TWELVE TYPES

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

LONDONARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS1902

NOTE

These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted withthe kind permission of the Editors of _The Daily News_ and _The Speaker_. 

G. K. C. KENSINGTON. 

CONTENTS

CHARLOTTE BRONTĖWILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOLTHE OPTIMISM OF BYRONPOPE AND THE ART OF SATIREFRANCISROSTANDCHARLES IISTEVENSONTHOMAS CARLYLETOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITYSAVONAROLATHE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

CHARLOTTE BRONTĖ

Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it revealsso much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The realobjection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about aman the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts andinsists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himselfis wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances ofhis ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things whichdo not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They donot occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, thatthey do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself asthe inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than hethinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man'sname was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, theseare not sanctities; they are irrelevancies. 

A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontės. The Brontė is inthe position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricitiesform an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mildand bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips ofliterature, like Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire ofcollecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lightsand sticks and straws which will go to make a Brontė museum. They arethe most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and thelimelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark oldYorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation, though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontės. For the Brontė genius was above all things deputed to assert the supremeunimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always beenconceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. CharlotteBrontė electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older andmore elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first greatassertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise astawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masqué. ' She showed thatabysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside amanufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress ofmerino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that CharlotteBrontė, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of hergenius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only theartificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the naturalgold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she feltthat the whole of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole of theinterior might be made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in theugliest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavensof Dante. 

It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals ofthe Brontės' life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matterless than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interestingto know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of theofficers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces. It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck orbeen inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction isconveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them. But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontės isthat the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a storyas 'Jane Eyre' is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to beexcluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what theyought to do, nor what they would do, nor, it might be said, such is theinsanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conductof Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Hartein his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. 'Then, resuming hisusual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew, ' does perhapsreach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochesterdresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to befound in any other branch of art, except in the end of the pantomime, where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, despite this vastnightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, 'JaneEyre' is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essentialtruth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not trueto manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almostalways false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would notmatter a single straw if a Brontė story were a hundred times moremoonstruck and improbable than 'Jane Eyre, ' or a hundred times moremoonstruck and improbable than 'Wuthering Heights. ' It would not matterif George Read stood on his head, and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, ifFairfax Rochester had four eyes and St John Rivers three legs, the storywould still remain the truest story in the world. The typical Brontėcharacter is, indeed, a kind of monster. Everything in him except theessential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on hisarms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart is in the right place. 

The great and abiding truth for which the Brontė cycle of fiction standsis a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth, the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Brontėheroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliatinginexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of hersolitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that ispossible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of anardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is ofhumanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting onevening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every firstnight. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the manof the world who appreciates the world. The man who has learnt to do allconventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do themprosaically. It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not fithim, whose gloves will not go on, whose compliments will not come off, who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He is frightenedenough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that elementof fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit isthe central spirit of the Brontė novel. It is the epic of theexhilaration of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in ourtime, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently becauseit does not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess ofCharlotte Brontė, with the small outlook and the small creed, had morecommerce with the awful and elemental forces which drive the world thana legion of lawless minor poets. She approached the universe with realsimplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and delight. She was, soto speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she hadpossessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment beingas black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the firstand the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lordis the beginning of pleasure. 

Upon the whole, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that thedark wild youth of the Brontės in their dark wild Yorkshire home hasbeen somewhat exaggerated as a necessary factor in their work and theirconception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions, emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and thespringtide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had somemidnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in whichthere was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress andpanic of 'Wuthering Heights. ' Every one of us has had a day-dream of ourown potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than 'Jane Eyre. ' Andthe truth which the Brontės came to tell us is the truth that manywaters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability cannot touchor damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like every other earthly city, isbuilt upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro in thewilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a meanreligion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never foundany expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go onworking harder and yet harder at dull and automatic employments, atscolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all these silent onesone suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony, and hername was Charlotte Brontė. Spreading around us upon every side to-daylike a huge and radiating geometrical figure are the endless branches ofthe great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, aswell we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, thefrantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought ofours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses;there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and housesis an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of thesemen is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each ofthese houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no singlehouse of all those millions which has not seemed to some one at sometime the heart of all things and the end of travel. 

WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL

It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morrisshould approximate to a public festival, for while there have been manymen of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there havebeen none so representative. He represents not only that rapacioushunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a seriousproblem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also thathonourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities ofworkmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The timehas passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to bedescribed as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatterinstead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfullyconscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, weshould have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground withthe grandeur of medięval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we shouldhave found, with no little consternation, our shoes graduallyapproximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would haveinvented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as anironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern, fit to be thenails of the Cross. The limitations of William Morris, whatever theywere, were not the limitations of common decoration. It is true that allhis work, even his literary work, was in some sense decorative, had insome degree the qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, hisstories, his religious and political views, had, in the most emphaticsense, length and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believethat men could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no account ofthe unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of theunnameable terrors, and the yet more unnameable hopes. So long as a manwas graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiringconsciousness that the chestnut colour of his hair was relieved againstthe blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he wouldbe, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if hewere a piece of exquisitely coloured cardboard. 

But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity ofhuman nature--took little account, so to speak, of human figures in theround, it is altogether unfair to represent him as a mere ęsthete. Heperceived a great public necessity and fulfilled it heroically. Thedifficulty with which he grappled was one so immense that we shall haveto be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge ofit. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of themost self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity ofthe thing. He felt that it was monstrous that the modern man, who waspre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictorybeauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, andthe colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcicalbathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist inraiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. Itis indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness whichblights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. Inall created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly asa pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height andthickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the mostrepulsive of colours--a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch ofblood or fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins. Yet there is noreason whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full ofcivic dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress ofa thousand souls. If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we maybe sure that it would have been surmounted by the severe, but graceful, figure of the god of letter-writing. If the medięval Christians hadpossessed it, it would have had a niche filled with the golden aureoleof St Rowland of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands at allour street-corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas underone of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that themiracles of science have not been such an incentive to art andimagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfthcentury had been told that the lightning had been driven for leaguesunderground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughinghuman beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded tothis pulverising portent chirpily as 'The Twopenny Tube, ' they wouldhave called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-wittedatheists. Probably they would have been quite right. 

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anęstheticelement in the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the work of a greatreformer: it requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evilthat surrounds us on every side. The manner in which Morris carried outhis crusade may, considering the circumstances, be called triumphant. Our carpets began to bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring, and our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas seemed growing legs and armsat their own wild will. An element of freedom and rugged dignity came inwith plain and strong ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate anduniversal has been the revolution in domestic art that almost everyfamily in England has had its taste cunningly and treacherouslyimproved, and if we look back at the early Victorian drawing-rooms it isonly to realise the strange but essential truth that art, or humandecoration, has, nine times out of ten in history, made things uglierthan they were before, from the 'coiffure' of a Papuan savage to thewall-paper of a British merchant in 1830. 

But great and beneficent as was the ęsthetic revolution of Morris, therewas a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact thathis revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partialexplanation of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dressesof modern ladies, 'upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being drapedlike women, ' as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practicalimitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further thanthis retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now, the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was atleast one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They wouldhave laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of thebowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting themselves an ęsthetic blue, after the custom of the ancient Britons. They would not have called thata movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress or mannerssprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred tolead. And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in thebeauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of thelife we lead and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without hints andhopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athleticcostumes. But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute orsatisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dressball. But the limitation of Morris's work lay deeper than this. We maybest suggest it by a method after his own heart. Of all the variousworks he performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidlyvaluable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions ofmankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy-talescontain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men's feelingfor things. Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may not haveclimbed up so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is notsuch things that make a story false; it is a far different class ofthings that makes every modern book of history as false as the father oflies; ingenuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. Itappears to us that of all the fairy-tales none contains so vital amoral truth as the old story, existing in many forms, of Beauty and theBeast. There is written, with all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all itsugliness we cannot make it beautiful. This was the weak point in WilliamMorris as a reformer: that he sought to reform modern life, and that hehated modern life instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast, big enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing witha million eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poetcan love this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with some generousexcitement his massive and mysterious 'joie-de-vivre, ' the vast scale ofhis iron anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot andwill not change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris's disadvantagewas that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he couldnot understand its fascination, and consequently he could not reallydevelop it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal influence inthe ęsthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and CraftsExhibitions, which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in thatof a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these ęstheticshows, we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that thedecorative school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for givingthe right touch of beauty to common and necessary things, but the thingsthat are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always tosome extent commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There arebeautiful gates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs, beautiful reading-desks. But there are no modern things made beautiful. There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful letter-boxes, beautifulengines, beautiful bicycles. The spirit of William Morris has not seizedhold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. Andthis was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not thesupreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from theBeast and the fairy-tale had a different ending. 

But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest claim to the name of a greatreformer: that he left his work incomplete. There is, perhaps, no betterproof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, thanthat his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention toneeds he cannot supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer andmore daring Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate thearmour of the twelfth century but the machinery of the twentieth. Alamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold thesanctity of fire. A pillar-box shall be carved with figures emblematicalof the secrets of comradeship and the silence and honour of the State. Railway signals, of all earthly things the most poetical, the colouredstars of life and death, shall be lamps of green and crimson worthy oftheir terrible and faithful service. But if ever this gradual andgenuine movement of our time towards beauty--not backwards, butforwards--does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it. Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will beremembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours andproved that this painful greenish grey of the ęsthetic twilight in whichwe now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness ofdeath, but the greyness of dawn. 

THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON

Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of Byron. The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when we wakein the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the world ofByron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world, where menwere romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and thevery word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery. Roses andnightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous elegance of awall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men, a revel withsplendid vesture and half-witted faces. 

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, theless ready shall we be to make use of the word "artificial. " Nothing inthe world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, manyworks of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanityand self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elementalthing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found indarkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl aroundhim. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanityis a voice out of the abyss. 

The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the presentposition of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it isremote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it notsavage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances ofthis: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we seesome of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorialwoods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silentexplosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believethat they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see someof the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. Wealmost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box, artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the greatconvulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano is not anextinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the remainsnot of a natural but of an artificial fire. 

But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than anythingthat is represented by such a view as this: their real value and meaningare indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron liesin the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himselfas such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byronwithout knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himselfthat ever fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real character ofwhat is known as Byron's pessimism is better worth study than any realpessimism could ever be. 

It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almosteverything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariablyextolled to the disadvantage of everything else. 

One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe hasbeen declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books, love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion, money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a lifeclose to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintainedby somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwiseindefensible world. Thus while the world is almost always condemned insummary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail afterdetail. 

Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. Thework of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniouslyamong them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the Houseof God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises alife of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellarand swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest ofpessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he haswritten some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one pangof joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude, withthe scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird. 

Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as faras words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adoredby an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despisedthe majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a littlemore deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in thispopularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulteratedpessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men wouldno more receive the news of the failure of existence or of theharmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing thanthey would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance abreakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist ispopular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, butbecause he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorusof praise even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who ispopular must be optimistic about something even if he is only optimisticabout pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and theByronists. Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that theyblamed everything, but upon the fact that they praised something. Theyheaped curses upon man, but they used man merely as a foil. The thingsthey wished to praise by comparison were the energies of Nature. Man wasto them what talk and fashion were to Carlyle, what philosophical andreligious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practicalhappiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in orderthat somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of thefact that one cannot write in white chalk except on a blackboard. 

Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of thedesolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism anddepression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone inwinter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure instorms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the olderearth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very youngand very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine whenseen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried agorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same timepowerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet atthe same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such wasthe darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them wasonly too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of theearth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts wereflaming like their own firesides. 

Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt andlamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in MrAubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with apessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of thecosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificiallife. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards therestaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the newpessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had anaffectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into theavenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. Andit is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that theirsinister philosophy is sincere; in their lights and garlands and ribbonswe read their indwelling despair. It was so, indeed, with Byron himself;his really bitter moments were his frivolous moments. He went on yearafter year calling down fire upon mankind, summoning the deluge and thedestructive sea and all the ultimate energies of nature to sweep awaythe cities of the spawn of man. But through all this his sub-consciousmind was not that of a despairer; on the contrary, there is something ofa kind of lawless faith in thus parleying with such immense andimmemorial brutalities. It was not until the time in which he wrote 'DonJuan' that he really lost this inward warmth and geniality, and a suddenshout of hilarious laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron hadreally become a pessimist. 

One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is hismetre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be ahypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is ofhorror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding 'pas de quatre. ' He mayarraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with themost desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walkin a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the bloodalive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:

 'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away, When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay; 'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast, But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past. '

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron. 

The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called theunconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the mostuncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of theirnature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But thewhole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident, and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotionalartifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard, political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at thetime that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call ofthat buried and sub-conscious happiness which is in all of us, and whichmay emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spearsof the enemy. 

POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE

The general critical theory common in this and the last century is thatit was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. Theclassical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes, one may justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easierreally to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense, to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to haveimagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a shamrhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to beunintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it isthe ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet:he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbitsout of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it maybe submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antitheticalcouplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the greatliberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did itpermit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority ofsmall writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, butat least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake ofexample, such a line as Pope's

 'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, '

the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have writtensuch a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not. 

Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal withsuch an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:

 'A being darkly wise and rudely great. '

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter thanthat old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he wouldreally be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. Theone thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing

 'A being darkly wise and rudely great, '

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses, would produce something like the following:--

 'A creature Of feature More dark, more dark, more dark than skies, Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise: Darkly wise as a formless fate And if he be great If he be great, then rudely great, Rudely great as a plough that plies, And darkly wise, and darkly wise. '

Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt tospread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poetmight manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope. 

There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis ofthe typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall haveoccasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has everbeen artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An elementof paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in therealm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that wecannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine aspace that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications ofdivinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness wastruly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, inthe same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that wecannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, ormagnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation tomeanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of naturalirrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheseswere fully in harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction interms. 

Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet ofcivilisation. Immediately after the fall of him and his school comeBurns and Byron, and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental. But to Pope civilisation was still an exciting experiment. Its perruquesand ruffles were to him what feathers and bangles are to a South SeaIslander--the real romance of civilisation. And in all the forms of artwhich peculiarly belong to civilisation, he was supreme. In oneespecially he was supreme--the great and civilised art of satire. Andin this we have fallen away utterly. 

We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence andhostility. Mr Henley and his young men have an infinite number offurious epithets with which to overwhelm any one who differs from them. It is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr Henley's enemy, though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. Andyet, despite all this, these people produce no satire. Political andsocial satire is a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It may beworth while to make some attempt to point out a reason for this. 

It may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generousenough to write great satire. This, however, is approximately a veryaccurate way of describing the case. To write great satire, to attack aman so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it isnecessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realises themerits of the opponent as well as his defects. This is, indeed, onlyanother way of putting the simple truth that in order to attack an armywe must know not only its weak points, but also its strong points. England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the samesimple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters ofbattle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (anidea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on apeople by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chanceof trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise theenemy; whereas when the enemy is strong every honest scout ought topraise the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having afull account of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man withouthaving a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom inpolitics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhumane, asutterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man everwas since the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may oftenhave a great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; itmay raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there isone man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom ithardly even touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. Theone person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the manwhom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. Heknows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he isnot utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarousand revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he cancount as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hoursof decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behindall this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the cravensilences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanlyvisions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is totouch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass andsalute a whole army of virtues. 

If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough butfirm grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points oftheir adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives asplendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunningof the

 'daring pilot in extremity, '

who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and

 'Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit. '

The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of thegreat Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound andpicturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in verypointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and theancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill, both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly, as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented himas a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence suppliedthe lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even grossfaults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, acertain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. Buthe was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore thesatire could not and did not overwhelm him. And here we have the causeof the failure of contemporary satire, that it has no magnanimity, thatis to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponenthas his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain could not endure to betold that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothingexcept persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterlystupid--that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. Ifwe take any prominent politician of the day--such, for example, as SirWilliam Harcourt--we shall find that this is the point in which allparty invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir WilliamHarcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he isinept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable anddisgraceful and untrustworthy. The defect of all this is that we allknow that it is untrue. Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is notinept, but is almost the ablest Parliamentarian now alive. Everyoneknows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a gentleman of theold school who is on excellent social terms with his antagonists. Everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy, but a man of unimpeachablehonour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself, and istherefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if wewere accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving ofstolen goods. We might be angry at the libel, but not at the satire; fora man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire becauseit is true. 

Mr Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire: ifthey wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they needonly turn to the opening of Pope's superb attack upon Addison. TheHenleyite's idea of satirising a man is to express a violent contemptfor him, and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that theman is contemptible. I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr Gladstoneby one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting that MrGladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I havesaid, go quietly and read Pope's 'Atticus, ' they would see how a greatsatirist approaches a great enemy:

 'Peace to all such! But were there one whose fires True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires, Blest with each talent, and each art to please, And born to write, converse, and live with ease. Should such a man--'

And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was notsuch a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew thatAddison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, inPope's case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, sopure, that it illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. Hesaid what was really wrong with Addison; and in calm and clear andeverlasting colours he painted the picture of the evil of the literarytemperament:

 'Bear like the Turk, no brother near the throne, View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, And hate for arts that caused himself to rise. 

 * * * * *

 Like Cato give his little Senate laws, And sit attentive to his own applause. While wits and templars every sentence raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise. '

This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which itaims. It is penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it isaddressed directly to a man. This is no mock-tournament to gain theapplause of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore. 

In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumptionthat, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we canbenefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and hismerits, we cannot even hurt him. 

FRANCIS

Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days tomisunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation ofthe great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of theone joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confinedto religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which assertsthat truth is alone satisfying: there is ęsthetic asceticism whichasserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism whichasserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicureanasceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying. Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that thespeaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ andessence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that 'loveis enough, ' it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art, science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves, walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and anyother things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When OmarKhayyam says:

 'A book of verse beneath the bough A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou Sitting beside me in the wilderness O wilderness were Paradise enow. '

It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he doesęsthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more. The same thing was done by a medięval monk. Examples might, of course, be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of ouryounger poets says, as the one thing certain, that

 'From quiet home and first beginning Out to the undiscovered ends-- There's nothing worth the wear of winning But laughter and the love of friends. '

Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all truejoy expresses itself in terms of asceticism. 

But if in any case it should happen that a class or a generation losethe sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, theyimmediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy andself-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have calledthe monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures ofliberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a BankHoliday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, thepleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is, however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of Englishathletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, ifscience should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfectingthe physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolutecontempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it iseasy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply statethat in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford andCambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. Theywere forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine ortobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certainbrutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising atunearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Manymen ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is anasceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strainedthemselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There isone difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do notfeel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the onecase and only the purchase in the other. 

The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christianascetics of which their ascetism was merely the purchasing price. Themere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way inwhich we miss the main points of human history. We are looking athumanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast anddominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive itas a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occurto us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universeis governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fitto set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad withjoy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment. The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stoodup in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the seagathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all thesedisconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of onedark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy. That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectlytenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. Weinsist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist thatthe ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years andten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare propositionof an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand timesmore optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias. 

Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring thisout; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has ratherthe tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing, but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reasonthat we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman, because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues totheir idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline, because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze ofbenediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, notin biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance, in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almostindecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white. 

It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley should see Francis primarilyas the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one, perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one ofthe minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vastpractical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for thisamazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple--minded infant was oneof the most consistently successful men that ever fought with thisbitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men istheir profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all thetruth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believein themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of hissuccess was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack ofthis that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons. Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about theircommon relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to theEmperor to draw his attention to the needs of 'his little sisters thelarks. ' He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about theirmisfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. Itwas an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often 'got round him, 'as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had'got round' them, and discovered the other side, the side of secretnobility. 

Conceiving of St Francis as primarily the founder of the FranciscanOrder, Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of thehistory of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing inthe book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichęanideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal ofself-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. Buthe does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider theabsorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reasonthat not being an outsider he does not find it a problem at all. 

To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in theposition of St Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language thanany earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to takepleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fellfrom his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yetthis man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what wethink the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted andpoetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere inthese awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men wereblind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk, andnot a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fullyhere, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked;we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly findthat much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also. So it was with the monks. The two great parties in human affairs areonly the party which sees life black against white, and the party whichsees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackensitself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of anuniversal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers andlights itself with bridal torches because it stands against a blackcurtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks areyoung. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and wewho are its misers. 

Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Adderley's book, the clear andtranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on thegenius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of hisliterary instinct is shown in his naming the fire 'brother, ' and thewater 'sister, ' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in thesermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood. ' In theamazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointmentsand excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing, his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoidedthe weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to acleaner and more transparent life. 

The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied akind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in'Alice in Wonderland'--'Why not?' impresses us as his general motto. Hecould not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. Thepomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and allits fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality ofthat innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, likethe questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of thenightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world wassmall, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reasonthat gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were tobe found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that themadness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in itthe features of a new friend. 

ROSTAND

When 'Cyrano de Bergerac' was published, it bore the subordinate titleof a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature whichwould justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once apoet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, thehero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which issystematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the powerof a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedyinto a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitivelegends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they havea happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certainoptimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer ofthe monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essentialdisastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itselfwith a hyper-ęsthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due tothe influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies ofMonsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct forremedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for'Frenchiness. ' The idea of comedy which is held in England by the schoolwhich pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a viewwhich renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible. The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our youngerwriters is that comedy is, 'par excellence, ' a fragile thing. It isconceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate andgimcrack description. Such stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's 'HappyHypocrite' are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utternonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy, the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, takenseriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up withmore faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In suchcomedies one laughs with the heroes and not at them. The humour whichsteeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic andphilosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is notsuperficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading. Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they werethe predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer ofcomedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. Heseems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When JohnOliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, shenamed it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, 'ASentimental Comedy. ' The ground of this conception of the artificialityof comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournfulbuffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow asa grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properlyspeaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice overthe eternal waters of bitterness. 

'Cyrano de Bergerac' came to us as the new decoration of an old truth, that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one ofits exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, theRabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they hadbeen in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado asold and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlongand haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano athis highest moment of happiness. 'Il me faut des géants. ' An essentialaspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama inrhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for thedramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to hiscanons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facingsome terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a partyplaying 'bouts rimés. ' In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculousthat two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults shouldobligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat andconvenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon thefact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by apoetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays whichare now written in England by the most advanced students of the dramafollow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme forthe adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supremeappropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land ofheroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is notdifficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is farmore conceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into theseharmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit ofyouth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorialdestiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is anunnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at themoment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because wehave an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow orartificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammeringattempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, likeCyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguisedor distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes answereach other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each other. Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or in lovethey talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent thespeech one half so much, as the speech misrepresents the soul. MonsieurRostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called 'Cyranode Bergerac' a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, it endswith disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a spiritualbreakdown or decline, and in the great French play the spiritualsentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not the factsthemselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and comedy, and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck. The sameapparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of'L'Aiglon, ' now being performed with so much success. Although the herois a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and apersonal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might havebeen chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable pęan of thepraise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells sohigh that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of thecharacters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. Amultitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate andillustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modernlife. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices ofthe wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux, les corbeaux, ' the Duke, overwhelmedwith a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, 'Oł, oł sont lesaigles?' That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at thebeginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. Whenan ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed theEmperor, he replies, 'La fatigue, ' and at that a veteran private of theGreat Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, 'Et nous?' pours outa terrible description of the life lived by the common soldier. To-daywhen pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion asjewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life infew other words but 'la fatigue, ' there might surely come a cry from thevast mass of common humanity from the beginning 'et nous?' It is thispotentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes thefunction of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's 'Much Adoabout Nothing' is a great comedy, because behind it is the wholepressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which iscommon to all the young, especially to those who swear they will diebachelors and old maids. 'Love's Labour Lost' is filled with the sameenergy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of oursubject since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyricallyas naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love isto the Shakespearian comedies, that other and more mysterious humanpassion, the love of death, is to 'L'Aiglon. ' Whether we shall ever havein England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at presentto say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise thatcomedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things, that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb. Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does notshrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices ofactual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but whenthe Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their finalword, they all cry together 'Vive l'Empereur!' Monsieur Rostand, perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that fieldof Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothingbut the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It isright that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of themshould be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life as theyare in modern art the only voices, they are the voices of men, but notthe voice of man. When questioned finally and seriously as to theirconception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of timeanswered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voiceand in a sense most sacred and tremendous, 'Vive l'Empereur. '

CHARLES II

There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II. , one of the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other thingsCharles II. Represented one thing which is very rare and verysatisfying; he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scepticism both in itsadvantages and disadvantages is greatly misunderstood in our time. Thereis a curious idea abroad that scepticism has some connection with suchtheories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of course amistake; the true sceptic has nothing to do with these theories simplybecause they are theories. The true sceptic is as much a spiritualist ashe is a materialist. He thinks that the savage dancing round an Africanidol stands quite as good a chance of being right as Darwin. He thinksthat mysticism is every bit as rational as rationalism. He has indeedthe most profound doubts as to whether St Matthew wrote his own gospel. But he has quite equally profound doubts as to whether the tree he islooking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros. 

This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently inthe lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence inthe life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation betweenatheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great andfixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed themost daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable dayof judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a manto say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that thereare no insects in any of the stars. 

Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic sceptic, Charles II. Whenhe took the Sacrament according to the forms of the Roman Church in hislast hour he was acting consistently as a philosopher. The wafer mightnot be God; similarly it might not be a wafer. To the genuine andpoetical sceptic the whole world is incredible, with its bulbousmountains and its fantastic trees. The whole order of things is asoutrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it. Transubstantiation might be a dream, but if it was, it was assuredly adream within a dream. Charles II. Sought to guard himself against hellfire because he could not think hell itself more fantastic than theworld as it was revealed by science. The priest crept up the staircase, the doors were closed, the few of the faithful who were present hushedthemselves respectfully, and so, with every circumstance of secrecy andsanctity, with the cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, wasconsummated the last great act of logical unbelief. 

The problem of Charles II. Consists in this, that he has scarcely amoral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel thatsome of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all thesaints and sages, and that Charles II. Was pre-eminently successful inthese wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter andthe real relation of Charles II. To the moral ideal is worth somewhatmore exhaustive study. 

It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be understoodwhen considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it isinsufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all thegood work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fireof Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint, which passed away; that still burns in the heart of England, only to bequenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered thatthe Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, thatthey relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, thatthey bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritansfell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can neversatisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical FrenchJacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lessonthat men's wants have always been right and their arguments alwayswrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to thehead rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarilymen of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can donothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over thebodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, andconflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was thetyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised humanspirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be lovedand reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they werefanatics, but because they were rationalists. 

When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, whichmeans in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant inthat day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend alittle more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and trivialityof the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. Was apre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassedparts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always beleft over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merelyaccount for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness andhorseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accountsalso for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is anameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about itsomething mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood andnowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as thetype of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide ofpoliteness. There was some moral and social value in his perfection inlittle things. He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept theten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great actsof duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of thoseacts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, whichlie on the dim borderland between morality and art. 'Charles II. , ' saidThackeray, with unerring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a snob. ' UnlikeGeorge IV. He was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeysstrange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practisesstrange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world. 

So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it wasthe revolt of something human, if only the débris of human nature. Butmore cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, arecoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength. That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably toofar, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of analmost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restorationinfinitely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less acollapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanismwas one of the world's great efforts after the discovery of the trueorder, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved noeffort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has beenwidely assumed, the most immoral epoch of our history. Its vices cannotcompare for a moment in this respect with the monstrous tragedies andalmost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. Butthe dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II. Seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions andpoisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appearsinevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared withthe Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Notonly was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent evenfor great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for thepursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a gameof lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II. 's poets quite asarduous to write 'Paradise Lost' as to regain Paradise. 

All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which, though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, andpoems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terriblysignificant as the phrase 'killing time. ' It is a tremendous andpoetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There is on theearth a race of revellers who do, under all their exuberance, fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. And themen of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and as wehave said we think that they had merits, they can never have a placeamong the great representatives of the joy of life, for they belongedto those lower epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higherepicureans who make time live. 

Of a people in this temper Charles II. Was the natural and rightfulhead. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with allhis geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimlessflaneur that he has been represented. He was a patient and cunningpolitician, who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of follythat he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceivedalmost all the historians that have come after him. But if Charles was, as he emphatically was, the only Stuart who really achieved despotism, it was greatly due to the temper of the nation and the age. Despotism isthe easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed. 

It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave. Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them, professionals to dance for them, and a professional to rule them. 

Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it were, like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unrealitybroods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries andproblems, we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate thantheir laughter, our restraints are larger than their liberty. 

STEVENSON[A]

A recent incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as wesuspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed, from the scorn of 'Ephemera Critica' and Mr George Moore, that Stevensonhad the first essential qualification of a great man: that of beingmisunderstood by his opponents. But from the book which Messrs Chatto &Windus have issued, in the same binding as Stevenson's works, 'RobertLouis Stevenson, ' by Mr H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that hehas the other essential qualification, that of being misunderstood byhis admirers. Mr Baildon has many interesting things to tell us aboutStevenson himself, whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms byany means valueless. That upon the plays, especially 'Beau Austin, ' isremarkably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goesfar, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable qualitywhich belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson cannumber and marshal all the master's work and distribute praise and blamewith decision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment ofthe principles of art and ethics which would have struck us as the verythings that Stevenson nearly killed himself to express. 

Mr Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his'pessimism'; surely a strange charge against the man who has done morethan any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. Buthe complains that, in 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Dr Jekyll and MrHyde, ' Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now if there wasone point that Stevenson more constantly and passionately emphasisedthan any other it was that we must worship good for its own value andbeauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in spaceand time. 'Whatever we are intended to do, ' he said, 'we are notintended to succeed. ' That the stars in their courses fight againstvirtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the veryspirit that through the whole of Stevenson's work sounded a trumpet toall the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyonestand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? Itis strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of anold church and see none in the ruins of a man. 

The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson's tales of bloodand spoil; he appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had (weuse Mr Baildon's own phrase) a kind of 'homicidal mania. ' 'He(Stevenson) arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly bebetter employed than in taking life. ' Mr Baildon might as well say thatDr Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr ClarkRussell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought thatone could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones andfalsifying marriage registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely alone in thiserror: few people have understood properly the goriness of Stevenson. Stevenson was essentially the robust schoolboy who draws skeletons andgibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took pleasure in death, but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular and emphatic actionof life, even if it were an action that took the life of another. 

Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentlemanand pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that thereare in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view. The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point ofview, and this Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in suchstories as 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Weir of Hermiston. ' But thereis another view of the matter--that in which the whole act is an abruptand brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with ablow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is thestandpoint of romance, and it is the soul of 'Treasure Island' and 'TheWrecker. ' It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that heloved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouringuniversalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such ashas not been known since St Francis called the sun brother and the wellsister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutchthat Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bonesleft at the 'Admiral Benbow, ' with the knife that Wicks drove throughhis own hand and the table. There is always in his work a certainclean-cut angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cuttingwood with an axe. 

Stevenson's new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for thisdeep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputingsomething to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as anobject. He says of that glorious riot of horror, 'The Destroying Angel, 'in 'The Dynamiter, ' that it is 'highly fantastic and putting a strain onour credulity. ' This is rather like describing the travels of BaronMunchausen as 'unconvincing. ' The whole story of 'The Dynamiter' is akind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story 'The DestroyingAngel' is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of themoment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbabilityis like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr Baildon, whether fromhasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the leastcomprehend the rich and romantic irony of Stevenson's London stories. Heactually says of that portentous monument of humour, Prince Florizel ofBohemia, that, 'though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me onthe whole rather an irritating presence. ' From this we are almost drivento believe (though desperately and against our will) that Mr Baildonthinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, as if he were aman in real life. For ourselves, Prince Florizel is almost our favouritecharacter in fiction; but we willingly add the proviso that if we methim in real life we should kill him. 

The fact is, that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual andintellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one additionalvirtue--that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his greatmessage on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters, it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote hislight-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyonesupposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from hisversatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department wellenough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people couldnot see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man canplay the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, heis called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughlywell, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a commonfiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what hashappened in the case of Stevenson. If 'Dr Jekyll, ' 'The Master ofBallantrae, ' 'The Child's Garden of Verses, ' and 'Across the Plains' hadbeen each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyonewould have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but bysucceeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once, he has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. Butthe real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mahomet, as moralas that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical asthat of James Watt. 

The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was thatromance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far moreimportant than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, theother the body, and that the soul was the precious thing. The germ ofall his stories lies in the idea that every landscape or scrap ofscenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing before a stuntedorchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a mere fact that no onehas been through it but an elderly female cook. But everything existsin the human soul: that orchard grows in our own brain, and there it isthe shrine and theatre of some strange chance between a girl and aragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for the conception thatideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are our adventures. Tothink of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one. And this isthe reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he had to make onestory as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: forthe story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. Itis quite inappropriate to judge 'The Teller of Tales' (as the Samoanscalled him) by the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge MrGeorge Moore by 'Esther Waters. ' These novels were only the two orthree of his soul's adventures that he happened to tell. But he diedwith a thousand stories in his heart. 

[Footnote A: 'Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism. ' By H. Bellyse Baildon. Chatto & Windus. ]

THOMAS CARLYLE

There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: thefirst is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the secondis that he should believe in the acceptability of his message. It wasthe whole tragedy of Carlyle that he had the first and not the second. 

The ordinary capital, however, which is made out of Carlyle's allegedgloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man andas a writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his'liver' is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a'Sartor Resartus, ' it would be a vastly more tolerable thing than it is. Diseases do not turn into poems; even the decadent really writes withthe healthy part of his organism. If Carlyle's private faults andliterary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only in thesituation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficultto say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personalpredilections begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savageegotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to graspCarlyle's gospel. 'Ruskin, ' says a critic, 'did, all the same, verilybelieve in God; Carlyle believed only in himself. ' This is certainly adistinction between the author he has understood and the author he hasnot understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not havebelieved in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God, because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin, themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed wasnot in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in beliefin other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in hismessage; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St Francis, Bunyan, Wesley, Mr Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribablevariety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average manas their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fearand without condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, notonly in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle. 

But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's religious sentiment mustabsolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle's senseof the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it hasthe same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets--humour. A manmust be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagandelicately suggesting a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half-convertedTheosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think ofcracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religionwas so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony ofits contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy andliterature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers hadseen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour ofthem. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental andeternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be somethingelemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget thepassage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narratesthat some Court chronicler described Louis XV. As 'falling asleep in theLord. ' 'Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thicknight, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, throughunending ages, insult the face of the sun any more . .. And we go on, ifnot to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher ones. '

The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was thefounder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modernrationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value orvaluelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productivetool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectualsystem has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and thetrowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is thetrowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actualintellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logicis mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians. 

But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears upthe position of logic in human affairs. Logic is a machine of the mind, and if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion. When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not usingwords in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything bybad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is anextraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meantis the abuse or decay of that organ. Thus we speak of a man sufferingfrom 'nerves, ' which is about as sensible as talking about a mansuffering from ten fingers. We speak of 'liver' and 'digestion' when wemean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion. And in the samemanner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is thedanger of fallacy. 

But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partialoverthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhatdifferent. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that theybring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all. Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend toforget that there are two parts of a logical process--the first thechoosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it; andhumanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of soundreasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of soundassumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rationaland even rationalistic persons such a phrase as 'He did not prove thevery thing with which he started, ' or 'The whole of his case rested upona pure assumption, ' two peculiarities which may be found by the curiousin the works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how constantly onehears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic, apparently withouttroubling about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense, as it were, of the real colour and character of a man's assumption. Forinstance, two men will argue about whether patriotism is a good thingand never discover until the end, if at all, that the cosmopolitan isbasing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, becomeas God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalistdenies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animalwho has preferences, as a bird has feathers. 

 * * * * *

Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments butassumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men ofthe nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealeddirectly to the very different class of matters which they knew to betrue. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, andmore the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even wherehis view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing andbeneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which theage of reason based itself. He denied the theory of progress whichassumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfthcentury. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth centuryaccording to him depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved tobe. 

He denied every type and species of prop or association or support whichthrew the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything butthe individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The realground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the lastera of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, therehas been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone. 

Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him, as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form ofcommon-sense. Mysticism and common-sense alike consist in a sense of thedominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formallydemonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common-sense arealike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which haveno place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist inbreaking through formulas, old and new, to these old and silent andironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred timesover, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man andwoman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship forthe exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness, it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe. About hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justiceto Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which hesometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which werea great deal more connected with his temperament than with hisphilosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theoryof hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern andarrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about somequestions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is notthat human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guidedand driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrousand fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it inthem to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty torebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle's toneinvariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled withadmiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity. Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle's utterances, his heroworship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired greatmen primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they weremore human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle andhis religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship ofvalour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part ofall healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact thathe, more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of thatmodern habit of what is vulgarly called 'Going the whole hog. ' Often inmatters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog. Thisremarkable modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion, politics, and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for opportunitiesto assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is a thing whichexisted comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were melancholy, andoptimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obligedto prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and thepessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a good supper convulsehim with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly possessed with thismania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take the same view of thewars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at Donnybrook Fair. It wasthis species of insane logic which led him into his chief errors, neverhis natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example. Carlyle's defence ofslavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak alike in argument and inmoral instinct. The truth is, that he only took it up from the passionfor applying everywhere his paradoxical defence of aristocracy. Heblundered, of course, because he did not see that slavery has nothing inthe world to do with aristocracy, that it is, indeed, almost itsopposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its thoughtful defendershave made for aristocracy was that a few persons could more rapidly andfirmly decide public affairs in the interests of the people. But slaveryis not even supposed to be a government for the good of the governed. Itis a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak; slavery usesthe weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as aspiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed he was, that he should beruled and guided for his own good like a child--for a child who isalways ruled and guided we regard as the very type of spiritualexistence. But it is a derogation and an absolute contradiction to thathuman spirituality in which Carlyle believed that a man should be ownedlike a tool for someone else's good, as if he had no personal destinyin the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular error of Carlyle'sbecause we think that it is a curious example of the waste and uncleanplaces into which that remarkable animal, 'the whole hog, ' more thanonce led him. 

In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and anunquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethicwhich conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing foronce and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberatelydeaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example. Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in moderntimes the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. ThoughNietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlylebeing a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat, they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange andpitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test toeverything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed, embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urgeshimself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm withwhich a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles asa monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancientnecessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, itcan hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many atlast. 

TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY

The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, notdeliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of falseinnocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution, who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peasantry for the enormousexpenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life ofpeasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is thenecessary outcome of all our systems and speculations and of our deepand continuous contemplation of things. For the universe is likeeverything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually beforewe see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time thatwe see it for the first time. The more consistently things arecontemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore tosimplify themselves. The simplification of anything is alwayssensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is asif we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and, suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge andstaring face. 

Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time areupon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be morefundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, toundermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man, classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist, who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature withcolourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, goingyet deeper, who asserts that to his physical eye, which alone iscertain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey face. Then comesthe Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is certain, man isa creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great writers ofour time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-establishcommunication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more roughlyand fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that thereturn to nature consists in drinking no wine; some think that itconsists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some thinkthat the return to nature is achieved by beating swords intoploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares intovery ineffectual British War Office bayonets. It is natural, accordingto the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himselfwith gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionist, tokill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It wouldbe too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that theclaim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature isinteresting when we consider that they require huge volumes ofparadoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truthof their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alikein that they approach by very different roads this conception of thereturn to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior offact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns tonature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much hecan reject. 

Now, this heroic desire to return to nature is, of course, in somerespects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its owntail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve andsoothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor butcharacteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It isimpossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character ifattached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail inthe sense that it is vitally important if it is to discharge its realduty that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see nature, especially our own nature, face to face is a folly; it is even ablasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy-tale, whoshould set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he wouldfind his tail growing like a tree in the meadows at the end of theworld. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in searchof nature when seen from the outside looks very like the gyrations ofthe tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity, much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she isomnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we thinkthat she is heeding us least. 'Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, ' saidthe Hebrew poet. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind aman's back that the spirit of nature hides. 

It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even toall the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. Wefeel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring oncomplexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot makehimself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far moreintrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of thepomp and sumptuousness of the world's history was simple in the truestsense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the workof men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear. 

 'King Solomon brought merchant men Because of his desire With peacocks, apes and ivory, From Tarshish unto Tyre. '

But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was apart of his folly--I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoy, we feel, would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at 'Solomon inall his glory. ' With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a stepfurther. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping theshameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field. 

The new collection of 'Tales from Tolstoy, ' translated and edited by MrR. Nisbet Bain, is calculated to draw particular attention to thisethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy's work. In one sense, and that thedeepest sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and nobleappeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach ispretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is, that anartist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, hislandscape, his costume, his idiom and technique--all the part of hiswork, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than bythe elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be hisopinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and theethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that thebad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the realmoral of Tolstoy comes out constantly in these stories, the great moralwhich lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probablyunconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehementlydisapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over allthe tales, the folklore simplicity with which 'a man or a woman' arespoken of without further identification, the love--one might almost saythe lust--for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood, and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancientkindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man--theseinfluences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting andtearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscenepurity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into smallsins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respectto humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritanand an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoyhas vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralistwho is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man. 

It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist withTolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that aman who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life ofhumanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which thatdignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that aman who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrendingemptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one oftheir pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult tobelieve that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited theearth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with thelandscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as thatwhich attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It isdifficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestableinsolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, laythe oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the searchafter a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, morenatural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, itwould be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truestkinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth. 

The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance. Itrepresents the re-assertion of a certain awful common-sense whichcharacterised the most extreme utterances of Christ. It is true that wecannot turn the cheek to the smiter; it is true that we cannot give ourcloak to the robber; civilisation is too complicated, too vainglorious, too emotional. The robber would brag, and we should blush; in otherwords, the robber and we are alike sentimentalists. The command ofChrist is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preachedto a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was suddenly stricken with asense of humour it would find itself mechanically fulfilling the Sermonon the Mount. It is not the plain facts of the world which stand in theway of that consummation, but its passions of vanity andself-advertisement and morbid sensibility. It is true that we cannotturn the cheek to the smiter, and the sole and sufficient reason is thatwe have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his followers have shown that theyhave the pluck, and even if we think they are mistaken, by this signthey conquer. Their theory has the strength of an utterly consistentthing. It represents that doctrine of mildness and non-resistance whichis the last and most audacious of all the forms of resistance to everyexisting authority. It is the great strike of the Quakers which is moreformidable than many sanguinary revolutions. If human beings could onlysucceed in achieving a real passive resistance they would be strong withthe appalling strength of inanimate things, they would be calm with themaddening calm of oak or iron, which conquer without vengeance and areconquered without humiliation. The theory of Christian duty enunciatedby them is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can, conquer by persuasion. In their mythology St George did not conquer thedragon: he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer ofmilk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero wouldhave turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred theGreat. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing withthe bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summedup in the celebrated verse of Mr Edward Lear:

 'There was an old man who said, "How Shall I flee from this terrible cow? I will sit on a stile and continue to smile, Till I soften the heart of this cow. "'

Their confidence in human nature is really honourable and magnificent;it takes the form of refusing to believe the overwhelming majority ofmankind, even when they set out to explain their own motives. Butalthough most of us would in all probability tend at first sight toconsider this new sect of Christians as little less outrageous than somebrawling and absurd sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall into asingular error in doing so. The Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we cometo consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in ourmodern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religionmore sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars. 

From the point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is renderedalmost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. Itturns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentiallypossible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dustycasket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider thisphenomenon as it really is. 

The religion of Christ has, like many true things, been disproved anextraordinary number of times. It was disproved by the Neo-Platonistphilosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth uponits startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many ofthe sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second andsupremely striking embodiment, the religion of Puritanism, was about totriumph over many kings, and civilise many continents. We all agree thatthese schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but weall believe naturally and inevitably that the negation of our own dayis really a breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, aRagnorak, a twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century, like a schoolboy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression aresymbols of the end of the world. In our day the great irreligionists whodid nothing but dethrone God and drive angels before them have beenoutstripped, distanced, and made to look orthodox and humdrum. A newerrace of sceptics has found something infinitely more exciting to do thannailing down the lids upon a million coffins, and the body upon a singlecross. They have disputed not only the elementary creeds, but theelementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience. Theyhave arraigned civilisation as openly as the materialists havearraigned theology; they have damned all the philosophers even lowerthan they have damned the saints. Thousands of modern men move quietlyand conventionally among their fellows while holding views of nationallimitation or landed property that would have made Voltaire shudder likea nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and wildest phase of thissaturnalia of scepticism, the school that goes furthest among thousandswho go so far, the school that denies the moral validity of those idealsof courage or obedience which are recognised even among pirates, thisschool bases itself upon the literal words of Christ, like Dr Watts orMessrs Moody and Sankey. Never in the whole history of the world wassuch a tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of an ancient creed. Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were clovenasunder, or the sun did stand still at mid-day. We are faced with thephenomenon that a set of revolutionists whose contempt for all theideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen, who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and thegentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot ridthemselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdoteswritten in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about itsomething stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is inits presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, seesthe immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the wayof a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that thedark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, containin themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream. 

This value which we have above suggested, unquestionably belongs to theTolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With theirstrange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offera tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It cannotbut be remarkable to watch a revolution in which both the rulers and therebels march under the same symbol. But the actual theory ofnon-resistance itself, with all its kindred theories, is not, I think, characterised by that intellectual obviousness and necessity which itssupporters claim for it. A pamphlet before us shows us an extraordinarynumber of statements about the New Testament, of which the accuracy isby no means so striking as the confidence. To begin with, we mustprotest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time. When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of allwhat He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he hadexpressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of question andanswer:

Q. 'How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words?'

A. 'Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even as your Father; your Father inthe spirit world is merciful, is perfect. '

There is nothing in this, perhaps, which Christ might not have saidexcept the abominable metaphysical modernism of 'the spirit world'; butto say that it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it isrecorded that He preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple andunadulterated untruth. The author should know that these words havemeant a thousand things to a thousand people, and that if more ancientsects had paraphrased them as cheerfully as he, he would never have hadthe text upon which he founds his theory. In a pamphlet in which plainprinted words cannot be left alone, it is not surprising if there aremis-statements upon larger matters. Here is a statement clearly andphilosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves withflatly denying: 'The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should takespecial pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreigncountries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even havean antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people, and those who are in sympathy with us. ' I should very much like to knowwhere in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent, unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind ofregard for one person as for another. We are specifically told thatthere were certain persons whom He specially loved. It is mostimprobable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own. The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highestcompliment He paid was, 'Behold an Israelite indeed. ' The author hassimply confused two entirely distinct things. Christ commanded us tohave love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, tospeak of having the same love for all men is merely bewilderingnonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us mustbe vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom welove. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about assensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards. Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity: He lovedmen. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving agigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endureto think of an equally distributed affection is that their love ofhumanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by theirown theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat. 

But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up theteaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely andingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching--itsabsolute spontaneity. The abyss between Christ and all His moderninterpreters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, exceptwith His finger in the sand. The whole is the history of one continuousand sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from itbefore these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deducedafterwards. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for anyelaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idlewords that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and thesun was darkened at noonday. 

SAVONAROLA

Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until weknow what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall notknow until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we maynever understand Savonarola. 

The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them fromcalamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are theancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy:the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformerssaved us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evilcompared with which all these are flea-bites, the most desolating cursethat can fall upon men or nations, and it has no name, except we call itsatisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order;not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but fromluxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendouspsychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no namehas ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, andcivilisation potentially the end of man. 

For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of hisday went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modernrationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards, dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification ofSavonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of thecrimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need notbe so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merelypicked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggishenlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hatethe civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that isprecisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist. He saw that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolenjewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms;that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine andpictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of asceticsand Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did notalways mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralistwould call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatredof what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics aresometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less. 

Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was makingwar against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thanklessquiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by whichall creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is thesign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, thatclean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure asto gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic hastruly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentallyanti-ęsthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli, and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerityare even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter thanfor anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patientlythe stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requiresa discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude. 

The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was acivilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn thatleads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things growold with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark ofimagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss ofimagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse asit is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer besurprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is thestimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist. Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, thatof making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learntto ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines isthe doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of whichSavonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there isnothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings. Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical with democracy, is thehardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear asthe saying that they are all the sons of God. 

Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administeredto the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at thepresent day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and formere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be animprovement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such menas these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear. We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those whichawoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola--a hedonism that is more sickof happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeksthe assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modernworks we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense ofthe beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depravedimagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than adead one. Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes thefalling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for the strong manwhich is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is worshipped ashe is worshipped by the readers of the 'Bow Bells Novelettes, ' and forthe same reason--a profound sense of personal weakness. That tendency todevolve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alikewhether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or emperors. Against allthis the great clerical republican stands in everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival's success. The issue is stillbetween him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and thelicence of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security ofsilence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. Thesupporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men forwhom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the moment, men towhom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintryspring. They have an art, a literature, a political philosophy, whichare all alike valued for their immediate effect upon the taste, not forwhat they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes andsonnets are rounded and perfect, while 'Macbeth' is in comparison afragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their campaigns andbattles are always called triumphant, while Cęsar and Cromwell wept formany humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoilsinto madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely acushioned apartment, but a padded cell. 

This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and benthis whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course. Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some acharlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even haveunderstood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving themfrom a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys andsorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silentdanger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They alsoare supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple. 

Mr M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine worksof art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been muchexaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks ofincomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real momentmore real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend MichaelAngelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, andburnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glowtransfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world. 

THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his ownhigh place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though nowdwindling, schools of severely technical and ęsthetic criticism havebeen unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and ifthere is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it isin consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquirewhether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott, is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in anycase, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effectscarefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in theincidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange. 

It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the mattercould be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers areneglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as itexists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, likethe beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thingthat in literature alone a house should be despised because it is toolarge, or a host impugned because he is too generous. If romance bereally a pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader'sconsuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it isdifficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, itseems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in somedisproportion. If some of Scott's stories are dull and dilatory, it isnot because they are giants but because they are hunchbacks or cripples. Scott was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I do notthink that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan on whichhis stories are built was by any means an imperfection. He arranged hisendless prefaces and his colossal introductions just as an architectplans great gates and long approaches to a really large house. He didnot share the latter-day desire to get quickly through a story. Heenjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a storylike a pill that it should do him good afterwards. He desired to tasteit like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time. Thereader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air ofimmortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. We should notbe surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heartof hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story withouteither beginning or close. 

Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will neverbe understood until Romance is understood, and that will be only whenTime, Man, and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott had more thanany other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in thesedays, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arisesfrom one fundamental mistake--the idea that romance is in some way aplaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon theoutside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we havegrasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life butabsolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man's existence is adream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, liketoothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiegeand often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel. The boast of the realist (applying what the reviewers call his scalpel)is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallowincision if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins. Deeper than all these lies a man's vision of himself, as swaggering andsentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of candour unearthsinnumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is calledromance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, butit does not perceive the deepest of sins--the sin of vanity--vanitywhich is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin thatis not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest. 

In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romancewe must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance oradventure are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of aplot or the multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is, like tragedy or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark andelemental reason which we can never understand, this state of the soulis evoked in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation ofcertain human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and coveredwooden bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber. In the selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romanceas in a net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. Hisfinest scenes affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream. They havethe same quality which is often possessed by those nocturnalcomedies--that of seeming more human than our waking life--even whilethey are less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and theold beggar crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and thetide closes around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest ofpractical situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can onlybe called boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incrediblesunset. Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with BailieNicol Jarvie, draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of thedazzling external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet thatplain and humorous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy ofromance which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhapsthe most profoundly thrilling of all Scott's situations is that inwhich the family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage whichmay or may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princelypossession. Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of aridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolousold lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say nothing about what makesthese scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thathere the wind blows strong. 

It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousnessthat Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of thecontemporary crop of romancers who have followed the leadership ofDumas. There has, indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival ofromance in our time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every caseby this rooted conception that romance consists in the vastmultiplication of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative. The heroes of Mr Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out oftheir hands; the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when thesword is at the hip ready for innumerable adventures too terrible to bepictured. The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supperexcept in the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand isemployed in lunging with a rapier. In Scott's heroes, on the other hand, there is no characteristic so typical or so worthy of honour as theirdisposition to linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk ofCopmanhurst or of Mr Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they aredescribed as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott's poetictouches. In short, Mr Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction thatthe sole essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity fromincident to incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of thesentiment of 'Oh! still delay, thou art so fair'; more of a certainpatriarchal enjoyment of things as they are--of the sword by the sideand the wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by anymeans so much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. Howlittle the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools andweapons may be tested by the fact that the most popular story ofadventure is concerned with a man who lived for years on a desertisland with two guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy. 

Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly broughtagainst Scott, particularly in his own day--the charge of a fanciful andmonotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The criticin the 'Edinburgh Review' said indignantly that he could tolerate asomewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when itcame to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages andyeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said aboutthat critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishlyimagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion'ssake. Not being himself romantic, he could not understand that Scottvalued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was adagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love, as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of theprofound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants isthis love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their owninherent characteristics, the child's love of the toughness of wood, thewetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was withScott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhapsthe principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not theonly characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had acharacter and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in thematter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between theanimate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by amenial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurablyfascinating--it was a two-handed sword. 

There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which islittle appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost inrecent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist iscompounded of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare andScott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literaturehad failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudalheroes in the 'Waverley Novels' retort upon each other with apassionate dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, which can hardlybe paralleled in political eloquence except in 'Julius Cęsar. ' With acertain fiery impartiality which stirs the blood, Scott distributes hisnoble orations equally among saints and villains. He may deny a villainevery virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a tellingword; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one ofScott's most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity, for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revoltingmiscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Thoughhis soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king. 

This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of thepassing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea ofputting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man's head, but even wherethe moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seemsfrozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to thescene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and thencompare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificingbore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself, or Athelstane's defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passionupon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is justnow at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulatingourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom. Inpolitics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence inthe first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders purelyintellectual, like those of an omnibus conductor. In discussingquestions like the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the waruses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps exaggeratively) wouldhave used it--the speaker is content with facts and expositions offacts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song inprose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrileeshurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: 'Ride your ways, Lairdof Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram--this day have yequenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlourburns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottarhouses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye maystable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the haredoes not couch on the hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, GodfreyBertram. '

The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scottwas not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, justas a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the objectof all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls, to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously haveany chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outsideit. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detachedcriticisms, but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated withroars of popular applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shoutingany central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible tothink of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter ofeloquence, the whole question is one of the immediate effect ofgreatness, such as is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd tocall it merely superficial; here there is no question of superficiality;we might as well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merelysuperficial. The very word 'superficial' is founded on a fundamentalmistake about life, the idea that second thoughts are best. Thesuperficial impression of the world is by far the deepest. What wereally feel, naturally and casually, about the look of skies and treesand the face of friends, that and that alone will almost certainlyremain our vital philosophy to our dying day. 

Scott's bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone whoapproaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child. We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiringmelodramas and adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admitthat it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyondall question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable tosimplify one's mind at the first signal of the advance of romance. 'Youdo me wrong, ' said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. 'Many a law, manya commandment have I broken, but my word, never. ' 'Die, ' cries Balfourof Burley to the villain in 'Old Mortality. ' 'Die, hoping nothing, believing nothing--' 'And fearing nothing, ' replies the other. This isthe old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by thegreat worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes alongwith the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game withchildren or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves, and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantlyeffected. 

Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fictionby this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work ofthe modern novelist (such as the work of Mr Henry James) is primarilyconcerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeperand deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech whichmounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration. Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade isMr Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of 'Candida' it is clearly a partof the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be eloquent, but he is not eloquent, because the whole 'G. B. S. ' condition of mindrenders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires. Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, theway that heroes and villains take themselves--especially villains. It isthe custom to call these old romantic poses artificial; but the wordartificial is the last and silliest evasion of criticism. There wasnever anything in the world that was really artificial. It had somemotive or ideal behind it, and generally a much better one than wethink. 

Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak, for faults are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet noadequate valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We havecompiled a complete botanical classification of the weeds in thepoetical garden, but the flowers still flourish neglected and nameless. It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff andpedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl ofeighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr Johnson. To him, as tomost men of his time, woman was not an individual, but aninstitution--a toast that was drunk some time after that of Church andKing. But it is far better to consider the difference rather as aspecial merit, in that he stood for all those clean and bracing shocksof incident which are untouched by passion or weakness, for a certainbreezy bachelorhood, which is almost essential to the literature ofadventure. With all his faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for thegreat mass of natural manliness which must be absorbed into art unlessart is to be a mere luxury and freak. An appreciation of Scott might bemade almost a test of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this onemost reckless and defective writer, it will be a proof to us that wehave erected round ourselves a false cosmos, a world of lying andhorrible perfection, leaving outside of it Walter Scott and thatstrange old world which is as confused and as indefensible and asinspiring and as healthy as he.