions a sneer at a creed's antiquity is likeintroducing a sneer at a lady's age. It is caddish because it isirrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be amonth behind the fashion Similarly I find that I have tried in thesepages to express the real objection to philanthropists and have notsucceeded. I have not seen the quite simple objection to the causesadvocated by certain wealthy idealists; causes of which the cause calledteetotalism is the strongest case. I have used many abusive terms aboutthe thing, calling it Puritanism, or superciliousness, or aristocracy;but I have not seen and stated the quite simple objection tophilanthropy; which is that it is religious persecution. Religiouspersecution does not consist in thumbscrews or fires of Smithfield; theessence of religious persecution is this: that the man who happens tohave material power in the State, either by wealth or by officialposition, should govern his fellow-citizens not according to theirreligion or philosophy, but according to his own. If, for instance, there is such a thing as a vegetarian nation; if there is a great unitedmass of men who wish to live by the vegetarian morality, then I say inthe emphatic words of the arrogant French marquis before the FrenchRevolution, "Let them eat grass. " Perhaps that French oligarch was ahumanitarian; most oligarchs are. Perhaps when he told the peasants toeat grass he was recommending to them the hygienic simplicity of avegetarian restaurant. But that is an irrelevant, though mostfascinating, speculation. The point here is that if a nation is reallyvegetarian let its government force upon it the whole horrible weight ofvegetarianism. Let its government give the national guests a Statevegetarian banquet. Let its government, in the most literal and awfulsense of the words, give them beans. That sort of tyranny is all verywell; for it is the people tyrannising over all the persons. But"temperance reformers" are like a small group of vegetarians who shouldsilently and systematically act on an ethical assumption entirelyunfamiliar to the mass of the people. They would always be givingpeerages to greengrocers. They would always be appointing ParliamentaryCommissions to enquire into the private life of butchers. Whenever theyfound a man quite at their mercy, as a pauper or a convict or a lunatic, they would force him to add the final touch to his inhuman isolation bybecoming a vegetarian. All the meals for school children will bevegetarian meals. All the State public houses will be vegetarian publichouses. There is a very strong case for vegetarianism as compared withteetotalism. Drinking one glass of beer cannot by any philosophy bedrunkenness; but killing one animal can, by this philosophy, be murder. The objection to both processes is not that the two creeds, teetotal andvegetarian, are not admissible; it is simply that they are not admitted. The thing is religious persecution because it is not based on theexisting religion of the democracy. These people ask the poor to acceptin practice what they know perfectly well that the poor would not acceptin theory. That is the very definition of religious persecution. I wasagainst the Tory attempt to force upon ordinary Englishmen a Catholictheology in which they do not believe. I am even more against theattempt to force upon them a Mohamedan morality which they activelydeny. 

Again, in the case of anonymous journalism I seem to have said a greatdeal without getting out the point very clearly. Anonymous journalism isdangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is sorapidly becoming an anonymous life. That is the horrible thing about ourcontemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret society. Themodern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness. He is more namelessthan his slave. He is not more of a bully than the tyrants of the past;but he is more of a coward. The rich publisher may treat the poor poetbetter or worse than the old master workman treated the old apprentice. But the apprentice ran away and the master ran after him. Nowadays it isthe poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix the fact ofresponsibility. It is the publisher who runs away. The clerk of Mr. Solomon gets the sack: the beautiful Greek slave of the Sultan Sulimanalso gets the sack; or the sack gets her. But though she is concealedunder the black waves of the Bosphorus, at least her destroyer is notconcealed. He goes behind golden trumpets riding on a white elephant. But in the case of the clerk it is almost as difficult to know where thedismissal comes from as to know where the clerk goes to. It may be Mr. Solomon or Mr. Solomon's manager, or Mr. Solomon's rich aunt inCheltenham, or Mr. Soloman's rich creditor in Berlin. The elaboratemachinery which was once used to make men responsible is now used solelyin order to shift the responsibility. People talk about the pride oftyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants. We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinkingmodesty of tyrants. Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers tobe shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated modesty. Rather wemust attempt to lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that throughostentation they may at last find their way to honesty. 

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

COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES

A writer in the _Yorkshire Evening Post_ is very angry indeed with myperformances in this column. His precise terms of reproach are, "Mr. G. K. Chesterton is not a humourist: not even a Cockney humourist. " I donot mind his saying that I am not a humourist--in which (to tell thetruth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I amnot a Cockney. That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home. If a Frenchwriter said of me, "He is no metaphysician: not even an Englishmetaphysician, " I could swallow the insult to my metaphysics, but Ishould feel angry about the insult to my country. So I do not urge thatI am a humourist; but I do insist that I am a Cockney. If I were ahumourist, I should certainly be a Cockney humourist; if I were a saint, I should certainly be a Cockney saint. I need not recite the splendidcatalogue of Cockney saints who have written their names on our nobleold City churches. I need not trouble you with the long list of theCockney humourists who have discharged their bills (or failed todischarge them) in our noble old City taverns. We can weep togetherover the pathos of the poor Yorkshireman, whose county has neverproduced some humour not intelligible to the rest of the world. And wecan smile together when he says that somebody or other is "not even" aCockney humourist like Samuel Johnson or Charles Lamb. It is surelysufficiently obvious that all the best humour that exists in ourlanguage is Cockney humour. Chaucer was a Cockney; he had his houseclose to the Abbey. Dickens was a Cockney; he said he could not thinkwithout the London streets. The London taverns heard always thequaintest conversation, whether it was Ben Johnson's at the Mermaid orSam Johnson's at the Cock. Even in our own time it may be noted that themost vital and genuine humour is still written about London. Of thistype is the mild and humane irony which marks Mr. Pett Ridge's studiesof the small grey streets. Of this type is the simple but smashinglaughter of the best tales of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, telling of the smoke andsparkle of the Thames. No; I concede that I am not a Cockney humourist. No; I am not worthy to be. Some time, after sad and strenuousafter-lives; some time, after fierce and apocalyptic incarnations; insome strange world beyond the stars, I may become at last a Cockneyhumourist. In that potential paradise I may walk among the Cockneyhumourists, if not an equal, at least a companion. I may feel for amoment on my shoulder the hearty hand of Dryden and thread thelabyrinths of the sweet insanity of Lamb. But that could only be if Iwere not only much cleverer, but much better than I am. Before I reachthat sphere I shall have left behind, perhaps, the sphere that isinhabited by angels, and even passed that which is appropriatedexclusively to the use of Yorkshiremen. 

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

I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially ofvulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may becertain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. The menwho made the joke saw something deep which they could not express exceptby something silly and emphatic. They saw something delicate which theycould only express by something indelicate. I remember that Mr. MaxBeerbohm (who has every merit except democracy) attempted to analyse thejokes at which the mob laughs. He divided them into three sections:jokes about bodily humiliation, jokes about things alien, such asforeigners, and jokes about bad cheese. Mr. Max Beerbohm thought heunderstood the first two forms; but I am not sure that he did. In orderto understand vulgar humour it is not enough to be humorous. One mustalso be vulgar, as I am. And in the first case it is surely obvious thatit is not merely at the fact of something being hurt that we laugh (as Itrust we do) when a Prime Minister sits down on his hat. If that were sowe should laugh whenever we saw a funeral. We do not laugh at the merefact of something falling down; there is nothing humorous about leavesfalling or the sun going down. When our house falls down we do notlaugh. All the birds of the air might drop around us in a perpetualshower like a hailstorm without arousing a smile. If you really askyourself why we laugh at a man sitting down suddenly in the street youwill discover that the reason is not only recondite, but ultimatelyreligious. All the jokes about men sitting down on their hats are reallytheological jokes; they are concerned with the Dual Nature of Man. Theyrefer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the thingsaround him and yet is at their mercy. 

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

Mr. Max Beerbohm, I remember, professed to understand the first twoforms of popular wit, but said that the third quite stumped him. Hecould not see why there should be anything funny about bad cheese. I cantell him at once. He has missed the idea because it is subtle andphilosophical, and he was looking for something ignorant and foolish. Bad cheese is funny because it is (like the foreigner or the man fallenon the pavement) the type of the transition or transgression across agreat mystical boundary. Bad cheese symbolises the change from theinorganic to the organic. Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy ofmatter taking on vitality. It symbolises the origin of life itself. Andit is only about such solemn matters as the origin of life that thedemocracy condescends to joke. Thus, for instance, the democracy jokesabout marriage, because marriage is a part of mankind. But the democracywould never deign to joke about Free Love, because Free Love is a pieceof priggishness. 

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

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

I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was amuch better prophecy than the careful observations of the most culturedobserver. When England was agitated, previous to the last GeneralElection, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a distinctdifference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of thepopulace. The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were mostcareful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of Chinese. According to them, it was a pure question of legal propriety, of whethercertain clauses in the contract of indenture were not inconsistent withour constitutional traditions: according to them, the case would havebeen the same if the people had been Kaffirs or Englishmen. It allsounded wonderfully enlightened and lucid; and in comparison the popularjoke looked, of course, very poor. For the popular joke against theChinese labourers was simply that they were Chinese; it was an objectionto an alien type; the popular papers were full of gibes about pigtailsand yellow faces. It seemed that the Liberal politicians were raising anintellectual objection to a doubtful document of State; while it seemedthat the Radical populace were merely roaring with idiotic laughter atthe sight of a Chinaman's clothes. But the popular instinct wasjustified, for the vices revealed were Chinese vices. 

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

THE FALLACY OF SUCCESS

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

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

Turning over a popular magazine, I find a queer and amusing example. There is an article called "The Instinct that Makes People Rich. " It isdecorated in front with a formidable portrait of Lord Rothschild. Thereare many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich;the only "instinct" I know of which does it is that instinct whichtheological Christianity crudely describes as "the sin of avarice. "That, however, is beside the present point. I wish to quote thefollowing exquisite paragraphs as a piece of typical advice as to how tosucceed. It is so practical; it leaves so little doubt about what shouldbe our next step--"The name of Vanderbilt is synonymous with wealthgained by modern enterprise. 'Cornelius, ' the founder of the family, wasthe first of the great American magnates of commerce. He started as theson of a poor farmer; he ended as a millionaire twenty times over. "

"He had the money-making instinct. He seized his opportunities, theopportunities that were given by the application of the steam-engine toocean traffic, and by the birth of railway locomotion in the wealthy butundeveloped United States of America, and consequently he amassed animmense fortune. 

"Now it is, of course, obvious that we cannot all follow exactly in thefootsteps of this great railway monarch. The precise opportunities thatfell to him do not occur to us. Circumstances have changed. But, although this is so, still, in our own sphere and in our owncircumstances, we _can_ follow his general methods; we can seize thoseopportunities that are given us, and give ourselves a very fair chanceof attaining riches. "

In such strange utterances we see quite clearly what is really at thebottom of all these articles and books. It is not mere business; it isnot even mere cynicism. It is mysticism; the horrible mysticism ofmoney. The writer of that passage did not really have the remotestnotion of how Vanderbilt made his money, or of how anybody else is tomake his. He does, indeed, conclude his remarks by advocating somescheme; but it has nothing in the world to do with Vanderbilt. He merelywished to prostrate himself before the mystery of a millionaire. Forwhen we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but itsobscurity. We exult in its very invisibility. Thus, for instance, when aman is in love with a woman he takes special pleasure in the fact that awoman is unreasonable. Thus, again, the very pious poet, celebrating hisCreator, takes pleasure in saying that God moves in a mysterious way. Now, the writer of the paragraph which I have quoted does not seem tohave had anything to do with a god, and I should not think (judging byhis extreme unpracticality) that he had ever been really in love with awoman. But the thing he does worship--Vanderbilt--he treats in exactlythis mystical manner. He really revels in the fact his deity Vanderbiltis keeping a secret from him. And it fills his soul with a sort oftransport of cunning, an ecstasy of priestcraft, that he should pretendto be telling to the multitude that terrible secret which he does notknow. 

Speaking about the instinct that makes people rich, the same writerremarks---

"In olden days its existence was fully understood. The Greeks enshrinedit in the story of Midas, of the 'Golden Touch. ' Here was a man whoturned everything he laid his hands upon into gold. His life was aprogress amidst riches. Out of everything that came in his way hecreated the precious metal. 'A foolish legend, ' said the wiseacres ofthe Victorian age. 'A truth, ' say we of to-day. We all know of such men. We are ever meeting or reading about such persons who turn everythingthey touch into gold. Success dogs their very footsteps. Their life'spathway leads unerringly upwards. They cannot fail. "

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

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

ON RUNNING AFTER ONE'S HAT

I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been flooded inmy absence, while I am in the mere country. My own Battersea has been, Iunderstand, particularly favoured as a meeting of the waters. Batterseawas already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of humanlocalities. Now that it has the additional splendour of great sheets ofwater, there must be something quite incomparable in the landscape (orwaterscape) of my own romantic town. Battersea must be a vision ofVenice. The boat that brought the meat from the butcher's must have shotalong those lanes of rippling silver with the strange smoothness of thegondola. The greengrocer who brought cabbages to the corner of theLatchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with the unearthly grace ofthe gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly poetical as an island; andwhen a district is flooded it becomes an archipelago. 

Some consider such romantic views of flood or fire slightly lacking inreality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quiteas practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things anopportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensiblethan the ordinary "Indignant Ratepayer" who sees in them an opportunityfor grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield orhaving a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be supported, butscarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception, andas for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the verylongest intervals. And most of the inconveniences that make men swear orwomen cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences--thingsaltogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up peoplecomplaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for atrain. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about arailway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside arailway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace ofpoetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light onthe signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when thewooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great kinghad thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournamentof trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter. They alsoserve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen. Their meditations maybe full of rich and fruitful things. Many of the most purple hours of mylife have been passed at Clapham Junction, which is now, I suppose, under water. I have been there in many moods so fixed and mystical thatthe water might well have come up to my waist before I noticed itparticularly. But in the case of all such annoyances, as I have said, everything depends upon the emotional point of view. You can safelyapply the test to almost every one of the things that are currentlytalked of as the typical nuisance of daily life. 

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant tohave to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to thewell-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, andrunning exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games andsports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting;little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is anidea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people sayit is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; butman is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does arecomic--eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all areexactly the things that are most worth doing--such as making love. A manrunning after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after awife. 

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hatwith the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regardhimself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly noanimal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe thathat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in thefuture. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high groundon a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional attendantshave started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever be thetechnical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest degreecombine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that theywere not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflictingpleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who werelooking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat inHyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to befilled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffectedpleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that momentgiving to the crowd. 

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

So I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible tosuppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyedpoetically. Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have beencaused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect, and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a reallyromantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightlyconsidered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For as the RomanCatholic priest in the story said: "Wine is good with everything exceptwater, " and on a similar principle, water is good with everything exceptwine. 

THE VOTE AND THE HOUSE

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

The second veto for canvassers which was printed on the little card saidthat you must not persuade any one to personate a voter. I have no ideawhat it means. To dress up as an average voter seems a little vague. There is no well-recognised uniform, as far as I know, with civicwaistcoat and patriotic whiskers. The enterprise resolves itself intoone somewhat similar to the enterprise of a rich friend of mine who wentto a fancy-dress ball dressed up as a gentleman. Perhaps it means thatthere is a practice of personating some individual voter. The canvassercreeps to the house of his fellow-conspirator carrying a make-up in abag. He produces from it a pair of white moustaches and a singleeyeglass, which are sufficient to give the most common-place person astartling resemblance to the Colonel at No. 80. Or he hurriedly affixesto his friend that large nose and that bald head which are all that isessential to an illusion of the presence of Professor Budger. I do notundertake to unravel these knots. I can only say that when I was acanvasser I was told by the little card, with every circumstance ofseriousness and authority, that I was not to persuade anybody topersonate a voter: and I can lay my hand upon my heart and affirm that Inever did. 

The third injunction on the card was one which seemed to me, ifinterpreted exactly and according to its words, to undermine the veryfoundations of our politics. It told me that I must not "threaten avoter with any consequence whatever. " No doubt this was intended toapply to threats of a personal and illegitimate character; as, forinstance, if a wealthy candidate were to threaten to raise all therents, or to put up a statue of himself. But as verbally andgrammatically expressed, it certainly would cover those general threatsof disaster to the whole community which are the main matter ofpolitical discussion. When a canvasser says that if the oppositioncandidate gets in the country will be ruined, he is threatening thevoters with certain consequences. When the Free Trader says that ifTariffs are adopted the people in Brompton or Bayswater will crawl abouteating grass, he is threatening them with consequences. When the TariffReformer says that if Free Trade exists for another year St. Paul'sCathedral will be a ruin and Ludgate Hill as deserted as Stonehenge, heis also threatening. And what is the good of being a Tariff Reformer ifyou can't say that? What is the use of being a politician or aParliamentary candidate at all if one cannot tell the people that if theother man gets in, England will be instantly invaded and enslaved, bloodbe pouring down the Strand, and all the English ladies carried off intoharems. But these things are, after all, consequences, so to speak. 

The majority of refined persons in our day may generally be heardabusing the practice of canvassing. In the same way the majority ofrefined persons (commonly the same refined persons) may be heardabusing the practice of interviewing celebrities. It seems a verysingular thing to me that this refined world reserves all itsindignation for the comparatively open and innocent element in bothwalks of life. There is really a vast amount of corruption and hypocrisyin our election politics; about the most honest thing in the whole messis the canvassing. A man has not got a right to "nurse" a constituencywith aggressive charities, to buy it with great presents of parks andlibraries, to open vague vistas of future benevolence; all this, whichgoes on unrebuked, is bribery and nothing else. But a man has got theright to go to another free man and ask him with civility whether hewill vote for him. The information can be asked, granted, or refusedwithout any loss of dignity on either side, which is more than can besaid of a park. It is the same with the place of interviewing injournalism. In a trade where there are labyrinths of insincerity, interviewing is about the most simple and the most sincere thing thereis. The canvasser, when he wants to know a man's opinions, goes and askshim. It may be a bore; but it is about as plain and straight a thing ashe could do. So the interviewer, when he wants to know a man's opinions, goes and asks him. Again, it may be a bore; but again, it is about asplain and straight as anything could be. But all the other real andsystematic cynicisms of our journalism pass without being vituperatedand even without being known--the financial motives of policy, themisleading posters, the suppression of just letters of complaint. Astatement about a man may be infamously untrue, but it is read calmly. But a statement by a man to an interviewer is felt as indefensiblyvulgar. That the paper should misrepresent him is nothing; that heshould represent himself is bad taste. The whole error in both caseslies in the fact that the refined persons are attacking politics andjournalism on the ground of vulgarity. Of course, politics andjournalism are, as it happens, very vulgar. But their vulgarity is notthe worst thing about them. Things are so bad with both that by thistime their vulgarity is the best thing about them. Their vulgarity is atleast a noisy thing; and their great danger is that silence that alwayscomes before decay. The conversational persuasion at elections isperfectly human and rational; it is the silent persuasions that areutterly damnable. 

If it is true that the Commons' House will not hold all the Commons, itis a very good example of what we call the anomalies of the EnglishConstitution. It is also, I think, a very good example of how highlyundesirable those anomalies really are. Most Englishmen say that theseanomalies do not matter; they are not ashamed of being illogical; theyare proud of being illogical. Lord Macaulay (a very typical Englishman, romantic, prejudiced, poetical), Lord Macaulay said that he would notlift his hand to get rid of an anomaly that was not also a grievance. Many other sturdy romantic Englishmen say the same. They boast of ouranomalies; they boast of our illogicality; they say it shows what apractical people we are. They are utterly wrong. Lord Macaulay was inthis matter, as in a few others, utterly wrong. Anomalies do mattervery much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities domatter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reasonthat any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to theidea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law thepower of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three timesbefore he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that thispower was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance. It could domy subjects no harm; it could do me no good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit to it. But the people of Batterseacould not safely submit to it, for all that. If I had nodded their headsfor them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at the endof it with immeasurably greater ease. For there would have permanentlysunk into every man's mind the notion that it was a natural thing for meto have a fantastic and irrational power. They would have grownaccustomed to insanity. 

For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more isnecessary than that they should think injustice unpleasant. They mustthink injustice _absurd_; above all, they must think it startling. Theymust retain the violence of a virgin astonishment. That is theexplanation of the singular fact which must have struck many people inthe relations of philosophy and reform. It is the fact (I mean) thatoptimists are more practical reformers than pessimists. Superficially, one would imagine that the railer would be the reformer; that the manwho thought that everything was wrong would be the man to put everythingright. In historical practice the thing is quite the other way;curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who reallymakes them better. The optimist Dickens has achieved more reforms thanthe pessimist Gissing. A man like Rousseau has far too rosy a theory ofhuman nature; but he produces a revolution. A man like David Hume thinksthat almost all things are depressing; but he is a Conservative, andwishes to keep them as they are. A man like Godwin believes existence tobe kindly; but he is a rebel. A man like Carlyle believes existence tobe cruel; but he is a Tory. Everywhere the man who alters things beginsby liking things. And the real explanation of this success of theoptimistic reformer, of this failure of the pessimistic reformer, is, after all, an explanation of sufficient simplicity. It is because theoptimist can look at wrong not only with indignation, but with astartled indignation. When the pessimist looks at any infamy, it is tohim, after all, only a repetition of the infamy of existence. The Courtof Chancery is indefensible--like mankind. The Inquisition isabominable--like the universe. But the optimist sees injustice assomething discordant and unexpected, and it stings him into action. Thepessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the optimist can besurprised at it. 

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

CONCEIT AND CARICATURE

If a man must needs be conceited, it is certainly better that he shouldbe conceited about some merits or talents that he does not reallypossess. For then his vanity remains more or less superficial; itremains a mere mistake of fact, like that of a man who thinks heinherits the royal blood or thinks he has an infallible system for MonteCarlo. Because the merit is an unreal merit, it does not corrupt orsophisticate his real merits. He is vain about the virtue he has notgot; but he may be humble about the virtues that he has got. His trulyhonourable qualities remain in their primordial innocence; he cannot seethem and he cannot spoil them. If a man's mind is erroneously possessedwith the idea that he is a great violinist, that need not prevent hisbeing a gentleman and an honest man. But if once his mind is possessedin any strong degree with the knowledge that he is a gentleman, he willsoon cease to be one. 

But there is a third kind of satisfaction of which I have noticed one ortwo examples lately--another kind of satisfaction which is neither apleasure in the virtues that we do possess nor a pleasure in the virtueswe do not possess. It is the pleasure which a man takes in the presenceor absence of certain things in himself without ever adequately askinghimself whether in his case they constitute virtues at all. A man willplume himself because he is not bad in some particular way, when thetruth is that he is not good enough to be bad in that particular way. Some priggish little clerk will say, "I have reason to congratulatemyself that I am a civilised person, and not so bloodthirsty as the MadMullah. " Somebody ought to say to him, "A really good man would be lessbloodthirsty than the Mullah. But you are less bloodthirsty, not becauseyou are more of a good man, but because you are a great deal less of aman. You are not bloodthirsty, not because you would spare your enemy, but because you would run away from him. " Or again, some Puritan with asullen type of piety would say, "I have reason to congratulate myselfthat I do not worship graven images like the old heathen Greeks. " Andagain somebody ought to say to him, "The best religion may not worshipgraven images, because it may see beyond them. But if you do not worshipgraven images, it is only because you are mentally and morally quiteincapable of graving them. True religion, perhaps, is above idolatry. But you are below idolatry. You are not holy enough yet to worship alump of stone. "

Mr. F. C. Gould, the brilliant and felicitous caricaturist, recentlydelivered a most interesting speech upon the nature and atmosphere ofour modern English caricature. I think there is really very little tocongratulate oneself about in the condition of English caricature. Thereare few causes for pride; probably the greatest cause for pride is Mr. F. C. Gould. But Mr. F. C. Gould, forbidden by modesty to adduce thisexcellent ground for optimism, fell back upon saying a thing which issaid by numbers of other people, but has not perhaps been said latelywith the full authority of an eminent cartoonist. He said that hethought "that they might congratulate themselves that the style ofcaricature which found acceptation nowadays was very different from thelampoon of the old days. " Continuing, he said, according to thenewspaper report, "On looking back to the political lampoons ofRowlandson's and Gilray's time they would find them coarse and brutal. In some countries abroad still, 'even in America, ' the method ofpolitical caricature was of the bludgeon kind. The fact was we hadpassed the bludgeon stage. If they were brutal in attacking a man, evenfor political reasons, they roused sympathy for the man who wasattacked. What they had to do was to rub in the point they wanted toemphasise as gently as they could. " (Laughter and applause. )

Anybody reading these words, and anybody who heard them, will certainlyfeel that there is in them a great deal of truth, as well as a greatdeal of geniality. But along with that truth and with that genialitythere is a streak of that erroneous type of optimism which is founded onthe fallacy of which I have spoken above. Before we congratulateourselves upon the absence of certain faults from our nation or society, we ought to ask ourselves why it is that these faults are absent. Are wewithout the fault because we have the opposite virtue? Or are we withoutthe fault because we have the opposite fault? It is a good thingassuredly, to be innocent of any excess; but let us be sure that we arenot innocent of excess merely by being guilty of defect. Is it reallytrue that our English political satire is so moderate because it is somagnanimous, so forgiving, so saintly? Is it penetrated through andthrough with a mystical charity, with a psychological tenderness? Do wespare the feelings of the Cabinet Minister because we pierce through allhis apparent crimes and follies down to the dark virtues of which hisown soul is unaware? Do we temper the wind to the Leader of theOpposition because in our all-embracing heart we pity and cherish thestruggling spirit of the Leader of the Opposition? Briefly, have we leftoff being brutal because we are too grand and generous to be brutal? Isit really true that we are _better_ than brutality? Is it really truethat we have _passed_ the bludgeon stage?

I fear that there is, to say the least of it, another side to thematter. Is it not only too probable that the mildness of our politicalsatire, when compared with the political satire of our fathers, arisessimply from the profound unreality of our current politics? Rowlandsonand Gilray did not fight merely because they were naturally pothousepugilists; they fought because they had something to fight about. It iseasy enough to be refined about things that do not matter; but menkicked and plunged a little in that portentous wrestle in which swung toand fro, alike dizzy with danger, the independence of England, theindependence of Ireland, the independence of France. If we wish for aproof of this fact that the lack of refinement did not come from merebrutality, the proof is easy. The proof is that in that struggle nopersonalities were more brutal than the really refined personalities. None were more violent and intolerant than those who were by naturepolished and sensitive. Nelson, for instance, had the nerves and goodmanners of a woman: nobody in his senses, I suppose, would call Nelson"brutal. " But when he was touched upon the national matter, there sprangout of him a spout of oaths, and he could only tell men to "Kill! kill!kill the d----d Frenchmen. " It would be as easy to take examples on theother side. Camille Desmoulins was a man of much the same type, not onlyelegant and sweet in temper, but almost tremulously tender andhumanitarian. But he was ready, he said, "to embrace Liberty upon a pileof corpses. " In Ireland there were even more instances. Robert Emmet wasonly one famous example of a whole family of men at once sensitive andsavage. I think that Mr. F. C. Gould is altogether wrong in talking ofthis political ferocity as if it were some sort of survival from ruderconditions, like a flint axe or a hairy man. Cruelty is, perhaps, theworst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind ofcruelty. But there is nothing in the least barbaric or ignorant aboutintellectual cruelty. The great Renaissance artists who mixed coloursexquisitely mixed poisons equally exquisitely; the great Renaissanceprinces who designed instruments of music also designed instruments oftorture. Barbarity, malignity, the desire to hurt men, are the evilthings generated in atmospheres of intense reality when great nations orgreat causes are at war. We may, perhaps, be glad that we have not gotthem: but it is somewhat dangerous to be proud that we have not gotthem. Perhaps we are hardly great enough to have them. Perhaps somegreat virtues have to be generated, as in men like Nelson or Emmet, before we can have these vices at all, even as temptations. I, for one, believe that if our caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is notbecause they are too big to hate them, but because their enemies are notbig enough to hate. I do not think we have passed the bludgeon stage. Ibelieve we have not come to the bludgeon stage. We must be better, braver, and purer men than we are before we come to the bludgeon stage. 

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

Allied to this question is the kindred question on which we so oftenhear an innocent British boast--the fact that our statesmen areprivately on very friendly relations, although in Parliament they sit onopposite sides of the House. Here, again, it is as well to have noillusions. Our statesmen are not monsters of mystical generosity orinsane logic, who are really able to hate a man from three to twelve andto love him from twelve to three. If our social relations are morepeaceful than those of France or America or the England of a hundredyears ago, it is simply because our politics are more peaceful; notimprobably because our politics are more fictitious. If our statesmenagree more in private, it is for the very simple reason that they agreemore in public. And the reason they agree so much in both cases isreally that they belong to one social class; and therefore the dininglife is the real life. Tory and Liberal statesmen like each other, butit is not because they are both expansive; it is because they are bothexclusive. 

 * * * * *

PATRIOTISM AND SPORT. 

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

The genuine English patriot will know that the strength of England hasnever depended upon any of these things; that the glory of England hasnever had anything to do with them, except in the opinion of a largesection of the rich and a loose section of the poor which copies theidleness of the rich. These people will, of course, think too much ofour failure, just as they thought too much of our success. The typicalJingoes who have admired their countrymen too much for being conquerorswill, doubtless, despise their countrymen too much for being conquered. But the Englishman with any feeling for England will know that athleticfailures do not prove that England is weak, any more than athleticsuccesses proved that England was strong. The truth is that athletics, like all other things, especially modern, are insanely individualistic. The Englishmen who win sporting prizes are exceptional among Englishmen, for the simple reason that they are exceptional even among men. Englishathletes represent England just about as much as Mr. Barnum's freaksrepresent America. There are so few of such people in the whole worldthat it is almost a toss-up whether they are found in this or thatcountry. 

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

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

This is one of the points, I think, on which something might really besaid for Lord Roberts and his rather vague ideas which vary betweenrifle clubs and conscription. Whatever may be the advantages ordisadvantages otherwise of the idea, it is at least an idea of procuringequality and a sort of average in the athletic capacity of the people;it might conceivably act as a corrective to our mere tendency to seeourselves in certain exceptional athletes. As it is, there are millionsof Englishmen who really think that they are a muscular race becauseC. B. Fry is an Englishman. And there are many of them who think vaguelythat athletics must belong to England because Ranjitsinhji is an Indian. 

But the real historic strength of England, physical and moral, has neverhad anything to do with this athletic specialism; it has been ratherhindered by it. Somebody said that the Battle of Waterloo was won onEton playing-fields. It was a particularly unfortunate remark, for theEnglish contribution to the victory of Waterloo depended very much morethan is common in victories upon the steadiness of the rank and file inan almost desperate situation. The Battle of Waterloo was won by thestubbornness of the common soldier--that is to say, it was won by theman who had never been to Eton. It was absurd to say that Waterloo waswon on Eton cricket-fields. But it might have been fairly said thatWaterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a veryclumsy cricket. In a word, it was the average of the nation that wasstrong, and athletic glories do not indicate much about the average of anation. Waterloo was not won by good cricket-players. But Waterloo waswon by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had some minimum ofathletic instincts and habits. 

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

The difficulty is therefore that the actual raising of the standard ofathletics has probably been bad for national athleticism. Instead of thetournament being a healthy _mêlée_ into which any ordinary man wouldrush and take his chance, it has become a fenced and guardedtilting-yard for the collision of particular champions against whom noordinary man would pit himself or even be permitted to pit himself. IfWaterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields it was because Eton cricket wasprobably much more careless then than it is now. As long as the game wasa game, everybody wanted to join in it. When it becomes an art, everyone wants to look at it. When it was frivolous it may have won Waterloo:when it was serious and efficient it lost Magersfontein. 

In the Waterloo period there was a general rough-and-tumble athleticismamong average Englishmen. It cannot be re-created by cricket, or byconscription, or by any artificial means. It was a thing of the soul. Itcame out of laughter, religion, and the spirit of the place. But it waslike the modern French duel in this--that it might happen to anybody. IfI were a French journalist it might really happen that MonsieurClemenceau might challenge me to meet him with pistols. But I do notthink that it is at all likely that Mr. C. B. Fry will ever challenge meto meet him with cricket-bats. 

AN ESSAY ON TWO CITIES. 

A little while ago I fell out of England into the town of Paris. If aman fell out of the moon into the town of Paris he would know that itwas the capital of a great nation. If, however, he fell (perhaps offsome other side of the moon) so as to hit the city of London, he wouldnot know so well that it was the capital of a great nation; at any rate, he would not know that the nation was so great as it is. This would beso even on the assumption that the man from the moon could not read ouralphabet, as presumably he could not, unless elementary education inthat planet has gone to rather unsuspected lengths. But it is true thata great part of the distinctive quality which separates Paris fromLondon may be even seen in the names. Real democrats always insist thatEngland is an aristocratic country. Real aristocrats always insist (forsome mysterious reason) that it is a democratic country. But if any onehas any real doubt about the matter let him consider simply the names ofthe streets. Nearly all the streets out of the Strand, for instance, arenamed after the first name, second name, third name, fourth, fifth, andsixth names of some particular noble family; after their relations, connections, or places of residence--Arundel Street, Norfolk Street, Villiers Street, Bedford Street, Southampton Street, and any number ofothers. The names are varied, so as to introduce the same family underall sorts of different surnames. Thus we have Arundel Street and alsoNorfolk Street; thus we have Buckingham Street and also Villiers Street. To say that this is not aristocracy is simply intellectual impudence. Iam an ordinary citizen, and my name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton; and Iconfess that if I found three streets in a row in the Strand, the firstcalled Gilbert Street, the second Keith Street, and the third ChestertonStreet, I should consider that I had become a somewhat more importantperson in the commonwealth than was altogether good for its health. IfFrenchmen ran London (which God forbid!), they would think it quite asludicrous that those streets should be named after the Duke ofBuckingham as that they should be named after me. They are streets outof one of the main thoroughfares of London. If French methods wereadopted, one of them would be called Shakspere Street, another CromwellStreet, another Wordsworth Street; there would be statues of each ofthese persons at the end of each of these streets, and any streets leftover would be named after the date on which the Reform Bill was passedor the Penny Postage established. 

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

But even if the imaginary traveller knew no alphabet of this earth atall, I think it would still be possible to suppose him seeing adifference between London and Paris, and, upon the whole, the realdifference. He would not be able to read the words "Quai Voltaire;" buthe would see the sneering statue and the hard, straight roads; withouthaving heard of Voltaire he would understand that the city wasVoltairean. He would not know that Fleet Street was named after theFleet Prison. But the same national spirit which kept the Fleet Prisonclosed and narrow still keeps Fleet Street closed and narrow. Or, if youwill, you may call Fleet Street cosy, and the Fleet Prison cosy. I thinkI could be more comfortable in the Fleet Prison, in an English way ofcomfort, than just under the statue of Voltaire. I think that the manfrom the moon would know France without knowing French; I think that hewould know England without having heard the word. For in the last resortall men talk by signs. To talk by statues is to talk by signs; to talkby cities is to talk by signs. Pillars, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pyramids, are an enormous dumb alphabet: as if some giant held up hisfingers of stone. The most important things at the last are always saidby signs, even if, like the Cross on St. Paul's, they are signs inheaven. If men do not understand signs, they will never understandwords. 

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

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

FRENCH AND ENGLISH

It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between beinginternational and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international wemust be national. And it is largely because those who call themselvesthe friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinctionthat they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which theybelong. International peace means a peace between nations, not a peaceafter the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after thedestruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is likethe heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love eachother; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be eachother. And in the case of national character this can be seen in acurious way. It will generally be found, I think, that the more a manreally appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less hewill attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is somethingin it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate. The Englishman who has afancy for France will try to be French; the Englishman who admiresFrance will remain obstinately English. This is to be particularlynoticed in the case of our relations with the French, because it is oneof the outstanding peculiarities of the French that their vices are allon the surface, and their extraordinary virtues concealed. One mightalmost say that their vices are the flower of their virtues. 

Thus their obscenity is the expression of their passionate love ofdragging all things into the light. The avarice of their peasants meansthe independence of their peasants. What the English call their rudenessin the streets is a phase of their social equality. The worried look oftheir women is connected with the responsibility of their women; and acertain unconscious brutality of hurry and gesture in the men is relatedto their inexhaustible and extraordinary military courage. Of allcountries, therefore, France is the worst country for a superficial foolto admire. Let a fool hate France: if the fool loves it he will soon bea knave. He will certainly admire it, not only for the things that arenot creditable, but actually for the things that are not there. He willadmire the grace and indolence of the most industrious people in theworld. He will admire the romance and fantasy of the most determinedlyrespectable and commonplace people in the world. This mistake theEnglishman will make if he admires France too hastily; but the mistakethat he makes about France will be slight compared with the mistake thathe makes about himself. An Englishman who professes really to likeFrench realistic novels, really to be at home in a French moderntheatre, really to experience no shock on first seeing the savage Frenchcaricatures, is making a mistake very dangerous for his own sincerity. He is admiring something he does not understand. He is reaping where hehas not sown, and taking up where he has not laid down; he is trying totaste the fruit when he has never toiled over the tree. He is trying topluck the exquisite fruit of French cynicism, when he has never tilledthe rude but rich soil of French virtue. 

The thing can only be made clear to Englishmen by turning it round. Suppose a Frenchman came out of democratic France to live in England, where the shadow of the great houses still falls everywhere, and whereeven freedom was, in its origin, aristocratic. If the Frenchman saw ouraristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if heset himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all knowthat we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsivelittle gnat. He would be imitating English aristocracy; he would beimitating the English vice. But he would not even understand the vice heplagiarised: especially he would not understand that the vice is partlya virtue. He would not understand those elements in the English whichbalance snobbishness and make it human: the great kindness of theEnglish, their hospitality, their unconscious poetry, their sentimentalconservatism, which really admires the gentry. The French Royalist seesthat the English like their King. But he does not grasp that while it isbase to worship a King, it is almost noble to worship a powerless King. The impotence of the Hanoverian Sovereigns has raised the English loyalsubject almost to the chivalry and dignity of a Jacobite. The Frenchmansees that the English servant is respectful: he does not realise that heis also disrespectful; that there is an English legend of the humorousand faithful servant, who is as much a personality as his master; theCaleb Balderstone, the Sam Weller. He sees that the English do admire anobleman; he does not allow for the fact that they admire a noblemanmost when he does not behave like one. They like a noble to beunconscious and amiable: the slave may be humble, but the master mustnot be proud. The master is Life, as they would like to enjoy it; andamong the joys they desire in him there is none which they desire moresincerely than that of generosity, of throwing money about amongmankind, or, to use the noble mediæval word, largesse--the joy oflargeness. That is why a cabman tells you are no gentleman if yougive him his correct fare. Not only his pocket, but his soul is hurt. You have wounded his ideal. You have defaced his vision of the perfectaristocrat. All this is really very subtle and elusive; it is verydifficult to separate what is mere slavishness from what is a sort ofvicarious nobility in the English love of a lord. And no Frenchmancould easily grasp it at all. He would think it was mere slavishness;and if he liked it, he would be a slave. So every Englishman must (atfirst) feel French candour to be mere brutality. And if he likes it, heis a brute. These national merits must not be understood so easily. Itrequires long years of plenitude and quiet, the slow growth of greatparks, the seasoning of oaken beams, the dark enrichment of red wine incellars and in inns, all the leisure and the life of England throughmany centuries, to produce at last the generous and genial fruit ofEnglish snobbishness. And it requires battery and barricade, songs inthe streets, and ragged men dead for an idea, to produce and justify theterrible flower of French indecency. 

When I was in Paris a short time ago, I went with an English friend ofmine to an extremely brilliant and rapid succession of French plays, each occupying about twenty minutes. They were all astonishinglyeffective; but there was one of them which was so effective that myfriend and I fought about it outside, and had almost to be separated bythe police. It was intended to indicate how men really behaved in awreck or naval disaster, how they break down, how they scream, how theyfight each other without object and in a mere hatred of everything. Andthen there was added, with all that horrible irony which Voltaire began, a scene in which a great statesman made a speech over their bodies, saying that they were all heroes and had died in a fraternal embrace. Myfriend and I came out of this theatre, and as he had lived long inParis, he said, like a Frenchman: "What admirable artistic arrangement!Is it not exquisite?" "No, " I replied, assuming as far as possible thetraditional attitude of John Bull in the pictures in _Punch_--"No, it isnot exquisite. Perhaps it is unmeaning; if it is unmeaning I do notmind. But if it has a meaning I know what the meaning is; it is thatunder all their pageant of chivalry men are not only beasts, but evenhunted beasts. I do not know much of humanity, especially when humanitytalks in French. But I know when a thing is meant to uplift the humansoul, and when it is meant to depress it. I know that 'Cyrano deBergerac' (where the actors talked even quicker) was meant to encourageman. And I know that this was meant to discourage him. " "Thesesentimental and moral views of art, " began my friend, but I broke intohis words as a light broke into my mind. "Let me say to you, " I said, "what Jaurès said to Liebknecht at the Socialist Conference: 'You havenot died on the barricades'. You are an Englishman, as I am, and youought to be as amiable as I am. These people have some right to beterrible in art, for they have been terrible in politics. They mayendure mock tortures on the stage; they have seen real tortures in thestreets. They have been hurt for the idea of Democracy. They have beenhurt for the idea of Catholicism. It is not so utterly unnatural to themthat they should be hurt for the idea of literature. But, by blazes, itis altogether unnatural to me! And the worst thing of all is that I, whoam an Englishman, loving comfort, should find comfort in such things asthis. The French do not seek comfort here, but rather unrest. Thisrestless people seeks to keep itself in a perpetual agony of therevolutionary mood. Frenchmen, seeking revolution, may find thehumiliation of humanity inspiring. But God forbid that twopleasure-seeking Englishmen should ever find it pleasant!"

THE ZOLA CONTROVERSY

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

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

For my part, therefore, I think the French Zola controversy much morepractical and exciting than the English Shakspere one. The admission ofZola to the Pantheon may be regarded as defining Zola's position. Butnobody could say that a statue of Shakspere, even fifty feet high, onthe top of St. Paul's Cathedral, could define Shakspere's position. Itonly defines our position towards Shakspere. It is he who is fixed; itis we who are unstable. The nearest approach to an English parallel tothe Zola case would be furnished if it were proposed to put somesavagely controversial and largely repulsive author among the ashes ofthe greatest English poets. Suppose, for instance, it were proposed tobury Mr. Rudyard Kipling in Westminster Abbey. I should be againstburying him in Westminster Abbey; first, because he is still alive (andhere I think even he himself might admit the justice of my protest); andsecond, because I should like to reserve that rapidly narrowing spacefor the great permanent examples, not for the interesting foreigninterruptions, of English literature. I would not have either Mr. Kipling or Mr. George Moore in Westminster Abbey, though Mr. Kiplinghas certainly caught even more cleverly than Mr. Moore the lucid andcool cruelty of the French short story. I am very sure that GeoffreyChaucer and Joseph Addison get on very well together in the Poets'Corner, despite the centuries that sunder them. But I feel that Mr. George Moore would be much happier in Pere-la-Chaise, with a riotousstatue by Rodin on the top of him; and Mr. Kipling much happier undersome huge Asiatic monument, carved with all the cruelties of the gods. 

As to the affair of the English monument to Shakspere, every people hasits own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to besaid for ours. There is the French monumental style, which consists inerecting very pompous statues, very well done. There is the Germanmonumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, badlydone. And there is the English monumental method, the great English waywith statues, which consists in not erecting them at all. A statue maybe dignified; but the absence of a statue is always dignified. For mypart, I feel there is something national, something wholesomelysymbolic, in the fact that there is no statue of Shakspere. There is, ofcourse, one in Leicester Square; but the very place where it standsshows that it was put up by a foreigner for foreigners. There is surelysomething modest and manly about not attempting to express our greatestpoet in the plastic arts in which we do not excel. We honour Shakspereas the Jews honour God--by not daring to make of him a graven image. Oursculpture, our statues, are good enough for bankers andphilanthropists, who are our curse: not good enough for him, who is ourbenediction. Why should we celebrate the very art in which we triumph bythe very art in which we fail?

England is most easily understood as the country of amateurs. It isespecially the country of amateur soldiers (that is, of Volunteers), ofamateur statesmen (that is, of aristocrats), and it is not unreasonableor out of keeping that it should be rather specially the country of acareless and lounging view of literature. Shakspere has no academicmonument for the same reason that he had no academic education. He hadsmall Latin and less Greek, and (in the same spirit) he has never beencommemorated in Latin epitaphs or Greek marble. If there is nothingclear and fixed about the emblems of his fame, it is because there wasnothing clear and fixed about the origins of it. Those great schools andUniversities which watch a man in his youth may record him in his death;but Shakspere had no such unifying traditions. We can only say of himwhat we can say of Dickens. We can only say that he came from nowhereand that he went everywhere. For him a monument in any place is out ofplace. A cold statue in a certain square is unsuitable to him as itwould be unsuitable to Dickens. If we put up a statue of Dickens inPortland Place to-morrow we should feel the stiffness as unnatural. Weshould fear that the statue might stroll about the street at night. 

But in France the question of whether Zola shall go to the Panthéon whenhe is dead is quite as practicable as the question whether he should goto prison when he was alive. It is the problem of whether the nationshall take one turn of thought or another. In raising a monument to Zolathey do not raise merely a trophy, but a finger-post. The question isone which will have to be settled in most European countries; but likeall such questions, it has come first to a head in France; becauseFrance is the battlefield of Christendom. That question is, of course, roughly this: whether in that ill-defined area of verbal licence oncertain dangerous topics it is an extenuation of indelicacy or anaggravation of it that the indelicacy was deliberate and solemn. Isindecency more indecent if it is grave, or more indecent if it is gay?For my part, I belong to an old school in this matter. When a book or aplay strikes me as a crime, I am not disarmed by being told that it is aserious crime. If a man has written something vile, I am not comfortedby the explanation that he quite meant to do it. I know all the evils offlippancy; I do not like the man who laughs at the sight of virtue. ButI prefer him to the man who weeps at the sight of virtue and complainsbitterly of there being any such thing. I am not reassured, when ethicsare as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that they are also as grave andsincere as suicide. And I think there is an obvious fallacy in thebitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between the aversion to Ibsen's"Ghosts" and the popularity of some such joke as "Dear Old Charlie. "Surely there is nothing mysterious or unphilosophic in the popularpreference. The joke of "Dear Old Charlie" is passed--because it is ajoke. "Ghosts" are exorcised--because they are ghosts. 

This is, of course, the whole question of Zola. I am grown up, and I donot worry myself much about Zola's immorality. The thing I cannot standis his morality. If ever a man on this earth lived to embody thetremendous text, "But if the light in your body be darkness, how greatis the darkness, " it was certainly he. Great men like Ariosto, Rabelais, and Shakspere fall in foul places, flounder in violent but venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are dirty, areindefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still speak with aconvincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the best things in theworld: Rabelais, of the instruction of ardent and austere youth;Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakspere, of the splendid stillness ofmercy. But in Zola even the ideals are undesirable; Zola's mercy iscolder than justice--nay, Zola's mercy is more bitter in the mouth thaninjustice. When Zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us, like Rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning. He takes usinto the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither booksnor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass bottles, and where the rule is taught from the exceptions. Zola's truth answersthe exact description of the skeleton in the cupboard; that is, it issomething of which a domestic custom forbids the discovery, but which isquite dead, even when it is discovered. Macaulay said that the Puritanshated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because itgave pleasure to the spectators. Of such substance also was thisPuritan who had lost his God. A Puritan of this type is worse than thePuritan who hates pleasure because there is evil in it. This manactually hates evil because there is pleasure in it. Zola was worse thana pornographer, he was a pessimist. He did worse than encourage sin: heencouraged discouragement. He made lust loathsome because to him lustmeant life. 

OXFORD FROM WITHOUT

Some time ago I ventured to defend that race of hunted and persecutedoutlaws, the Bishops; but until this week I had no idea of how muchpersecuted they were. For instance, the Bishop of Birmingham made someextremely sensible remarks in the House of Lords, to the effect thatOxford and Cambridge were (as everybody knows they are) far too muchmerely plutocratic playgrounds. One would have thought that an AnglicanBishop might be allowed to know something about the English Universitysystem, and even to have, if anything, some bias in its favour. But (asI pointed out) the rollicking Radicalism of Bishops has to berestrained. The man who writes the notes in the weekly paper called the_Outlook_ feels that it is his business to restrain it. The passage hassuch simple sublimity that I must quote it--

"Dr. Gore talked unworthily of his reputation when he spoke of theolder Universities as playgrounds for the rich and idle. In the firstplace, the rich men there are not idle. Some of the rich men are, and soare some of the poor men. On the whole, the sons of noble and wealthyfamilies keep up the best traditions of academic life. "

So far this seems all very nice. It is a part of the universal principleon which Englishmen have acted in recent years. As you will not try tomake the best people the most powerful people, persuade yourselves thatthe most powerful people are the best people. Mad Frenchmen and Irishmentry to realise the ideal. To you belongs the nobler (and much easier)task of idealising the real. First give your Universities entirely intothe power of the rich; then let the rich start traditions; and thencongratulate yourselves on the fact that the sons of the rich keep upthese traditions. All that is quite simple and jolly. But then thiscritic, who crushes Dr. Gore from the high throne of the _Outlook_, goeson in a way that is really perplexing. "It is distinctly advantageous, "he says, "that rich and poor--_i. E. _, young men with a smooth path inlife before them, and those who have to hew out a road forthemselves--should be brought into association. Each class learns agreat deal from the other. On the one side, social conceit andexclusiveness give way to the free spirit of competition amongst allclasses; on the other side, angularities and prejudices are rubbedaway. " Even this I might have swallowed. But the paragraph concludeswith this extraordinary sentence: "We get the net result in such careersas those of Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and Mr. Asquith. "

Those three names lay my intellect prostrate. The rest of the argument Iunderstand quite well. The social exclusiveness of aristocrats at Oxfordand Cambridge gives way before the free spirit of competition amongstall classes. That is to say, there is at Oxford so hot and keen astruggle, consisting of coal-heavers, London clerks, gypsies, navvies, drapers' assistants, grocers' assistants--in short, all the classes thatmake up the bulk of England--there is such a fierce competition atOxford among all these people that in its presence aristocraticexclusiveness gives way. That is all quite clear. I am not quite sureabout the facts, but I quite understand the argument. But then, havingbeen called upon to contemplate this bracing picture of a boisterousturmoil of all the classes of England, I am suddenly asked to accept asexample of it, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and the present Chancellor ofthe Exchequer. What part do these gentlemen play in the mental process?Is Lord Curzon one of the rugged and ragged poor men whose angularitieshave been rubbed away? Or is he one of those whom Oxford immediatelydeprived of all kind of social exclusiveness? His Oxford reputation doesnot seem to bear out either account of him. To regard Lord Milner as atypical product of Oxford would surely be unfair. It would be to deprivethe educational tradition of Germany of one of its most typicalproducts. English aristocrats have their faults, but they are not at alllike Lord Milner. What Mr. Asquith was meant to prove, whether he was arich man who lost his exclusiveness, or a poor man who lost his angles, I am utterly unable to conceive. 

There is, however, one mild but very evident truth that might perhaps bementioned. And it is this: that none of those three excellent personsis, or ever has been, a poor man in the sense that that word isunderstood by the overwhelming majority of the English nation. There areno poor men at Oxford in the sense that the majority of men in thestreet are poor. The very fact that the writer in the _Outlook_ can talkabout such people as poor shows that he does not understand what themodern problem is. His kind of poor man rather reminds me of the Earl inthe ballad by that great English satirist, Sir W. S. Gilbert, whoseangles (very acute angles) had, I fear, never been rubbed down by an oldEnglish University. The reader will remember that when thePeriwinkle-girl was adored by two Dukes, the poet added--

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

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

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

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

Of course the truth is exactly as the Bishop of Birmingham put it. I amsure that he did not put it in any unkindly or contemptuous spirittowards those old English seats of learning, which whether they are orare not seats of learning, are, at any rate, old and English, and thoseare two very good things to be. The Old English University is aplayground for the governing class. That does not prove that it is a badthing; it might prove that it was a very good thing. Certainly if thereis a governing class, let there be a playground for the governing class. I would much rather be ruled by men who know how to play than by men whodo not know how to play. Granted that we are to be governed by a richsection of the community, it is certainly very important that thatsection should be kept tolerably genial and jolly. If the sensitive manon the _Outlook_ does not like the phrase, "Playground of the rich, " Ican suggest a phrase that describes such a place as Oxford perhaps withmore precision. It is a place for humanising those who might otherwisebe tyrants, or even experts. 

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

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

It is not in any such spirit of facile and reckless reassurance that weshould approach the really difficult problem of the delicate virtues andthe deep dangers of our two historic seats of learning. A good son doesnot easily admit that his sick mother is dying; but neither does a goodson cheerily assert that she is "all right. " There are many goodarguments for leaving the two historic Universities exactly as they are. There are many good arguments for smashing them or altering thementirely. But in either case the plain truth told by the Bishop ofBirmingham remains. If these Universities were destroyed, they would notbe destroyed as Universities. If they are preserved, they will not bepreserved as Universities. They will be preserved strictly and literallyas playgrounds; places valued for their hours of leisure more than fortheir hours of work. I do not say that this is unreasonable; as a matterof private temperament I find it attractive. It is not only possible tosay a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say thehighest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained thatthe true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden;heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that onecan juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one cantreat everything as a joke--that may be, perhaps, the real end and finalholiday of human souls. When we are really holy we may regard theUniverse as a lark; so perhaps it is not essentially wrong to regard theUniversity as a lark. But the plain and present fact is that our upperclasses do regard the University as a lark, and do not regard it as aUniversity. It also happens very often that through some oversight theyneglect to provide themselves with that extreme degree of holiness whichI have postulated as a necessary preliminary to such indulgence in thehigher frivolity. 

Humanity, always dreaming of a happy race, free, fantastic, and atease, has sometimes pictured them in some mystical island, sometimes insome celestial city, sometimes as fairies, gods, or citizens ofAtlantis. But one method in which it has often indulged is to picturethem as aristocrats, as a special human class that could actually beseen hunting in the woods or driving about the streets. And this neverwas (as some silly Germans say) a worship of pride and scorn; mankindnever really admired pride; mankind never had any thing but a scorn forscorn. It was a worship of the spectacle of happiness; especially of thespectacle of youth. This is what the old Universities in their noblestaspect really are; and this is why there is always something to be saidfor keeping them as they are. Aristocracy is not a tyranny; it is noteven merely a spell. It is a vision. It is a deliberate indulgence in acertain picture of pleasure painted for the purpose; every Duchess is(in an innocent sense) painted, like Gainsborough's "Duchess ofDevonshire. " She is only beautiful because, at the back of all, theEnglish people wanted her to be beautiful. In the same way, the lads atOxford and Cambridge are only larking because England, in the depths ofits solemn soul, really wishes them to lark. All this is very human andpardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no such things inthe world as danger and honour and intellectual responsibility. But ifaristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most unpractical of allvisions. It is not a working way of doing things to put all yourhappiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at them. It is nota working way of managing education to be entirely content with the merefact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the world) given theluckiest boys the jolliest time. It would be easy enough, like thewriter in the _Outlook_, to enjoy the pleasures and deny the perils. Ohwhat a happy place England would be to live in if only one did not loveit!

WOMAN

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

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

My correspondent says, "Would not our women be spared the drudgery ofcooking and all its attendant worries, leaving them free for higherculture?" The first thing that occurs to me to say about this is verysimple, and is, I imagine, a part of all our experience. If mycorrespondent can find any way of preventing women from worrying, hewill indeed be a remarkable man. I think the matter is a much deeperone. First of all, my correspondent overlooks a distinction which iselementary in our human nature. Theoretically, I suppose, every one wouldlike to be freed from worries. But nobody in the world would alwayslike to be freed from worrying occupations. I should very much like (asfar as my feelings at the moment go) to be free from the consumingnuisance of writing this article. But it does not follow that I shouldlike to be free from the consuming nuisance of being a journalist. Because we are worried about a thing, it does not follow that we are notinterested in it. The truth is the other way. If we are not interested, why on earth should we be worried? Women are worried about housekeeping, but those that are most interested are the most worried. Women are stillmore worried about their husbands and their children. And I suppose ifwe strangled the children and poleaxed the husbands it would leave womenfree for higher culture. That is, it would leave them free to begin toworry about that. For women would worry about higher culture as much asthey worry about everything else. 

I believe this way of talking about women and their higher culture isalmost entirely a growth of the classes which (unlike the journalisticclass to which I belong) have always a reasonable amount of money. Oneodd thing I specially notice. Those who write like this seem entirely toforget the existence of the working and wage-earning classes. They sayeternally, like my correspondent, that the ordinary woman is always adrudge. And what, in the name of the Nine Gods, is the ordinary man?These people seem to think that the ordinary man is a Cabinet Minister. They are always talking about man going forth to wield power, to carvehis own way, to stamp his individuality on the world, to command and tobe obeyed. This may be true of a certain class. Dukes, perhaps, are notdrudges; but, then, neither are Duchesses. The Ladies and Gentlemen ofthe Smart Set are quite free for the higher culture, which consistschiefly of motoring and Bridge. But the ordinary man who typifies andconstitutes the millions that make up our civilisation is no more freefor the higher culture than his wife is. 

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

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

And then the higher culture. I know that culture. I would not set anyman free for it if I could help it. The effect of it on the rich men whoare free for it is so horrible that it is worse than any of the otheramusements of the millionaire--worse than gambling, worse even thanphilanthropy. It means thinking the smallest poet in Belgium greaterthan the greatest poet of England. It means losing every democraticsympathy. It means being unable to talk to a navvy about sport, or aboutbeer, or about the Bible, or about the Derby, or about patriotism, orabout anything whatever that he, the navvy, wants to talk about. Itmeans taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do. Itmeans pardoning indecency only when it is gloomy indecency. Itsdisciples will call a spade a spade; but only when it is agrave-digger's spade. The higher culture is sad, cheap, impudent, unkind, without honesty and without ease. In short, it is "high. " Thatabominable word (also applied to game) admirably describes it. 

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

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

THE MODERN MARTYR

The incident of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron chainsto the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of mostmodern martyrdom. It generally consists of a man chaining himself up andthen complaining that he is not free. Some say that such larks retardthe cause of female suffrage, others say that such larks alone canadvance it; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that they have thesmallest effect one way or the other. 

The modern notion of impressing the public by a mere demonstration ofunpopularity, by being thrown out of meetings or thrown into jail islargely a mistake. It rests on a fallacy touching the true popular valueof martyrdom. People look at human history and see that it has oftenhappened that persecutions have not only advertised but even advanced apersecuted creed, and given to its validity the public and dreadfulwitness of dying men. The paradox was pictorially expressed in Christianart, in which saints were shown brandishing as weapons the very toolsthat had slain them. And because his martyrdom is thus a power to themartyr, modern people think that any one who makes himself slightlyuncomfortable in public will immediately be uproariously popular. Thiselement of inadequate martyrdom is not true only of the Suffragettes; itis true of many movements I respect and some that I agree with. It wastrue, for instance, of the Passive Resisters, who had pieces of theirfurniture sold up. The assumption is that if you show your ordinarysincerity (or even your political ambition) by being a nuisance toyourself as well as to other people, you will have the strength of thegreat saints who passed through the fire. Any one who can be hustled ina hall for five minutes, or put in a cell for five days, has achievedwhat was meant by martyrdom, and has a halo in the Christian art of thefuture. Miss Pankhurst will be represented holding a policeman in eachhand--the instruments of her martyrdom. The Passive Resister will beshown symbolically carrying the teapot that was torn from him bytyrannical auctioneers. 

But there is a fallacy in this analogy of martyrdom. The truth is thatthe special impressiveness which does come from being persecuted onlyhappens in the case of extreme persecution. For the fact that the modernenthusiast will undergo some inconvenience for the creed he holds onlyproves that he does hold it, which no one ever doubted. No one doubtsthat the Nonconformist minister cares more for Nonconformity than hedoes for his teapot. No one doubts that Miss Pankhurst wants a vote morethan she wants a quiet afternoon and an armchair. All our ordinaryintellectual opinions are worth a bit of a row: I remember during theBoer War fighting an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen's Hall, andgiving and receiving a bloody nose; but I did not think it one of theincidents that produce the psychological effect of the Romanamphitheatre or the stake at Smithfield. For in that impression there issomething more than the mere fact that a man is sincere enough to givehis time or his comfort. Pagans were not impressed by the torture ofChristians merely because it showed that they honestly held theiropinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts ofopinions. The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle. It isthat it gives an appearance of a man having something quite speciallystrong to back him up, of his drawing upon some power. And this can onlybe proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed; when all thecurrent of his bodily being is reversed and turned to pain. If a man isseen to be roaring with laughter all the time that he is skinned alive, it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere in the recesses ofhis mind he had thought of a rather good joke. Similarly, if men smiledand sang (as they did) while they were being boiled or torn in pieces, the spectators felt the presence of something more than mere mentalhonesty: they felt the presence of some new and unintelligible kind ofpleasure, which, presumably, came from somewhere. It might be a strengthof madness, or a lying spirit from Hell; but it was something quitepositive and extraordinary; as positive as brandy and as extraordinaryas conjuring. The Pagan said to himself: "If Christianity makes a manhappy while his legs are being eaten by a lion, might it not make mehappy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down thestreet?" The Secularists laboriously explain that martyrdoms do notprove a faith to be true, as if anybody was ever such a fool as tosuppose that they did. What they did prove, or, rather, stronglysuggest, was that something had entered human psychology which wasstronger than strong pain. If a young girl, scourged and bleeding todeath, saw nothing but a crown descending on her from God, the firstmental step was not that her philosophy was correct, but that she wascertainly feeding on something. But this particular point of psychologydoes not arise at all in the modern cases of mere public discomfort orinconvenience. The causes of Miss Pankhurst's cheerfulness require nomystical explanations. If she were being burned alive as a witch, if shethen looked up in unmixed rapture and saw a ballot-box descending out ofheaven, then I should say that the incident, though not conclusive, wasfrightfully impressive. It would not prove logically that she ought tohave the vote, or that anybody ought to have the vote. But it wouldprove this: that there was, for some reason, a sacramental reality inthe vote, that the soul could take the vote and feed on it; that it wasin itself a positive and overpowering pleasure, capable of being pittedagainst positive and overpowering pain. 

I should advise modern agitators, therefore, to give up this particularmethod: the method of making very big efforts to get a very smallpunishment. It does not really go down at all; the punishment is toosmall, and the efforts are too obvious. It has not any of theeffectiveness of the old savage martyrdom, because it does not leave thevictim absolutely alone with his cause, so that his cause alone cansupport him. At the same time it has about it that element of thepantomimic and the absurd, which was the cruellest part of the slayingand the mocking of the real prophets. St. Peter was crucified upsidedown as a huge inhuman joke; but his human seriousness survived theinhuman joke, because, in whatever posture, he had died for his faith. The modern martyr of the Pankhurst type courts the absurdity withoutmaking the suffering strong enough to eclipse the absurdity. She is likea St. Peter who should deliberately stand on his head for ten secondsand then expect to be canonised for it. 

Or, again, the matter might be put in this way. Modern martyrdoms faileven as demonstrations, because they do not prove even that the martyrsare completely serious. I think, as a fact, that the modern martyrsgenerally are serious, perhaps a trifle too serious. But their martyrdomdoes not prove it; and the public does not always believe it. Undoubtedly, as a fact, Dr. Clifford is quite honourably indignant withwhat he considers to be clericalism, but he does not prove it by havinghis teapot sold; for a man might easily have his teapot sold as anactress has her diamonds stolen--as a personal advertisement. As amatter of fact, Miss Pankhurst is quite in earnest about votes forwomen. But she does not prove it by being chucked out of meetings. Aperson might be chucked out of meetings just as young men are chuckedout of music-halls--for fun. But no man has himself eaten by a lion as apersonal advertisement. No woman is broiled on a gridiron for fun. Thatis where the testimony of St. Perpetua and St. Faith comes in. Doubtlessit is no fault of these enthusiasts that they are not subjected to theold and searching penalties; very likely they would pass through them astriumphantly as St. Agatha. I am simply advising them upon a point ofpolicy, things being as they are. And I say that the average man is notimpressed with their sacrifices simply because they are not and cannotbe more decisive than the sacrifices which the average man himself wouldmake for mere fun if he were drunk. Drunkards would interrupt meetingsand take the consequences. And as for selling a teapot, it is an act, Iimagine, in which any properly constituted drunkard would take apositive pleasure. The advertisement is not good enough; it does nottell. If I were really martyred for an opinion (which is more improbablethan words can say), it would certainly only be for one or two of mymost central and sacred opinions. I might, perhaps, be shot for England, but certainly not for the British Empire. I might conceivably die forpolitical freedom, but I certainly wouldn't die for Free Trade. But asfor kicking up the particular kind of shindy that the Suffragettes arekicking up, I would as soon do it for my shallowest opinion as for mydeepest one. It never could be anything worse than an inconvenience; itnever could be anything better than a spree. Hence the British public, and especially the working classes, regard the whole demonstration withfundamental indifference; for, while it is a demonstration that probablyis adopted from the most fanatical motives, it is a demonstration whichmight be adopted from the most frivolous. 

ON POLITICAL SECRECY

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

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

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

Then there is a third class of things on which the best civilisationdoes permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is inthe case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot beexplained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible--caprices, suddenimpulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice. A man must not beasked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he doesnot know. A man is not asked (even in Germany) why he walks slow orquick, simply because he could not answer. A man must take his own roadthrough a wood, and make his own use of a holiday. And the reason isthis: not because he has a strong reason, but actually because he has aweak reason; because he has a slight and fleeting feeling about thematter which he could not explain to a policeman, which perhaps the veryappearance of a policeman out of the bushes might destroy. He must acton the impulse, because the impulse is unimportant, and he may neverhave the same impulse again. If you like to put it so he must act on theimpulse because the impulse is not worth a moment's thought. All thesefancies men feel should be private; and even Fabians have never proposedto interfere with them. 

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

I cannot imagine that any human being could think any other human beingcapable of maintaining the proposition that men ought not to receivemoney. The simple point is that, as we know that some money is givenrightly and some wrongly, an elementary common-sense leads us to lookwith indifference at the money that is given in the middle of LudgateCircus, and to look with particular suspicion at the money which a manwill not give unless he is shut up in a box or a bathing-machine. Inshort, it is too silly to suppose that anybody could ever have discussedthe desirability of funds. The only thing that even idiots could everhave discussed is the concealment of funds. Therefore, the wholequestion that we have to consider is whether the concealment ofpolitical money-transactions, the purchase of peerages, the payment ofelection expenses, is a kind of concealment that falls under any of thethree classes I have mentioned as those in which human custom andinstinct does permit us to conceal. I have suggested three kinds ofsecrecy which are human and defensible. Can this institution be defendedby means of any of them?

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

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

And if we apply the third test to this problem of political secrecy, thecase is even clearer and even more funny. Surely no one will say thatthe purchase of peerages and such things are kept secret because theyare so light and impulsive and unimportant that they must be matters ofindividual fancy. A child sees a flower and for the first time feelsinclined to pick it. But surely no one will say that a brewer sees acoronet and for the first time suddenly thinks that he would like to bea peer. The child's impulse need not be explained to the police, for thesimple reason that it could not be explained to anybody. But does anyone believe that the laborious political ambitions of modern commercialmen ever have this airy and incommunicable character? A man lying on thebeach may throw stones into the sea without any particular reason. Butdoes any one believe that the brewer throws bags of gold into the partyfunds without any particular reason? This theory of the secrecy ofpolitical money must also be regretfully abandoned; and with it the twoother possible excuses as well. This secrecy is one which cannot bejustified as a sensational joke nor as a common human freemasonry, noras an indescribable personal whim. Strangely enough, indeed, it violatesall three conditions and classes at once. It is not hidden in order tobe revealed: it is hidden in order to be hidden. It is not kept secretbecause it is a common secret of mankind, but because mankind must notget hold of it. And it is not kept secret because it is too unimportantto be told, but because it is much too important to bear telling. Inshort, the thing we have is the real and perhaps rare politicalphenomenon of an occult government. We have an exoteric and an esotericdoctrine. England is really ruled by priestcraft, but not by priests. Wehave in this country all that has ever been alleged against the evilside of religion; the peculiar class with privileges, the sacred wordsthat are unpronounceable; the important things known only to the few. Infact we lack nothing except the religion. 

 * * * * *

EDWARD VII. AND SCOTLAND

I have received a serious, and to me, at any rate, an impressiveremonstrance from the Scottish Patriotic Association. It appears that Irecently referred to Edward VII. Of Great Britain and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, under the horrible description of the King ofEngland. The Scottish Patriotic Association draws my attention to thefact that by the provisions of the Act of Union, and the tradition ofnationality, the monarch should be referred to as the King of Britain. The blow thus struck at me is particularly wounding because it isparticularly unjust. I believe in the reality of the independentnationalities under the British Crown much more passionately andpositively than any other educated Englishman of my acquaintancebelieves in it. I am quite certain that Scotland is a nation; I am quitecertain that nationality is the key of Scotland; I am quite certain thatall our success with Scotland has been due to the fact that we have inspirit treated it as a nation. I am quite certain that Ireland is anation; I am quite certain that nationality is the key to Ireland; I amquite certain that all our failure in Ireland arose from the fact thatwe would not in spirit treat it as a nation. It would be difficult tofind, even among the innumerable examples that exist, a stronger exampleof the immensely superior importance of sentiment to what is calledpracticality than this case of the two sister nations. It is not that wehave encouraged a Scotchman to be rich; it is not that we haveencouraged a Scotchman to be active; it is not that we have encouraged aScotchman to be free. It is that we have quite definitely encouraged aScotchman to be Scotch. 

A vague, but vivid impression was received from all our writers ofhistory, philosophy, and rhetoric that the Scottish element wassomething really valuable in itself, was something which even Englishmenwere forced to recognise and respect. If we ever admitted the beauty ofIreland, it was as something which might be loved by an Englishman butwhich could hardly be respected even by an Irishman. A Scotchman mightbe proud of Scotland; it was enough for an Irishman that he could befond of Ireland. Our success with the two nations has been exactlyproportioned to our encouragement of their independent nationalemotion; the one that we would not treat nationally has alone producedNationalists. The one nation that we would not recognise as a nation intheory is the one that we have been forced to recognise as a nation inarms. The Scottish Patriotic Association has no need to draw myattention to the importance of the separate national sentiment or theneed of keeping the Border as a sacred line. The case is quitesufficiently proved by the positive history of Scotland. The place ofScottish loyalty to England has been taken by English admiration ofScotland. They do not need to envy us our titular leadership, when weseem to envy them their separation. 

I wish to make very clear my entire sympathy with the national sentimentof the Scottish Patriotic Association. But I wish also to make clearthis very enlightening comparison between the fate of Scotch and ofIrish patriotism. In life it is always the little facts that express thelarge emotions, and if the English once respected Ireland as theyrespect Scotland, it would come out in a hundred small ways. Forinstance, there are crack regiments in the British Army which wear thekilt--the kilt which, as Macaulay says with perfect truth, was regardedby nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief. The Highlandofficers carry a silver-hilted version of the old barbarous Gaelicbroadsword with a basket-hilt, which split the skulls of so many Englishsoldiers at Killiecrankie and Prestonpans. When you have a regiment ofmen in the British Army carrying ornamental silver shillelaghs you willhave done the same thing for Ireland, and not before--or when youmention Brian Boru with the same intonation as Bruce. 

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

Now it so happens that in the passage complained of I said the King ofEngland merely because I meant the King of England. I was speakingstrictly and especially of English Kings, of Kings in the tradition ofthe old Kings of England. I wrote as an English nationalist keenlyconscious of the sacred boundary of the Tweed that keeps (or used tokeep) our ancient enemies at bay. I wrote as an English nationalistresolved for one wild moment to throw off the tyranny of the Scotch andIrish who govern and oppress my country. I felt that England was atleast spiritually guarded against these surrounding nationalities. Idreamed that the Tweed was guarded by the ghosts of Scropes and Percys;I dreamed that St. George's Channel was guarded by St. George. And inthis insular security I spoke deliberately and specifically of the Kingof England, of the representative of the Tudors and Plantagenets. It istrue that the two Kings of England, of whom I especially spoke, CharlesII. And George III. , had both an alien origin, not very recent and notvery remote. Charles II. Came of a family originally Scotch. George III. Came of a family originally German. But the same, so far as that goes, could be said of the English royal houses when England stood quitealone. The Plantagenets were originally a French family. The Tudors wereoriginally a Welsh family. But I was not talking of the amount ofEnglish sentiment in the English Kings. I was talking of the amount ofEnglish sentiment in the English treatment and popularity of the EnglishKings. With that Ireland and Scotland have nothing whatever to do. 

Charles II. May, for all I know, have not only been King of Scotland; hemay, by virtue of his temper and ancestry, have been a Scotch King ofScotland. There was something Scotch about his combination ofclear-headedness with sensuality. There was something Scotch about hiscombination of doing what he liked with knowing what he was doing. But Iwas not talking of the personality of Charles, which may have beenScotch. I was talking of the popularity of Charles, which was certainlyEnglish. One thing is quite certain: whether or no he ever ceased to bea Scotch man, he ceased as soon as he conveniently could to be a ScotchKing. He had actually tried the experiment of being a national rulernorth of the Tweed, and his people liked him as little as he liked them. Of Presbyterianism, of the Scottish religion, he left on record theexquisitely English judgment that it was "no religion for a gentleman. "His popularity then was purely English; his royalty was purely English;and I was using the words with the utmost narrowness and deliberationwhen I spoke of this particular popularity and royalty as the popularityand royalty of a King of England. I said of the English people speciallythat they like to pick up the King's crown when he has dropped it. I donot feel at all sure that this does apply to the Scotch or the Irish. Ithink that the Irish would knock his crown off for him. I think that theScotch would keep it for him after they had picked it up. 

For my part, I should be inclined to adopt quite the opposite method ofasserting nationality. Why should good Scotch nationalists call EdwardVII. The King of Britain? They ought to call him King Edward I. OfScotland. What is Britain? Where is Britain? There is no such place. There never was a nation of Britain; there never was a King of Britain;unless perhaps Vortigern or Uther Pendragon had a taste for the title. If we are to develop our Monarchy, I should be altogether in favour ofdeveloping it along the line of local patriotism and of localproprietorship in the King. I think that the Londoners ought to call himthe King of London, and the Liverpudlians ought to call him the King ofLiverpool. I do not go so far as to say that the people of Birminghamought to call Edward VII. The King of Birmingham; for that would be hightreason to a holier and more established power. But I think we mightread in the papers: "The King of Brighton left Brighton at half-past twothis afternoon, " and then immediately afterwards, "The King of Worthingentered Worthing at ten minutes past three. " Or, "The people of Margatebade a reluctant farewell to the popular King of Margate this morning, "and then, "His Majesty the King of Ramsgate returned to his country andcapital this afternoon after his long sojourn in strange lands. " Itmight be pointed out that by a curious coincidence the departure of theKing of Oxford occurred a very short time before the triumphal arrivalof the King of Reading. I cannot imagine any method which would moreincrease the kindly and normal relations between the Sovereign and hispeople. Nor do I think that such a method would be in any sense adepreciation of the royal dignity; for, as a matter of fact, it wouldput the King upon the same platform with the gods. The saints, the mostexalted of human figures, were also the most local. It was exactly themen whom we most easily connected with heaven whom we also most easilyconnected with earth. 

THOUGHTS AROUND KOEPENICK

A famous and epigrammatic author said that life copied literature; itseems clear that life really caricatures it. I suggested recently thatthe Germans submitted to, and even admired, a solemn and theatricalassertion of authority. A few hours after I had sent up my "copy, " I sawthe first announcement of the affair of the comic Captain at Koepenick. The most absurd part of this absurd fraud (at least, to English eyes) isone which, oddly enough, has received comparatively little comment. Imean the point at which the Mayor asked for a warrant, and the Captainpointed to the bayonets of his soldiery and said. "These are myauthority. " One would have thought any one would have known that nosoldier would talk like that. The dupes were blamed for not knowing thatthe man wore the wrong cap or the wrong sash, or had his sword buckledon the wrong way; but these are technicalities which they might surelybe excused for not knowing. I certainly should not know if a soldier'ssash were on inside out or his cap on behind before. But I should knowuncommonly well that genuine professional soldiers do not talk likeAdelphi villains and utter theatrical epigrams in praise of abstractviolence. 

We can see this more clearly, perhaps, if we suppose it to be the caseof any other dignified and clearly distinguishable profession. Suppose aBishop called upon me. My great modesty and my rather distant reverencefor the higher clergy might lead me certainly to a strong suspicion thatany Bishop who called on me was a bogus Bishop. But if I wished to testhis genuineness I should not dream of attempting to do so by examiningthe shape of his apron or the way his gaiters were done up. I have notthe remotest idea of the way his gaiters ought to be done up. A veryvague approximation to an apron would probably take me in; and if hebehaved like an approximately Christian gentleman he would be safeenough from my detection. But suppose the Bishop, the moment he enteredthe room, fell on his knees on the mat, clasped his hands, and pouredout a flood of passionate and somewhat hysterical extempore prayer, Ishould say at once and without the smallest hesitation, "Whatever elsethis man is, he is not an elderly and wealthy cleric of the Church ofEngland. They don't do such things. " Or suppose a man came to mepretending to be a qualified doctor, and flourished a stethoscope, orwhat he said was a stethoscope. I am glad to say that I have not eventhe remotest notion of what a stethoscope looks like; so that if heflourished a musical-box or a coffee-mill it would be all one to me. ButI do think that I am not exaggerating my own sagacity if I say that Ishould begin to suspect the doctor if on entering my room he flung hislegs and arms about, crying wildly, "Health! Health! priceless gift ofNature! I possess it! I overflow with it! I yearn to impart it! Oh, thesacred rapture of imparting health!" In that case I should suspect himof being rather in a position to receive than to offer medicalsuperintendence. 

Now, it is no exaggeration at all to say that any one who has ever knownany soldiers (I can only answer for English and Irish and Scotchsoldiers) would find it just as easy to believe that a real Bishop wouldgrovel on the carpet in a religious ecstasy, or that a real doctor woulddance about the drawing-room to show the invigorating effects of his ownmedicine, as to believe that a soldier, when asked for his authority, would point to a lot of shining weapons and declare symbolically thatmight was right. Of course, a real soldier would go rather red in theface and huskily repeat the proper formula, whatever it was, as that hecame in the King's name. 

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they arenever worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taughtseverely and systematically that might is not right. The fact isobvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what isheld to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They learn toobey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons on a coat, atitle, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may be unreasonablethings; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but they are weakthings. They are not Force, and they do not look like Force. They areparts of an idea: of the idea of discipline; if you will, of the idea oftyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could possibly say that his ownbayonets were his authority. No soldier could possibly say that he camein the name of his own bayonets. It would be as absurd as if a postmansaid that he came inside his bag. I do not, as I have said, underratethe evils that really do arise from militarism and the military ethic. It tends to give people wooden faces and sometimes wooden heads. Ittends moreover (both through its specialisation and through its constantobedience) to a certain loss of real independence and strength ofcharacter. This has almost always been found when people made themistake of turning the soldier into a statesman, under the mistakenimpression that he was a strong man. The Duke of Wellington, forinstance, was a strong soldier and therefore a weak statesman. But thesoldier is always, by the nature of things, loyal to something. And aslong as one is loyal to something one can never be a worshipper of mereforce. For mere force, violence in the abstract, is the enemy ofanything we love. To love anything is to see it at once under loweringskies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune; and when asoldier has accepted any nation's uniform he has already accepted itsdefeat. 

Nevertheless, it does appear to be possible in Germany for a man topoint to fixed bayonets and say, "These are my authority, " and yet toconvince ordinarily sane men that he is a soldier. If this is so, itdoes really seem to point to some habit of high-faultin' in the Germannation, such as that of which I spoke previously. It almost looks as ifthe advisers, and even the officials, of the German Army had becomeinfected in some degree with the false and feeble doctrine that might isright. As this doctrine is invariably preached by physical weaklingslike Nietzsche it is a very serious thing even to entertain thesupposition that it is affecting men who have really to do military workIt would be the end of German soldiers to be affected by Germanphilosophy. Energetic people use energy as a means, but only very tiredpeople ever use energy as a reason. Athletes go in for games, becauseathletes desire glory. Invalids go in for calisthenics; for invalids(alone of all human beings) desire strength. So long as the German Armypoints to its heraldic eagle and says, "I come in the name of thisfierce but fabulous animal, " the German Army will be all right. If everit says, "I come in the name of bayonets, " the bayonets will break likeglass, for only the weak exhibit strength without an aim. 

At the same time, as I said before, do not let us forged our own faults. Do not let us forget them any the more easily because they are theopposite to the German faults. Modern England is too prone to presentthe spectacle of a person who is enormously delighted because he has notgot the contrary disadvantages to his own. The Englishman is alwayssaying "My house is not damp" at the moment when his house is on fire. The Englishman is always saying, "I have thrown off all traces ofanæmia" in the middle of a fit of apoplexy. Let us always rememberthat if an Englishman wants to swindle English people, he does not dressup in the uniform of a soldier. If an Englishman wants to swindleEnglish people he would as soon think of dressing up in the uniform of amessenger boy. Everything in England is done unofficially, casually, byconversations and cliques. The one Parliament that really does ruleEngland is a secret Parliament; the debates of which must not bepublished--the Cabinet. The debates of the Commons are sometimesimportant; but only the debates in the Lobby, never the debates in theHouse. Journalists do control public opinion; but it is not controlledby the arguments they publish--it is controlled by the arguments betweenthe editor and sub-editor, which they do not publish. This casualness isour English vice. It is at once casual and secret. Our public life isconducted privately. Hence it follows that if an English swindler wishedto impress us, the last thing he would think of doing would be to put ona uniform. He would put on a polite slouching air and a careless, expensive suit of clothes; he would stroll up to the Mayor, be soawfully sorry to disturb him, find he had forgotten his card-case, mention, as if he were ashamed of it, that he was the Duke of Mercia, and carry the whole thing through with the air of a man who could gettwo hundred witnesses and two thousand retainers, but who was too tiredto call any of them. And if he did it very well I strongly suspect thathe would be as successful as the indefensible Captain at Koepenick. 

Our tendency for many centuries past has been, not so much towardscreating an aristocracy (which may or may not be a good thing initself), as towards substituting an aristocracy for everything else. InEngland we have an aristocracy instead of a religion. The nobility areto the English poor what the saints and the fairies are to the Irishpoor, what the large devil with a black face was to the Scotch poor--thepoetry of life. In the same way in England we have an aristocracyinstead of a Government. We rely on a certain good humour and educationin the upper class to interpret to us our contradictory Constitution. Noeducated man born of woman will be quite so absurd as the system that hehas to administer. In short, we do not get good laws to restrain badpeople. We get good people to restrain bad laws. And last of all we inEngland have an aristocracy instead of an Army. We have an Army of whichthe officers are proud of their families and ashamed of their uniforms. If I were a king of any country whatever, and one of my officers wereashamed of my uniform, I should be ashamed of my officer. Beware, then, of the really well-bred and apologetic gentleman whose clothes are atonce quiet and fashionable, whose manner is at once diffident and frank. Beware how you admit him into your domestic secrets, for he may be abogus Earl. Or, worse still, a real one. 

THE BOY

I have no sympathy with international aggression when it is takenseriously, but I have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when itis quite absurd. Raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they arehuman and imaginable as practical jokes. In fact, almost any act ofragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition--that it isof no use at all to anybody. If the aggressor gets anything out of it, then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of utilityor profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does notsteal. A gentleman knocks off his friend's hat; but he does not annexhis friend's hat. For this reason (as Mr. Belloc has pointed outsomewhere), the very militant French people have always returned aftertheir immense raids--the raids of Godfrey the Crusader, the raids ofNapoleon; "they are sucked back, having accomplished nothing but anepic. "

Sometimes I see small fragments of information in the newspapers whichmake my heart leap with an irrational patriotic sympathy. I have had themisfortune to be left comparatively cold by many of the enterprises andproclamations of my country in recent times. But the other day I foundin the _Tribune_ the following paragraph, which I may be permitted toset down as an example of the kind of international outrage with which Ihave by far the most instinctive sympathy. There is somethingattractive, too, in the austere simplicity with which the affair is setforth--

"Geneva, Oct. 31. 

"The English schoolboy Allen, who was arrested at Lausanne railwaystation on Saturday, for having painted red the statue of General Jominiof Payerne, was liberated yesterday, after paying a fine of £24. Allenhas proceeded to Germany, where he will continue his studies. The peopleof Payerne are indignant, and clamoured for his detention in prison. "

Now I have no doubt that ethics and social necessity require a contraryattitude, but I will freely confess that my first emotions on reading ofthis exploit were those of profound and elemental pleasure. There issomething so large and simple about the operation of painting a wholestone General a bright red. Of course I can understand that the peopleof Payerne were indignant. They had passed to their homes at twilightthrough the streets of that beautiful city (or is it a province?), andthey had seen against the silver ending of the sunset the grand greyfigure of the hero of that land remaining to guard the town under thestars. It certainly must have been a shock to come out in the broadwhite morning and find a large vermilion General staring under thestaring sun. I do not blame them at all for clamouring for theschoolboy's detention in prison; I dare say a little detention in prisonwould do him no harm. Still, I think the immense act has something aboutit human and excusable; and when I endeavour to analyse the reason ofthis feeling I find it to lie, not in the fact that the thing was big orbold or successful, but in the fact that the thing was perfectlyuseless to everybody, including the person who did it. The raid ends initself; and so Master Allen is sucked back again, having accomplishednothing but an epic. 

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

One example can be found in such cases as that of the prank of the boyand the statue. When some trick of this sort is played, the newspapersopposed to it always describe it as "a senseless joke. " What is the goodof saying that? Every joke is a senseless joke. A joke is by its naturea protest against sense. It is no good attacking nonsense for beingsuccessfully nonsensical. Of course it is nonsensical to paint acelebrated Italian General a bright red; it is as nonsensical as "Alicein Wonderland. " It is also, in my opinion, very nearly as funny. But thereal answer to the affair is not to say that it is nonsensical or evento say that it is not funny, but to point out that it is wrong to spoilstatues which belong to other people. If the modern world will notinsist on having some sharp and definite moral law, capable of resistingthe counter-attractions of art and humour, the modern world will simplybe given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage to do a nasty thingin a nice way. Every murderer who can murder entertainingly will beallowed to murder. Every burglar who burgles in really humorousattitudes will burgle as much as he likes. 

There is another case of the thing that I mean. Why on earth do thenewspapers, in describing a dynamite outrage or any other politicalassassination, call it a "dastardly outrage" or a cowardly outrage? Itis perfectly evident that it is not dastardly in the least. It isperfectly evident that it is about as cowardly as the Christians goingto the lions. The man who does it exposes himself to the chance of beingtorn in pieces by two thousand people. What the thing is, is notcowardly, but profoundly and detestably wicked. The man who does it isvery infamous and very brave. But, again, the explanation is that ourmodern Press would rather appeal to physical arrogance, or to anything, rather than appeal to right and wrong. 

In most of the matters of modern England, the real difficulty is thatthere is a negative revolution without a positive revolution. Positivearistocracy is breaking up without any particular appearance of positivedemocracy taking its place. The polished class is becoming less polishedwithout becoming less of a class; the nobleman who becomes a guinea-pigkeeps all his privileges but loses some of his tradition; he becomesless of a gentleman without becoming less of a nobleman. In the same way(until some recent and happy revivals) it seemed highly probable thatthe Church of England would cease to be a religion long before it hadceased to be a Church. And in the same way, the vulgarisation of theold, simple middle class does not even have the advantage of doing awaywith class distinctions; the vulgar man is always the mostdistinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar. 

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

Touching the morality of the public schools, I will take one point only, which is enough to prove the case. People have got into their heads anextraordinary idea that English public-school boys and English youthgenerally are taught to tell the truth. They are taught absolutelynothing of the kind. At no English public school is it even suggested, except by accident, that it is a man's duty to tell the truth. What issuggested is something entirely different: that it is a man's duty notto tell lies. So completely does this mistake soak through allcivilisation that we hardly ever think even of the difference betweenthe two things. When we say to a child, "You must tell the truth, " we domerely mean that he must refrain from verbal inaccuracies. But the thingwe never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, ofgiving a complete and fair picture of anything we are talking about, ofnot misrepresenting, not evading, not suppressing, not using plausiblearguments that we know to be unfair, not selecting unscrupulously toprove an _ex parte_ case, not telling all the nice stories about theScotch, and all the nasty stories about the Irish, not pretending to bedisinterested when you are really angry, not pretending to be angry whenyou are really only avaricious. The one thing that is never taught byany chance in the atmosphere of public schools is exactly that--thatthere is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking itwe are happy. 

If any one has the smallest doubt of this neglect of truth in publicschools he can kill his doubt with one plain question. Can any one onearth believe that if the seeing and telling of the whole truth werereally one of the ideals of the English governing class, there couldconceivably exist such a thing as the English party system? Why, theEnglish party system is founded upon the principle that telling thewhole truth does not matter. It is founded upon the principle that halfa truth is better than no politics. Our system deliberately turns acrowd of men who might be impartial into irrational partisans. Itteaches some of them to tell lies and all of them to believe lies. Itgives every man an arbitrary brief that he has to work up as best he mayand defend as best he can. It turns a room full of citizens into a roomfull of barristers. I know that it has many charms and virtues, fightingand good-fellowship; it has all the charms and virtues of a game. I onlysay that it would be a stark impossibility in a nation which believed intelling the truth. 

LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

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

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

Now it is just here that the chief difficulty occurs. It arises fromthe very rarity and rectitude of those minds which commonly inauguratesuch crusades. I have the warmest respect for Dr. Horton's thirst afterrighteousness; but it has always seemed to me that his righteousnesswould be more effective without his refinement. The curse of theNonconformists is their universal refinement. They dimly connect beinggood with being delicate, and even dapper; with not being grotesque orloud or violent; with not sitting down on one's hat. Now it is always apleasure to be loud and violent, and sometimes it is a duty. Certainlyit has nothing to do with sin; a man can be loudly and violentlyvirtuous--nay, he can be loudly and violently saintly, though that isnot the type of saintliness that we recognise in Dr. Horton. And as forsitting on one's hat, if it is done for any sublime object (as, forinstance, to amuse the children), it is obviously an act of verybeautiful self-sacrifice, the destruction and surrender of the symbol ofpersonal dignity upon the shrine of public festivity. Now it will not doto attack the modern editor merely for being unrefined, like the greatmass of mankind. We must be able to say that he is immoral, not that heis undignified or ridiculous. I do not mind the Yellow Press editorsitting on his hat. My only objection to him begins to dawn when heattempts to sit on my hat; or, indeed (as is at present the case), whenhe proceeds to sit on my head. 

But in reading between the lines of Dr. Horton's invective onecontinually feels that he is not only angry with the popular Press forbeing unscrupulous: he is partly angry with the popular Press for beingpopular. He is not only irritated with Limericks for causing a meanmoney-scramble; he is also partly irritated with Limericks for beingLimericks. The enormous size of the levity gets on his nerves, like theglare and blare of Bank Holiday. Now this is a motive which, howeverhuman and natural, must be strictly kept out of the way. It takes allsorts to make a world; and it is not in the least necessary thateverybody should have that love of subtle and unobtrusive perfections inthe matter of manners or literature which does often go with the type ofthe ethical idealist. It is not in the least desirable that everybodyshould be earnest. It is highly desirable that everybody should behonest, but that is a thing that can go quite easily with a coarse andcheerful character. But the ineffectualness of most protests against theabuse of the Press has been very largely due to the instinct ofdemocracy (and the instinct of democracy is like the instinct of onewoman, wild but quite right) that the people who were trying to purifythe Press were also trying to refine it; and to this the democracy verynaturally and very justly objected. We are justified in enforcing goodmorals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified inenforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners. Wehave no right to purge the popular Press of all that we think vulgar ortrivial. Dr. Horton may possibly loathe and detest Limericks just as Iloathe and detest riddles; but I have no right to call them flippantand unprofitable; there are wild people in the world who like riddles. I am so afraid of this movement passing off into mere formless rhetoricand platform passion that I will even come close to the earth and laydown specifically some of the things that, in my opinion, could be, andought to be, done to reform the Press. 

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

Second, it's impossible to pass over altogether the most unpleasant, butthe most important part of this problem. I will deal with it asdistantly as possible. I do not believe there is any harm whatever inreading about murders; rather, if anything, good; for the thought ofdeath operates very powerfully with the poor in the creation ofbrotherhood and a sense of human dignity. I do not believe there is apennyworth of harm in the police news, as such. Even divorce news, though contemptible enough, can really in most cases be left to thediscretion of grown people; and how far children get hold of suchthings is a problem for the home and not for the nation. But there is acertain class of evils which a healthy man or woman can actually gothrough life without knowing anything about at all. These, I say, shouldbe stamped and blackened out of every newspaper with the thickest blackof the Russian censor. Such cases should either be always tried _incamera_ or reporting them should be a punishable offence. The commonweakness of Nature and the sins that flesh is heir to we can leavepeople to find in newspapers. Men can safely see in the papers what theyhave already seen in the streets. They may safely find in their journalswhat they have already found in themselves. But we do not want theimaginations of rational and decent people clouded with the horrors ofsome obscene insanity which has no more to do with human life than theman in Bedlam who thinks he is a chicken. And, if this vile matter isadmitted, let it be simply with a mention of the Latin or legal name ofthe crime, and with no details whatever. As it is, exactly the reverseis true. Papers are permitted to terrify and darken the fancy of theyoung with innumerable details, but not permitted to state in cleanlegal language what the thing is about. They are allowed to give anyfact about the thing except the fact that it is a sin. 

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

ANONYMITY AND FURTHER COUNSELS

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

In my last article I said that I favoured three things--first, the legalpunishment of deliberately false information; secondly, a distinction, in the matter of reported immorality, between those sins which anyhealthy man can see in himself and those which he had better not seeanywhere; and thirdly, an absolute insistence in the great majority ofcases upon the signing of articles. It was at this point that I was cutshort, I will not say by the law of space, but rather by my ownlawlessness in the matter of space. In any case, there is something morethat ought to be said. 

It would be an exaggeration to say that I hope some day to see ananonymous article counted as dishonourable as an anonymous letter. Forsome time to come, the idea of the leading article, expressing thepolicy of the whole paper, must necessarily remain legitimate; at anyrate, we have all written such leading articles, and should never thinkthe worse of any one for writing one. But I should certainly say thatwriting anonymously ought to have some definite excuse, such as that ofthe leading article. Writing anonymously ought to be the exception;writing a signed article ought to be the rule. And anonymity ought to benot only an exception, but an accidental exception; a man ought alwaysto be ready to say what anonymous article he had written. Thejournalistic habit of counting it something sacred to keep secret theorigin of an article is simply part of the conspiracy which seeks to putus who are journalists in the position of a much worse sort of Jesuitsor Freemasons. 

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

Then there is another rule for making journalism honest on which Ishould like to insist absolutely. I should like it to be a fixed thingthat the name of the proprietor as well as the editor should be printedupon every paper. If the paper is owned by shareholders, let there be alist of shareholders. If (as is far more common in this singularlyundemocratic age) it is owned by one man, let that one man's name beprinted on the paper, if possible in large red letters. Then, if thereare any obvious interests being served, we shall know that they arebeing served. My friends in Manchester are in a terrible state ofexcitement about the power of brewers and the dangers of admitting themto public office. But at least, if a man has controlled politics throughbeer, people generally know it: the subject of beer is too fascinatingfor any one to miss such personal peculiarities. But a man may controlpolitics through journalism, and no ordinary English citizen know thathe is controlling them at all. Again and again in the lists of BirthdayHonours you and I have seen some Mr. Robinson suddenly elevated to thePeerage without any apparent reason. Even the Society papers (which weread with avidity) could tell us nothing about him except that he was asportsman or a kind landlord, or interested in the breeding of badgers. Now I should like the name of that Mr. Robinson to be already familiarto the British public. I should like them to know already the publicservices for which they have to thank him. I should like them to haveseen the name already on the outside of that organ of public opinioncalled _Tootsie's Tips_, or _The Boy Blackmailer_, or _Nosey Knows_, that bright little financial paper which did so much for the Empire andwhich so narrowly escaped a criminal prosecution. If they had seen itthus, they would estimate more truly and tenderly the full value of thestatement in the Society paper that he is a true gentleman and a soundChurchman. 

Finally, it should be practically imposed by custom (it so happens thatit could not possibly be imposed by law) that letters of definite andpractical complaint should be necessarily inserted by any editor in anypaper. Editors have grown very much too lax in this respect. The oldeditor used dimly to regard himself as an unofficial public servant forthe transmitting of public news. If he suppressed anything, he wassupposed to have some special reason for doing so; as that the materialwas actually libellous or literally indecent. But the modern editorregards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who canselect and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or acaricaturist. He "makes up" the paper as man "makes up" a fairy tale, heconsiders his newspaper solely as a work of art, meant to give pleasure, not to give news. He puts in this one letter because he thinks itclever. He puts in these three or four letters because he thinks themsilly. He suppresses this article because he thinks it wrong. Hesuppresses this other and more dangerous article because he thinks itright. The old idea that he is simply a mode of the expression of thepublic, an "organ" of opinion, seems to have entirely vanished from hismind. To-day the editor is not only the organ, but the man who plays onthe organ. For in all our modern movements we move away from Democracy. 

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

ON THE CRYPTIC AND THE ELLIPTIC

Surely the art of reporting speeches is in a strange state ofdegeneration. We should not object, perhaps, to the reporter's makingthe speeches much shorter than they are; but we do object to his makingall the speeches much worse than they are. And the method which heemploys is one which is dangerously unjust. When a statesman orphilosopher makes an important speech, there are several courses whichthe reporter might take without being unreasonable. Perhaps the mostreasonable course of all would be not to report the speech at all. Letthe world live and love, marry and give in marriage, without thatparticular speech, as they did (in some desperate way) in the days whenthere were no newspapers. A second course would be to report a smallpart of it; but to get that right. A third course, far better if you cando it, is to understand the main purpose and argument of the speech, andreport that in clear and logical language of your own. In short, thethree possible methods are, first, to leave the man's speech alone;second, to report what he says or some complete part of what he says;and third, to report what he means. But the present way of reportingspeeches (mainly created, I think, by the scrappy methods of the _DailyMail_) is something utterly different from both these ways, and quitesenseless and misleading. 

The present method is this: the reporter sits listening to a tide ofwords which he does not try to understand, and does not, generallyspeaking, even try to take down; he waits until something occurs in thespeech which for some reason sounds funny, or memorable, or veryexaggerated, or, perhaps, merely concrete; then he writes it down andwaits for the next one. If the orator says that the Premier is like aporpoise in the sea under some special circumstances, the reporter getsin the porpoise even if he leaves out the Premier. If the orator beginsby saying that Mr. Chamberlain is rather like a violoncello, thereporter does not even wait to hear why he is like a violoncello. He hasgot hold of something material, and so he is quite happy. The strongwords all are put in; the chain of thought is left out. If the oratoruses the word "donkey, " down goes the word "donkey. " If the orator usesthe word "damnable, " down goes the word "damnable. " They follow eachother so abruptly in the report that it is often hard to discover thefascinating fact as to what was damnable or who was being compared witha donkey. And the whole line of argument in which these things occurredis entirely lost. I have before me a newspaper report of a speech by Mr. Bernard Shaw, of which one complete and separate paragraph runs likethis--

"Capital meant spare money over and above one's needs. Their country wasnot really their country at all except in patriotic songs. "

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

But we have not the advantage of knowing what Mr. Shaw really did say, so we had better illustrate the different methods from something that wedo know. Most of us, I suppose, know Mark Antony's Funeral Speech in"Julius Cæsar. " Now Mark Antony would have no reason to complain if hewere not reported at all; if the _Daily Pilum_ or the _Morning Fasces_, or whatever it was, confined itself to saying, "Mr. Mark Antony alsospoke, " or "Mr. Mark Antony, having addressed the audience, the meetingbroke up in some confusion. " The next honest method, worthy of a nobleRoman reporter, would be that since he could not report the whole of thespeech, he should report some of the speech. He might say--"Mr. MarkAntony, in the course of his speech, said--

 'When that the poor have cried Cæsar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. '"

In that case one good, solid argument of Mark Antony would be correctlyreported. The third and far higher course for the Roman reporter wouldbe to give a philosophical statement of the purport of the speech. Asthus--"Mr. Mark Antony, in the course of a powerful speech, conceded thehigh motives of the Republican leaders, and disclaimed any intention ofraising the people against them; he thought, however, that manyinstances could be quoted against the theory of Cæsar's ambition, andhe concluded by reading, at the request of the audience, the will ofCæsar, which proved that he had the most benevolent designs towards theRoman people. " That is (I admit) not quite so fine as Shakspere, but itis a statement of the man's political position. But if a _Daily Mail_reporter were sent to take down Antony's oration, he would simply waitfor any expressions that struck him as odd and put them down one afteranother without any logical connection at all. It would turn outsomething like this: "Mr. Mark Antony wished for his audience's ears. Hehad thrice offered Cæsar a crown. Cæsar was like a deer. If he wereBrutus he would put a wound in every tongue. The stones of Rome wouldmutiny. See what a rent the envious Casca paid. Brutus was Cæsar'sangel. The right honourable gentleman concluded by saying that he andthe audience had all fallen down. " That is the report of a politicalspeech in a modern, progressive, or American manner, and I wonderwhether the Romans would have put up with it. 

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

Thus we may concede that politicians have done something towardsdegrading journalism. It was not entirely done by us, the journalists. But most of it was. It was mostly the fruit of our first and mostnatural sin--the habit of regarding ourselves as conjurers rather thanpriests, for the definition is that a conjurer is apart from hisaudience, while a priest is a part of his. The conjurer despises hiscongregation; if the priest despises any one, it must be himself. Thecurse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism whichis the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer thanthe people for whom we write, whereas, in fact, we are generally evenstupider. But this insolence has its Nemesis; and that Nemesis is wellillustrated in this matter of reporting. 

For the journalist, having grown accustomed to talking down to thepublic, commonly talks too low at last, and becomes merely barbaric andunintelligible. By his very efforts to be obvious he becomes obscure. This just punishment may specially be noticed in the case of thosestaggering and staring headlines which American journalism introducedand which some English journalism imitates. I once saw a headline in aLondon paper which ran simply thus: "Dobbin's Little Mary. " This wasintended to be familiar and popular, and therefore, presumably, lucid. But it was some time before I realised, after reading about half theprinted matter underneath, that it had something to do with the properfeeding of horses. At first sight, I took it, as the historical leaderof the future will certainly take it, as containing some allusion to thelittle daughter who so monopolised the affections of the Major at theend of "Vanity Fair. " The Americans carry to an even wilder extreme thisdarkness by excess of light. You may find a column in an American paperheaded "Poet Brown Off Orange-flowers, " or "Senator Robinson ShoehornsHats Now, " and it may be quite a long time before the full meaningbreaks upon you: it has not broken upon me yet. 

And something of this intellectual vengeance pursues also those whoadopt the modern method of reporting speeches. They also becomemystical, simply by trying to be vulgar. They also are condemned to bealways trying to write like George R. Sims, and succeeding, in spite ofthemselves, in writing like Maeterlinck. That combination of wordswhich I have quoted from an alleged speech of Mr. Bernard Shaw's waswritten down by the reporter with the idea that he was beingparticularly plain and democratic. But, as a matter of fact, if there isany connection between the two sentences, it must be something as darkas the deepest roots of Browning, or something as invisible as the mostairy filaments of Meredith. To be simple and to be democratic are twovery honourable and austere achievements; and it is not given to all thesnobs and self-seekers to achieve them. High above even Maeterlinck orMeredith stand those, like Homer and Milton, whom no one canmisunderstand. And Homer and Milton are not only better poets thanBrowning (great as he was), but they would also have been very muchbetter journalists than the young men on the _Daily Mail_. 

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

THE WORSHIP OF THE WEALTHY

There has crept, I notice, into our literature and journalism a new wayof flattering the wealthy and the great. In more straightforward timesflattery itself was more straight-forward; falsehood itself was moretrue. A poor man wishing to please a rich man simply said that he wasthe wisest, bravest, tallest, strongest, most benevolent and mostbeautiful of mankind; and as even the rich man probably knew that hewasn't that, the thing did the less harm. When courtiers sang thepraises of a King they attributed to him things that were entirelyimprobable, as that he resembled the sun at noonday, that they had toshade their eyes when he entered the room, that his people could notbreathe without him, or that he had with his single sword conqueredEurope, Asia, Africa, and America. The safety of this method was itsartificiality; between the King and his public image there was really norelation. But the moderns have invented a much subtler and morepoisonous kind of eulogy. The modern method is to take the prince orrich man, to give a credible picture of his type of personality, as thathe is business-like, or a sportsman, or fond of art, or convivial, orreserved; and then enormously exaggerate the value and importance ofthese natural qualities. Those who praise Mr. Carnegie do not say thathe is as wise as Solomon and as brave as Mars; I wish they did. It wouldbe the next most honest thing to giving their real reason for praisinghim, which is simply that he has money. The journalists who write aboutMr. Pierpont Morgan do not say that he is as beautiful as Apollo; I wishthey did. What they do is to take the rich man's superficial life andmanner, clothes, hobbies, love of cats, dislike of doctors, or what not;and then with the assistance of this realism make the man out to be aprophet and a saviour of his kind, whereas he is merely a private andstupid man who happens to like cats or to dislike doctors. The oldflatterer took for granted that the King was an ordinary man, and set towork to make him out extraordinary. The newer and cleverer flatterertakes for granted that he is extraordinary, and that therefore evenordinary things about him will be of interest. 

I have noticed one very amusing way in which this is done. I notice themethod applied to about six of the wealthiest men in England in a bookof interviews published by an able and well-known journalist. Theflatterer contrives to combine strict truth of fact with a vastatmosphere of awe and mystery by the simple operation of dealing almostentirely in negatives. Suppose you are writing a sympathetic study ofMr. Pierpont Morgan. Perhaps there is not much to say about what hedoes think, or like, or admire; but you can suggest whole vistas of histaste and philosophy by talking a great deal about what he does notthink, or like, or admire. You say of him--"But little attracted to themost recent schools of German philosophy, he stands almost as resolutelyaloof from the tendencies of transcendental Pantheism as from thenarrower ecstasies of Neo-Catholicism. " Or suppose I am called upon topraise the charwoman who has just come into my house, and who certainlydeserves it much more. I say--"It would be a mistake to class Mrs. Higgsamong the followers of Loisy; her position is in many ways different;nor is she wholly to be identified with the concrete Hebraism ofHarnack. " It is a splendid method, as it gives the flatterer anopportunity of talking about something else besides the subject of theflattery, and it gives the subject of the flattery a rich, if somewhatbewildered, mental glow, as of one who has somehow gone through agoniesof philosophical choice of which he was previously unaware. It is asplendid method; but I wish it were applied sometimes to charwomenrather than only to millionaires. 

There is another way of flattering important people which has becomevery common, I notice, among writers in the newspapers and elsewhere. Itconsists in applying to them the phrases "simple, " or "quiet, " or"modest, " without any sort of meaning or relation to the person to whomthey are applied. To be simple is the best thing in the world; to bemodest is the next best thing. I am not so sure about being quiet. I amrather inclined to think that really modest people make a great deal ofnoise. It is quite self-evident that really simple people make a greatdeal of noise. But simplicity and modesty, at least, are very rare androyal human virtues, not to be lightly talked about. Few human beings, and at rare intervals, have really risen into being modest; not one manin ten or in twenty has by long wars become simple, as an actual oldsoldier does by long wars become simple. These virtues are not things tofling about as mere flattery; many prophets and righteous men havedesired to see these things and have not seen them. But in thedescription of the births, lives, and deaths of very luxurious men theyare used incessantly and quite without thought. If a journalist has todescribe a great politician or financier (the things are substantiallythe same) entering a room or walking down a thoroughfare, he alwayssays, "Mr. Midas was quietly dressed in a black frock coat, a whitewaistcoat, and light grey trousers, with a plain green tie and simpleflower in his button-hole. " As if any one would expect him to have acrimson frock coat or spangled trousers. As if any one would expect himto have a burning Catherine wheel in his button-hole. 

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

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

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

Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generallyreduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him "brilliant;"which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression ofcontempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me toomuch honour. I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from ashiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges uponimbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and thateverybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just beenreading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a numberof men for whom I have a high respect, and called "New Theology andApplied Religion. " And it is literally true that I have read throughwhole columns of the things without knowing what the people were talkingabout. Either they must be talking about some black and bestial religionin which they were brought up, and of which I never even heard, or elsethey must be talking about some blazing and blinding vision of God whichthey have found, which I have never found, and which by its verysplendour confuses their logic and confounds their speech. But the bestinstance I can quote of the thing is in connection with this matter ofthe business of physical science on the earth, of which I have justspoken. The following words are written over the signature of a manwhose intelligence I respect, and I cannot make head or tail of them--

"When modern science declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of ahistorical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary, thestory of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite plainthat the Pauline scheme--I mean the argumentative processes of Paul'sscheme of salvation--had lost its very foundation; for was not thatfoundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from theirfirst parents?. .. . But now there was no Fall; there was no totaldepravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, thesuperstructure followed. "

It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must meansomething. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove thatman is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You donot boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes ofdepravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall?What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find afossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ageswould have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to aslightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted issimply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue inthemselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never saidthat there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, oneon top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent witheverything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have grownmorally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no wayhave contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science (not beingraving lunatics) never said that there had been "an incessant rise inthe scale of being;" for an incessant rise would mean a rise without anyrelapse or failure; and physical evolution is full of relapse andfailure. There were certainly some physical Falls; there may have beenany number of moral Falls. So that, as I have said, I am honestlybewildered as to the meaning of such passages as this, in which theadvanced person writes that because geologists know nothing about theFall, therefore any doctrine of depravity is untrue. Because science hasnot found something which obviously it could not find, thereforesomething entirely different--the psychological sense of evil--isuntrue. You might sum up this writer's argument abruptly, butaccurately, in some way like this--"We have not dug up the bones of theArchangel Gabriel, who presumably had none, therefore little boys, leftto themselves, will not be selfish. " To me it is all wild and whirling;as if a man said--"The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; soI suppose that my wife does love me. "

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

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

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

THE METHUSELAHITE

I Saw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertainingand deeply philosophical incident. A man was enlisting as a soldier atPortsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, Isuppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an inquiryabout what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial gravity theman wrote down the word "Methuselahite. " Whoever looks over such papersmust, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his time; unlessthe Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist knowledge hecould not "place" Methuselahism among what Bossuet called the variationsof Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the tenets andtendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it meant. Thesoldier replied that it was his religion "to live as long as he could. "

Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, thatanswer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads ofquarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religiousproblems and religious books. Every day the daily paper reviews some newphilosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the whole twothousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as or wise asthat word "Methuselahite. " The whole meaning of literature is simply tocut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy arenever literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature;he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like VictorHugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day. 

Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their newreligions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all theway down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and beable to cut them short with a single inspired word. One of them willbegin, "The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy inNature. .. . " "Methuselahite, " I shall say sharply; "good morning. " "HumanLife, " another will say, "Human Life, the only ultimate sanctity, freedfrom creed and dogma. .. . " "Methuselahite!" I shall yell. "Out you go!""My religion is the Religion of Joy, " a third will explain (a bald oldman with a cough and tinted glasses), "the Religion of Physical Prideand Rapture, and my. .. . " "Methuselahite!" I shall cry again, and I shallslap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall down. Then a paleyoung poet with serpentine hair will come and say to me (as one did onlythe other day): "Moods and impressions are the only realities, and theseare constantly and wholly changing. I could hardly therefore define myreligion. .. . " "I can, " I should say, somewhat sternly. "Your religion isto live a long time; and if you stop here a moment longer you won'tfulfil it. "

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some oldvice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls itmasculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and callsit the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defendsidleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen--it canalmost certainly be prophesied--that in this saturnalia of sophistrythere will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to idealisecowardice. And when we are once in this unhealthy world of mere wildwords, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice! "Is notlife a lovely thing and worth saving?" the soldier would say as he ranaway. "Should I not prolong the exquisite miracle of consciousness?" thehouseholder would say as he hid under the table. "As long as there areroses and lilies on the earth shall I not remain here?" would come thevoice of the citizen from under the bed. It would be quite as easy todefend the coward as a kind of poet and mystic as it has been, in manyrecent books, to defend the emotionalist as a kind of poet and mystic, or the tyrant as a kind of poet and mystic. When that last grandsophistry and morbidity is preached in a book or on a platform, you maydepend upon it there will be a great stir in its favour, that is, agreat stir among the little people who live among books and platforms. There will be a new great Religion, the Religion of Methuselahism: withpomps and priests and altars. Its devout crusaders will vow themselvesin thousands with a great vow to live long. But there is one comfort:they won't. 

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

SPIRITUALISM. 

I Have received a letter from a gentleman who is very indignant at whathe considers my flippancy in disregarding or degrading Spiritualism. Ithought I was defending Spiritualism; but I am rather used to beingaccused of mocking the thing that I set out to justify. My fate in mostcontroversies is rather pathetic. It is an almost invariable rule thatthe man with whom I don't agree thinks I am making a fool of myself, andthe man with whom I do agree thinks I am making a fool of him. Thereseems to be some sort of idea that you are not treating a subjectproperly if you eulogise it with fantastic terms or defend it bygrotesque examples. Yet a truth is equally solemn whatever figure orexample its exponent adopts. It is an equally awful truth that four andfour make eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions oreight angels, or eight bricks or eight bishops, or eight minor poets oreight pigs. Similarly, if it be true that God made all things, thatgrave fact can be asserted by pointing at a star or by waving anumbrella. But the case is stronger than this. There is a distinctphilosophical advantage in using grotesque terms in a seriousdiscussion. 

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

When I was a very young journalist I used to be irritated at a peculiarhabit of printers, a habit which most persons of a tendency similar tomine have probably noticed also. It goes along with the fixed belief ofprinters that to be a Rationalist is the same thing as to be aNationalist. I mean the printer's tendency to turn the word "cosmic"into the word "comic. " It annoyed me at the time. But since then I havecome to the conclusion that the printers were right. The democracy isalways right. Whatever is cosmic is comic. 

Moreover, there is another reason that makes it almost inevitable thatwe should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously. It is that allgrotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness. Unless athing is dignified, it cannot be undignified. Why is it funny that a manshould sit down suddenly in the street? There is only one possible orintelligent reason: that man is the image of God. It is not funny thatanything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No onesees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicateabsurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roarswith laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall ofthunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and highbuildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that welaugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it isthe Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified. 

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

But my correspondent's second objection is more important. He charges mewith actually ignoring the value of communication (if it exists) betweenthis world and the next. I do not ignore it. But I do say this--That adifferent principle attaches to investigation in this spiritual fieldfrom investigation in any other. If a man baits a line for fish, thefish will come, even if he declares there are no such things as fishes. If a man limes a twig for birds, the birds will be caught, even if hethinks it superstitious to believe in birds at all. But a man cannotbait a line for souls. A man cannot lime a twig to catch gods. All wiseschools have agreed that this latter capture depends to some extent onthe faith of the capturer. So it comes to this: If you have no faith inthe spirits your appeal is in vain; and if you have--is it needed? Ifyou do not believe, you cannot. If you do--you will not. 

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

THE ERROR OF IMPARTIALITY

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

If we walk down the street, taking all the jurymen who have not formedopinions and leaving all the jurymen who have formed opinions, it seemshighly probable that we shall only succeed in taking all the stupidjurymen and leaving all the thoughtful ones. Provided that the opinionformed is really of this airy and abstract kind, provided that it has nosuggestion of settled motive or prejudice, we might well regard it notmerely as a promise of capacity, but literally as a promise of justice. The man who took the trouble to deduce from the police reports wouldprobably be the man who would take the trouble to deduce further anddifferent things from the evidence. The man who had the sense to form anopinion would be the man who would have the sense to alter it. 

It is worth while to dwell for a moment on this minor aspect of thematter because the error about impartiality and justice is by no meansconfined to a criminal question. In much more serious matters it isassumed that the agnostic is impartial; whereas the agnostic is merelyignorant. The logical outcome of the fastidiousness about the Thawjurors would be that the case ought to be tried by Esquimaux, orHottentots, or savages from the Cannibal Islands--by some class ofpeople who could have no conceivable interest in the parties, andmoreover, no conceivable interest in the case. The pure and starryperfection of impartiality would be reached by people who not only hadno opinion before they had heard the case, but who also had no opinionafter they had heard it. In the same way, there is in modern discussionsof religion and philosophy an absurd assumption that a man is in someway just and well-poised because he has come to no conclusion; and thata man is in some way knocked off the list of fair judges because he hascome to a conclusion. It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias;whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism. I rememberonce arguing with an honest young atheist, who was very much shocked atmy disputing some of the assumptions which were absolute sanctities tohim (such as the quite unproved proposition of the independence ofmatter and the quite improbable proposition of its power to originatemind), and he at length fell back upon this question, which he deliveredwith an honourable heat of defiance and indignation: "Well, can you tellme any man of intellect, great in science or philosophy, who acceptedthe miraculous?" I said, "With pleasure. Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Newton, Faraday, Newman, Gladstone, Pasteur, Browning, Brunetiere--as many moreas you please. " To which that quite admirable and idealistic young manmade this astonishing reply--"Oh, but of course they _had_ to say that;they were Christians. " First he challenged me to find a black swan, andthen he ruled out all my swans because they were black. The fact thatall these great intellects had come to the Christian view was somehow orother a proof either that they were not great intellects or that theyhad not really come to that view. The argument thus stood in acharmingly convenient form: "All men that count have come to myconclusion; for if they come to your conclusion they do not count. "

It did not seem to occur to such controversialists that if CardinalNewman was really a man of intellect, the fact that he adhered todogmatic religion proved exactly as much as the fact that ProfessorHuxley, another man of intellect, found that he could not adhere todogmatic religion; that is to say (as I cheerfully admit), it provedprecious little either way. If there is one class of men whom historyhas proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in alldirections, it is the class of highly intellectual men. I would alwaysprefer to go by the bulk of humanity; that is why I am a democrat. Butwhatever be the truth about exceptional intelligence and the masses, itis manifestly most unreasonable that intelligent men should be dividedupon the absurd modern principle of regarding every clever man whocannot make up his mind as an impartial judge, and regarding everyclever man who can make up his mind as a servile fanatic. As it is, weseem to regard it as a positive objection to a reasoner that he hastaken one side or the other. We regard it (in other words) as a positiveobjection to a reasoner that he has contrived to reach the object of hisreasoning. We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is athinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end. We say thatthe juryman is not a juryman because he has brought in a verdict. We saythat the judge is not a judge because he gives judgment. We say that thesincere believer has no right to vote, simply because he has voted. 

PHONETIC SPELLING

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

Now my own fear touching anything in the way of phonetic spelling isthat it would simply increase this tendency to use words as counters andnot as coins. The original life in a word (as in the word "talent")burns low as it is: sensible spelling might extinguish it altogether. Suppose any sentence you like: suppose a man says, "Republics generallyencourage holidays. " It looks like the top line of a copy-book. Now, itis perfectly true that if you wrote that sentence exactly as it ispronounced, even by highly educated people, the sentence would run:"Ripubliks jenrally inkurrij hollidies. " It looks ugly: but I have notthe smallest objection to ugliness. My objection is that these fourwords have each a history and hidden treasures in them: that thishistory and hidden treasure (which we tend to forget too much as it is)phonetic spelling tends to make us forget altogether. Republic does notmean merely a mode of political choice. Republic (as we see when we lookat the structure of the word) means the Public Thing: the abstractionwhich is us all. 

A Republican is not a man who wants a Constitution with a President. ARepublican is a man who prefers to think of Government as impersonal; heis opposed to the Royalist, who prefers to think of Government aspersonal. Take the second word, "generally. " This is always used asmeaning "in the majority of cases. " But, again, if we look at the shapeand spelling of the word, we shall see that "generally" means somethingmore like "generically, " and is akin to such words as "generation" or"regenerate. " "Pigs are generally dirty" does not mean that pigs are, inthe majority of cases, dirty, but that pigs as a race or genus aredirty, that pigs as pigs are dirty--an important philosophicaldistinction. Take the third word, "encourage. " The word "encourage" isused in such modern sentences in the merely automatic sense of promote;to encourage poetry means merely to advance or assist poetry. But toencourage poetry means properly to put courage into poetry--a fine idea. Take the fourth word, "holidays. " As long as that word remains, it willalways answer the ignorant slander which asserts that religion wasopposed to human cheerfulness; that word will always assert that when aday is holy it should also be happy. Properly spelt, these words alltell a sublime story, like Westminster Abbey. Phonetically spelt, theymight lose the last traces of any such story. "Generally" is an exaltedmetaphysical term; "jenrally" is not. If you "encourage" a man, you pourinto him the chivalry of a hundred princes; this does not happen if youmerely "inkurrij" him. "Republics, " if spelt phonetically, mightactually forget to be public. "Holidays, " if spelt phonetically, mightactually forget to be holy. 

Here is a case that has just occurred. A certain magistrate toldsomebody whom he was examining in court that he or she "should always bepolite to the police. " I do not know whether the magistrate noticed thecircumstance, but the word "polite" and the word "police" have the sameorigin and meaning. Politeness means the atmosphere and ritual of thecity, the symbol of human civilisation. The policeman means therepresentative and guardian of the city, the symbol of humancivilisation. Yet it may be doubted whether the two ideas are commonlyconnected in the mind. It is probable that we often hear of politenesswithout thinking of a policeman; it is even possible that our eyes oftenalight upon a policeman without our thoughts instantly flying to thesubject of politeness. Yet the idea of the sacred city is not only thelink of them both, it is the only serious justification and the onlyserious corrective of them both. If politeness means too often a merefrippery, it is because it has not enough to do with serious patriotismand public dignity; if policemen are coarse or casual, it is becausethey are not sufficiently convinced that they are the servants of thebeautiful city and the agents of sweetness and light. Politeness is notreally a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely suaveand deprecating. Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid andvigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politenessis a policeman. A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a truncheon:a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of theaccidents of everyday existence. In other words, a policeman ispoliteness; a veiled image of politeness--sometimes impenetrably veiled. But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city, whichis the force and youth of both the words, both the things actuallydegenerate. Our politeness loses all manliness because we forget thatpoliteness is only the Greek for patriotism. Our policemen lose alldelicacy because we forget that a policeman is only the Greek forsomething civilised. A policeman should often have the functions of aknight-errant. A policeman should always have the elegance of aknight-errant. But I am not sure that he would succeed any the better nremembering this obligation of romantic grace if his name were speltphonetically, supposing that it could be spelt phonetically. Somespelling-reformers, I am told, in the poorer parts of London do spellhis name phonetically, very phonetically. They call him a "pleeceman. "Thus the whole romance of the ancient city disappears from the word, andthe policeman's reverent courtesy of demeanour deserts him quitesuddenly. This does seem to me the case against any extreme revolutionin spelling. If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to thinkit wrong. 

HUMANITARIANISM AND STRENGTH

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

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

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

Nothing would induce me in so idle a monologue as this to discussadequately a great political matter like the question of the militarypunishments in Egypt. But I may suggest one broad reality to be observedby both sides, and which is, generally speaking, observed by neither. Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument thatwe Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages andAsiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists use themetaphor, "We must fight them with their own weapons. " Very well; letthose controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally. Letus fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own weapons arelarge, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned gun. Theirown weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them with tortureand slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if we fought themwith clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole strength of ourChristian civilisation, that it does fight with its own weapons and notwith other people's. It is not true that superiority suggests a tit fortat. It is not true that if a small hooligan puts his tongue out at theLord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Justice immediately realises that hisonly chance of maintaining his position is to put his tongue out at thelittle hooligan. The hooligan may or may not have any respect at all forthe Lord Chief Justice: that is a matter which we may contentedly leaveas a solemn psychological mystery. But if the hooligan has any respectat all for the Lord Chief Justice, that respect is certainly extended tothe Lord Chief Justice entirely because he does not put his tongue out. 

Exactly in the same way the ruder or more sluggish races regard thecivilisation of Christendom. If they have any respect for it, it isprecisely because it does not use their own coarse and cruel expedients. According to some modern moralists whenever Zulus cut off the heads ofdead Englishmen, Englishmen must cut off the heads of dead Zulus. Whenever Arabs or Egyptians constantly use the whip to their slaves, Englishmen must use the whip to their subjects. And on a similarprinciple (I suppose), whenever an English Admiral has to fightcannibals the English Admiral ought to eat them. However unattractive amenu consisting entirely of barbaric kings may appear to an Englishgentleman, he must try to sit down to it with an appetite. He must fightthe Sandwich Islanders with their own weapons; and their own weapons areknives and forks. But the truth of the matter is, of course, that to dothis kind of thing is to break the whole spell of our supremacy. All themystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry of the white man, sofar as it exists in the eyes of these savages, consists in the fact thatwe do not do such things. The Zulus point at us and say, "Observe theadvent of these inexplicable demi-gods, these magicians, who do not cutoff the noses of their enemies. " The Soudanese say to each other, "Thishardy people never flogs its servants; it is superior to the simplestand most obvious human pleasures. " And the cannibals say, "The austereand terrible race, the race that denies itself even boiled missionary, is upon us: let us flee. "

Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the generalproposition I suggest is the plainest common sense. The elements thatmake Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation areprecisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. Forthe power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the sameas that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination. It isimagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imaginationthat makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because this picturingof the other man's point of view is in the main a thing in whichChristians and Europeans specialise that Christians and Europeans, withall their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peaceand war. 

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

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

Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk aboutmaterial substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talkedabout the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem ofDrink--as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call theproblem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk aboutcuring it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dimstage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; itis no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle isa devil. The people who talk about the curse of drink will probablyprogress down that dark hill. In a little while we shall have themcalling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit ofhousebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade; andfor all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all thestationers' shops by Act of Parliament. 

I cannot help thinking that there is some shadow of this uncivilisedmaterialism lying at present upon a much more dignified and valuablecause. Every one is talking just now about the desirability ofingeminating peace and averting war. But even war and peace are physicalstates rather than moral states, and in talking about them only we haveby no means got to the bottom of the matter. How, for instance, do we asa matter of fact create peace in one single community? We do not do itby vaguely telling every one to avoid fighting and to submit to anythingthat is done to him. We do it by definitely defining his rights and thenundertaking to avenge his wrongs. We shall never have a common peace inEurope till we have a common principle in Europe. People talk of "TheUnited States of Europe;" but they forget that it needed the verydoctrinal "Declaration of Independence" to make the United States ofAmerica. You cannot agree about nothing any more than you can quarrelabout nothing. 

WINE WHEN IT IS RED

I suppose that there will be some wigs on the green in connection withthe recent manifesto signed by a string of very eminent doctors on thesubject of what is called "alcohol. " "Alcohol" is, to judge by the soundof it, an Arabic word, like "algebra" and "Alhambra, " those two otherunpleasant things. The Alhambra in Spain I have never seen; I am toldthat it is a low and rambling building; I allude to the far moredignified erection in Leicester Square. If it is true, as I surmise, that "alcohol" is a word of the Arabs, it is interesting to realise thatour general word for the essence of wine and beer and such things comesfrom a people which has made particular war upon them. I suppose thatsome aged Moslem chieftain sat one day at the opening of his tent and, brooding with black brows and cursing in his black beard over wine asthe symbol of Christianity, racked his brains for some word ugly enoughto express his racial and religious antipathy, and suddenly spat out thehorrible word "alcohol. " The fact that the doctors had to use this wordfor the sake of scientific clearness was really a great disadvantage tothem in fairly discussing the matter. For the word really involves oneof those beggings of the question which make these moral matters sodifficult. It is quite a mistake to suppose that, when a man desires analcoholic drink, he necessarily desires alcohol. 

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dustyEnglish road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented. The factthat beer has a very slight stimulating quality will be quite among thesmallest reasons that induce him to ask for it. In short, he will not bein the least desiring alcohol; he will be desiring beer. But, of course, the question cannot be settled in such a simple way. The real difficultywhich confronts everybody, and which especially confronts doctors, isthat the extraordinary position of man in the physical universe makes itpractically impossible to treat him in either one direction or the otherin a purely physical way. Man is an exception, whatever else he is. Ifhe is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it isnot true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of theanimals went entirely off its head. In neither case can we really arguevery much from the body of man simply considered as the body of aninnocent and healthy animal. His body has got too much mixed up with hissoul, as we see in the supreme instance of sex. It may be worth whileuttering the warning to wealthy philanthropists and idealists that thisargument from the animal should not be thoughtlessly used, even againstthe atrocious evils of excess; it is an argument that proves too littleor too much. 

Doubtless, it is unnatural to be drunk. But then in a real sense it isunnatural to be human. Doubtless, the intemperate workman wastes histissues in drinking; but no one knows how much the sober workman wasteshis tissues by working. No one knows how much the wealthy philanthropistwastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer conditions, bythinking. All the human things are more dangerous than anything thataffects the beasts--sex, poetry, property, religion. The real caseagainst drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but that it callsup the Devil. It does not call up the beast, and if it did it would notmatter much, as a rule; the beast is a harmless and rather amiablecreature, as anybody can see by watching cattle. There is nothingbestial about intoxication; and certainly there is nothing intoxicatingor even particularly lively about beasts. Man is always something worseor something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animalperfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is eitherchivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so badas drunkenness--or so good as drink. 

The pronouncement of these particular doctors is very clear anduncompromising; in the modern atmosphere, indeed, it even deserves somecredit for moral courage. The majority of modern people, of course, willprobably agree with it in so far as it declares that alcoholic drinksare often of supreme value in emergencies of illness; but many people, Ifear, will open their eyes at the emphatic terms in which they describesuch drink as considered as a beverage; but they are not content withdeclaring that the drink is in moderation harmless: they distinctlydeclare that it is in moderation beneficial. But I fancy that, in sayingthis, the doctors had in mind a truth that runs somewhat counter to thecommon opinion. I fancy that it is the experience of most doctors thatgiving any alcohol for illness (though often necessary) is about themost morally dangerous way of giving it. Instead of giving it to ahealthy person who has many other forms of life, you are giving it to adesperate person, to whom it is the only form of life. The invalid canhardly be blamed if by some accident of his erratic and overwroughtcondition he comes to remember the thing as the very water of vitalityand to use it as such. For in so far as drinking is really a sin it isnot because drinking is wild, but because drinking is tame; not in sofar as it is anarchy, but in so far as it is slavery. Probably the worstway to drink is to drink medicinally. Certainly the safest way to drinkis to drink carelessly; that is, without caring much for anything, andespecially not caring for the drink. 

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

DEMAGOGUES AND MYSTAGOGUES

I once heard a man call this age the age of demagogues. Of this I canonly say, in the admirably sensible words of the angry coachman in"Pickwick, " that "that remark's political, or what is much the same, itain't true. " So far from being the age of demagogues, this is really andspecially the age of mystagogues. So far from this being a time in whichthings are praised because they are popular, the truth is that this isthe first time, perhaps, in the whole history of the world in whichthings can be praised because they are unpopular. The demagogue succeedsbecause he makes himself understood, even if he is not worthunderstanding. But the mystagogue succeeds because he gets himselfmisunderstood; although, as a rule, he is not even worthmisunderstanding. Gladstone was a demagogue: Disraeli a mystagogue. Butours is specially the time when a man can advertise his wares not as auniversality, but as what the tradesmen call "a speciality. " We all knowthis, for instance, about modern art. Michelangelo and Whistler wereboth fine artists; but one is obviously public, the other obviouslyprivate, or, rather, not obvious at all. Michelangelo's frescoes aredoubtless finer than the popular judgment, but they are plainly meant tostrike the popular judgment. Whistler's pictures seem often meant toescape the popular judgment; they even seem meant to escape the popularadmiration. They are elusive, fugitive; they fly even from praise. Doubtless many artists in Michelangelo's day declared themselves to begreat artists, although they were unsuccessful. But they did not declarethemselves great artists because they were unsuccessful: that is thepeculiarity of our own time, which has a positive bias against thepopulace. 

Another case of the same kind of thing can be found in the latestconceptions of humour. By the wholesome tradition of mankind, a joke wasa thing meant to amuse men; a joke which did not amuse them was afailure, just as a fire which did not warm them was a failure. But wehave seen the process of secrecy and aristocracy introduced even intojokes. If a joke falls flat, a small school of æsthetes only ask us tonotice the wild grace of its falling and its perfect flatness after itsfall. The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company hasbeen superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was notworthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualisminto that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariouslycommunal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have madelaughter lonelier than tears. 

There is a third thing to which the mystagogues have recently beenapplying the methods of a secret society: I mean manners. Men who soughtto rebuke rudeness used to represent manners as reasonable and ordinary;now they seek to represent them as private and peculiar. Instead ofsaying to a man who blocks up a street or the fireplace, "You ought toknow better than that, " the moderns say, "You, of course, don't knowbetter than that. "

I have just been reading an amusing book by Lady Grove called "TheSocial Fetich, " which is a positive riot of this new specialism andmystification. It is due to Lady Grove to say that she has some of thefreer and more honourable qualities of the old Whig aristocracy, as wellas their wonderful worldliness and their strange faith in the passingfashion of our politics. For instance, she speaks of Jingo Imperialismwith a healthy English contempt; and she perceives stray and strikingtruths, and records them justly--as, for instance, the greater democracyof the Southern and Catholic countries of Europe. But in her dealingswith social formulæ here in England she is, it must frankly be said, acommon mystagogue. She does not, like a decent demagogue, wish to makepeople understand; she wishes to make them painfully conscious of notunderstanding. Her favourite method is to terrify people from doingthings that are quite harmless by telling them that if they do they arethe kind of people who would do other things, equally harmless. If youask after somebody's mother (or whatever it is), you are the kind ofperson who would have a pillow-case, or would not have a pillow-case. Iforget which it is; and so, I dare say, does she. If you assume theordinary dignity of a decent citizen and say that you don't see the harmof having a mother or a pillow-case, she would say that of course _you_wouldn't. This is what I call being a mystagogue. It is more vulgar thanbeing a demagogue; because it is much easier. 

The primary point I meant to emphasise is that this sort of aristocracyis essentially a new sort. All the old despots were demagogues; atleast, they were demagogues whenever they were really trying to pleaseor impress the demos. If they poured out beer for their vassals it wasbecause both they and their vassals had a taste for beer. If (in someslightly different mood) they poured melted lead on their vassals, itwas because both they and their vassals had a strong distaste formelted lead. But they did not make any mystery about either of the twosubstances. They did not say, "You don't like melted lead?. .. . Ah! no, of course, _you_ wouldn't; you are probably the kind of person who wouldprefer beer. .. . It is no good asking you even to imagine the curiousundercurrent of psychological pleasure felt by a refined person underthe seeming shock of melted lead. " Even tyrants when they tried to bepopular, tried to give the people pleasure; they did not try to overawethe people by giving them something which they ought to regard aspleasure. It was the same with the popular presentment of aristocracy. Aristocrats tried to impress humanity by the exhibition of qualitieswhich humanity admires, such as courage, gaiety, or even mere splendour. The aristocracy might have more possession in these things, but thedemocracy had quite equal delight in them. It was much more sensible tooffer yourself for admiration because you had drunk three bottles ofport at a sitting, than to offer yourself for admiration (as Lady Grovedoes) because you think it right to say "port wine" while other peoplethink it right to say "port. " Whether Lady Grove's preference for portwine (I mean for the phrase port wine) is a piece of mere nonsense I donot know; but at least it is a very good example of the futility of suchtests in the matter even of mere breeding. "Port wine" may happen to bethe phrase used n certain good families; but numberless aristocrats say"port, " and all barmaids say "port wine. " The whole thing is rathermore trivial than collecting tram-tickets; and I will not pursue LadyGrove's further distinctions. I pass over the interesting theory that Iought to say to Jones (even apparently if he is my dearest friend), "Howis Mrs. Jones?" instead of "How is your wife?" and I pass over animpassioned declamation about bedspreads (I think) which has failed tofire my blood. 

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

The only thing to be done or said in reply, I suppose, would be to applythe same principle of bold mystification on our own part. I do not seewhy I should not write a book called "Etiquette in Fleet Street, " andterrify every one else out of that thoroughfare by mysterious allusionsto the mistakes that they generally make. I might say: "This is the kindof man who would wear a green tie when he went into a tobacconist's, " or"You don't see anything wrong in drinking a Benedictine onThursday?. .. . No, of course _you_ wouldn't. " I might asseverate withpassionate disgust and disdain: "The man who is capable of writingsonnets as well as triolets is capable of climbing an omnibus whileholding an umbrella. " It seems a simple method; if ever I should masterit perhaps I may govern England. 

THE "EATANSWILL GAZETTE. "

The other day some one presented me with a paper called the _EatanswillGazette_. I need hardly say that I could not have been more startled ifI had seen a coach coming down the road with old Mr. Tony Weller on thebox. But, indeed, the case is much more extraordinary than that wouldbe. Old Mr. Weller was a good man, a specially and seriously good man, aproud father, a very patient husband, a sane moralist, and a reliableally. One could not be so very much surprised if somebody pretended tobe Tony Weller. But the _Eatanswill Gazette_ is definitely depicted in"Pickwick" as a dirty and unscrupulous rag, soaked with slander andnonsense. It was really interesting to find a modern paper proud to takeits name. The case cannot be compared to anything so simple as aresurrection of one of the "Pickwick" characters; yet a very goodparallel could easily be found. It is almost exactly as if a firm ofsolicitors were to open their offices to-morrow under the name ofDodson and Fogg. 

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

Naturally, an outsider feels inclined to ask why Eatanswill should beeither one or the other. As a matter of fact, I fear Eatanswill wasevery town in the country. It is surely clear that when Dickensdescribed the Eatanswill election he did not mean it as a satire onSudbury or a satire on Ipswich; he meant it as a satire on England. TheEatanswill election is not a joke against Eatanswill; it is a jokeagainst elections. If the satire is merely local, it practically losesits point; just as the "Circumlocution Office" would lose its point ifit were not supposed to be a true sketch of all Government offices; justas the Lord Chancellor in "Bleak House" would lose his point if he werenot supposed to be symbolic and representative of all Lord Chancellors. The whole moral meaning would vanish if we supposed that Oliver Twisthad got by accident into an exceptionally bad workhouse, or that Mr. Dorrit was in the only debtors' prison that was not well managed. Dickens was making game, not of places, but of methods. He poured allhis powerful genius into trying to make the people ashamed of themethods. But he seems only to have succeeded in making people proud ofthe places. In any case, the controversy is conducted in a trulyextraordinary way. No one seems to allow for the fact that, after all, Dickens was writing a novel, and a highly fantastic novel at that. Factsin support of Sudbury or Ipswich are quoted not only from the storyitself, which is wild and wandering enough, but even from the yet wildernarratives which incidentally occur in the story, such as Sam Weller'sdescription of how his father, on the way to Eatanswill, tipped all thevoters into the canal. This may quite easily be (to begin with) anentertaining tarradiddle of Sam's own invention, told, like many othereven more improbable stories, solely to amuse Mr. Pickwick. Yet thechampions of these two towns positively ask each other to produce acanal, or to fail for ever in their attempt to prove themselves the mostcorrupt town in England. As far as I remember, Sam's story of the canalends with Mr. Pickwick eagerly asking whether everybody was rescued, andSam solemnly replying that one old gentleman's hat was found, but thathe was not sure whether his head was in it. If the canal is to be takenas realistic, why not the hat and the head? If these critics ever findthe canal I recommend them to drag it for the body of the old gentleman. 

Both sides refuse to allow for the fact that the characters in the storyare comic characters. For instance, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, the eminentstudent of Dickens, writes to the _Eatanswill Gazette_ to say thatSudbury, a small town, could not have been Eatanswill, because one ofthe candidates speaks of its great manufactures. But obviously one ofthe candidates would have spoken of its great manufactures if it had hadnothing but a row of apple-stalls. One of the candidates might have saidthat the commerce of Eatanswill eclipsed Carthage, and covered everysea; it would have been quite in the style of Dickens. But when thechampion of Sudbury answers him, he does not point out this plainmistake. He answers by making another mistake exactly of the same kind. He says that Eatanswill was not a busy, important place. And his oddreason is that Mrs. Pott said she was dull there. But obviously Mrs. Pott would have said she was dull anywhere. She was setting her cap atMr. Winkle. Moreover, it was the whole point of her character in anycase. Mrs. Pott was that kind of woman. If she had been in Ipswich shewould have said that she ought to be in London. If she was in London shewould have said that she ought to be in Paris. The first disputantproves Eatanswill grand because a servile candidate calls it grand. Thesecond proves it dull because a discontented woman calls it dull. 

The great part of the controversy seems to be conducted in the spirit ofhighly irrelevant realism. Sudbury cannot be Eatanswill, because therewas a fancy-dress shop at Eatanswill, and there is no record of afancy-dress shop at Sudbury. Sudbury must be Eatanswill because therewere heavy roads outside Eatanswill, and there are heavy roads outsideSudbury. Ipswich cannot be Eatanswill, because Mrs. Leo Hunter's countryseat would not be near a big town. Ipswich must be Eatanswill becauseMrs. Leo Hunter's country seat would be near a large town. Really, Dickens might have been allowed to take liberties with such things asthese, even if he had been mentioning the place by name. If I werewriting a story about the town of Limerick, I should take the liberty ofintroducing a bun-shop without taking a journey to Limerick to seewhether there was a bun-shop there. If I wrote a romance about Torquay, I should hold myself free to introduce a house with a green door withouthaving studied a list of all the coloured doors in the town. But if, inorder to make it particularly obvious that I had not meant the town fora photograph either of Torquay or Limerick, I had gone out of my way togive the place a wild, fictitious name of my own, I think that in thatcase I should be justified in tearing my hair with rage if the people ofLimerick or Torquay began to argue about bun-shops and green doors. Noreasonable man would expect Dickens to be so literal as all that evenabout Bath or Bury St. Edmunds, which do exist; far less need he beliteral about Eatanswill, which didn't exist. 

I must confess, however, that I incline to the Sudbury side of theargument. This does not only arise from the sympathy which all healthypeople have for small places as against big ones; it arises from somereally good qualities in this particular Sudbury publication. First ofall, the champions of Sudbury seem to be more open to the sensible andhumorous view of the book than the champions of Ipswich--at least, thosethat appear in this discussion. Even the Sudbury champion, bent onfinding realistic clothes, rebels (to his eternal honour) when Mr. PercyFitzgerald tries to show that Bob Sawyer's famous statement that he wasneither Buff nor Blue, "but a sort of plaid, " must have been copied fromsome silly man at Ipswich who said that his politics were "half andhalf. " Anybody might have made either of the two jokes. But it was thewhole glory and meaning of Dickens that he confined himself to makingjokes that anybody might have made a little better than anybody wouldhave made them. 

FAIRY TALES

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

 "Where nobody grows old or weary or wise, Where nobody grows old or godly or grave. "

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

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

This great idea, then, is the backbone of all folk-lore--the idea thatall happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on onenegative. Now, it is obvious that there are many philosophical andreligious ideas akin to or symbolised by this; but it is not with them Iwish to deal here. It is surely obvious that all ethics ought to betaught to this fairy-tale tune; that, if one does the thing forbidden, one imperils all the things provided. A man who breaks his promise tohis wife ought to be reminded that, even if she is a cat, the case ofthe fairy-cat shows that such conduct may be incautious. A burglar justabout to open some one else's safe should be playfully reminded that heis in the perilous posture of the beautiful Pandora: he is about tolift the forbidden lid and loosen evils unknown. The boy eating someone's apples in some one's apple tree should be a reminder that he hascome to a mystical moment of his life, when one apple may rob him of allothers. This is the profound morality of fairy-tales; which, so far frombeing lawless, go to the root of all law. Instead of finding (likecommon books of ethics) a rationalistic basis for each Commandment, theyfind the great mystical basis for all Commandments. We are in thisfairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditionsunder which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. The vetoes areindeed extraordinary, but then so are the concessions. The idea ofproperty, the idea of some one else's apples, is a rum idea; but thenthe idea of there being any apples is a rum idea. It is strange andweird that I cannot with safety drink ten bottles of champagne; but thenthe champagne itself is strange and weird, if you come to that. If Ihave drunk of the fairies' drink it is but just I should drink by thefairies' rules. We may not see the direct logical connection betweenthree beautiful silver spoons and a large ugly policeman; but then whoin fairy tales ever could see the direct logical connection betweenthree bears and a giant, or between a rose and a roaring beast? Not onlycan these fairy-tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but moralitycan be enjoyed because it puts us in fairyland, in a world at once ofwonder and of war. 

TOM JONES AND MORALITY

The two hundredth anniversary of Henry Fielding is very justlycelebrated, even if, as far as can be discovered, it is only celebratedby the newspapers. It would be too much to expect that any such merelychronological incident should induce the people who write about Fieldingto read him; this kind of neglect is only another name for glory. Agreat classic means a man whom one can praise without having read. Thisis not in itself wholly unjust; it merely implies a certain respect forthe realisation and fixed conclusions of the mass of mankind. I havenever read Pindar (I mean I have never read the Greek Pindar; PeterPindar I have read all right), but the mere fact that I have not readPindar, I think, ought not to prevent me and certainly would not preventme from talking of "the masterpieces of Pindar, " or of "great poets likePindar or Æschylus. " The very learned men are angularly unenlightened onthis as on many other subjects; and the position they take up is reallyquite unreasonable. If any ordinary journalist or man of general readingalludes to Villon or to Homer, they consider it a quite triumphant sneerto say to the man, "You cannot read mediæval French, " or "You cannotread Homeric Greek. " But it is not a triumphant sneer--or, indeed, asneer at all. A man has got as much right to employ in his speech theestablished and traditional facts of human history as he has to employany other piece of common human information. And it is as reasonable fora man who knows no French to assume that Villon was a good poet as itwould be for a man who has no ear for music to assume that Beethoven wasa good musician. Because he himself has no ear for music, that is noreason why he should assume that the human race has no ear for music. Because I am ignorant (as I am), it does not follow that I ought toassume that I am deceived. The man who would not praise Pindar unless hehad read him would be a low, distrustful fellow, the worst kind ofsceptic, who doubts not only God, but man. He would be like a man whocould not call Mount Everest high unless he had climbed it. He would belike a man who would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he hadbeen there. 

But I think there is a limit, and a highly legitimate limit, to thisprocess. I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of aGreek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going toabuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly exposePindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus andoutrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as wellperhaps--I think, at any rate, it would do no harm--if he did know alittle Greek, and even had read a little Pindar. And I think the samesituation would be involved if the critic were concerned to point outthat Pindar was scandalously immoral, pestilently cynical, or low andbeastly in his views of life. When people brought such attacks againstthe morality of Pindar, I should regret that they could not read Greek;and when they bring such attacks against the morality of Fielding, Iregret very much that they cannot read English. 

There seems to be an extraordinary idea abroad that Fielding was in someway an immoral or offensive writer. I have been astounded by the numberof the leading articles, literary articles, and other articles writtenabout him just now in which there is a curious tone of apologising forthe man. One critic says that after all he couldn't help it, because helived in the eighteenth century; another says that we must allow for thechange of manners and ideas; another says that he was not altogetherwithout generous and humane feelings; another suggests that he clungfeebly, after all, to a few of the less important virtues. What on earthdoes all this mean? Fielding described Tom Jones as going on in acertain way, in which, most unfortunately, a very large number of youngmen do go on. It is unnecessary to say that Henry Fielding knew that itwas an unfortunate way of going on. Even Tom Jones knew that. He said inso many words that it was a very unfortunate way of going on; he said, one may almost say, that it had ruined his life; the passage is therefor the benefit of any one who may take the trouble to read the book. There is ample evidence (though even this is of a mystical and indirectkind), there is ample evidence that Fielding probably thought that itwas better to be Tom Jones than to be an utter coward and sneak. Thereis simply not one rag or thread or speck of evidence to show thatFielding thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than to be a goodman. All that he is concerned with is the description of a definite andvery real type of young man; the young man whose passions and whoseselfish necessities sometimes seemed to be stronger than anything elsein him. 

The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad, though not so bad, _spiritually_ speaking, as the practical morality of Arthur Pendennis orthe practical morality of Pip, and certainly nothing like so bad as theprofound practical immorality of Daniel Deronda. The practical moralityof Tom Jones is bad; but I cannot see any proof that his theoreticalmorality was particularly bad. There is no need to tell the majority ofmodern young men even to live up to the theoretical ethics of HenryFielding. They would suddenly spring into the stature of archangels ifthey lived up to the theoretic ethics of poor Tom Jones. Tom Jones isstill alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is walking about thestreets; we meet him every day. We meet with him, we drink with him, wesmoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him. The only differenceis that we have no longer the intellectual courage to write about him. We split up the supreme and central human being, Tom Jones, into anumber of separate aspects. We let Mr. J. M. Barrie write about him inhis good moments, and make him out better than he is. We let Zola writeabout him in his bad moments, and make him out much worse than he is. Welet Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of spiritual panic which heknows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard Kipling celebrate thosemoments of brutality which he knows to be far more cowardly. We letobscene writers write about the obscenities of this ordinary man. We letpuritan writers write about the purities of this ordinary man. We lookthrough one peephole that makes men out as devils, and we call it thenew art. We look through another peephole that makes men out as angels, and we call it the New Theology. But if we pull down some dusty oldbooks from the bookshelf, if we turn over some old mildewed leaves, andif in that obscurity and decay we find some faint traces of a tale abouta complete man, such a man as is walking on the pavement outside, wesuddenly pull a long face, and we call it the coarse morals of a bygoneage. 

The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the generalview of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown toassociate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness;according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the oldidea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book aboutimmoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth's "GinLane" or "Stages of Cruelty, " or it recorded, like the popularbroadsheet, "God's dreadful judgment" against some blasphemer ormurderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homelessscepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that moralityis somehow merely a matter of human taste--an accident of psychology. And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man wishing topraise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it that thereis in human minds or the number of human minds in which it is supreme. Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that virtue isvisionary. Every book which admits that evil is real is felt in somevague way to be admitting that good is unreal. The modern instinct isthat if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that remains good. But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was ever so evil, there was something that remained good--goodness remained good. Anactual avenging virtue existed outside the human race; to that men rose, or from that men fell away. Therefore, of course, this law itself was asmuch demonstrated in the breach as in the observance. If Tom Jonesviolated morality, so much the worse for Tom Jones. Fielding did notfeel, as a melancholy modern would have done, that every sin of TomJones was in some way breaking the spell, or we may even say destroyingthe fiction of morality. Men spoke of the sinner breaking the law; butit was rather the law that broke him. And what modern people call thefoulness and freedom of Fielding is generally the severity and moralstringency of Fielding. He would not have thought that he was servingmorality at all if he had written a book all about nice people. Fieldingwould have considered Mr. Ian Maclaren extremely immoral; and there issomething to be said for that view. Telling the truth about the terriblestruggle of the human soul is surely a very elementary part of theethics of honesty. If the characters are not wicked, the book is. Thisolder and firmer conception of right as existing outside human weaknessand without reference to human error can be felt in the very lightestand loosest of the works of old English literature. It is commonlyunmeaning enough to call Shakspere a great moralist; but in thisparticular way Shakspere is a very typical moralist. Whenever he alludesto right and wrong it is always with this old implication. Right isright, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody iswrong about it. 

THE MAID OF ORLEANS

A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I readVoltaire's "La Pucelle, " a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity ofJoan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it againfor years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began toturn over the leaves of the new "Jeanne d'Arc, " by that great andgraceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tendersympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a nobletact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girlthrough the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and evenrespectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of Joanthe Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come tothe conclusion that I prefer Voltaire's. 

When a man of Voltaire's school has to explode a saint or a greatreligious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or acommon human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode asaint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussylittle literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, thoughit was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was notspecially Voltaire's nature. But M. France read M. France's nature intoJoan of Arc--all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin ofthe modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me withstartling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentionedanywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jésus. " It has just the same generalintention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at leastpatronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quitethe other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudestblasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man toattack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise. 

And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessivelyunreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as muchknowledge of reason as Anatole France. And, if anything is irrational, it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculousstories is irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this: youexplain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply byinventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you areconfronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk intothe sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not thinkthat he did. It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply thathe may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is towrite like this: "When we consider Jack's curious and even perilousheredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and aprofligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven anda beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover, there is littledoubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India, who toldhim about the tricks of the mango plant, and how t is sent up to thesky. We can imagine these two friends, the old man and the young, wandering in the woods together at evening, looking at the red and levelclouds, as on that night when the old man pointed to a small beanstalk, and told his too imaginative companion that this also might be made toscale the heavens. And then, when we remember the quite exceptionalpsychology of Jack, when we remember how there was in him a union of theprosaic, the love of plain vegetables, with an almost irrelevanteagerness for the unattainable, for invisibility and the void, we shallno longer wonder that it was to him especially that was sent this sweet, though merely symbolic, dream of the tree uniting earth and heaven. "That is the way that Renan and France write, only they do it better. But, really, a rationalist like myself becomes a little impatient andfeels inclined to say, "But, hang it all, what do you know about theheredity of Jack or the psychology of Jack? You know nothing about Jackat all, except that some people say that he climbed up a beanstalk. Nobody would ever have thought of mentioning him if he hadn't. You mustinterpret him in terms of the beanstalk religion; you cannot merelyinterpret religion in terms of him. We have the materials of this story, and we can believe them or not. But we have not got the materials tomake another story. "

It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. AnatoleFrance in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible tohis somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore dismiss itand her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries to invent areal story, for which he can find no real evidence. He produces ascientific explanation which is quite destitute of any scientific proof. It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and chemistry) saidthat the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and argon got intothe subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most obvious example, the principal character in M. France's story is a person who neverexisted at all. All Joan's wisdom and energy, it seems, came from acertain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest trace in all themultitudinous records of her life. The only foundation I can find forthis fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a peasant girl could notpossibly have any ideas of her own. It is very hard for a freethinker toremain democratic. The writer seems altogether to forget what is meantby the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must havelearnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from _a_ priest, islike saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must havelearnt it from _a_ Labour Member. She would learn it where the LabourMember learnt it--in the whole state of our society. 

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

Joan of Arc is a wild and wonderful thing enough, but she is much sanerthan most of her critics and biographers. We shall not recover thecommon sense of Joan until we have recovered her mysticism. Our warsfail, because they begin with something sensible and obvious--such asgetting to Pretoria by Christmas. But her war succeeded--because itbegan with something wild and perfect--the saints delivering France. Sheput her idealism in the right place, and her realism also in the rightplace: we moderns get both displaced. She put her dreams and hersentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put herpracticality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case isreversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy. 

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

A DEAD POET

With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning. His energy was of somewhat the same kind. Browning was intellectuallyintricate because he was morally simple. He was too simple to explainhimself; he was too humble to suppose that other people needed anyexplanation. But his real energy, and the real energy of FrancisThompson, was best expressed in the fact that both poets were at oncefond of immensity and also fond of detail. Any common Imperialist canhave large ideas so long as he is not called upon to have small ideasalso. Any common scientific philosopher can have small ideas so long ashe is not called upon to have large ideas as well. But great poets usethe telescope and also the microscope. Great poets are obscure for twoopposite reasons; now, because they are talking about something toolarge for any one to understand, and now again because they are talkingabout something too small for any one to see. Francis Thompson possessedboth these infinities. He escaped by being too small, as the microbeescapes; or he escaped by being too large, as the universe escapes. Anyone who knows Francis Thompson's poetry knows quite well the truth towhich I refer. For the benefit of any person who does not know it, I maymention two cases taken from memory. I have not the book by me, so I canonly render the poetical passages in a clumsy paraphrase. But there wasone poem of which the image was so vast that it was literally difficultfor a time to take it in; he was describing the evening earth with itsmist and fume and fragrance, and represented the whole as rollingupwards like a smoke; then suddenly he called the whole ball of theearth a thurible, and said that some gigantic spirit swung it slowlybefore God. That is the case of the image too large for comprehension. Another instance sticks in my mind of the image which is too small. Inone of his poems, he says that abyss between the known and the unknownis bridged by "Pontifical death. " There are about ten historical andtheological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that apontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, thatdeath may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at leastpriests and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can getseparated from another thing--these ideas, and twenty more, are allactually concentrated in the word "pontifical. " In Francis Thompson'spoetry, as in the poetry of the universe, you can work infinitely outand out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the markof greatness; and he was a great poet. 

Beneath the tide of praise which was obviously due to the dead poet, there is an evident undercurrent of discussion about him; some chargesof moral weakness were at least important enough to be authoritativelycontradicted in the _Nation_; and, in connection with this and otherthings, there has been a continuous stir of comment upon his attractionto and gradual absorption in Catholic theological ideas. This questionis so important that I think it ought to be considered and understoodeven at the present time. It is, of course, true that Francis Thompsondevoted himself more and more to poems not only purely Catholic, but, one may say, purely ecclesiastical. And it is, moreover, true that (ifthings go on as they are going on at present) more and more good poetswill do the same. Poets will tend towards Christian orthodoxy for aperfectly plain reason; because it is about the simplest and freestthing now left in the world. On this point it is very necessary to beclear. When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, theyseem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thingthere is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but theworld has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the worldhas plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it hasnever been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself. 

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

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

Now, poetical people like Francis Thompson will, as things stand, tendaway from secular society and towards religion for the reason abovedescribed: that there are crowds of symbols in both, but that those ofreligion are simpler and mean more. To take an evident type, the Crossis more poetical than the Union Jack, because it is simpler. The moresimple an idea is, the more it is fertile in variations. FrancisThompson could have written any number of good poems on the Cross, because it is a primary symbol. The number of poems which Mr. RudyardKipling could write on the Union Jack is, fortunately, limited, becausethe Union Jack is too complex to produce luxuriance. The same principleapplies to any possible number of cases. A poet like Francis Thompsoncould deduce perpetually rich and branching meanings out of two plainfacts like bread and wine; with bread and wine he can expand everythingto everywhere. But with a French menu he cannot expand anything; exceptperhaps himself. Complicated ideas do not produce any more ideas. Mongrels do not breed. Religious ritual attracts because there is somesense in it. Religious imagery, so far from being subtle, is the onlysimple thing left for poets. So far from being merely superhuman, it isthe only human thing left for human beings. 

CHRISTMAS

There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebratingChristmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article. It is the veryessence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the greatday is. Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling ordinary andsad; for it is only Wednesday. At the next moment your heart leaps upand your soul and body dance together like lovers; for in one burst andblaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming (of course) that you are aworshipper of Thor, and that you celebrate his day once a week, possiblywith human sacrifice. If, on the other hand, you are a modern ChristianEnglishman, you hail (of course) with the same explosion of gaiety theappearance of the English Sunday. But I say that whatever the day isthat is to you festive or symbolic, it is essential that there should bea quite clear black line between it and the time going before. And allthe old wholesome customs in connection with Christmas were to theeffect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of somethingbefore the actual coming of Christmas Day. Thus, for instance, childrenwere never given their presents until the actual coming of the appointedhour. The presents were kept tied up in brown-paper parcels, out ofwhich an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentallystuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect of modern Christmasceremonies and publications. Especially it ought to be observed inconnection with what are called the Christmas numbers of magazines. Theeditors of the magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so longbefore the time that the reader is more likely to be still lamenting forthe turkey of last year than to have seriously settled down to a solidanticipation of the turkey which is to come. Christmas numbers ofmagazines ought to be tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration, I should favour the editors being tied up in brownpaper. Whether the leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed toprotrude I leave to individual choice. 

Of course, all this secrecy about Christmas is merely sentimental andceremonial; if you do not like what is sentimental and ceremonial, donot celebrate Christmas at all. You will not be punished if you don't;also, since we are no longer ruled by those sturdy Puritans who won forus civil and religious liberty, you will not even be punished if you do. But I cannot understand why any one should bother about a ceremonialexcept ceremonially. If a thing only exists in order to be graceful, doit gracefully or do not do it. If a thing only exists as somethingprofessing to be solemn, do it solemnly or do not do it. There is nosense in doing it slouchingly; nor is there even any liberty. I canunderstand the man who takes off his hat to a lady because it is thecustomary symbol. I can understand him, I say; in fact, I know him quiteintimately. I can also understand the man who refuses to take off hishat to a lady, like the old Quakers, because he thinks that a symbol issuperstition. But what point would there be in so performing anarbitrary form of respect that it was not a form of respect? We respectthe gentleman who takes off his hat to the lady; we respect the fanaticwho will not take off his hat to the lady. But what should we think ofthe man who kept his hands in his pockets and asked the lady to take hishat off for him because he felt tired?

This is combining insolence and superstition; and the modern world isfull of the strange combination. There is no mark of the immenseweak-mindedness of modernity that is more striking than this generaldisposition to keep up old forms, but to keep them up informally andfeebly. Why take something which was only meant to be respectful andpreserve it disrespectfully? Why take something which you could easilyabolish as a superstition and carefully perpetuate it as a bore? Therehave been many instances of this half-witted compromise. Was it nottrue, for instance, that the other day some mad American was trying tobuy Glastonbury Abbey and transfer it stone by stone to America? Suchthings are not only illogical, but idiotic. There is no particularreason why a pushing American financier should pay respect toGlastonbury Abbey at all. But if he is to pay respect to GlastonburyAbbey, he must pay respect to Glastonbury. If it is a matter ofsentiment, why should he spoil the scene? If it is not a matter ofsentiment, why should he ever have visited the scene? To call this kindof thing Vandalism is a very inadequate and unfair description. TheVandals were very sensible people. They did not believe in a religion, and so they insulted it; they did not see any use for certain buildings, and so they knocked them down. But they were not such fools as toencumber their march with the fragments of the edifice they hadthemselves spoilt. They were at least superior to the modern Americanmode of reasoning. They did not desecrate the stones because they heldthem sacred. 

Another instance of the same illogicality I observed the other day atsome kind of "At Home. " I saw what appeared to be a human being dressedin a black evening-coat, black dress-waistcoat, and blackdress-trousers, but with a shirt-front made of Jaegar wool. What can bethe sense of this sort of thing? If a man thinks hygiene more importantthan convention (a selfish and heathen view, for the beasts that perishare more hygienic than man, and man is only above them because he ismore conventional), if, I say, a man thinks that hygiene is moreimportant than convention, what on earth is there to oblige him to weara shirt-front at all? But to take a costume of which the onlyconceivable cause or advantage is that it is a sort of uniform, and thennot wear it in the uniform way--this is to be neither a Bohemian nor agentleman. It is a foolish affectation, I think, in an English officerof the Life Guards never to wear his uniform if he can help it. But itwould be more foolish still if he showed himself about town in a scarletcoat and a Jaeger breast-plate. It is the custom nowadays to have RitualCommissions and Ritual Reports to make rather unmeaning compromises inthe ceremonial of the Church of England. So perhaps we shall have anecclesiastical compromise by which all the Bishops shall wear Jaegercopes and Jaeger mitres. Similarly the King might insist on having aJaeger crown. But I do not think he will, for he understands the logicof the matter better than that. The modern monarch, like a reasonablefellow, wears his crown as seldom as he can; but if he does it at all, then the only point of a crown is that it is a crown. So let me assurethe unknown gentleman in the woollen vesture that the only point of awhite shirt-front is that it is a white shirt-front. Stiffness may beits impossible defect; but it is certainly its only possible merit. 

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

I do not know whether an animal killed at Christmas has had a better ora worse time than it would have had if there had been no Christmas or noChristmas dinners. But I do know that the fighting and sufferingbrotherhood to which I belong and owe everything, Mankind, would have amuch worse time if there were no such thing as Christmas or Christmasdinners. Whether the turkey which Scrooge gave to Bob Cratchit hadexperienced a lovelier or more melancholy career than that of lessattractive turkeys is a subject upon which I cannot even conjecture. But that Scrooge was better for giving the turkey and Cratchit happierfor getting it I know as two facts, as I know that I have two feet. Whatlife and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul ofScrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business. Nothing shall induceme to darken human homes, to destroy human festivities, to insult humangifts and human benefactions for the sake of some hypothetical knowledgewhich Nature curtained from our eyes. We men and women are all in thesame boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragicloyalty. If we catch sharks for food, let them be killed mostmercifully; let any one who likes love the sharks, and pet the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give them sugar and teach them todance. But if once a man suggests that a shark is to be valued against asailor, or that the poor shark might be permitted to bite off a nigger'sleg occasionally; then I would court-martial the man--he is a traitor tothe ship. 

And while I take this view of humanitarianism of the anti-Christmaskind, it is cogent to say that I am a strong anti-vivisectionist. Thatis, if there is any vivisection, I am against it. I am against thecutting-up of conscious dogs for the same reason that I am in favour ofthe eating of dead turkeys. The connection may not be obvious; but thatis because of the strangely unhealthy condition of modern thought. I amagainst cruel vivisection as I am against a cruel anti-Christmasasceticism, because they both involve the upsetting of existingfellowships and the shocking of normal good feelings for the sake ofsomething that is intellectual, fanciful, and remote. It is not a humanthing, it is not a humane thing, when you see a poor woman staringhungrily at a bloater, to think, not of the obvious feelings of thewoman, but of the unimaginable feelings of the deceased bloater. Similarly, it is not human, it is not humane, when you look at a dog tothink about what theoretic discoveries you might possibly make if youwere allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarians' fancyabout the feelings concealed inside the bloater, and thevivisectionists' fancy about the knowledge concealed inside the dog, areunhealthy fancies, because they upset a human sanity that is certain forthe sake of something that is of necessity uncertain. Thevivisectionist, for the sake of doing something that may or may not beuseful, does something that certainly is horrible. The anti-Christmashumanitarian, in seeking to have a sympathy with a turkey which no mancan have with a turkey, loses the sympathy he has already with thehappiness of millions of the poor. 

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

Now, whether torturing an animal is or is not an immoral thing, it is, at least, a dreadful thing. It belongs to the order of exceptional andeven desperate acts. Except for some extraordinary reason I would notgrievously hurt an animal; with an extraordinary reason I wouldgrievously hurt him. If (for example) a mad elephant were pursuing meand my family, and I could only shoot him so that he would die inagony, he would have to die in agony. But the elephant would be there. Iwould not do it to a hypothetical elephant. Now, it always seems to methat this is the weak point in the ordinary vivisectionist argument, "Suppose your wife were dying. " Vivisection is not done by a man whosewife is dying. If it were it might be lifted to the level of the moment, as would be lying or stealing bread, or any other ugly action. But thisugly action is done in cold blood, at leisure, by men who are not surethat it will be of any use to anybody--men of whom the most that can besaid is that they may conceivably make the beginnings of some discoverywhich may perhaps save the life of some one else's wife in some remotefuture. That is too cold and distant to rob an act of its immediatehorror. That is like training the child to tell lies for the sake ofsome great dilemma that may never come to him. You are doing a cruelthing, but not with enough passion to make it a kindly one. 

So much for why I am an anti-vivisectionist; and I should like to say, in conclusion, that all other anti-vivisectionists of my acquaintanceweaken their case infinitely by forming this attack on a scientificspeciality in which the human heart is commonly on their side, withattacks upon universal human customs in which the human heart is not atall on their side. I have heard humanitarians, for instance, speak ofvivisection and field sports as if they were the same kind of thing. Thedifference seems to me simple and enormous. In sport a man goes into awood and mixes with the existing life of that wood; becomes a destroyeronly in the simple and healthy sense in which all the creatures aredestroyers; becomes for one moment to them what they are to him--anotheranimal. In vivisection a man takes a simpler creature and subjects it tosubtleties which no one but man could inflict on him, and for which manis therefore gravely and terribly responsible. 

Meanwhile, it remains true that I shall eat a great deal of turkey thisChristmas; and it is not in the least true (as the vegetarians say) thatI shall do it because I do not realise what I am doing, or because I dowhat I know is wrong, or that I do it with shame or doubt or afundamental unrest of conscience. In one sense I know quite well what Iam doing; in another sense I know quite well that I know not what I do. Scrooge and the Cratchits and I are, as I have said, all in one boat;the turkey and I are, to say the most of it, ships that pass in thenight, and greet each other in passing. I wish him well; but it isreally practically impossible to discover whether I treat him well. Ican avoid, and I do avoid with horror, all special and artificialtormenting of him, sticking pins in him for fun or sticking knives inhim for scientific investigation. But whether by feeding him slowly andkilling him quickly for the needs of my brethren, I have improved in hisown solemn eyes his own strange and separate destiny, whether I havemade him in the sight of God a slave or a martyr, or one whom the godslove and who die young--that is far more removed from my possibilitiesof knowledge than the most abstruse intricacies of mysticism ortheology. A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels andarchangels In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told uswhat a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for anhour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has ratherincreased than diminished.