G. K. Chesterton

The Apostle and the Wild Ducks

G. K. Chesterton

[1874–1936]

The Apostle and the Wild Ducks

And Other Essays

1975

Edited by Dorothy E. Collins

Table of Contents

IN GENERAL

A Sermon on Cheapness

On Manners

For Persons of the Name of Smith

The True Vanity of Vanities

Written in the Sand

A Case of Comrades

Something

Asparagus

The English Spirit and the Flea

The Hobby and the Head Waiter

In Praise of Pie

Culture versus Civilisation

The Winter Feast

They Tell a Story

HERE AND THERE

Walking Tours

The Blindness of the Sightseer

The Aesthetes in the Kitchen Garden

The Need of Personalities in Politics

The Largest Window in the World

The Apostle and the Wild Ducks

Travellers’ Joys

Understanding France

Salute to New York

The British Beech

Public Monuments

THE MAKING OF HISTORY

Statues

A Theory of Tyrants

An Anecdote of Persecution

The Return of Pageantry

Rational History

The Unknown Warrior

William Penn and His Royalist Friends

ON LITERATURE

Ruskin: the Humorist

Literature of Information

Eulogy of Robin Hood

A Plea for Hasty Journalism

The Voice of Shelley

The Great Translation

Jane Austen’s Juvenilia

The Countrymen of Mary Webb and Thomas Hardy

The Words of Strong Poetry

The Refrain of the Rover

ON REFLECTION

What is Right With the World

IN GENERAL

A Sermon on Cheapness

The Speaker, 29 March 1902

It is really time that the absurd pretence of the vices to be romantic were given up. Ever since the time of Byron there has been vague and foolish conception clinging to all men’s minds that there is some connection between lawlessness and poetry, between orderly images and disorderly acts. A thousand instances might be given to show the shallowness of this idea. For instance, blasphemy has been regarded as something bold and splendid, as if the very essence of blasphemy were not the commonplace. It is the very definition of profanity that it thinks and speaks of certain things prosaically, which other men think and speak of poetically. It is thus a defeat of the imagination, and a volume full of the wildest pictures and most impious jests remains in its essential character a piece of poor literalism, a humdrum affair. The same general truth might be pursued through all the Ten Commandments. Murder, for instance, is quite overrated, aesthetically. I am assured by persons on whose judgment I rely, and whose experience has, presumably, been wide, that the feelings of a murderer are of a quite futile character. What could be stupider than kicking to pieces, like a child, a machine you know nothing about, the variety and ingenuity of which should keep any imaginative person watching it delightedly day and night? Say we are acquainted with such a human machine; let us say, a rich uncle. A human engine is inexhaustible in its possibilities; however long and unrewarding has been our knowledge of the avuncular machine, we never know that the very moment that we lift the assassin’s knife the machine is not about to grind forth some exquisite epigram which it would make life worth living to hear, or even, by some spasm of internal clockwork, produce a cheque. To kill him is clearly prosaic. Alive, he is a miracle; dead, he is merely a debris, a debris of unpleasant gore and quite inappropriate and old-fashioned clothes. Objection is sometimes brought against the absolute legal and medical doctrine that life should under all circumstances and at all costs be kept burning. It may or may not be moral and humane but there can be no doubt of its impressiveness as a purely poetical ideal. It is the desire, so natural in an imaginative man of science, to preserve the only thing that can really be of any interest to anyone.

I have taken these two instances, as the first that come to hand, of the general fact of the mean and matter-of-fact character of the vices, the wild and thrilling character of the virtues. Many other examples might be taken of the raptures and roses of virtue, the lilies and languors of vice. But an example, stranger both in its truth and in its unfamiliarity than any other, chiefly occupies my mind. Of all the conventional virtues there is none that is so completely despised by the aesthetic and Bohemian philosophers as economy. It is represented as the very meanest of human standards, a merit for cowards and greasy burgesses, a thing that is even base when it is a virtue and dull when it is a vice. But in truth there is no quality so truly romantic as economy.

Economy is essentially imaginative because it is a realisation of the value of everything. The real objection to murder, aesthetically speaking, is that it is uneconomical. It is a failure in efficiency (I want to write that word down and look at it) to waste a whole man in order to procure a momentary emotion which is often disappointing. And the real objection to waste is that all waste is a kind of murder, a merely negative and destructive thing, the obliteration of something which we can neither value nor understand. We slay an uncle because we do not realise the strange dumb poetry of an uncle; we fling away a penny because we cannot realise the gorgeous possibilities of a penny. I have murdered many pennies, many trusting half-crowns, in my life. For let it be clearly understood that I do not maintain for a moment that this poetry of economy is an easy thing for any of us to keep up. We tend to forget the poetry of pennies just as we tend to forget the poetry of skies and woods and great buildings, because we see them so often. In practice it is most difficult to be the Economic Man. We have all heard of the clergyman who spoke in defence of teetotalism, saying that for twenty years he had tried to teach drunkards to drink moderately, and had never once succeeded. The reporters, with unintentional kindness, described him as having said that for twenty years he had tried to drink moderately and had never once succeeded. So it is with this great question of economy.

For a long period the writer of the present article has tried to be economical and has never once succeeded. But I impute this entirely to a lack of true poetry in myself. I do not for a moment dream of shielding myself behind so transparent and canting a plea as the notion that there is anything artistic or romantic in being extravagant. The man who does not look at his change is no true poet. To give away a penny deliberately is indeed one of the highest triumphs of imagination: it means that the giver can realise the meaning of the existence of some ragged family herded in the lairs of East London. But to throw away a penny is sheer lack of imagination; it means that the giver cannot realise even the meaning of a penny. It means that he forgets the first and most thrilling of all the lessons of the universe, the lessons of every seed and germ, the lesson of the infinite and terrible power that may be found in small things. The French, the most poetical of all peoples, are also the most economical. The English working man, with his sterling, solid common sense, throws away every rag and bone that does not appear to him useful at the first glance; the French cottager turns those rags and bones into exquisite and civilised dishes. Economy is only another name for universalism; the true poet regards every earthly object as having some value and secret utility— with the possible exception of a dust-cart. The old romance of life was held to consist in expense—in the jewels and perfumes of the ‘Arabian Nights’, in the cushion and cigars of Ouida. The newer and truer romance will be the romance of cheapness. It will address itself to the truly imaginative task of realising what is the real worth (a worth running into millions) of the penny cup of coffee to the tired pedestrian at midnight or the pennyworth of tobacco, to the poor man in his half-hour holiday. It will celebrate the cheapness of ecstasy.

My bosom friend the Pessimist and I were standing outside a small toy shop, glueing our noses to the glass, when the long silence was broken by my remarking on the beauty of a solid stick of blue chalk, which was offered for sale (in some tempest of generosity) for a halfpenny. ‘Have you considered,’ I asked, ‘all that this stick of blue chalk means? For a halfpenny I am possessed of it. I go home at night under the stars, between dark walls and through mazy streets. I shall be free to write upon those walls beautiful or stern sentiments, arraigning the powers of the earth, and write them in the very colour of heaven. At home I may beguile the evening in a thousand innocent sports, designing barbaric patterns upon the new table-cloth, drawing dreamy and ideal landscapes upon the note-paper, decorating my own person in the manner of our British predecessors, sketching strange and ideal adventures for strange and ideal characters. And all this blue river of dreams is loosened by a halfpenny.’

The Pessimist replied, in his sad, stern way, ‘Drivel. It is only the blue chalk you buy for a halfpenny. You do not buy the stars for a halfpenny; you do not buy the streets for a halfpenny; you do not buy your dreams or your love of drawing or your tastes and imaginations for a halfpenny.’

‘True,’ I replied. ‘The stars and the dreams and myself are cheaper than chalk: for I bought them for nothing.’

He burst into tears and became immediately convinced of the basis of true religion. For our very word for God means Economy: is not improvidence the opposite of Providence?

On Manners

Daily News, 18 July 1902

One of the greatest difficulties in any philosophical discussion of manners is the fact that the presence of bad manners and the absence of any manners are treated as identical. We say indifferently of a man of a more or less repulsive social ineptitude either that he has no manners or that he has bad manners. How entirely different these two things are may be tested by the fact that in no other affairs do we treat these phrases as synonymous. There is all the difference in the world between saying that a man has no wine and saying that he has bad wine. There is all the difference in the world between the comparatively trifling biographical statement, ‘He has no sons,’ and the really disquieting one, ‘He has bad sons’. If, when we were about to breakfast with a friend, a common acquaintance were to approach us and whisper impressively, ‘You will eat no eggs,’ the expression would amount to little more than an interesting detail; if he were to whisper, ‘You will eat bad eggs,’ an element of tragedy would at once appear. But the difference between no manners and bad manners is quite as definite and important as the difference between no eggs and bad eggs.

The absence of manners is an unconscious and chaotic thing, the product of vagueness, of monomania, of absence of mind, of ignorance of the world. But the presence of bad manners is a perfectly solemn, deliberate, and artificial thing, the result of pride and vainglory, hypocrisy and blindness and hardness of heart. A great mass of human society may thus be simply and satisfactorily divided into two definite sections. But the actual nature of the bad manners which constitute the chief characteristic of good society is worthy, it may be, of somewhat more profound examination and definition. For the manners which we see in the centres of social life such as the House of Commons are really bad, not in the sense that they are insufficient or ignorant, but in the sense that they violate what is the whole object and meaning of manners.

Courtesy is a mystical thing; it may be defined as a spontaneous worship. Politeness is, indeed, even more fantastically reverential than religion itself, for it treats a landlady’s parlour as the religionist treats a temple. To him all houses are holy, and whenever or wherever it be found, the covered place demands the uncovered head. Politeness is thus a thing mysterious and elemental, going down to the foundations of the world. Since no man can express how surprising and terrifying and beautiful is every object upon which we gaze, on the day when we all become truly primitive we shall all become extravagantly polite; we shall take off our hats to the sparrows, and apologise for treading on the daisies. Politeness of this kind is simply imagination. That is the inevitable result of realising that things are there. Here, as in so many other cases, we see the singular dullness of all those sections of society who call themselves unconventional. They imagine that unconventionality is a mark of being artistic or imaginative. It is, of course, a mark of being especially prosaic and limited. For the great conventions are, as their name grammatically implies, simply the great agreements, and agreement is essential to all art, and to all ceremony, and, indeed, to everything, except mere rowdy competition and free fights. If a man is ceremonious he is conventional, and if he is poetical he is ceremonious.

In so far, therefore, as the artistic classes believe in a lounging and Bohemian existence, they are fighting against the very nature of art, and also against the very nature of a vivid realisation of things. If once we realised things vividly, and saw how valuable they are, we should become more elaborately urbane than any dandy of the old school. What was wrong with the dandies of the old school was not the fact that their politeness was extravagant, but the fact that they did not really believe in it. The Brummell type was wrong, not because it bowed repeatedly over a lady’s hand, but because it did not respect her either in act or conversation. The bowing was entirely right; if we saw things for one moment as they are we should stand bowing for several minutes over the hand of the news-boy or the crossing-sweeper, thus creating some sensation in the neighbourhood.

Now if it be once granted that politeness is reverence, an expression of reverence for our environment, it does not particularly matter by what actual physical pantomime it is expressed. It may be expressed, as in the case of the Christian and Jewish religions, by taking off your hat, or by putting it on. In many Oriental countries it is expressed by taking off one’s boots, and in some of the great Republics of the Antipodes it may, for all I know, be expressed by taking off your collar or your waistcoat. Certain savages rub each other’s noses when they meet, and I have no doubt that they rub them reverentially. The form matters nothing, so long as the spirit which it is meant to convey is a spirit of chivalry and of a poetic humility. But the great central and remarkable thing about society manners in this decade is that they are not intended to express the idea of courtesy, the idea, that is to say, that we are impressed with our surroundings, but, on the contrary, specially and elaborately intended to express the idea that we do not care a brass farthing for anyone for a mile round. The old-fashioned bowing and scraping may have been ludicrous and hypocritical, when taken in conjunction with the materialistic or immoral practices which went along with it, but at least the form itself, the actual bow and scrape, did express deference and self-subordination. But the modern manners of the richer class are actually framed, like a careful artistic work, to express indifference to everything and everybody.

The modern gentleman is not the man who knows how to be polite; he is the man who knows how to be rude in an entirely gentlemanly manner. His only scruple is that he must not be rude in the same way that an omnibus conductor is rude—that is to say, in an amusing way. It is the object of modern urbanity not to cultivate the hypocritical subservience of the old bucks and beaux, but to cultivate a way of bowing to a lady which is a great deal more personally offensive than hitting her in the face. It is not, in short, courtesy at all; it is not an awkward and clownish attempt to indicate that we care for our surroundings; it is a perfectly polished, deliberate and successful attempt to indicate that we care for nothing in earth or Heaven. Uneducated people, that is to say, have no manners, educated people have bad manners.

Nobody can visit the House of Commons without coming away with the general impression that the art cultivated by the young country gentleman is the art of doing his worst elegantly; and to do one’s worst, however elegantly, remains what it is, the one and solitary supreme insult. If a man throws his worst or his tenth best to anything, it matters nothing if the thing he throws be the Iliad or a casket of sapphires, it still remains an insult. And this insult to the ancient English Parliament is expressed in every line of the figures of the well-dressed Members of the House. A man with a million genuine and intellectual charms, is supposed to be a man with good manners. This simply means that he exhibits an unusual degree of physical grace in the act of putting his boots within a foot or two of the Mace of the King of England. It is a terrible thing that while true courtesy is a transcendental virtue and involves admiration, the most courteous man in modern politics is also the incarnation of indifference.

For Persons of the Name of Smith

Daily News, 28 November 1902

Some time ago Mr C. F. G. Masterman led a vigorous attack upon my timid and humble optimism, and declared in effect that when I maintained a poetry in all things it was I who supplied it. I wish I could claim that I had ever supplied poetry to anything; it seems to me that I am at the very best a humdrum scientific student noting it down. The sentimentalists, the sons of a passionate delusion, are those who do not think everything poetical. For they are wholly under the influence of words, of the vague current phraseology, which thinks ‘castle’ a poetical word and ‘Post-office’ an unpoetical word, which thinks ‘knight’ a poetical word and ‘policeman’ an unpoetical word, which thinks ‘eagle’ a poetical word and ‘pig’ an unpoetical word. I do not say that there is not truth in this as a matter of literature; I do not say that in pure technical style there is not a difference between eagles and pigs. All I wish to point out is that the ordinary man in the street when he says that there is no poetry in a pig or a post-office is, in fact, merely intoxicated with literary style. He is not looking at the thing itself; if he did that he would see that it was not only poetical, but obviously and glaringly poetical. He thinks a railway-signal, let us say, must be prosaic, because the word sounds funny, and there is no rhyme in it. But if he looked straight and square at what a railway-signal is, he would realise that it was, to take a casual case, a red fire or light kindled to keep people from death, as poetical a thing as the spear of Britomart or the lamp of Aladdin. It is, in short, the man who thinks ordinary things common who is really the man living in an unreal world.

But of all the examples of this general fact that have recently been called to my notice, there is none more peculiar and interesting than that of the family name of Smith, in which we have a splendid example of the fact that the poetry of common things is a mere fact, while the commonplace character of common things is a mere delusion. For, if we look at the name Smith in a casual and impressionable way, remembering how we commonly hear it, what is commonly said about it, we think of it as something funny and trivial; we think of pictures in Punch, of jokes in comic songs, of all the cheapness and modernity which seem to centre round a Mr Smith. But, if we look at the plain word itself, we suddenly behold a poem. It is the name of a great rugged and primeval craft, a trade that is in the bones of every great epic of antiquity, a trade on which the ‘arma virumque’ have everlastingly depended, and which they have repeatedly acclaimed. It is a craft so poetical that even the babies of village yokels stand and stare into the cavern of its creative violence, with a dim sense that the dancing sparks and the deafening blows are in some way wonderful, as the shops of the village cobbler and the village baker are not wonderful. The mystery of flame, the mystery of metals, the fight between the hardest of earthly things and the weirdest of earthly elements, the defeat of the unconquerable iron by its only conqueror, the brute calm of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the origin of a thousand sciences and arts, the ploughing of fields, the hewing of wood, the arraying of armies, and the whole beginning of arms, these things are written with brevity indeed, but with perfect clearness, on the visiting card of Mr Smith. The Smiths are a house of arrogant antiquity, of prehistoric simplicity. It would not be at all remarkable if a certain contemptuous carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, marked people whose name was Smith. Yet novelists, when they wish to describe a hero as strong and romantic, persistently call him Vernon Aylmer, which means nothing, or Bertrand Vallance, which means nothing; while all the time it is in their power to give him the sacred name of Smith, this name made of iron and fire. From the very beginnings of history and fable this clan has gone forth to battle; their trophies are in every hand, their name is everywhere; they are older than the nations, and their sign is the Hammer of Thor.

Anyone whose name is Smith may be connected with a Smith who was a lawyer in the reign of Henry VIII, or a Smith who was a Colonel in the British army at Blenheim, or a Smith who was a Cavalier, or a Smith who was a Puritan, or a Smith who was a Bishop, or a Smith who was hanged. All this kind of historic information exists in a very perfect form. But it must be remembered that the origin of a great family should be not merely historic, but also prehistoric. Every single practical and triumphant thing in this world has begun, not with an accuracy, but with a legend. These dim, gigantic fables are the origins of all practical things. And behind the dimmest and most gigantic Smith, we may see the more tremendous outlines of the formless and fabulous Smith who was the son of Vulcan and the first conqueror of iron. The shame which many people seem to feel about owning to such a patronymic or tracing its origin, is an extraordinary thing, but it is part of a very deep and general evil which has been going on for some time back. The interest in race, the interest in genealogy, which were professed by the ancient aristocratic world, were not bad things; they were in themselves good things. It is, at least, as reasonable to investigate the origin of a man as to investigate the origin of a cowslip, or a periwinkle, or a prairie dog; the herald with his tabard and trumpet holds his perfectly legitimate place beside the botanist and the conchologist and the natural history expert. What was wrong with the old heraldic speculations was not that they existed, but that they did not go far enough. They did not interest themselves in the blood of the yokel and the mystic paternity of the tinker. In other words, the evil was not that there was too much genealogy, but that there was not enough. And the real work to which democracy ought to address itself is that of extending this racial interest to the case of all ordinary men, of teaching the butcher to be proud of his grandfather, and the railway porter to remember his name with pride. For the single case of the name ‘Smith’ is sufficient to indicate what profundities of origin and significance lie in all our names. The case of Smith is no mere accident; the case would be the same with any one of the common names which we account prosaic or absurd. ‘Jones’ is more mean and preposterous even than Smith, and even those who bear the name of Jones do not probably remember that it is but a corruption of the name that Christ loved. There is not one of us that is not noble in origin, whatever we may be in essence.

The True Vanity of Vanities

Daily News, 27 February 1904

It will not, I imagine, be disputed that the one black and inexcusable kind of pride is the pride of the man who has something to be proud of. It is true that you often do hear people saying, as they say other idle and unmeaning things while they are really watching a bird fly or expecting the dinner-bell, that such and such a person is vain, but has some right to be. But you do not find these people actually regarded with anything short of the most delightful loathing; whereas the nice old donkeys who are vain without any earthly ground for vanity at all, are not only universally and rightly beloved, but are made Cabinet Ministers and Bishops, and covered with a continual admiration. And this popular feeling is right. The universal objection to the people who are proud of genuine calibre is not any mere jealousy of them; it is not a paltry or panic-stricken resentment of their admitted superiority. It is, like a great many other things which ordinary people feel in a flash and could not possibly defend, entirely philosophical. The instinct of the human soul perceives that a fool may be permitted to praise himself, but that a wise man ought to praise God. A man who really has a head with brains in it ought to know that this head has been gratuitously clapped on top of him like a new hat. A man who by genius can make masterpieces ought to know that he cannot make genius. A man whose thoughts are as high as the stars ought to know that they roll almost as regardless of his power. A man who possesses great powers ought to know that he does not really possess them.

So it certainly does in practice come about that the more right a man has to vanity the less the sensible human race permits him to be vain. The most really ennobling, the most really health-giving orders of conceit are those that concern something of which a man has no obvious right at all to be conceited, the things over which he exercises no control, which he did not create and which he could not terminate. If we want what we should all regard as the very kindliest and most harmless kind of pride a man could have, the kind of pride that does not in effect make him offensive and unbrotherly, we should all mention something like the love of country or the dim pride of some very ancient race. The people who, profess these are mostly dear old buffers, because they are proud of something they have not procured. Far more brutal than these are the people who have in some sort of way deserved their position—the capitalists, the parvenus, the children of the modern mercantile ferocity. Yet they, too, in their way have a silvery thread of graciousness, because they are stupid, and have been, like the aristocrats, the acceptors of some beautiful accident.

The sin of pride blackens into an unbearable infamy when we came to the artistic and literary people who are proud of their intellects. They are worse than the scientific people, because the scientific people have far less reason to be proud than the artistic and literary people. The scientists to a great extent inherit, like the aristocrats, and are thus kept tolerable; the literary people—such, for instance, as the present writer—create, and are too disgusting for words. The literary arrogance is very nearly the worst, but is not the worst. Those who swagger because they have intellects suppose that intellect is the most important thing on earth, and theirs would be an easy existence only that it happens that it is not. Those who pride themselves on intelligence are priding themselves on a quite subordinate and suburban sort of excellence. The highest thing in the world is goodness. It is so high that, fortunately, the great majority of people who have it are horribly frightened of it, and keep their own virtue as they would keep some sort of wild horse or griffin. But every now and then there do appear people who are good and who know they are good, and who are proud of being good. And if there be any reality burning through the written phrase, if there be any passion which strains at the strings of language, if there be any emotion which, through translations and re-translations and versions and diversions, is still alive, these were the people whom Jesus Christ could hardly forbear to scourge.

This is, I suppose, the whole subtlety of the sin of pride; all other sins attack men when they are weak and weary; but this attacks when men are happy and valuable and nearer to all the virtues. And when it attacks most easily the results are vilest. The whole difference between the religion of Christianity and such a religion, for instance, as that of Brahminism, is merely this. The castes of Christian Europe are insolent, abominable, unendurable things, which have been endured, as a matter of fact, for centuries; but they have one great virtue, they are irreligious. But in Brahminism the castes are religious things; it is a virtue to be aristocratic. And against any people who claim to rule me by spiritual superiority, I will everlastingly and happily rebel, conscious of that image of deity which equalises us all.

Written in the Sand

Daily News, 19 August 1905

In the mid-way of this our mortal life, I find myself (as in one of the changes of a dream) at a watering-place on the East Coast. I find among other things that it is raining and that my fellow creatures, or at least my fellow visitors, are in a state of irrational indignation over that circumstance. ‘How paradoxical it is in you,’ I say to them with astonishment, ‘to come to a watering-place and exhibit distress when it waters you.’ I explain to them how unjust, how fundamentally unpoetic is the current prejudice against rain.

I point out to them how singular an example this prejudice affords of the perverse and artificial nature of our modern English patriotism... All Englishmen join in reviling that lovable and admirable English thing, the English climate. Everybody blasphemously rails against those mutable and magnificent skies which are a perpetual transformation scene. Everybody vilifies this land of violent and benignant clouds, the only land that could have produced the stormy summers of Constable or the red apocalypse of Turner. Of these mysterious phases rain is only one, and not the least beautiful. When I point this out to my fellow Englishmen their spirit takes on something of the turbid transformations of the English sky. ‘How colossal, how cosmic a vision,’ I say to them, ‘is the rain upon the sea. Worms, you are permitted to gaze upon a reversal of the fifth day of creation. The waters below the firmament were divided from the waters that were above the firmament. And lo! they are wedded again.’ This kind of conversation naturally makes me popular.

I am particularly beloved by those who are frustrated in their desire for sea-bathing. ‘What,’ I exclaim, ‘your whole heart is set on wetting yourself in that silly pool of salt. Give me,’ I cry ecstatically, ‘the Baths of Heaven!’ After thus discussing the matter with various groups of people, I find myself thrown back on a gentle solitude. I wander along the lean sands by the bright, bleak sea. The weather is clearing, and sky and sea shine like pale steel, as if they had been washed and rubbed by the rain. Along the empty sands two small boys are trailing their feet disconsolately. They do not know what to do; they do not know where to go. Only a dim and blind gregarious instinct, a brotherhood as deep as the brutes, leads them to do nothing together and to go nowhere together. They do not speak, they are too weary even to quarrel, though they have made no exertion; they are sunk in that strange and sudden and very occasional boredom which belongs to boyhood, and which is like all boyhood’s experiences, like its love and its fear, pure and intense, the undiluted essence of ennui.

At last, after what seems like leagues of drifting, something happens. Either the sun paints one strip of silver on the leaden sea, or, more likely, the soul itself, with its mysterious silences and activities, rebels and flashes; but one of the boys bounds suddenly into an excavation in the sand, the remains of some other boy’s fortress, and begins to bank it up again furiously, as if he were walling the wild sea out of the flats of England. The other stares a little while with a stupid curiosity, as at a trifle; then on him also comes the primeval will to action which drives metaphysicians to madness, and he also leaps, like Remus, over the wall and begins to build the city. Three minutes afterwards they are talking; six minutes afterwards, still happier sign, they are fighting.

I will not go so far as to say that these two boys were some dark and dreadful cherubim sent to act before my eyes a spiritual mystery, however fine a background for it would have been the grey edge of the sea and that strange blank light so white and wet which grows in the clearing sky. But it is certainly true that the episode of the two little boys depicts as in a small miracle play one of the least of the truths that lie behind our modern civilisation, and constitute the answer to that question which is asked in large letters all over the newspapers, ‘What is Wrong?’

The thing that is wrong is a certain fallacy with which we English have comforted ourselves for same decades, which may be called the fallacy of unity, or in another and slighter form, the fallacy of sociability. What I mean is this, that we have fallen into a habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is full of quarrelling as a sign that it is weak. And we have fallen into the more dangerous habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is not full of quarrelling as a sign that it is strong or energetic. The reason that the Irish fight each other, and even hate each other, is not that they are Celts. It is not even that they are Irish. It is simply that they have something to do. The reason that the French groups split and fight is not that they are Latins; it is not even that they are French. It is simply that they have something to do. And the reason that English politicians work together in unity is certainly not that they are English. It is that they have nothing to do; when, for instance, they had James II to dethrone, or when they had Walpole to howl against, or when they had Napoleon to fight, they behaved exactly as the French and the Irish do; parties were broken by secessions; heads were broken by sticks.

We are like the two little boys walking along the sands. We go together easily enough as long as we are going nowhere. We can do as others do cheerfully enough, as long as we are doing nothing. But the moment we agree to do anything we begin to disagree about it.

A Case of Comrades

Daily News, 14 March 1908

There was once a lady of a very beautiful character (delicate, yet decisive, for that is the definition of a lady) who asked me whether I did not believe in the possibility of a simple comradeship between the sexes. Being somewhat in a corner, I replied that, as I understood the word comradeship, I did not.

I gave some of my reasons. I did not give my first and firmest and most unhesitating reason, which was this: that I knew quite well that if I had treated the lady herself for four consecutive minutes as a comrade she would have ordered me out of the house. But I gave some other reasons. I remarked that comradeship was a quite special thing; that it was quite different from friendship. I said (and this, oddly enough, I believe to be profoundly true) that a man can be the friend of a woman, but not her comrade. For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.

In the Greek grammar, which I learnt with difficulty and forgot with ease, there was one thing, I remember, which would by itself prove that the Greeks were a great people. I mean the fact that there is in Greek a dual as well as a plural. Two is quite different from any other number, just as one is quite different from any other number: that truth is the basis of marriage. When I knew there was a Greek dual I could easily realise that the Greeks gave philosophy to the world.

My concern here is that comradeship is essentially plural. Now, women are not plural. The very word ‘women’ has about it, I think, a sort of bad taste: it smacks of polygamous Turks or tired and cynical men-about-town. There are no such things as women. There is only the woman you are at this particular moment afraid of or in love with, or inclined to reverence or inclined to assassinate. I think a real crowd of women would be like fifty suns or half a hundred moons—it would be weaker for its numbers. The sun would not have room to shine.

In any case, what I had to say about comradeship to this particular lady was tolerably clear. I merely pointed out that comradeship is a particular sort of human association; and the essential paradox of it is this; that it is at once violent and cool. People talking in twos talk gently, because they feel emphatically: people talking in tens or twenties talk emphatically because they do not care a dump about anything. Friendship becomes comradeship when you have forgotten the presence of your friend. You are addressing the abstract thing, the club, which, when two or three are gathered together (of the male sort at least) is always in the midst of them. Men’s debating clubs have a pedantic phrase which exactly expresses this truth: they talk of ‘speaking to the motion’. It is true; men do speak to a motion, not about it; they talk to a topic. Women talk to each other; that is why their conversations are frightfully fascinating, but too terrible for us to listen to for long without running away.

Do you remember how Thackeray cries out, ‘O les lâches que les hommes!’ when George Warrington and Lord Castlewood rush from the room merely because the young American girl has begun a sweet satiric conversation with old Beatrix Esmond? It is almost the truest thing in Thackeray. Our sex is not strong or bold enough to endure that agony of directly personal conversation in which women are supreme. We must have a topic— an impersonal one. And as I told my admirable lady friend, a male friend becomes a comrade when one has forgotten him. To forget a male friend is only to behave like a comrade. But to forget a woman friend is only to behave like a cad. She is herself; he is the club.

But if either that lady or any other lady really wants to know whether she and her sex should share masculine camaraderie; whether they would really be stronger and happier by doing so; whether, in short, we are in such a matter keeping them out of something they would naturally enjoy, I am just now in a position to enlighten them, by giving them an instance, realistically exact and universally typical, of what our masculine comradeship really is.

If any lady wants to know what she is letting herself in for if she goes in for Comradeship, what really happens when comrades meet together, this is what happens. It happened yesterday morning. I was breakfasting with a mob of undergraduates of one of our great Universities, and the whole company was broken up into groups of two or three extravagantly engaged in some argument. I myself was engaged in two arguments. I was trying to prove to an Agnostic on my right that there was such a place as Heaven, and to an Imperialist on my left that there was such a place as England: when suddenly all our minor clamours were cloven with a monstrous and crashing noise from the other end of the table. Ten men were talking at once, three were beating on the table in pure passion, one was screaming above the din, and then (as is common in such crises) there was, for an instant, an unmeaning silence, and then the voice of one of the best orators of the Union rose, piercing and pathetic, throbbing to the echoes of the roof, alone:

‘I do not say that the corridor ran the whole length of the train. What I say, what I say emphatically and with the full responsibility of my intellect, is that it ran on the left-hand side of our carriage. And I know that I speak the truth.’

We all rushed to the spot. I dropped England with one hand and Heaven with the other. I craned my neck to find out what it was all about. It was about this very profound and urgent question: whether when three persons present travelled to Scotland about two years ago in a luncheon car, the shape of that car had been such that there was a corridor down the left-hand side or a kind of passage down the middle. Only three persons present had ever seen the car, and they could not agree; but we soon took it out of their puny hands. We argued it in the abstract. We discussed whether in the nature of things the passage would have been in the middle. I founded a sect of my own, midway between the Orthodox Passagist position and the Extreme Corridorians’ position. Some held that the nature of the luncheon should be taken into account in all evidence of the shape of the luncheon-car. We made maps of the car with forks and spoons on the table, and little lumps of sugar to show where the people sat. The whole discussion took nearly two hours.

But, indeed, temporal measurements cannot express the length, for we talked as if we were the immortal Gods and had all eternity before us: for to be outside time is one of the strange elements of fraternity. We were only interrupted by some academic custom which required that the Union officials should be photographed. And even then one of them moved. He kept on quivering and stirring until the photographer broke into pathetic complaint. Then he, in return, broke out, ‘I never denied that there was a case for the corridor at the side. What I said—’ But we crushed him, reluctantly. All this is, to the best of my recollection, quite true.

I fancy that I do not see any very approving expression on the faces of my lady friends. They are not moved by this Homeric war. They feel, perhaps, that the question of whether one luncheon-car two years ago was of a particular shape was not an urgent question. They feel that when argued by eighteen youths for two hours it might even have become a tiring question. O mightiest of all things, O mothers of the gods, they are only little things that you do not understand, only a few sports and follies of the stags of the herd. Be you content as you are secure: you understand everything except comradeship.

Something

Daily News, 9 July 1910

It is customary for cultivated people from century to century to set up some artistic fashion and pretend to be more old-world or natural than they are. Thus the French noblesse played at being old Greek shepherds and shepherdesses; for the rich are always craving for barbarism while the poor are always pushing (rather blindly) for more civilisation. Within our own memory drawing-rooms have been full of dismal people in dingy garments who were supposed (I hardly know why) to recall the gay colours and coarse virtues of the Middle Ages. If ever I adopted one of these barbaric affectations it would be one which has been, I think, undeservedly neglected. In the British Museum, while others are admiring the bleak busts of Caesars or the placid horrors of Assyria, I always stray to a kindlier and more homely department. I am found worshipping the hairy and goggle-eyed images from the Sandwich Islands; idols to which I really feel a man might bow down. For the beautiful Gods of Greece are cruel; but one always feels that an ugly god might be kind. If therefore I ever arrange my house on one artistic plan (which God forbid) it shall be on a rugged Polynesian plan; it shall be on a goggle-eyed and hairy sort of plan. Everything I hear about these savages attracts me to them more and more. It is vain to tell me that under such a regime the man will be lazy and fond of pleasure while the woman is hard-working and practical; for that is already the case in the house which I inhabit at present. I do not mind painting myself; in fact, I never can paint anything else without doing so. If I colour so much as a cardboard figure for a toy theatre, I emerge painted like the leaves of autumn, painted like the sky of morning, as it says in Hiawatha.

I cannot imagine how the strange notion arose that ignorance is the origin of superstitions. It is true indeed, if we mean ignorance in the same sense that Plato and Bacon were ignorant; the common ignorance of all men about the meaning of their monstrous destiny. But if this be intended, the phrase that ignorance is the origin of all superstitions is a coarse and misleading way of stating the case. It would be much truer to say that agnosticism is the origin of all religions. That is true; the agnostic is at the beginning not the end of human progress. But those who speak of superstitions born of ignorance generally mean that myths and mystical assertions have arisen from mere accidental or animal incapacity to realise all the circumstances of the case. The old Victorian scientific theory was that men invented fairy tales because they had not yet grasped facts. They thought the moon was a woman because they had not the sense enough to see it was a moon. They thought the sea was a god because no kind scientist had ever passed by and pointed out that it was really the sea. They worshipped a stone as a fetish because their lack of geological knowledge prevented them from noting that it was a stone. They were so dull, inexperienced and narrowly materialistic that they could see no difference between a crackle in the clouds and a ringing hammer hurled by a red-headed giant; between a spat of yellow fire in the sky and a young god driving horses.

That is the materialistic theory of myths, and it is manifest nonsense. Nobody could ever have thought that the moon looked like a woman, even of the amplest contours. Nobody can ever have thought that the sun looked like a carriage and pair, because it doesn’t. If they used these terms in connection with sun or moon, mountain or river, rock or tree, they were certainly not using them because they knew no better. On the contrary, they were using them because they knew something much better; because a woman is more beautiful than moonlight and a young man more splendid than the sun.

This is essentially admitted about such fables as those of Phoebus and Artemis; or even Balder and Thor; here it is vaguely conceded that ‘poets’ and not mere ignorant savages, have had something to do with the matter. But what the folklorists of the Fraser type will not see is that the ruder savages also are poets; even if they are minor poets. All that they say about their totems, their taboos, their dances, and services to the dead must be understood with a certain poetic sympathy, as meant to be weird, glorious, shocking, or even impossible. They are the abrupt expressions of unique spiritual experiences, quiet and queerly coloured moods; dreams and glimpses that do really lie on the borderline between this existence and some other. If a savage says that a pepper-plant is his divine great-grandmother, he is not speaking from ignorance, for ignorance would leave him with the bare knowledge that it was a pepper-plant. Rather he is speaking from knowledge, fragmentary and perhaps dangerous knowledge. He may have seen something about a pepper-plant that it is better not to see.

There is one really tremendous question. The savage respecting the pepper-plant, the idolator adoring the stone, the sage choosing his star, the patriot dying for a boundary, all do unmistakably mean something—something far down in the abysses of the universe and the soul. Do they mean that everything is sacred? Or do they perhaps mean that something is sacred—something they have not found?

Asparagus

New Witness, 18 June 1914

At about twenty-one minutes past two today I suddenly saw that asparagus is the secret of aristocracy. I was trying to put long limp stalks into my mouth, when the idea came into my head; and the stalk failed to do so. I do not refer to any merely metaphorical and superficial comparisons which could easily be made between them. We might say that most of the organism was left dead white; merely that a little button at the top might be bright green. We might draw the moral that average aristocrats are made out much stronger than they are; and illustrate it from average asparagi. They say that any stick is good enough to beat a dog with; but did anyone ever try to beat a dog with a stick of asparagus? We might draw the moral that aristocratic traditions are made out much more popular than they really were. ‘Norman’ gets mispronounced as English. In this way three French leopards were somehow turned into British lions. And in this way also the solemn word Asparagus, which means nothing so far as I know, was turned by the populace into ‘sparrowgrass’, which means two of the most picturesque things in the world. Asparagus, which I presume to have been the name of a Roman pro-consul, Marcus Asparagus Esculens, or what not, never deserved such luck as to lose its origin in two things so true and common as the bold birds of the town or the green democracy of the fields. Or again, we might say of sticks of asparagus that they have often lost their heads, and we might say the same of aristocrats. Both heads have been bitten off by the guillotine before now. But to complete the parallel we must maintain that the head of the aristocrat was the best part of him; and this is often hard to maintain. But, indeed, I do not base the view upon any such fancies from phraseology. Far deeper in earth are the roots of asparagus.

The one essential of an aristocracy is to be in advance of its age. That is, there must be something new known to a few. There must be a password; and it must always be a new password. Moreover, it must be by its nature, an irrational password, for anything quite rational might rapidly be calculated even by the uninitiated. In the same way it is essential to any social observance that involves a social distinction, that the observance should be, in this sense at least, artificial. That is, you can only know the observance as the soldier knows the password, because he has been told.

The working instance best known to us of the middle classes is the old arbitrary distinction about how to eat asparagus. Now, excluding cannibalism and the habit of eating sand (about which I can offer no opinion) there is really nothing one can eat which is less fitted to be eaten with the fingers than asparagus. It is long; it is greasy; it is loose and liable to every sort of soft yet sudden catastrophe; it is always eaten with some sort of oily sauce; and its nice conduct would involve the powers of a professional juggler confirmed with some practice in climbing the greasy pole. Most things could easily be eaten with one’s fingers. Cold beef could quite easily be eaten with one’s fingers; or simply with one’s teeth. I have seldom seen a noble cheese without an impulse merely to fix my fangs in it. New potatoes could be eaten with the fingers as cleanly as Easter eggs; and whitebait might as well be shovelled into our open mouths by a Whitebait Machine, for all the use we make of a knife and fork to dissect them. We could easily eat fish cakes as we eat seed cake. Cold Christmas pudding is a substance with all the majesty of coloured marble; far cleaner, stronger and more coherent than any ordinary bread or biscuit. Yet all these we are supposed to approach through the intervention of a little stunted sword or a stumpy trident. Only this one tiresome, toppling vegetable, I eat between my finger and thumb. I should be better off as a giraffe eating the top of a palm-tree: it doesn’t want any holding up.

We will not exaggerate. Eating soup with the fingers the young student should not attempt; and sauces, custards and even curries are no field for the manual labourer. I would not eat stewed rhubarb with my fingers, or, indeed, with any instrument that science could devise. Even with things involving treacle, I have not a good touch. But, while strictly avoiding anything like exaggeration or frivolity, I still note that the point of asparagus is that it is not the food—among other foods, specially fitted for the fingers. In other words, the principle could not have been deduced from abstract reason, or have grown out of the general instincts of men. It could not have been custom: that is why it was etiquette.

The brotherhood of man is a fact which in the long run wears down all other facts. Therefore, a privileged class, if it would avoid sliding naturally back into the body of mankind must keep up an incessant excitement about new projects, new cultures and new prejudices, new skirts and stockings. It must tell a new tale every day or perish, like the lady of the Arabian Nights. Tennyson, who was too much touched with this aristocratic—or snobbish—Futurism, wrote, ‘Lest one good custom should corrupt the world’, which really means lest everybody should learn the right way of eating asparagus. And so, out of luxury and waste and weariness, the fever they call Progress came into the world.

Do you tell me they don’t eat asparagus with their fingers now? Do I not know that in some of the best houses they have little tongs for each person, which are charming? Have I not heard that asparagus is now lowered into the open mouth on a string, or shot into the mouth with a small gun, or eaten with the toes, or not eaten at all? No; I do not know, that is what I wish to point out. They have changed the password.

The English Spirit and the Flea

Illustrated London News, 25 September 1915

I met a man who was awaiting a letter from his family in the Eastern Counties. Before the letter came he learnt that the place where his family lived had been singled out specially as one of the places where the Germans have lately made hell in heaven with their colossal and destructive flying ships. He did not show much perturbation; but when the letter from his nearest relatives at last arrived, he naturally opened it with some interest.

It was all about a flea. I will not develop the topic, though Swift allegorised infinity under that image, and William Blake thought it worthwhile to paint a most careful portrait of the Ghost of a Flea. In the East Anglian household, anyhow, there had never before been the ghost of a flea. The solitary specimen was by the householder connected in some way with the imprudence of his relative in some slumming adventure: and it was held up before him, as it were, in derision and pursued with a wealth of detail. Its arrival, adventures, and personal eccentricities were scientifically set forth. Any entomologist writing on the habits and habitat of the East Anglian flea would find it a most careful compilation. It contained no reference to the war. There is another animal, not the East Anglian flea, on which the entomologist might gradually have gained a little light. I do not refer to the Zeppelin. Zeppelins did not occur in the letter. I refer to a little-known animal called the Englishman, whose habits, habitat, and other curious constituent elements the German entomologists might find it worthwhile to study, and of which this letter is a fragmentary but not quite valueless record.

I do not idolatrize this animal. I do not expect the German to fall dawn and worship the East Anglian inhabitant any more than the East Anglian flea—like an ancient Egyptian worshipping a beetle. The qualities he displays in such cases are characteristics rather than abstract virtues. No good ever came of merely flattering one’s nation: a man flatters the land he fears, but not the land he loves. The Englishman does not neglect war merely because he is calm and wise and strong; there are many respects in which he can be wayward and foolish and weak. Like the other animal, he can be at his best an irritant and at his worst a parasite. The Englishman is not simply calm and wise and strong; but he is English. I do not set my country above human temptations, like an allegory on a ceiling; I do not say that enemies could not conceivably perturb the British Lion or fluster the British Bulldog. I do say that I am not, as a fact, perturbed, and specially not perturbed by people who say ‘The British Lion is drawing in his horns’—I perceive that they have no vivid mental picture of a lion. I am not flustered by people who say ‘The British Bulldog will soon have his wings clipped’, because I know such curtailment to be both unnecessary and impossible. And the distinction is important. Our very weaknesses are strengths so long as they are undiscovered weaknesses. It is possible to remind my own countrymen very generally of whereabouts the strengths and weaknesses lie. I would not do even that if there were the smallest chance of a German understanding it.

Some of the best things the English have done were the things they didn’t do. For instance, in spite of a seething fuss of small leagues and committees, they cannot really be induced to ‘do anything for Shakespeare’. Lord Melbourne (who was almost as English as Shakespeare) used to solve the most intense diplomatic crises by saying, ‘Can’t we let it alone?’ We can. We let Shakespeare alone. Just as we have an enormous negative monument to Shakespeare, so we have an enormous negative victory over Count Zeppelin. As a nation we receive his flaming visitations with something more insulting than defiance—absentmindedness. Such absence of mind can co-exist with considerable presence of mind at particular moments. It did in Hamlet, who always struck me as a particularly English character—which was, no doubt, the reason why he could not get on with the Danes, and had to be sent to England. His sudden lunge at the curtain was very like the sudden rush our mob sometimes makes at the alien. But, on the whole, it is the other attitude that is our ultimate strength. Not anything we have done against the Zeppelins, but all that we have not done against them, is our monument aere perennius. Let us continue not to notice Zeppelins. I do not mean this with a dull literalism; and I disclaim responsibility for anyone who should take it so. Notice them, of course— but not so much as fleas.

There is one kindred characteristic of the English which is very subtle and easily expressed wrongly, but which plays a very great part in practical things of this kind. I know not what to call it, except perhaps, somewhere-elseness. It is a sort of distant optimism. It is a refusal to accept as final the facts immediately in front of us— a strong belief in the other side of the world, or even the other side of the moon. It was rather pompously expressed by the phrase about the sun never setting on the British Empire. The same thought was much more sincerely expressed in the popular ejaculation, ‘Somewhere the sun is shining!’ This came, I think, from one of our noble comic songs, and used to be uttered by people when they broke valuable teapots, or put their feet into cucumber-frames. Its excess was well satirised by Mr John Burns when he summed up Imperialism under the text, ‘The eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth’. And it is true, as of every true national characteristic, that it has the defect of its quality, and often goes with an undue laxity about the rights of our own field or the laws of our own parish. But it goes also with more imaginative generosity about remote lands like Bulgaria or Japan than is common in more closely logical countries. And there really exists many a City clerk who is more concerned for bombs in Belgium than bombs in the City.

I repeat that I will have nothing to do with bragging about these good qualities as if they were the only good qualities. It is not a good quality, but a defect in us that we do not understand the French revanche; it only means that we have not long enough memories to make tyrants and enemies keep their promises. Our people are courageous, not because of pride and praise, but rather in spite of it. In spite of our education we are still intelligent; and it was often in spite of our athletics that we were strong. The Battle of Waterloo was not won on Eton playing fields. The Battle of Waterloo (as the same authority said, and he certainly knew something about it) was won by the scum of the earth. And today also we are largely saved by the people whom we have failed to educate, failed to rule, failed to provide with land or religion, and very nearly failed to save from starvation. It is these people who in the travail and agony of the hour, provide the note which is most needed and most unexpected; the note of frivolity. And it is they, even more than their social superiors, who have seen the heavens filled with fire; and thought it less than a flea-bite.

The Hobby and the Head Waiter

New Witness, composite essay, 17 and 24 March 1922

In the matter of property we may find an obvious but useful parable in the difference between living in a house and living in an hotel. There are some practical conveniences in the hotel; but there is first of all a sort of megalomaniac glamour of great spaces and gilded ceilings that is not practical at all. At best there is the romance of personal adventure and accident; but there is no corporate and communal life.

It is when we pass to the practical difference between a house and an hotel that we come to the creative nature of property. I have taken this figure of speech for convenience and clarity, because I do not think everybody understands what we mean by this creative quality. Now a man in an hotel is entirely receptive. He may receive as many things as an average man in an average house. He may receive more things than most modern men in most modern houses. But these things must all be of a certain recognised and conventional character. He cannot add anything to the hotel. If he were to attempt to improve the hotel in any sweeping and striking fashion, his adventures would be somewhat sensational. Rich people in a rich hotel are in one sense protected and too much protected; but though they have protection they have not property. The point, however, is this; that nobody can provide beforehand for the creative needs, as people can provide for the protective need. It is in the nature of any creation that it is in some sense original; and it is in the nature of anything original that it cannot be foreseen. There is no prophecy of poetry; there is not even any prophecy of prophecy. A Futurist cannot predict a song even if he can produce a song; which is not always the case. He cannot foresee a poem or foresee a picture; he cannot even foresee a practical joke. If he did, indeed, it might possibly not occur.

In some hotels of the American sort there used to be an instrument erected in the bedroom; it had rather the general appearance of a clock, with a finger pivoted so as to point at various inscriptions on the dial, and these were supposed to be a complete list of the needs of man, in his highest capacity of an American hotel-frequenter. Whenever he wanted a Prairie Oyster or a Horse’s Neck, a secretary or a sandwich, or anything (for all I know) from a daily paper to a dentist, he had only to move the hand on the clock and a bell rang and the person or object was somehow produced from the interior mechanism of the hotel. Now it is quite true that even the real list was long and detailed, and that it could be extended and applied to almost any length along certain lines. It would no doubt include not only a dentist but a detective.

But we may here turn from the fancies about what a man might desire to the facts about what he does desire. The simplest course is for each man to take himself as an example; as a typical and not necessarily an egotistic example. I am not a person especially prone by nature to be a nuisance in an hotel; I am not a vegetarian; I am not an epicure; I can eat and drink and smoke the ordinary things provided in ordinary places. But if it came to living my life in an hotel, especially that part of my life that is creative in the sense of being personal, I think I should find the list of things on the bedroom clock a little insufficient. For instance, if I have a hobby or a potential hobby, it is probably a toy theatre. Hobbies imply holidays; and while it is very arguable that journalists do no real work; it is also true that they have no real holidays. But if I had no need to earn my bread and cheese, and no country and no conscience and none of all those nonsensical things, I should settle down with a serious aim in life, which would be working a toy theatre. It is to me almost as much a box of miracles today, as it was when I first saw it as a baby; and I feel as if I knew that mimic world before I knew the real one. The gilded figures of a prince and princess glow in my memory against black oblivion, almost before the memory of my father who had made them for me; which things may be an allegory. Now this example is an understatement. I am in no sense alone in this taste; Stevenson and my father and many others evidently shared it. But it is an excellent example of something which, without being exactly eccentric, is just sufficiently out of the ordinary way to make it most improbable that any practical organizer would see it; or provide it, or put it into any definite class of things. I do not think I could say carelessly to a waiter, over my shoulder, ‘Just get me a black coffee and Benedictine and a toy theatre, will you?’ I cannot imagine the headwaiter roaring down the speaking tube, ‘Three Manhattan cocktails and a toy theatre’. I cannot imagine it was mentioned among the minor luxuries printed on the piece of clockwork in the bedroom. But even if it was, it would not meet the case. Even if the waiter returned laden with toy theatres, as he sometimes comes laden with cigar-boxes, it would not solve the problem. For a hobby implies work as well as play; a process as well as a result. It would be a little nearer the mark if the head waiter brought me trays of tinsel and cardboard and that glorious metallic paper as intoxicating as all his wines, a crimson richer even than his burgundy and a green better than the greenest Chartreuse. Even then it would only work if the head waiter would sit down on the floor with me and help to cut the things out; and of this one could never be absolutely certain.

As these reflections pass through my mind, my abstracted eye is riveted on an ordinary wooden chair such as they make at Wycombe from the woods of South Bucks. And I see, as in a vision, that if one were to saw off the back of the chair, knock its bars out and screw it like a frame on to the four feet, the whole would make an almost exact model of a toy theatre, the bars between the legs forming the slips for the wings. I cannot pause for the experiment just now, having something worse to do; but the fancy happens to be an exact example of the sort of thing I mean; a fancy that could not possibly be foreseen, yet which might quite possibly be fulfilled. No great organizing mind would say, ‘See that seven thousand chairs are ordered from High Wycombe in case somebody wishes to turn them into toy theatres.’ It is a hundred to one that nobody ever thought of this nonsensical notion before, and that nobody will ever think of it again. I do not say the world would have lost anything, but I do say I should have lost something, and that something is my own. It is private property.

Now, when I am in my sumptuous and select suite of apartments at the Hotel Beelzebub, reclining on rugs of leopard and tiger skin under tapestries of cloth of gold, it is quite certain that I shall not be encouraged to rush at one of the hotel chairs and begin cutting it up with a chopper or a saw. My explanation that I am turning it into a toy theatre will be coldly received. It may even lead to my being removed from that cushioned apartment to a still more cushioned apartment, commonly called a padded cell. But the point here is that the two forms of human comfort and convenience run distinct and parallel; and no increase of the one comes an inch nearer to the other. The hotel might multiply its chairs by the million, it might vary its pattern of chairs by the thousand, but it would never come into the same world as that perverse and personal day-dream of turning a chair, first into a stool and then into a stage. In that world are all the wonders of the creative side of property; and though I have taken for convenience the lighter and more portable types of property, the same psychology applies to the larger business of production. A man wishes to own his field, primarily because its productiveness is the protection of his honour and independence; but partly also because he wishes to do things with his field which he cannot explain to anybody, and is only vaguely shaping for himself. He is considering a balance between particular necessities and particular luxuries which escapes classification; he is ready, so to speak, to live on turnips on a chance of growing tobacco. I mean he is ready to act on a calculation exactly like the turning of a wooden chair into a wooden stage; something at once fantastic and thrifty. Where that power is democratically distributed men are more than citizens, they are all artists.

With this note on the purely creative or spiritual side of property I conclude the sketch I have here attempted against communism. I need not repeat for the hundredth time that the case against communism is not a case for capitalism; indeed the case against communism is that it is much too like capitalism. It matters little whether our allegorical hotel is called by capitalists an hotel or by communists a hostel. The case against it is that it is not a home, and that the spirit of man will never feel at home in it. It can only be a home when it has a sense of something at once restful and capricious, which is the mood of all creative action. It is only by narrowing itself to locality and privacy that the soul can broaden itself with real imagination and novelty. To listen to all the modern talk about organization and trade and transport is like watching a man wandering about carrying an uprooted tree. The tree is intended for transplantation; it is involved in problems of transport; it enjoys all the educational improvements of travel. It is carried by cosmopolitan trains through various countries with marvellous speed; it is unpacked or carted about in colossal railway stations with marvellous organization. But there are only two things worth saying about it. One is that the tree may be already dead. The other is that there is only one possible way of seeing it again alive. Only when it is planted finally in one fixed place on the face of the earth, will it ever bear fruit or blossom or become a greenhouse of birds.

In Praise of Pie

G.K.’s Weekly, 1 October 1927

We should like to utter our fervid and enthusiastic thanks to the clergyman who wrote to The Times the other day to protest against the neglect, both as a title and an Institution, of the glorious English possession known to our fathers as ‘Apple Pie’; and shamefully described by various degraded outcasts and aliens as Apple Tart. As he very acutely pointed out, nobody says that a room is in apple tart order. As he warmly affirmed, no practical joker ever made an apple tart bed. Whether in the arrangements of rooms or the disarrangement of bedrooms, the traditions of our fathers testify to the true form of the word. A hundred inspiring battle-hymns rise to inspire the march; as in that truly national anthem which says

‘I’m not a glutton

But I do like pie.’

as well as those lyrics that form the foundation of all education and told us that A was an apple pie. ‘Pie’ is a full and powerful word, like pig or pork; which fills the mouth with an appropriate and anticipatory fullness; it is impossible to say the words ‘I do like tart’ and produce the desired effect of talking with your mouth full.

It is not a light or trivial matter. There are questions, seemingly accidental, that divide Society by a spiritual chasm far more real than the artificial frontiers of the factions. The armies of Piemen and Tarters confront each other across an abyss. The passionate consumers of Pie are divided from the frigid triflers with Tart by something far more essential than ever divided Whigs from Tories or Liberals from Conservatives. We could almost guess a man’s religion, or at least the religion towards which he tends, by his ignorant instincts on this solemn and profound matter. It is not only that he who says Pie, and disdains to say Tart, is preserving the language of Shakespeare and the legend of the English and pure religion, breathing household laws. There are in it yet more subtleties of doctrine. He who says ‘Pie’ is he who, being assured that a bodily thing is lawful is not ashamed merely because it is bodily; but finds far more of Christian humility in the frank confession of the body. But he, who shrinks from the old gross word, feeling in it a suggestion of greed or ignominy, is of the tribe that turn into Theosophists and Esoteric Buddhists and end as mere Manichees and haters of the creative word. They, who would insinuate that they are merely toying with a sort of light confectionery, when confronted with the solid duty of eating pie, are of the sort who complains of the coarseness of the Marriage Service or the clamour of church bells or the habit of singing carols at Christmas. We do not mean to blame those who, being in invincible ignorance, happen to say ‘tart’ through habit and the teaching of ill-advised pastors and masters; but when the question is fairly faced, it would be found true that the obstinate and unrepentant are of this order. They are also of the kind that turn pale at a pun; or, what is worse, gravely discuss whether the example of Shakespeare makes it permissible. For the pleasure of annoying them, we utter in a loud voice this protest on behalf of the ‘Pie’ as a symbol of Piety.

Culture versus Civilisation

Illustrated London News, 24 March 1934

An interesting distinction, which is almost a contradiction, has recently been drawn between Culture and Civilization. Two leading writers of the day, the one a Russian and the other a German, have accepted this difference, even if they use it rather differently. The German, being a freethinker and an agnostic, is, of course, rigidly bound by the iron rivets of the dogmas of materialism. The Russian, being a Greek Orthodox Christian and the relic of a ruined and persecuted Church, is a little more cheerful, and seems to think there is some such thing as human freedom and a chance for human liberty. But both agree, more or less, in a certain theory of the relation between Culture and Civilization; and it is roughly that Civilization is the end of Culture, even in the sense of the death of Culture.

Restating the matter roughly here, for my own purposes, the conception is that Culture is growth; the original sprouting of man’s spiritual or artistic nature, as it appears in the native folklore or primitive architecture of a whole people. Civilization is rather the limit or compromise laid upon this by the discovery that there are other peoples or other methods of production. In following Culture, a man develops his arts; that is to say, his tastes. Consequently, true Culture, like true Charity, begins at home. With Civilization there appears something that is not only purely public, but a little homeless. Culture is growing such flowering trees as you prefer in your own front garden, and planting them where you like. Civilization is having a lawsuit with the next-door neighbour about whether your trees overshadow his garden, or calling in the policeman to throw him out if he becomes violent upon the question.

It is possible to recognise a certain rough truth in this distinction, without committing oneself to the fatalistic and rather pessimistic view which Spengler takes of his geological epochs with their human fossils. It is enough to say that we are not fossils; and that Isaiah and Pythagoras and Augustine are not fossils. Spengler tends to treat the coming of a complete Civilization as the coming of an Ice Age, freezing all human life as the ice freezes all animal life. Berdyaev, the Russian, is, as I have said, rather more free and easy, but especially more free. It is not my purpose here, however, to adjudicate on the theory or on the two theorists. I am only concerned with one particular angle or aspect of it, which affects the Civilization in which most of my countrymen actually have to live—the Civilization of London and the big industrial towns— if you can call it a Civilization.

Here, for instance, is a doubt that troubles me. If there was one thing which we did suppose was done for us by Civilization, it was to make us civil. The very word politeness is really the Greek for civilization, just as the very word civilization is really the Latin for politeness. It is a pleasing thought that the word ‘policeman’ and the word ‘politeness’ not only have the same meaning, but are almost the same word. But the Romans inheriting from the Greeks had no sooner established the idea of what is civic, or belonging to a citizen, than there became somewhat vaguely attached to it the idea of civility. Up to a point, Civilization, or even public life, probably does act in this way. Men begin to feel a new and strange restraint, making them feel a little shy and bashful about knocking off the hats or pulling the noses of total strangers to whom they have not been introduced. A new delicacy, a new sense of what is tactful and fitting, leads them to beat, bash and kick only their nearest and dearest and their most intimate friends. But there is another side to the story, and it is becoming rather a tragic story, in the light of that thesis about Civilization as the fossilization and final end of the truly creative life of a culture. I think we have reason for grave criticism and apprehension when there is a tendency for civic and public life to become more coarse and brutal than private and educational life. It is a dark and sinister omen when men begin to be ruder to strangers than they are to friends.

After all, the home, insofar as any ruins of it are left standing, is still the school of good manners. Many make very great efforts, and most make some sort of effort, to train their children at least in some standard of social behaviour. Little trivial gestures of impatience in which you or I may have indulged—the soup-tureen hurled across the table, the carving-knife brandished with motions mistaken by the superficial for those prefatory to murder—do not alter the fact that, even in the same household, babies are still instructed with some care about spreading the jam or spilling the milk. The old traditions of behaviour, so far as they still exist, are still largely traditions of a household; they concern opening the door to a lady or passing the mustard to a guest. Almost all that remains of the forms of courtesy are the forms of hospitality. Whether you call it behaving like a gentleman or behaving like a snob, it is still inside a human house that the man generally tries to live up to his highest standards, and to perform what are, in fact, the ancient rites and ceremonies of his Culture.

But in public things have altered a good deal. There you have the sharp test and truth; that the man is generally not living up to the highest standards, even of his own family; but often abandoning them in despair, owing to the crush and crowding of modern street life. The man who would bow somebody else into a drawing room is content himself with barging into a tram. The man who would make room for his guest in a tiny villa will leave no room at all for his fellow-citizen in a great big Tube train. In other words, public life, the life that the Greeks called polite, the life that the Romans called civil, has become a great deal more barbarous than the solitary life or the life of the tribe.

We might tolerate the notion that civilization makes our culture more cold or official. But we cannot easily tolerate the notion that our civilization makes us more barbaric. Culture, in the connotation used by the writers I mention, is something interior and imaginative and almost sacred, which, when it takes form, we recognise as the characteristic work of a particular people; as we recognise certain art as the characteristic work of a certain artist. It is a growth of the English culture, for instance, that the poorest cottagers love to have a mass of flowers in their front gardens. It is even a growth of English culture, in a way, that English cottages and villages have a certain peculiar beauty, and are picturesque even when they are inconvenient. It would be with a certain sorrow, whatever our opinions, that we should yield to a more orderly civilization, which should make the village streets straight, or even the village buildings stately. But it does not do anything of the kind. Our civilization today does not make anything straight or anything stately. The romantic rubbish-heap of cottages and cottage gardens would not be replaced by ordered avenues or classical colonnades. They would be replaced by a patchwork of hoardings and a litter of bungalows. That is one aspect of the doom of civilization, over which these literary men lament. Civilization makes us more uncivil—like the man in the Tube.

The Winter Feast

(Probably written for an American magazine.)

These modern men, who are less anxious to be men than to be moderns, have one little habit that has not been spotted as it should be. They are very fond of first painting the lily, and then proving from the painted surface that it was always a paper flower. Nothing delights these intelligent little creatures more than gilding refined gold, and then scraping it furiously, on the plea of taking the gilt off the gingerbread. I mean that they will first take a natural thing, then daub it and disguise it and deface it with artificial things, and then complain that it is an unnatural thing and throw it away. At the beginning, such alteration must be accepted as an improvement. By the end, each improvement is used to show that the thing should be not so much altered as abolished.

Thus the seed of Democracy, the assembly of the village or the tribe, is as old as the world, and may perhaps go back to the similar assemblies of rooks or wolves. It still exists in many peasant communities, especially in the mountains, and when it is reasonably civilised, that is humanised, and above all when it is Christian, it is still about as just and decent and dignified a government as any, in a world whose governments are hardly its happiest products. Now we men of the modern and Western world took this ancient thing, and proceeded to improve it. We improved democracy by demagogy, that is by professional politicians; we improved election by electioneering, that is by organised lying; we improved announcement by advertisement; that is, we substituted for the horn blown to assemble men round the village tree the megaphone through which a statesman could speak like a salesman; facilitating every exchange in which the voters could sell their votes or the statesmen could sell his soul. We have been positively proud of it as a technical dexterity; that we could turn an act of representation into an art of misrepresentation. And then, when the whole idea has been improved out of recognition in this cynical fashion, we generally find that the cynics have become sceptics; and sceptics about the democratic idea itself. These men, with their wonderful progressive improvements, have themselves turned popular government into unpopular government. But since they also have probably become rather unpopular, they will now often turn round with a fine fastidious aristocratic pride, and express their contempt for popular opinion.

The same sort of ironic injustice is applied to any old popular festival like Christmas. Moving step by step, in the majestic march of Progress, we have first vulgarised Christmas and then denounced it as vulgar. Christmas has become too commercial; so many of these thinkers would destroy the Christmas that has been spoiled, and preserve the commercialism that has spoiled it. They will think me but a belated and bemused being, if I here am found roaming or drifting backwards to consider what Christmas is when it is defined, or what it was before it was spoiled. And it is not surprising that the same modern gentlemen, who have performed this peculiar feat of first pelting a thing with mud and then complaining that it is muddy, have also made a similar muddle about the actual history of the thing which they bury with insults, because they have killed it with improvements.

Thus, the first thing that such people will probably tell you today is that Christmas is really a Pagan festival; because many traditional features of it were taken from Pagans. What they do not seem to see is that, in so far as this is in any sense true, it only proves that the ancient Pagans were much more sensible than the modern Pagans. There are many psychological truths about such a human habit, which are hidden from those who talk day and night about psychology; but who do not really care about any psychology except what they call the psychology of salesmanship. The old Pagans knew that such a ritual must be old, that it must be religious, that it must be concerned fundamentally with simple elements like wood or water or fire, but that it must also be, in a queer way of its own, revolutionary: exalting the humble or putting down the mighty from their seat. That was expressed in a hundred ways, both among heathens and Christians. The Saturnalia was made for a society of slaves; but it gave one wild holiday to those slaves. The medieval Christmas had to exist in a feudal society; but all its carols and legends told again and again a story in which angels spoke to shepherds and a devil inspired a king. An ancient revolt is enshrined in an ancient ritual. Now the reason why Christianity found it quite easy to absorb these Pagan customs is that they were in this way almost Christian customs. The man who does not see that the Saturnalia was almost Christian is a man who has never read the Magnificat.

It is thoroughly bad history to suppose that it was the Paganism that absorbed the Christianity; when there are a thousand things to show that it was the Christianity that absorbed the Paganism. For instance, anything that the Early Church really regarded as horrible among the heathens did completely disappear. The butchery of human beings in amphitheatres, which had been the huge uproarious popular sport of all the vast populace of antiquity, completely disappeared. Doubtless, it disappeared partly because Christian martyrs had suffered there; partly because St Telemachus, the heroic hermit, had hurled himself into the arena to cry aloud to God and the human conscience, against human blood being poured out in festivity like wine. But anyhow, and for whatever reason, it did disappear. If various old Pagan popular customs, like the Winter Feast, did not disappear, it was quite certainly because they did not so insult the innocence and indignation of Christianity in its youth. When Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, that religion could have suppressed any heathen thing it really wanted to suppress. The interesting point to note is how very few heathen things it really did want to suppress. There is, for instance, the whole great glorious mass of the Pagan literature, in which there are hardly ten pages without something that a Christian might be excused for wanting to suppress. The mere fact that that mass of culture has come down to us at all, is to me much more remarkable than a few random examples of alleged suppression. For instance, the first generations of the saints might surely be excused for drawing the line at Sappho if she did really preach Sapphism. But in fact, there is hardly a rag of historical evidence either that she did preach it or that they did suppress her. To anybody with a general view of history, the really remarkable and interesting thing is the toleration of the last Pagans by the first Christians. The Church certainly never swept away all record of the ancient gods as Mahomet swept away the ancient idols. It never merely burned books as the Iconoclasts destroyed statues. The attitude of Augustine towards Plato, as of Aquinas towards Aristotle, is really much more respectful and understanding than the attitude of Hobbes or Hume towards Aquinas. In short, Christians have always committed countless crimes; but these Christians did not commit this one crime. They were not unhistorical. Christianity failed in practice in many ways; but this was one thing it did not fail to do; to preserve continuity. The Christians were often criminals; but they were not Vandals. Platonists like St Augustine, living in besieged cities, knew too much about Vandals.

It is, therefore, the greatest glory of the Christian tradition that it has incorporated so many Pagan traditions. But it is most glorious of all, to my mind, when they are popular traditions. And the best and most obvious example is the way in which Christianity did incorporate, in so far as it did incorporate, the old human and heathen conception of the Winter Feast. There are, indeed, two profound and mysterious truths to be balanced here. The first is that what was then heathen was still human; that is, it was both mystical and material; it expressed itself in sacred substances and sacramental acts; it understood the mystery of trees and waters and the holy flame. And the other, which will be a much more tactless and irritating assertion, is that while a thing is heathen it is not yet completely human. But the point here is that the Pagan element in Christmas came quite natural to Christians, because it was not in fact very far from Christianity.

Take, for example, the whole fundamental idea of a Winter Feast. There is a perfectly natural parallel between a religion that defies the world and a ritual that defies the weather. Heathenism in the sense of hedonism, the concentration of the mind on pure pleasure as such, would chiefly concentrate on the conception of a Summer Feast. But in winter even a rich man receives some faint hint of the problem of a poor man; he may avoid being hungry, but he cannot always avoid being cold. To choose that moment of common freezing for the assertion of common fraternity is, in its own intrinsic nature, a foreshadowing of what we call the Christian idea. It involves the suggestion that joy comes from within and not from without. It involves the suggestion that peril and the potentiality of pain are themselves a ground of gratitude and rejoicing. It involves the suggestion that even when we are merely Pagans we are not merely Pantheists. We are not merely Nature-worshippers; because Man smiles when Nature frowns. It has always involved, under varying limitations in varying societies, the idea of hospitality; especially hospitality to the stranger and generally to the poor. Of course, there are perfectly natural reasons for wanting to drink wine or warm ourselves at the fire in winter; but that is not an answer, except to those who already have the ill-informed prejudice that Christianity must be opposed to things merely because they are natural. The point is in making a point of it; the special interest is in the special occasion; in the fact that during the Winter Feast, whether Pagan or Christian, there always was, in some degree, the idea of extending the enjoyment to others; of passing round the wine or seating the wanderer by the hearth. It is no controversial point against the Christians that they felt they could take up and continue such traditions among the Pagans; it only shows that the Christians knew a Christian thing when they saw it.

It may seem a gloomy sentiment for the festive season; but the plain truth is that the old original Christians would have more reasons to quarrel with the new Christian Christmas than they had to quarrel with the old Pagan Christmas. In the congested commerce of our time, it has come to stand rather for goods being sold than for gifts being given. But if any revolutionary critic complains of it on this score, he must complain of his own revolutionary criticism; or at least of the previous revolutionary critics. I remember that Mr Bernard Shaw, the chief spokesman of the Socialism of the later nineteenth century, declared that Christmas is now only kept up for the sake of the tradesmen. I think he would find it hard to prove that every little boy or girl has hung up a stocking, or slept with one eye open on Christmas Eve, solely because they calculated that Santa Claus going his round would be Good for Trade. But if the complaint contains any truth, it is not to the disadvantage of the old tradition; but rather to the disadvantage of the recent revolutions. It is strangely forgotten that it was radicals and reformers who set up the Capitalism they now desire to pull down. It was done, if not by Socialists, certainly by revolutionists; in the sense of extreme pioneers of progress. For instance, it was precisely the progressive prophet of new things who brought Christmas, and everything else, out of the country into the town. It was he who told the young man that the streets of London were paved with gold; and that in great cities like Chicago and Philadelphia there was work for all. It was he who said that life on the farm was not life but death; that the rustics were all turnips and that their creeds were all turnip ghosts. Hence it was he who was responsible for making the old Christmas mysteries and mummeries relatively unmeaning; by taking them away from the fields where they grew to the markets where they could only be bought and sold. He took away the Yule Log from the place where it had really been part of a tree, to the place where it was only a lump of dead wood; he took away the mistletoe from where it was really gathered from the oak, to the store where it was only stacked like dead sticks; he would have brought in the Boar’s Head (supposing that he dealt at all in that delicacy) under conditions that made it highly improbable that he had himself slain the boar with a boar-spear in the forest, in the old heroic style of hunting, when men slew beasts stronger than themselves. All this genuine and even generous savour in the old Christmas symbols did undoubtedly suffer by being half-digested by the industrial town; but it was the same sort of reformer who built the town. True, he then called himself an Individualist and not a Socialist; and by this time he probably calls himself something else. But under all names, he is always exactly what the old Pagans and Christians would have called a profane person. He does not understand Christmas; he does not even understand the Saturnalia. Mr Scrooge hated Christmas because he was a Utilitarian; that is, he thought that economics only meant being economical. Mr Gradgrind of the Manchester School began by hating Christmas; but his partner Mr Bounderby soon perceived that he could make money by selling turkeys and toys, as well as coal or cotton. But these men in their day were all Reformers; they all called themselves Radicals. Perhaps it is time we ceased to concentrate on the Reform and went back again to the Form.

This real history of Christmas is very relevant to the real crisis of Christendom. We live in a terrible time of war and rumour of war; with a barbaric danger of the real reaction, that goes back not to the old form but to the old formlessness. International idealism in its effort to hold the world together, in a peace that can resist wars and revolutions, is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply that it does not go deep enough. Christianity could draw life out of the depths of Paganism; but mere Modernism cannot draw on the depths of either. Charity is too much of a manufactured article; and too little of a natural product. The League of Nations is too new to be natural. The modern materialistic humanitarianism is too young to be vigorous. If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder, we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod. If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the hunger of a human being, a pain as positive as toothache; and not as the fall in wages or the failure of imports, or even the lowering of the economic standard of living. We must say first of the beggar, not that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has nowhere to lay his head. We must say first of the human family, not that there are no jobs for them in the factory, but that there is no room for them in the inn. That is, we must talk of the human family in language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics used to talk of the Holy Family. We must learn again to use the naked words that describe a natural thing; and dispense for a moment with all those sociological polysyllables, with which an artificial society has learned to talk of it as an artificial thing. Then we shall draw on the driving force of many thousand years; and call up a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.

They Tell a Story

(Introduction to a book on art, source and date unknown.)

The statement that the work of the Old Masters can be effective for popular education is not such a platitude as it will at first appear. It is both more disputable and more true than it seems. For the truth is that the great art of the past can be used for this purpose where a great many other methods now generally adapted are quite clumsy and futile. Something of this utility is shared by the plays of Shakespeare; and by no other agency I know except the paintings of such men as Titian and Leonardo.

To explain this peculiar kind of public value one must understand one of the deepest differences, and perhaps diseases, of our time. It was the mark of the art of the past, especially the art of the Renaissance, that the great man was a man. He was an extraordinary man, but only in the sense of being an ordinary man with something extra. Shakespeare or Rubens went with the plain man as far as the plain man went; they ate and drank, and desired and died as he did. That is what people mean when they say that these Gods had feet of clay; their giant boots were heavy with the mire of the earth. That is what people mean when they say that Shakespeare was often coarse; that is what people mean when they say that he was often dull. They mean that a great poet of the elder kind had spaces which were idle and absent-minded; that his sub-consciousness often guided him; that he sprawled; that he was not ‘artistic’. It is not only true that Homer sometimes nodded; but nodding was part of the very greatness of Homer. His sleepy nod shakes the stars like the nod of his own Jupiter.

The old artists, then, were plain and popular in the more fundamental or (if you will) lower parts of their personality. But the typical modern artist sets out to be a separate and fantastic sort of creature, who feeds and feels in a strange manner of his own. Compare Velazquez with Whistler; compare Shakespeare with Shaw; compare even Addison with Stevenson. Whistler professed to be a butterfly, feasting on strange flowers and following incalculable flights; Stevenson was called by many of his friends an elf; and though this did not mean that he was inhumane, it did mean that he was in a manner disembodied. Bernard Shaw is certainly a fairy: and an Irish fairy, which is worse. Shakespeare, like the Shepherd in Iolanthe, was only a fairy down to the waist. He would undoubtedly, to quote the same work of art, have left his legs kicking behind if he had tried to get through the keyhole.

Now this distinction between two conceptions of genius, the Something more and the Something different, very deeply influences the effect of painting upon the public. The great painters had all the things which we call weaknesses in the great poets; they constantly pot-boiled, they occasionally pandered. They often seemed to care little for glory, and sometimes not quite enough for honour; they threw things off, and as Ruskin truly said, gave their great frescoes ‘to be blasted by the sea wind, or wasted by the worm’. But if they had the everyday vices, they had the everyday virtues also; and whether they were good men or no, their idea of a good man was the same as everybody else’s. If they too seldom attempted to reform their conduct, they never attempted to reform their conscience. The consequence is that they preserved a mass of primitive intuitions, appetites, and unconscious instincts, which are the same as those of the common people even in our corrupt modern cities; and which in our corrupt modern cities have now a great part to play.

For without raising, even in parentheses, the old argument of Swift’s and Temple’s time about the relative merits of Ancients and Moderns, we may be quite certain that for democratic purposes the ancients are better. A few scratches of grey and green on a piece of brown paper may really be as good in its own way as a ‘still life’ by a Flemish painter or a Holy Family by an Italian painter. But it must be perfectly obvious to anybody that the two latter are more likely to make a plain man understand what painting means. We talk somewhat lightly about ‘schools’ of art. Whether or no the art of Raphael be better as an art it is certainly better as a school. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Post-post-Impressionism and the rest, are developments which may be credited or criticised according to every man’s aesthetic philosophy. It may be the end of art, in the sense of the object of art. It may be the end of art in the sense of the abolition of art. But anyhow it is not the beginning of art; it is not the initiation, the origin, the introductory motive. What art is to begin with, what it obviously is, what is the reason that anyone ever made it, that people can learn today from the Old Masters. And they can learn it from nobody else.

A hundred cases could be taken, but take the case of a common phrase: a common sneer with the art critics. I mean the phrase ‘a picture that tells a story’. There could not be a sharper instance of the difference between the old hero who was man and more than man and the new hero who is not man at all. A picture by Leonardo da Vinci tells a story. A picture by Paul Veronese tells a story. A picture by Titian or Tintoretto tells a story. The first and most important question is, what story? Most medieval and Renaissance pictures tell the story; the story on which all our European civilisation is founded, and is founded as finally if the thing is a fairy tale or if the thing is a truth. The objection to pictures which ‘tell a story’ only began in our time, for the very simple reason that the story was a dull story. I will not discuss here whether the great story of God made Man has been destroyed. I will confine myself to saying that it has certainly not been replaced.

There are other qualities in which the Old Masters are demagogues as well as demi-gods. I mean there are other elements in which they eternally appeal to a popular instinct which was in them and in their patrons and in their populace. I should select the two examples of clarity and solidity. In Michelangelo’s ‘Vision of Judgment’ a real man appears in the real skies. The man is solid. The skies are lucid. To the cultured it may appear incredible; but it will be much more credible to mankind, that universal church of which culture is a small and doubtful sect. To mankind, to men as they ordinarily are, a complete man appearing in a clear sky, will not be incredible. It will be much more credible than an impressionist portrait of a real person or a post-impressionist picture of a real place.

I should therefore urge the re-publication of old and good pictures as a real part of that grossly neglected thing—public education. Our historians lie much more than our journalists; our fashionable conceptions of the past change with every fashion; and like most fashions, are fantastic and hideous. But the old colours and the old canvases do not lie; they were really achieved in the ages which we parody or pervert; and the squareness of their drawing, the brightness of their colours, the substantial sincerity of their subject, will still tell us something of the fathers we have forgotten. I do not go so far as to say we have relapsed into barbarism. But I do say that we can just now learn best from picture writing.

HERE AND THERE

Walking Tours

Daily News, 23 September 1901

The close of the holiday season sets most of us reflecting on the philosophy of travel, and many of us upon the simplest form of it, the philosophy of walking tours. Among serious and imaginative pedestrians there are only two schools or parties, and one school maintains that the pedestrian should go forth without map or compass, and wander until a wood beckons to him or a pathway points like a finger. The other school maintains that he should map out with every circumstance of detail the place he is going to, and then go somewhere else. The idea of having a fixed intention on such an occasion, and adhering to it through thick and thin would make an excellent medieval religious vow, but makes a very poor holiday. Some people set out upon walking tours with the most horrible indifference to that idea of loneliness and liberty which is the essence of such an enterprise. Some even send a bag on before them to the hotels to which they intend to go: a dark and depraved aspect in which to regard human nature. They might as well station footmen in livery at intervals of every three miles carrying coffee and liqueurs. The whole beauty and meaning of pedestrianism vanishes if the pedestrian is once tied to a particular hotel, even if it is thirty miles away. Then he is no longer a wild thing like the hawk or the hare, he is only a cow on a particularly long tether. The sending on of bags is predestination: it is a sort of holiday Calvinism, when the very soul of walking is free will. If a travelling companion is sought he should always be sought among those lovers of the errant and the spontaneous. He should be sought among those true worshippers of liberty who feel a certain degradation whenever they take a return ticket. Those who are interested in antiquities should be avoided, but those who are interested in what they call nature are worse. Great public buildings were after all in some sense made to be stared at, but to regard our mother earth merely as a thing to be stared at is like exhibiting one’s maiden aunt in a cage. A man should walk in the country in order to become a part of the country, not in order to get to the top of a particular hill and see a distressing number of counties.

The man who goes upon a walking tour should be open to all the usual interests. He should enjoy the country and enjoy the churches and enjoy the beetles, but also, and as a very important item, he should enjoy the walk. He should not be consumed with any devouring preference for going anywhere. His desires should be no more fixed upon the end of the walk than the desire of a child upon the end of a sugarstick. The walk should be a work of art, the real colour and value of which do not appear until it is completed. The objects of a walk are often disappointing, but the accidents are magnificent. The true adventurer does not walk so much in the hope of finding cities or mountains as in the hope of discovering by the end of his journey why he came out. The darkness of this great mystery will always be present to his mind. Every twist of roadway, every knot of trees may conceal behind it the explanation of his own superb folly. He is in search of the central incident of his journey, and it may be a strange sunset or a fight with a foot-pad, a patch of primroses or a lunatic with a green umbrella. Just as some primitive hero trusted himself upon the back of a dragon or hippogriff, the traveller trusts himself upon that wildest of steeds—a runaway road. Upon the whole, it may be admitted that the pedestrian should carry a map, but he should not consult it often, and he should always cherish the thrilling and secret thought that it may be all wrong. In fact, a map should be taken chiefly because it is such a particularly beautiful thing in itself. A great many other things should be selected and retained on the same principle. A walking tour, for example, is unthinkable without a walking-stick, though the experienced will have the strongest internal doubts whether it is any use, and the walking-stick of all walking-sticks for such a purpose is one cut in the woods, as being the most rough and crooked and inconvenient. Carrying such a staff a man feels himself a thing of the earth. He is almost a walking portion of the woods, he carries a tree like the army which brought Birnam to Dunsinane. And if he has walked well and cheerfully, by the time he sticks his staff in the ground and sits down to rest in the evening he will do it in such a state of inward glory that he would scarcely be surprised if the staff broke into flower before him like the Pope’s rod in Tannhäuser. The essential ground of the unwisdom and unprofitableness of planning a walk too systematically with maps and guide books is a thing easy to feel, but not quite so easy to analyse. One point, however, may be noticed. In our days, when we have names for everything and accurate plans of everywhere, we tend very much to forget that there does exist a place called the world. The world was the place, for example, into which the heroes of the fairy tales went out to seek their fortune. It began at the end of their father’s garden, and it stretched away into infinity full of everything from birds’ nests to dragons, from apple trees to ogres. This remarkable place, the world, is the only place that is not marked even upon the latest and most accurate geographical charts. We have so cut up the face of the earth into our own arbitrary divisions, that it is always Sussex, or Essex, or Kent, or Norway, or Patagonia, and never simply the earth. Science has given us a vulgar familiarity with the earth, a familiarity without knowledge. We have set the seal of the commonplace upon inaccessible peaks that no man has ever trodden, and unfathomable seas inhabited by monsters that have never risen to the surface. We have names and tickets for sights and regions which we no more possess than if they existed only in someone else’s dreams. Thousands and thousands of leagues beyond the farthest limit of our possible personal experience the earth contains things as marvellous as any fairy tale. But we have not the wisdom as the men of the fairy tales had, the wisdom to call these places fairyland or the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. We call them Jonestown, and Smith’s River, and Snooksville, U.S.A.

The perfect pedestrian should always set forth like the third son in the fairy tale. It is a mystic and beautiful dispensation of Providence that every person in this world has an inward conviction that in the cosmic system he himself is the third son. He should go into Kent if he likes, or Buckinghamshire if he likes, or Normandy, or Italy, or China if he likes, but first and foremost into the world. He should go forth with any object he pleases: to shoot lions, or pick flowers, or collect fossils, or find a desert island, or find a wife, but first and foremost he should go out, in the old fairy tale phrase, to seek his fortune. In the life of industrial civilisation, where everything is done by a kind of clockwork, most of us have forgotten that we have a fortune. Most of us have forgotten that somewhere in the nooks and corners of the world there has, perhaps, been waiting for us all our lives a neglected destiny. When we praise the order of Nature it is only as we might praise a mangle or a mincing machine, useful for our own practical purpose, just as the old silversmiths cried ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Like them we have forgotten the true identity of the moon who was the patroness of lunatics and the goddess of crossroads.

The Blindness of the Sightseer

Daily News, 24 July 1902

I once had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of an American, a very intelligent and inspiriting person, who, during a pause in a discussion on scenery, said, with the inimitable accent, ‘Well, I can’t see when you have seen the highest mountain in Switzerland what you want to see the rest for’. So completely obsessed was he with this American sense of competition that he admitted competition even among mountains, and judged of some hundreds of the towering crests of the earth as he would have judged of six American hotel servants who struggled at the station for his bag. There is a very general idea—how general I cannot imagine— that competition is productive of or conducive to individuality. The defenders of the extreme forms of competition invariably insist upon this argument, that the struggle develops personality and variety. Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Competition is simply imitation, and however fierce and ruthless competition may be it only becomes a fierce and ruthless imitation. When the most important object in a landscape must be the thing which is down in the guidebook—the highest hill, the largest tree, the roundest hole in the wall—thousands of other beauties for miles round waste themselves like the neglected talents of humanity. People see the Madeleine and the Louvre, but they do not see Paris. They see the Pfalz Castle and the Drachenfels, but they do not see the Rhine. They see Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, but they have never seen England; England is still to them an undiscovered Atlantis. They see pyramids, dolmens, sloping towers, great walls, hanging gardens, catacombs, colossal statues; but they have never seen that one miracle to which all these are nothing. They have seen the seven wonders of the world, but they have never seen the world.

Let me hasten to say at once that I have not a gleam of sympathy with that contempt which is sometimes expressed by the languid for those who travel. My complaint is not that people are enthusiastic about the Drachenfels, but that they are not enthusiastic about other things. The real evil is that which takes these sights out of their setting and holds them up as the reason for travel. A man of any imagination gains enormously by travelling in France or Germany. My only suggestion is that he would gain scarcely an atom less if he never saw any one of the places to which such tours are universally and systematically directed. If a man could come upon these places suddenly and naturally the effect would be magnificent. Statues and cathedrals would waylay him like a patch of blossom in the hedges or a shape in the clouds. To walk across the magnificent hills of Sussex, to come upon the long lines of a great forest and a great fortress, and to be told that it is the Castle of the Howards. To walk along the sands of the great Norman coast, and behold out at sea a village clinging upon a spire of rock, and to know that it is the Mountain of St Michael; this would indeed be to be educated by travel. But, then, the great sights would come as the culmination of a series of lesser ones, enjoyed and admired in the same manner. The man who did not enjoy the Sussex Downs would not really enjoy the Castle of Arundel. The man who was not impressed by mere sand and sea would not be impressed by the awful crag of the Archangel. But the system of modern travel takes these things out of their environment, makes them prodigies, valuable in themselves. There is not a pin to choose in essential superstition between the medieval pilgrim who would walk miles that for a moment he might touch a particular stone and the modern tourist who will drive leagues that for a moment he may stare at it. We can all feel this essential difference between seeing a sight as an example of its environment and seeing a sight as an exception to its environment, if we merely imagine the principle applied to other forms in nature. If we walked down a long lane in Surrey, and saw, let us say, an incomparable hedge of wild roses extending apparently for miles, we might be stricken still with an exceptionable wonder at the height and splendour of some exceptionable branch or bloom. But if, because this branch was the highest in the lane, it was suddenly given a name, and advertised through the country; if we heard that a station had been opened near it, that omnibuses and excursion trains were run down to it on Bank Holidays, and that by these facilities some hundreds of harmless human beings were dragged out of London, dropped down in front of it for a minute or two to stare, and then dragged back again, we should say that the magic had departed. And if we were wise, we should see that the magic had not departed, as some superfine people suppose, because trains and trippers are ugly. Trains are very poetical things, and so are trippers; for only the wildest kind of poetry can furnish any explanation of why they trip. But the magic would have gone from that branch of wild roses for the very simple reason that the magic had not resided in that alone; the magic was partly the magic of the lane itself and of loneliness, of the combination of the two strangest and most impressive of things— silence and life. Now, steamers and conducted tours have done precisely this very thing for places like the Rhine: they have found the wild rose and they have lost the lane. It is better a hundred times to wander about the lane and never see its most glorious and natural product than to see that product and regard it as a monstrosity. In so far as a thing is what people call marvellous it is not and cannot be representative. To judge of Italy by the leaning tower is like judging of the human race by the bearded woman at a fair. That type of wonders of the world is based upon the principle that the wonderful consists in things going wrong: to a somewhat more essential imagination the genuine wonder is that things go right. The leaning tower of Pisa is, if we realise man’s history seriously, by no means so astonishing as the nearest waterworks tower. The marvel is that all our turrets and tenements do not reel this way and that, like a scene from the Day of Judgment.

In one sense, the great buildings and great cities which we labour to visit are less worth the labour than those common scenes and figures in the street which we pass easily by. For great buildings belong to great traditions of European civilisation which are akin throughout Europe, and whether or no a man could get as much education from Westminster Abbey as from Cologne Cathedral, at least it would be education upon the same lines. It is in a chance strip of landscape, a chance group in the street that we see the real difference which it is worth while to cross the sea to find. The architecture of a German cathedral and that of an English one belong to the same school; but the architecture of a German and that of an Englishman exhibit the most fascinating differences. Every land, every town, has its dark and sacred individuality. The man who has found this out, and he alone, has visited that land or town. And, perhaps, when we have wandered, in obedience to modern culture, among all the kingdoms of the earth, and gathered the knowledge of them, we may begin to penetrate into that most unexplored of all territories, our own country. We may realise what it is that constitutes an English landscape, and in the wild developments of some future century, may begin to be patriots.

The Aesthetes in the Kitchen Garden

Daily News, composite essay, 13 and 20 August 1904

When, a week or two ago, I came down among the hills of Kent, the country looked ancient and innocent enough. Save for birds and old men lapping hedges the visitor seemed to be in solitude. But all this was a mask—a delusion. This green England of ours is really bursting with literary men. Short story writers leap from behind hedges, minor poets drop from the trees like ripe fruit; you cannot walk through deep grass without stumbling over Sociologists. On dark, windy nights wild voices mingle with the wind, and the words ‘reactionary’, ‘superman’, ‘the Philistines’, and ‘raise the drama’ echo desolately from hill to hill. We see the vision of Fitz-James in ‘The Lady of the Lake’ which Scott describes in words (which I quote from memory):

At once from copse and heath arose

Roundels and fugues and lyric prose,

From shingles grey their nocturnes start,

The bracken bush cries, ‘Art is Art’,

And every tuft of broom is rife

With highly beastly views of life.

I have met in meadows here some of the most terrible and beautiful people of Fleet Street. I have seen a cottage, decent and quiet on the outside, inside which, as I hope for heaven, there were Burne-Jones’s on the wall. In short, we are in the presence of a peculiar phenomenon. The people are not going ‘back to the land’ but the cultivated classes are.

But there is something about these intellectual people in flannel shirts who come out and live in the country, where they play tennis and read Thoreau which gives me a haunting notion that they do not really belong to the country; they dwell rather than live in it.

Now this is very false. Go into the country for your health; go into the country for your children; go into the country because the police are after you; go into the country because you like painting in water-colours, or because you like keeping chickens, or because you like spearing otters, or because you want beauty or contentment or the continual presence of cows. But do not go into the country because you like liberty, for there is of necessity less liberty in the country than anywhere else. The pressure of society on the individual must be much greater in a village than in a city. Public opinion must be much stronger; personal eccentricity much more difficult. And if the aesthetic people in the flannel shirts do not feel this pressure it is because they are not really living in the life of the village— that is to say, not really living in the life of the country. Liberty is a thing of the town; any Roman or Greek would have understood that. It is in the places where men live an intense and complicated life that they find the necessity for liberty, and that which is almost the same as liberty—loneliness. The routine of rural life, happy, dignified, sensible, but not inventive, and not free, has been going on almost unchanged from the beginning of the world.

Amid all these philosophers and artists who run like rabbits about the woods of Kent I met one who really loved the country. He was driving a sort of wagonette which was plastered all over with little bills and placards announcing that now for the first time people could go from Westerham or Limpsfield to various places that I have never heard of for some singularly small price which I did not read. He was trotting his coach up and down the country roads by way of a preliminary pageant or advertisement, giving free lifts to highly amused pedestrians, or proclaiming the nature and glories of the route to dazed stonebreakers or wild-eyed gypsies. Something led me to make the acquaintance of this individual, and I discovered that driving a coach was by no means the first of his adventures, nor the most amusing. He has written books; he has stood for Parliament; he has conducted, I believe, a kind of wild newspaper. His name is Stuart Gray, and will probably be familiar to many of my readers, especially if they are interested in the movement for the colonisation of England, the return of the people to the land. It was a single sentence of his that convinced me that he had that really poetic feeling which the minor poets in the neighbourhood tend to lack. Before us lay a roll of country like the back of an unbroken wave, spacious, silent, meeting the sky. He stretched out his whip towards it, and said in what I can only call an awestruck voice, ‘If this were all kitchen gardens! Then you’d have people—people—people.’ Three times he said the sacred word of the republic. This article, you will perceive, is also written in a kitchen garden, and a witchery of onions is wafted with it.

While standing in this kitchen garden I perceived what many of my readers must have perceived long ago, that of all things on earth the one perfectly beautiful thing is a kitchen garden. It has a hundred kinds of beauty richly blent into a solemn harmony. It has the beauty of an embroidery, for all the colours are quiet and yet varied infinitely. It has the beauty of an army, for all the vegetable regiments are set in ranks as if they had been drilled by God for the great battle against Nonentity. It has the beauty of a sepulchre, because so many of the shapes and colours that are seen are but the coloured crests or monuments upon the more precious bodies underground. It has the beauty of a store-cupboard, the beauty of a fairy tale. Cabbages alone have all the colours of the sea. I am forced, I find, to conclude these reflections for the moment. But I trust that before I resume my reflections on kitchen gardens someone will have brought out a book of amatory poems in which all the similes shall have been drawn from this nobler and more fruitful Eden. I do not see why he should not say that in a lady’s cheek the turnip and the carrot fought for supremacy. Such a description is far truer to the mellow and tawny quality in the human complexion than the violent similes of the rose and the lily. These latter, I may be fastidious, offend me as fantastic.

The Need of Personalities in Politics

Daily News, 22 July 1905

The village I now inhabit (as a locum tenens in the temporary absence of the Village Beauty) was in a great stir last night, owing to the arrival of the Liberal Van, which was regarded with more gravity than I should have thought possible. It drew up on the village green; its speakers opened a meeting, and everything would have gone smoothly and respectably if it had not happened that among the promoters of the meeting, standing beside the van, was a man with that air of strained intellectuality which marks a reader of The Daily News. He heard my name by some social accident; and remembered seeing it in the paper. ‘I have read your articles,’ said this excellent Liberal, with a friendly smile, while I faintly condoled with him. Then he said, after a pause of some length, ‘I think I know what some of them mean’. I implored him to share with me this secret and painful knowledge, but he refused, and I shall go to my grave without it. But my encounter with the man had drawn me into the dangerous circle. And when the Chairman, a local Liberal magnate, was obliged to leave halfway through the meeting, they hoisted me into the chair instead of him. The chair was a kind of wooden ledge a little way above the shafts; and I took the chair with so dignified a decisiveness as almost to wreck the van. Then, I regret to say, the proceedings took on a more turbulent character. My rising to say anything was greeted (I cannot explain this phenomenon) with loud shouts coming exclusively from little boys. I think I somehow stirred in them a sickening hope that after all it was going to be a circus.

Then there was a sombre Conservative on the outskirts of the crowd, who interrupted so consistently and continuously that it came to be a rather delicate logical question whether he was interrupting our speeches or we were interrupting his. But it was not so much the quantity as the quality of his interruptions that pleased and at the same time perplexed me. One thing was firmly embedded in his mind, the fruitful seed of continuously flowering satire. This was the conviction that all of us in the van were persons of enormous wealth. He even professed to know the sources of that wealth. When I was making some remarks about poverty, he hurled at my head, with a deadly aim, this mysterious sarcasm: ‘Ha! We ain’t all on the Civil List.’ I made, of course, the somewhat obvious retort, that some of us seemed to be on the Uncivil List; but to this moment I cannot imagine what was the meaning of that unfathomable sneer. Is there something in my air and manner, something of official dignity and decorum, touched with a servile prosperity, that suggests that I am in receipt of a bloated pension? Or has somebody really given or left me some money (poignant and improbable thought) since I have been away from town?

Let us leave this merely personal enigma and pass on to the final development, which from a deeper point of view, at any rate, was the most interesting. The temperature of the meeting, I am proud to say, rose higher and higher: a perfect rattle of repartees, the sympathisers on each side rocked and roared, a large fat farmer of Conservative opinions was beginning with a dreadful and dangerous slowness to think of something to say; and when I wound up the meeting and thanked everybody for their patience, politeness, and good temper, they were ready to kick each other round the green.

And then an interesting thing happened. Ten minutes after the end of the meeting the large, deliberate farmer of Conservative opinions was delivered of the thing that he wanted to say; and eclipse and thunder accompanied that portentous birth. The thing he wanted to say was—Could anybody there say he’d ever cut down any man’s wages? This seemed to me a very essential, a very serious, and a very manly challenge, immeasurably more important not only than anything said at our meeting, but than anything that is ever said in the House of Commons.

It was followed by a kind of restless silence, such as occurs in such mobs at such moments, and in the next instant there was drama. A pale, coarse-looking lad, his arm half out of his coat with eagerness and anger, thrust his face forward. His wages had been cut down, he said; he had been underpaid, and underpaid by this man. The farmer, staring at him through the darkness, at first denied all knowledge of his face. Then a voice broke out of him, a loud and wrathful and decisive voice, crying, ‘Why, I know yer now. I know yer now, I sacked yer for—’. Then the sense of English respectability awoke suddenly in everybody, and the men were torn apart and soothed wildly by their friends. Whatever happened, we must not be asked to decide on a matter of real and diurnal right and wrong. Whatever happened we must not have a plain personal challenge answered by a plain personal reply. The farmer went away, shaking with his furious secret; the lad went away shaking with his. Yet here was present on that dark green, in that dim group, what is often the eternal substance and whole meaning of society and government. Two men were calling upon their neighbours to give judgment on their wrongs. This is politics. We had fixed the frontiers of India; we had examined the imports of Canada; we had meditated on the quarrels between Dutchmen and German Jews; we had criticised kindly but firmly the condition of the Prussian working classes; we had thought imperially and also in continents; we had seen the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.

But this doing of justice between one angry man and another never crossed our minds as a public duty. This was the last business that could be expected of us— this which would be the first business of a primitive community, this which would be the first business of a tribe of Zulus. Our politics for the night had ended. Our politics had ended exactly at the point where all politics ought to begin.

It seemed to me that on this little green, as on a green baize stage, was acted an allegory of the whole situation of our contemporary statesmanship. Everything goes on gaily as long as we are dealing with things. Everything stops abruptly the moment we come to men. We are allowed to say: ‘The supporters of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act are corrupt scoundrels.’ We are allowed to say, ‘Sir William Guppy is a supporter of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act’. We are not allowed to complete the syllogism. Everybody says with one accord in our English Parliament: ‘Let us have no personalities in politics.’ Every Briton says at his breakfast table: ‘At least, we are not like the French and the Irish; we have no personalities in our politics.’ And because we have no personalities we have no responsibilities.

The Largest Window in the World

(Contributed to King Albert’s Book, 1914)

It is a terrible thing to have trod on battlefields before they were fought. It gives a man a cold and ghostly shiver, as of being the babe unborn. But I was a boy, and almost a babe, when I was first in Belgium; and I can only write down the reality that impressed me then. Beyond some streets burning with brassware, which seemed perpetually on sale, almost out of sight of the great Belfry, there is (or was) a sort of museum of the great Memlinc. Among the pictures was one which even as a boy I could not forget; and very few poets or prophets can even imagine how much a boy can forget. It was a picture in which the window seemed hardly wider than the crack of a door. Yet through that crack the human eye could almost, in the strong Scripture rhetoric, take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea.

And I remember a voice near me speaking in an accent that was neither French nor Flemish nor my own: ‘You see how narrow the windows were in those days.’

I did. I also began to see, for the first time, how narrow the minds are in these days. I looked at the little window again and I thought it the largest window in the world. Simply because the aperture was narrow, I knew the landscape was wide. If modern artists had swept it in a larger style, I should have noticed it no more than some hundred miles of wallpaper. Then note not only the pride of a small nation, but the pride of the rich peasantry. Look from the slit of a turret in Cumberland or Calabria and there is a chance that your eye may strike something slightly depressing. But any strip of Belgium will be a string of jewels. Note, thirdly, that the thinness of the outlook is largely due to the thickness of the walls. There is no trace of what vulgar people call ‘a vista’: the house does not open up indefinitely to the world outside. The man of Memlinc sees the world from his window. But it is still the final fact that the window was his window and the world is not his world. I should have thought it, then, quite inconceivable that any one would assail that turret. But I should have thought it equally inconceivable that any one should fail to defend it. A man living in such a house might almost shut the front door to protect the beauty of the window.

I have never been in Belgium since; I have never met any who would possibly be in connection with any revolutionary or anti-national idea. Yet for me Belgium has continued to mean that small field of vision, making certain so vast a field of prosperity. That keyhole is still the largest window in the world.

Since then I have not seen the country, except in frightful photographs. I have gradually begun to understand what was meant by my alien friend when he spoke of the needless narrowness of the medieval window. To judge by the photographs, he has broadened architectural effects very much; he has blown window into window and enlarged the premises; he has left long lines of street in which it is impossible to say whether he has combined the windows that exist, or spared the windows that never existed. He cannot make anything except a window; for a window is simply a hole. When he has blown everything to atoms, when no stack or stone stands about us for many miles, he will say, with an insane simplicity: ‘I have made the largest window in the world.’

The Apostle and the Wild Ducks

New Witness, 27 October 1922

Last week I learned a historical lesson in some sense by going on a wild-goose chase. Perhaps it might more correctly be described as a wild-duck chase. Not that I had any intention of shooting wild ducks, though the country I visited was, I believe, specially suited to the sport; the country round about the Fens of Lincoln and the Broads of Norfolk. Those eastern flats generally are famous for such wild-fowl, as also for the remains of the rich medieval civilisation founded on the Flemish trade, and for expansive opportunities for the admiration of the sunset; or, for those of suitable habits, of the sunrise. Yet the wild duck I pursued was not entirely symbolical, though he was among other things a symbol. What happened in my own case was merely this: that a friend of mine told me that far in the interior of the Fens, in the heart of a labyrinth of lanes and dykes there was a little church which contained some medieval paintings in remarkable preservation. These pictures were said to represent scenes of medieval sport, dealing especially with ducks. After wanderings which might have led to the other end of nowhere, only that the endless road seemed to be perpetually turning inward instead of outward, we came at last to the place, in a wilderness of dusty grass and stunted and sprawling trees; with one of the great square towers of fine flints, that mark the Norfolk churches, alone filling the empty sky and dwarfing everything at its feet. And it was here that I found the feature that seemed to me a sort of symbol or summary for our understanding of the Middle Ages.

Incidentally, of course that great tower was something of a symbol itself. It was not only a beacon or thing to be seen; it is a symbol of blindness as well as sight. Nothing is so strange in human history as the things men do not see. Over all those flat lands the only mountains were made by men; and they were made by medieval men. For that matter, in a thousand little villages all over England there has been for centuries only one tall, stately ornate and orderly building; all the rest was obvious patchwork and poverty. Yet the Puritans could successfully teach five generations of English people, and especially of East Anglian people, that the men who built the big systematic building were living in savagery and superstition, while the men who still tolerated the little hovels had emerged into liberty and enlightenment. In this case it is curiously true that faith can remove mountains; it can remove the mountain opposite a man’s door, if his prejudice has taught him that a mountain is only a myth. But this is a parenthesis; for my purpose here is not concerned with the old English churches in general, but with something that is to be found in this old Norfolk church in particular.

I say it is something that can be found, though at first it seemed rather like something that could not be found. In truth, in that remarkable little fane of the flats, we might be said to have found everything but what we were looking for. There were indeed medieval paintings; and very fine ones, by no means hidden but splendidly displayed. Fronting us as we entered the church door, in a great row across the rood-screen, stood the Twelve Apostles, six on each side, with their rich colours somewhat darkened but their gold in full glow, and their emblems and tools of martyrdom unmistakable. Facing inwards, opposite each other, were two figures of St Michael and St George, treated somewhat in a heraldic manner. I mean the manner that looks arbitrary until we realise that it is decorative. The armament of St George seemed fantastic and top-heavy even for the tilting armour of the fourteenth century; the feathers of St Michael seemed to be sprouting from strange parts of him, as from the body of a monster. Only when we consider it as we do a coat of arms, as a pattern more than a picture, we suddenly realise that every line of it is in exactly the right place. High above all these there was a much more faded figure of St Etheldreda, the great Christian foundress and patron of those parts; looking down perhaps the more impressively for seeming more like a ghost or a great shadow on the wall.

This was, in the strict sense of the word, all very fine; but it was not what we had come to see. The attitude of the Apostles however darkly traced, could not be mistaken for the postures of gentlemen when duck-shooting. St George was clearly occupied in killing a dragon and not a duck. St Michael’s wings might seem to be sticking out of him in an arbitrary and ornamental fashion; but they did not recall the wings of a duck, or even what the Psalmist coveted as the wings of a dove. Besides, St Michael is more associated with a goose. Nobody would venture to call St Etheldreda a duck. We concluded that the rumour about pictures of duck-hunting in the Fens must have been a rumour without foundation. In short, the duck was only a canard.

Just as we were trailing out of the church in disappointment and even despair, so far as our duck-hunting expedition was concerned, my friend gave a cry; and I turned in the very porch to look back at him. He was bending over the figure representing St Paul, which wore a long inner garment elaborately embroidered with gold; we had both passed it over as a pattern merely adding richness to the general design. But on looking closer, I found that the Apostle of the Gentiles was all over ducks. He was, so to speak, crawling with ducks, with ducks and dogs pursuing them in one pantomimic dance all over the gilded pattern. It was here that the artist had crowded all his comic sketches of the sports of his native fens. It was a very good pattern, but it was made of quite grotesque pictures. It might have been the design for the fancy waistcoat of a fat gentleman in one of the Dickens novels. The first of all the Dickens novels, by the way, was originally written to illustrate some grotesque sketches of sport. It is not too much to say that, in the original scheme of the publishers, Mr Pickwick merely existed for the sake of Mr Winkle. Mr Winkle might very well have gone duck-shooting in the fens, as he went skating on the ice or riding on the famous horse that went sideways. The sporting artist employed on that occasion would doubtless have been ready to depict him surrounded by any number of ducks and dogs. But he would have been mildly surprised if he had been asked to depict them as part of the decoration of the parish church, to say nothing of the vestments of the parson. But the older artist saw nothing incongruous in depicting them thus in mazy detail between the massive book and the mighty sword, that stood for that terrible convert who was struck down upon the road to Damascus.

Now that is the answer to the question I have already asked and that is why this pointless anecdote is also a parable. People were able to shut their eyes to the big church because it was only a church, however big; and they did not think of deducing anything from it about the number of houses or the nature of households. Because the framework of so much of medieval life was a religious framework, they never even looked at the picture in the frame. They passed it over exactly as anyone looking at the painted figures of the Twelve Apostles passed over all the lively little animals of which its ornament was made up. Thus, to take only one example, popular history seldom takes account of the large numbers of medieval people more or less loosely attached to the Church without being in the full sense either priests or monks: students, members of lay orders and men who were merely clerks in the sense of pleading benefit of clergy; that is, being under the milder law of the Church rather than the harsher law of the State. All this popular life, I suspect, moved normally within more or less clerical enclosures, as the details of the decoration seemed to dance within the enclosure of the main lines of the design. In the gradual revival of the study of such a period, we have had to investigate the religious life in order to discover the secular life. We have had to search the cathedrals to find the guilds; as my friend had to scrutinise the saint in order to find the hounds and the birds. There is no way to those things except through that Gothic porch; and this was realised even by the great men like Morris and Rossetti who might well have wished, for some other reason, to come in by some other way. But none ever came in by any other way except the thieves and the robbers.

There are thousands of little things like that to be found in every corner of what is left of medieval craft and culture. I have taken this small instance because it is small, and because it is the last that has occurred to me. The study of these old things has to be intensive study; just as the cultivation of them anew would have to be an intensive cultivation.

Travellers’ Joys

Illustrated London News, 2 October 1926

Once when I was wandering about in the beautiful city of Bath, I fell into a vein of meditation not concerned with any of the antiquities of the place, as such things are counted in a guidebook. My reflections, though profound and philosophical, were not concerned with the Bath of Bath, which recalls the Roman foundation of Britain. They were not concerned with the Abbey of Bath, which recalls the Middle Ages; nor with the Pump Room or Assembly Room which recall the stately frivolity of the eighteenth century. I was not even thinking of that noble theme, the Wife of Bath, a medieval monument which seems even more gigantic than an abbey.

If anyone really wants to know why some of us have a taste for what is called ‘medievalism’, he can find a great deal of it in that grand and grotesque personality. But the point is that the Wife of Bath was coming from Bath, and not going to Bath. When we consider what her errand was, and then what she was, we realise the wide reach and grasp of religion upon the motley mob of mankind. The Wife of Bath is a sort of caricature carved in brass; as brazen as Mrs Gamp and with as broad a grin. But who can imagine Dickens, who described so many wanderings in Kent, describing Mrs Gamp as going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint? I suppose the whole stretch of history from the medieval to the modern world, might be summed up in the reversal of that journey. It is the change from the time when the Wife of Bath went to sprinkle herself with holy water at Canterbury, to the time when the Archbishop of Canterbury probably went to sprinkle himself with medicinal water at Bath. But it was not of such trifles as the towers of Canterbury or the Roman floors of Bath that I was musing mystically at the moment.

My mind was uplifted and attuned to the subject of buns. I was reflecting upon the remarkable fact that, to a great extent, it is still necessary to go to Bath for Bath buns. I have, indeed, encountered in my travels in less civilised places something apparently intended for food, to which is attached the name of the Roman city of Somerset. But, after tasting it, I have come to the conclusion that the derivation is different. These other objects, I conceive, are very legitimately called Bath buns because they are made of soap and flannel. But to a great extent, in spite of the modern network of communications and dead level of standardisation, a Bath bun still means a bun of Bath. The same is true in its degree, I believe, in the case of Chelsey buns. It may be true, for all I know, of those unique cakes of Richmond, gloriously described as Maids of Honour. It may be that, before standardisation began, there were these local luxuries in nearly every locality. Perhaps there were Pimlico Pancakes which were the rich reward of crossing the meadows to the picturesque hamlet of Pimlico. Perhaps Clapham produced a sweetmeat as well as a sect; and Mayfair was famous for toffee before it was famous for toffs. But over all districts that have been surrounded and swallowed by the big industrial cities, there runs the rule of the great commercial combinations, and all such individual things have perished.

I do not insist that nobody must be allowed to eat Brussels sprouts except in Brussels. I do not demand that everyone who likes Jerusalem artichokes should take staff and scrip and make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I do not say that Turkish delight should delight none but Turks or travellers in Turkey. I do not even insist (though it would be a fine heroic idea, worthy of a romance of Scott or Stevenson) that no person should be permitted to taste Edinburgh Rock until he has earned it by scaling the steep and splendid facade of the Rock of Edinburgh. Some of these are merely names; and some of them do still carry with them something of the savour and the pride of nations. But in England, in those exquisitely English centres, the old provincial towns, we did manage to produce good things whose very glory was in being provincial.

It was worth a man’s while to go from one town to another, and even from one county to another, to find things that he could not find at home. Thus there was a very real romance of travel, for romantic as well as for religious pilgrims. The traveller plodded along the Bath Road sustained from afar by the vista of the Bath Bun. He saw the cake peculiar to Richmond shining like a guiding star more brilliant than the Star and Garter. And though this may not seem the loftiest sort of star for a wise man to follow, yet these material luxuries had their moral significance, and stand in social criticism today as the symbols of something much deeper and wider than themselves. They illustrate something that is not only wanting in our latest social development, but something not immediately likely to be developed.

Thus travel in the true sense has become impossible in the large urban or urbanised districts. There are twenty ways of going everywhere, and there is nowhere to go. There are a hundred improved means of communication and there is nothing to communicate. A traveller in simpler times travelled with two legitimate and even estimable objects; first to see strange things in the places he went to; and second, to boast about the country he came from. Both these admirable arts are bound to suffer neglect and negation under existing conditions, when the place he finds is exactly like the place he leaves. All such places are alike, plastered with the same advertisements, blocked up with the same big shops, selling the same newspapers, attending the same schools.

There is therefore no real meaning in his travels, apart from the permanent personal interest of humanity. But the general spirit of travel, the desire to see new folk or new customs, all that has been ruined by the commercial concentration of modern times. I do not object to a reasonable number of things being scattered over the whole world, to remind the traveller of home and of the bond of mankind. I have seen The Illustrated London News for instance, in remote mud villages of Spain, or in caravanserais on the edge of the desert; and I am quite prepared to find it in the dark forests of Africa or the islands of the Southern Seas. But the Spanish villages and the Arab settlements were themselves quite different from London and the London News.

If each of our separate towns and villages were cut off by some happy catastrophe such as being snowed up or turned into an island by a flood, that town or village might begin to produce its own magazines. It might produce its own style of architecture, its own school of poets. It might produce something of its own out of the soil, instead of passing on something from somewhere else to somewhere else; as if every human town were no more than a railway junction It might be encouraged to use all the talent within its reach; instead of having that talent swamped and swept away by mere floods of fashion and rumour, from the ends of the earth. Then the true type of the traveller and the pilgrim might reappear upon the earth. Then it would really be worth while to cross the hills from one valley to another; for, entering a new valley, he would enter a new world. There would be more fun to wander over a part of England than it is today to wander over all the earth. The old fairy-tales, that told of a man coming to one kingdom where the houses were built of gold, or another where the fountains ran with wine, were but the legitimate literary exaggeration of the experience of real travellers, who found one peasantry wearing gilded headdresses or another brewing golden ale. But in our present phase travel has destroyed the traveller; and there is nowhere for the pilgrim to go save on a spiritual journey— the only possible pilgrim’s progress.

Understanding France

Illustrated London News, 5 September 1931

It is curious, but very obvious, that internationalists are never interpreters between nations. It is what their name almost implies; it is what we should logically expect them to be, or at any rate try to be. And yet they do not do it, and I rather doubt whether they really try. What happens is that the internationalist, while he is often mildly but sincerely horrified at the nationalism of his own nation, is almost always even more horrified at the nationalism of some other nation. And it so happens, as the history of humanity has in fact developed, that very often the nationalism is the nation.

Take the nearest and clearest case; the ancient but by no means primeval rivalry between England and France. In the early Middle Ages they were very nearly one nation. In the later Middle Ages, they were the first of the new and clearly distinguishable nations: on the one side by the splendid accident of Agincourt; on the other by something rather too splendid to be called an accident: St Joan. But ever since then, roughly speaking the two nations drifted further and further apart. And for anybody who is content with nations as nations, or with a very crude and clean-cut sort of nationalism, that might be natural enough. But what has the internationalist been doing? What about the man who talks with particular earnestness about the need for peace among the peoples, for mutual understanding among men of every race and realm, about friendliness to foreigners or humanity to natives? Has he, for instance, ever attempted to explain France to England? The extraordinary fact is that he has never done anything of the kind. He has always been the very last to do anything of the kind.

Few ordinary Englishmen, whether Imperialist or Internationalist, have ever really grasped even what was meant by the greatness of France. But the Internationalist has grasped it much less than the Imperialist. There is much more sense of it in the poems of Mr Kipling than in the pamphlets of Mr Wells. But what is really needed is a widening of English culture, so as to understand what was really valued in French culture. Passing over all that earlier French history, in which the King of Paris had not yet fully become the King of France, we may note even in passing that the Crusades were a French affair; and we only fail to realise the fact because at that time our own monarchy and nobility were as French as the French. St Louis did not succeed in his Crusade; not even with the abortive success of Coeur de Lion. But St Louis does explain the Crusades, while Coeur de Lion rather confuses them. The main modern matter of which I speak, however, begins with the Renaissance and all that gigantic tradition that springs from Rabelais. Does it strike you that the worthy Nonconformist minister, who preaches against militarism and in favour of international pacifism, would be the very best man in the world to translate Rabelais?

Then follows what the French call with a pride that is perfectly logical in a Frenchman but has been allowed to remain almost unintelligible to an Englishman, the Great Century. Nobody knows anything about France, or even about Europe, who does not know that the Great Century was great. Our historians have seen nothing but bombast in the instinct or imagination which compared Louis the Fourteenth to the Sun. But there is no historical truth without historical imagination. And it is much nearer the truth to compare him to a sun-god than to compare him to a pompous dancing-master, in the manner of the narrow national bigotry of Macaulay. Some English literary men have begun to do justice to the great age of Racine and Pascal and the fullness of the Golden Age of classicism. Mr Sacheverell Sitwell, in an excellent study of the Baroque, has a truly imaginative and therefore understanding description of one of those great pageants in which royalty was such a reality that it could carry any load of artifice; and in which it seemed something quite spiritual and spontaneous, like a song, that the King should not only go clad in gold, but clothed with the sun. Mr Maurice Baring has repeatedly insisted with great force and humour, that the notion that Racine is merely stilted and dull is worth as much as the impression of a Breton fisherman that Milton is only stilted and dull: it arises from the rather simple cause of incapacity to read a foreign language.

There have been some good English translations of good French books on the tremendous and even tragic religious quarrel, the Jansenists and the Jesuits and the rest; a huge hinge or turning point in the whole history of Christianity. There have even been a few English critics capable of reading and reviewing the English translations. But the Rev. Timothy Tooting, who is a pacifist because he disapproves of all fights except bun-fights, who serves out cocoa but has never touched ‘alcohol’, and who holds meetings to promote the peace of the world—do you suppose that he has contributed very much to the understanding of the procession of the great Kings and the pride in the glory of Gaul? But until we understand that pride we shall never understand the point of view of a Frenchman. Again, the odd thing is that the Rev. Timothy Tooting was equally shocked at the great Kings and at the great rebellion against the great Kings. His remarks about the French Revolution and especially about Napoleon are just as silly and sniffy as his remarks about the French Monarchy, and especially about Louis the Fourteenth. And the remarks made about Napoleon by Mr Wells, who has some prejudices in common with Mr Tooting, are of the sort that might be excusable in a very stupid half-pay Tory captain who had served under Nelson, but are certainly not worthy either of Napoleon or of Mr Wells. Yet it is precisely men like Mr Wells who set out elaborately to reconcile the nations; to bring about what they call a better understanding between them. I suggest that he begin by reconciling England and France, and achieving a better understanding, or any sort of understanding, of France.

It has often been said that signs and portents will accompany the advent of the Millennium, or the coming of the heavenly kingdom upon earth. Oliver Wendell Holmes demanded that certain miracles should precede that apocalypse; as that raspberries and strawberries should grow bigger downwards through the box; or that lawyers should take what they would give and doctors give what they would take. I would respectfully suggest that before peace, perfect peace, reigns in the United States of Europe, we shall probably have seen some strange things. We shall see that particular sort of pacifist in our country no longer content with being at peace with the same particular sort of pacifist in every other country. We shall see him do what is really needed to avert war: attempt to understand the patriots of the other country. We shall see Earl Russell explaining the ideals of Fascism as clearly and fairly and sympathetically as he would explain the ideals of Socialism. We shall see Mr H. G. Wells fighting o’er again the hundred battles of Napoleon, shouting the war-songs of the Revolutionary War, and beginning to realise how much of the modern world which he admires, and the European unity he values, are due to those who carried the Code Napoleon to the palaces of Vienna or Madrid. We shall see the Rev. Tooting himself, of whose soul no Christian must despair, sitting down to write some rousing and romantic record of the charging chivalry of Poland. It is barely possible that all this, at the moment, may appear slightly improbable. But it is the only way in which we shall ever have international peace, and the only way in which these men can work for international peace. What they are doing at present is to consolidate all the people of one particular philosophy against all the people of the opposite philosophy. They are drawing them up like two long lines of battle. It may be defensible to prepare for war; anyhow, the peacemakers of this school are preparing for it very thoroughly.

Salute to New York

New York American, 19 September 1931

I said to somebody, as I was leaving New York and looking back at its aerial towers, that it was very lovely. I found I had only conveyed the impression that it was a very lovely place to leave. These double meanings or misunderstandings are common in such cases, and the stranger in America often feels that, while his blame sounds like insolence, his praise sounds like insincerity; or at least like irony. I remembered that I had myself been criticised, first for whitewashing Main Street in defiance of the Menckenites, and afterwards for saying that American villages were unsightly as compared with English villages. The general tendency is, however, to overrate the subtlety of the wicked foreigner. I said the skyline of New York was beautiful, because it is; and I said the ruck of the villages are ugly, because they are. The whole labyrinthine plot of perfidious Albion being thus laid bare, it occurred to me that there really is a parallel between the case of the city and of the villages; and that it offered a good opportunity of explaining to some of the more quarrelsome persons something which they did not seem to know; I mean what the quarrel was all about.

The queer thing about New York is that it goes on being new. It is the only case in which the name has not come to mean the very opposite of what it says. Nova Scotia does not sound particularly novel or particularly Scottish. New Orleans sounds older than Old Orleans. And if you meet anywhere a progressive prophet announcing the New Religion or the New Theology, you may be sure that they are about as recent and revolutionary as the New Forest. But New York is unique. It is truly to be called a vision; because a vision means something that is hardly ever visible. It is the dwelling place of a Spirit; which men may like or dislike in all kinds of ways, but which does express itself in a particular art; in an architecture that is akin to aviation. It is built out of winged stones; its architecture is like the law of gravity turned upside down. And those starry heights, those palaces riding the air like rainbows, those pale opalescent spears piercing the sky, lighter than the very light of heaven, have a meaning and are a sign. They do stand for something which the stranger, if he is wise, will recognise; however many things he may find alien to his own civilisation, however many he may think evil for any civilisation. It is a spirit not easy to name without cant, but much more real than all the cant with which it is covered... Lift up your heads, O ye gates... Lift up your hearts, O ye people.... It is a sursum corda in the national soul that is not merely false or affected.

So that even all the old rant about the Starry Flag or the Bird of Freedom was right in its instinct for images exalted and far up in air; and a man in a sort of dream, grown dizzy with that dance of towers, may somewhere against the blinding sun, see suddenly the unblinded eagle.

Now suppose somebody said to me that New York was nothing but muck and money; that it might as well be carted away; that industrial capitalism is the same everywhere, I should tell him he was wrong. Industrialism began in England; but it never ended in anything like New York. The pilgrim approaching Pudsey does not behold palaces like rainbows. The traveller leaving Wigan does not look back on opalescent loveliness. The clerk in a poor suburb of Sheffield is not necessarily dizzy with stars and starry towers. This case is unique; it is a special spiritual expression; it probably could not be replaced. That is what I should say to them about New York. And that is what I said, to the protectors of rural England, about the English village.

The point was that a thing like English country life does not spring up merely out of living in the country. It does not spring up in America, or for that matter in Asia or Africa or a great part of Europe. It is the perfect artistic expression of something English, just as the best American architecture is the expression of something American. But you will not find the first in anything called a village or the second in anything called a city. And if you let it perish, you are like men who should look on at the ruin of the last Greek god or the last Christian cathedral.

The British Beech

G.K.’s Weekly, 17 December 1932

I am happy to say that I live in Beaconsfield; I mean, of course, that I live in Bekonsfield. I believe that there are some people who live in Beaconsfield, but I do not know where it is, and I cannot imagine why anybody should live there. By the sound of it, I should suppose that it is in some Colony, and was probably named after Disraeli who ought to have called himself Earl of Hughenden if he had followed out his own rustic, rugged and feudal dreams and not been led astray by the temptation to pick up the abandoned coronet of Burke. Now about the origin of the name of this town there is some dispute; but about the pronunciation of the name, there is no dispute whatever. There is only knowledge as possessed by those who know; and the often invincible and therefore innocent ignorance of the world outside. I need hardly say that those who know are those who are now commonly called ignorant and uneducated people. When you have heard the name of your own town for twenty years on the tongues of hedgers, ditchers, rat-catchers, gamekeepers, poachers and village idiots, then you know absolutely for certain that it is the correct pronunciation. When the intellectual aristocracy comes down to such a place and pronounces it as it is spelt, you know for a simple fact that they are wrong. If you have any real education, you know that spelling was never in the past a great part of education; that it is now treated by these people as the whole of education; simply because it is the whole of their education; or the only education they have. It never occurs to them that, while Shakespeare would write his own name in two or three totally different but equally illegible scrawls, he trusted the whole great load of his glory to the sound of words, to be spoken by living men. In dealing therefore with a word like ‘Beaconsfield’, they do not know how to choose between the men who can speak and the men who can only spell. It was always pronounced right. Only it is still spelt wrong.

Subject to this philological parenthesis, it is true that some at least maintain that the name is derived from an old word for a beech tree. Certainly there could be no more appropriate name and no more symbolic and inspiring thing. For the beech tree has a special representative quality in all this rolling wooded landscape, which makes up the central and southern parts of Buckinghamshire; and through the county a real relation to the country. A Sussex man, himself boiling over with enthusiasm for Sussex, once said to me of the beech-woods about my Beaconsfield home, ‘This is really the most English part of England; I confess that compared with this, Sussex is a thing quite separate and apart.’

We have all heard about the British oak; and I am traditional enough not to quarrel with a tradition full of many heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams, or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships. A modern naval enthusiast, by the way, would find it difficult to scatter screws and bolts in the hope that they would turn themselves into the war-machines of today. There is something in that parable of the organic and mechanic growth. But detaching my mind as much as possible, I am forced to feel that the oak has qualities less intimately national. The oak, dedicated to Jupiter of the Romans, has the jagged angular branches that are like the bolts of Jove. Its hard texture and rectangular corners belong almost to the logic of the Latins. If I were choosing an entirely English emblem, I should choose the beech-tree. It is equally strong and expressive of strength; but the smoothness is also expressive of a certain slowness that is akin to mercy and mildness. Its curves are of the gradual sort found in everything in these parts; in the slow speech of the rustics; in the gradual curves in the hills; even far away to the downs of Hampshire and Sussex, that are the only mountains of the South. They have a power like that of lazy waves that are lifted slowly; and allow villages to grow up in their hollows, only because they are too lazy to fall. There is nothing in them of the oak-blasting thunderbolts and very little of the oaks. But here especially, in this section of Bucks, the beeches surround and overshadow us and cover our home; so that it is no accident that has called this particular stretch of England the Home Counties.

Perhaps there is something profane and unhistorical in thus suggesting the belated substitution of the British Beech for the British Oak. And yet there is an important truth in this, if used as a literary symbol; even if we would never wish it to be actually used as a pictorial emblem. For much of the English error about England, which has misled us ever since our real origins were shut off by the obscurantism of the Reformation, is expressed in the undue emphasis on the oak and the neglect of the nobler qualities of the beech. The tendency to turn John Bull into a braggart, and from that into a bully, was only too readily represented by giving him a great oaken cudgel, supposed to be as invincible as the club of Hercules. It left out all the better elements in the native temperament; the humour, the good humour and especially the good nature. These would have been much better expressed in the smoothness that can co-exist with the strength of the beech. Moreover, noble as was the Nelson legend and all the earlier part of our maritime romance, the consideration of oaks only with reference to ships did turn English thoughts too exclusively outwards to the ends of the earth, and too little inwards to England. Thus Britannia became merely a statue to be seen from afar, rather than a real woman and mother, to be made happy in her own home. Hence the dangerous neglect of agriculture and internal economic conditions from which we are already suffering. The whole thing was altogether too emblematic. The British Oak was a thing like the British Lion; but lions are really rather rare in our Buckinghamshire lanes. On the other hand, the British Beech could not suggest anything except the British Pig. The swine feed on the beech-mast; and the pig is more realistic, even if he is growing almost equally rare. The return to a real England, with real pigs for real Englishmen, would be a return to the beech-woods; which still make this town like a home.

At least, they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech-forests have been removed to enable a motorist temporarily deaf and blind to go from Birmingham to Brighton.

Public Monuments

Illustrated London News, 21 April 1934

I happened to have occasion recently to behold again the celebrated monument of King Victor Emmanuel in Rome, and it turned my thoughts backwards to monuments in general, and to the controversies about our own Cenotaph. They are, as I shall suggest in a moment, rather controversies about the place, the scale, and the formal use of the Cenotaph than controversies about the Cenotaph. It might be argued that the thing itself fulfils it own laws— and limitations. It may be unfair to complain that it is thin, when it is inherent in its intentional proportions to be thin. It may be unjust to object that it is naked and negative, when it was obviously meant to be naked and negative; it may be illogical to protest that it contains no symbol of any special spiritual significance, when it was obviously most carefully designed to contain nothing of the sort. But touching the emplacement and employment of the memorial, there is a great deal more to be said.

Nobody can complain that the Victor Emmanuel monument is too thin. Its thickness has the effect of a huge fortified wall which it is difficult to get round and unthinkable to get over. What is worse, this new Citadel actually bars the way to the old and real Citadel. The original rock of Rome, the high place from which the eagles flew, is practically overshadowed by this new wall of white marble. Victor Emmanuel of Savoy appears in the perspective of topography, if not precisely of history, as a considerably more important person than Julius Caesar. The road to the temple of Capitoline Jove, up which Caesar went with his roaring Triumphs, the place of the Capitol, where he met the end of the greatest human glory, seems no longer to dominate Rome, as I believe it did before the excited Liberals of the nineteenth century planned a mountain of marble that seemed ambitious to rise higher than the Seven Hills. And somehow, with all respect and sympathy, the purpose and the ambition seem hardly to fit. A particular Piedmontese prince, not without many virtues, and certainly not without most distressing difficulties, considerable as were, doubtless, his services to United Italy, does not now, in fact, bulk quite so big in history as Julius Caesar or even many a great Latin leader like Scipio or Marius. Its proportions in relation to the Capitol and the streets of Rome may yet need some explaining. It will probably be very difficult to convince our immediate posterity that it is not a monument to Mussolini.

Those whom in England we call Victorians, or, more properly, the men of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, are more completely misunderstood by most modern writers than if they were Ancient Britons. They are now always represented as stodgy and slow and paralysed by mere caution. The fact is that in most ways they were far too impetuous and enthusiastic. As romantic love was almost their religion, so in other ways they worshipped things, worthy indeed, but without enough discrimination between the sort of love that is fleeting and the sort of love that is lasting. They fell in love with public heroes, instead of merely following them. It is true that some return of this passion has appeared in some parts of Europe which were always specially prone to it, but I doubt whether even now the idolatries are so great as the noble idolatries of the English Victorians, and certainly not so great in England. Even in England we hear much of new movements and a need for leadership. But, with the greatest possible respect to all concerned, I doubt whether any mob actually makes a god out of Sir Oswald Mosley, as the middle-class Victorian mobs made a huge heroic legend out of Garibaldi or General Gordon. Remember that Victorianism was much more affected by its romantic side than by the later claims made on its scientific side. It was much more really moved by Carlyle than by Mill, let alone Herbert Spencer. And it did largely accept, among the apparent decay of many forms of religion, the form of religion which Carlyle invented and called ‘Hero-Worship’. And it acted on this religion, which it did not always do in relation to the other religions. The trouble is that it acted much too swiftly and ardently. It acted with a blind impetuosity which was the very reverse of stodgy. The evidence for it can be seen in many eyesores that we call public monuments. It is true that in England this is as far as their rage and madness went. In Europe as a whole, a great part of the nineteenth century might be called, and was called, the age of revolutions. It is true that the Victorians in England prided themselves on not being destructive, but only constructive. But those who have gazed on certain sculptured memorials, dedicated to eternal fame, have sometimes been tempted to think that construction can be more devastating than destruction.

By the way, may I be here excused if I enter once more a protest against that most meaningless distinction? If a man cuts down a tree and makes a mast, is he destructive or constructive? The emotional effect depends entirely on whether you happen to want a woodland shade or a sea-voyage. Except some of the Manichee heretics who attacked the Early Church, an Albigensian or two, and perhaps some of the old Russian Nihilists, I know of no political group which admits that it is destroying for the sake of destroying. And all political groups, if they are doing anything (a large assumption), are constructing by means of destroying. Compare this journalese jargon with the shrewd proverbs of popular life. It must have been a French peasant, I think, who invented the much wiser phrase: ‘You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.’

Victor Emmanuel’s monument has one great merit not easily to be found in London. It may seem to some merely to block the traffic, but it can seem to others to be really the goal of the traveller. The very fact that it fills the whole view, like a back-scene, does enable it to play the part of a great temple or theatre to which processions can march and seem to find their final goal. In other words, it is a shrine. It is a place to receive pilgrimages, if only patriotic pilgrimages. And when I saw an army of Italian Scouts grounding their poles or lowering their flags, like pilgrims laying down their staves, I thought they did really convey, by that halt and that salute, some sense of having come to the heart of their country.

Now, what is primarily the matter with the Cenotaph in London is simply what the Londoners did with it. They did not put it on a height or in an enclosure or with a background of finality, where it could possibly look like a national shrine to be the goal of pilgrimages. They put it down at random in the middle of the road, a road running both ways; and turned it into a mere stage in the traffic, one of many other objects, like a lamp-post. In fact, the Cenotaph looks like an unfortunate pedestrian who has started from one side of the street and is very doubtful of his chances of reaching the other. Under these disadvantages, he has even something a little weak-minded about his hesitation; as if, by some inversion of Einstein, the Hollow Tomb could be hollow outside as well as inside. But the fault is really in a lack of the sense, the true sense, of town-planning. And the moral is that we cannot make public monuments unless we recover the old imaginative instinct of public life; which did not mean sitting on committees, but marching in processions, organising into effective crowds, and learning how to salute the altar or the tomb.

THE MAKING OF HISTORY

Statues

Illustrated London News, 1 June 1907

Monuments last for ever. Therefore the mistakes of monuments last forever. That is what the modern world does not understand about the ancient dignity of marble or of stone. If I make a mistake in writing an article, I can cross it out. But if I make a mistake in carving a colossal figure of Rameses the Seventh (if there was a Rameses the Seventh) there is a tendency for that mistake to remain, and become unalterable; you cannot cross it out. If in carving Rameses you have given that slight curl to the nostril which suggests that his cynicism was cruel (as his enemies unreasonably maintained) rather than kindly (as those who knew him best are quite prepared to assert emphatically), in that case it is to be feared that your mistake about Rameses will remain, and be perpetuated for ever in that face of marble. If you have done him any injustice, you have done him an eternal injustice. If you have slandered him at all, you have slandered him forever.

Of course there is the method of smashing every statue you see. Personally I am in favour of it. I agree with the ancient Jews that the graven image has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind. That is, it has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind if mankind has no religion; and I am speaking of the modern world. Moreover, the ordinary statue has a curious power of falsifying the ordinary person. There was a great deal to be said for the old eighteenth century method of making monumental statues of great men. The eighteenth century method of making a statue of a great man was quite simple. You simply made the statue of the great man as unlike the great man as possible; you then gave him bare shoulders and a Roman toga, and you called it the classical style, which perhaps it was. There is something to be said for this classical style. There is also something to be said for the modern realistic style of Monsieur Rodin, in which you leave out a man’s leg or arm at random, to indicate that you have forgotten it in the frenzy of your genius. Both these styles have real ideas behind them; but I think there was an unfortunate period between them, especially in England, and that this period gave rise to the general disposition to smash statues which exists in all the healthy-minded English. I wonder if all the statues were as bad at the time when the army of Oliver Cromwell had finally defeated the army of Charles I. If they were as bad it would go a long way to explain the iconoclasm of the Puritans. We feel reasonably angry with them because they smashed to pieces many beautiful and celebrated images. Still, we never saw the images.

Perhaps the most pathetic instance of this English sculpture applied to the wrong purpose can be found in the five or six statues which stand in the square opposite the Houses of Parliament. The personality of the politician is there not expressed even in the smallest degree. Punch’s caricatures of Palmerston make him more dignified than his statue makes him. Punch, which hated Disraeli, represented him as a more real and admirable creature than the shapeless one before whom bunches of primroses are offered on Primrose Day. If the spirit of these statesmen could return they would prefer the fleeting caricatures of the comic papers to these everlasting caricatures in stone. They would prefer the thing drawn in ill-nature by their enemies to this thing conceived in adoration by their friends. And yet the definition of the deficiency is not quite easy to state. The figures are reasonably well designed; reasonably well dressed. There are no mistakes in costume or in anatomy that the eye of a layman can detect or denounce. Lord Palmerston wears a frock-coat; I suppose he did wear a frock-coat. He holds out his hand; I suppose that from time to time in the course of his animated and interesting career he did sometimes hold out his hand. He has whiskers; I presume he had whiskers. Sometimes, in a dark dream of ecstasy, I venture to hope not such whiskers; still I never saw him, and it may be so. There is nothing essentially unreasonable or unlikely about any part of his appearance or the appearance of the other stone statesmen who share with him that sacred and most impressive place. And yet when one thinks what a place it is, one suddenly sees that all those figures are hopelessly and incurably comic. If there is any England, this is the high historic Senate of England. If there is any England, there runs the sacred English river. And when we think of England as anything everlasting, even when we think of England as anything moderately lasting, those Victorian stone figures become suddenly like silly dolls. There must be some reason for this. And I think the reason is exactly that the men who put up those statues did not really feel as if they were putting up anything permanent at all; as if there was nothing in Palmerston (or at least, in their view of Palmerston), as if there was nothing in Beaconsfield (or at least, in their admiration of Beaconsfield), that suggested any line that was eternal, any grouping or massing that seemed able to endure the open day. For this is the real and final test of a statue. Its test is in two forms of trial. First, it must be able to endure publicity. Second, it must be able to endure solitude. One must be able to think of it as abandoned. The epic of war is for the feast of great princes; the old wives’ tale is for the circle of gossips and rustics; the picture is for the inhabited room; the miniature is for the locket. Even the carved church is mostly conceived for a common need, and even a common comfort. But the stone statue is something that one can leave alone under the stars.

It would be a strange thing if, after all, those four or five stone figures expressed all that has been wrong with England for so long a time. It would be strange if the bad carving of Lord Palmerston’s frock-coat were the only thing that really expressed what is wrong with the Party system. Yet I fancy that it is exactly there or thereabout that the truth lies. We admire our Party leaders. We do not believe in them. We praise them for making so much of our case, as if all the time it were really a bad case. They are all advocates and they were better in the eighteenth century, when they all wore wigs. You cannot make an enduring statue of an advocate, for you cannot make a statue unless you have an idea; and the essence of an advocate is that he has any ideas or all ideas. Exactly what men admired in Palmerston is exactly what men cannot carve in stone; his easy variety, his quickness to leap, which seemed almost like omnipresence. ‘What a faculty that fellow has,’ said Macaulay admiringly, ‘for falling on his feet!’ It is a splendid capacity, doubtless, to fall on one’s feet; but if one is a statue it is dangerous to fall on anything else.

What people admired in Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, was simply his jumpiness. But jumpiness cannot be expressed in stone. I am aware that Monsieur Rodin and others have brought the eccentricity of statuary to a high point; but even they have not yet succeeded in making a statue of a man who has jumped clean off the ground. It was the whole point of Beaconsfield that he jumped clean off the ground. Seriously speaking, I am not sure that he had ever been on the ground; hence he was a subject inappropriate for statuary, and his statue in front of the Houses of Parliament is simply a great gown with a goatish face on top of it. But indeed the sculptors are scarcely to be blamed if they showed inadequate results, for their art can only express eternal ideas, and they were called upon to deal with personalities whose whole boast was that no ideas could be eternal. What could the best sculptors do when they were told to make characteristic statues of six acrobats?

A Theory of Tyrants

Daily News, 13 June 1908

I have come to be convinced of late of a certain theory of the nature of tyranny. It may be right or wrong, but I think it is at least worthy of thought in connection with a highly interesting matter. Broadly speaking, the common theory of tyranny has been this: That men have groaned under some system for centuries, and have at last rebelled against it. But I think that men have actually done quite otherwise; they have rebelled against the system against which they have not groaned. But the matter is so mixed and also so acute that I may be permitted to state it in a more explanatory manner.

Let us take, for the sake of argument, the two risings against tyranny most commonly considered in current literature— the English rebellion of the early seventeenth century and the French Revolution. According to the common theory, Charles I should have been the heir of at least twenty intolerable despots. The truth is that he was the heir of one tolerable despot (who had not quite effected despotism), and beyond that everything was different. Queen Elizabeth was not tolerable, and she was not tolerated. In so far as she was endured she was adored. Cavaliers and Puritans alike looked back to her reign (most mistakenly, doubtless, but most certainly) as a midsummer of popular monarchy.

In short the English Puritans did not rebel against an old system; whatever else it was it was not old. Even if Charles I had been a much worse king than he was there would not have been enough time for him to have created a complete and cruel tradition against the tradition of Elizabeth. A few years before Charles’ head was cut off, most Englishmen would have died to keep Elizabeth’s on. If you turn to the case of the French Monarchy before the French Revolution you will find exactly the same thing. A very short time before the Revolution the French Monarchy was the generally accepted French symbol. The King before Louis the Guillotined was Louis the Well Beloved. The Monarchy (in France as in England) became the most unpopular thing very soon after it had been the most popular thing. There was no weakness, there was no long decline: the defeat of the thing followed swiftly on its first victory. Charles I was not the last of the English despots. He was one of the first of the English despots— only there happened to have been no more of them. Encouraged by the arrogance and popularity of Elizabeth, who had stood for patriotism and Protestantism and the defiance of Spain, Charles tried to work with Elizabethan England and found that Elizabethan England was not there. It was not too old to last, it was too new to last. Louis XVI was not the last of a line of unpopular kings. On the contrary, he was the first of a line of popular kings to be unpopular.

I can only explain all this by my private theory of tyrants; which is this. Men do not rebel against the old; rather they rebel against the new. They turn upon something when they find that it has them in a trap. They do not revolt against something that has been unpopular. They revolt (and very rightly) against something that has been popular. They hated Charles I because they had loved Elizabeth. They killed Louis XVI because they had been killed for Louis XIV. In fact, this is probably what is meant by that seemingly meaningless phrase, the fickleness of the mob. It probably means that the mob is quicker than other people in discovering that man has walked into a man-trap. England went mad with joy for the English Monarchy, because the Armada had not conquered England. And then England suddenly went mad with rage because it discovered that (during that exciting interlude) the English Monarchy had conquered England. We had escaped the snare of Philip; we walked into the snare of Elizabeth; we broke out of the snare of Charles I.

This is the essential mark of tyranny: that it is always new. Tyranny always enters by the unguarded gate. The tyrant is always shy and unobtrusive. The tyrant is always a traitor. He has always come there on the pretence that he was protecting something which people really wanted protected—religion, or public justice, or patriotic glory. Men staring at the Armada; did not watch the King; so they strengthened the King. Later when they watched the King they unconsciously strengthened the aristocracy. Again, when they attacked the aristocracy, they did not watch the big merchants who were attacking it— and who wanted watching. All tyrannies are new tyrannies. There are no such things really as old tyrannies; there are hardly any such things as old superstitions.

There is one moral to these evident facts of history. When you look for tyrants, do not look for them among the obvious types that have oppressed men in the past—the king, the priest, or the soldier. If you do, you are merely looking at the Spanish Armada while England is being turned into a despotism behind your back. Monarchy was once a popular organ; yet it was turned against the people. Remember that newspapers are popular organs that may be turned against the people. Whatever the new tyrant is, he will not wear the exact uniform of the old tyrant.

An Anecdote of Persecution

Daily News, 1 August 1908

There are many tales in Joinville’s reminiscences of St Louis which would be worth retelling; I will, however, be reasonable, and retell only one of them. I will tell it with strict reference to the record; I will only expand it in so far as obvious inference and historical circumstances are clear in the case; whenever I am ornamenting it I will say so, and anybody can buy the book and bowl me out. But it is a tale which seems to me to tell in the most vivid and everyday style how it is in practice that persecution arises. It is common talk in these days that we ought to be imaginative, if only in order to be charitable. If a man commits forgery we must try to understand his temptations and his original trend. But no such mercy is generally shown to the enthusiast for ideas. The sins of the intolerant are seldom considered with any intellectual tolerance. It seems that we are to find excuses for the crimes of good men.

Wherever we have read history we have noticed one class of statements or allegations. I mean simply incredible allegations; and statements that cannot be believed. For instance, it cannot be believed (at least, I cannot believe it) that the French Jacobins who ran the Terror were diseased and hysterical doctrinaires. They fought all Europe and beat it; the thing is impossible. Now exactly in this sense it is impossible to believe the ordinary modern version of the position of the Jew in the Middle Ages. Whatever else the Jew was, he was important. If he had really lived like Isaac in Ivanhoe he could not have been important; he could not have been at all. A man from whom anybody could steal money would not have any money to steal. A man utterly outlawed must perish. Now I will tell a little tale out of Joinville. The Monastery of Our Lady at Cluny was prosperous and charitable; when the snow was on the ground in winter it showed a maze of footprints of the poor folk who came to its doors. Most of these, of course, were not only poor but of plain rank; but it sometimes happened that a man of good estate was so impoverished as to receive such aid. Among the many figures familiar at the door was one especially who crawled to it more slowly than the others, for he was crippled and hung upon a crutch. He was an old knight with white hair, quite disabled, and entirely penniless; but his eyes (I think) were fierce and restless, as are the eyes of all those whose activity has been shifted from the body to the mind. His clothes were dropping off his back; he was a perfect gentleman, and very much of a nuisance.

Now it happened that he came to the Monastery on a day that was somewhat solemnly set apart for one of those intellectual tournaments which the men of the Middle Ages loved as much as bodily tournaments. The Abbot was presumably something of a philosopher as well as a philanthropist, and he was liberal in his mental interests as well as liberal with his corn. In the exact words of Joinville’s Chronicle, ‘There was a great disputation between clergy and Jews at the Monastery of Cluny.’ That single sentence knocks flat for ever the whole picture and conception of the medieval Jew which we all have from Scott’s romances or from general report. Ignorant fools who insult a strange sect merely because it is strange, do not arrange public debates to give it a chance of explaining itself. People bent on rooting out a tribe ruthlessly like rats or weeds do not invite the heads of the tribe to make speeches about themselves on a platform. The truth is, of course, that the medievals, like all other sane human beings, started with a preference for reasonable argument and peaceable settlement. It is always afterwards, if at all, that these excellent intentions break down. And they did, unfortunately, break down in the philanthropic and philosophical Monastery of Cluny; as you shall hear.

I think we can call up some rude and dim conception of the scene. The architecture would still be Norman with the low, almost sullen arch and short, almost brutal columns; for though no date is given to the story, the Gothic can hardly have been greatly spread. Such laymen as were present would be people of all conditions; and while there would be more initial ceremony of precedence between these classes, there would be far less practical shyness or contemptuous shrinking than at the present day. Prominently, and probably in a row, would sit the Christian theologians, eager with the eagerness of all men who live much with their own sex in schools and clubs and universities, for an unending war of words. Like all men who have a complete theory of things, they would be fretting and on fire with the chance of expounding it, many of them stirring and stamping. For men who have much to say are more nervous than men who have nothing to say.

Over against them, probably calmer, probably more prosperous in appearance, certainly more observant of all that was going on, would sit the great Rabbis of the mysterious race. In their hands they would hold parchments undecipherable to all the children of the West; but their very faces would be more undecipherable parchments. Their smiles would seem carved like hieroglyphics. Into that place of plain arches and Latin logicians with shaven heads they brought the memory of things cloudy and monstrous, as of many-headed cherubim or winged bulls walking enormous in the desert. For though both theologies were by this time twisted and elaborate, each worked back like a tangled tree to its original root. All the arabesque of Rabbinical riddle and commentary referred eventually to the ultimate Jewish idea; the idea of the awful distance between man and God. All the roaring and grinding syllogisms of the Schoolmen were tools and symbols of the awful union of God and man. The Jewish angel had ten eyes or twelve wings to express the idea that if ever we saw the beauty and wisdom of God it would seem to us outrageous or frightful. The Christian angel often had two wings only, in addition to eyes and two arms; to show that human beauty and dignity were divine realities which would survive and break the doors of death. Two sublime creeds were in collision; the creed that flesh is grass, and the creed that flesh was God. And at the moment, before any of the philosophers could move, the old man of the crutch stood up and asked to speak.

Joinville in his Chronicle gently says that this was received ‘with doubt’. Human life is so startlingly the same in all ages that one can see the scene as clearly as if it were a modern meeting when some peppery and impractical Colonel insists on addressing the meeting. One can imagine the whispers between the Abbot and his chief supporters. ‘If he speaks there will be a row,’ and the unanswerable answer, ‘If we stop him there will be a worse row’. The assembled philosophers, who had been about to pose the Rabbis with the awful rationalism of medieval argument, ‘Why do you believe in God if He is not manifest?’ or ‘Could anyone believe in Heaven except through revelation?’ stood for a moment aside. The old cripple said, ‘At least you admit that Our Lady was the Mother of God.’

The Rabbi who was addressed smiled, perhaps, that rich smile which some find repulsive even when it is benevolent, and said that he did not admit this. The old man said steadily, ‘Then if you do not love Our Lady you were very silly to come into her house.’ He plucked the crutch from under his arm, and whirling it suddenly aloft, caught the Jew a stunning crack behind the ear, bringing him to the ground. Instantly, of course, there was a scuffle, and the Jews were driven from the place. The Abbot rushed up to the old Knight and told him in no measured terms that he had made a horrible fool of himself. The old gentleman, still panting and blowing, no doubt from his exertion, told the Abbot that he thought him the greater fool of the two. Thus unfortunately ended the great experiment of religious inquiry in the Monastery of Cluny. I leave it to anyone to say whether it is not as human a tale as any that might have happened in Surbiton during the War.

The Return of Pageantry

Eye-Witness, 29 June 1911

The Puritans, in their hours of pride, seem actually to claim that our nation is fundamentally Puritan, was made by the Puritan spirit. They put Cromwell in the place of Alfred; they put him not only at the head of English patriotism, but at the beginning of English history. They make old England a sort of Puritan colony like New England. All this is, of course, a ludicrous delusion. The first facts or names that jump to the mind will remind any Englishman that his country had a splendid national literature and a very unmistakable type of national life before the hat of a single Puritan had been seen and hooted in England. Chaucer is even more English than Bunyan; Shakespeare is certainly more English than Milton. The Tabard and the Mermaid, Lady Godiva and St George, Robin Goodfellow and Robin Hood, belong to a national tradition that has not even been touched by Puritanism; yet which is quite different from the tradition of Spain, of Scotland, or of France. Chaucer’s Franklin, whose beard was white as a daisy, and in whose house ‘it snewed meate and drinke’, was as certainly an Englishman as he most certainly was not a Puritan.

Puritanism was something put into the Englishman after he had grown to his full national stature. Some hated it as an alien poison; some praised it as a violent medicine. But nobody pretended that it was the natural bread and ale that had built up the countrymen of Colet or Ben Jonson. It might indeed be maintained that in all the three cases of nations thus raided by Puritanism, the Scotch, the English and the Dutch, this religion has been rather a sort of spell or possession than a true change of personality. It might be suggested that in each case a merrier and more medieval nation went alive into that land of bondage and is now coming alive out of it. Thus the Scotch romance and witchery which Scott and Stevenson have brought to life is only the return of a spirit most marked in the old Scottish ballads and chronicles, in the tales of Tamlane in the Forest, and Thomas the Rhymer among the fairies; and in that almost Arthurian romance of the roving court of Robert Bruce, which left, like a gypsy blood for generations, a tradition of wandering Scottish kings. Even in Scotland, I believe, Calvinism has only been an episode. The Scotch are taking off their ‘blacks’ and appearing again in the purple of their ancient poetry. We may yet hear the twang of the last precentor before we really hear the Lay of the Last Minstrel.

Even in the third case of Holland, of which I know far less, something of the same kind could be suggested. Before the coming of the Puritan, the people of the flat country had already shown that talent for a certain detail and domesticity in art which fills so many galleries with their quaint interiors and their convincing still life. It might well be maintained that the same note of half religious realism, of an almost mystical silence and solidity, is being sounded in much of the new literature of the Netherlands. It is marked in Maeterlinck’s love of interiors and the unconscious shapes of things; in the way in which he writes of a window standing open or a passage leading to a door. He lives in a dumb fairyland of furniture. Nothing could be more like the almost conventual quietude and neatness of the pre-Reformation art among the Flemings. And nothing certainly could be more unlike the somewhat vulgar yet really demonic energy, the curious mixture of bourgeois smugness and visionary anarchy that marked the mighty days of the Puritan. Nothing could be further from the sensational art and literature of the Protestant extremists, as you may see it in old Bibles or illustrations of Bunyan; an atmosphere at once monstrous and prosaic, mixed of a mild view of this world, and a mad view of the other; the earth an endless Clapham and the sky a permanent apocalypse. It left on the mind a confused sense that angels had whiskers and saints had top hats; and certainly the dull energy in it was at the opposite extreme from the spirit of a small room either described by Maeterlinck or painted by Memlinc.

But the case of England at least admits of no mistake. Not only did England produce a most anti-Puritan literature before the Puritans existed, but it went on, under the Puritans and in spite of the Puritans, producing a literature that was quite anti-Puritan. There is as little that is Puritan about Fielding and Dickens as there is about Chaucer and Shakespeare. Dickens quite obviously existed to champion everything that the Puritans existed to destroy; when Mr Scrooge is converted to Christmas, the Puritan would have thought that Scrooge was relapsing and not repenting. When Scrooge and his clerk sit down to ‘a bowl of smoking Bishop’, the Puritan would have been equally disgusted with the spirit and with the name. Nevertheless the Ironside element, though alien to England, was to a certain extent mixed with it; and I myself believe that it is to this partial mingling of a foreign and a native idea that we owe the curious attitude of the English, until lately, towards processions and pomps.

The Calvinist colour, mixing with each separate national colour, made in each case a different blend or tint. The Scotch had been restless, rebellious, fond of mystery, valiant, and sometimes cruel. The combinations of Calvinism with this produced a sort of sombre romanticism which one can feel very strongly in Burns and in the blacker tales of Stevenson. The Dutch, I imagine, were domestic and devout; the combination of Calvinism with this produced a slight dullness and a rage for keeping things clean. The English certainly were lusty, casual and fond of broad fun. The combination of Calvinism with this produced a curious kind of bourgeois embarrassment, part humour, part respectability and part good sense. Since the Englishman was not to wear crimson clothes carelessly, the next most English thing was to wear black clothes casually and unobtrusively. Where the Catholic Englishman had been modest enough to make a fool of himself, the Protestant Englishman had only that lower sort of modesty that will not make a show of itself. He objected to making a Pageant, because it is, literally speaking, ‘making a scene’. It is said that the Frenchman shrugs his shoulders; but the Victorian Englishman was born with his shoulders shrugged. His whole attitude until lately has been ‘What’s the good of making a fuss?’ It is a sensible and pleasant temper; it is the remains of the real Englishman who gave its patient Pickwickian cheerfulness to the Canterbury Pilgrimage. But it will be gain and not loss if this minor humility of drab and grey can give place to that higher, and much more humble humility, which can forget itself in flowers and fireworks and in the colours of Carnival.

Rational History

Illustrated London News, 10 May 1913

There is a sort of phrase or joke about ‘whitewashing’ the villains of history; but to be quite just there ought to be some phrase such as ‘blackwashing’ also. For the truth is that such rehabilitations are of two very different kinds. One is a mere anarchist itch to upset a traditional and universal verdict. The other is a reasonable petition to appeal against a very hasty and sectarian verdict. In other words, we may appeal for whitewashing if we can prove that there has been blackwashing. There are men in history who may rationally be held to be better than they appear in history. And they are those who have been, for fairly obvious reasons, blackened immediately after their death. We have a right to doubt in every case where it was indispensable (to a new dynasty or regime) that a man who was dead should also be damned. Two very interesting cases of such rational rehabilitation have appeared of late. An American writer has written a romantic sketch of the sympathetic view of Richard III. A French writer has written a scholarly and historic study of the sympathetic view of Napoleon. In both cases there is the same real and intellectual reason for a reconsideration. We are right to remember that these victorious soldiers were at the mercy of their ultimate victors. It is common sense to ask ourselves what tales would most probably be set about by the enemies of one after Bosworth or of the other after Waterloo.

Shakespeare was a very English type of genius; but so was Gillray. And it may fairly be said that Shakespeare’s version of Richard is pretty much like Gillray’s version of Napoleon. He is a diabolic dwarf, far less temperately and sanely conceived than Quilp. But Richard of Gloucester was not a dwarf, either physically or morally. And Napoleon was not a devil, either in incredible crime or incredible capacity. He made many concessions—and many mistakes. It was his normality that succeeded not his abnormality. In so far as he conquered Europe, it was as Man not as Superman. The Rights of Man formed his only working and real droits de seigneur. He was popular with soldiers not only because he was a conqueror, but also because he was a soldier. He ruled France not because he had conquered it, but because he had conquered its enemies. A great French writer put the truth in its unfavourable form by saying that men of the world sympathise with Napoleon because he had no internal life. He did not think about himself; he was not a Higher Thinker, a Buddhist. He was a creator—that is, a Christian. He did not know his own portrait till he saw it in his own works.

The sins of the Superman are unpardonable. But the sins of man are as the hairs of his head. So long as we regard Napoleon as a Superman, we are bound to regard all his cruelties as cold-blooded, all his pride as blasphemous, all his diplomacy as ‘black causeless duplicity’ (as Stevenson said of his own Master of Ballantrae), all his sins, in short, as sins against the Holy Ghost—and, above all, all his misfortunes as deserved. But if we regard him as Man, we pretty soon find that his sins were the sins of a selfish, simple, generous, crude Corsican officer of artillery. His few cruelties were of the half-constrained kind—the kind that twenty other officers of artillery would have committed if they had been in the same hole. His pride was pure vanity; as innocent and as active as the vanity of a schoolboy. His diplomacy was at once less secret and less bullying than nearly all the diplomacy before and after his time. Compared with Metternich or with Bismarck, he was a straightforward but persuasive person. Unlike these other diplomatists, he did appeal to the reason and conscience of other nations and other Kings. He did not merely try to conceal; he did not merely try to convict. He did not even merely try to conquer. He did really try to convert—that is, to convince. And as for his misfortunes, he may have deserved to be called the Corsican Ogre, but he never really deserved to be called the Man of Destiny. It was a slander of which his misfortunes should have purged him for ever.

Much of the same is true, as I have said, of the last stand of the remote Plantagenet at Bosworth: when Henry Tudor rode as best he could into battle, making up his pedigree as he went along. The real medieval king was the man who died calling out ‘Treason’ and killing men on every side of him. Richard III was doing exactly what would have been expected of Richard I. But nothing was ever expected of the Tudors except the unexpected. They were the first English monarchs who were Sultans instead of Kings. They acted by a caprice, and not by a creed. It was owing to their brief and impatient despotism that England, ever since, has been capricious and creedless. One can almost see the lean, long face of the Welsh usurper, as he rode with the great nobles who had deserted to his standard; one can see his smile as he entered London; and one can guess what kind of tale he would tell of the fallen King.

The Unknown Warrior

Illustrated London News, 20 November 1920

The recent ritual of Armistice Day was overshadowed, as everyone knows, by the shadowy figure of the Unknown Warrior. And this was well; for that figure, however like a shadow, alone possesses something of the character of a statue. It is one of the very few monumental things in modern civilisation. The world will never forget that altar which St Paul saw as he passed by, where the Greeks had built a shrine to the Unknown God. So it is in this case, almost alone among all modern cases; it is really possible that the world may never forget that we built a shrine to the Unknown Man.

For whatever the future is like, it will not be Futurist. The very notion of always talking in terms of tomorrow is a passing taste that will soon be a thing of yesterday. Those who are concerned for the coming thing are really rather concerned for the vanishing thing, concerned to catch a fashion before it vanishes. Most of the artistic experiments and social prophecies which appeal to the next age, are in fact stamped with all the special marks and limitations of this age. Our Utopian predictions may not be very easily fulfilled, but they will be very easily dated. Our Futurist pictures may be mistaken at the first glance for the primitive drawings of the Sandwich Islanders, but a more expert examination will certainly reveal the characteristic conventions of the twentieth century. This is as true of War Memorials as of everything else; and those who insisted on things of immediate usefulness were mostly denying and destroying the whole of their ultimate use. Whatever else might be said of such War Memorials, they do not happen to discharge the function of being memorials of the war. With a changing Society these practical things will become impracticable; these useful things will be disused. The building of cottages, let us say, is vital to the present shortage of housing; but it might become almost unintelligible in a society with a decently distributed power over the means of production, where a common man could afford to build his own cottage. A club or institute may be established with enthusiasm and applause; it may be regarded as a mere saving of wealth and life by ‘keeping people out of the public house’. But it may be regarded as a meaningless waste by people who will, perhaps, have restored the public house to the proper public dignity, and made the old Christian inn a place for Christian men. These things are at best modern medicines for modern maladies. They will appear to another age like some special provisions against the Black Death, or some particular warning against the Norse pirates. But though the advanced ideas of our own age are the very last that are likely to endure into another age, neither is it enough to express common ideas in the sense of conventional ideas. That is, it is not enough to express common ideas in a conventional way.

If there are many mad pamphlets and queer pictures and fantastic flags of revolt in the dust-bin of the ages, it is equally true that there are whole rubbish-heaps of lost Latin epitaphs and dead English epics, and pompous monuments like the urns and nymphs in a deserted garden. The thing that survives is that which has a certain combination of normality with distinction. It has simplicity with a slight touch of strangeness; as has the style of Milton or Michelangelo. It is a tale just sufficiently unusual to be worth telling, and yet immediately intelligible when told. It is what the hero is to the human being; a thing magnified but made to scale. Of this really enduring quality I know no other modern example except the burial of the Unknown Warrior, with a King for his chief Mourner.

It is a tale that could be told in any future society, and remain simple and striking. It is a monument that could be looked at by any future generation, with any customs or costumes, and looked at with the same mixture of mystery and familiarity. If we wish to imagine the feelings of the future, the best approximation to it is not to trust the fancies of our own futurism, but to note the facts of our own attitude towards the past, especially the remote past. Now this story of the Unknown Warrior would have a point and a pathos if it were told about a prehistoric tribe burying a man in a barrow, or an ancient Egyptian procession bearing a faceless mummy to a pyramid. If we read that a nameless legionary was buried high upon the Capitol, and that the Roman Emperor offered some sacrifice or libation to his manes, we should understand what was meant. If we were told that some great medieval king spent wealth on masses to be sung in some great cathedral for the soul of some unknown archer, picked up at random on the field of Courtrai or Crecy, we should feel what we were meant to feel. We should feel what we felt on Armistice Day in London. It is something perhaps better expressed, in any age, by the silent symbol of gesture and action than by any definition of a thing so deep. It is strange that the same thinkers who disapprove of dogma often disapprove of ritualism. For ritualism is the only possible alternative to dogma. In this case the dogma is so deep and vital that its verbal definition invariably leads to disputes and absurd misunderstandings. It is a truth that worries people when put into words; so that they talk the wildest nonsense about it, and especially against it. Perhaps, therefore, it is just as well that their subconscious faith in this dogma should only be expressed in a grave and graceful ceremonial action. But the dogma itself, the truth symbolised itself, is something that was almost rediscovered in the realities of war: it is that in the darkness of battle, and in the very heart of the whirlwind of death, is discovered that mystery whose name is the quality of men.

Men are not equal in their realisation of equality. They are really equal in many other essentials of the true egalitarian idea, but they are not equal in that. Certain conditions favour the growth of plutocratic fashions obscuring our brotherhood; certain other conditions make intensely vivid the great things we have in common, as compared with the small things that divide us. And anyone who understands the real doctrine of equality (there are not very many in the modern world who do) will understand that some sense of it vaguely but invariably comes to the surface under the hideous conditions of war. An army, which in one sense would seem the very home of subordination, has nevertheless an ultimate tendency to encourage equality; because, whatever may be the rule or the orders, the facts are those of an intense independence. If any man really fails to understand the mystical dogma of the equality of man, he can immediately test it by thinking of two men, of totally different types and fortunes, falling on the same field at some terrible crisis in the war which saved our country. One might be, and often was, a gentleman of the finer tradition, fortunate in his friends, in his tastes, in his culture as well as his character.

Another might be some stunted serf of our servile industrial slums, a man whom all modern life conspired to crush and deform. In the hour when the flag of England was saved, there was no man who dared to say, or would have dreamed of saying, that one death was less glorious than the other.

William Penn and His Royalist Friends

Illustrated London News, 24 January 1931

The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England. I know this is still regarded as a historical heresy by those who have long ceased to worry about a religious heresy. For while these persons still insist that the Pilgrim Fathers were champions of religious liberty nothing is more certain than the fact that an ordinary modern liberal sailing with them would have found no liberty and would have intensely disliked almost all that he found of religion. Even Thanksgiving Day itself, though it is now kept in a most kindly and charming fashion by numbers of quite liberal and large-minded Americans, was originally intended, I believe, as a sort of iconoclastic expedient for destroying the celebration of Christmas, which does not encourage me, for one, to develop a special and spiritual fervour for Puritanism. Oddly enough, however, the Puritan tradition in America has always celebrated Thanksgiving Day by often eliminating the Christmas Pudding but preserving the Christmas Turkey. I do not know why, unless the very name of Turkey reminded them of the Prophet of Islam, who was also the first Prophet of Prohibition.

It is not, however, in connection with either Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day, that I recur for a moment to the somewhat controversial question of the Pilgrim Fathers. It is merely to note anew that there has always seemed to me too much emphasis on the Pilgrim Fathers, as compared with many others who were at least as truly Fathers of the Republic. There has certainly been in recent times a considerable combination between Puritanism and Publicity. The Puritans may not always have approved of the stage, but for all that they got a great deal of the limelight. Somebody managed to make the Mayflower as legendary as the Ark or the Argo; indeed, it is legendary in more ways than one, so far as the aim and atmosphere of the expedition are concerned. But I doubt whether most people even know the names of the ships in which many of the other devoted or heroic colonists of America sailed; I, for one, most certainly do not. I will not insist especially on the very noble example of Lord Baltimore and the founders of the State of Maryland, who established the first system of religious toleration in history, for there I might be accused of favouring my own religious sympathies and ideas. But I am at least detached and impartial in the subsequent and somewhat similar story of the founding of the State of Pennsylvania. And whatever ship brought the great Quakers to that settlement has a rather better right than the Mayflower to be called a Peace Ship.

These reflections occurred to me when I was recently standing in the city of Philadelphia, on which looks down the great statue of William Penn, whose unmarked grave lies a mile or two from my own house at home. And it struck me as very strange that all the millions of men with modern humanitarian sympathies have said so little of the immense superiority of that intellectual and spiritual leader to the clamorously advertised Calvinists of the Mayflower. I gravely fear that a great many of them do not see much difference between the two.

Among the most curious of all curiosities of literature or of legend, I have actually heard a sort of romantic rumour (which I have never been able either to trace or test) that portions of the timber of the Mayflower were found in some strange way attached to the old Quaker meeting-house which stands beside Penn’s grave. I cannot imagine what the story could possibly mean, or how the incident can possibly be supposed to have come about; unless, indeed, some enthusiastic American globetrotter merely threw fragments of Mayflower furniture (said to be rather suspiciously common in the States) at any house that had any connection with any founder of any American State. Anyhow, he might just as well have said that Sir Walter Raleigh sailed in the Mayflower as connect William Penn and his people with the fanaticism that filled that famous vessel. He might as well have hung the first Calvinistic meeting-house with rosaries and relics and scapularies belonging to the Catholic Calverts as pretend to have patched up the house of the first Friends with the relics of their mortal enemies and persecutors, the Old Puritans.

An American Puritan in the seventeenth century would have regarded a Quaker very much as an American Puritan in the twentieth century would regard a Bolshevist. And, though Bolshevists are supposed to be fierce and Quakers were supposed to be meek, they were at least like each other in this: they were what modern America would call Radical, in the sense of going to the real root of the question and answering it rightly or wrongly. In short, they were really Fundamentalists, and most Fundamentalists are not Fundamentalists. For whatever we think of the thing now called Fundamentalism, it is not fundamental. It is not particularly fundamental to throw a big Bible at people’s heads (or rather, a particular translation of the Bible, with a lot of books left out as Apocrypha) any more than to throw the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Institutes of Calvin. Even if it be a truth, it is not a first principle. But it is fundamental and it is a first principle, right or wrong, to go back, as William Penn did, to the doctrine of the Inner Light. For William Penn really was a great man and not merely a seventeenth-century sectarian; his thoughts, whether we think with him or no, having a meaning in the twentieth century or any century; and he founded something much larger than Pennsylvania and much greater than Philadelphia—a faith that has not yet failed.

I think I know why Penn has been thrown into the shade by the Pilgrim Fathers. It was his politics; and for some they are still a dreadful secret. I was once asked by some worthy modern pacifists, of the Nonconformist culture, to lecture on something in one of the oldest meeting-houses of the Society of Friends. I agreed to lecture upon William Penn and with secret and malignant joy drew up an elaborate plan for a eulogium on that Quaker hero. I set myself specially to express boundless admiration for all those parts of his life and opinion which his modern Puritan admirers do not admire. I proposed to praise extravagantly his loyal and devoted sympathy with the House of Stuart. I intended to point out eagerly how worthy he was of the gracious and glorious friendship of a man like Charles the Second. I meant to rub in every detail of his diplomatic and political support of the admirable political designs of James the Second. I intended to insist on the intellectual amity, almost amounting to intellectual alliance which so often bound him to Cavaliers and even to Catholics. In short, it was my evil intention to praise him for everything for which Macaulay blamed him. Then, I thought, when I had explained how intimately identified was Penn with Royalists, and especially with Papists, then surely all the Nonconformist ministers would be frightfully pleased. Then should I be acclaimed and admired by all the modern Puritans for my perfect understanding of the great seventeenth-century sectary. Then should I become the idol of all the people who glorify the Pilgrim Fathers and talk enthusiastically about the Mayflower. Then it would be admitted that I also was a grand, grim old Puritan, like all the rest of them. Unfortunately, I fancy I must have boasted of my intention, and some rumour of it must have reached them. For I received at the eleventh hour a hurried request to give a lecture on Dickens. And from this we may learn that, if Dickens was an enemy of the Puritans, he was not so much of an enemy as Penn.

ON LITERATURE

Ruskin: the Humorist

The Speaker, 28 April 1900

I do not think any one could find any fault with the way in which Mr Collingwood has discharged his task in The Life of John Ruskin except, of course, Mr Ruskin himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless and revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin’s humour, and one of the deepest disappointments with Mr Collingwood is that he, like every one else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humorist. Yet he was a great humorist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as ‘one-sided’ were simply meant to be one-sided, were mere laughing experiments in language. Like a woman, he saw the humour of his own prejudices, did not sophisticate them by logic, but deliberately exaggerated them by rhetoric. One-tenth of his paradoxes would have made the fortune of a modern young man with gloves of an art yellow. He was as fond of nonsense as Mr Max Beerbohm. Only . . . he was fond of other things too. He did not ask humanity to dine on pickles.

But while his kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit above the head of his fellows. Many elements, good and bad, have destroyed it, humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as scepticism, have bred in us a desire to give our advice lightly and persuasively, to mask our morality, to whisper a word and glide away. The contrast was in some degree typified in the House of Commons under the last leadership of Mr Gladstone: the old order with its fist on the box, and the new order with its feet on the table. Doubtless the wine of that prophesy was too strong even for the strong heads that carried it. It made Ruskin capricious and despotic, Tennyson lonely and whimsical, Carlyle harsh to the point of hatred, and Kingsley often rabid to the ruin of logic and charity. One alone of that race of giants, the greatest and most neglected, was sober after the cup. No mission, no frustration could touch with hysteria the humanity of Robert Browning.

But though Ruskin seems to close the roll of the militant prophets, we feel how needful are such figures when we consider with what pathetic eagerness men pay prophetic honours even to those who disclaim the prophetic character. Ibsen declares that he only depicts life, that as far as he is concerned there is nothing to be done, and still armies of ‘Ibsenites’ rally to the flag and enthusiastically do nothing. I have found traces of a school which avowedly follows Mr Henry James: an idea full of humour. I like to think of a crowd with pikes and torches shouting passages from The Awkward Age. It is right and proper for a multitude to declare its readiness to follow a prophet to the end of the world, but if he himself explains, with pathetic gesticulations, that he is only going for a walk in the park, there is not much for the multitude to do. But the disciple of Ruskin had plenty to do. He made roads; in his spare moments he studied the whole of geology and botany. He lifted up paving stones and got down into early Florentine cellars, where, by hanging upside down, he could catch a glimpse of a Cimabue unpraisable but by divine silence. He rushed from one end of a city to the other comparing ceilings. His limbs were weary, his clothes were torn, and in his eyes was that unfathomable joy of life which man will never know again until once more he takes himself seriously.

Mr Collingwood’s excellent chapters on the art criticism of Ruskin would be better, in my opinion, if they showed more consciousness of the after revolutions that have reversed, at least in detail, much of Ruskin’s teaching. We no longer think that art became valueless when it was first corrupted with anatomical accuracy. But if we return to that Raphaelism to which he was so unjust, let us not fall into the old error of intelligent reactionaries, that of ignoring our own debt to revolutions. Ruskin could not destroy the market of Raphaelism, but he could and did destroy its monopoly. We may go back to the Renaissance, but let us remember that we go back free. We can picnic now in the ruins of our dungeon and deride our deliverer.

But neither in Mr Collingwood’s book nor in Ruskin’s own delightful Praeterita shall we ever get to the heart of the matter. The work of Ruskin and his peers remains incomprehensible by the very completeness of their victory. Fallen for ever is that vast brick temple of Utilitarianism, of which we may find the fragments but never renew the spell. Its records read with something of the mysterious arrogance of Chinese: hardly a generation away from us, we read of a race who believed in the present with the same sort of servile optimism with which the Oriental believes in the past. It may be that banging his head against that roof for twenty years did not improve the temper of the prophet. But he made what he praised in the old Italian pictures—‘an opening into eternity’.

Literature of Information

The Speaker, 3 August 1901

It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition stored up in detective stories, and the replete and solid sweet-stuff shops which are called sentimental novelettes, should be popular with the ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realise that all of us, ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with the most indisputed and depressing facts; men are not apparently so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latch-key which exist in London, or the time it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely circulated papers, such as Tit Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous passages in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. It is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother Seigel’s Syrup, because he wished to know what eventually happened to the young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes we can most of us feel, whatever our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures. But the literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this particular branch of popular literature.

Primarily, at least, there is one rather peculiar thing which must, in justice, be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be allowed to be, upon the whole, as disinterested as a prophet seeing visions or a child reading fairy tales. Here, again, we find, as we so often do, that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this popularity for information, which would be given by a person of greater cultivation, would be that common men are chiefly interested in those sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the popularity of these insane encyclopaedias, it cannot be the ground of utility. The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very moonstruck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain facts relevant to daily life than compilations and the subject of the number of cows’ tails that would reach the North Pole. There are many more people who are in love than there are people who have any intention of counting or collecting cows’ tails. It is evident to me that the grounds of this widespread madness of information for information’s sake must be sought in other and deeper parts of human nature than those daily needs that lie so near the surface that even social philosophers have discovered them, somewhere in that profound and eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding other people’s business which made great popular movements like the Crusades or the Gordon Riots.

I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private life after the manner of these papers. His conversation consisted of fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth, and time and population, and his conversation was a nightmare of dullness. During the shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge, and how many rival shops Mr Whiteley had bought up since he opened his business. The attitude of his acquaintances towards this inexhaustible entertainer varied according to his presence or absence between indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man’s brain being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and glass cases filled with specimens of London mud, of common mortar, or broken walking sticks, and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered that this intolerable prosaic bore had been in fact a poet. I learnt that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went along, that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and Mr Whiteley were creatures of the poet’s brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him it must have been a case of art for art’s sake. The joke sustained so gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true, immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it, from seeing with the eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place; when they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art, though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life for interest with the same kind of cheerful and ineradicable assurance with which we look for interest at a comedy, for which we have paid money at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured picture, the scrawling in circles of a baby upon the slate of night; its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a Cockney brilliancy, like the holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level, they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man, the taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of one hundred and ten in South Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip. When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always supposed to be, for his benefit, but in the fact that an unusually large whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading millionaire like Mr Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralised with the mere indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and splendid disinterestedness of the reader of Pearson’s Weekly. He still keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of men, the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and with a truly sportsmanlike instinct the average man takes most pleasure in the details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the were-wolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature, a refuge indicating the dullness of the world; it was an incident pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.

That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial, it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the objections which we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers. The natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is far less often a subject of speculation; yet the healthy hungers which lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics long dethroned and the intrigues of commonwealths long obliterated from the earth. And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer: that perhaps the taste for the shreds and patches of journalistic science and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young, and entering history for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and conventional eccentricities which, in any case, they would tell each other in taverns. Science itself is only the exaggeration and specialisation of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can be contented with a planet of miracles.

Eulogy of Robin Hood

Daily News, 6 June 1903

The notion that the historic past, and particularly the Middle Ages, was a mass of negligible darkness is pretty well gone by this time; and there are quite a large number of people engaged in collecting the original costumes, and the genuine ballads, and the authentic frying pans of the twelfth century. The only thing that I never can understand about these people is why instead of admiring the doings of these ages, they do not merely do them. If ever there does appear a valid instance of these ancient observances continuing in actual operation at the present day, the antiquarians simply faint in the street at the sight of it. For example, most of my aesthetic friends lie awake at night dreaming of the reinstitution of some beautiful pagan festival, and yet none of them (for I have tempted them all) can eat four helpings of Christmas pudding. Christmas, with its sausages and its stars, is the very historic thing that they are talking about, but they resent it merely because it is still alive.

Another and much stronger instance of this truth occurred to me the other day. I was walking down a small and ugly street and happened to be reading the first printed version of a ballad of Robin Hood. Raising my eyes (I had just knocked over a man selling matches) I found myself staring at a glaring stack of ‘penny dreadfuls’ in a dirty paper shop. They were inscribed, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘I have at last an unbroken English tradition, known in the time of Edward I, known in the time of Mr Harmsworth.’ And the more I compared the old ballad with the ‘penny dreadful’, the more I saw their resemblance to each other. Both were traditional; both contained repetitions; both were multiplied endlessly; both were adventurous; both were popular; both were anonymous. In both cases the great bulk of the work was not interesting from a literary, but most interesting from an ethical and historic point of view. Both kinds of work were profoundly English; both were profoundly, and almost depressingly, moral. In one point only they differed; that the antiquarians and the aesthetes adore the one without any reason, and despise the other without any reason. Both stand as an everlasting protest of the human spirit against the modern idolatry of art; and in nothing more than in their most fascinating characteristic, their inordinate length. The modern world thinks short stories artistic, mistaking a weak digestion for a fine palate. So has arisen the preposterous paradox that the old spirit exhibited in the long books and the long ballads was not literary, because it liked to have so much literature. It is somewhat parallel to the equally strange assertion that religion was at enmity with life because it refused to believe in the finality and victory of death. Sceptics say that the saints were the foes of life because they desired life to last for ever. And pedants say that the old story-tellers were the foes of literature because they desired a book to last for ever.

In these Robin Hood ballads there is almost every bracing and popular element; there is one above all, the moral and melodramatic. We can all remember when we began first to feel that there was something pompous and ludicrous in the morals of the melodrama, began to feel uncomfortable when the heroine said, ‘Would you have me sell my child?’ or when the burglar spared the infant because of the little ones at home. Then we read Kipling and the realists, and were refreshed and invigorated with their salt and stinging candour; we wept sacred tears when we read of a woman whose personal affection expressed itself not by saying, ‘How can I sell my own child?’ but by saying, ‘Took for a common drunk. Gawd send they don’t look at ’is boots.’ Artistically we were quite right. The Kipling story, with its savage pleasantry and its colossal cynicism, is immeasurably superior in almost everything there is to the strained romantic melodrama; but it has one inferiority. It is not so like life. The Adelphi play gives a much more accurate version of the solemn, magnanimous, vainglorious pose which the average man really adopts in matters he thinks important. The poor do, indeed, employ a gross fantasy of speech (such as ‘Gawd send’, etc.) when they wish to be satiric or frivolous; but that is simply their literature; slang is a kind of deliberate song. But when they are talking seriously they do talk pompously. A man has only to walk down the Battersea Highroad on a Saturday night to hear round him one universal chatter of such things as ‘How can I sell my own child?’ And as for the burglar who thinks of the little ones at home, every evidence in life and the newspapers seems to support the hypothesis that criminals are sentimental, and I can readily believe in that burglar.

Now, these Robin Hood ballads, as I say, show among other things an amusing proof of this popularity, this antiquity, this intense realism of sentimental melodrama. Let me give an example. Mr W. S. Gilbert (perhaps the most brilliant Rationalist writer of the nineteenth century) made admirable fun in The Pirates of Penzance of the preposterous tradition of the generosity of freebooters. He represented the pirate as making it a rule to spare orphans, and being in consequence somewhat perplexed to find them apparently crossing the sea in shiploads. But when we look at these rude and bloody legends of a rude and bloody age, the ballads of Robin Hood, we find an altruism wilder than that of the Pirate of Penzance. The capering satire of the nineteenth century is positively less fantastic than the reality of the thirteenth. For while Mr Gilbert’s pirate only marked off one class, that of orphans, the oldest ballad of Robin Hood (which I was reading in the street) depicts that hero as giving a whole catalogue of people who are not to be molested. And it is scarcely any exaggeration to say that the catalogue includes almost everyone whom it would occur to an outlaw to molest. No honest yeoman working his plot of land, no good farmer, no brave knight kind to his people, etc., etc., is to be touched by these discriminating bandits. What is the use of denouncing sentimentalism as something artificial and protected when we have it here plainly written in the black letter of a brutal and naked age? No, it is realism that is artificial and melodrama that is human. The slangy short stories are written by pale men in libraries; the melodramas are written by men of the people. The case of the people is very like the similar case of schoolboys. Stalky and Co. is undoubtedly a much more artistic creation than Eric or Little by Little. But Eric is immeasurably more like school life, and more like it precisely because it is crude, because it is precocious, because it is moral.

I may be carried away by an excessive patriotism (I hope I am), but I cannot help fancying that there is something about this egregious nobility in the old ballads that is peculiarly English. There is certainly in these Robin Hood tales an element which can only be described as a sort of stupid magnanimity, a certain kind of generosity which is quite distinct in its colour from the chivalry of France or the tenderness of Ireland. It consists in a great natural gusto in the recognition of opponents. The collected records of Robin Hood become perfectly monotonous at last, as they relate the number of people who vanquished the hero, and whom he warmly commended. There is, of course, a great deal of English vanity about these admissions; the implication is, ‘How splendid you must be, as you have conquered such a one as I’. But this self-satisfaction is an eternal English trait. The great English generosity is really in these ballads. There is nothing that Robin Hood seems to like so much as being knocked down by somebody, and getting up and telling him how fine a fellow he must be. It is useless for Mr Henley and such prophets of revenge to go back to our old English literature; they will not find what they want. Here are songs written by a rude people in an age of bludgeons and gibbets, here is the rawest and plainest utterance of primitive England, and if there be one truth that runs from one end of it to the other, it is ‘the policy of Majuba’.

A Plea for Hasty Journalism

The World, 13 September 1904

My last week’s article, which reads worse in print than anything I have ever had the misfortune to read, was written under an opulent beech-tree on a walking tour, and only just caught the post. I do not mention this fact merely in order to introduce the adjective ‘opulent’—admirable as it is—nor do I do it out of mere egotism; for egotism is even more of a nuisance to the ego than it is to other people. The precept ‘know thyself’ did not fall from heaven; it fell upstairs from the other place. I decline to know myself; he is not in my set. He is an unknown benefactor of mine, who prefers to remain anonymous. Nor do I mention it out of any pride in the walking tour; for, to tell the truth, my walking tour chiefly consisted of sitting under opulent beech-trees for very long periods and at very short intervals. I state the circumstances under which the article was written because I am convinced that this is the only moral thing to do. Journalism would be far more honest if it dropped its tone of monastic meditation and Papal gravity, and talked a little more about the commonplace conditions of muddle and procrastination and flurry and scurry in which it is really produced. And I wish that at the beginning or end of all the articles we read, there were a brief note stating the situation in which the work was written. Thus we should read, ‘Will Australia adopt Bimetallism?’ then, in small letters, ‘Top of Omnibus’; or some such place in which we journalists do most of our learned research and compilation. We should see in some excited morning paper the headlines, ‘Battle at Ping Cho still in Progress, by an Eyewitness. Latest’. Then in the usual place would be the note, ‘A.B.C. shop, Strand’. The title, ‘Should Spinsters Marry Widowers?’ would be annotated with ‘Swan and Elephant, 12.15’, and so on. Perhaps, as rather longer descriptions would often be required, it might be as well to confine the matter to a system of easily recognised initials. Thus, for instance, ‘How England could be Invaded. L.S.R.D.’ (Lodgings at the Seaside. Rainy Day); or ‘Buddhism and the German Pessimists: a Parallel. C.W.P.P.S.’ (Cottage. Wallpaper with Pink Spots). The thing would throw a kind of flush of colour into our articles. Nature would creep into them as she creeps into the colour of flowers and wine.

Of course I am for righteousness, and all that. But, as I say, I think this plan of talking about the way the thing is done is really a vast deal more righteous than the present habit of keeping up an enormous pomposity of veil and temple. A good many people who say they want journalism to be honest really want it to be solemn. But honesty is never solemn; it is only hypocrisy that can be that. Honesty always laughs, because things are so laughable. It remembers what a queer thing is man—a creature that picks up objects lying all round him (eggs, water-melons, sheep, and so on), and packs them into himself as if he were a carpetbag. It remembers that the very bones of our heads are grinning. And so you will always find in every age that very sincere men are accused of what is called ‘blasphemy’ (it was Caiaphas’s charge)—blasphemy, which means taking things too lightly. The people who can be consistently and entirely solemn are the people who have no convictions at all. Look at them, as they walk down Band Street, in their burnished hats. No belief on any earthly subject has ever broken into the perfection of that innocent and colossal gravity. It is the same, I fear, with most of the great bigwigs of our trade, with the men who write leading articles especially. They are not sincere enough to take anything lightly. If the leader-writer on The Times were sincere (intellectually sincere, I mean), if he became in his own mind serious and real for a second, the consequences would be awful. The terrified sub-editors would peer into his room and see him rolling about on the floor in an agony of laughter, curled up, screaming and kicking—a new problem in the office.

The first step in the making and keeping of journalism an honest thing, is to confess that it is journalism and nothing more. It is a thing produced in a violent hurry, generally in the middle of the night, by men who (terrible as it may sound to say so) are commonly of the average human intelligence. It cannot be accurate. It can be honest; and if it is honest it will own—nay, vaunt— its ingrained and necessary inaccuracy. Its object is not to tell the absolute truth about Russian gunnery or Canadian finance. But its object is, or ought to be, to tell the absolute truth about the minds and convictions of the men who write it.

The real journalistic sin is not that the leading article should misrepresent history (for who will ever be certain what represents history?); the real sin is that the articles should misrepresent the journalist’s own soul. This is vile and by no means uncommon. But it is less likely, obviously, to happen when a man writes hastily than when he writes carefully. The slap-dash style is all on the side of morality.

A paper ought not to be an encyclopaedia—nor, perhaps, to puff one. Both the paper and the encyclopaedia have, of course, eventually the same fate. They are both proved wrong. But the difference is this: that the paper comes out so quickly that even its mistakes are important, while the encyclopaedia comes out so late that even its discoveries do not matter. The newspaper should be the best account of the daily impressions of an intelligent man on one side or the other. If it is anything else but this, it is, or tends to be, a fraud. Honest milk is milk that is milky; honest wine is wine that is wine, and nothing else; honest journalism is journalism that is journalistic. To be journalistic is to be daily, to be constantly receiving impressions vividly and expressing them with absolute fidelity. Give us a frivolous journalism, and we will save England.

The Voice of Shelley

Daily News, 10 June 1905

I have recently been remonstrated with upon two points—first, that I called Nero an artist; and second, that I called Shelley a typical aristocrat. The first query is somewhat easily answered. I called Nero an artist because he was an artist. He loved art in every form all his life, and his last words were a poetical quotation. If he fiddled while Rome was burning, he thought quite as much of the fiddle as he did of the fire. And if he thought a great deal of the fire, it was from the simple, and from his point of view unanswerable, reason that a fire is a very artistic thing. Mr Max Beerbohm in one of his most delightful and absurd essays has denounced the fire brigade as a band of vandals who destroy a ‘fair thing’. He has threatened to start an opposition fire brigade whose pipes shall be filled not with water but with oil. Nero was only Max made serious; Nero was only Max without his good nature; Nero was only Max in action.

But the aim I had in mentioning him is very simple. A defender of undenominationalism spoke of giving his hand to every man who was working for his highest, thereby implying, as it seemed to me, that if a man put something or other highest it did not in practice matter very much what it was. To this I replied that it seemed to me a very awful and urgent matter whether a man put the right thing or the wrong thing highest; that to put the right thing highest was very difficult, and to put the wrong thing very deadly. A salient example of this is the pursuit of mere art or beauty. The moment a man puts beauty higher than love Nero becomes a logical possibility.

The other matter, it may be, is less obvious, but not, I think, less true. When I call Shelley a typical aristocrat; I have fully in remembrance all his revolutionary ardour and his almost anarchic ideality; I do not call Shelley an aristocrat in spite of these things; I call him an aristocrat because of them. The true aristocrat is by nature an anarchist. The aristocrat was and is the person desiring to do as he liked. His castle was a defiance of the decent orders of the king. His motorcar was a defiance of the decent orders of the democracy. The gentlemen of real history were never anything but rowdy. They were admired for being rowdy. They were hanged for being rowdy. They are no longer hanged which seems to me to mark a considerable falling-off in the fullness of the control of the democracy. They are still admired.

Now all this patrician rebelliousness seems to me to have been built into the blood and bone of Shelley, as into the blood and bone of Byron. It was the subconscious foundation upon which he erected his republican idealism. Shelley loved liberty as all aristocrats love liberty. Shelley hated kings as all aristocrats hated kings; the feud between them has flamed since the beginning of the world. Shelley hated priests, and hated them most of all; for priests represent a startling and supernatural denial of the gradations of mankind; an aristocracy can submit to a king or humour a democracy, but another aristocracy is too much for them. Of course, Shelley, a man of quite crystalline sincerity, did not know that his anarchism had this feudal foundation; he imagined, I have no doubt, that he was a veritable voice of the people. His voice is the voice of liberty, it is the voice of beauty, it is the voice of change, and even the voice of revolution, but whatever it is it is never the voice of the people. There is not enough pain in it, and there is not enough laughter. There is not enough of that clean thing which Shelley and many other fine gentlemen would call coarseness. Shelley was idealistic; he was lyric; he was a hundred things, but there were two things that he never was. He was never comic and he was never tragic. Everything that comes out of the common heart, the heart of the real people, is comic and tragic.

There are only two kinds of ballads, recurrent and permanent, coming from the community itself. There are sad ballads about broken hearts and cheerful ballads about broken heads. There is not a trace of this popular quality in Shelley anywhere. It is not necessary, however, in order to indicate this truth to compare Shelley with any folk literature of other times or places. We can compare him with another poet, another democratic idealist, another man moved by the French Revolution, living almost in Shelley’s time, and almost in Shelley’s country, a man who differed from Shelley in nothing except that he was really a man of the people. To think of him after Shelley is like swallowing fire after swallowing water. It is not so easy to get out of one’s mouth the stinging taste of the sweetness and bitterness of Burns.

Shelley never came to that queer common place where grand passion meets the grotesque; where the cross is a sublime gibbet and the gibbet a caricature of the cross. That is the first and best reason why he was never of the people. But there were other reasons as well. One wholly non-popular element in him was his anarchism. The poor are not anarchists, and never can be anarchists. They live too close to life for such artistic trifling. When I speak of anarchism, of course I do not use the term in the exact sense which indicates a political programme. I do not mean that Shelley disapproved of all government though he sometimes used phrases which might be taken in this sense. But his trend and tone was to offer liberty and an escape from rule as a panacea for the misfortunes of the people; and this is not a genuine popular trend or tone. The people know that life cannot be conducted without rules. The people is the maker and keeper of all custom, tradition and convention, just as it is the maker and (except, perhaps, in modern England) the keeper of all religion. Shelley never understood any of these deep tides in the profanum vulgus. And with all his many princely virtues I do not think I am doing him any injustice if I say that he never tried to understand them.

The Great Translation

Daily News, 25 March 1911

The Jacobean translation of the Bible has one real claim to be English. Many of the eulogies about its Protestant purity and its Anglo-Saxon empire building are partisan and fantastic. But it is in this immense sense national, that it is anonymous. The translation, as a translation, is as English as the ballads about Robin Hood, which were written by everybody and nobody. It is true that the learned bishops and dons who translated it were far from regarding themselves as nobodies. But in the history of English literature they are nobodies; only they are immortal nobodies. It is impossible to point to a single great man who is responsible for this masterpiece of verbal music. At the very time when the translation was being made there were in England greater literary men than she is ever likely to see again. But by no conceivable trick or turn of circumstance can Bacon or Burton, Jonson or Shakespeare, have had anything to do with the translation of the Bible. It was done by a mob of bishops; that is, a mob of simple and well-meaning men. The enemies of the Bible have been heard to describe it as Jewish folklore; of course, in a bad sense. In any case, our translation is English folklore—and that in the best sense. England wrote it; no mere Englishman could have done so.

‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good news.’ That is as light and as leaping and as classically pure as Spenser. But Spenser had nothing to do with it; some ordinary parson wrote it.

‘And his driving is as the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi; for he drives furiously.’ That is far more vigorous than Chapman or Ford. But Chapman and Ford had nothing to do with it; it was done by some common clergyman.

‘Where there is no vision the people perish.’ That is as plain and picturesque as Bunyan. But Bunyan had nothing to do with it; in fact, he was not born. It may seem a strange matter that these pompous big-wigs summoned by so stiff a Scotch pedant as James I should be ultimately urged as an argument for popularism and the populace. And yet they are one of its strongest arguments. They show how well quite commonplace people can write when they are writing about something that is not commonplace.

That is the plain element of patriotic importance in the translation. It is the last collective creation of our people. It is the last case in which everybody reads the book and nobody asks the author. After that England left off writing. Englishmen rushed into the breach and tried to write, not altogether without success. Milton, Dryden, Addison, Dr Johnson, made a very good show of it. But almost at once they were flooded by forces not English; by Irishmen like Swift and Goldsmith, by Scotchmen like Hume and Scott. We are right to treat this book, even as an English book, as authoritative. It may or may not record the real origin of the Jews; but I am sure that it records the real end of the English.

There comes a perfect moment when there is no difference between language and literature. Prose is poetry without knowing it; it is as if an absentminded poet always said good morning in metre, or asked us to pass the potatoes in impromptu and unconscious rhyme. Imagine that we all talked poetry all day long; suppose we asked for a ticket with a triolet; suppose we used a post-card only for the purpose (which its shape obviously suggests) of writing a sonnet. Suppose, whenever we talk about the weather, we talk as Shelley wrote about the weather. Suppose, whenever we use a term of affection, it is like one of the great love songs. If we fancy some such condition, we may begin to imagine what really happens when a language is in its perfection. Everything said goes to an inaudible tune; as to a march of totally muffled drums. The poetry has got inside the prose of life, and moves all its limbs into a rhythm and beat of beauty.

The English of the English Bible is not merely splendid about splendid things; it is splendid about everything. In any modern leading article we might see the words ‘We cannot understand why English watering-places like Bath or Brighton are not as adequate as foreign watering-places like Baden or Dieppe; nor why those who seek the one should not as reasonably seek the other.’ And that would be perfectly good modern English. It is not mere religious association that makes us see better English in ‘Are not Pharpar and Abanah, the waters of Damascus, better than all the waters of Jordan, and may I not wash in them and be clean?’ It is really the perfection of style; it is poetry inside prose.

Any magazine article might contain the paragraph: ‘The enthusiast must always be discouraged by certain perishability in all popular things. The mass of mankind seems so plainly a mere part of nature, that it is hard to believe that all their ideas are not at once as monotonous and as fickle as the physical universe; nevertheless, the best philosopher will always return to the idea of an order and a reason in things.’ That would be perfectly sound, intelligent modern English.

It is not mere religious tradition that makes us think that this is better: ‘The voice said, Cry; and he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.’

And then, as in an answer across an abyss: ‘The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.’

It is not the glamour of an ancient language. It is simply a much better use of the modern one.

In one of those tremendous passages that pierce through all languages and belong to the sacred Scripture itself, one of the prophets speaks of the perfect time as a time when all the vessels shall be as vessels before the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem shall be written ‘Holy unto the Lord’. That is what the English translation, by a literary accident, really managed to achieve. The phrase ‘verbal inspiration’ may be orthodox or unorthodox about the Bible in its supernatural sense. But it is very nearly true about the English translation in a secondary and merely human sense. The dull parts of the narrative are not dull; the trivial details are not trivial, because they are all lifted up on this last great wave of the poetical English language. Everyone, revolutionist and reactionary, is in our time saying that domestic things must be dull, that common things must be commonplace. Everyone is saying, though with much less literary brevity, ‘Surely the people is grass’. But in our sterile time we have never guessed how tall the grass can grow.

Jane Austen’s Juvenilia

Preface to Love and Friendship and Other Early Works, Chatto & Windus, 1923

In a recent newspaper controversy about the conventional silliness and sameness of all the human generations previous to our own, somebody said that in the world of Jane Austen a lady was expected to faint when she received a proposal. To those who happen to have read any of the works of Jane Austen, the connection of ideas will appear slightly comic. Elizabeth Bennet, for instance, received two proposals from two very confident and even masterful admirers; and she certainly did not faint. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did. But in any case it may be amusing to those who are thus amused, and perhaps even instructive to those who thus need to be instructed, to know that the earliest work of Jane Austen might be called a satire on the fable of the fainting lady. ‘Beware of fainting fits . . . though at times they may be refreshing and agreeable yet believe me they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your Constitution.’ Such were the words of the expiring Sophia to the afflicted Laura; and there are modern critics capable of adducing them as a proof that all society was in a swoon in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But in truth it is the whole point of this little skit that the swoon of sensibility is not satirised solely because it was a fiction. Laura and Sophia are made ludicrously unlike life by being made to faint as real ladies do not faint. Those ingenious moderns, who say that the real ladies did faint, are actually being taken in by Laura and Sophia, and believing them against Jane Austen. They are believing, not the people of the period but the most nonsensical novels of the period, which even the people of the period who read them did not believe. They have swallowed all the solemnities of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and never even seen the joke of Northanger Abbey.

For if these juvenilia of Jane Austen anticipate especially any of her after works, they certainly anticipate the satiric side of Northanger Abbey. Of their considerable significance on that side something may be said presently; but it will be well to preface it by a word about the works themselves as items of literary history. Everyone knows that the novelist left an unfinished fragment, since published under the name of The Watsons, and a finished story called Lady Susan, in letters, which she had herself apparently decided not to publish. These preferences are all prejudices, in the sense of matters of unmanageable taste; but I confess I think it a strange historical accident that things so comparatively dull as Lady Susan should have been printed already, while things so comparatively lively as Love and Friendship should never have been printed until now. It is at least a curiosity of literature that such curiosities of literature should have been almost accidentally concealed. Doubtless it was very rightly felt that we may go much too far in the way of emptying the waste-paper basket of a genius on the head of the public; and that there is a sense in which the waste-paper basket is as sacred as the grave. But without arrogating to myself any more right in the matter than anybody has to his own taste, I hope I may be allowed to say that I for one would have willingly left Lady Susan in the waste-paper basket, if I could have pieced together Love and Friendship for a private scrap-book; a thing to laugh over again and again as one laughs over the great burlesques of Peacock or Max Beerbohm.

Jane Austen left everything she possessed to her sister Cassandra, including these and other manuscripts; and the second volume of them containing these was left by Cassandra to her brother, Admiral Sir Francis Austen. He gave it to his daughter Fanny, who left it in turn to her brother Edward, who was the Rector of Barfrestone in Kent, and the father of Mrs Sanders, to whose wise decision we owe the publication of these first fancies of her great-aunt; whom it might be misleading here to call her great great-aunt. Everyone will judge for himself; but I myself think she has added something intrinsically important to literature and to literary history; and that there are cartloads of printed matter, regularly recognised and printed with the works of all great authors, which are far less characteristic and far less significant than these few nursery jests.

For Love and Friendship, with some similar pages in the accompanying fragments, is really a rattling burlesque; something much better than what the ladies of the time called an agreeable rattle. It is one of those things that can be the more readily read with enjoyment through being written with enjoyment; in other words, it is all the better for being juvenile in the sense of being joyful. She is said to have written these things at the age of seventeen, evidently in much the same spirit in which people conduct a family magazine; for the medallions included in the manuscript were the work of her sister Cassandra. The whole thing is full of the sort of high spirits that are always higher in private than in public; as people laugh louder in the house than in the street. Many of her admirers would not expect, perhaps many of her admirers would not admire, the sort of fun to be found in the letter to the young lady ‘whose feelings were too strong for her judgment’, and who remarks incidentally ‘I murdered my father at a very early period in my life, I have since murdered my mother, and I am now going to murder my sister’. Personally, I think it admirable; not the conduct, but the confession. But there is much more than hilarity in the humour, even at this stage of its growth. There is almost everywhere a certain neatness in the nonsense. There is not a little of the true Austen irony. ‘The noble Youth informed us that his name was Lindsay—for particular reasons, however, I shall conceal it under that of Talbot.’ Did anyone really desire that to disappear into the waste-paper basket? ‘She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her— she was only an object of contempt.’ Is not that something like the first faint line in the figure of Fanny Price? When a loud knocking is heard on the door of the Rustic Cot by the Uske, the heroine’s father enquires the nature of the noise, and by cautious steps of inference they are enabled to define it as somebody outside striking the door. ‘“Yes” (exclaimed I) “I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.” “That is another point” (replied he) “we must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock—tho’ that some one does rap at the door I am partly convinced”.’ In the aggravating leisure and lucidity of that reply, is there not the foreshadowing of another and more famous father; and do we not hear for a moment, in the rustic cottage by the Uske, the unmistakable voice of Mr Bennet?

But there is a larger critical reason for taking pleasure in the gaiety of these various travesties and trifles. Mr Austen-Leigh seems to have thought them not sufficiently serious for the reputation of his great relative; but greatness is not made up of serious things, in the sense of solemn things. The reason here, however, is as serious as even he or anyone else could desire; for it concerns the fundamental quality of one of the finest talents in letters.

A very real psychological interest, almost amounting to a psychological mystery, attaches to any early work of Jane Austen. And for that one reason, among others, which has hardly been sufficiently emphasised. Great as she was, nobody was likely to maintain that she was a poet. But she was a marked example of what is said of the poet; she was born, not made. As compared with her, indeed, some of the poets really were made. Many men who had the air of setting the world on fire have left at least a reasonable discussion about what set them on fire. Men like Coleridge or Carlyle had certainly kindled their first torches from the flambeaux of equally fantastic German mystics or Platonic speculators; they had gone through furnaces of culture where even less creative people might have been inflamed to creation. Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself; like the fire of the first man who rubbed two dry sticks together. Some would say that they were very dry sticks which she rubbed together. It is certain that she by her own artistic talent made interesting what thousands of superficially similar people would have made dull. There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist. It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental. It might even seem even a little wanton to insist that she was original. Yet this objection would come from the critic not really considering what is meant by an element or an origin. Perhaps it might be as well expressed in what is really meant by an individual. Her ability is an absolute; it cannot be analysed into influences. She has been compared to Shakespeare; and in this sense she really does recall the joke about the man who said he could write like Shakespeare if he had the mind. In this case we seem to see a thousand spinsters sitting at a thousand tea-tables; and they could all have written Emma, if they had the mind.

There is therefore, in considering even her crudest early experiments, the interest of looking at a mind and not at a mirror. She may not be conscious of being herself; yet she is not, like so many more cultivated imitators, conscious of being somebody else. The force, at its first and feeblest, is coming from within and not merely from without. This interest, which belongs to her as an individual with a superior instinct for the intelligent criticism of life, is the first of the reasons that justify a study of her juvenile works; it is an interest in the psychology of the artistic vocation. I will not say of the artistic temperament; for nobody ever had less of the tiresome thing commonly so described than Jane Austen. But while this alone would be a reason for finding out how her work began, it becomes yet more relevant when we have found out how it did begin. This is something more than the discovery of a document; it is the discovery of an inspiration. And that inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter.

If it seemed odd to call her elemental, it may seem equally odd to call her exuberant. These pages betray her secret; which is that she was naturally exuberant. And her power came, as all power comes, from the control and direction of exuberance. But there is the presence and pressure of that vitality behind her thousand trivialities; she could have been extravagant if she liked. She was the very reverse of a starched or a starved spinster; she could have been a buffoon like the Wife of Bath if she chose. This is what gives an infallible force to her irony. This is what gives a stunning weight to her understatements. At the back of this artist also, counted as passionless, there was passion; but her original passion was a sort of joyous scorn and a fighting spirit against all that she regarded as morbid and lax and poisonously silly. The weapons she forged were so finely finished that we might never have known this, but for these glimpses of the crude furnace from which they came. Finally there are two additional facts involved which I will leave the modern critics and correspondents in newspapers to ponder and explain at their leisure. One is that this realist, in rebuking the romantics, is very much concerned with rebuking them for the very thing for which revolutionary sentiment has so much admired them; as for their glorification of ingratitude to parents and their easy assumption that the old are always wrong. ‘No!’ says the noble Youth in Love and Friendship, ‘never shall it be said that I obliged my father.’ And the other is that there is not a shadow of indication anywhere that this independent intellect and laughing spirit was other than contented with a narrow domestic routine, in which she wrote a story as domestic as a diary in the intervals of pies and puddings, without so much as looking out of the window to notice the French Revolution.

The Countrymen of Mary Webb and Thomas Hardy

Illustrated London News, 12 May 1928

The work of Mary Webb had an aspect distinct from all the debate about it merely as a case of something first neglected because it was not advertised and then advertised because it was neglected. I am not claiming to be one of the discoverers: nor am I one of those who hastened to discover the thing after it had been discovered. I only read one of the writer’s books, Precious Bane, and that struck me as strangely and very individually beautiful; but I thought it unique in every sense of the word, and never even knew if the writer’s name were known, or if she had written anything else. But the book left a very strong impression on my mind, and especially in one respect. It is very vivid and at the same time indescribable. Perhaps the hint is in the word ‘precious’ in Precious Bane. Not that Mrs Webb was in the least precious in the priggish sense. I mean in the things of price: a richness in things commonly connected with bareness and poverty. Something of what is spoken of as the gorgeous East, rested like the transparent colours of a rainbow, upon a landscape very typical of the West. Perhaps we sometimes forget, when we talk of Orient pearls and gold, that the sunset can be rich as well as the sunrise.

The romance described rustics in an age when they were even ruder than they were in the tales of Hardy or the poems of Housman. Nor was there the smallest attempt to idealise the life in the sense of suiting it to the rather low ideal of modern sentiment and comfort. The country was not turned into an Arcadia even of the really natural grace of Virgil or Theocritus; still less are the peasants turned into stage peasants or the shepherdess to a china shepherdess. The thing I mean by riches is something more subtle even than happiness. These peasants live a hard life; they probably on occasion live a hungry life; they are quite capable in some circumstances of living a gross or ferocious life. But they do, in a very deep sense, live a full life. And that is where the very atmosphere of the book differs from that of Hardy or of many striking and valuable books upon the same theme; books that have, indeed, found grandeur and even beauty in such a primitive existence, but have found only the beauty of bare rocks or the grandeur of the desert. The atmosphere of such books is that of stoicism, if not pessimism. The atmosphere of this book is that of mysticism; and we feel that the rustics themselves are not only the mysteries but also the mystics. It is inadequate to say, by one of those critical phrases which become only too quickly cant phrases, that the story is full of colour. The stories of Thomas Hardy, for instance, are undoubtedly full of colour. Men have used the metaphors of cloud and darkness in talking, whether justly or unjustly, of his metaphysical and moral ideas. But whatever may be true of his ideas, this is certainly not true of his imagery. The pictures that remain in my own memory, and I imagine in most other memories, of a first reading of the Wessex Tales, are rather specially picked out in strong sunlight. Nothing could be clearer than the outlines or brighter than the hues of some of those bright and cruel comedies of love and hate, along the white roads or on the great green hills. If his characters were indeed only puppets of destiny, they were often very gaily dressed puppets. There is no lack of light, if it be sometimes as deadly as lightning; and though he insisted too much that there is no rose without a thorn, he never failed to give very rich tints to the roses.

But there is in Hardy’s work, as in all work really belonging to a pagan world, this character: that all the light is shining on things and not through them. It is all the difference between the gaiety of an old pagan painting or mosaic and the burning clarity of a medieval window. And we do sometimes feel, in mere poverty, as in medieval austerity, that things may be bright by being transparent and transparent by being thin. If Hardy made a tragedy out of a tree and a well and a thunderstorm, he wanted to turn the strong sunlight on the scene almost like a theatrical limelight. He wanted the daylight to explore the well, we might almost say that he wanted the daylight to shine on and show up the darkness. But he did not mean, at any rate, not as the mystics can mean, that there was a mystery within the tree, making it truly a tree of life; or a special providence even in a falling thunderbolt. And if he thought that truth lay at the bottom of the well, I think it was commonly in the form of a corpse. At any rate, it was not in the form of a goddess or a nymph of the spring. He did not specially feel that a positive life, still less that a joyful life, was irradiating outwards through these things. He did not think that they meant something; he only thought that he meant something in saying that they meant nothing. The whole irony of his meaning is in that unmeaning world.

Now, Mary Webb and her peasants live in a very meaning world. Life, quite apart from the proportions of its sadness or gladness, is stuffed with significance. There is the silent pressure of a second sense in things; and a sort of halo round every object, whether of horror or tenderness. Thunderstorms are more than thunderstorms, and trees are more than trees, and the well is deeper than any man has known. This is expressed, merely externally, in a tangle of associations and traditions about all sorts of things; so that candles or cabbages or common objects of the kitchen may have dark properties. But it is the expression of a sense of fullness, as in the rain-cloud or even the thundercloud; and richness not only in the soul, but in the dark subsoil of existence. And I think this atmosphere is true, touching simple people, and all those who are near to the earth. Stupid people, hopelessly, hideously stupid people, generally call it superstition.

I mean that the more grimly realistic school is not wrong in being realistic, certainly not wrong in being tragic, but it is wrong, touching humanity of this type, in not being mystic. Common country folk like Tess or Jude the Obscure might well have been hurt as much as they were hurt, and cried out when they were hurt in a human fashion, and died when they were hurt too much, in the manner of all tragedy. But they would not have seen themselves in such hard and naked outline as the pessimistic novelist sees them. The whole thing would have been at once enriched and confused by the mystical traditions of mankind; by the remains of religion, by the hints of superstition, by the mystery of death which cuts both ways, like the two-edged sword of the angel. They would have felt desperate, but they would not have felt insignificant; they would have felt significant. That is the quality that clings to my memory out of that remarkable story, which I read so long ago—the story called Precious Bane. And it is connected with another quality in it, a quality very rare in recent literature; something which I can only call the note of nobility. Here again, there is something even in the title that suggests the truth. A precious thing does not merely mean a sumptuous thing, in the sense of something connected with gross luxury and wealth. A precious thing means something that is bought with a price; and in this case there is present the whole of that idea of the ancient price of sacrifice. That a bane can be precious is not a fashionable doctrine just now. Nor do I propose to debate its moral implications in this passing literary note. But it is certain that, wherever that conception is present in literature, there is made possible a poetic height and the breathing of a spiritual air that are never known where it is neglected; that even in the world of what is purely artistic, that degree of dignity is only attainable through something moral; and that, if there be art critics who care only for art, they would do well to keep martyrdom in the world, if only by making other people the martyrs.

The Words of Strong Poetry

Illustrated London News, 1 April 1933

The writing of Free Verse is currently compared to talking, as in the accepted French phrase about a causerie. And indeed any one who has conducted it so continuously and so long is apt to forget that anything he says may be taken down and used in evidence against him. I have always done my best to remember that I am rather in the dock than in the pulpit, and that I have very little to say, though I have said a good deal, to show why sentence of death should not be passed on me. When Science has really completed all these comforts which it promises mankind, and when all conversations are automatically taken down on a dictaphone or repeated on a phonograph, I rather doubt whether many people will want to put on the records. But, just as many a man has said that he hardly knew his own voice when it came back to him out of a gramophone, so I often wonder, when I chance to come in contact with some of the cracked and dreary records, how I failed to make my voice properly heard or my meaning sufficiently clear. Sometimes it arises from unavoidable hurry or pressure of work; sometimes from neglecting to explain things in their proper order and to put first things first. Sometimes I find I have taken things for granted, used words that have six or seven meanings, left out important steps of the argument, jumped to conclusions, and acted in short as if I were a Professor of Universal Science expounding an Outline of Universal History for Neglected Aunts and Uncles.

Many of these things are merely the inevitable disadvantages of the causerie; but there is one very real advantage in a causerie, even in the literal sense of a talk. Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed it excellently when he said that writing to a man was like firing at him with a gun, while talking to him was like playing on him with a garden-hose. In the first case it is hit and miss; in the second a man can correct his mistakes and correct his line of fire, or rather of water. In such a case, this kind of causerie has really some of the advantages of conversation. I will, therefore, have a shot at the free versifier; or rather (being too humane to shoot him, and very likely to miss him) I will continue to play on him benevolently with the hose, till he is soaked and dripping with the refreshing waters of Helicon, the true fount of free verse, with which I have the joy of sprinkling or asperging him.

I think the first truth about traditional metres is that there is a sort of speech that is stronger than speech. Not merely smoother or sweeter or more melodious or even more beautiful; but stronger. Words are jointed together like bones; they are mortared together like bricks; they are close and compact and resistant; whereas, in all common conversational speech, every sentence is falling to pieces. Perhaps we recognise this latter fact when we talk about letting fall a remark or dropping a hint or throwing out an observation. All conversational speech or writing is under the curse of the Fall; it is under the law of gravitation; it is perpetually falling down, like the universe of Lucretius. But great poets do not drop hints or let observations fall; they lift them and hold them aloft, as the keystone of a strong arch thrusts up the stones, defying the law of gravity and the devil and all his angels. The words of strong poetry are packed as tight and solid as the stones of the arch. The lines of a good sonnet are like bridges of sound across abysses of silence. The boast of the bridges is that you could march armies across them; that a man can rest his weight on every word. The awful cry out of the last tragic trance of Othello, when he realises that death is as real as love, finds words worthy of itself; megalithic words; words not only of weight but weight-bearing; words strong enough to support him above the abyss. ‘If I quench thee, thou flaming minister . . .’ The address to the candle might almost be called obscure, but it is not doubtful; it is not hesitant or wavering in words or the sound of words; it is rather as if a man were granted a greater thing than speech. And the effect is gained by this firmness in the words and the weight that can rest on them. ‘I know not where is that Promethean heat.’ You could stand an elephant on that line. It is true, first of all, as a mere fact of acoustics, that there is not one weak syllable in the line. At the same time, there is also that strength of style that is like the strength of gesture. ‘I know not where’ is the essential elemental cry of man, eternally ignorant of the beginning of life, or of how it may truly be renewed. And it is a plain and simple fact, whether we like it or not, that the words ‘I know not where’ do sound like some such ancestral city; while the words, ‘I don’t know where’ certainly do not.

Now half the current case for free against traditional verse turns simply on that. It consists in calling ‘I know not where’ pompous and theatrical; and calling ‘I don’t know where’ natural and sincere. It is not more natural and it is not more sincere; it is only more conversational. And the fact that it is conversational only means that it is conventional. In our time, especially, slang is merely the most conventional mode of address. But it is not a mode of expression, as poetry is a mode of expression, for the emotions and indescribable imaginations of men, for the simple reason that it does not express them. Common speech is not the thing by which men express their emotions; it is only the thing by which they fail to express them.

The distinction does not necessarily exclude all free verse; nor, indeed, do I wish to exclude it. But it does indicate why many poets, who would seem capable of writing good free verse, do in fact write bad free verse. They are misled by this fallacy of verse being free in the sense in which conversation is free. But conversation is not free; that is to say it is not free to sing and it is not free to satisfy. Above all, as above explained, it is not free to build; to pick words for their permanent and massive character; or to recast or rearrange them so, as to weld them closer together. A gentleman lighting a cigarette, in talk over the tea-table, would rather unduly suspend social intercourse if he refused to blow out the match until he had composed a line as full and satisfying as ‘If I quench thee, thou flaming minister’. In truth, of course, it would apply to tragic occasions as well as trivial occasions in real life. A man, after murdering a woman, would not talk about Prometheus; he is more likely to confess to the nearest policeman that he has done Desdemona in. But it is none the less true that ‘done in’ is a very weak description of what he has done. It is that weakness in the mere words, and especially in the relation of words, which seems to me to paralyse in practice a vast amount of what is called free verse. If anyone asks why free verse should not be written which included this close grip and gravity and resistant strength in a sentence, I am content to answer: ‘Why indeed!’ But the real repartee of the free versifier in such a case is not to ask why it should not be done, but to do it.

The Refrain of the Rover

New York American, 15 December 1934

A modern man of genius, Gauguin I think, said that an artist must be either a revolutionist or a plagiarist. He might, in fairness, have added that most of the very great artists were plagiarists. Antiquated authors of the type of Chaucer and Shakespeare were quite enthusiastic for copying; until more modern authors became more enthusiastic for copyright. But there runs through all poetry, through medieval down even to modern times, something like an everlasting echo that has in it an element of enchantment. There are refrains that recur in any sort of song; such as ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, or ‘On Christmas Day in the Morning’, or ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. But I was recently rather amused to note two or three cases in which two or three poets had repeated the same sentence, as well as the same sentiment. I mean that they had avowedly used a verbal repetition, which the vulgar might really call plagiarism. One series began, as I imagined, with that spirited song of Byron, ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’. Its chief beauty is that Byronic beauty of swiftness, which is often neglected. It consists of three verses of four lines each; but it could all be said in a breath. The one great quality which Byron always retained was exactly the duality which he was always boasting that he had lost. It was Gusto; a boyish power of enjoyment, especially of his own poetry. Now, it reappears in almost the same words, in the works of W. E. Henley, who professed the widely different creed of a rather stormy optimism; though its storminess sometimes led him to throw his crutch at his friends, when they differed on some fine shade of criticism. He is probably best known by the poem in which he thanks whatever gods there be for his unconquerable soul; though I have my private doubts about the unconquerable soul which goes with the unconquerable temper. Still, he was a fine fellow in his way, and his friends loved him, though he did throw his crutch at them. He wrote a lyric which simply changes, ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’, to ‘We’ll go no more a-roaming’. It might at least be called an echo; but I am now defending echoes. And now I discover, from the recent and most fascinating memoirs of a common sailor, that both the poems may have been echoes; and both the poets plagiarists. For he quotes a sea-shanty, as sung by common sailors, which I myself like better than either of the literary productions. I can imagine a seaman singing with the proper doleful boom:

A-roving—, a-roving—, since roving’s been my ru-u-in

I’ll go no more a-roving

With you, fair maid!

The small coincidence is worth noting; because it is well to remember that there is a whole literature which is lucky in being quite unconnected with literary men.

ON REFLECTION

What is Right With the World

T.P.’s Weekly, 1910

The above excellent title is not of my own invention. It was suggested to me by the Editor of this paper, and I consented to fill up the bill, partly because of the pleasure I have always had from the paper itself, and partly because it gives me an opportunity of telling an egotistical story, a story which may enlighten the public about the general origin of such titles.

I have always heard of the brutality of publishers and how they crush and obscure the author; but my complaint has always been that they push him forward far too much. I will not say that, so far from making too little of the author, they make too much of him; that this phrase is capable of a dark financial interpretation which I do not intend. But I do say that the prominent personalities of the literary world are very largely the creations of their publishers, in so far as they are not solely the creations of their wives. Here is a small incident out of my own existence. I designed to write a sort of essay, divided into sections, on one particular point of political error. This fallacy, though small and scholastic at first sight, seemed to me to be the real mistake in most modern sociological works. It was, briefly, the idea that things that have been tried have been found wanting. It was my purpose to point out that in the entanglements of practice this is untrue; that an old expedient may easily be the best thing for a new situation; that its principle may be useful though its practice failed; that its practice may have failed because its principle was abandoned; and so on. Therefore, I claimed, we should look for the best method, the ideal, whether it is in the future or the past. I imagined this book as a drab-coloured, decorous little philosophical treatise, with no chapters, but the page occasionally broken by section-headings at the side. I proposed to call my analysis of a radical error ‘What is wrong’, meaning where the mistake is in our logical calculation. But I had highly capable and sympathetic publishers, whose only weakness was that they thought my unhappy monologue much more important than I did. By some confusion of ecstasy (which entirely through my own fault I failed to check) the title was changed into the apocalyptic trumpet-blast ‘What’s Wrong With the World’. It was divided up into three short, fierce chapters, like proclamations in a French riot. Outside there was an enormous portrait of myself looking like a depressed hairdresser, and the whole publication had somehow got the violence and instancy of a bombshell. Let it be understood that I do not blame the publishers in the least for this. I could have stopped it if I had minded my own affairs, and it came out of their beautiful and ardent souls. I merely mention it as an instance of the error about publishers. They are always represented as cold and scornful merchants, seeking to keep your writers in the background. Alas (as Wordsworth so finely says), alas! the enthusiasm of publishers has oftener left me mourning.

Upon the whole, I am rather inclined to approve of this method of the publisher or editor making up the title, while the author makes up the remarks about it. Any man with a large mind ought to be able to write about anything. Any really free man ought to be able to write to order. Some of the greatest books in the world—Pickwick, for instance— were written to fulfil a scheme partly sketched out by a publisher. But I only brought together these two cases of titles that came to me from outside because they do illustrate the necessity of some restatement in such a case. For these two titles are, when it comes to the fulfilment, at once too complex and too simple. I would never have dreamed of announcing, like some discovery of my own, what is wrong with the world. What is wrong with the world is the devil, and what is right with it is God; the human race will travel for a few more million years in all sorts of muddle and reform, and when it perishes of the last cold or heat it will still be within the limits of that very simple definition. But in an age that has confused itself with such phrases as ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’, it is necessary to distinguish along more delicate lines. One of the strangest things about the use of the word ‘optimist’ is that it is now so constantly used about the future. The house of man is criticised not as a house, but as a kind of caravan; not by what it is; but by where it is going to. None are more vitally and recklessly otherworldly than those modern progressives who do not believe in another world.

Now, for the matter of that, I do think the world is getting very much better in very many vital respects. In some of them, I think, the fact could hardly be disputed. The one perfectly satisfactory element at the present crisis is that all the prophecies have failed. At least the people who have been clearly proved to be wrong are the people who were quite sure they were right. That is always a gratifying circumstance. Now why is it that all these prophecies of the wise have been confounded and why has the destiny of men taken so decisive and so different a course? It is because of the very simple fact that the human race consists of many millions of two-legged and tolerably cheerful, reasonably unhappy beings who never read any books at all and certainly never hear of any scientific predictions. If they act in opposition to the scheme which science has foreseen for them, they must be excused. They sin in ignorance. They have no notion that they are avoiding what was really unavoidable. But, indeed, the phrases loosely used of that obscure mass of mankind are a little misleading. To say of the bulk of human beings that they are uneducated is like saying of a Red Indian hunter that he has not yet taken his degree. He has taken many other things. And so, sincerely speaking, there are no uneducated men. They may escape the trivial examinations, but not the tremendous examinations of existence. The dependence of infancy, the enjoyment of animals, the love of woman, and the fear of death—these are more frightful and more fixed than all conceivable forms of the cultivation of the mind. It is idle to complain of schools and colleges being trivial. Schools and colleges must always be trivial. In no case will a college ever teach the important things. For before a man is twenty he has always learnt the important things. He has learnt them right or wrong, and he has learnt them all alone.

We therefore come back to the primary truth, that what is right with the world has nothing to do with future changes, but is rooted in original realities. If groups or peoples show an unexpected independence or creative power; if they do things no one had dreamed of their doing; if they prove more ferocious or more self-sacrificing than the wisdom of the world had ever given them credit for, then such inexplicable outbursts can always be referred back to some elementary and absolute doctrine about the nature of men. No traditions in this world are so ancient as the traditions that lead to modern upheaval and innovation. Nothing nowadays is so conservative as a revolution. The men who call themselves Republicans are men walking the streets of deserted and tiny city-states, and digging up the great bones of pagans. And when we ask on what republicanism really rests, we come back to that great indemonstrable dogma of the native dignity of man. And when we come back to the Lord of creation, we come back of necessity to creation; and we ask ourselves that ultimate question which St Thomas Aquinas (an extreme optimist) answered in the affirmative: Are these things ultimately of value at all?

What is right with the world is the world. In fact, nearly everything else is wrong with it. This is that great truth in the tremendous tale of Creation, a truth that our people must remember or perish. It is at the beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end. The primordial things—existence, energy, fruition—are good so far as they go. You cannot have evil life, though you can have notorious evil livers. Manhood and womanhood are good things, though men and woman are often perfectly pestilent. You can use poppies to drug people, or birch trees to beat them, or stones to make an idol, or corn to make a corner; but it remains true that, in the abstract, before you have done anything, each of these four things is in strict truth a glory, a beneficent specialty and variety. We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn; we do praise the Lord, even if we do not believe in Him. We do admire and applaud the project of a world, just as if we had been called to council in the primal darkness and seen the first starry plan of the skies. We are, as a matter of fact, far more certain that this life of ours is a magnificent and amazing enterprise than we are that it will succeed. These evolutionary optimists who call themselves Meliorists (a patient and poor-spirited lot they are) always talk as if we were certain of the end, though not of the beginning. In other words, they don’t know what life is aiming at, but they are quite sure it will get there. Why anybody who has avowedly forgotten where he came from should be quite so certain of where he is going to I have never been able to make out; but Meliorists are like that. They are ready to talk of existence itself as the product of purely evil forces. They never mention animals except as perpetually tearing each other in pieces; but a month in the country would cure that. They have a real giddy horror of stars and seas, as a man has on the edge of a hopelessly high precipice. They sometimes instinctively shrink from clay, fungoids, and the fresh young of animals with a quivering gesture that reveals the fundamental pessimist. Life itself, crude, uncultivated life, is horrible to them. They belong very largely to the same social class and creed as the lady who objected that the milk came to her from a dirty cow, and not from a nice clean shop. But they are sure how everything will end.

I am in precisely the opposite position. I am much more sure that everything is good at the beginning than I am that everything will be good at the end. That all this frame of things, this flesh, these stones, are good things, of that I am more brutally certain than I can say. But as for what will happen to them, that is to take a step into dogma and prophecy. I speak here, of course, solely of my personal feelings, not even of my reasoned creed. But on my instincts alone I should have no notion what would ultimately happen to this material world I think so magnificent. For all I know it may be literally and not figuratively true that the tares are tied into bundles for burning, and that as the tree falleth so shall it lie. I am an agnostic, like most people with a positive theology. But I do affirm, with the full weight of sincerity, that trees and flowers are good at the beginning, whatever happens to them at the end; that human lives were good at the beginning, whatever happens to them in the end. The ordinary modern progressive position is that this is a bad universe, but will certainly get better. I say it is certainly a good universe, even if it gets worse. I say that these trees and flowers, stars and sexes, are primarily, not merely ultimately, good. In the Beginning the power beyond words created heaven and earth. In the Beginning He looked on them and saw that they were good.

All this unavoidable theory (for theory is always unavoidable) may be popularly pulled together thus. We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from this is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being. The pessimist of the ordinary type, the pessimist who thinks he would be better dead, is blasted with the crime of Iscariot. Spiritually speaking, we should be justified in punishing him with death. Only, out of polite deference to his own philosophy, we punish him with life.

But this faith (that existence was fundamentally and purposely good) is not attacked only by the black, consistent pessimist. The man who says that he would sooner die is best answered by a sudden blow with the poker, for the reply is rightly logical, as well as physically very effective. But there has crept through the culture of modern Europe another notion that is equally in its own way an attack on the essential rightness of the world. It is not avowedly pessimistic, though the source from which it comes (which is Buddhism) is pessimistic for those who really understand it. It can offer itself—as it does among some of the high-minded and distinguished Theosophists—with an air of something highly optimistic. But this disguised pessimism is what is really wrong with the world— at least, especially with the modern world. It is essential to arrest and to examine it.

There has crept into our thoughts, through a thousand small openings, a curious and unnatural idea. I mean the idea that unity is itself a good thing; that there is something high and spiritual about things being blended and absorbed into each other. That all rivers should run into one river, that all vegetables should go into one pot— that is spoken of as the last and best fulfilment of being. Boys are to be ‘at one’ with girls; all sects are to be ‘at one’ in the New Theology; beasts fade into men and men fade into God; union in itself is a noble thing. Now union in itself is not a noble thing. Love is a noble thing; but love is not union. Nay, it is rather a vivid sense of separation and identity. Maudlin, inferior love poetry does, indeed, talk of lovers being ‘one soul’, just as maudlin, inferior religious poetry talks of being lost in God; but the best poetry does not. When Dante meets Beatrice, he feels his distance from her, not his proximity; and all the greatest saints have felt their lowness, not their highness, in the moment of ecstasy. And what is true of these grave and heroic matters (I do not say, of course, that saints and lovers have never used the language of union too, true enough in its own place and proper limitation of meaning)—what is true of these is equally true of all the lighter and less essential forms of appreciation of surprise. Division and variety are essential to praise; division and variety are what is right with the world. There is nothing specially right about mere contact and coalescence.

In short, this vast, vague idea of unity is the one ‘reactionary’ thing in the world. It is perhaps the only connection in which that foolish word ‘reactionary’ can be used with significance and truth. For this blending of men and women, nations and nations, is truly a return to the chaos and unconsciousness that were before the world was made. There is, of course, another kind of unity of which I do not speak here; unity in the possession of truth and the perception of the need for these varieties. But the varieties themselves; the reflection of man and woman in each other, as in two distinct mirrors; the wonder of man at nature as a strange thing at once above and below him; the quaint and solitary kingdom of childhood; the local affections and the colour of certain landscapes— these actually are the things that are the grace and honour of the earth; these are the things that make life worth living and the whole framework of things well worthy to be sustained. And the best thing remains; that this view, whether conscious or not, always has been and still is the view of the living and labouring millions. While a few prigs on platforms are talking about ‘oneness’ and absorption in ‘The All’, the folk that dwell in all the valleys of this ancient earth are renewing the varieties forever. With them a woman is loved for being unmanly, and a man loved for being unwomanly. With them the church and the home are both beautiful, because they are both different; with them fields are personal and flags are sacred; they are the virtue of existence, for they are not mankind but men.

The rooted hope of the modern world is that all these dim democracies do still believe in that romance of life, that variation of man, woman and child upon which all poetry has hitherto been built. The danger of the modern world is that these dim democracies are so very dim, and that they are especially dim where they are right. The danger is that the world may fall under a new oligarchy— the oligarchy of prigs. And if anyone should promptly ask (in the manner of the debating clubs) for the definition of a prig, I can only reply that a prig is an oligarch who does not even know he is an oligarch. A circle of small pedants sit on an upper platform, and pass unanimously (in a meeting of none) that there is no difference between the social duties of men and of women, the social instruction of men or of children. Below them boils that multitudinous sea of millions that think differently, that have always thought differently, that will always think differently. In spite of the overwhelming majority that maintains the old theory of life, I am in some real doubt about which will win. Owing to the decay of theology and all the other clear systems of thought, men have been thrown back very much upon their instincts, as with animals. As with animals, their instincts are right; but, as with animals, they can be cowed. Between the agile scholars and the stagnant mob, I am really doubtful about which will be triumphant. I have no doubt at all about which ought to be.

Europe at present exhibits a concentration upon politics which is partly the unfortunate result of our loss of religion, partly the just and needful result of our loss of our social inequality and iniquity. These causes, however, will not remain in operation forever. Religion is returning from her exile; it is more likely that the future will be crazily and corruptly superstitious than that it will be merely rationalist.

On the other hand, our attempts to right the extreme ill-balance of wealth must soon have some issue; something will be done to lessen the perpetual torture of incompetent compassion; some scheme will be substituted for our malevolent anarchy, if it be only one of benevolent servitude. And as these two special unrests about the universe and the State settle down into more silent and enduring system, there will emerge more and more those primary and archaic truths which the dust of these two conflicts has veiled. The secondary questions relatively solved, we shall find ourselves all the more in the presence of the primary questions of Man.

For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man’s life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won’t, to the end of the last evening. And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone make daily life tolerable. It will be an ironic tragedy if, when we have toiled to find rest, we find we are incurably restless. It will be sad if, when we have worked for our holiday, we find we have unlearnt everything but work. The typical modern man is the insane millionaire who has drudged to get money, and then finds he cannot enjoy even money. There is danger that the social reformer may silently and occultly develop some of the madness of the millionaire whom he denounces. He may find that he has learnt how to build playgrounds but forgotten how to play. He may agitate for peace and quiet, but only propagate his own mental agitation. In his long fight to get a slave a half-holiday he may angrily deny those ancient and natural things, the zest of being, the divinity of man, the sacredness of simple things, the health and humour of the earth, which alone make a half-holiday even half a holiday or a slave even half a man.

There is danger in that modern phrase ‘divine discontent’. There is truth in it also, of course; but it is only truth of a special and secondary kind. Much of the quarrel between Christianity and the world has been due to this fact; that there are generally two truths, as it were, at any given moment of revolt or reaction, and the ancient underlying truism which is nevertheless true all the time. It is sometimes worth while to point out that black is not so black as it is painted; but black is still black, and not white. So with the merits of content and discontent. It is true that in certain acute and painful crises of oppression or disgrace, discontent is a duty and shame could call us like a trumpet. But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards not so bad. The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.

THE END