All Is Grist

                  A Book of Essays, first published 1931

                            By G.K.Chesterton

                                 Contents

CHAPTER

I.                ON THE PRUDERY OF SLANG
II.               ON LIBERTIES AND LOTTERIES
III.              ON THE NUDISTS
IV.               ON BUSINESS EDUCATION
V.                ON THE INTELLECT OF YESTERDAY
VI.               ON TRAVEL'S SURPRISES
VII.              ON FLOCKING
VIII.             ON THE BEHAVIOURIST
IX.               ON THE PLEASURES OF NO LONGER BEING VERY YOUNG
X.                ON MR. MENCKEN AND FUNDAMENTALISM
XI.               ON ANTHONY TROLLOPE: HISTORIAN
XII.              ON THE WAY OF THE WORLD
XIII.             ON THE NEW INSULARITY
XIV.              ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
XV.               ON REST CURES FOR NATIONS
XVI.              ON PHILOSOPHY versus FICTION
XVII.             ON LOGIC AND LUNACY
XVIII.            ON THE THRILLS OF BOREDOM
XIX.              ON GOSSIP ABOUT HEREDITY
XX.               ON DANTE AND BEATRICE
XXI.              ON QUACKS IN THE HOME
XXII.             ON A GENERALLY ACCEPTED MISTAKE
XXIII.            ON THE LATER PORTIONS OF POEMS
XXIV.             ON THE ROMANCE OF CHILDHOOD
XXV.              ON THE RENAISSANCE
XXVI.             ON THE LAUREATESHIP
XXVII.            ON LIVING FOR POSTERITY
XXVIII.           ON MR. SHAW'S PURITANISM
XXIX.             ON THE TRUTH OF LEGENDS
XXX.              ON EXPERIENCE
XXXI.             ON SIGHTSEEING
XXXII.            ON CONDIMENTS AND CONDUCT
XXXIII.           ON OPTIMISM AND SCEPTICISM
XXXIV.            ON THOUGHTS IN CANADA
XXXV.             ON THE BAD WORD FOR GUILD
XXXVI.            ON SOPHISTICATION
XXXVII.           ON DRESS AND DECORUM
XXXVIII.          ON ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE



I. On the Prudery of Slang

WHAT puzzles me is that so many things which boast of being
wild and free, which are even abused for being wild and free,
are in reality rather snobbish, not to say slavish.  All that sort
of unconventionality seems to me a great deal too conventional.
The most obvious and everyday example is the fuss about divorce;
which is unfortunately a very everyday example.  But the point
of divorce is not that people are professing to be reckless,
but that people arc pretending to be respectable.  The point of it
is not in the parting of wives and husbands, which has unfortunately
happened in various forms in nearly all the various lands and ages.
The point of it is the covering of the disunion by the use of the old
label of union.  Many satirists in many periods have had occasion to note
the domestic dissolution that seemed to threaten a social dissolution.
Many have had occasion to strike the lyre and lament in the mournful
language of Mr. Bentley's Ballade:

    Rupert has bolted with the children's nurse,
    Claude has declared himself an Infidel.

The peculiarity of the recent social tendency is that a visiting-card
inscribed `Mr. and Mrs. Rupert' is carefully engraved to cover the fact
that the children's nurse is no longer looking after the children.
The peculiarity of the position is not that Claude has proclaimed
himself an Infidel; but, that Claude has proclaimed himself
a Christian with a higher and more purely spiritual religion,
which is too exalted to believe in any creeds or sacraments, but which
does permit him to remain an ordinary respectable Anglican parson--
or possibly even an Anglican bishop.

In all these compromises, it seems to me that the chief feature is
the saving of the ordinary social position of the persons involved.
And to think first about such social position is not the act
of a sceptic but simply of a snob.  What matters to a man with a
free intelligence is what the man and woman are actually doing,
or what the parson or bishop is actually teaching.  Whether in the one
case somebody gets a new wedding-ring, or in the other case retains
an old dog-collar, is surely a matter comparatively conventional.
Yet it is at the back of nearly all the pleas for freedom,
which profess to be pleas for unconventionality.  But there
are a great many other examples of this curious contradiction
with relation to convention.  It appears not only in the manners,
but in the language, and especially the slang, of society.
There is a queer sort of prudery about slang, and modernity shows
it most in what it calls `facing the facts of nature'.

For instance, there was a time when it was customary to call
a father a father; which seems to me a very normal example of
calling a spade a spade.  There were, of course, many variations,
both formal and familiar, in different times and communities.
But most men have used a language as ancient and traditional as that of
Esau when he cried aloud, `Hast thou not a blessing for me, O my father?'
Now as far as I can discover from the social authorities who tell
us all about the Rising Generation and the Bright Young Things,
it appears to be considered a mark of advanced intelligence to call
your father a bean or a scream, or possibly Tom, Dick, and Harry,
in reference (or without reference) to his Christian name.
Broadly speaking, the parent of the progressive age appears to
answer to `Hi!' or to any loud cry; and it seems to be considered
in itself a proof of progress that the cries are very loud indeed.
But loud cries do not make any difference to logic; and in this
case the logic is all the other way.  It is obvious to me that
calling the old gentleman `father' is facing the facts of nature.
It is also obvious that calling him `bean' is not facing the facts
of nature.  It is, so far as that example is concerned, perhaps,
merely weaving a graceful fairy-tale to cover the facts of nature.
It is prettily pretending for a moment that the Heavy Father
is an elf of the dimensions of Moth and Mustard-Seed,
capable of concealing himself in the green hood of the bean.
But that is a digression without being in any way an exception.
The general truth obviously is that all these phrases that evade
the family relation do therefore evade the facts of life.
You may call your father Tom as if he were a total stranger
from Australia, whom you had come rather to like at the Empire Club.
But in that case it is you who are indulging in a fiction,
and ultimately in a convention.  The real facts of your relation
are rather more remarkable; and to ignore them is to ignore something
at once natural and notable.  And it is to ignore it in favour
of things much more superficial and trivial; the mere society
slang or fashion of the passing moment.  It is, in fact, to think
the rules of the Empire Club more important than the laws of Nature.
That does not strike me as being natural; to say nothing of being naked.
That does not impress me as being realistic, but as being ready
to go through any sort of antics rather than face a reality.

There are, indeed, human and historic aspects of this problem, which would
in any case be rather too real for our realists to understand.
The truth is that traditional humanity has always felt these natural facts
to be so real that they were best expressed in some sort of ritual.
Talking about them in detail did (and does) very little good;
but recognizing them in conduct and courtesy and the very carriage of
the body made all men feel sane and near to nature.  Men were ceremonial
towards their fathers and mothers, just as they were ceremonial about
the harvest or the ploughing of the ground or the scattering of the seed.
They were ceremonial about these things because these things were
so very real; because they are the most real of all realities.
They are the things by which we live and without which we die.
In the same way, their gleams of simple intelligence enabled them
to perceive that their parents were things without which they
would never have been alive.  The recognition of that fact
is entirely realistic, not to say scientific; but the best
recognition of it has always been in gesture and artistic form.
It has been what I, for one, should unhesitatingly describe
as good form.

There are some of the innovators whom I should not expect to understand
what is meant by good form.  They are far too much tied to convention
to understand ritual.  They cannot even understand courtesy, so long
as the convention of the moment is a convention of discourtesy.
But these deplorable people are very rare in any generation;
and the majority of the young are doubtless what they always were;
and no more than normally disposed to desert normality for the sake
of novelty.  The trouble is that very few people encourage them
really to think about these things, or thrash them out in any
intelligent fashion.  They are sometimes blamed for not following
the conventions of the last generation; to which the obvious answer
is that they are following the conventions of this generation.
The real trouble is that they are following the conventions far too much.
As they have no defence against their fathers except a new fashion,
so they will have no defence against their sons except an old fashion.
The habit of uttering loud cries (of which I am a warm and
enthusiastic supporter) can seldom be carried on absolutely continuously
to the age of sixty, without any pause for rest or refreshment.
And what is wanted here is not only a pause for refreshment but
for reflection.  There is a great deal to be said for rapidity;
but it is not especially a good way of grasping reality.  People merely
going the pace, in any age, have generally missed everything except
the most artificial and external costume and custom of that age.
Men need to walk a little slower to look at the earth and to face
the facts of nature.

II.  On Liberties and Lotteries

ALMOST alone among my contemporaries I have not been a sceptic
about Liberty; but I recognize the materials for scepticism in the
discussion about liberties.  The difference between the liberties valued
by one community and those valued by another is doubtless very great.
The vulgar modern argument used against religion, and lately against
common decency, would be absolutely fatal to any idea of liberty.
It is perpetually said that because there are a hundred religions
claiming to be true, it is therefore impossible that one of them
should really be true.  The argument would appear on the face
of it to be illogical, if any one nowadays troubled about logic.
It would be as reasonable to say that because some people
thought the earth was flat, and others (rather less incorrectly)
imagined it was round, and because anybody is free to say that it
is triangular or hexagonal, or a rhomboid, therefore it has no
shape at all; or its shape can never be discovered; and, anyhow,
modern science must be wrong in saying it is an oblate spheroid.
The world must be some shape, and it must be that shape and no other;
and it is not self-evident that nobody can possibly hit on
the right one.  What so obviously applies to the material shape
of the world equally applies to the moral shape of the universe.
The man who describes it may not be right; but it is no argument
against his rightness that a number of other people must be wrong.

As I say, the same childish argument is now extended to ordinary
morality or decency.  It is insisted that, because the decorum of a
Roman matron is not exactly the same as that of a Sandwich Islander,
therefore there can be no superiority in the one over the other;
no possible way of deciding which is the better of the two;
and, ultimately, no meaning or value in dignity or propriety at all.
The conclusion is so unnatural that, even if the argument were apparently
logical, we might be excused for suspecting it of being sophistical.
But, as a matter of fact, the argument is not logical enough
to be called a sophistry.  It is simply transparently untenable;
for it rests on the same fallacy:  that one man cannot be right
because a number of other men are wrong.  In this case, of course,
it is true that the question is conditioned by different circumstances
and that the principle must be applied in different ways.
In this case it is true that we cannot say that the whole world
is alike, in the sense that we can say that the whole world is round.
It is true, but this fashionable argument does not prove it to be true.
So far as that argument goes, there might be one costume suitable
to all mankind, as there is one custom of washing suitable
to all mankind, though some men neglect it and are dirty.
All we complain of, in that aspect, is that the sceptic always
refuses to be a rationalist.

But the point here is that, if this argument is fatal to faith
or modesty, it is a thousand times fatal to liberty.  If we simply
say that this or that practice is tolerated in this or that place,
if we refuse to look for any moral or metaphysical principle by
which the differences can be tested, we shall find the definition
of liberty dissolving into a dust of differentiations and exceptions.
And I very much fear that this is exactly what the definition
of liberty will really do.  I am very much afraid, as things
are going at present, that the next generation will have quite
as little idea of what their fathers meant by dying for liberty,
as the last generation had of what their fathers meant by dying
for religion or sound theology or the true faith.  There is already
a large number of modern writers who talk as if the old notion
of independence, national or personal, were something simply
inconceivable as well as impossible; exactly as the champions of liberty,
a hundred years ago, spoke of the mysterious dogmas of the Church.
Indeed, it is quite as easy, by the methods of the rationalistic heckler,
to suggest that freedom is nonsense as that faith is nonsense.
It is a great deal too easy.  That is what made me suspect it
from the first in both cases.  But, anyhow, it is perfectly true
that variation gives the sceptic an opportunity in both cases.
It is easy to show that liberties are local; it is much less easy
to prove that Liberty is universal.

For instance, I am writing these words in a country which
many of my countrymen regard as utterly crushed by a system
destructive of every liberty.  There is no doubt that Italy
has restrained the liberty of the Press; it can easily be
argued that it has restrained the liberty of the people.
But it is quite certain that the people enjoy, and take for granted,
quite definite forms of liberty that do not exist in England at all.
The Italians would think Mussolini was mad if he forbade Lotteries,
as the English law forbids Lotteries.  It would seem to them
very much what forbidding Lawn Tennis would seem to us.
The whole Latin world regards the notion of not being allowed
to drink beer between three and six very much as we should regard
the idea of not being allowed to eat buns on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It is quite inadequate to call it tyranny; because they would call
it lunacy.  Now I have argued often enough upon these points elsewhere,
and I am not going to dwell on these particular points now.
I am merely using them to point out that, even where we imagine
there is a clear-cut issue against liberty, there is a considerable
complexity when we come to argue about liberties.  If the costume of the
Sandwich Islander is an argument against abstract decency, then certainly
the liberty of the lottery is an argument against abstract liberty.
If the thousand and one religions make a case against religion,
then the thousand and one liberties make a case against liberty.
And I am very much afraid that, in the present mood of mankind,
that case may carry weight.  It will be very useful to the monopolist,
or modern tyrant, who carries most weight in the modern world;
and when he has taken away all English freedom from the Englishman
and all Italian freedom from the Italian, he will smile broadly
and say that, after all, men have never agreed about the definition
of being free.

I am so paradoxical as to think that there is a real theory of freedom.
Perhaps I may have a shot at expounding it in another essay.
But the theory is bound to be rather theoretical; and the modern world,
having tried in vain to be thoughtful, has fallen back on the abject
alternative of being practical.  And it looks to me as if liberty
would suffer in that practical age much more than religion suffered
in the age of the French Revolution.  It can easily be derided,
quite as successfully as Victorian decorum or the legend of Mrs. Grundy.
But just as there are other kinds of decorum besides Victorian decorum,
and yet a sense of dignity and decency behind them all, so there can
be other kinds of freedom besides that of the free-born Englishman,
and yet leave an ultimate significance in the ideal of being free.
Broadly, I should say that the commonwealth is healthy in which
all things are not common, but some things, in the exact sense
of the phrase, `distinguished'. Many who talk about distinction
mean only aristocratic distinction; and by that mean only fashion.
But fashion is almost the opposite of distinction.  A democracy can
be distinguished, if its citizens are distinguishable; if each has
an area of choice in which he really chooses.  To keep that area
of choice as large as possible is the real function of freedom.
But, as there is no space here for me to develop my eleutheromaniac
dogma on this page, I feel inclined to ask my readers to do it for me;
or at least to think it out for themselves.  I dare not offer a prize;
I understand it is now likely to be classed with a Lottery.
And it would be dreadful if free-born Englishmen were allowed to do
what is permitted to Italian slaves.  But if any one thinks he has
a definition that will save Liberty, I should be interested . . . and,
I will add, surprised.

III.  On the Nudists

IN a great many illustrated papers there is a continuous and by this
time rather monotonous stream of articles and illustrations advertising
the new Gymnosophists of Germany.  I mean the cult of cranks who insist
in a crazy degree on certain notions connected with sun-cures;
to me, more suggestive of sunstroke.  An occasional article about
them might be normal enough in any magazine, as being in the nature
of a news-item. But the concentrated attempt to boom this barbaric
sophistry is not a good sign of the turn of public opinion,
and seems connected with that particular sort of glorification of
the body which generally goes with a certain weakness in the head.
There is, indeed, something singularly weak-minded about
the sort of respect--we might almost say reverence--with which
experiments of this sort are often described in our journalism.
It seems quite sufficient to insist upon the seriousness of any persons
engaged in such experiments, a seriousness which invariably marks
faddists and fanatics and small provincial sects of every kind.
Thus the admiring advertiser explains how very solemnly the German
professor plays the goat, though not quite so seriously as a real goat.
For goats do not laugh at anything, least of all at themselves,
and in this the nature-worshippers in question are undoubtedly, as they
would say, at one with Nature.  Nature is inferior to man in many things,
but most of all in respect of the human speciality of humour.
For the rest, goatishness has often been made a sort of symbol
of paganism; but even among the pagans it was not regarded as
the highest form of paganism.  `Half a beast is the great god Pan'
as the poet very truly observed; and the satyr and the faun were
conceived as being half-human and half-goatish, presumably on
the principle that half a goat is better than no beastliness.
To a serene and philosophical judgment, it will not appear altogether
inappropriate that, in the division of mankind, the goats were on
the wrong side of the judgment seat.

But the fallacy in such a fashion is concerned with a certain
ultimate common sense about mankind.  The cult of nakedness,
which used to be called the Adamite Heresy, does, in fact,
reveal its falsity at the beginning, even in the merely
material aspect.  Man is not independent of artificial things,
even in the most natural sense.  Nakedness is not even practical,
except on selected occasions that are entirely artificial.
Even the physical conditions of the world bear witness to something
in man that is strictly to be called metaphysical, that is unique
and detached and raised above the obvious physical order.
It is not native to man to go without clothes, unless it is native
to man to die of double pneumonia in about a month.  He cannot do it
at all through the greater part of the year, or over the greater part
of the globe.  And the very fact that he has been left, as it were,
without any aids to survival except what we call artificial aids,
is a proof that in his case they can hardly even be called artificial.
It is not a question so much of artificiality which departs from nature,
but rather of art, which is the essence of human nature; art, which is
almost the nature of man.

For instance, man could not exist at all, in the ordinary sense, if he had
not discovered the dreadful and astonishing thing that is called fire.
It would be just as easy to elaborate a philosophy against fire
as a philosophy against clothes.  In fact, the two things often
serve the same purpose, but fire is by far the more questionable
and dangerous of the two.  It is not very often that a man
is actually killed by a hat or tortured by a pair of trousers.
There was, indeed, an instrument of torture called the Boot;
it was used in seventeenth-century Scotland, and we hear a great deal
about it when it was used by Royalists upon Whigs, and very little
about it when it was afterwards used by Whigs upon Royalists.
But even those who complain most of what Mr. H. G. Wells called
the Misery of Boots would hardly compare it to being sentenced
to the Boot, and certainly not to being sentenced to the fire.
Yet it would be easy enough, in the accepted style of rhetoric
about these things, to represent every advocate of ordinary
warmth as invoking some such unnatural peril.  All fuel would,
in the medieval phrase, smell of the faggot, To defend the stove
would be to defend the stake; and any housewife lighting a fire
would be re-lighting the fires of Smithfield.  Such talk would
be no more ridiculous than many of the ravings of the reformers,
who cry out that they arc being persecuted as by the Spanish Inquisition
when they are required to wear common human clothes.  There would
be any number of other ways of giving the familiar element a permanent
flavour of arson.  Where, is it alleged, is Woman most oppressed
and tormented; where is she enslaved and threatened with every type
of tribal and ancestral brutality?  Where but at the fireside?
A little confused oratory and imagery, applied to that notion,
would be quite enough to suggest a general idea that the woman
was to be roasted like a leg of mutton.  Indeed, the whole business
of cookery would afford a most convenient and fitting parallel.
Cooking is artificial, exactly as clothes are artificial.
Some people do largely dispense with cookery, as some people do
frequently dispense with clothes.  There are prigs who live on nuts,
as there are prigs who live in nakedness.  But there are a good
many other human beings as well, and most of them are of opinion
that cookery is a part of something which we call culture.
And, while we may argue for ever about whether it is natural,
most of us know that it is normal.

The whole conception of culture is bound up with that first
fact about man; that he is not himself, until he has added to
himself certain things which are, in a sense, outside himself.
As he is more powerful than any other creature with those things,
so he is more helpless than any other creature without those things.
It would be easy for the wild philosopher to argue that the very
existence of fire is an insult to sunlight.  It would be easy for him
to denounce Prometheus as the rival of Apollo.  I can imagine him
elaborately explaining, in an endless series of lectures, that we
ought not to need any such in direction or deflection of the rays
of the sun; that we ought never to have come into a condition in
which the sun's rays are not sufficient to us; that it is an insult
to the splendid solar unity to tear away flames from it, like rags
from a golden garment.  It is true that, as a minor matter of fact,
the sun's rays are not always there at all.  But that is just as much
an objection to the attack on clothes as to the attack on cooking.
The point is that the whole of this philosophy is wrong at the root;
is wrong in its whole conception of the nature and position
of man on the earth; is wrong even in its relation to matter;
and is wrong long before we come to the higher question of morals.

But when we do come to it, we shall not be surprised to find that
the theory is as false in moral fact as it is in material fact.
A human being is not even completely human without clothes,
because they have become a part of him as the symbol of purely
human things; of dignity, of modesty, of self-ownership,
of property, and privacy and honour.  Even in the purely artistic
sense humanity would never have become human without them,
because the range of self-expression and symbolic decoration would
have been hopelessly limited, and there would have been no outlet
even for the most primary instincts about colour and form.
The Adamite heresy begins in madness, but it ends only in monotony.
Some actually praise it because they think it would dull and blunt
all sorts of human feelings, fancies, and shades of sentiment;
and they are the sort of madmen who would actually boast of monotony.
But the central civilization of mankind is not very likely
to be deeply disturbed, in its immemorial intellectual instincts,
by these crudities on the borderland.  It takes a long time
to explain such simple things; but, when a man disregards them,
it is a shorter way to laugh at him and lock him up.

IV.  On Business Education

A LONG time ago I pointed out the fallacy of crying out for
a practical man.  I noted, what should be obvious enough,
that when a problem is really bad and basic, we should rather wail
and pray and cry aloud for an unpractical man.  The practical
man only knows the machine in practice; just as many a man can
drive a motor-car who could not mend it, still less design it.
The more serious is the trouble, the more probable it is that some
knowledge of scientific theory will be required; and though the theorist
will be called unpractical, he will probably be also indispensable.
What is generally meant by a business man is a man who knows the way
in which our particular sort of modern business does generally work.
It does not follow that he is imaginative enough to suggest
something else, when it obviously does not work.  And (unless I
very much misread the signs of the modern transition) we are soon
coming to a time when everybody will be looking for somebody who can
suggest something else.

I am glad to see that what I applied to the unpractical
reformer has been applied, by an unimpeachably practical man,
to the unpractical instructor.  Mr. John C. Parker,
a hundred-per-cent American, a highly successful engineer,
the vigorous agent of a company named after Edison--in short,
a man with all the unquestioned stigmata of a Regular Guy,
rigorous and energetic in the application of science to business,
has recently astonished his friends by delivering an address with
the truly admirable title, `Wanted--An Unpractical Education'.
I have only read his remarks in an indirect form, but they seem to me
quite excellent remarks.  `My complaint would be rather that training
youth to earn a living is not education at all; second, that a specific
training may keep the youngster from earning the best kind of living;
and third, that it can't be done in school anyhow.'  Or, again, `I would
infinitely prefer that education fit him for happiness and decency
in poverty, than for wealth acquired through the sacrifice of himself
and his character.'  These are almost startlingly sensible counsels;
though what they would look like side by side with those shiny and
strenuous advertisements inscribed `You Can Add Ten Thousand Dollars
to Your Salary', or `This Man Trebled his Turnover in Two Weeks',
it is not my province to conjecture.

But this extraordinary affair called Business Education, which has
begun to be supported in England after having long subsisted
in America, has another aspect perhaps not so easy to explain.
When I say that we want to train the citizen and not the city man,
or the equivocal `something in the city', I mean even more than
Mr. Parker's just and rational ideal of `the fitting of students
to live richly and fully and contribute most broadly to the welfare
of the social group who have paid for their education'.
Being myself a senile survival of the old republican idealism
(I use the adjective to express the American political principle,
not the American political party) I mean something else, as well
as the mere social enjoyment of culture.  I mean that to train
a citizen is to train a critic.  The whole point of education
is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards,
by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.
If the citizen is to be a reformer, he must start with some ideal
which he does not obtain merely by gazing reverently at the
unreformed institutions.  And if any one asks, as so many are asking:
`What is the use of my son learning all about ancient Athens
and remote China and medieval guilds and monasteries, and all sorts
of dead or distant things, when he is going to be a superior
scientific plumber in Pimlico?' the answer is obvious enough.
`The use of it is that he may have some power of comparison,
which will not only prevent him from supposing that Pimlico
covers the whole planet, but also enable him, while doing full
credit to the beauties and virtues of Pimlico, to point out that,
here and there, as revealed by alternative experiments, even Pimlico
may conceal somewhere a defect.'

Now, the nuisance of all this notion of Business Education,
of a training for certain trades, whether of plumber or plutocrat,
is that they will prevent the intelligence being sufficiently active
to criticize trade and business properly.  They begin by stuffing
the child, not with the sense of justice by which he can judge the world,
but with the sense of inevitable doom or dedication by which
he must accept that particular very worldly aspect of the world.
Even while he is a baby he is a bank-clerk, and accepts the principles
of banking which Mr. Joseph Finsbury so kindly explained to the banker.
Even in the nursery he is an actuary or an accountant; he lisps in
numbers and the numbers come.  But he cannot criticize the principles
of banking, or entertain the intellectual fancy that the modern
world is made to turn too much on a Pythagorean worship of Numbers.
But that is because he has never heard of the Pythagorean philosophy;
or, indeed, of any other philosophy.  He has never been taught
to think, but only to count.  He lives in a cold temple of
abstract calculation, of which the pillars are columns of figures.
But he has no basic sense of Comparative Religion (in the true
sense of that tiresome phrase), by which he may discover whether
he is in the right temple, or distinguish one temple from another.
This is bad enough when we are dealing with the normal sense of number
and quantity, the eternal foundations of rational and permanent commerce;
which are in themselves as pure and abstract as Pythagoras.
It becomes both preposterous and perilous when we are dealing
with the mere scramble of speculation and economic illusion
which is called business in America and elsewhere; with all
its degrading publicity, with all its more dangerous secrecy.
To begin a boy's training by teaching him to admire these things,
and then call it Business Education, is exactly like teaching him
to worship Baal and Baphomet, and then calling it Religious Education.
And much of what is called commercial training is really of
this character.  Stevenson, with the assistance of Lloyd Osbourne
(himself an American), gives a very vivid and amusing sketch
of it in The Wrecker.  His American hero very justly resents
being laughed at merely because he leaves the u out of `colour';
but adds that his critics might have had a better case had they
known that his father `had paid large sums to have him brought up
in a gambling-hell'.

Anyhow, that is what is the matter with Business Education;
that it narrows the mind; whereas the whole object of education
is to broaden the mind and especially to broaden it so as to enable
it to criticize and condemn such narrowness.  Everybody ought
to learn first a general view of the history of man, of the nature
of man, and (as I, for one, should add) of the nature of God.
This may enable him to consider the rights and wrongs of slavery
in a slave community, of cannibalism in a cannibal community,
or of commerce in a commercial community.  If he is immediately
initiated into the mysteries of these institutions themselves, if he is
sworn in infancy to take them as seriously as they take themselves,
if he becomes a trader not only before he becomes a traveller,
but even before he becomes a true citizen of his own town, he will
never be able to denounce those institutions--or even to improve them.
Such a state will never have the ideas or imagination to reform itself;
and hustle and bustle and business activity will have resulted
in the dead fixity of a fossil.

V. On the Intellect of Yesterday

IS the present generation better educated than the last generation?
Is it more intelligent than any one of any number of past generations?
Most of those writing on the subject say `Yes'. Most of them,
by a curious coincidence, belong to the present generation,
or some very recent generation.  I have no axe to grind in the matter;
neither the ancestral axe of Brutus, red with the blood of his sons,
nor the latest pattern of guillotine on which a revolutionary son
can enthusiastically execute his father.  There are some matters
in which the world has lately veered towards my own opinions;
some matters in which it has turned away from them.  But I have
enough intellectual curiosity to have doubts, and certainly enough
to make distinctions.

I think there would be a case for maintaining this:
that the world has improved in everything except intellect.
In artistic sensibilities, and even in social sympathies (at least,
of a certain kind), I think there has been a quickening and a response.
I think it probable that the number of people who can rapidly get
used to a foreign fashion or style of ornament, who can guess what
an eccentric artist is driving at, who can feel the emotions evoked
by unusual music, is larger than it was in mid-Victorian times.
But these things do not appeal to the intellect.  And I think they
appeal to the modern mood because they do not appeal to the intellect.
They make signals to the sentimental part of human nature,
and the code of those signals is learned more quickly than it
would once have been.  But when it comes to anything like a strain
on the intellect as such, I think that most modern people are
much stupider than those in the age of my father, and probably
very much stupider than those in the age of my grandfather.
I have reasons for my belief, but it illustrates my point that the
modern reader would hardly listen to a long process of reasoning.
I believe I could even prove it, if people now were patient enough
to listen to proof.

First, it must be realized that liveliness in the preacher does
not mean liveliness in the congregation.  On the contrary,
the extreme liveliness in the preacher is produced by dullness
in the congregation.  I am ready to believe, for instance,
that Mr. Lloyd George is a more purely entertaining speaker than Cobden.
But that is because Mr. Lloyd George speaks to men who want to
be entertained.  Cobden spoke to men who wanted to be convinced.
The listeners provided something of the liveliness needed
to carry them through a purely logical process.  When there
was a congregation of logicians, as there was in some of the old
Scottish Calvinist kirks, the preacher could reckon on being
followed when his discourse was a pure demonstration in logic.
It is when the congregation is dull that it wants to be amused.
Cobden stood for various views which I do not myself find convincing;
but his audience was convinced, it was not merely amused.
Now, a man cannot be convinced by an argument without following
the argument.  He can be amused, even if he goes to sleep
in the middle of the argument and wakes up just in time to hear
a joke about Tories drinking beer or Bolshevists sharing boots.
I believe there is infinitely less of this intellectual attention
to an argument than there used to be.

It is illustrated, for instance, in the great modern change in the Press.
I am not now arguing about whether Lord Northcliffe's revolution in
journalistic methods was morally or socially good.  I only say it may
well stand for something which is intellectually very much to the bad.
When I was a boy, the papers printed long and detailed reports of
speeches by Gladstone or Goschen or Asquith, on complex controversies
of economies and finance.  Perhaps they were not worth printing;
perhaps they were not worth reading; but they were read.
Now, it may be very bright and pleasant to have all Gladstone's subtle
and searching logical distinctions swept away in favour of the fixed
and unfailing headline of `What Did Mr. Gladstone Say in 1885?'
It may be very comfortable to forget all the luminous legal
distinctions of Asquith, and agree that that statesman never said
anything in this life except `Wait and See'.  But it is not
a proof of increased intellectual activity that we are satisfied
with the simple and soothing quotations.  The minds of our fathers
may have been occupied in futile and pedantic hair-splitting,
but their minds were really capable of splitting a hair.
It may be more cosy to be stunned with a blow on the head by a club
than to have one of your hairs split by a needle, but it is not any
better tribute to the quality of your head, or of anybody else's.

Or take another test from another type of inquiry.
When all the drawing-rooms began to buzz suddenly with the name
of Einstein, some of us were enabled to guess that they must
once have buzzed quite as abruptly with the name of Darwin.
Some of us are inclined to guess that Darwinism became
a fashion long before anybody really thought it was a fact.
Doubtless any number of society ladies went about saying that
Professor Darwin was really too wonderful, just as they afterwards
went about saying that Professor Einstein was really too wonderful.
But, when all is said, there is no comparison between the two cases.
Any number of people did really attack the study of biology, in order
to agree or disagree with Darwin.  Hardly one person in a thousand thought
of attacking the higher mathematics in order to agree with Einstein.
People did talk about Darwinism as well as about Darwin.
Most of those who talk about Einstein talk about Einstein.
They know nothing but the name and the notion that something very
important has happened in connexion with the name.  The talk about Darwin
may have been popular science, but it was science, and it was popular.
The talk about Einstein may rather be called popular nescience.
He has not made astronomy really popular, as the other made biology
really popular.  And I believe that the reason is a certain increased
laziness of the intellect; that fewer people are ready for a long,
sustained logical demonstration, quite apart from whether we think
that the demonstration really demonstrates.  In my boyhood there
were any number of funny little atheists running about ready
and eager to prove what they had learned from the work of Darwin.
So there were any number of fanatical little Free-Traders eager
to prove what they had learned from the speeches of Cobden.
I do not find men now so eager to prove things; but, at the most,
to assure me that they have been proved.

One way of putting it is that this is a psychological age,
which is the opposite of an intellectual age.  It is not a question
of persuading men, but of suggesting how they are persuaded.
It is an age of Suggestion; that is, of appeal to the irrational
part of man.  Men discussed whether Free Trade was false or true;
they do not so much discuss whether Empire Free Trade is false
or true, as whether it is booming or slumping; whether it is based
on an understanding of Mass Psychology, or whether its opponents
or supporters have what Americans call Personality.  It is all
great fun, and there is doubtless a truth in it, as in other things.
But, whatever else it is, it is not a mark of stronger mentality,
and any old Scotch Calvinist farmer, who could follow his minister's
desolate and appalling sermon to Seventeenthly and Lastly,
had an immeasurably better brain.

VI.  On Travel's Surprises

TRAVELLERS' tales are supposed to be tall tales; but I have always
found them fall short.  I have nearly always felt that the real
monument or landscape, when I saw it for myself, was something
stranger and more striking than the indirect impression of reading.
The old tale against travellers' tales was that they magnified everything;
that every lizard became a dragon and every savage tribe a race
of giants.  But my experience is that travellers in a strange land,
especially if they have travelled in it long, tend too much to forget
its strangeness.  They become concerned with a dust of details,
and tend to take the green lizards as casually as the green leaves.
The danger is rather, I think, that a man can live in a tribe
of gigantic savages, and grow to remark and record all sorts
of details about their tribal taxes or their coinage of tusks
or hides, and, at the end of his detailed narrative, forget even
to mention that they were giants.  For as there are things too big
and obvious to be noticed, so especially there are things too big
and obvious to be remembered.

There have, indeed, been many cases in which travellers have
been accused of telling lies, which have often afterwards
turned out to be truths.  Modern research, which has justified
so many medieval reputations, has made some reparation even to
medieval travellers.  It was Marco Polo, I think, who reported
that he had met in Africa men who had the heads of dogs.
And most modern critics treated it as a manifest fairy-tale,
as if he claimed to have seen birds with the heads of elephants.
But it is very likely indeed that the traveller saw baboons, or some
of the larger apes; and his description is really more scientific
and exact than the common popular impression about men and monkeys.
For the higher apes have not that sort of hollow, half-human visage
which we see in the little monkeys; they often have an aggressive
and solid projection of nose and jaw, like the nozzle or muzzle
of a dog.  But even here the principle of comparison is true.
It is one thing to read in a book about dog-headed men and believe it
or not as we choose; it must have been quite another to see the first
of the huge hairy anthropoids--monstrous, mysterious, erect; a premature
provocation to the myth of the Missing Link.  And I repeat that foreign
sights have mostly affected me as the first ape must have affected
the first explorer; not necessarily as something beautiful or charming,
but certainly as something very surprising and entirely unexpected.
When I first saw St. Mark's, Venice, I am by no means sure
that I liked it; but I am quite sure that I was surprised by it;
that it was not only quite different from anything I had ever seen,
but quite different from anything I had ever expected.
I thought it looked like Aladdin's Palace in a pantomime.
And the impression was not altogether false for a man standing
in that great merchant city of the Western Mediterranean is,
by a paradox, standing deep in the golden gate of the East.  There was
always something a little too Oriental about the Venetian republic;
and this, it has been suggested, was why it did, in a sense, fall like
Carthage rather than survive like Rome.  But, however that may be,
the Christian who first looks at the Christian Church of St. Mark's
is as startled as if it were a Chinese pagoda.  Yet I had often
seen pictures of it; photographs, and even coloured photographs;
but these never conveyed how extraordinary the thing really is.
For the extraordinary thing is that anything so fantastic
should be solid.

The queer thing is that what one would expect to be the first thing
mentioned is generally the last thing mentioned.  I had heard a thousand
things about Jerusalem ever since my babyhood, and seen views of it,
and plans of it, and read controversies about it.  But, somehow or other,
I had never got hold of the first fact that it is a mountain city.
A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; but some how it seems
as if the hill could be hid.  All the photographs and descriptions
I had seen were like glimpses of an Eastern bazaar; and suggested
all the accompaniments of heat and stagnation and flat desert sands.
Whereas the real city, relatively speaking, is much more like a castle
on the crags of the Rhine, or set high among the rocks of Spain.
From Spain itself it would be easy to take similar examples.
I knew that the Escorial was a palace; I did not know that it
looks much more like a prison; but especially I did not know
the strange journey into the mountains by which it is reached,
with the consequent sense of separation and unearthly loneliness
in that huge habitation of a moody King.  In short, I have
sometimes positively disliked the famous spectacles of travel.
But the thing I disliked was always utterly different from the thing
that I was expected to like; so utterly different that I generally
came at last to like it.

I had another experience of the same sort recently; I suddenly
saw Canada.  I had visited it before; but I had never seen it before.
On the former occasion I crossed the frontier from the United States;
and there is nothing particularly interesting about
the frontier except the undignified fuss about Prohibition.
On the second occasion I went up the St. Lawrence to Montreal.
This also was a thing I had heard of often enough; but nothing I
had ever heard of gave me any rumour of the reality.  As is usual
in such cases, the point of the experience is almost always missed.
The point of the experience is that the traveller is carried
far northward, almost as if he were going to the North Pole,
or at least to find the North-West Passage.  He sees icebergs
and the Northern Lights and the whales of the northern waters;
a hundred signs recall to him the Arctic adventures of which he read
as a boy.  Then the ship takes a sharp turn, which seems like one
of the sharpest turns in navigation, and enters a new, an enormous,
and yet a secret world.  He feels, as the first explorers must
have felt, that it is really a world set apart; that he had never
guessed the earth contained anything so vast yet so concealed.
And the impression is now increased when there begin to appear upon
the narrowing coasts of that inland sea villages and the spires
of churches that are not altogether like anything he has left behind.
It is as if there were another Mediterranean, with another civilization
in all its ports and shrines.  So a man sails up the great St. Lawrence,
wondering more and more, until the broad river seems to split
about the great rock of Quebec.

I fancied that there might be here the beginning and the end
of a quarrel I remember in my youth.  Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote
a poem in praise of Canada, which very much annoyed the Canadians.
Many of them stated with great sternness that, if he praised
them any more, they would give him a good hard knock.
The ground of the offence was that he had referred to the
Dominion of Canada as `Our Lady of the Snows'.  This was held
to imply that Canada has no local industry except snowballing;
that her principal exports are icebergs; and that the typical
Canadian citizen is a sort of furry and inarticulate Eskimo.
One Canadian poet haughtily replied that Canada contained glowing
maple woods in which England might be lost.  One Canadian painter
painted an ironical allegory, representing the spirit of the Dominion
sitting on a pile of gorgeous fruits and varied products of the sun,
and entitled the picture, `Our Lady of the Snows'.  I am no Imperialist
in particular, but the days of my skirmishes with Mr. Kipling
about Imperialism are long past, and I am affected by the thought
of leaving Mr. Kipling and Canada in an embrace of reconciliation.
I would therefore suggest that the impression of Arctic magnificence
may be partly due to the fact that, though Canada is not made of snow,
in a sense her gates are of ice.  And though her woods are really
as beautiful as any Canadian painter or poet can depict them,
the true traveller really does have an impression of having travelled
beyond the North Pole to find them.

VII.  On Flocking

THE elusive, enormous, and nameless thing, with which I have so
long wrestled, as with a slippery leviathan, in such places as this,
suddenly heaved in sight the other day and took on a sort of
formless form.  I am always getting these brief glimpses of the monster,
though they seldom last long enough for me to make head or tail of it.
In this ease it appeared in a short letter to the Daily Express,
which ran, word for word, as follows:

`In reply to your article "What Youth Wants in Church", I assert
that it does not want sadness, ceremony, or humbug.
Youth wants to know only about the present and future, not about
what happened 2,000 years ago.  If the churches forsake these things,
young people will flock to them.'

The syntax is a little shaky, and the writer does not mean that
the young people will flock to the things that happened 2,000 years
ago if only the churches will desert them.  He does actually mean
(what is much more extraordinary) that the young people will flock
to the churches merely because the churches have forsaken all the
original objects of their existence.  Every feature of every church,
from a cross on a spire to an old hymn-book left in a pew, refers more
or less to certain things that happened about 2,000 years ago.
If we do not want to be reminded of those things, the natural inference
is that we do not want any of the buildings built to remind us of them.
So far from flocking to them, we shall naturally desire to get away
from them; or still more to clear them away.  But I cannot understand
why something which is unpopular because of what it means should
become frightfully popular because it no longer means anything.
A War Memorial is a memorial of the war, and I can imagine that
those who merely hate the memory might merely hate the memorial.
But what would be the sense of saying that, if only all the names
of the dead were scraped off the War Memorials, huge pilgrimages
would be made from all the ends of the earth to visit and venerate
the absence of names on a memorial of nothing?

Most of us would not devote our short summer holiday to visiting
the ruin of what had once been the record of something that we did
not want to think about.  Nor would most people, indifferent to
the Christian origin of Christian churches, waste their time
in churches merely because they had ceased to be Christian.
There are plenty of other places in which to spend our holidays,
and plenty of other resorts to which young people can flock,
without flocking to hollow shrines stripped of all traces of their
history or their object.  He would be a bold spirit who should
hope to lure the duchess back from the Lido, or the typist from
the seaside sun-cure, by offering to show them a chapel of no
particular date, with no particular design, in which a total stranger
had promised not to mention something that happened 2,000 years ago.
Somehow I do not think there would be a flock of duchesses,
or even typists, at the doors of that weirdly negative edifice.
And this marks the first of the fallacies which beset
this rather fashionable style of protest or proposal.
Even supposing it were true that theology is unpopular,
it does not follow that the absence of theology is popular.
This need no more be true of the absence of theology than of
the absence of conchology or bacteriology, or anything else.
I may not want to hear a bore talking about bimetallism,
but it does not follow that I want to go for a walking tour
with the bore when he promises not to mention bimetallism.
I may not wish to listen to the lecture on `Genetics and Genesis'
at the Co-educational Congress at Gum Springs, Ill., but neither do I want
to go to the Co-educational Congress at Gum Springs, or anywhere else,
even if there is to be no lecture on `Genetics and Genesis'.
And surely those who are so innocently confident of the attraction
of merely negative religion might realize that a broad-minded
parson can be as much of a bore about nothing as anybody can
be about anything.

But there is another, more subtle, more sunken and fundamental
queerness about this way of looking at things.  As I have
said before, it is only occasionally that we get a real glimpse
of its strange outline, as we get it for a moment in this letter.
The minds of these people work backwards, from effect to cause,
and not from cause to effect.  The cause of the Church, the cause
which produced it, the cause for which it stands, is regarded as
something bad, some thing that ought to be abolished.  In that case,
one would naturally infer that the Church ought to be abolished.
But this type of thinker does not begin with the cause; he begins with
the result, and then turns on the cause and rends it, as if the cause
were a disfigurement that had been added afterwards to the result,
He suggests that the result must destroy its cause, and go off looking
for another cause, in the hope of becoming the result of something else.
It is as if the Union Jack were wandering about the world trying
to mean the dragon standard of the Sacred Emperor of China,
or the Blue Peter were bending all its efforts to become a flag
of truce with the significance of the White Flag.

One explanation is that such people, who commonly call
themselves progressive, are in the most stodgy sense conservative.
They cannot bear to alter any concrete fact, but only the idea behind it.
They cannot actually abolish the Union Jack or the White Flag,
but only all that they stand for.  So they see in front of them
a solid block of brick called a church.  They accept that;
they cannot conceive a real revolt against that; they are even ready
to throw themselves into all sorts of schemes for making this mere
brick building fashionable, so that people shall `flock' to it.
It commands their strange loyalty in its own strange way, merely by
being there.  It is a solid fact; something must be done with it;
and therefore something must be done for it.  In pure reason, it is about
as reasonable as saying that since we have a Post Office we had better
turn it into a swimming-bath, or that the successful establishment
of a tennis court necessitates our using it as a turnip field.
But the practical man does not trouble about pure reason;
he can confront, with an unsmiling visage, what is in reality
pure unreason.  For pure reason involves some degree of imagination,
and not only creative but also destructive imagination.
The thinker must not only be able to think things, but to unthink them;
he must be imaginative enough to unimagine anything.

Now this sort of conservative cannot unthink anything that is perceptible
to his senses.  He can only unthink the theory on which it depends,
because it is only a theory.  He cannot unimagine the big brick
church in front of him, as it actually bulks in the landscape.
He cannot imagine the landscape without the church; he can
only imagine the church without the religion, or the religion
without the reason.  In the world of ideas he can alter anything,
however fundamental, as if it were something fanciful.
But he cannot be fanciful about a fact like a brick building;
that is a solid object, and must be made a solid success.
People must be induced to `flock' to it, even if it has to be turned
into an aquarium or an aerodrome.  In one sense, to do him justice,
this melancholy materialist is the most disinterested of men.
The mystic is one who will serve something invisible for his own reasons.
The materialist is one who will serve anything visible for no reason.
But there are a good many of him, and, even if he has not begun
to flock very much into the churches of the present and future,
he does already flock a good deal in the correspondence columns
of the newspapers.

VIII.  On the Behaviourist

EVERYBODY knows that a new school of sceptics has recently appeared,
especially in America; they call themselves the Behaviourists,
and the late Mr. Harvey Wickham called them the Misbehaviourists.
So far as I can understand, their philosophy is rooted in a theory
of physiology:  the theory that thought is originally a sort of movement
of the body rather than the brain.  `There is nothing in the brain,'
I think one of them has written, `except a lot of neurons.
We do not think with our minds.  We think with our muscles.'
Those of us, that is, who are so old-fashioned as to think at all.
For we have all seen vigorous representatives of the rising
generation who suppose that everything can be done with the muscles,
and whom nobody, not even a psychologist of the far-off
nineteenth century, would accuse of merely using their minds.
I am not especially concerned with the truth or falsehood of this fancy.
While it is flourished, like the majority of such fancies, with a vague
defiance directed towards orthodoxy or tradition, it really has no
sort of importance for them.  It is an excellent example of the rule
about nearly all such new notions that are valued as new negations.
The new scientific theory never does really deny the old
religious theory.  What it does do is to deny--or, rather, destroy--
the old scientific theory.  And it was precisely in the name
of that old theory that religion was once to have been destroyed.
The heretics never attack orthodoxy; the heretics only avenge
orthodoxy on each other.

It does not matter to any Christian whether God has made a man to think
with his brains or his big toe.  But it did matter very much to the recent
type of Materialist that a man could only think with his brains.  He was
perpetually basing all sorts of destructive arguments on an analysis
of what he called the convolutions and the `matter' in the brain.
He was as devoted as M. Hercule Poirot to The Little Grey Cells;
but, alas! with far less brilliant and entertaining results.
All that the Behaviourist does is, in every sense, to dash
out the brains of the old Materialist.  There is no question
of his touching the soul, even the soul of an old Materialist,
for that escapes him as completely as it does every other kind
of material analysis, including that of the old Materialist himself.
What he abolishes is not the soul, but the cells on which his
predecessor depended for the denial of the soul.  If ever we do really
come to talk about a brilliant idea flashing through our biceps,
or a curious and original theory creeping up the calf of our leg,
it may sound to some a little funny, or even fantastic.
It will not make the slightest difference to those who believe
that God made an invisible spirit as part of an invisible order.
But it will make nonsense of pages and pages of recent
realistic literature, in which the crumbling grey matter proved
that nothing but death awaited even the primary form of mind,
or in which the soul was supposed to have been tracked to its
lair and killed in a cell under the cavern of the skull.
Libraries of nineteenth-century scepticism would become
so much lumber; but the mystical passage in St. Paul about
the glorified body would not be in the least affected either way.
It would be amusing to irreverent persons if men ever began
to look for the Differential Calculus in their deltoid muscles
or to conceal a joke somewhere near the joint of the elbow.
But it would only contradict the man who said that all truths
were in the human skull or all jokes a decay of brain-stuff;
not the man who says that jokes come from man, or that man and
mathematical truths come from God.

Nevertheless, there is another aspect of this fancy, whether or no it
is anything more than a fancy, in which it may be used to suggest
a rather neglected truth.  If we were only allowed to accept
scientific suggestion, as jokes, we could sometimes get some serious
good out of them.  If the young scientist would ever allow us
to regard his hypothesis as anything so human as a half-truth,
it might sometimes really be worth while to find the other half.
If, instead of claiming that everything is covered by his explanation,
he confined himself to pleading that there is something in his suggestion,
he would look considerably less of a fool when the next man,
with the new explanation, comes along in about thirty years.
And there is something in the suggestion about mind and muscle,
though there may be nothing but nonsense in an attempt to affirm
muscle and deny mind.  It is true, I think, that among the lesser
guides to truth is a certain craving for creative movement:
a longing to stretch the limbs, to smite, to scrawl, to make
sweeping gestures, to lift up the hands as well as the heart.
There is an instinctive movement of the body towards better and
nobler things, as in the text that said, `I will lift up mine eyes
to the hills', or in that divine command of liberation that took
the form of `Stretch forth thine hand'.  The old ceremonial gestures
of the human body are necessary to the health of the human soul:
the gesture that pledged the guest in the goblet that strewed
the flowers upon the grave; that drew the sword for the salute
or set up the candle before the shrine.  In that sense a man
actually can think with his muscles; he can pray with his muscles;
he can love with his muscles and lament with his muscles.
All religion that is without that gesture, all Puritan or purely
Intellectualist religion that rages at ritual, is raging at human nature.
If an ancient pagan came from the city of Plato and the temple of Pallas,
and found himself in a certain type of town of the Middle West, I
admit that he would probably prefer to be a Behaviourist rather
than a Baptist.

Now, if we take a fine poem of religious invocation, like that
which Chaucer called his A.B.C., which consists of a series of
apostrophes to the Virgin, each like the first salute at morning,
we shall feel the almost physical presence of this sort of ancient
or medieval Behaviourism.  The words seem to carry with them a gesture;
it is impossible not to feel that the poet is doing something;
is bowing to a lady or standing up to salute a sovereign;
is lifting an offering up or casting an offering down.  Such an opening
as `Almighty and all-mercyable Queen' has a breadth about it beyond
that of the brain, in the narrow sense, because such invocation is,
among other things, one of the most ancient human habits of the body.
Of course, that broad and expansive gesture can be found in other
poets besides Chaucer, and other schools besides Chaucer's. But it
has not expanded with the particular modern type of expansion.
Milton was capable of it:

    Thine are these mighty works, Parent of Good, 
    Almighty, thine this everlasting frame.

But it seems to me that, after Milton, there is in literature less
and less of that sort of invocation, even when there are many other
sorts of inspiration.  Shelley invented half a hundred goddesses,
but he could not pray to them, not even as well as the old atheist
Lucretius could pray to Venus, Mother of Rome.  All Shelley's
deities were abstractions; they were Beauty or Liberty or Love;
but they might as well have been Algebra and Long Division, so far
as inviting the gesture of worship goes.  In this, as in everything else,
what is the matter with the new pagan is that he is not a pagan;
he has not any of the customs or consolations of a pagan.
There is a little more of it, I admit, in the almost ironic
invocations of Swinburne.  But that is precisely because Swinburne
was more deeply read, not in the new paganism, but in the old.
He had at least gone into the temples of the old Greeks, even if it
was to curse the gods as well as invoke them.  But, on the whole,
this gesture of invocation has rather gone out of poetry; and even our
diabolists do not wave the wand with anything like a fine flourish,
when they start to raise the devil.

IX.  On the Pleasures of no Longer being Very Young

THERE are advantages in the advance through middle age into
later life which are very seldom stated in a sensible way.
Generally, they are stated in a sentimental way; in a general
suggestion that all old men are equipped with beautiful snowy beards
like Father Christmas and rejoice in unfathomable wisdom like Nestor.
All this has caused the young people to be sceptical about the real
advantages of the old people, and the true statement of those advantages
sounds like a paradox.  I would not say that old men grow wise,
for men never grow wise and many old men retain a very attractive
childishness and cheerful innocence.  Elderly people are often much
more romantic than younger people, and sometimes even more adventurous,
having begun to realize how many things they do not know.
It is a true proverb, no doubt, which says `There is no fool
like an old fool'.  Perhaps there is no fool who is half so happy
in his own fool's paradise.  But, however this may be, it is true
that the advantages of maturity are not those which are generally
urged even in praise of it, and when they are truly urged they
sound like an almost comic contradiction.

For instance, one pleasure attached to growing older is that many things
seem to be growing younger; growing fresher and more lively than we once
supposed them to be.  We begin to see significance, or (in other words)
to see life, in a large number of traditions, institutions, maxims,
and codes of manners that seem in our first days to be dead.
A young man grows up in a world that often seems to him intolerably old.
He grows up among proverbs and precepts that appear to be quite
stiff and senseless.  He seems to be stuffed with stale things;
to be given the stones of death instead of the bread of life;
to be fed on the dust of the dead past; to live in a town of tombs.
It is a very natural mistake, but it is a mistake.  The advantage
of advancing years lies in discovering that traditions are true,
and therefore alive; indeed, a tradition is not even traditional except
when it is alive.  It is great fun to find out that the world has
not repeated proverbs because they are proverbial, but because they
are practical.  Until I owned a dog, I never knew what is meant
by the proverb about letting a sleeping dog lie, or the fable
about the dog in the manger.  Now those dead phrases are quite alive
to me, for they are parts of a perfectly practical psychology.
Until I went to live in the country, I had no notion of the meaning
of the maxim, `It's an ill wind that blows nobody good'.
Now it seems to me as pertinent and even pungent as if it were
a new remark just made to me by a neighbour at the garden gate.
It is something to come to live in a world of living and significant
things instead of dead and unmeaning things.  And it is youth
in revolt, even in righteous revolt, which sees its surroundings
as dead and unmeaning.  It is old age, and even second childhood,
that has come to see that everything means something and that life
itself has never died.

For instance, we have just seen a staggering turn of the wheel
of fortune which has brought all the modern material pride
and prosperity to a standstill.  America, which a year or two ago
seemed to have become one vast Eldorado studded with cities of gold,
is almost as much embarrassed as England, and really much more
embarrassed than Ireland.  The industrial countries are actually
finding it difficult to be industrial, while the old agricultural
countries still find it possible to be industrious.  Now, I do
not pretend to have prophesied or expected this, for a man may
cheerfully call a thing rotten without really expecting it to rot.
But neither, certainly, did the young, the progressive, the prosperous,
or the adventurous expect it.  Yet all history and culture is
stiff with proverbs and prophecies telling them to expect it.
The trouble is that they thought the proverbs and history a great
deal too stiff.  Again and again, with monotonous reiteration,
both my young friends and myself had been told from childhood that
fortune is fickle, that riches take to themselves wings and fly,
that power can depart suddenly from the powerful, that pride goes
before a fall, and insolence attracts the thunderbolt of the gods.
But it was all unmeaning to us, and all the proverbs seemed
stiff and stale, like dusty labels on neglected antiquities.
We had heard of the fall of Wolsey, which was like the crash of a
huge palace, still faintly rumbling through the ages; we had read
of it in the words of Shakespeare, which possibly were not written
by Shakespeare; we had learned them and learned nothing from them.
We had read ten thousand times, to the point of tedium, of the difference
between the Napoleon of Marengo and the Napoleon of Moscow; but we
should never have expected Moscow if we had been looking at Marengo.
We knew that Charles the Fifth resigned his crown, or that Charles
the First lost his head; and we should have duly remarked `Sic
transit gloria mundi', after the incident, but not before it.
We had been told that the Roman Empire declined, or that the
Spanish Empire disintegrated; but no German ever really applied
it to the German Empire, and no Briton to the British Empire.
The very repetition of these truths will sound like the old
interminable repetition of the truisms.  And yet they are to me,
at this moment, like amazing and startling discoveries, for I
have lived to see the dead proverbs come alive.

This, like so many of the realizations of later life, is quite
impossible to convey in words to anybody who has not reached it
in this way.  It is like a difference of dimension or plane,
in which something which the young have long looked at,
rather wearily, as a diagram has suddenly become a solid.
It is like the indescribable transition from the inorganic
to the organic; as if the stone snakes and birds of some ancient
Egyptian inscription began to leap about like living things.
The thing was a dead maxim when we were alive with youth.
It becomes a living maxim when we are nearer to death.
Even as we are dying, the whole world is coming to life.

Another paradox is this:  that it is not the young people who
realize the new world.  The moderns do not realize modernity.
They have never known anything else.  They have stepped
on to a moving platform which they hardly know to be moving,
as a man cannot feel the daily movement of the earth.  But he would
feel it sharp enough if the earth suddenly moved the other way.
The older generation consists of those who do remember a time when
the world moved the other way.  They do feel sharply and clearly
the epoch which is beginning, for they were there before it began.
It is one of the artistic advantages of the aged that they
do see the new things relieved sharply against a background,
their shape definite and distinct.  To the young these new things
are often themselves the background, and are hardly seen at all.
Hence, even the most intelligent of innovators is often strangely mistaken
about the nature of innovation and the things that are really new.
And the Oldest Inhabitant will often indulge in a senile chuckle,
as he listens to the Village Orator proclaiming that the village church
will soon be swept away and replaced by a factory for chemicals.
For the Oldest Inhabitant knows very well that nobody went to
church in the days of his childhood except out of snobbishness,
and that it is in his old age that the church has begun once more
to be thronged with believers.  In my capacity of Oldest Inhabitant
(with senile chuckle), I will give one instance of a kindred kind.
A man must be at least as old as I am in order to remember
how utterly idiotic, inconceivable, and crazily incredible it
once seemed that any educated or even reasonably shrewd person
should confess that he believed in ghosts.  You must be nearly
the Oldest Inhabitant to know with what solid scorn and certainty
the squire and the parson denied the possibility of the village ghost;
the parson even more emphatically than the squire.  The village ghost
was instantly traced to the village drunkard or the village liar.
Educated people knew that the dead do not return in the world of sense.
Those who remember those times, and have lived to see a man of science
like Sir Oliver Lodge founding quite a fashionable religion, are amused
to hear a young man say the world is moving away from the supernatural.
They know in what direction it has really moved.

X. On Mr. Mencken and Fundamentalism

IT is the custom to make fun of Fundamentalism and to suggest that
American religion is rather antiquated.  But I sometimes think that
American irreligion is much more antiquated than American religion,
and that the sceptic can be more of a fossil than the sectarian.
Both, of course, are sects only representing sections.
America contains many other brighter and better things; and certainly
America is sufficiently advanced and adventurous, especially in
certain forms of scientific practice, to balance any thing belated
in certain forms of scientific theory.  But the belated forms exist,
and seem to be still under the illusion that they are advanced forms.
There seem still to be places in the world where the earth shakes
if the indomitable Darrow mentions the unmentionable Darwin.
I am not sure that they may not be referring to Erasmus Darwin.

Mr. H. L. Mencken is at least a brilliant man of letters and ought
to know better.  But he, I gather, has just been coming out in defence
of the dead and buried negations of the nineteenth century, and gallantly
doing his best to prevent American science from moving with the times.
His way of doing it seems to be to play about with the word `Scientist'
in opposition to some other word like the word `Physicist'. `Scientist'
is a horrible word to be driven to use, though I have often been
driven to use it; but all these terms for the study of science are
in a very unscientific confusion.  It would be embarrassing to summon
a physician and be visited by a physicist.  Yet on the parallel
of physics and metaphysics, the former word would seem more logical.
Few of us have ever, in desperate haste, summoned a metaphysician.
But it would be far more frightful and terrifying to be visited
by a metaphysicist.  Subject to the further clarification of
the language, I presume Mr. Mencken to mean by a scientist either
a man who specializes in all sciences (a somewhat alarming figure)
or else a man who really specializes in one science in a scientific way.
Mr. Mencken chooses to contradict flatly the principal living
physicists, who have studied physics in a strictly scientific way.
I do not know if he has studied the science in any way,
but I am pretty sure that he has not studied it in that way.
When, therefore, he says of the distinguished men whose close
study of matter has not led them to materialism, that it only
shows that they can be physicists without being scientists,
it throws a yet more uncanny light on that very ugly word.
Apparently a scientist is a man who surveys all the sciences,
without any particular study of them, and then gives expression
to his own moral principles or prejudices.  In this way it is
proved that Mr. Mencken is a scientist.  I also am a scientist;
but in my time it used to be called a journalist.

It is great fun, for what it really means is that the scientific
materialist never cared for science but only for materialism.
So long as he supposed that material inquiry supported materialism,
he roared and bellowed at us that we must `accept the conclusions
of science'.  But he is not the least inclined himself to accept
the conclusions of science, if they happen to go against his
own crude and clumsy creed.  The Darwinians would have been
hysterical with horror if any Victorian journalist had told them
that Darwin might be a biologist without being a scientist.
Twenty years ago, it would have been atrociously antiquated to say
that Haeckel was not really a scientist, though it is now much
less clear that he was a scientist than that he was a monist.
He was, anyhow, a propagandist, and a pretty unscrupulous propagandist;
but we were all supposed to swallow what he said at once,
because he was Science.  The new physicists are not propagandists,
but Mr. Mencken, so far from reverencing them as Science,
desperately refuses to respect them even as scientists.
And he takes up this extraordinary position for no reason in the world,
except that they will not say exactly what he tells them to say,
in the world of morals and metaphysics.  But it is rather hard to ask
them to drop all their scientific work for fear they should get
a little ahead of Mr. Mencken.

God forbid that I should blame Mr. Mencken for being a Diehard and dying
in the last ditch, even in the rather muddy ditch of a dead materialism.
If he still thinks the old-fashioned science was right, he is perfectly
right to be old-fashioned. But he will hardly expect us not to laugh
at him, when we consider how we were derided as Diehards for being ready
to die in a ditch which we thought more deep and rather less dirty.
He is now, apparently, in exactly the same situation as we were,
except that our principle has satisfied the intelligence of teeming
populations for two thousand years, while his prejudice has
broken down as soon as it was set up.  So far as the teeming
populations are concerned, it has ended before it had begun.
For modern monism and materialism were never accepted by
simple people, and are now being abandoned by scientific people.
To be true to them when they lie under such a complication of disasters
and disillusions may be admired as chivalric in the sense of quixotic;
but Mr. Mencken would be the first to insist that it is allowable
to smile at Don Quixote.

I have so warm an admiration for Mr. Mencken as the critic of Puritan
pride and stupidity that I regret that he should thus try to make
himself out a back number out of mere irreligious irritation.
He has been the hammer of those false idealists who call themselves
moral because they demand the Prohibition of a few hard drinks, and dare
not say a word of the Prohibition of hard dealings, of hard bargains
that break the poor, and the brutal ethics tolerated in business.
I sympathize so much with this that I do not mind the hammer being
flourished sometimes a little cheaply and ostentatiously, like an
auctioneer's hammer; nor do I demand in the present ease that it
should tap as cautiously and scientifically as a geological hammer.
But I do demand that it should go somewhere near hitting the right
nail on the head, even if it be hit with all the windy violence
of some Nietzschean imitation of the Hammer of Thor.  I do not mind
Mr. Mencken being destructive, like his master Nietzsche before him.
What I complain of here is that he is not destructive enough.
He not only dare not destroy, but he cannot even bear to watch the
destruction of a few blunders and blind dogmas of old Victorian science.
The Fundamentalists are funny enough, and the funniest thing about
them is their name.  For, whatever else the Fundamentalist is,
he is not fundamental.  He is content with the bare letter of Scripture--
the translation of a translation, coming down to him by the tradition
of a tradition--without venturing to ask for its original authority.
But Mr. Mencken, in his latest phase, is almost as superficial as
a Fundamentalist.  I should have expected a man of his intelligence
to be something fundamental, if it were only a fundamental sceptic.
But a real fundamental sceptic, as he has existed in Hellas or in India,
or possibly in the cavern of Zarathustra, would never be frightened
because the new scientific study of matter leads to mathematical
abstractions and abysses.  He would never be alarmed because
the world now revealed by the physicists is not even physical.
It is the business of the agnostic to admit that he knows nothing;
and he might the more gracefully admit it touching sciences about
which he knows precious little.  As it is, it seems as if the agnostic
were transformed into the atheist, and a pretty stale and provincial
sort of atheist; what might be called respectfully the village atheist.
Even then, I suspect that I should sympathize with him in practice,
in his free fight with the village Puritans in front of the village inn.
But, just as I should prefer him to admit that even the village chemist
knows something about chemistry, or the village physician about physic,
I would suggest that even physicists do know something about physics.

XI.  On Anthony Trollope:  Historian

I WAS recently reading an article on Anthony Trollope, one of the many
that have appeared in literary magazines since critics have discovered
that his work can be treated as literature, when they used only to
treat it as fiction.  He is a rather rare example of a man who has
been taken more seriously after his death than in his presence.
The Victorians tended to regard Trollope as light literature,
and Thackeray and even Dickens as more serious literature.
The modern critics, rightly or wrongly, are disposed to treat Trollope
more seriously, and even Dickens and Thackeray more lightly.
Of course, Trollope is treated in both fashions, according to the taste
of the critic.  Mr. Hugh Walpole has cultivated the Trollope style
both by precept and example; and Father Ronald Knox has made a most
elaborate and detailed map of Barsetshire, and annotated it with stern
queries about why Dr. Thorne took so long to get to Plumstead Episcopi,
or what Mr. Gresham was doing on the wrong road to Framley Parsonage.
These are not the right examples; for I, alas! have not the powerful
detective and documentary brain of Father Knox.  But it is broadly
true that Trollope has again attracted many people from many aspects.
And yet there is one aspect of Trollope which I think has been
entirely neglected, and which I think is of very great and vital
importance to the history of England.

The critic in question says of Trollope, truly enough in the main:
`He scarcely concerned himself with the lower orders.'
We may add that the whole system of English squirearchy scarcely
concerned itself with the lower orders; or only in the same vague
and well meaning way as Trollope.  But when the critic adds,
`His values were those of the middle class', he misses the point--
the point which I think important about English history.
It is not really true, as a whole, that his characters were middle class.
It might be said more truly that Dickens dealt largely with the middle
class, though doubt less more largely with the lower middle class,
and even the lower class.  But Trollope really deals with the upper
middle class in so far as it is attached to the upper class.
Squire Gresham was not middle class; and I fancy that Archdeacon Grantly
would have been very much surprised to be told he was.
I draw a veil over the fury of Mrs. Proudie, who would probably,
I admit, have been even more indignant at the description if it
happened to be true.  Dr. Thorne was, in the ordinary sense,
of the professional middle class but we are never allowed to forget
that his family was older and prouder than the De Courcys.
Most of the Government clerks are of the more or less aristocratic
class from which Government clerks were, and to some extent
still are, chiefly drawn.  In other words, we shall not learn
the first historical lesson from Trollope till we realize that
he bears witness to England as an aristocratic State; and not,
as our friends the Communists would say, as a bourgeois State.
But there is a further development of this historical truth,
which I think rather curious.  Trollope bears witness to a big
historical fact about our past, and does it all the more solidly
and sincerely because he has no notion that he is doing it at all.

I know it was the fashion in the Victorian times to say that England
was represented by its Great Middle Class and not by its aristocracy.
That was the artfulness of its aristocracy.  Never did a governing
class govern so completely, by saying it did not govern at all.
The middle-class English man was always pushed into the foreground;
while the rulers remained in the background.  It was the middle-class
Englishman who wrote letters to The Times; it was not he who
informed The Times.  It was the middle-class man who went to
the political meeting; it was not he who sent down the candidate.
The governing class governed by the perfectly simple principle of
keeping all the important things to themselves; and giving the papers
and the public unimportant things to discuss.  When Earl Balfour
(one of the last great survivals of the governing class) said languidly
that he never read the newspapers, everybody laughed, as if he had
said that he could not read the alphabet.  In fact, of course,
he never read the newspapers because he had read the State papers.
Why should he read all the nonsense that was served out to the public,
when he knew all the real secrets which were kept as secrets of State?

But when we have realized that the England of Trollope was
still an aristocratic England, there is a further distinction,
which Trollope never notices, but always makes clear.
His evidence is alone enough to upset Macaulay and Green and
the whole Whig theory of our history taught in the schools.
The really interesting fact to be inferred from Trollope is this.
Nineteenth-century England is not a country in which we have a populace
led by a Liberal middle class on one side and a powerful Tory nobility
led by Dukes and Earls on the other.  The division of the parties is
totally different, and unconsciously betrays the real secret, not only
of the nineteenth, but of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It betrays the truth about the Glorious Revolution of 1688,
and the nature of the new system which it really introduced.
The Crown did not pass from James II to William III.  Like many
stolen treasures, it was cut up:  it was cut up into coronets.

Let anybody, reading Trollope carefully, note what the real division
between the parties was.  There is a large proportion of minor gentry,
who may be called middle class, if we will, who are certainly
numerous and not very rich:  doctors, parsons, small squires,
and yeomen and all sorts of plain and hard-working people.
Now these people are all Tories.  They inherit the old Tory tradition
of loyalty to a king, which belonged to purely middle-class people
like Dr. Johnson or Dr. Goldsmith.

Far above all these people, like gods on Olympus, like higher
beings living on a loftier plane, there are two or three people
who are of prodigious public importance, like emperors or kings.
The tone of everybody else in talking about them implies the remote
condescension of a sovereign.  The obvious example is the Duke of Omnium.
He is spoken of as playing a great princely part like a prince.
We need not deny him the credit, but we need not disguise the fact
that his importance rested on being what we call a millionaire.
More presentable, I admit, than the millionaires who are flattered
to-day. But he is ruler of all England because he is gigantically rich.
Now this kind of man is always a Whig.

What the serious historians have disguised the frivolous novelist
has detected.  Their histories are fiction and his fiction is history.
That is the truth; and that is Trollope's unconscious
witness to what the Whigs really did in English history;
why they were able to overthrow the Stuarts; why they were able
to dominate the common traditional Tories like Dr. Thorne.
What the Revolution did was obviously not to establish a democracy;
not even to establish a normal and national gentry; not even to
establish a mere rustic squirearchy.  It was to establish certain
great magnates, whose wealth and power was far out of proportion
to that of the ordinary gentleman, let alone the ordinary citizen.
They owned every thing, and Trollope knew it.  What other possible meaning
is there in the title of The Duke of Omnium?  Thackeray also knew it.
What possible other meaning is there in that fine satiric flourish,
`I am not a Whig . . . but oh, how I should like to be!'?
Even the waiters and couriers on the Continent knew it.
What other meaning was in the Arabian Nights legend of the
English Milord?  Everybody seems to have known it, except the people
who taught history in the schools and universities of England.

XII.  On the Way of the World

IT was Matthew Arnold, if I remember right, who invented or
popularized the phrase `the way the world is going', a motto for
social reformers only too easily adapted into a motto for snobs.
It is not really even a simple, let alone a safe, guide, as can
be easily tested in his own ease.  After all, if it comes to that,
what way was the world going in the time of Matthew Arnold?  We are
far enough from it to look back to it, and, when we look back to it,
the world seems to be going all ways at once.  It was certainly a time
when the Philistines, as he called them, the middle-class mercantile
Liberals of the school of Cobden and Bright, were still marching
from victory to victory.  And yet the end of the Liberal century
was crowned, or crushed, by the Jingo journalism of the Kipling epoch,
with War, Imperialism, and everything that the old Liberals loathed.
In one sense the world was more sceptical and scientific; in every
sense it seemed more sceptical and scientific; and yet the mystical
and religious reaction increased steadily from then till now.
In short, when we look back on that time we see not a tide but an eddy,
or a welter of eddies, in which each person is paddling his own
canoe desperately in his own direction.  Arnold wanted to go
back to Athens; Newman to go back to Rome; Carlyle to go back
to Scandinavia; Schopenhauer to go back to India; Nietzsche to go
back to chaos.  I do not say there was no predominant influence among
these influences, but I do say that it was not so simple as Arnold
and some other people thought it; and, so far from simplifying itself
with distance, it seems with distance to grow more dizzy and distracted.
Wherever that age was drifting, it was to the place where we are now.
And where in the world are we?

There is one case of this complexity that always amuses me:
the way in which the abstract assumptions of an age are
often contradicted by its concrete customs and amusements.
The superficial examples are obvious enough.  In theory this is
the age of Prohibition; in practice it is the age of Cocktails.
In theory women are working in the world on an assumption of
absolute equality with men.  In practice vast numbers are reading
the novels of Miss Ethel M. Dell and all sorts of rubbishy
tales and essays about the fascination of sheikhs and cavemen.
In theory the State has been practically secularized and theology
is a dead and threadbare thing, dismissed disdainfully in every other
paragraph as a lumber of `creeds and dogmas'.  In practice no newspaper
can apparently pay its way without plastering itself all over with
headlines and captions about the position of Christianity, the nature
of Christ, the immortality of the soul, the future of the Churches,
and a whole picture-gallery of portraits of popular clergymen.
But there is one particular contradiction which I would note here,
between the tone of such religious journalism and something
else that might rather be called spiritual literature.
At a moment when the popular religion, or at least the religion
preached in the popular press, all points one way, the work
of the most modern and independent artists points the other.
The newspapers are all God and no devil.  The novels are all
devils and no God.  The tone of that religious journalism,
or whatever we call it, is something that people call Optimism.
It is a bad word, but it can sometimes stand for a good thing.
I have used it myself in other days, merely in opposition to Pessimism,
and as meaning the primary conviction that life is worth living
and the world is worthy of our efforts for it.  But nowadays it
means something much more; or, rather, something immeasurably less.
It means a sort of cheap cheeriness, at the back of which there is
a curious sort of hollow unbelief in reality.  Men boasted of being
Optimists about the war; which is like being Optimists about the weather.
A man may try to be cheerful even if there is a thunderstorm;
but these lunatics talked as if they could prevent a thunderstorm
by being cheerful.  Those who pro pose to be cheerful when
struck by lightning introduce a more mystical question.
So people now boast of being Optimists about Trade, this is more vulgar
but less irrational, precisely because trade is a less real thing
than war.  Some are surprised that the same American civilization
should produce Christian Science and commercial salesmanship.
But in fact Christian Science is very like commercial salesmanship.
Both rest on the idea that facts can be conjured away by moods
and mesmerism.  The perfect Scientist persuades a man that he hasn't
got what he has got.  The perfect Salesman persuades a man
that he does want what he doesn't want.  We may call it, in a
complimentary phrase, the power of spirit over matter.  We may call it,
in a less complimentary phrase, the power of lies over facts.
But this spirit of persuasion, or illusion, does pervade our time
in good and bad forms, and especially in one popular religious form.
I have remarked before that Spiritualism, for instance, while it does
not affirm that all Spirits are good, does rather tend to ignore
the suggestion that some are bad.  And it will be agreed that the general
tone of all the True Christianity and New Religions that pervades
the newspapers rather leaves out the possibility that anything is bad.
One would infer from these lay sermons that there is no difficulty
about being happy, if it be only accompanied by being hazy.
Some of the writers deal with the tremendous and pulverizing
paradox of the Love of God, especially in the aspect of faith
in the God of Love, as if it were not only perfectly self-evident,
but as if it could have no effect except to make us self-satisfied.
The thunderous riddle of the `Est Deus Caritatis' which broke
above the dying Brand after his life of agony on the peak of his
perfect renunciation, seems to be uttered chirpily every morning
to every clerk or stockbroker who will be sufficiently broadminded
to play golf instead of going to church.  Carlyle complained
of people who were at ease in Zion.  But the new Zion ism thinks it
enough to prove that it is easier still not to be in Zion at all.
Whatever else it does encourage, the dread of devilry or definite evil
is admittedly a thing that it does not encourage.  We could read reams
and files of the new newspaper theology and not find even a mention
of that fear of demons that was felt by all our fathers.  Very well;
that is the way the world is supposed to have gone in our time.
But when we read the literature of our time, especially when it
is really literary, we find something quite the contrary.
The most distinguished men of letters, the novelists or the new poets,
often have no more definite beliefs than the newspaper believers.
They are quite as pure from the taint of creed, dogma, or intellectually
intelligible statement of faith.  Most of them are probably agnostics;
and in that sense do not believe in God, let alone the devil.
And yet they are perpetually writing about devils.
They are always at it.  Book after book comes out,
of which the theme is some strange psychological wickedness,
encouraged more or less by some more strange psychical influence.
One distinguished novelist writes a book about Pan, as a positive
influence and a highly unpleasant influence, fully worthy of his
ancient association with Panic.  Another distinguished novelist
devotes another imaginative novel to a dark and terrible deity of
the South Americans, worshipped in former ages with torture and blood.
Among the master pieces of the last twenty or thirty years,
those that stand out in my own memory with startling power arc
almost all of them stories of necromancy or diabolic possession,
often written by men who had no definite religious affiliations,
but who had imagination carrying all the solidity of conviction.
I look back over the whole of that long period, that has been littered
to the sky with newspaper philosophies preaching cheerfulness
and optimism, and ignorance of evil.  And the two things that stand
out in my memory for their solidity and sincerity and power,
staring like stone gargoyles of gigantic stature, are both things that
seem to face the other way from the whole recent movement of the world.
I remember the real literary thrill which I felt long ago when reading
The Turn of the Screw, and how it woke within me again long after,
under the suffocating vividness of Seaton's Aunt.

XIII.  On the New Insularity

THAT a heresy is a half-truth is a very old and familiar example
of a whole truth; but a truth that is not often realized as a whole.
Most mistaken people mean well, and all mistaken people mean some thing.
There is something to be said for every error, but, whatever may be
said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it
is erroneous.  On the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread,
it ought to be true that half a truth is better than no verity.
But in practice, it is not so much a case of the half loaf of the proverb
as of the half apple of the fairy-tale; the apple of which one half
was poisoned by the wicked stepmother for the good princess.
At least, as modern mental feeding goes, to stop lathe middle
of the meal is often to eat the poison without eating the antidote.
And if we look back on history, we shall see it largely encumbered
and crushed with half-truths; we shall wonder how it happened so
often that a whole age or generation was content with a half-truth,
without making the faintest effort to find the other half.
We shall wonder how one fashion could be entirely set upon fame
or glory, or another upon order and symmetry, or another upon
discovery and adventure; and be unable to understand how men could
sacrifice all other things to each of these things in turn.
It may be that we shall never fully understand why our fathers
did it, for we certainly do not in the least understand why we
do it ourselves.

There are certain half-truths that are even now allowed to occupy the
whole mind.  There are certain statements that are true as far as they go,
and even important and interesting as far as they go, which are yet
incessantly being used to stop the mind from going any farther.
One of these, for example, is the phrase we find in the phraseology
of all our literature and journalism; `Rapid modern communications
are bringing different parts of the world nearer and nearer together.
It takes but a few days to go to Siberia by train; it may take but
a few hours to go there by aeroplane.  Instead of being at the ends
of the earth, Siberia may yet be a sort of suburb like Surbiton.'
But nobody stops to ask himself whether Siberia really is like Surbiton;
in what respect it is really unlike Surbiton, or, above all,
whether it is not in some respects growing more unlike Surbiton.
For another process is going on, parallel to the process of
the connexion of routes, and it is the disconnexion of ideas.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that some bold and romantic
adventurer from Surbiton had gone to Siberia a hundred years ago.
Doubtless he would have found the people there something like savages;
perhaps, to his too refined suburban eye, something hardly
different from the beasts of the field.  And yet, without claiming
any antiquarian scholarship about that somewhat obscure district;
I would undertake to say that there were some ideas common
to the Siberian and the Suburban.  I should guess, for instance,
that the Asiatic savages had some rudimentary idea of private property.
I suspect that a Siberian would have said, `This is my spear',
as confidently as the Surbitonian would have said, `This is my umbrella'.
It is probable that there was some sort of religion in Siberia,
as it is probable that there is some sort of religion in Surbiton.
The traveller to-day could get ten times more quickly to the
Siberian village than he could have got there a hundred ago.
But it is no longer so absolutely certain that he would find
these simple things if he got there.  He might find it was already a
Communist village, not in the old and normal sense of a communal village;
but in the fixed fanatical sense of a Bolshevist village.
He might find the villagers being dogmatically taught the doctrine
of Bolshevism; taught that it is really wicked to own an umbrella
or still more wicked to wield a spear.  He might find, for almost
the first time in human history, a people being systematically
instructed in the theory that there is neither God nor gods.
That means that the village, which is geographically so much nearer,
is now philosophically much farther away.  And this is due to a new
division in the thoughts of man; to the rise of a new sect and the
separation of a whole civilization from the general human tradition.
There are many modern examples of the disproportionate size of such
queer modern sects;--there is the rather comic example of Prohibition.
It is only a half-truth to say that America comes nearer and nearer
to Europe, as ships fly faster and faster across the Atlantic.
A ship took heaven knows how long to get from England to America in
the days of the American Revolution and the Fathers of the Republic.
But the traveller in the ship found Washington drinking wine his
house in Virginia, exactly as he had left Lord North drinking wine
in his house in London.  If you had told them that it was wicked
to drink wine, Washington would have stared just as North would
have stared at such a statement.  A Moslem morality had not then
arisen beyond the Atlantic, to divide America from Christendom.
Wine was thicker than water.  It united men of a common culture;
and the English race on either side of the ocean was only divided
by liquid and not by liquor.

For that matter, our own British politics have lately illustrated
vividly enough the fact that a division accompanies such a unification.
We have seen it, first in the case of Ireland and then in the case
of India.  It was exactly at the time when they were easiest to reach
that they were hardest to hold.  No improvement in the trains
from Euston or the boats from Holyhead, can alter the fact
that our folly allowed Ireland to float farther and farther away,
in the sea of the spirit, till it was as remote as a South Sea Island.
It was perhaps too much to expect that we should ever really
understand India; but in the old days it was at least understood
how much we proposed to understand.  If a hostile critic likes to put
it so, it was understood that we should continue to misunderstand.
But at least something was understood; and in the present welter
and dissolution of bonds, it is not too much to say that nothing
is understood.  The new India is more of a riddle than the old;
and the country grows more mysterious as it grows more near,
or even more new.  For we are for the first time near enough
to feel the full force of the differences; and that sort
of silent shock of collision is occurring with the closer
communications all over the world.  But there is, moreover, as I
have said, a moral division due to the growth of new ideas.
When we dealt with the active resistance of Hyder Ali the Moslem,
both sides were fighting with the same weapons and in the same world.
When we deal with the passive resistance of Gandhi the Mahatma,
we are in a world as unfamiliar as magic.  The paradox of this
parallel of contraction and expansion is really simple enough.
It follows on the modern attempt to combine wild spiritual speculation
with systematic scientific order.  Philosophy sprouts and sprawls in
every direction, and science tries in vain to tie the bundle together.
Men were united by religions and loyalties, and then it did not matter
how widely they were scattered.  A clan or tribe would he spread thinly
over a whole moorland or prairie.  Each hut would be as solitary
as a hermitage, but they would be hermits of the same creed.
The modern method is to stick up a row of villas all exactly alike,
and all close together for convenience of electricity and drainage.
But the man living in the first house may be a Buddhist, and in the second
a Papist, and in the third an atheist, and in the fourth a diabolist;
and each villa is an isolated universe.

XIV.  On Christian Science

THE friends of Christian Science say proudly that very good business
men are Christian Scientists.  The foes of Christian Science say,
unkindly, that Christian Scientists are very good business men.
I will not debate whether these are only two ways of saying
the same thing, far less whether it is a nice thing to say.
The former point radiantly to rows and rows of hard-headed millionaires,
reverently listening to readings from Science and Health, under the
rather extraordinary impression that the presence of millionaires
helps them to prove that Christian Science is Christian.  The latter
explain that Mrs. Eddy, though doubtless unconscious of the existence
of matter, was not wholly unconscious of the existence of money.
I have no intention of entering upon these purely personal feuds here.
But I should like to point out that there really is a moral connexion
between the two things, that extends beyond the defined boundaries
of either.  Just as there are more invisible (and therefore,
presumably, more spiritual) forms of money than mere material coin--
such as dues, debts, expectations, dead men's shoes, mortgage, usury,
economic threats and blackmail, and all the other purer and more
immaterial forms of wealth--so there are indirect and impalpable
influences of Christian Science which affect many who do not profess
to be Scientists and could not, without some implication of humour,
pretend to be Christians.

The truth is that in one sense Christian Science has succeeded
and really become the religion of the age, though it does
not follow of necessity that this is a compliment to the age.
I do not mean by this that most people have studied and accepted
Mrs. Eddy's original metaphysics; if, indeed, they were original,
or if they were really Mrs. Eddy's. Still less do I mean that the world
accepts the original morals of Christian Science, for I am told
that they are no longer accepted even by Christian Scientists.
The primary principle of the cult obviously forbade them to run
for a doctor if Mrs. Eddy broke her leg, since either the leg,
or certainly the break, or possibly both, were illusions of Mortal Mind.
Whether there really were people who would have let a man bleed to death,
because the blood was a result of the mere flow of his thoughts,
I have my doubts; but that did seem to be involved in some of the
original definitions, though not, I understand, in some of the later
modifications of them.  But this practical morality about doctors does
not here concern me, however practical or unpractical it may be.
What I mean, when I say that this is the age of Christian Science,
is not that most people living in it are in any sense
Christian Scientists.  I mean that the world is in a certain mood,
of which Christian Science is the expression and exaggeration.
It is not so much that the age could not find a more accommodating
religion, as that the religion could not find a more accommodating age.
Men have sometimes talked about people who were Christians
before Christ, and in one sense there were certainly any number
of people who were Christian Scientists before Christian Science.
There was something in the whole air and movement of that time,
and especially of that nation, and it was of a curious blind,
sweeping, and abnormal sort.  The air was rather like a whirl
wind and the movement rather like a whirlpool.  It had an element
of formlessness that was rather that of abstraction than anarchy;
that rushed head long, yet followed the curves of a tendency or a fate.
Indeed, among the queer jokes so often to be found in American names,
there is none more quaintly expressive than the very name of Mrs. Eddy.

The truth about the tendency was this:  that the world had become
a world of Commerce.  And there is about Commerce an invisible thing
that may be called Confidence; even if it sometimes means no more than the
Confidence Trick.  It depends on faith, even if it prove to be bad faith.
It does not depend on plain matters of material fact and experience.
The millionaires in the Church of Christ Scientist are supposed
to be hard-headed; I have myself a suspicion that they are rather
soft-headed. But, anyhow, they do not really deal in hardware;
they do emphatically deal in what may be called soft goods.
They deal in things that easily receive impressions from without,
and are especially sensitive to the impressions that we call depressions.
They deal in rumours, in understandings, in fictitious values,
in temporary offers, in things that are never what they seem,
and seldom do exactly what they promise.  Business is such stuff
as dreams are made on, and its little life is rounded with a slump.

This nervous and not very sane state of affairs is the origin
of Optimism and the general advice to the salesman to Keep Smiling.
If he left off smiling for one single second, he might blight
the market for hundreds of miles around.  The whole condition has
now become so terribly atmospheric; not in the milder sense of men
suffering from the atmosphere, but in the almost agonizing sense of men
making the atmosphere.  That is why the whole of this commercial
world is struck by the stubborn dissatisfaction or harsh discontent
of the more rooted rural populations.  They say that the farmer
always grumbles; and so he does, for he can afford to grumble.
He thinks the weather is bad, but he knows that his grumbling will
not make it worse.  He knows he cannot produce a cloud in the sky
by every curse that comes to his tongue; that he cannot blight
his own crops, even by declaring falsely that they are blighted.
He cannot create a slump in turnips merely by turning a melancholy
face upon them, or frown at the cabbages until they close weak and
quiet when they began brisk and strong.  He is dealing with absolute
and unalterable realities, and, as he is dealing with real facts,
he can express his real feelings.  He is, in a rather curious and
eccentric sense, in a position in which the truth has made him free.
He is a realist be cause he is dealing with realities.
The commercial man almost has to be a romanticist because he so often
deals with unrealities.  And that is what Americans mean when they
talk about The Romance of Salesmanship.

Now, for an atmosphere so atmospheric as that the obvious religion
was Christian Science, with its general suggestion of men creating
their own atmosphere.  To say that there was no such thing as a
headache was part of the same mentality as saying that there would
be no such thing as a slump; it was of the very essence of that
mythology and genealogy that the wish was father to the thought.
It had all kinds of minor manifestations, apart from any
acceptance of that particular creed; but it was obviously more
in touch with that particular creed than with any other creed.
It was closely akin to all that astonishing mass of advertisement
and suggestion about Personality and Will-Power and all the rest
which we see sprawling over so many American books and magazines.
It is an ironic jest that the religion is revealed, or betrayed,
by its images or icons.  The American papers show portraits of men
who have Personality; which is why they all look exactly alike.

I have remarked recently that the world is now occupied with the Study
of the Mind rather than with the Use of the Mind.  This is what is
meant by calling it the Age of Psychology.  It is also what is meant
by calling it, in a somewhat sinister sense, the Age of Physical Jerks.
It is a nervous and unrestful sort of optimism that is thus
perpetually trying to impose a mood upon the objective universe,
and the world, like Wall Street, is liable to reactions of panic.
But certainly Christian Science did for a time suit the mood, if it
does not for any long period suit the mind; if, indeed, we return
to using the mind instead of merely doctoring it with drugs.

XV.  On Rest Cures for Nations

WE certainly need a new theory of Progress, for all existing theories
about the future have a very hopeless air of being things of the past.
There is even a detachable grain of truth in the doctrine of Spengler,
which roughly maintains that there is no such thing as Progress,
but only Progresses.  That is, there is such a thing as one
civilization becoming completely civilized in its own way,
and then getting out of the way to make room for a totally
different civilization.  Unfortunately, every heathen seems fated
to be a fatalist, and every fatalist seems fated to be a pessimist.
The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone; in other words,
he is pitifully cramped and crushed by the study of botany and geology.
Sometimes he even passes from botany to biology, or, worse still,
to anthropology.  Now, in these dead or undeveloped things, it is
more or less true that there is no Progress, but only Progresses.
It is not easy to compare one completed phase with another; it is idle
to ask whether old red sandstone is redder than greengages are green.
The fossil that was and the flower that is cannot call to each other
across the ages, and though there may be, in one sense, an upward
spiral of evolution, it is not a spiritual spiral, or, as the Yankees
would say, a live wire.  There is not, in that manifest manner,
at least, a memory in nature; but there is a memory of mankind.
Cultures do not so completely perish as the pessimists pretend.
Men do own the cave-drawings of a Neolithic man, as birds do not
own the fossil of a pterodactyl.  Still, there is a truth in that
substitution of Progresses for Progress.

The truth seems to me to be this:  that men do from time to time
make special efforts; these are often crowned with success,
and when they are crowned with success they generally end in failure.
But that leaves on one side the question of the ordinary human life,
which existed before the effort and still exists after the effort.
Rome made a great effort and civilized a great part of the world,
and the effort was followed by the Dark Ages.  But the Dark Ages
were not sub-human, any more than the Roman Empire was superhuman.
It has been said by historical scholars that the simplicity
of the Dark Ages refreshed the world like a sleep.
It is certainly true that nations can be notably vigorous and
hopeful at the end of what is called a period of decline and might
more properly be called a period of neglect.  Spain is far more
vigorous and hopeful at this moment than many parts of the vast
industrial field of what are considered successful societies.
Spain made a great effort in the sixteenth century, and opened a new world
of wealth and discovery; then it began to sink slowly out of sight.
But Spaniards were not stupid and stunted savages in the time
of Goya any more than in the time of Velasquez.  Very likely
the time will soon come when the Spaniards will make another effort;
and for this purpose it is likely enough that their repose or retirement
will have left them healthier and happier than most other people.
In fact, we need a new theory or conception in history; the conception
of the historical holiday.  Perhaps the Dark Ages were a holiday,
if they were a little like a dull and rainy holiday.  But there
is something to be said for a vacation, even in the literal sense
of a vacuum.  Anyhow, I think it extremely probable that the Spaniards
will turn up again as fresh as paint, even the paint of Velasquez.
They have not been so much exhausted and depressed by our dismal
industrial materialism or our vast capitalist responsibilities.
They have been refreshed and rejuvenated by a little decay;
and have thoroughly enjoyed themselves for three centuries as
a dying nation.

I would not insist everywhere on substituting, for the respectable
old theory of the Revolution, this disturbing and dangerous theory
of the Rest Cure No doubt it might be overdone.  People might go
on decaying a little too long and degenerate more than was really
good for their health.  I propose only a moderate indulgence
in ruin; a cautious and temperate use of a return to barbarism.
There are many quite modern people in whom the merest touch
of decomposition, the merest soupçon of corruption and rottenness,
would be enough to reassure me.  But there are some modern
people who are a great deal too modern; who are quite certainly
devouring and destroying themselves with the nonsense of novelty,
and trying always to hear of something later than the very latest.
They are visibly growing old in order to keep up with their youth.
They are wasting away to nothing, for want of a little nothing to do.
If only some of their friends would persuade them to go away
for a few centuries of superstition and ignorance, like the people
of the Dark Ages, they might come back and astonish the world
by something that the world had never seen before, like Gothic
architecture or the portraits in the Canterbury Tales.

Anyhow, there is something to be said for this theory of the periodical
enterprise of humanity.  One advantage of it is that it resettles
in a sane proportion all that question which was discussed
in an earlier article:  the question of the real case for the
Noble Savage and Rousseau's conception of a return to Nature.
So long as scientific men merely despised savages (much more than
the missionaries who were charged with despising them), the ease
seemed simple enough.  If primitive people were always more cruel
and vindictive, as well as more clumsy and ignorant, than we are,
then it was possible to present a progressive humanity, which every
day and in every way was growing better and better.  But (as I
remarked elsewhere) even the story of simple tribes is not so simple.
There is evidence of simple tribes that are actually milder in their
punishments than we are, or kinder to their children than we are;
or at least than we very recently were.  But though this upsets
the whole progressive theory that we civilized people are better
than the savages in all respects, it does not force us to the contrary
conclusion that the savages are better than we are in all respects.
It is arguable that when men marched out on a special enterprise,
they had to adopt a special discipline.  Civilization might in some
ways have more severe laws, because it had more serious problems.
There might be harder lessons to learn, because there was more
to be learned.  The progressive tribe might be under martial law,
while the conservative tribe was under common law.  But the former
might none the less be marching to the promised land.

For instance, there is a tiresome journalistic habit of fulsomely
praising ourselves, and fatuously despising our fathers, because we
no longer hang a man for forgery.  But, as a fact, it was not an early
primitive habit, but a late progressive habit, to hang a man for forgery.
The law punishing forgery with death appeared quite late in
our history, and was a result of our advancing civilization.
It was a highly modern sort of thing to do.  For forgery did not
become frightfully important until finance and commercial contracts,
and banking business of all sorts, had become important.
I am very glad that men are no longer hanged for forgery.
But I can quite imagine a simple and artless tribe of savages among
whom the habit of imitating another man's handwriting would appear
as gay and innocent as making faces in imitation of another man's face.
If Hiawatha wrote his name in picture-writing on the smooth bark
of the birch-tree, there would be no particular harm in Chibiabos
playfully copying his friend's particular way of drawing a wigwam
or a rising sun.  No; there is something after all in the Noble Savage;
there is something at least in the Happy Savage.  But that does
not prove that the tribe should not sacrifice some of its happiness
when the Great Spirit bids it go forth to war.

XVI.  On Philosophy versus Fiction

LOOKING back on a wild and wasted life, I realize that I have especially
sinned in neglecting to read novels.  I mean the really novel novels;
for such old lumber as Dickens and Jane Austen I know fairly well.
If instead of trifling away my time over pamphlets about Collectivism
or Co-operation, plunging for mere pleasure into the unhealthy
excitement of theological debates with dons, or enjoying the empty
mirth of statistics about Poland and Czechoslovakia, I had quietly
sat at home doing my duty and reading every novel as it comes out,
I might be a more serious and earnest man than I am to-day. If
instead of loitering to laugh over something, merely because it
happened to be laughable, I had walked stiffly and sternly on to
the Circulating Library, and put myself under the tuition of our more
passionate lady novelists, I might by this time be as intense as they.
If instead of leading a riotous life, scrapping with Mr. Shaw
about Socialism, or Dean Inge about Science, I had believed
everything I was told about marriage by an unmarried young woman
in an avowedly imaginary story, I might now have a more undisturbed
faith and simplicity.  Novels are the great monument of the amazing
credulity of the modern mind; for people believe them quite seriously
even though they do not pretend to be true.

But it is really true, alas I that I have failed to follow adequately
the development of serious fiction.  I do not admit that I have
entirely failed to follow the development of serious facts.
Not only have I discussed Labour with Socialists, or Science
with Scientists, but I have argued with myself about other things,
so new and true that I cannot get anybody else to argue about them.
The world wide power of trusts, for instance, is a thing that is never
attacked and never defended.  It seems to have been completed without
ever having been proposed; we might say without ever having been begun.
The small shopkeeper has been destroyed in the twentieth century,
as the small yeoman was destroyed in the eighteenth century.  But for
the yeoman there was protest and regret; great poets sang his dirge,
and great orators like Cobbett died trying to avenge his death.
But the modern destructive changes seem to be too new to be noticed.
Perhaps they are too enormous to be seen.  No; I do not think it
can be fairly said that I have neglected the most recent realities
of the real world.  It seems rather the real world that neglects them.
Nor do I confess, thank heaven, to the more odious vice of neglecting
funny or frivolous fiction; whether in the sense of reading
everything from the first story of Mr. Jacobs to the last story
of Mr. Wodehouse; or in that richer sense in which the joke
consists entirely of a corpse, a blood-stained hat-peg,
or the mysterious footprints of a three-legged man in the garden.
I have been a munificent patron of fiction of that description;
and have even presented the public with a corpse or two of my own.
In short, the limitation of my literary experience is so altogether
on the side of the modern serious novel; especially that very
serious novel which is all about the psychology of flirting
and jilting and going to jazz dances.  I have read hundreds
of books bearing titles like Socialism:  The Way Out; or Society:
the Way In; or Japanese Light on the Paulus Mythus; or Cannibalism
the Clue to Catholicism; or Parricide:  a Contribution to Progress;
or The Traffic Problem:  The Example of Greenland; or Must We Drink?;
or Should We Eat?; or Do We Breathe? and all those grave and
baffling questions.  I have also read hundreds of books bearing
titles like Who Killed Humphrey Higgleswick?; or The Blood
on the Blotting paper; or The Secret of Piccadilly Circus;
or The Clue of the Stolen Toothbrush; and so on and so on.
But I have not read with sufficient regularity, diligence and piety
all those other books that bear titles like The Grasswidowhood
of Grace Bellow; or The Seventh Honeymoon of Sylphide Squeak;
or Dear Lady Divorce; or The Sex of Samuel Stubbin;
or Harold Hatrack, Soul-Thief; or The Hypnotist of Insomnia Smith.
All these grave and laborious, and often carefully written books
come out season after season; and somehow I have missed them.
Sometimes they miss me, even when hurled at my head by publishers.
It were vain to deny that I sometimes deliberately avoid them.
I have a reason, of a reasonable sort for I do not think it
is a really reasonable reason merely to say that they bore me.
For I did once really try to read them; and I got lost.
One reason is that I think there is in all literature a sort of purpose;
quite different from the mere moralizing that is generally meant
by a novel with a purpose.

There is something in the plan of the idea that is straight like a
backbone and pointing like an arrow.  It is meant to go somewhere,
or at least to point somewhere; to its end, not only in the modern
sense of an ending, but in the medieval sense of a fruition.
Now, I think that many of the less intellectual stories have
kept this, where the more intellectual stories have lost it.
The writer of detective stories, having once asked who killed
Humphrey Higgleswick, must, after all, end by telling us who did it,
even by the mean subterfuge of saying it was Humphrey Higgleswick.
But the serious novelist asks a question that he does not answer;
often that he is really incompetent to answer.  The sex of Samuel Stubbin
may even remain in considerable doubt, in some of the more
emotional passages, and the seventh honeymoon of Sylphide seems
to have nothing to do with the probable prospect of her eighth.
It is the custom of these writers to scoff at the old sentimental
novel or novelette, in which the story always ended happily to
the sound of church bells.  But, judged by the highest standards
of heroic or great literature, like the Greek tragedies or the
great epics, the novelette was really far superior to the novel.
It set itself to reach a certain goal--the marriage of two persons,
with all its really vital culmination in the founding of a family
and a vow to God; and all other incidents were interesting because
they pointed to a consummation which was, by legitimate hypothesis,
a grand consummation.

But the modern refusal both of the religious vow and the romantic hope
has broken the backbone of the business altogether, and it is only an
assorted bag of bones.  People are minutely described as experiencing
one idiotic passion after another, passions which they themselves
recognize as idiotic, and which even their own wretched philosophy
forbids them to regard as steps towards any end.  The sentimental
novelette was a simplified and limited convention of the thing;
in which, for the sake of argument, marriage was made the prize.
Of course marriage is not the only thing that happens in life;
and somebody else may study another section with another goal.
But the modern serious novelists deny that there is any goal.
They can not point to the human happiness which the romantics
associated with gaining the prize.  They cannot point to the heavenly
happiness which the religious associated with keeping the vow.
They are driven back entirely on the microscopic description
of these aimless appetites in themselves.  And, microscopically
studied in themselves, they are not very interesting to a
middle-aged man with plenty of other things to think about.
In short, the old literature, both great and trivial, was built on
the idea that there is a purpose in life, even if it is not always
completed in this life; and it really was interesting to follow
the stages of such a purpose from the meeting to the wedding,
from the wedding to the bells, and from the bells to the church.
But modern philosophy has taken the life out of modern fiction.
It is simply dissolving into separate fragments and then
into formlessness; and deserves much more than the romantic novel
the modern reproach of being `sloppy'.

XVII.  On Logic and Lunacy

THE idea of logic is so entirely lost in this phase of
philosophical history, that even those who invoke it do so rather
as the Athenians once invoked the Unknown God, or the men of
the Dark Ages retained a dim respect for Virgil as a conjurer.
The very people who say, `be logical', will generally be found to be
quite illogical in their own notion of logic.  One of the last men
who understood logic in its full and impartial sense, died only lately:
the late William Johnson of King's College, Cambridge; one of
the finest minds of the age and an exact measure of the modern
contrast between notability and notoriety.  I mean that somehow
the glory has departed from glory, and the first men of the time
are often the last men to be advertised or even adequately admired.
He was as incapable of intellectual injustice as of infanticide;
and while he and I differed about a thousand things, even if I had
regarded his view as ultimately leading to falsehood, I should always
have known that it was free from the faintest tinge of fallacy.
If there had been any weed of weak logic in his own argument he would
have torn it up with as much joy as any weed in the garden of the enemy.
For he liked that sort of weeding as an amusement and an art--
a sort of art for art's sake.  And when I wander in the jungle
of journalistic nonsense in which we all live to-day, his memory
again and again returns.

Let us begin with a trifle that does not matter in the least.
He loved to argue about trifles that do not matter in the least.
Some journalist the other day shook the foundation of the universe
and the British Empire by raising the question of whether a girl
ought to smoke a cigar.  But what I noted about his, and about
the hundred eager correspondents who pursued this great theme,
was that they wrote again and again some such sentence as this:
`If you like a girl to smoke a cigarette, why can't you be logical
and like her to smoke a cigar?'  Now I do not care an ounce of shag
whether she smokes a cigarette or a cigar or a corn-cob pipe
or a hubble-bubble, or whether she smokes three cigars at once,
or whether she is an Anti-Tobacco crank.  But it is none the less
true that when a man writes that sentence telling us to `be logical',
he shows that he has never even heard of the nature of logic.
He might just as well write:  `You like the look of a horse;
why won't you be logical and like the look of a hippopotamus?'
The only answer is, `Well, I don't; and it is not illogical,
because it does not in any way invade the realm of logic.
A man has a perfect right to say that he likes the look of one thing
and does not like the look of another thing; or even that he likes
the look of a smaller thing, but does not like the look of a larger
but somewhat similar thing.  It is all a question of liking;
and not in the least a question of logic.  There is no logical
compulsion upon him whatever to go on from the smaller to the larger
and like them both.  The man who uses this phrase attaches some queer
particular meaning to the word `logical'; something that is dimly
adumbrated in the words, `extremist' or `going the whole hog'.
But if my appetite is so small that I only require half a hog
for breakfast, I am not any less of a logician because I refuse
to eat the whole hog for breakfast.  The obligation to eat
the whole hog, if it exists, must be a mystical or moral or
transcendental obligation; but it is not a logical obligation.
It is not logical, because it has not been deduced from any premises;
it has simply been stated without reference to any premises.

And that is what is the matter with the modern man who says,
`be logical'.  He cannot take his own advice, and therefore he cannot
state his own first principles.  But though his logic is nonsense
as he states it, it does refer to some first principles if he could
only state them.  It all depends on the reason for approving
of cigarettes or cigars or girls or any other strange creatures.
What he really means, at the back of his muddled modernistic mind,
is some thing like this:  `If I approve of Jennifer smoking a cigarette
because Jennifer can jolly well do anything she likes, and does, then it
is illogical in me to object to her liking a cigar; or for that matter
an opium-pipe or a pint of laudanum or a bottle of prussic acid.'
And this statement would really be quite logical, because the logical
reason is given.  Or if he said, `It is my first principle that women
may do anything that men do; therefore I am bound in logic to pass
the cigars to my daughter as much as to my son,' then that also is
perfectly reasonable as the application of a stated principle.
But to say that a man is bound in logic to like a cigar as much
as a cigarette whether in his own mouth or that of his maiden
aunt or his maternal grandmother, is stark staring unreason;
and shows that the speaker is entirely illogical in dealing with
the two ideas of liking and logic.

This half superstitious veneration for logic, combined with a complete
misunderstanding of it, is very common in those popular works of fiction
which are the joy of my existence; the crime novels and the police
romances and the rest.  There is a queer notion that the detective,
who is distinguished from all human beings by having the gift
of reason, is bound in logic not to like anything or anybody.
Even Sherlock Holmes (the friend of my childhood to whom I shall
always pay a tribute of piety) is described somewhere, I think,
as being incapable of falling in love because of his logical nature.
You might as well say that he could not be expected to have much
appetite for lunch, because of his proficiency in mathematics.
There is nothing intrinsically illogical in having affections
or admirations or appetites, so long as we recognize them reasonably
as what they are.  But the romantic tradition, as it exists
in all the romances, is that the logician cannot be romantic.
It may be remarked that the word `cold' will always be found coupled
with the word `logical'; I imagine the printers keep such words
together in one block of type.  But the cold logician, though be
must not be romantic, is almost entirely a creature of romance.
As a matter of fact and experience, most of the very logical
people I have known have been very warm-blooded, affectionate or
enthusiastic people.  Most of the very good debaters were very
warm debaters.  Some of the closest reasoners in history were men
of the most enthusiastic convictions; like St. Thomas Aquinas
or the great French preachers and orators.  The truth is, I think,
that it was because the English were originally taught to have
a prejudice against logic, that even when they half overcame
the prejudice, there remained something alien in the admiration.
They could be brought to feel a sort of awe in the presence
of a really reasonable person; as if he were a sort of monster.
The fact that a man could think could only be explained on
the hypothesis that he was a Martian or the Man in the Moon;
that he was a Clockwork Man; that he was The Thinking Machine.
They began by thinking that reason is inhuman; and only gradually
conceded that it is superhuman.

Is it not about time somebody preached the older doctrine;
that reason is human?  Is there not some thing to be said for
those medieval Schoolmen and antiquated sages, who held that man
is a rational animal; and even more rational than the other animals?
The modern experiment of first sneering at logic for not being a
practical thing, and then timidly praising it for being a priggish thing,
seems to have resulted in the general loss of it as a normal
function of the mind.  It is as if the same Victorian English
had supported their railway-trains by forbidding anybody to walk;
and then, when all human limbs were paralysed, had deified two
or three athletes as gods because they had the power of walking.
Logic is as normal as legs; but legs can be neglected as well as logic.
All that is needed is a little ordinary training and practice;
the knowledge that inferences rest on their first principles, as men
rest on their feet.  But without it the world seems to be drifting
into an intellectual dissolution and destruction, which is at its very
wildest when some wild voice shrieks out of the chaos; `Be logical'.
This strange cry apparently means that you cannot stroke a cat
without stroking a tiger; or that you are bound to wish the house
was on fire because you sit by the fireside.

XVIII.  On the Thrills of Boredom

IT is a dogma imposed on all, by the dogmatic secularism of the
modern system, that Youth needs, must have, and cannot possibly
be happy without, a riot of dances, plays, or entertainments.
We all know the practical truth embodied in this; and yet I am so doubtful
about the fashionable assumption that I think it very nearly untrue.
I have no objection to dances, plays, and masquerades:
on the contrary, I enjoy them enormously; but then I am not what is
commonly called a Youth.  And from what I remember of being young,
and what I have read of the real reminiscences of youth, I incline
to think that youth never shows its glorious vividness and vitality
so much as when transfiguring what might be called monotony.
I feel far more sense of a creative glow, and of something
passionately alive, in the description of the dreary moorland and dark
mansion of the Brontës, or even of the dismal coffee-houses that were
filled with the first dreams of Dickens, than I feel in the faces
and conversation of half the young people I see at shows and dances
to-day. Nor do I think it was a case of imagination existing in spite
of dreariness; I think it existed in some degree because of dreariness.
There is a psychological paradox here which perhaps only a poet
can fully understand; but young people are generally poets.

I can recall in my childhood the continuous excitement of long days
in which nothing happened; and an indescribable sense of fullness
in large and empty rooms.  And with whatever I retain of childishness
(and whether it be a weakness or otherwise, I think I retain
more than most) I still feel a very strong and positive pleasure
in being stranded in queer quiet places, in neglected corners where
nothing happens and anything may happen; in unfashionable hotels,
in empty waiting-rooms, or in watering-places out of the season.
It seems as if we needed such places, and sufficient solitude in them,
to let certain nameless suggestions soak into us and make a richer
soil of the subconsciousness.  Certainly, if there is such a need,
it is a need that is now being everywhere neglected.  Of course, all such
views of youth or childhood or the past are a matter of proportion.
Children did not like thrashings or even threatenings; they did
not all like thunderstorms; they did not like solitude or darkness
or horrors increased beyond their capacity for supporting them.
But, allowing for that, the normal little boy likes solitude
and loves horrors.  Only, as I say, there is a fine shade
that goes even beyond this, and suggests something of sustenance
even in what many would now call merely stuffy and stagnant.
The imagination can not only enjoy darkness; it can even enjoy dullness.
I know that men like Dickens, writing recollections, have complained
of dullness.  But when I read their recollections, I doubt if they
were ever for one instant dull.  It must have been in those very
hours that there first began that dance of the Dickens characters
after which the world need never be dull again.

In that dance of Dickens characters, I trust I need not explain that I
do not figure either as Mr. Stiggins the Puritan or Mr. Scrooge
the Utilitarian.  I have not the smallest intention of interfering
with anybody's dances or dramatic entertainments; and, in due
proportion, I am prepared to interfere with any interference.
But there is a moral and mental fact involved, which is being
neglected in the concentration on communal or convivial enjoyment;
and that fact consists precisely in the real vitality and power of youth.
Youth is much more capable of amusing itself than is now supposed,
and in much less mortal need of being amused.  The only real warning
against solitude and stagnation which needs to be uttered is that you
do really need to be rather young and strong in order to get the fun
out of them.  The same principle applies to the monastic life;
a career that requires very great vigour and vivacity.
No normal person is expected to be so vigorous and vivacious as that.
But most normal persons are now taught to neglect far too much the sort of
excitement which the mind itself manufactures out of unexciting things.
And anybody who can feel the fine shades, in fiction or philosophy
will agree that the old school called Romantic, or even Byronic,
which we feel still volcanic in the Brontës, had really about it
a curious confidence in life, an unbroken hope in the heart,
which is strangely stubborn in many people who had been as badly
brought up as Byron.  Byron himself, with all his parade of pessimism,
had a sort of glamour of life about him that he could not get rid of,
and a gusto that never left his language, even when he used it
to deny its existence in his life.

Now, one need not belong to the extreme school of The Nightmare
of the Night Club, or Vengeance on the Vamp, in order to observe
around us a certain lack of that really romantic gusto and glamour.
To mention another Dickens character, it will be remembered
that the Infant Phenomenon was kept short by means of gin,
so that she might go on dancing as a light and airy child.
It seems to me that a good many people are kept from growing
by cocktails, and stunted rather than stimulated by dancing.
They are not allowed to grow, because they are always pulling
themselves up by the roots to see how they are growing.
In the ease of those who really have a heat and force of generous youth
within them, I seriously think that imprisonment in a second-rate
boarding-house during a rainy day at Worthing, or enforced retirement
to a faded and forgotten tea-shop off the road to Wormwood Scrubs,
would lead to their returning to their friends younger than ever.
As to those who are already dried up, hopeless, cynical, and filled
with intellectual despair, they can continue to be gay.

This need is a normal need; like other normal needs,
it can be neglected for a period; like other normal needs,
it will certainly be rediscovered at a later period.
Perhaps it will be discovered incidentally and individually;
perhaps it will be discovered darkly and secretly, as by the
conspirators of individualism or the revolutionists of tradition.
Perhaps the plotters will whisper to each other, amid the whirl
of the latest jazz or ragtime, the forbidden assignation and the
address of the Worthing boarding house.  Perhaps a solitary figure
will be seen slinking from the Scarlet Cuttlefish (that exclusive
night club) and grimly taking the road to Wormwood Scrubs.
Perhaps, on the other hand, it will come with a communal rush
like the return of a fashion; and it will be all the rage to be
found sitting speechless in a waiting-room at Willesden Junction;
and all the best people will leave themselves lying about, like so much
lost luggage, in the parlours of dilapidated public-houses or on
the steps of derelict bathing-machines at dead Victorian resorts.
These are the only places I can think of in which a modern man and woman
could possibly have time or opportunity to think for themselves.
These are the modern equivalents of sitting among the ruins or
meditating among the tombs; and both were very healthy human exercises,
very improving to the spirits.

In this connexion, by the way, I must once more express my
astonishment that, in an age which will have ten professors
of psychology to tea, or strew the world with pamphlets and books
about subconsciousness and psycho-analysis, nobody seems to notice
the most normal and elementary facts of practical psychology.
Otherwise, it would not be left to an irresponsible and ignorant
journalist to point out the elementary fact:  that dullness can
be a stimulant.  There is hardly any need to point out, to any
one acquainted with our lighter entertainments, that amusement
can be a narcotic.  But, anyhow, some one with more scientific
authority ought really to study these strange reactions of stale
and even oppressive atmospheres on the romantic spirit of youth.
Who knows?--if something suggestive were written on the subject,
even youth might be young once more.

XIX.  On Gossip about Heredity

A SHORT time ago a distinguished scientific expert, pleading for a more
normal and less panic-stricken treatment of consumptives, summed up
one aspect in the decisive words:  `Consumption is no more hereditary
than measles.'  He said, of course, that it could attack successive
members of the same family, and for the same reason as measles.
I have no authority to speak on the technical point; but a statement
like this, which may fairly be called authoritative, turns my mind
back on the vast and sprawling treatment of the topic of heredity,
in popular science and public opinion.  And, though I do not claim
to know much about the medical facts or falsehoods set forth in this
particular case, I rather think I do know something of the moral
facts and falsehoods that lie behind them and are their sole and
continuous motive-power. There are undoubtedly individual professors,
who fight each other on tiny points out of pure impersonal curiosity,
or possibly out of pure personal dislike.  But when any part
of the general public is drawn into a debate on physical science,
we may be certain that it has already become a debate on moral science.
Mobs are always moral.  There never was a mob that rose to demand
the squaring of the circle or the closer observation of the Transit
of Venus.  Professor Higgle and Professor Haggle may argue
the hind-leg off a donkey, or the hundredth leg off a centipede,
to settle a question that nobody can understand but themselves.
But if ever the dancing donkey and the writhing centipede become
heraldic figures on the flags and ensigns of the crowd, then we
may be quite certain that for some sort of reason (probably quite
an unreasonable reason) these biological questions have somehow
been entangled with faith and morals; and that what is raging
in the street is the war of two philosophies.

Now, almost as soon as the word `heredity' was invented or spoken aloud,
it was caught up like a cry in the market-place, and repeated in
every variation of gossip and chattering comment; applied to this,
that, and the other, to which it was never in any case applicable;
and trumpeted aloud by men who did not even know what it meant,
long before even the most learned men knew even the little
about it that they know now.  Mendel the monk has explained it
much more fully than did Darwin and all the material scientists;
but even after that it remains a very obscure and subtle subject,
as the scientists would be the first to admit.

But in the great days when Science was also Fashion, when the world
had to bow down not only to Darwin but to all Darwinians, when anything
labelled `Specimens' or `Sections' passed without challenge,
and all the camp-followers of materialism were sacred, like the suite
of an Embassy--in those days of one idea or one tendency there
arose the most amazing fashion of talking about Heredity.
It was simply taken for granted, for instance, in a hundred
provincial homes that what they called Drink was hereditary.
If they had used language in a rational manner they might have been
quite right, for the disposition to drink something is a hereditary
human instinct; and the objection to doing so, when it happens
to be beer, is a superficial, artificial, and self-conscious pose.
But what they meant was alcoholism; and what they meant was nonsense.
Nobody has ever tasted alcohol.  Nobody in the normal way has ever
seen it.  Nobody most certainly has ever liked it.  What people
liked was a certain pleasure, either of excitement or serenity,
which can be gained through a variety of liquids, moderately by
moderate indulgence, or excessively by excessive indulgence.
Alcohol is simply a name which professors give (for the present)
to some elements in all these liquids which they suppose
(for the present) to be the cause of this mental pleasure.
Now, it is obvious on the face of it that, if anything is hereditary,
it cannot be a craving for the chemical process, which most people do
not even know to exist.  It can only be a craving for the mental result,
which is simple pleasure.  Now, all men have a craving for pleasure;
and, though some men are weaker or more wilful in snatching at it,
I cannot for the life of me see why such men should not snatch
at other pleasures as much as this one.  If what is inherited is
anything so vague as a lack of vigilance and self-control against
pleasure itself, I cannot see why the drunkard should not have
one son who was a jewel-thief and another who was always flirting
with barmaids or bolting with ballet-girls. Of course, many children
of drunken families are drunken; not because there is heredity,
but because there are a great many other things besides heredity.
There is such a thing as tradition, which is nearly half of true history;
and there is such a thing as suggestion, which is nearly all
of modern journalism; and there are such things as education
and environment, about which a still louder yell of human folly
will go up--in short, there is something in morals which corresponds
to infection in measles.

But this wild romance of popular science spread wider and wider.
What is odd about it is not its truth or untruth, but the unresisted
smoothness with which it spread over one field after another.
I know so little of the scientific study itself that I should not think
of denying the possibility of some sort of inherited drunkenness;
though I cannot make any sense of the theory of inherited alcoholism.
But why were hundreds and thousands of people, who knew even less science
than I do, instantly and calmly assured that drunkenness was hereditary?
Why did they begin at once to watch the doubtful steps of the curate,
because his great-uncle the Admiral was found drunk in a ditch on
Trafalgar Day?  Why did they eagerly watch for the fire of alcoholic
craving in the eyes of the new-born infant who was remotely descended
from Three-Bottle Thumpington?  The question grows wilder as the
application grew wider.  The next thing we heard was the cheerful news
that Assassination was a regular family feature, like a family nose.
As in the other cases, it was not so much stated by scientific people
as spread by unscientific people as the last scientific news.
A brilliant lady novelist lately based a whole novel upon it,
called Red Sky at Morning, in which a hazy, good-natured youth kills
somebody for a very insufficient reason, merely because his father
fifty years ago had killed somebody quite different for a totally
different reason.  All this seems to me highly irrational.  There are
almost as many motives for murdering men as there are men to murder.
A man kills because he is blackmailed, or because he is jilted,
or because he is a political fanatic, and so on.  But how do you
inherit a blackmailer, or an unreliable girl, or a political theory?
There certainly is inheritance, as of physical type, perhaps of
physical temperament; of being indolent or restless and so on.
But the number of lazy men who will murder a valet for waking them
up is about as large as the number of impatient men who will murder
him for keeping them waiting.  That is to say, it is very small.
The mysterious moral inhibition, or its absence, by which men
do or do not murder, is in the individual soul; and I defy anybody
to show that it is hereditary.

What is the meaning of this popular superstition?  In existing relations
of religion and good taste, I can only suggest it in a parable.
On the highest and hoariest of the ashpits of hell sits the oldest
of all the Demons, whose name is Doom; it is he who has always
blighted mankind with superstitions of the destiny and death of races;
who told the old Greeks like Oedipus that they were bound to their
blind crimes; who told the old feudal tribes that there was a curse
on a castle or an abortion that was the burden of a family.
And when modern science said `Heredity' the old fiend stirred,
and saw a new chance of renewing the old bondage.  For however we take
the symbols, it was a wise instinct by which heaven was symbolized
by wings that are free as the wind, and hell symbolized by chains.

XX.  On Dante and Beatrice

THE interesting, one might almost say amusing, idea of `The Poets on
the Poets', the series published by Messrs.  Faber and Faber, is described
by those playful publishers themselves as based `on the impudent maxims,
"Set a Poet to catch a Poet" and "Bards of a feather flock together"'.
I am not sure that the latter motto is so exact as the former.
Thus Mr. Humbert Wolfe is to write on Tennyson; and it would never
have occurred to me that those two excellent bards had a single
feather between them.  But the former maxim is sound enough,
and is well supported by the second of the series, in which an
illuminating sketch of Dante is presented by Mr. T. S. Eliot.

In such cases we are all of us only picking up stray feathers here
and there, as Browning picked up the eagle's feather on the heath.
Mr. T. S. Eliot would be the last to pretend that he had
completely plucked the eagle of Florence and Ravenna.
If it is not easy to write a short book about Dante,
neither is it easy to write a short article about Mr. Eliot.
As he naturally picks out two or three of Dante's ideas, I can
only pick out one or two of his own ideas, and the subject-matter
necessarily narrows from the poet to the critic and from the critic
to the critic of the critic.  But all his ideas are both stimulating
and subtle, including any number I have no space to estimate here.
Perhaps the most out standing matter, in a popular sense, is his
very just reconstruction of the business about the story of Beatrice,
as she appears not only in the Divine Comedy, but in the Vita Nuova.
There has always been a controversy about Beatrice, and as so
often happens (I grieve to say) in the controversies of the very learned,
a mass of the most extraordinary nonsense has been talked on both sides.
At one extreme there was the school of those who pretended that Beatrice
was in the position of Mrs. Harris; or that she was, at best (to quote
another great female authority), an allegory on the banks of the Nile:
at any rate, hardly human enough to have ever been on the banks
of the Arno.  Some of them said she was a symbol standing for
Theology or Divine Wisdom or some such thing; others, from colleges
even nearer Hanwell, said she was an allegory of United Italy
or Liberty or the League of Nations or heaven knows what.
About that, especially in the case of the Vita Nuova (though I
am not learned, and hardly even educated, touching Italian
language and letters), I have not myself the shadow of a doubt.
The man--or, rather, boy--who remembered with such scorching delight
the fact that a little girl had nodded and smiled at him on a
particular morning, and with such scorching despair the fact that she
had not nodded or smiled at him on another morning, was most certainly
in love, It was first love, calf-love, moon-calf-love, no doubt,
but certainly human love; and if it wasn't I will modestly
exclaim with Shakespeare, `I never writ nor no man ever loved.'
And that Dante does mean the same young woman to reappear in the
Paradiso is obvious, not only from many phrases in the Paradiso,
but from the quite definite words at the end of the Vita Nuova.
But when the opposite extreme of criticism suggests that human
love is the whole subject of both books, then, as Mr. Eliot shows,
it makes even worse nonsense out of the whole business.

For the Romantics of the nineteenth century really implied that God
and the Universe, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, were all one elaborate
and rather laborious compliment to Beatrice Portinari.  It is truer
to say that, in the true sense, Beatrice is a compliment to God.
She is lifted like flowers on an altar, or flames on a candlestick,
to be an example of that earthly beauty which, used rightly, can lead us
to heavenly beauty.  And in this case the critics have missed the whole
point of the comparison between the Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy.
The point is that the first slight, youthful, merely emotional
story is really a sad story; it is only the completion in Paradise
that is a joyful story.  The former has an unhappy ending--or, rather,
that most unhappy ending which consists in having no ending.
It is the mere fragment of a human tragedy; it is only the
religious epic that is, in the exact sense, a divine comedy.
Dante is drawn as a dark and bitter spirit; but in fact he wrote
the only one of the great epics that really has a happy ending.

The trouble was that the age of the Romantics was the age of
the Rationalists, or those who thought they were Rationalists.
Having figured as ruthless realists sweeping all spiritual visions
like cobwebs out of the sky, they then suddenly became extravagant
sentimentalists over some of the common or garden flowers they found
growing naturally out of the earth.  Having forbidden all belief
in the legend of Adam and Eve, they demanded universal and absolute
belief in the legend of Edwin and Angelina.  They were not content
with the natural sympathy we all have with such natural feelings;
they really gave to them the supremacy of supernatural feelings--
and (what is the real point) the only supernatural feelings.
They did not use the coarse cant of our day; but they did, in fact,
make Sex the supreme end of life for its own sake--in which they
were much less sensible than the common or garden flowers.
They therefore missed the whole meaning of Dante, which is
that human love may indeed be a new life; but the new life
must be dedicated to a supreme good as much as the old life.
All other goods are only manifestations of that supreme good, and must
ultimately be referred to it, as Beatrice to the Beatific Vision.

There is one comment, in this connexion, which occurred to me
while reading Mr. Eliot's book.  The Beatific Vision is described
by Dante about as well as it could be described by anybody--
that is, chiefly by saying that it cannot be described at all.
But Mr. Eliot has noticed, as I have often noticed, the very
extraordinary effect of the ending, when, after a few grand hints
(like that about a happy but forgotten dream), the poet suddenly
introduces the vast but seemingly very distant simile about
how Neptune must have felt when the Argo first sailed over him.
At first sight it seems quite out of the picture; and yet for
the imaginative it is right on the spot.  Now there seem to be a
number of these abrupt and abysmal irrelevancies in Dante's poetry,
and, indeed, in all great poetry.  They seem to be suggesting
a vivid image by suddenly introducing a totally different image.
Instead of saying that Beatrice looked beautiful, Dante says that he felt
like Glaucus when he ate the grass that made him seafellow of the gods.
I do not know why that dim heathen dream delights me, but it does;
much more, probably, than the best direct description of
Beatrice's beauty.  It seems as if the sudden presentation of some
quite remote vision, as imaginative as the main image, completes it
and makes it convincing.  There are many examples in other poets,
including the rather hackneyed example of Keats, when he broke
off a reasonably intelligent discourse on the nightingale to talk
about perilous seas and magic casements, with which nightingales
have nothing whatever to do.  Like Dante, he had got beyond himself,
and irrelevancy was the only expression of imagination.
But there is something else in it relevant to Mr. Eliot's thesis.
This summoning of remote symbols, this calling of spirits from the
vasty deep, like the sea-green Glaucus into the presence of Beatrice,
does suggest something involved in the theology of the matter.
It suggests that all beautiful images are shadows of the one real beauty,
and can be, in a sense, shifted or interchanged for its service.
It prevents mere fixed idolatry of one shadow in one minor,
as if it were the origin of all.  Beatrice is to be loved because she
is beautiful; but she is beautiful because there is behind her a many
sided mystery of beauty, to be seen also in the grass and the sea,
and even in the dead gods.  There is a promise in and yet beyond
all such pictures; and the poet can see grass or the great sea
or the great ship going over it, hearing a sort of whisper:
`Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty.'

XXI.  On Quacks in the Home

CAN anything be done to dam, not to say damn, the deluge of Quackery
that is now being poured out everywhere to inform what is called
the ignorance of the democracy?  As the term implies, it is not
only democracy that is ignorant.  Those who would inform it are
more ignorant still, or they would not invariably say the democracy
when they mean the demos.  Democracy does not mean the populace,
or even the people; it means government by the people.  Democracy is
a very noble thing, and it does not exist--at any rate at present.
Demos is a very jolly thing in its way, especially when it does
all the things that ideal democrats generally abuse it for doing,
such as drinking, shouting, and going to the Derby.  But, what ever else
it is doing, it is not ruling:  it is not teaching, but being taught.
And there might be a reasonable ease for its being taught,
were it not for the unfortunate fact that it is being taught tosh.
Which brings me back, after this parenthesis on the word democracy,
to the more solemn and sacred subject of quackery.

Quackery is false science; it is everywhere apparent in cheap
and popular science; and the chief mark of it is that men
who begin by boasting that they have cast away all dogmas go on
to be incessantly, impudently, and quite irrationally dogmatic.
Let any one run his eye over any average newspaper or
popular magazine, and note the number of positive assertions
made in the name of popular science, without the least pretence
of scientific proof, or even of any adequate scientific authority.
It is all the worse because the dogmas are generally concerned
with domes tic and very delicate human relations; with heredity
and home environment; and everything that can be coloured by the
pompous and pretentious polysyllables of Psychology and Education.
At least many of the old dogmas, right or wrong, were concerned
with cherubim and seraphim, with lost spirits and beatified souls;
but these dogmas always directly attack fathers and wives
and children, without offering either credentials or evidence.
The general rule is that nothing must be accepted on any ancient
or admitted authority, but everything must be accepted on any new or
nameless authority, or accepted even more eagerly on no authority at all.
It is quite satisfactory, of course, if any nobody says in any newspaper:
`Dr. Binns, of Buffalo, has told us that, while aunts may be fond
of nephews, great-aunts always have an instinctive hatred and aversion
both for nephews and nieces.'  But it is even more convincing than
that if the information is anonymous in every way, and the writer
merely states:  `Recent science has shown that second cousins are
naturally antagonistic, but that in second cousins once removed,
the antagonism is sometimes introverted into suicidal mania.'
Where all these statements come from nobody knows.  Where they
all go to everybody ought to know, since they go to everybody.
But it is in practice very difficult to discover what becomes of them,
and whether they are really treated as wisdom or waste paper.
On the whole, I fear it is more likely that everybody believes them
than that anybody takes the trouble to check them.

This evil is wilder in America, but I doubt if it is worse in America.
It is scattered all over our own Press and public speech, and is all
the more insidious because it is not so much associated with the
conspicuous figures of picturesque charlatans and fantastic prophets,
such as strut in strange plumage about the plains of the West.
Anyhow, it is scattered so widely both here and there that the difficulty
is to pick up any adequate example.  For the triviality of one specimen
does not convey the tremendous and mountainous multitude of specimens.
Here is one example, however, which I find in a periodical
of considerable intellectual pretensions, to judge by its title.
Like most of these professed organs of thought, it is marked
by a complete incapacity for any precision in thinking.
But I mention it, not because it is worse than the rest, but because
it is representative of the rest and all the rest are no better.
The instructor informs us that there can be between parent and child
a negative transference (the intense italics arc his), which seems
to mean, not merely that the child will hate the parent, but that
the child will love somebody who is the opposite of the hated parent.
`Thus a child who is treated coldly by his mother will come
to reject all people like his mother and seek for her opposite.
We will say the mother is good, honest, moral, even pious.
The boy will gravitate to some one crooked, immoral, or even wicked,
in short, his mother's goodness may send him to the devil,
though all the time she may be wondering why her excellent precepts,
her discipline, her goodness are failing to develop like traits
in her son.'

You will note the utter chaos of terminology and definition,
even in these few lines.  Some of us, to begin with, might hesitate
to insist on the goodness of a mother who treated a child coldly.
But what is meant by the mother being good, as distinct from her
being moral?  What is meant by the mother's mysterious rival
being immoral, as distinct from being wicked?  And what in
the name of goodness (or morality) is meant by the mysterious
word `even', which is reserved only for wickedness and for piety?
The transference of these thoughts, from writer to reader,
is a very negative transference indeed.  However, the writer,
having said that the mother's goodness, which seems to be the same
as her coldness, may send the boy to the devil, goes on to say
that it may be a good thing that he should go to the devil;
in which case it was presumably a good thing that the mother should
be cold.  Revolt, we are told, sometimes leads to new ways of life,
and it may be highly satisfactory that the boy should seek for the
opposite of his mother.  But what is the opposite of your mother?
As a point of logic, it seems rather subtle; nor does the logician
here instructing us give us very much help.  `A rebel boy may,
of course, become, like the proverbial minister's son, a good-for-naught
or a crook; on the other hand, a boy like Balzac who hated his
practical father, became a great novelist--his father's opposite.
Or in a different way, Beethoven, whose father was a poor fiddler,
a drunkard and ne'er-do-well, became one of the great composers of
the world, doggedly determined to protect his mother and be as unlike
his father as possible.'  If that was his object, we can hardly say
that he succeeded very well.  I am not quite sure what is the opposite
of a poor fiddler, but certainly it is not a great composer.
There may be many a great composer who has been a poor fiddler,
and many a poor fiddler who may yet be a great composer.
The same mysterious use of the word `opposite' darkens the other
instance given from the career of Balzac.  I cannot understand why,
in logic, a great novelist is the exact contrary of a practical father.
I do not see why any child may not happen to rejoice in the possession
of a great practical novelist-father. The children of Sir Walter Scott,
for instance, to a great extent did so, despite the accident which
ruined his later fortunes.  But it is not only false in the typical
case of Scott, it is far from true even in the actual case of Balzac.
Balzac had a decidedly `practical' side to him; he was not only busy,
but business-like, in his own way; and, anyhow, all these
crude contrasts about complex characters are all nonsense.
Balzac did not become a great novelist because his father had annoyed
him with practicality; he became a great novelist because he was
a great man.  Beethoven did not succeed because his father drank;
it is much more likely that he was a composer for the same reason
that made his father a fiddler.  These are only a few random examples
of these random statements which are thrown about everywhere,
that the people may learn Science from men who have never learnt Logic.
Now that everybody is talking about the public being informed of this
or that, is there any way of stopping the public being misinformed
in this endless and exuberant fashion?

XXII.  On a Generally Accepted Mistake

THE current cant, which is a cant against cant, has produced
a crop of modern proverbs, or phrases, which everybody repeats
for the hundredth time and nobody examines for the first time,
or they would instantly be found to be false.  A typical case is that
which we have all heard again and again in some such form as this:
`In every age people have thought their own time prosaic
and only the past poetical.  If you think the medieval or any
other period picturesque, that is only the glamour of antiquity;
men in those days felt about them as you do about these days.
Their costumes and customs were as dull and trivial to them as yours
are to you.'  The maxim appeals in many ways to the modern mind;
it merges something with something else; it levels downwards;
it contradicts the claims of chivalry and religious devotion;
it is comforting and it is entirely untrue.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling, always the poet of this popular modernity,
has summarized the notion admirably in a poem about Romance being
at all times actually in the present and apparently in the past--
a poem beginning, I think:

    `Farewell, Romance,' the cavemen cried,
    With bone and flint he went away.

I need hardly say that there is not a grain of anything remotely
resembling evidence that the cavemen ever cried anything of the sort.
It is one of the thousand things which are said about them
because there is no evidence either way.  But there are tons
of evidence that the earliest men whose motives we can follow
regarded their own rituals and traditions as reasonably dignified.
There have been periods in which poets and satirists have
said that society was degenerating through luxury or laxity,
and many periods in which they were perfectly right in saying so.
There have been some periods--not very many--in which men have
been intensely interested in some special period of the past.
So the men of the Renaissance vaguely regarded antiquity as a
heroic age.  But they did not regard their own as a prosaic age.
Shakespeare might be thrilled by Plutarch's tales of great men
in togas and tunics; but that did not prevent him from conceiving
Hamlet as an ordinary Elizabethan gentleman, fencing with rapier
and dagger, wearing probably a ruff and almost certainly a beard.
Every modern man, when he first heard of Hamlet in modern dress,
felt a faint shiver of doubt; even if he was sympathetic,
he feared that it might be comic.  But Shakespeare probably
did conceive Hamlet in modern dress--in his modern dress.
And there is nothing to show that he thought it in the least comic.

The truth is that no other age except the nineteenth century
(and perhaps our little bit of the twentieth) ever did regard
its own dress and habits as ugly and undignified.  The thing can
be tested in a hundred ways, and one is even tolerably familiar.
Sensational French artists, in the nineteenth century, deliberately
and defiantly painted pictures from the Gospel in modern dress,
with Christ standing among men in trousers and top-hats. It
was purposely done to `shock' the Salon; needless to say,
it would have been far too shocking for the Royal Academy.
Yet it was not the first time the thing had been done.
It was only the first time it had been thought shocking.
There is not a single one of the previous epochs of Christian art,
from the stiffest primitive Byzantine to the last realism of the Venetians
or Dutch, when artists had not painted the Gospel scenes with the dress
and habits of their own time.  It is not, in plain fact, a question of why
men think the present fashion ugly and the past fashion beautiful.
It is a question of why they think this of trousers and top-hats,
when they did not think it of trunk-hose or togas or tunics.
Many subtle explanations might be suggested; but I incline myself
to suspect that the dark secret can, after all, be stated more simply.
Might I tentatively suggest that top-hats and trousers give us
this uncanny impression of ugliness because they are ugly?
Might I suggest that the mercantile nineteenth century thought
itself hideous because it was hideous?--and the perception did
credit to its acumen and even to its humility.

In short, there was a moment in the middle of the nineteenth century
which was the midnight of artistic instinct, just as there was a moment
about the middle of the ninth century which was the midnight of law
and organization.  It was blackest in a commercial country like England,
which was only saved by treating itself as comic because it
could not treat itself as dignified.  It produced, for instance,
the figure of the policeman, who was so comic that he had to be put
at once into a pantomime, because he could not be put into a pageant.
But almost any other age or country would have clad and armed
the city guard so as to be an ornament to any pageant.  Our age
was ugly and undignified; our nation was redeemed by the national
sense of humour that at least would not pretend to be dignified.
The things of that period are all stamped with the insignia of indignity.
It is not true that this is affected by it being a past or a
present period.  Mr. Kipling himself in the poem quoted, gave the
case away by saying that `Romance brought up the nine-fifteen',
implying that the clerks in the train did not yet realize their
own romance.  But since that was written steam has grown old
compared to petrol, as stage-coaches grew old compared to steam.
Yet taking a third-class ticket at Euston Station is not much
more wildly poetic now than it was when railways ruled the land.
Steam may grow stale, but it does not grow specially poetical.
If the old coach was faintly poetical, it was because a faint
tradition of quite another sort lingered with the ancient echoes
of the horse and of the horn.  If the railway carriage does not turn
into a romantic ruin before our eyes, it is because there lingers
in it a nameless something of the nineteenth century:  something that
was proud of being prosaic and rigidly refuses to be anything else.
It is the stamp of that particularly barbarous interlude:
the only age in history when men dared not put the Twelve Apostles
in modern dress.

This particular matter, in which the medieval world differed from
the modern, must be clearly understood to start with, for instance,
as one of the conditions governing The Canterbury Tales.
The creative imagination of Chaucer could do much; it could do much
more than it is commonly credited with doing; but it could hardly
have bridged the abyss between the sublime and the ridiculous
which yawned in the imagination of a man of the nineteenth century.
Chaucer did not regard his own age as comic and commonplace.
He regarded some people in it as comic, and some, perhaps, as commonplace;
but the clothes and externals of these people could be used
just as easily to express what was most imaginative and ideal.
The Knight as described, might have figured in any medieval
picture as kneeling all clad in iron on one side of an enthroned
Virgin and Child; his crusading spirit belongs altogether to that
more remote region of delicate distances and golden clouds.
But he is not out of the picture of The Canterbury Tales,
nor of any medieval picture in which there might be grotesque dwarfs
or gambolling dogs.  But he would be out of the picture called
`The Derby Day', by Frith.  That picture contains considerable variety;
but it does not contain the Knight of The Canterbury Tales.
For `The Derby Day' was painted at that midnight moment of art when
even the artist did not think that the world he saw was artistic.
This unnatural sense of ugliness is so much our immediate inheritance
that there are ordinary words that have never recovered from it.
The very word `hat' has a hazy air of farce about it;
mentioned by itself it suggests first the hat of Charlie Chaplin
or the admirable song of `Where Did You Get that Hat?'  The first
lesson in medievalism is to understand that Chaucer did not feel
about the word `hood' as we do about the word `hat'. He knew
there were knavish people who carried two faces under one hood;
but the one face might be that of Friar Francis as well as of Friar Tuck.
A halo round a hood did not seem queer, like a halo round a hat,
for those who think only of modern hats.  There had been plenty
of preposterous fashions among the rich in Chaucer's time, but their
very limitations to the rich had left the landscape and colour-scheme
of medievalism more or less what it is in the simplest medieval pictures.
There was preposterous costume in that age, but he did not
think all costume preposterous because it was of that age.
He was as ready to be humorous in verse as any serious poet
who ever lived, but his head was not filled with an endless,
derisive echo of `Where Did You Get that Hood?'

XXIII.  On the Later Portions of Poems

SOMETIMES I have a dark suspicion that there are many poems,
and perhaps prose competitions also, which people think they know
when they know only the first few lines.  Possibly this might explain
the sinister haste and eagerness with which the great Epic Poets
cram into the first few lines a statement of the whole story,
which they intend to tell in the ensuing twelve books.
They always begin with a summary of this kind, perhaps because they
have a craven fear that many of their readers will not read any more.
Everybody knows the first three lines of Paradise Lost:

    Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
    Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 
    Brought death into the world and all our woe.

But I strongly suspect that there is a sudden and enormous falling off
in the numbers of those who could quote the fourth line.  And Milton
may himself have paused at that point, and heaved a sigh of relief,
to think that he had got the whole story packed pretty thoroughly into
the three lines, even if all his readers refused to read him any more.
He had successfully informed the public of the incident called
`The Fall of Man', had explained its connexion with the fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge, and attached to it all the results
of the doctrine of Original Sin.  He did not, however, stop here,
and leave this little trifle as a sort of epigram or short lyric.
He went on for quite a long time; and it must have been with a sense
of relief, not unmingled with fatigue, that he reached at last
that quiet and beautiful ending, and saw the exiles, hand in hand,
with faltering steps and slow, through Eden take their solitary way.
It is perhaps an advantage to the epic poets that their story,
as a rule, is already more or less known to the public; just as a
considerable number of people have heard the story of Adam and Eve.
All adventure stories, in Stevenson's phrase, begin to end well;
and in the greatest of adventure stories Ulysses is obviously meant
to get home at last; nor are there many people who need to read
to the end of the Iliad to find out what happened to Hector.
In the case of longer and more elaborate, not to say more entangled,
poems, like those of Ariosto and Spenser, it is legitimate
to doubt whether everybody does know what happened to anybody.
Lord Macaulay was the most persistent of readers, with the most
perfect of memories; yet it is admitted that he came a cropper,
or fell out of the race, in the forests of the Faërie Queene.
He said that few readers were in at the death of the Blatant Beast,
and if he had been there himself he would have known that the Beast
does not even die.  But while this lack of final perseverance
is common in the case of the complicated epics, and not uncommon
in that of the simpler epics, it may seem almost cynical
to suggest that it is sometimes true even of shorter poems.
It seems heartless to suggest that somebody may have fainted
before he got to the end of `We Are Seven'.  It is awful to think
that some critic may have been so fastidious as to be unable
to support more than two lines of `The Village Blacksmith'.
And yet I fancy there are cases in which something like this is true;
and I came across one recently, or rather I only recently fancied
that I saw the true meaning of it.

Everybody quotes the opening lines of Shelley's fine chorus of `Hellas'.
And everybody quotes them as the expression of Shelley's heroic hope
for the human race, his idealism and his optimism about his ideals,
his radiant faith in a final fulfilment in which humanity should
be happy and free

    The world's great age begins anew,
    The golden years return.

And I suspect that of these a very considerable number have not read,
or do not remember, or did not understand, the curious breaking-point
which is the point of the poem.  I have read it hundreds of times myself,
but I confess that it was not until lately that I saw its
full meaning, in connexion with cosmic and philosophical theories.
I dare say every body else who has read it understood it much better
and more immediately; I am not setting up as a discoverer, but I do think
it curious that the discovery has not been more often rediscovered.
Shelley's poem mounts steadily in an ascending curve of choral
thanksgiving to Nature for a new and glorious renovation of all things;
and then, when it comes to its highest note of triumph, it breaks.
The poet cries, with something like horror, that we must look
no further and foresee no more:

    O, drain not to the dregs the urn 
    Of bitter prophecy.

It is obvious, to put it mildly, that something has occurred
to him to put him out.  And though all readers must have realized
at least that, I fancy there have been a considerable number
of quoters who were not readers.  And I do not think that Shelley's
name would have been so innocently and irrevocably bound up
with ideas of Progress and Perfectibility and A Good Time Coming,
if every body had instantly realized to what he really referred.

This very obvious reflection, which must have occurred to hundreds
of people, occurred to me when I was in the act of reading that
very remarkable historical study called Progress and Religion,
by Christopher Dawson, which Messrs.  Sheed & Ward published some
little time ago.  It contains, among many other interesting things,
a very complete account of that extraordinary theory of Recurrence,
which many modern as well as ancient philosophers have held, but to
which the ancient philosophers gave the name of `The Great Year'.
The theory, of course, is broadly this:  that when all
possible permutations and combinations have been exhausted,
the cosmic system will of its nature have to begin all over again
and repeat everything we know exactly as we have known it.
This will happen again and again for ever; for the same logic that brings
the repetition must also bring the repetition of the repetition.
And, indeed, it is odd to notice how the philosophers repeat themselves
even in describing the repetition.  Mr. Dawson quotes the case of a Greek
sage who said, `This staff that I am holding I shall hold again,'
and the case of a Socialist thinker who said, `This pen I am holding
I shall hold again,' in almost exactly the same form of words.
Every detail of every life will return with exactitude, and return
again and again to eternity.  And everybody knows how Nietzsche
uttered this revelation, with something almost like a howl,
from the last high and crazy peak of his strange existence;
about the time, indeed, when he collapsed into complete insanity.
I do not know whether he went mad because he believed the theory,
or only believed the theory because he went mad.  But it always struck
me as an almost startling example of how a deathly fatalism overcomes
the most lively sceptic.  For Nietzsche's views, in his best days,
were wild enough, but wild at least on the side of Will and of Liberty.
To see him entangled in that old necessitarian net is like seeing
a great spider's web entangle an eagle.

What interests me here is that it entangled the skylark as well
as the eagle.  It is surely obvious that Shelley, in the rise
and fall of those remarkable lines of the Hellas Chorus,
is referring to the old pagan conception of The Great Year.
He feels that it justifies him in saying that the world's
great age will begin anew and the golden years return.
But he does not want to drain the urn of prophecy to the dregs,
because the same wheel of fate that has brought round the golden years
will bring round also the leaden and the iron years; and we shall
all be forced to repeat all the crimes and tyrannies of history.
Without being unduly controversial, I think I may say that it
is not a cheery prospect.  And I am exceedingly proud to observe
that it was before the coming of Christianity that it flourished,
and after the neglect of Christianity that it returned.

XXIV.  On the Romance of Childhood

I AM just old enough to remember the world before telephones.
And I remember that my father and my uncle fitted up with their own
metal and chemicals the first telephone I ever saw:  a miniature
telephone reaching from the top bedroom under the roof to the remote
end of the garden.  I was really impressed imaginatively by this;
and I do not think I have ever been so much impressed since by
any extension of it.  The point is rather important in the whole
theory of imagination.  It did startle me that a voice should sound
in the room when it was really as distant as the next street.
It would hardly have startled me more if it had been as distant
as the next town.  It does not startle me any more if it
is as distant as the next continent.  The miracle is over.
Thus I admired even the large scientific things most on a small scale.
So I always found that I was much more attracted by the microscope
than the telescope.  I was not overwhelmed in childhood by being
told of remote stars which the sun never reached, any more than
in manhood by being told of the empire on which the sun never set.
I had no use for an empire that had no sunsets.  But I was inspired and
thrilled by looking through a little hole at a crystal like a pin's head,
and seeing it change pattern and colour like a pygmy sunset.

I have already picked two quarrels with better men than myself,
who were enthusiasts for childish romance, upon the reality of the
romance of childhood.  First, I disagree with them when they treat
the infantile imagination as a sort of dream; whereas I remember it
rather as a man dreaming might remember the world where he was awake.
And second, I deny that children have suffered under a tyranny
of moral tales.  For I remember the time when it would have seemed
the most hideous tyranny to take my moral tales away from me.
And, in order to make this clear, I must contradict yet another
common assumption in the romantic description of the dawn of life.
The point is not very easy to explain; indeed, I have spent
the greater part of my life in an unsuccessful attempt to explain it.
Upon the cartloads of ill-constructed books in which I
have completely failed to do so I have no desire to dwell.
But perhaps, as a general definition, this might be useful; or, if not
as a definition, at least a suggestion.  From the first vaguely,
and of late more and more clearly, I have felt that the world
is conceiving liberty as something that merely works outwards.
And I have always conceived it as something that works inwards.

The ordinary poetic description of the first dreams of life is
a description of mere longing for larger and larger horizons.
The imagination is supposed to work towards the infinite;
though in that sense the infinite is the opposite of the imagination.
For the imagination deals with an image, and an image is in its
nature a thing that has an outline, and therefore a limit.
Now I will maintain, paradoxical as it may seem, that the child
does not desire merely to fall out of the window, or even to fly
through the air or to be drowned in the sea.  When he wishes to go
to other places, they are still places, even if nobody has ever
been there.  But, in truth, the case is much stronger than that.
It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively
in love with limits.  He uses his imagination to invent
imaginary limits.  The nurse and the governess have never told
him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones.
He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving-stones,
in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself.
I played that kind of game with myself all over the mats and boards
and carpets of the house; and, at the risk of being detained during
His Majesty's pleasure, I will admit that I often play it still.
In that sense I have constantly tried to cut down the actual space
at my disposal; to divide and subdivide, into these happy prisons,
the house in which I was quite free to run wild.

I believe that there is in this psychological freak a truth without
which the whole modern world is missing its main opportunity.
If we look at the favourite nursery romances, or at least if we
have the patience to look at them twice, we shall find that they all
really support this view, even when they have largely been accepted
as supporting the opposite view.  The charm of Robinson Crusoe
is not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island,
but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it.
It is that fact which gives an intensive interest and excitement
to all the things that he had with him on the island; the axe
and the parrot and the guns and the little hoard of grain.
The tale of Treasure Island is not the record of a vague desire
to go on a sea voyage for one's health.  It ends where it began;
and it began with Stevenson drawing a map of the island,
with all its bays and capes cut out as clearly as fretwork.
The eternal interest of the Noah's Ark, considered as a toy,
consists in its complete suggestion of compactness and isolation;
of creatures so comically remote and fantastic being all locked up
in one box; as if Noah had been told to pack up the sun and moon
with his luggage.  In other words, it is exactly the same game that I
have played myself, by piling all the things I wanted on a sofa,
and imagining that the carpet around me was the surrounding sea.

This game of self-limitation is one of the secret pleasures of life.
As it says in the little manuals about such sports, the game is
played in several forms.  One very good way of playing it is to look
at the nearest bookcase and wonder whether you would find sufficient
entertainment in that chance collection, even if you had no other books.
But always it is dominated by this principle of division and restriction,
which begins with the game played by the child with the paving-stones.
But I dwell upon it here because it must be understood as some thing
real and rooted, so far as I am concerned, in order that the other
views I have offered about these things may make any sort of sense.
If anybody chooses to say that I have founded all my social philosophy
on the antics of a baby, I am quite satisfied to bow and smile.

I have no great hopes that my own private Utopia, the Utopia of
subdivision and self-limitation, is likely to be rapidly established
in the real world.  I do not immediately expect that the landlord
with five hundred acres will instantly cut it down to fifty acres,
and stand in startled admiration of the fresh and pleasing shape,
the entirely new and attractive map or outline of his domains.
I hardly suppose that he will be romantically enraptured, all at once,
at the discovery of the enchanted island that I have cut out for him,
out of the dull and dreary sea of his solid landed estate.
I doubt whether the simple kindly act of stealing half his books will
drive him to reading the other half; I am not sure that the traditional
childish present, of a little garden marked out in the middle
of his large garden, will instantly change him to a little child.
But I do know that great historic changes always begin at exactly
the opposite end to the end the world is pursuing, and that the
human search, so long turned outwards, will turn inwards very soon.

XXV.  On the Renaissance

IN Rome a man feels suddenly the paradox of the Renaissance.
It was a Christian miracle if it called up a Pagan god.  It was in
itself a Christian notion that, if the dead could return, they would
not be shadows from Hades, but human beings from Heaven or Hell.
But as a fact, of course, the god who rose again was not pagan.
He could not be, since he was carved by Christians, even by bad
and blasphemous Christians.  Something that had not been in heathen
antiquity had entered the very blood and bones of the human race;
and it entered equally into the stone and clay of all that the human
race could make.  Without it, even the worst of men would now have felt
suddenly cold and strange, like fishes, or, rather, like fossils.
To be a Greek god was as impossible as to be a fossil, though both
might be beautiful mouldings or even beautiful models in stone.
To be completely heathen was no longer to be completely human.

The examples are obvious.  Many people must have pointed out that
Michelangelo was really more like Michael the Angel than Apollo
the Archer.  It was not for nothing that his very name is Hebrew
and Greek as well as Italian.  Every one must have noticed that
there is, in some mysterious way, more colour in the monochrome
marbles and bronzes of the Renaissance than in many of the cold,
clay-like pigments that were called colours in the pagan houses
of Pompeii.  Even where the work is materially a matter of light
and shade, it is not something put down in black and white:
the light is richer and the shadow glows.  Of course, a great part
of the problem here is connected with modern religious controversies.
Because modern pagans wanted to go back to paganism, in the sense
of destroying Christianity, they said that the sixteenth-century
artists wanted it too, though there was not one of them that would
not have drawn a sword or dagger and destroyed the critic who told
him that he wanted to destroy the Cross.  Benvenuto Cellini would
have been as prompt as Giotto; for the Christian Church is not made
for good men, but for men.

The difficulty of history is that historians seldom see the simple things,
or even the obvious things, because they are too simple and obvious.
It is sometimes said of the pictures of the Renaissance artists,
especially of the pictures of Rubens, that we ought to stand
far back in order to take in the whole stupendous design,
and not be annoyed because some detail is technically careless
or emotionally coarse.  It is probably true of more than one
Renaissance picture of the Resurrection; and it is certainly true
of that general Resurrection that is called the Renaissance.
There has been too much bickering over bits of the astonishing business;
too much casuistry about whether this or that painter in this
or that point surrendered to heathenism, or merely to human nature.
The whole story consists of two staggering truths.  First, that these
men did really raise the dead.  They did call up all heathenism,
which might seem about as safe as calling up all hell.
And, second, that they did really in a manner convert and christen
the dead; that they did baptize all that bodily manifestation
and materialization into the body of Christ.  Even when it had been
and was no more, it did become something that it had not been.
They paraded before the world a wild hypothetical pageant of what
old Greece and Rome would have been if they had not been pagan.
To do this with any dead society is an amazing achievement.
To copy the old body in any case is amazing; to copy the old body,
and also put in a new soul, is amazing beyond praise, beyond question,
and certainly beyond quibbling.  The fact is so familiar that it
has ceased to amaze; the only chance of conveying it would be
to take some fantastic parallel in modern and ancient things.
We should be mildly surprised to hear that the English in Egypt
had reconstructed for themselves the ancient Egyptian civilization;
that all the proclamations of Lord Lloyd had been carved on obelisks
in Egyptian hieroglyphics; that Lord Cromer had been preserved on
the premises in the form of a mummy; or that Lord Kitchener at Cairo
had religiously gone the round of worshipping a series of stuffed cats.
But we should be surprised, with something less of mildness, if we were
told that all this was done in such a way as to cause no embarrassment,
or even amusement, to the English gentlemen who were doing it;
and who managed to do it without the least sense that their code
of manners was altered, or that their religion, when they had any,
was suffering neglect.  Just as it would be a remarkable thing
for men to become ancient Egyptians and yet remain modern Englishmen,
so it was a remarkable thing when these men became ancient Greeks
and yet remained medieval Christians.

There are many morals to the story; but one must be manifest in
the mere word I have used.  If the medieval religion had really been
such a silly superstition as some of its simpler enemies represent,
it quite certainly would have been swallowed up for ever in
such an earthquake of enlightenment as the great Renaissance.
The fact that the vision of a superb and many-sided human culture
did not disturb the fundamental ideas of these late medieval
Christians has a simple explanation:  that the ideas are true.
The application of these true ideas in medieval times had been
very much hampered by local ignorance and feudal prejudice.
But the truths were so true that they would have survived,
in really thinking men, through ten Renaissances and twenty Revivals
of Learning.  We see this vividly in the intensely intellectual
character of the religious conviction in men like Michelangelo
and even Leonardo da Vinci.  Nobody knew better than they that
Christianity is really wiser, and even wider, than Paganism;
that Aquinas was not only better but broader than Aristotle.
Not from such men came the clumsy denials of the deep dogmas of
the Faith.  Michelangelo was not the man to dispute that the truly
divine humanity would be crucified; nor could Raphael be reckoned
on for a breezy protest against the respect felt for the Madonna.
But if the whole thing had been a dirty asceticism of the desert,
the mere monkey tricks of the Manichees, it would have fallen like
filthy rags from men who had seen the grace of the Greek athletes.
If it had been only a worship of dolls with tinsel crowns,
it would have looked a paltry and pygmy affair in the presence
of the great head of Jupiter.  But the real men of the Renaissance
knew that, as a matter of fact, there was much more humanity
in the rules for the brethren gathered by St. Francis than
in the rules for the boys beaten before the altar of Diana;
and that, as a matter of fact, the Church had a much more logical
idea about the exact position of Jesus in Heaven than the heathens
had ever had about the exact position of Jupiter on Olympus.
It was the intellectual value of the creed that preserved it through
any revolution of aesthetic values, just as it preserves it still
amid the wildest changes in aesthetic taste to-day. Michelangelo
went on being a Christian then, just as Mr. Eric Gill goes on being
a Christian now, because a man may be original without being
separated from the origins; and because a man may be able to think,
even if he can also draw.

I would not be provocative, but I think this rather neglected truth
is due to these great artists, when so many people imagine them
to have been Pagans and some can even imagine them as Puritans.
It seems clear to me that those despised medieval superstitions,
suited only for barbarians like Dante and St. Francis, were exactly
the ideas that did remain rooted in the most civilized centres of
the world, when they were disputed in the more barbarous provinces.
When we consider how exciting the destructive quest of the intellect
really is (though it is generally people totally devoid of
intellect who say so), it is really rather remarkable that there
was comparatively so little of it in these great adventurers,
who were devoted to the creative quest of the imagination.
When we consider how wild they often were in the matter of morals
(though it is generally the sort of moderns who have no morals
at all who darkly denounce the immorality of these later men
of the medieval decline) it is really rather remarkable that they
kept as much as they did of the faith from which the morals grew--
or ought to have grown.  When we consider that it really is a fact
(though the first fool in the street will tell you so)
that scepticism had begun to appear here and there even among
priests and bishops, it is really singular, upon the balance,
that it had not appeared more among painters and sculptors.
We may talk, as they sometimes may have talked, about reviving
the gods of Greece.  But Moses is Moses and David is David,
and a Pagan would have stood puzzled before them.

XXVI.  On the Laureateship

IT is often said that the office of Poet Laureate is not fitted
to our times.  This is true; it is perhaps the most compact
condemnation of our times.  If we want to know exactly
what is really lacking in current culture, we had better ask
why it cannot support the idea of a real Poet Laureate.
It is enough merely to look at the words which make up the title.
Whenever it is suggested that some little modern man of letters,
in a tail-coat and trousers, should be solemnly presented
with a Crown of Laurel, everybody laughs, as if it were a joke.
But it is not the laurel, but the little man, that is a joke.
It is not the wreath of leaves, the lines of which are still as free
and rhythmic and adapted to decoration as when they decorated a hundred
marble monuments or golden frescoes; it is not the wreath that
is ridiculous.  It is the tail-coat and trousers it is the Modern Man;
it is the Spirit of Our Time, to which the Laureateship is,
we have agreed, so unsuited.  As is the Laurel to modern dress,
so is the Laureateship to modern manners.  Nobody sees anything silly
in those leaves when they cluster round the hood of some bust of Dante.
Nobody saw anything silly in them when, at the high moment of the
medieval renaissance, they were bound about the brows of Petrarch.
It was partly that the same scheme of decoration, more or less
unconsciously, ran through the whole world of costume and ornament.
It was much more because, in those dim and barbarous ages,
people did not think it undignified to be dignified.
They were so strangely constituted that they laughed at ugly things,
and not only at beautiful things.  A gentleman who wished to be stared
at or admired dressed in purple and cloth of gold, trailing trappings
that went in great curves like those of a comet or a cataract.
With such fashions a crown was actually a crown; it crowned the edifice;
it was a crest or culmination of lines rising to and demanding such
a diadem.  Nowadays, by the tradition of the nineteenth century,
a gentle man dresses like a comic waiter in a third-rate farce,
and is surprised that the bay-wreath looks grotesque on his head.
But it is not the bay-wreath that looks grotesque.

That is a parable of the whole practical problem.
And it always is a problem, whether it is worth while to keep
the habit when it no longer makes the monk, or one small rag torn
from the habit when the monk no longer knows how to make himself.
The psychology of the Laureateship, dating as it does from
the days when Petrarch was crowned with laurel, implies a number
of things not now vivid to any very large number of people.
It implies the notion of a crowd being excited but quite serious:
like devotees before a sacrament or children before a fairy-play.
There is still a certain kind of popular enthusiasm, but it is not
an enthusiasm for enthusiasts.  It might almost be called an affection
for anti-enthusiasts; an affection for mockers and cynics and artists
in the antic view of life.  They might be as much thrilled by meeting
Charlie Chaplin as any medieval Italians by meeting Petrarch.
But though they might be cheering without jeering, they would
be cheering somebody who jeers:  who jeers admirably at himself
and this wicked world.  Nobody can expect that sort of popular
artist to wear a laurel round his remarkable bowler hat.
But it has been possible, and it will be possible again,
for the public to rejoice seriously, and even solemnly.
In those older days the very word `solemn' went with the word `joyous';
and `a high solemnity' was almost always an affair of dancing
and junketing.  A modern crowd would cheer the critical faculty,
as in Mr. Chaplin; it would not cheer the creative faculty, as in Dante.
And unless we keep the idea of a high solemnity, or public function
of state, like the famous scene of the tribute to Petrarch,
there is indeed little point in keeping merely an office and a name.
As we do not preserve the coronation it may seem idle to preserve
the crown.  Nevertheless, if there were a crown, I think I should
preserve it--among the Crown Jewels.  I should not attach any man
to it, but leave it there and wait for better times.

For my part, though I have indulged in any amount of buffoonery,
I regret the new and solitary pre-eminence of the buffoon.
I regret the fact that the new popular hero must not be heroic
as well as popular.  He must not receive from the State a serious
tribute for revealing a serious truth.  When, for the moment,
the most intelligent art is the most flippant art, it will mean
a certain abdication of the old claims of the artist.  But it may mean
worse things than that.  When people begin to ignore human dignity,
it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.
The pagan state, in which the artist is only a buffoon, will soon
resemble the ancient pagan state in which he was only a slave.
I am all for playing the goat; I am charitably disposed even
to those enacting the funny dog; I have myself appeared more
than once in public in the character of a performing elephant.
But if we allow the Image of Man to fade away altogether in these
animal antics, if it vanishes amid mere mockery and scepticism, the human
being will find himself something very much worse than fair game.
He may ultimately be tethered like the goat, or chained up like the dog,
or ridden and prodded like the elephant.

The man who has exhibited himself--as in so much of modern prose
and verse--in every attitude of abject and dishonourable ignominy will
find it very much harder to spring up straight of a sudden and defend
his honour, if his real intellectual and spiritual honour is attacked.
Among the old ways of preserving this sense of honour was the system
of honours; and, though most of them are now pretty thoroughly
dishonoured, nobody suggests that the Poet Laureateship has been sold.
Anyhow, among the wider ways of doing it was what may be called
the Pageant of Poetry; the public acknowledgment of the Poet,
`to whom the high gods gave of right their thunders and their laurels
and their light'.

XXVII On Living for Posterity

WE all remember the story of that excess of aspiration,
in the sense of the use of aspirates, which led somebody to say
of somebody, `If you give him a Hinch, he'll take a Hell.'
Some recent extensions of social liberty have made the accident
of the last word sound strangely like an omen.  But what strikes me
as even more curious is this:  that there are some people who are
perpetually demanding an ell but cannot be persuaded to accept an inch.
They demand certain forms of social liberty in the large,
but refuse them in the small, and especially in the solid.
They are like people who should furiously demand a hundred head
of cattle, and then flee in terror at the first appearance of a cow.
Or they are like a king who should claim to rule the waves
and be afraid to have a well or a pond in his own garden.
The little more, and how little it is and how lightly they will take
the larger responsibility!  The little less, and what miles they
will run in order to be worlds away!

For instance, I read in any number of New Leaders and Labour weeklies,
and all sorts of papers supposed to be both progressive and popular,
that the working-classes will now take over the government of
the country; that the majority of manual workers will have their
proper proportional right to rule in all matters of education and
humanitarian reform; that the poor will at last inherit the earth.
But if I say that one workman is capable of deciding about the education
of one child, that he has the right to select a certain school
or resist a certain system, I shall have all those progressive papers
roaring at me as a rotten reactionary.  Why the workman should be
clever enough to vote a curriculum for everybody else's children,
but not clever enough to choose one for his own children, I cannot
for the life of me imagine.  If I say that a decent costermonger
is to be trusted with a donkey, or a decent rat-catcher with a dog,
I shall be denounced as an obstacle to humanitarian legislation.
But there is no objection to trusting a crowd of costermongers
and rat-catchers to decide about the humanitarian legislation.
And what is true of these particular cases of proprietorship
is true of the whole ease of property.  When the meek inherit
the earth, it must only mean that the mob inherits the earth.
It must not mean that the man inherits even the smallest portion
of the earth.  The mob is meek enough, certainly, when it is thus
herded to its pastures by its sociological and educational pastors.
It does not really mean that the many sheep, but that the few shepherds,
will rule over all the meadows.  And when the nomadic shepherd
finds himself confronted with the static or domestic peasant,
with the man who is actually ruling his own small meadow like
a realm, there is always a collision and a sort of civil war
in the country-side. In any case, the original paradox remains:
that it was regarded as a simple thing that all the meadows should
belong to all the men, but a frantic and fantastic thing that any
man should own any meadow.

But there is another ease that is even more curious.
In the works of Mr. Wells, and all the typical Utopias and futuristic
world-systems of recent times, it is incessantly and impressively
repeated that we must live for the Future, for the Young,
for the Rising Generation or the Babe Unborn.  The traditional
obligations of the past are nothing, and even the temporary
contracts and compromises of the present are comparatively little;
but we really do have a duty to the future generations.
It is apparently the only duty that remains.  While we are kicking
our grandfather downstairs, we must take care to be very polite
to our great-great-grandson, who is not yet present; and if a more
enlightened ethic should ever justify us in painlessly poisoning
our mother, it will be well to distract the attention by dreaming
of some perfect Woman of the Future who may never need to be poisoned.
These examples are quoted but lightly and from memory,
but nobody will deny that current culture is in fact full of this
notion of living for posterity.  It is preached as a democratic
doctrine in the democratic organs to which I have referred.
But it is always the People as a whole that is to live for the Posterity
as a whole.

But if we present precisely the same idea, in a present and
practical form, it is called antiquated.  Its practical form
is called Marriage or the Family.  It really does demand that a
man and a woman should live largely for the next generation.
It does demand that they should, to some extent, defer their
personal amusements, such as divorce and dissipation, for the
benefit of the next generation.  And whenever we suggest that,
a wail goes up about the wickedness and cruelty of depriving
the poor dear parents of the innocent gaieties of divorce.
How can a poor father get any real fun out of being divorced,
if his enjoyment is to be dashed by a morbid memory of the existence
of his own son?  Nay, can we even be certain that the mother will
keep up her high standard of dancing all night and every night,
if there is a new-born baby who (with curious taste) is crying for her
all night long?  When the problem of Posterity is presented in this
practical form, poor old Posterity gets the knock pretty badly.
The Present suddenly becomes much more important than the Future;
and the rising generation is a mere drag on the risen generation,
which intends to dance until it drops.  In this case also,
the new thinkers are only thinking of the general, and are afraid
to think of the particular.  Just as the Socialist must not confront
a peasant with one concrete piece of land, so the Sociologist must
not confront the parent with one concrete piece of Posterity.
Otherwise the new parents will fly screaming, and in some cases adopt
measures to ensure that there shall be next to no Posterity at all.

I grieve to say that I am not moved to a profound respect or
admiration for this intellectual compromise.  If the social idealist
would take his inch I might be ready to trust him with his ell.
If he could trust a poor man with the care of a cow or a cottage,
or a common or garden child, I might believe he was sincere in wishing
to trust all poor men with the destiny of all cottages and cows.
As it is, I suspect that he is not going to trust that destiny
to a democracy of poor men, but to an official or oligarch
appointed to organize the poor men.  Similarly, if the new social
philosophies fervently encouraged people to think more about
domesticity and less about divorce, I might believe that they
really were preferring the future generation to their own.
As it is, I think they want to procure all possible pleasures
and amusements for their own, including the mild amusement of
prophesying some Utopia that can only come long after they are dead.
If their novels and newspapers were less filled with the sublime
spiritual liberation of eloping with the chauffeur, and more
filled with the duty and dignity of remaining with the baby,
I might admit that their faces are set towards the Future
and their souls full of the song of `A Good Time Coming'.
As it is, it seems to be an impatient and even pessimistic lyric
about `A Good Time Now'.

I am not at all pharisaical about these weaknesses considered
as weaknesses, but I am rather bored with the pretence that they
are strong with the strength of vigilant Watchers for the Dawn.
And I am increasingly tired of the whole tone of that inverted idealism,
which is terrified when told to make use of a single talent,
but quite confident of its fitness to rule over ten cities.
But I suspect, if I may describe the fashionable mood in terms
of old-fashioned sentiment, that these people are only filling
the Castle of Indolence with the Pleasures of Hope.

XXVIII On Mr Shaw's Puritanism

THERE was a time when I was asked, with quite a curious persistence,
what I thought of Mr. Bernard Shaw and what he thought of
Professor Einstein.  It was especially in connexion with certain
remarks about the nature of Great Men, and his reasons for limiting
the list to some and excluding others.  I had no difficulty at
the time in answering that I thought of Mr. Bernard Shaw very much
as I have always thought of him, and that I shou1d have no difficulty
in admitting him to my list of Great Men, though perhaps my list
might be a little longer, and perhaps a little more liberal than his.
I actually wrote a book about him in the ancient days, and I am
happy to say that he reviewed it himself, with the typical opening:
`This is the best book of criticism that I have yet produced.'
And what I said then is very much what I should say still:
that there is no very fundamental antagonism between Mr. Bernard Shaw
and myself except in one fact--that he is a Puritan and I am at least
relatively a Pagan.  It is true that I have become a Christian;
but that is a thing that happened to quite a large number of Pagans.
Only I never became a Puritan; and it seems to me that Mr. Shaw
never became anything else.

Of course I know that there are a number of things to which his actual
attitude would be merely negative or sceptical as compared with my own;
but those things never affect me as real or ultimate disagreements,
but merely as matters which he does not happen to have understood
even sufficiently to disagree.  They are part of a heritage of
negation from the rebels of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries:
a rebellion that has become almost respectable with age.
It is almost a mark of being behind the times to go on talking merely
of traditional religion.  What we have to deal with in the modern
world is traditional irreligion.  The period between Voltaire
and Bernard Shaw is merely the period of the rise and decline
of something that began as a joke and ended as a prejudice.
Nobody will deny the wit of Shaw, any more than the wit of Voltaire;
but these sceptical or negative notions are not even the jokes of Shaw:
they are merely the prejudices of Shaw.  The jokes of Shaw have
been much more serious and socially useful things, and have been
directed against things much more modern than ecclesiastical
abuses which have long ago been more than sufficiently abused.
They have been directed against the spiritual pride of physical science;
against the Doctor's Dilemma and not merely against the Curate's Egg--
a rather ancient egg which, after all, was always excellent in parts.
They have been directed against the worldliness of San Francisco
rather than the unworldliness of St. Francis.  If he made fun
of America, it was at least at the moment when America was being
taken most seriously, and at the moment when the seriousness was
certainly a form of snobbishness.  I have never been disturbed by his
disbelieving the things he does not understand, and I have always
been delighted with his disbelieving the things he does understand:
such as the Darwinian Theory or the Capitalist State.
I should never be so stupid as to mistake Mr. Bernard Shaw
for an irreligious man.  He seems to me, in a rather special
and vivid sense, to be a religious man.  But there is always that
deeper difference, and it is involved in the nature of the religion.
And if I wanted a profound illustration of the difference that I mean,
whether or no it is a difference I could explain, I could find it
in a remark made in this discussion about Einstein and Great Men:
a remark that may not seem to have anything to do with religion at all.
Mr. Shaw is reported, and I apologize if he is misreported,
as saying that he would hesitate to admit Napoleon into his select
club of heroes; and that `it would have been better for the world
if Napoleon had never lived'.  To which I answer that if Napoleon
had never lived, then certainly Bernard Shaw never would have lived.
At any rate, if Napoleon had not succeeded in being Napoleon, Shaw would
not have succeeded in being Shaw.

For certainly if Napoleon, or some revolutionary soldier nearly as
competent as Napoleon (there may have been one or two others who could
have proved competent), had not appeared to save the French Revolution
from the invading forces of the aristocracies and autocracies, reaction
would have shut down on the first republican hopes like a trap of iron,
and all the democratic dreams that have since filled the intellect
and imagination would have been utterly and perhaps finally destroyed.
All that we call the modern world, with all its good and evil,
was made by Napoleon; at any rate was made possible by Napoleon.
And among the various products of that original revolutionary expansion
was the particular theory of reconstruction which we call Socialism.
I will leave Mr. Shaw to decide whether that particular product is to
be classed among the good or evil products of the French Revolution.
But surely nobody with historical sense can doubt that all these modern
ideals of revolutionary improvement, with the purpose of social
justice or equality, date from the great idealistic movement
at the end of the eighteenth century.  Now I take it as certain
that if the Revolution had not become militant, and been successfully
defended by a man of military genius, it would have been easily
crushed by the old oligarchies and despotic systems; and, having been
easily crushed, would have been easily forgotten.  There would
have remained no legend of revolutionary victory; and therefore,
alas for human nature, very little of revolutionary heroism.
There would probably have remained, for centuries afterwards,
not a gleam of revolutionary hope.  I am merely stating the historical
and especially the practical probabilities.  I do not discuss
here how far the balance would have been for evil or good.
We should doubtless have avoided many annoying forms of anarchical
nonsense such as still manage to live on the tradition of the triumph
of France.  We should have been less troubled with some mistaken
mob movements, and some much more poisonous secret societies.
But we should have missed some good things as well.
We should have missed social reform as the serious preoccupation
of the nineteenth century, we should have missed Socialism,
and we should have missed Shaw.

Now I can heartily respect, and even sympathize with,
some jolly old English Tory who still regards Bonaparte as Boney.
I can understand the genial reactionary, like Mr. Sapsea,
who continues through all continental changes to drink the toast,
`When the French come over, may we meet them at Dover.'
But I should hardly have thought of associating Mr. Sapsea with Mr. Shaw.
And whatever may be the true story of the punishment of St. Helena,
it seems rather hard on Napoleon that he should endure not only an eternal
punishment, but a double punishment:  one from all the reactionaries
he defeated and the other from all the reformers he defended.
It was the expansion of Napoleonic France that established
everywhere the modern theories of civic right and equal opportunity;
and the very name of that justice is the Code Napoleon.
In the face of these facts, I naturally ask myself:  Why does
a man like Mr. Shaw hate Napoleon?  Why does a man like Mr. Wells
hate Napoleon?  The only sincere answer is that it is the mark
of the Nonconformist always to hate Napoleon.

It would take a long time to explain.  A vague notion that a soldier
is a naughty man; that he wears a cocked hat and sometimes even
a cockade or a feather in it; that bodily fighting is always
a blackguardly way of dealing with any position, however provocative;
that soldiering is associated with canteens and cans; these and
a thousand other things have created in the mind of the modern
Puritan the mood of the modern Pacifist.  We can all understand,
and Napoleon himself would entirely understand, the higher sense
in which it may be said that glory is vanity.  But the Puritan
always insists, not that glory is vanity, but that glory is infamy.
He thinks this sort of action, this sort of ambition, not only
the worst but the most horrible; he thinks there is no smell so foul
as the smell of gunpowder.  I think the smell of the hair-oil
of hypocritical peace-mongering infinitely more offensive.
Nobody will accuse Mr. Shaw's work of smelling like that; but there
does come from it sometimes, suddenly, this strange stale smell
of the Puritan; and it is then that I can answer our old question:
Do We Agree?

XXIX.  On the Truth of Legends

I HAVE known all my life what is called the conflict between romance
and realism, and I have always found that it was the realists
who were romancing.  I have found, in a fashion too curious to be
a coincidence, that the romances were generally real after all.
For instance, everybody knows how a boy is told that his boyish
day-dreams are only day-dreams, and will not long survive in daylight;
that his picturesque figures of the Red Indian or the Jolly Tar are only
painted and pasteboard figures out of a toy-theatre, or melodramatic
personalities out of a penny dreadful.  It is taken for granted that
he will begin by believing in them and end by disbelieving in them.
In a number of solid historical cases, I myself began rather early
to disbelieve them, and have come eventually to believe them.
I seriously think that the popular sentiment that created those characters
was often a tradition of truth, where the pedantic cynicism which
destroyed them was often a much more deliberate perversion of truth.
The tradition may have come down rather loosely and vaguely,
through a long line of nurses and grandmothers.  But the nurses
and grandmothers were not paid to tell lies, and they did therefore,
to a considerable and very valuable extent, tell the truth.
The critics and historians were paid to tell lies though they may
not have put the truth to themselves in quite so crude a fashion.
They were academic officials of a certain academic system; achieving a
fame which depended upon a fashion; successful or unsuccessful,
according to the power of a theory; suiting themselves,
consciously or unconsciously, to a certain school; and, when all
is said, living by receiving salaries or selling books.
They had not the disinterestedness or detachment of gossip.
They were not merely mentioning the things they remembered,
but remembering only the things they were supposed to mention.
Their minds had formed a mechanical habit of recording only
the things that were suited to the records, and writing only
the records that were suited to the official record office.
Some of them were stark liars; some of them, which is much more strange
and uncanny, were honest men.  But they were, at best, men telling
untrue stories in the interest of the truth, or what they believed
to be the truth.  They were not ordinary people telling true stories,
merely as stories that were curious because they were true.
It is all the difference between the chronicler and the historian.
And the difference is that the chronicler sometimes told fables;
whereas the historian never tells fables, but only falsehoods.
However this may be, I have known a curious number of cases in
which mere sentimental gossip surrounded my childhood, and serious
historical scholarship surrounded my manhood; and the sentimental
gossip was right.

For instance, it was sentimental gossip that Mary Queen of Scots
was very badly treated; or that Charles the First was to be
pitied or even admired.  I remember loving both the historical
characters as legends, and then learning afterwards that
the legends were entirely legendary.  The historical realists
of that time told me that the attraction of Mary Queen of Scots
was merely that she was much prettier than Queen Elizabeth.
They told me that the charm of the Cavalier consisted only in his
wearing more picturesque clothes than the Puritan.  Those who told me
this were often learned, and those who had left me with the earlier
impression were often ignorant; and I myself was unfathomably ignorant.
I therefore believed what they told me; I proceeded to believe,
to believe blindly, credulously, and in hopeless intellectual servitude;
to believe in the much more fabulous fable, in the legend of the learned.
I believed much more seriously--that is, much more superstitiously--
in the school text-book than I had believed in the old wives' tale.
But the old wife was an old wife by the normal process of becoming
a wife and growing old, and she employed the normal habit of talking
to children about her childhood.  But the schoolmaster was a
professional schoolmaster; the schoolmaster was tied to his school;
the schoolmaster was as much under discipline as the schoolboy.

In the case of Mary Queen of Scots or Charles the First, which I
have mentioned, it is, of course, perfectly true that there are two
sides to the story.  What I complain of in the schoolmaster is that
he always taught only one side of the story.  So, it may be said,
did the nursery story-teller. But her story was a story in the literary
sense of a legend.  His story was a story in the nursery sense of a lie.
It was a lie in the very real sense that he was not merely reporting
what he had heard, but very care fully selecting from what he had read.
Of course, as I say, it is perfectly true that there is a case
for the Calvinists who opposed Mary Stuart, or the later Calvinists
who opposed Charles Stuart.  Of course, it is arguable that Mary Stuart
killed her husband, or that Charles Stuart broke his word.
Of course, it is arguable that it was better for England that the Whigs
should turn it into an aristocracy than that the Stuarts should turn
it into an autocracy.

But that is not the point.  The point is that the ignorant legend
was much more true, as far as it went, than the learned legend
as far as it went.  To paint a portrait of Mary Queen of Scots
as a lovely, unhappy, charming, and cultured lady, brutally baited
by barbarous Puritans and tragically martyred by a jealous
Tudor tyrant, is a process of portraiture very far from complete;
but it is in its way true, even when it is not complete.
To paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth as a prophetic lioness
of Protestantism, upholding the Huguenots out of mere love of
the Holy Scriptures, and brandishing a Bible to cow all the Papists
of the world, is not a process of portraiture true but incomplete;
it is simply completely untrue.  It is contradicted by every fact
in Elizabeth's history, from her continuous invalidism or ill-health
to her continuous intrigues about marrying Catholic princes.
And the first truth, or half-truth, was a truth of tradition.
The second lie, and complete lie, was a lie of scholarship.
Similarly, the popular legend was not lying about the kind of atmosphere,
or even the kind of glamour, surrounding King Charles and the Cavaliers.
It may have been little more than a romance; the legend really
recorded little more than a romance; but it was the real romance.
It was not false when it represented the Cavalier with his
goblet lifted and his sword drawn; ready to drink to the King,
ready to die for the King.  For thousands of such men did actually
drink to him and did actually die for him.  It was not romancing
to say that the Royalist had a romantic loyalty.  It would not have
been romancing to say that the Puritan had a religious loyalty.
He had a loyalty to the letter of Scripture, to the logic of Calvin,
to the awful duty of spreading true religion.

But my schoolmasters did not tell me that the Puritan stood
for religious loyalty, which is true.  They told me that he stood
for religious liberty, which is a lie of that mountainous and
monstrous order which ignorant traditionalists call a Whopper.
They were not concerned, like the traditionalists, with gathering up,
however lazily, the loose fragments of a truth.  They were concerned
with covering up most carefully the most accidental glimpses of the truth;
with so picking their words and arranging their sentences that no
suspicion of the main truth of the matter should really penetrate
to the reader.  It is amazing to consider how carefully and how
successfully they did cover up a truth so obvious and so enormous.
There is, for instance, the perfectly simple fact, written in large
letters across the history of two reigns and practically two revolutions,
that the last Stuarts tried to establish religious toleration and
the Puritans tried to prevent religious toleration.  It would seem
as impossible to hide so huge and simple an historic fact as to hide
the fact that Nelson fought for England and Napoleon for France.
Yet men like Macaulay and Green really did manage to hide it
from a whole rising generation, the generation with which I myself
originally rose.  But, fortunately, I had learned some truths
in my childhood before I began to learn lies in my boyhood.
And all my subsequent knowledge has led me to prefer the pictures
which honestly professed to be picturesque to the plans and diagrams
which dishonestly pretended to be accurate.

XXX.  On Experience

IT will be remarked that Experience, which was once claimed
by the aged, is now claimed exclusively by the young.
There used to be a system of morals and metaphysics that was
specially known as the Experience Philosophy; but those who
advanced it were grim rationalists and utilitarians who were
already old in years, or, more commonly, old before their time.
We all know that Experience now stands rather for the philosophy
of those who claim to be young long after their time.  But they preach
something that may, in a sense, be called an Experience Philosophy,
though some of the experiences seem to me the reverse of philosophical.
So far as I can make it out, it consists of two dogmas first,
that there is no such thing as right or wrong; and secondly, that they
themselves have a right to experience.  How they manage to have any
rights if there is no such thing as right I do not know; nor do they.
But perhaps the philosophy was best summed up in a phrase I saw
recently in a very interesting and important American magazine,
quoted from one of the more wild and fanciful of the American critics.
I have not the text before me, but the substance of the remark was this.
The critic demanded indignantly to know how many ordinary American
novelists had any Experiences outside those of earning their bread,
pottering about in a farm or a frame-house, helping to mind the baby,
and so on.  The question struck me as striking at the very root
of all the rot and corruption and imbecility of the times.

On the face of it, of course, the whole question is rather a joke;
only that these gay pleasure-seekers and revellers in the joy of life
have seldom been known to see a joke.  We might politely inquire exactly
how much Experience is needed to equip a novelist to write novels?
How many marks does he get for being vamped or for being intoxicated
and which are the particular discreditable acts by which he can
get credits?  How many liaisons give him this singular rank
as a literary liaison officer; and how many double lives does it
take to constitute Life?  Is it only after his fourth divorce
that he may write his first novel?  For my part, I do not see
why the same principle should not be applied to all the other
Ten Commandments as well as to that particular Commandment.
It should surely be obvious that, if love affairs are necessary
to the writing of this particular sort of love story, then it follows
that crime is necessary to the writing of any kind of crime story.
I have myself made arrangements (on paper) for no fewer than
fifty-two murders in my time; they took the form of short stories;
and I shall expose myself to the withering contempt of the young
sages of Experience when I confess that I am not really
a murderer, and have never yet committed an actual murder.
And what about all the other forms of criminal Experience?  Must a
writer be a forger, and manufacture other men's names before
he is allowed to make his own?  Must there be a journalistic
apprenticeship in picking pockets as well as in picking brains;
and have we to look to the establishment of an Academy of Anarchy,
with the power of conferring degrees?  Novelists might proudly print
after their names the letters indicating the degrees they had taken;
such as F.Y.B., meaning `Five Years for Burglary', or T.N.H.,
for `Twice Nearly Hanged'.  Altogether it may be said that writers
do not rob, but it may be fortunate that robbers do not write.
It is possible that the wild and wicked criminal might, after all,
make almost as good a novelist as the novelist.

It would also be easy enough to attack the fallacy upon the facts.
Everybody who has any real experience knows that good writing
would not necessarily come from people with many experiences.
Some of the art which is closest to life has been produced under
marked limitations of living.  Its prestige has generally lasted
longer than the splash made by sensational social figures.
Jane Austen has already survived Georges Sand.  Even the most
modern critic, if he is really a critic, will admit that Jane Austen
is really realistic, in a sense in which Georges Sand is only romantic.
She was, indeed, a flaming, fashionable figure created entirely by
the Romantic Movement; but Jane Austen did not belong to any movement;
she does not move, but she stays.  And, though I do not agree
with the too common depreciation of Byron, it is true that all his
somewhat excessive Experience, in the new or juvenile sense, has not
prevented people feeling him to be the very reverse of realistic,
and in some ways strangely unreal.

But there is, of course, a much deeper objection to the whole of this
new sort of Experience Philosophy, which is quite sufficiently
exposed in the very examples I quoted from the magazine.
There are certainly all sorts of experiences, some great and some small.
But the small ones are those which the critic imagines to be great,
and the great ones are those that he contemptuously dismisses as small.
There are no more universal affairs than those which he imagines
to be little and local.  There are no events more tremendous
than those which he regards as trivial.  There are no experiences
more exciting than those which he dully imagines to be dull.
To take his own example, a literary man who cannot see that a baby
is marvellous could not see that anything was marvellous.
He has certainly no earthly logical reason for regarding a movie
vamp as marvellous.  The movie vamp is only what happens to the baby
when it goes wrong; but, from a really imaginative and intellectual
standpoint, there is nothing marvellous about either of them,
except what is already marvellous in the mere existence of the baby.
But this sort of moralist or immoralist has a queer, half-baked prejudice
to the effect that there is no good in anything until it has gone bad.
It is supposed to be a part of Experience for the woman to be a vamp,
but not for the woman to be a mother; although it stares us all
in the face, as a stark fact of common sense, that child-bearing
really is an experience, and a highly realistic experience,
while the other sort of experiment may not really be an experience
at all.  It may be in the exact sense mere play-acting;
and, as the game is now played, the main preoccupation is to
prevent its ending with an addition to the cast of characters.
Whatever happens, it must not be the means of bringing on the scene
a new, breathing, thinking, conscious creature like a baby.
That would not be Life.

Now, if there is one thing of which I have been certain
since my boyhood, and grow more certain as I advance in age,
it is that nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical;
and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
All this talk of waiting for experiences in order to write
is simply a confession of incapacity to experience anything.
It is a confession of never having felt the big facts in such
experiences as babyhood and the baby.  A paralytic of this
deaf-and-dumb description imagines he can be healed in strange
waters or after strange wanderings; and announces himself ready
to drink poisons, that they may stimulate him like drugs.
But it is futile for him to suppose that this sort of quackery
will teach him how to be a writer, for he has been from the first
admittedly blind to everything that is worth writing about.
He will find nothing in the wilderness but the broken shards or ruins
of what should have been sacred in his own home; and if he can really
make nothing of the second he will certainly make nothing of the first.
The whole theory rests on a ridiculous confusion by which it is
supposed that certain primary principles or relations will become
interesting when they are damaged, but are bound to be depressing
when they are intact.  None of those who are perpetually suggesting
this view ever states it thus plainly; for they are incapable of making
plain statements, just as they are incapable of feeling plain things.
But the point they have to prove, if they really want their
Experience Philosophy accepted by those who do not care for catchwords,
is that the high perils, pleasures, and creative joys of life
do not occur on the high road of life, but only in certain crooked
and rambling by-paths made entirely by people who have lost their way.
As yet they have not even begun to prove it; and in any case,
and in every sense, it could be disproved by a baby.

XXXI.  On Sightseeing

I HAVE often done my best to consider, in various aspects,
what is really the matter with Sightseeing.  Or rather, I hope,
I have done my best to consider what is the matter with me,
when I find myself faintly fatigued by Sightseeing.
For it is always wiser to consider not so much why a thing is
not enjoyable, as why we ourselves do not enjoy it.  In the case
of Sightseeing, I have only got so far as to be quite certain
that the fault is not in the Sights and is not in the Sightseers.
This would seem to drive the speculative philosopher back upon
the dreadful and shocking conclusion that the fault is entirely in me.
But, before accepting so destructive a deduction, I think there are
some further modifications to be made and some further distinctions
to be drawn.

The mere fact that a mob is going to see a monument ought not
in itself to depress any imaginative and sympathetic mind.
On the contrary, such a mind ought to perceive that there is something
of the same mystery or majesty in the mob as in the monument.
It is a weakness to fail in feeling that a statue standing on a
pedestal above a street, the statue of a hero, carved by an artist,
for the honour and glory of a city, is, so far as it goes,
a marvellous and impressive work of man.  But it is far more
of a weakness to fail in feeling that a hundred statues walking
about the street, alive with the miracle of a mysterious vitality,
are a marvellous and impressive work of God.  In so far as that
ultimate argument affects the matter, the sightseer might almost
as well travel to see the sightseers as to see the sights.
There are, of course, vulgar and repulsive sightseers.
There are, for that matter, vulgar and repulsive statues.
But this cannot be a complete excuse for my own lamentable coldness;
for I have felt it creeping over me in the presence of the most
earnest and refined sightseers, engaged in inspecting the most
classical and correct statues.  Indeed (if I must make the
disgraceful confession in the interests of intellectual discovery),
I will own that I have felt this mysterious wave of weariness
pass over me rather more often when the elegant and distinguished
Archdeacon was explaining the tombs to the Guild of Golden Thoughts
than when an ordinary shouting showman was showing them to a
jolly rabble of trippers with beer bottles and concertinas.
I am very much troubled with this unnatural insensibility of mind;
and I have made many attempts, none of them quite successful, to trace
my mental malady to its origin.  But I am not sure that some hint
of the truth may not be found in the first popular example that I gave--
the example of a statue standing in a street.

Now, men have stuck up statues in streets as part of the general
and ancient instinct of popular monumental art, which they
exhibited in erecting pillars, building pyramids, making monoliths
and obelisks, and such things, from the beginning of the world.
And the conception may be broadly stated thus--that this sort
of sight was meant for two different kinds of sightseers.
First, the monument was meant to be seen accidentally;
it was actually set up purposely in order to be seen accidentally.
In other words, a striking tower on a hill, an arresting
statue on a pedestal, a remarkable relief over an archway,
or any other piece of public art, was intended for the traveller,
and even especially for the chance traveller.  It was meant for
the passer-by, perhaps in the hope that he would not merely pass by;
perhaps in the hope that he would pause, and possibly even meditate.
But he would be meditating not only on something that he had never
seen before, but on something that he had never expected to see.
The statue would almost spring out upon him like a stage brigand.
The archway would arrest him and almost bar his path like a barricade.
He would suddenly see the high tower like a sort of signal; like a
rocket suddenly sent up to convey a message, and almost a warning.
This is the way in which many popular monuments have been seen;
and this, some may agree with me in thinking, is pretty much
the best way to see them.  No man will ever forget the sights
he really saw when he was not a sightseer.  Every man remembers
the thing that struck him like the thunderbolt of an instant,
though it had stood there waiting for him as the memorial of an aeon.
But, whether or no this be the best way of treating popular memorials,
it is not the only way, and certainly has not been the only popular way.
Historic relics, as a whole, have been treated differently in history
as a whole.  But, in history as a whole, the other way of seeing
such sights was not what we commonly call sightseeing.

We might put the point this way:  that the two ways of visiting
the statue or the shrine were the way of the Traveller and the way
of the Pilgrim.  But the way of the Pilgrim almost always involved
the way of the Pilgrimage.  It was a ritual or ceremonial way:
the way of a procession which had indeed come to see that shrine,
but had not come to see anything else.  The pilgrim does not feel,
as the tourist does often quite naturally feel, that he has had his
tour interrupted by something that does not happen to interest him.
The pilgrimage must interest him, or he would never have been a pilgrim.
He knows exactly what he wants to do; and, what is perhaps
even more valuable, he knows for certain when he has done it.
He cannot be dragged on from one thing to another; from one thing
that interests him mildly to another thing that bores him stiff.
He has undertaken a certain expedition with a certain logical end:
an end both in the sense of a purpose and in the sense of a termination.
For a certain mystical reason of his own he wanted to visit a certain
monument or shrine; and, now lie has visited it, he is free to visit
the nearest public-house or any other place he pleases.

But all this is altered, because we have passed from the age
of monuments to the age of museums.  We have been afflicted with
the modern idea of collecting all sorts of totally different things,
with totally different types of interest, including a good many of no
apparent interest at all, and stuffing them all into one building,
that the stranger may stray among a hundred distracting monuments
or the pilgrim be lost among a hundred hostile shrines.
When the traveller saw the statue of the hero, he did not see
written on the pedestal:  `This way to the Collection of
Tropical Fungi', in which he possibly felt no interest at all.
When the pilgrim found his way to the shrine, he did not find
that the priest was eagerly waving him on to a glass case filled
with the specimens of the local earthworms.  Fungi and earthworms
may be, and indeed are, exceedingly interesting things in themselves;
but they are not things which men seek in the same mood which sends
them to look at the statues of heroes or the shrines of saints.
With the establishment of that entirely modern thing, the Museum,
we have a new conception, which, like so many modern conceptions,
is based on a blunder in psychology and a blindness to the true
interests of culture.  The Museum is not meant either for the
wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe.
It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education
to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food
in one indigestible meal.  It is meant for the mere Sightseer,
the man who must see all the sights.

Of course, I am only speaking of this kind of sight as it affects this
kind of sightseer.  I do not deny that museums and galleries and other
collections serve a more serious purpose for specialists who can
select special things.  But the modern popular practice of which I
complain is bad, not because it is popular, but because it is modern.
It was not made by any of the ancestral instincts of mankind;
either the instinct that erected the crucifix by the wayside,
to arrest the wayfarer, or the instinct that erected the
crucifix in the cathedral to be the goal of the worshipper.
It is not a product of popular imagination, but of what is called
popular education; the cold and compulsory culture which is not,
and never will be, popular.

XXXII.  On Condiments and Conduct

I HAVE always wondered why there is no New Religion forbidding the use
of salt and pepper; not to mention the more monstrous case of mustard.
I cannot understand how it is that no Moral Movement, no deeper
stirring of social consciousness, no wave of higher citizenship
and devotion to the ideal of Service, has appeared to start some
people interfering with other people in the use of condiments--
of all those pungent luxuries with which an effete and self-indulgent
civilization has hitherto complicated its meals; taking salt with eggs,
mustard with beef, pepper with mutton, and all sorts of strange,
unnatural sauces with everything else.  Surely there ought to be a Crusade
against these things, since a Crusade is now commonly held to mean
an attack upon some habit of Christian civilization.  Very little
would be needed to set the Puritans, who are above all Manicheans,
denouncing these things exactly as they now denounce beer or tobacco,
and are, indeed, already beginning to denounce coffee and tea.
In contradiction of the advertisement recently so common, we should
see the town plastered with the words `Join the No-Mustard Club'.
By a slight emendation of Scripture (which is nothing to the
devout Puritan) we should be told that the salt which has not lost its
savour is fit only to be cast forth and trampled under foot of men.

Such a Puritan version of salt in the Gospel would be far less
impudent than the Puritan version of wine in the Gospel.
In a hundred ways we should be assured of the corrupting and degrading
character of these condiments; and terrible stories would be told
of ruined families weltering in anchovy sauce as if in gore,
or darker stories of that darker drug, the sauce that bears
the name of Worcester.  I could myself, on the spur of the moment,
easily make up all sorts of arguments and illustrations as convincing
against condiments as others are against convivial liquors.
I could point out that the old proverb about taking strange stories
`with a grain of salt' was itself an evidence of the connexion
between strange substances and strange delusions, and bring out
the result that salt is really a sort of opium.  I could point out
that the very fact of mustard being hot in the mouth is analogous
to the old phrase about ginger being hot in the mouth, which has come
to be a sort of euphemism for vice or violent self-indulgence. I could
point out that pepper is actually used by criminals as something
to fling in the faces of their pursuers, to blind and choke them.
So that the pepper-pot takes its place in the police museum as being
both a weapon of crime and an instrument of torture.

It seems as sensible to argue that some criminals make a bad use
of pepper as to argue that some drunkards make a bad use of port wine.
For those who sneer at tobacco may be expected, in the same sense,
to sniff at snuff, and presumably to snivel over pepper, for a great
part of their moral eloquence consists of sniffing and snivelling.
Nothing is needed, for most of their moral movements, but a sort
of gesture of priggish repugnance and small-minded superiority;
and it would be just as easy for a moralist to make that sort
of face over a jar of pickles as over a pot of porter.
A curious mixture of the snobbish sneering of the middle classes
against the working classes, with the more morbid snarling
of the invalid against the healthy man, has made a large
number of things that are simply common appear merely coarse.
So perhaps we may look forward to fresh purifications of society,
purging it of all the poisons of pepper and salt and sauce, and reducing
it to plain living by this remarkable course of high thinking.
Vinegar would be forbidden by the teetotallers, because of its
wicked past when it was wine.  Mustard would arouse a similar
Moslem or Judaic fury, because it is generally eaten with ham.
The equality of the sexes, in eternal ethics, would be asserted
by saying that there shall be no sauce, either for the goose
or for the gander.

By the way, though the point is a parenthesis, what a remarkable
anticipation that proverb is of modern muddle-headedness about the sexes!
It is, in fact, often used, in the sex controversy, as a metaphor meaning
that one sex or sort must in all things be treated like the other.
But nothing could be more unlucky than the metaphor, whatever we
may think of the moral.  If there is one thing to which this
argument of sameness or assimilation does not apply, it is to the
question of sex in connexion with the solemn question of supper.
Suppose the sauce is egg-sauce; am I to wait patiently for eggs
from the cock, as an alternative to eggs from the hen?
I will not eat cow-beef if I can help it, merely on the ground
that what is mustard for the bull is mustard for the cow.
Nor will I look for milk from the bull, however much I may
recognize the general necessity of milk rather than mustard.
It is some thing rather typical of the way these things are treated
that people should express their view in proverbs rather than principles.
The scientific course is obviously to begin by clearing up the question
of what is the real difference between a goose and a gander,
and then pointing out that it does not affect the question of sauce,
though it may very much affect the question of something else.
But this laborious method is very unpopular with a generation
which thinks that self-assertion is a complete substitute
for self-criticism, or, indeed, for any other sort of criticism.
In that world we are well acquainted with the sort of goose who
possesses very little except sauce.

But this, as I have said, is merely a remark in brackets,
in the course of other remarks about other heresies.
We are chiefly concerned with the heresy of the Manichees,
which has already expressed itself in the denunciation of wine
and even tobacco, and might just as well express itself,
I would suggest, in the denunciation of mustard or even salt.
For the essence of that idea is that every pleasure as such is suspect;
or that, unless a thing can be specially shown to be morally good,
it is most probable that it is morally bad.  There is no real
defence of a luxury except to prove that it is a necessity.
Now, it would be much easier to argue, in certain cases,
that wine is a necessity than that vinegar is a necessity.
There are certain practical good effects sometimes produced by the
tobacco plant which are very seldom produced by the pepper plant.
The enemies of these drinks or drugs, as they would call them,
may think that the evil of them enormously outweighs the good;
so enormously as to justify their extinction as pure evils.
But they could not deny that the drug is a drug; in the double
sense in which a drug is normally regarded as good and evil.
They could not deny that such a thing is a drug, both in the sense of
something consumed by a drug-fiend and of something sold by a druggist.
They may think it unwise to use it for an immediate remedy,
but it is used for an immediate remedy.  Smoking has been
known to serve for some time as a substitute for eating,
and a cigarette does sometimes soothe the nerves of a neurotic.
Brandy and champagne are constantly administered in illness,
except among rank and raving lunatics.  But I have seldom heard
of an invalid leaping to life after a draught of anchovy sauce;
or of anybody eating pepper for days on end; or of people in hysterics
being quieted with pickles.  If it ever comes to the old Manichean
controversy about useless luxuries, I think it will be harder to defend
the condiments than to defend the stimulants, or even the intoxicants.
I am presuming that such Puritans will carry out the moral philosophy
that is really at the back of their minds; it does not affect me,
for I have quite a different moral philosophy at the back of my mind.
It would occupy too much space to expound it here, and I have often
enough expounded it elsewhere.  But it might be indicated by saying
that there is a truth behind the joke of the man who said:
`Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities';
and the truth can be more soberly stated by saying that, in one sense,
human beings are not even completely human, until they are civilized.

XXXIII.  On Optimism and Scepticism

I SUPPOSE people will go on till the crack of doom saying
(as somebody said the other day) that Browning expressed the opinion
that God is in His heaven and therefore all is right with the world.
I could mention a number of other opinions that Browning expressed,
in exactly the same method and degree.  I could point out that
Browning said, in his gay and careless fashion:  `Which is the poison
to poison her, prithee?' doubtless referring to Mrs. Browning.
I could note that Browning observed, when brooding on his own
immediate course of action:  `Or there's Satan . . . one might
venture pledge one's soul to him.'  It will occur to every
reader of the poet that he observed on a celebrated occasion:
`Lo! lieth flat and loveth Setebos', presumably prostrating himself
upon the carpet in Wimpole Street.  It will also be recalled
that Browning, after confessing to various frauds and lies,
virulently cursed the patron to whom he had confessed them, saying:
`I only wish I dared burn down the house and spoil your sniggering.'
If these incidents in the life of the poet cause any surprise,
it may be well to explain that they are, in fact, incidents in
the lives of his characters; and so is the much-quoted phrase
about all being `right with the world'.  It is not a remark
made by Browning, but a remark made by Pippa in the dramatic
work by Browning.  Even those who know that the remark occurs
in a lyric do not always know that the lyric occurs in a drama.
It has therefore a double right to be considered dramatic.
It is a remark made by a particular dramatic character on a particular
dramatic occasion, and, above all, for a particular dramatic reason.
And the reason is not a desire to show that all is right with the world,
but to bring out in sharp contrast the fact that there is a great
deal very wrong with it.

So far as that is concerned, the facts (as everybody knows, or ought
to know) are these.  The idea of the play called `Pippa Passes'
is that a very poor girl, on her one solitary holiday, goes singing
through the world in a state of perfect innocence and therefore
of perfect gaiety.  In doing so she crosses various human groups
who are the very reverse of innocent or gay, each of whom is at some
crisis of crime or sin or sorrow.  In each case, as she passes,
she sings a song, of which the innocence tingles through them
in the form of irony.  She passes by a house where a wife has
just seduced her lover into murdering her husband, and, by way of
the last violence of contrast, sings a little song about the morning
being so beautiful that all seems to be right with the world.
One would have thought it would have occurred to most readers
that Browning was not very likely to think that assassination
and adultery were actually examples of the rightness of the world.
The point was not, of course, that all was right with the world,
but that all was right with Pippa, because she had kept herself
unspotted from the world.

It is perhaps worth while to mention this queer old blunder about
Browning, and what is called his optimism, because we have since seen
a great deal of optimism that is very much less reasonable than his.
Browning did, indeed, believe that God is in His heaven, though the mere
fact of the song of Pippa would not prove that he did.  He did believe
in God; and, curiously enough, he is not entirely alone in that,
and in some quarters the curious superstition is even spreading anew.
But he did not believe that all was right with the world,
in the sense that there is no wickedness, madness, or misery in it;
his works possibly contain a larger and more varied assortment
of blackguards, miscreants, maniacs, and miserably deluded people than
those of any writer of his time.  If you had gone to Robert Browning
with the definite and deliberate doctrine, `There is no pain
or evil', he would certainly have classed you among the maniacs.
He would very probably have written a long, ingenious, and partly
incomprehensible poem about you in blank verse, but your portrait would
be even less pleasing than that of Sludge the Medium or Caliban.
Yet the same people who go on quoting poor Pippa's little song
as a proof that Browning was absurdly optimistic, have lived to see
the preaching of an optimism that he would have thought utterly absurd.

Elsewhere I recently remarked that the new optimism, though it expresses
itself in commerce and journalism, and especially in advertisement,
probably has, like everything else, its roots in religion.
Its essence, or at least its extreme expression, is to be found in what
is called Christian Science.  Anyhow, it does what Browning and the old
optimists never dreamed of doing--it denies the actual reality of evil
in experience.  At any rate, it maintains that by ignoring evil we
can expel it from experience.  It is this which is the last phase
of philosophy popular in America, and to some extent in England.
And it has gone very much further than the human holiday cheerfulness
of the poor Italian work-girl in Browning's poem.  For one thing,
the American optimist especially insists that the work-girl shall
sing optimistically about her work, as well as about her holiday.
She must sing a new song of optimism even as she labours;
to the effect that the Boss is in his office and all is right
with the world.

Curiously enough, all this new sort of optimism can be traced back
to a sort of scepticism which is very much nearer to pessimism.
It may almost, in a sense, be traced back to a great pessimist.
Nobody ever accused Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as depicted
by Shakespeare, of being an American optimist.  Nobody ever
reproached Hamlet with being a hustler, a go-getter, a business man
with plenty of pep and sand, an active and animated member of Rotary.
But these busy business men are all acting on a philosophical
principle drawn from Hamlet, and thoroughly typical of Hamlet:
`There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.'
That is the original germ of Christian Science, but also the original
germ of Business Optimism.  I believe that those mystics,
the members of the American business clubs, go about with large labels
or buttons on their coats inscribed with the words `Trade is Good'.
The savage who thinks he can hurt a man by writing his name in the dust
could hardly be more superstitious.  But, anyhow, for good or evil,
whether it be superstition or science, it marks a belief in the power
of words over things, or, if you will, of ideas over realities,
which goes far beyond the dreams of the older optimists.
Some of this sect of optimists, I believe, recently held a sort
of religious ceremony in which they cursed an old woman dressed up
as Mrs. Pessimism, and bowed down before a queen called Mrs. Optimism.
That does not seem very far from lying flat and loving Setebos.

I protested a short time ago against the abominable slander
of suggesting that most Americans are like these people.
Most Americans laugh at them, even more derisively and destructively
than we do.  America may be a country of strange sects, but it
is also a country of almost continuous satire on strange sects.
Nobody needs to add anything to the satire of Mark Twain
and some more recent writers on people like Mrs. Eddy.
But it is worthy of remark that America has given birth, among many
other strange sects, to this strange sect of the commercial optimist,
who may perhaps be best defined as the Unrealist.  The creed is perhaps
the corruption of many good things, of the ancient American hope
and pioneering courage gone wild.  But, as there seems a tendency,
even in England, to boost this mere religion of boosting,
an Englishman may be allowed to protest that it is preposterously
unsuited to England and is not really respected even in America.
Christian Science may or may not start with the assumption
that God is in His heaven and all is right with the world;
it is a subject for a respectful debate with Christian Scientists.
But Christianity emphatically began with the assumptions
that God has come on earth because all is wrong with the world;
and from those two things the whole Christian theory proceeds.

XXXIV.  On Thoughts in Canada

I NEED not say what any normal Englishman feels, or ought to feel,
when he sails up the St. Lawrence, under the high trophies
on the Heights of Abraham, and I have never affected any new
abnormality about such feeling.  My thoughts, when I was there,
went back in one flash to the little town in the hills of Kent
where I had been but a few weeks before:  the little town
where James Wolfe was born and where his statue still stands,
sword in hand, in a romantic but not inappropriate swagger.
For Wolfe, who was one of the most interesting of English heroes,
was himself a flat contradiction to the vulgar and prosaic version
of English heroism.  It is strange that people should ever have
talked of the English as if they must be heavy, stupid, and brutal.
It is still more astounding that they should ever have been
proud of being heavy, stupid, and brutal.  It would be nothing
to be proud of; and, in fact, it is not even there for them to be
ashamed of.  In historical fact, it is a very recent affectation:
a mixture of the bad fashion of copying Prussia and the growth
of a modern materialism which is solemn about sports because it
has no other rites to solemnize.

Englishmen were more sportive about sports in the days of
General James Wolfe; and the battle of the Heights of Abraham was
won on the village green, with very rotten old bats and stumps.
And the men who represented England, in the days when her Empire
was really an adventure, were the very opposite of the sort of stuck
pigs who are called strong, silent men.  Nelson and Wolfe, the two
noblest names of England's action by land and sea, were both of them
men of exactly the opposite kind:  sensitive, poetical, even cursed
with what is called the artistic temperament.  Nelson suffered
from something which is even worse than the artistic temperament--
sea-sickness. Wolfe was of the slight and high-strung sort, and owed
nothing of his bravery to brutality.  He was himself, I believe,
an artist with the pencil, of considerable felicity and talent:
he was devoted to books, and, whether he did or did not quote
Gray's Elegy as he sailed up the St. Lawrence to death and glory,
it was exactly the sort of thing he would have done.  But there is
another aspect of the fine culture and dignity in Wolfe and the earlier
English heroes which seems to me to teach a sad but salutary lesson.
As I sailed past Quebec, I was told by a fellow-traveller a thing
I had never heard before, which moved me very much.  With all our
talk of globe-trotting and sightseeing, it seems to me that some
of the finest sights of the globe are neglected or not appreciated.
It was only by such a casual stranger that I was once told,
what I hope is the truth, that on the mountain range between two
South American Republics, which had made peace with each other,
there stands a colossal figure of Christ; apparently one of the largest,
and surely one of the most impressive, statues in the world.
But it stands, if it does stand, alone and enormous upon the mountains.

Somewhat in the same way I had seen many tributes to Wolfe,
of a worthy or unworthy sort.  I had seen him in patriotic posters,
figuring side by side with people whom he would have intensely disliked,
such as Cecil Rhodes.  But it was only this chance information
which informed me that a monument has been set up on that high
place to Wolfe and Montcalm together, with a fine Latin inscription
saying that fate gave to them the same death and the same honour.

And when I thought of that worthy commemoration, of those two great
and gallant soldiers, it occurred to me that they were, in truth,
nearer together, even in their lifetime, than most of their kindred
are to-day. There were real differences, of course; Montcalm was
a noble and Wolfe a man of the middle classes, risen by merit;
but their notion of the manners, the code of honour, and the necessary
information of a gentleman would have been very much the same.
Neither would have thought it odd for a soldier to go about
quoting poetry; both would have thought it quite ordinary and obvious
to be quoting Horace.  I fancy there was a far wider division,
at the beginning of the Great War, between French and Foch.
The older generals were nearer together as enemies than the modern
generals were as allies.  By which I do not mean to refer
to any of the quarrels about quarrels, the reports of rivalries
or irritations in the higher command, which occur in all wars,
and can easily occur between fellow-countrymen. I mean that the whole
make-up of the mind of a man like Foch was more exclusively French,
and more puzzling to a man who was exclusively English, than was
a great continental noble to a scholarly Englishman like Wolfe.
The Latin of Horace was a link between two eighteenth-century gentlemen,
whether French or English.  The Latin of the Mass, as heard by a
French soldier, is not a link with the Latin of the Latin grammar
as vaguely remembered by an English soldier.

We are perpetually being told to-day that nations are drawing nearer to
each other; Mr. Wells is supposed to be engaged in an Open Conspiracy in
the matter; I can only say that, if it is open, it is not at all obvious.
I grieve to say that I gravely doubt it.  I fear that the French
and English, at this moment, understand each other a great deal
less than they did not only when they were allies in the Great War,
but even when they were enemies in the older and lesser wars.
Indeed, the farther we go back the closer the French and English
come together.  The Black Prince and Bertrand Duguesclin were even
more capable of understanding each other than Montcalm and Wolfe.
That would not, of course, have prevented them from killing each other,
which was all in the game.  But they would have agreed much more about
the rules of the game, and especially about the rules of the killing.
The truth is, of course, that France and England were very nearly
one nation in the Middle Ages; at least, in the early Middle Ages.
The English kings especially were always trying to make them one nation;
but then it must be remembered that, in a sense, even the English
kings were French kings.

Now, I do not wish myself to make England and France one nation;
my views on that subject are the same as those energetically advanced
by St. Joan of Arc.  But I do think it a fitting subject for sober
and prayerful consideration, whether with invocations to St. George
or St. Denis, to St. Joan the fighter or St. Francis the peacemaker,
that these two great Western nations have steadily drifted further
and further apart through the centuries, and are now so very far apart
as they are.  The national division is really dangerous when it cuts
across all other differences, and is really much deeper than they.
There have always been strong hatreds against special types
or tendencies, such as much of the medieval world felt against
the Moslem or much of the modern world feels against the Bolshevist.
But, though men may hate Russia because of Bolshevism, they do
not hate France because of Republicanism or Roman Catholicism,
or any one definable intellectual idea.

The ordinary Englishman does not understand either the French Republican
or the French Royalist; he is equally mystified by the French atheist
and the French Catholic.  The English Radical cannot comprehend
the French Radical; the Englishman who is most loyal to his own monarch
is utterly ignorant of the French case for a return to monarchy.
Yet France is still what she always was, the intellectual focus
and creative crater of Christendom; the place where the ideas are
hammered out and tested which are to build or to destroy a world.
Those who do not understand what is happening in Paris are
dangerously ignorant of what will soon be happening everywhere;
for all Frenchmen are Radicals in the sense of going to the roots
of things, and none more Radical than the Royalist.  And it seems
to me a very menacing and perilous thing that we have lost, so much
as we have, that one flash of the ancient Western understanding
which shone for an instant on the marching armies of the Marne.

XXXV.  On the Bad Word for Guild

IT is a very old controversial custom to give a dog a bad name,
which is generally the more learned scientific name for a cat.
It is then, of course, a comparatively easy and natural matter
to nail him up as a bat or a barn-door owl.  Such fantasies
of logic are the commonplaces of controversial history.
The most usual form of the process, as we all know, is to fix
some person with a definite label, and then proceed to deduce
everything from the label and nothing from the person.
I have experienced this, in my own small way often enough.
Somebody will write:  `Mr. Chesterton is a medievalist; and he is
therefore quite justified (from his own benighted standpoint)
in indulging as he does, in the sport of tearing out the teeth of Jews,
burning hundreds of human beings alive, and perpetually seeking
for the Philosopher's Stone.'  But I never said I was a medievalist;
and I have only the very vaguest idea of what it would mean.
But I have a very vivid and definite idea of what I mean.
And what I mean does not involve providing free dentistry for Jews;
though indeed there is only one doubtful tale of King John doing to one
Jew what it is now considered highly hygienic to do to everybody.
Nor does it include seeking for the Philosopher's Stone; though it
might involve seeking, somewhat wearily, for the Philosopher.
The simple truth, which some people, seem to find it so difficult
to understand or to believe, is that what a reasonable man
believes in is not this or that period, with all its ideas,
good or bad, but in certain ideas that may happen to have been
present in one period and relatively absent from another period.
But nothing can convince his critics that he does not think in terms
of hats and coats and caps and feathers and jerkins and hooded robes.
Nothing will convince them that he thinks in terms of thought.

A very good working example is in the word Guild.
As a matter of fact, it is the moderns and not the medievals
who use the word in a romantic and irrational way.
Anything in the world may be called a Guild nowadays:  a society
for picking up orange-peel may be the Guild of the Golden Gleaners;
or a company of pierrots performing at Margate and Ramsgate may be
the Guild of the Ghostly Guitars; or a movement for muzzling cats as
well as dogs may be a Guild for Equal Rights for Four-Footed Friends.
But whenever we, who are accused of this mysterious medievalism,
happen to say a word in favour of the Guild idea, nobody seems to imagine
for a moment that it is really an idea.  Now, as a matter of fact,
it is an idea, and in that sense nothing less or more than an idea.
It is an economic and ethical theory for the construction of certain
parts of society; and it has nothing in the world to do with the
romance or ritual externals or picturesque costume of that society.
To say that you believe in Guilds is like saying that you
believe in Trusts, or in State Ownership, or in Syndicalism,
or in any other definite way of managing certain matters of trade
and employment and exchange.  In my opinion, the Middle Ages
were fortunate in having begun to develop industry in this way.
But the Middle Ages were extremely unfortunate in many other ways;
and not least in being ultimately unable to develop it.
But if anybody says that I merely behold, as in a dream,
ideal craftsmen in coloured garments carving exquisite masterpieces,
or happy apprentices dancing round the maypole or distributing
the Christmas ale, then he is a hundred miles away from the point
at issue.  The case for the Guild has nothing to do with the romance
of medievalism; nothing whatever.

The theory of a Guild, as distinct from Socialism as generally defined,
and Capitalism as at present practised, is simply this.
The men working in a particular trade remain independent tradesmen;
in the sense that they are independent and therefore up to a
point competitive.  Each is working for himself, with his own capital
or machinery, and in that sense each is working against the others.
But each has entered into an agreement with the others, that he will
not compete past a certain point or work against the others in certain
unfair and forbidden ways.  In other words, there is a competition,
but it is a deliberately limited competition; or, if you will,
an artificially limited competition.  The object is perfectly simple:
that it should remain a competition, and not merely turn into a combine.
Capitalist competition, which started avowedly as unlimited competition,
has only been running freely for about a hundred years,
and everywhere it has turned into a combine.  I use the word combine
as a polite convention; for, of course, we all know that it involves
no equality of combination.  The true story of the thing is that
when all the shops are let loose to compete anyhow and everywhere,
by any method good or bad, one shop swallows all the rest.
To speak more rightly and worthily, one man swallows all the rest.
It is very often, by the nature of the competition, the worst shop
and the worst man.

Now the Guild method is no more medieval than it is modern, in so far
as it is a principle apart from time.  The best proof is that it does
still exist in a practical profession with which we are all acquainted.
The Doctor, the ordinary general practitioner, whom most of us know
and to whom many of us owe our lives, is a typical example of the member
of a Guild.  He is not a Socialist official; he is not a State servant;
he is an example of private enterprise.  That is to say, he owns
his own lancet and stethoscope; he has to buy his own practice;
he does in a certain degree compete with the men of his own trade.
But he is forbidden to compete with them by certain methods;
he is forbidden to drive another doctor out of his practice by certain
expedients of self-assertion or self-advertisement.; he has to observe
towards his fellow-doctor a certain respect and consideration.
He has to do this because he has joined a Guild or confraternity,
which exists for the maintenance of the members of his profession
as a whole.  Its definite and deliberate policy is to keep all
the doctors in existence, as far as possible, and prevent one of them
destroying all the rest.  Once it is admitted that a man may use
any methods of advancement and advertisement, the chances are that
about twenty honest doctors will be swallowed up by one quack.
We know this is what has happened in journalism and in commerce,
and in any number of other things.

It is also to be noted that the other side of the old Guild idea,
which balances this idea of preserving the small man in independence,
the idea of testing him as to his claims to such independence,
is also true of the modern doctor, as of the medieval Master.
It is often regretted that Trade Unions do not insist,
as did the Guilds, on a standard of work and finish.
They cannot do so under modern conditions, because they exist
to contend with another and specially modern evil.  But it is quite
true that, before the Guild protected a man from unfair competition,
it examined him in the mastery of his craft; and all that obviously
corresponds to modern medical examinations and medical degrees.
Now a man may quite reasonably disapprove of this system,
just as I, in my own opinion, quite reasonably approve of it.
He may say quite truly that it has evils of its own.  He may say
quite tenably that in his view those evils outweigh the good.
But his attitude is neither true nor tenable if he pretends that the case
for this social system is a mass of romantic rubbish about the perfect
beauty of the Middle Ages.  He is simply making a fool of himself
when he talks of the method by which all the most modern surgery
accomplished and all the most novel medical theories advanced as if it
were a mere fantastic dream of bringing back falconry and tilting-armour;
or as if nobody could trust Sir Stanley Hewett or Sir Thomas Horder
without wanting to wave a pennon or wear a tabard.

XXXVI.  On Sophistication

SOME are complaining that the rising generation is sophisticated;
and it is true that some members of it are too sophisticated even
to believe in sophistry.  They believe in nothing; which I suppose
is one way of returning to simplicity.  The golden age of the sophists
was somewhere about the last half of the nineteenth century.
The Victorians were lectured and led a dance by any number of sophists;
but that was because the Victorians were unsophisticated.
They believed the most crazy paradoxes; as that it was more practical
not to be logical; which is like saying that we should make sure
of having a chain and not bother whether it consists of missing links.
They believed that men must always have the same morality,
though they had a new religion or no religion; that is, they said
that what was done now for a definite reason would be done indefinitely
for no reason.  Those sturdy Saxon ideas were all sophistries;
but that did not mean that the sturdy Saxon who accepted them
was necessarily a sophist.  What I think has really happened,
in the ease of the more sophisticated youth of to-day, is that they
have become sceptical of everything, including scepticism.
And though two blacks do not make a white, it has sometimes been known,
in grammar and philosophy, that two negatives make a positive.
So that the sophisticated youth who has seen through the sophistical
old men, may even yet see something worth seeing.

But there is one way in which the young seem to me not sophistical
but very simple; and there is one type or section of them that is
sufficiently simple to be called silly.  A great deal of the current
cult of pleasure, of luxury, of liberty in love, and all the rest of it,
appears to me to be perfectly childish and childish in the literal
sense that it is greedy without any grasp of consequences.
I read novels and poems in which the seeker after pleasure simply
goes on saying, over and over again:  `I must have Happiness.
I must have Life.  I must have Love.  Why do you reproach me because I
cannot live without passing from ecstasy to ecstasy?'  This seems
to me about as simple as the speech of a savage who should say:
`I must have Gin.  I like Gin.  I like more and more Gin.
Why will you not instantly provide me with a hundred bottles
of Gin?'  It does not seem to require much intellectual
strenuousness to say this.  It is, like other simple things,
quite true as far as it goes.  But in the matter of connected
thought and the sense of consequence it does not go very far.
Gin does make a man happy; up to a point more gin will make him
more happy; but even more gin will make him many other things as well.
By a succession of phases not contemplated by the philosopher
in his first phase, it will make him first drunk, then dead drunk,
and then dead to the world, and then very possibly dead altogether.
That also seems to be a simple truth, requiring no great subtlety;
but the savage cannot see it, and the sex novelist cannot see it.
He cannot see, what nearly everybody in history has hitherto seen,
that there are certain laws and limits to the mind, as there
are certain laws and limits to the body.  There is such a thing
as concentration; there is such a thing as contrast; there is such
a thing as proportion; there is emphatically such a thing as boredom.
Above all, there is such a thing as a contradiction in terms;
and it is a contradiction in terms to have every moment a crisis,
every event an escapade, every fact an exception, every person
an eccentric, every day a holiday, or society an endless Saturnalia.
If people try to do that, they will find it dull; just as certainly as,
if they drink unlimited gin, we shall find them drunk.
If you do literally paint the town red, you will not be able to use
it as a background, either to the red flag of Bolshevism or the red
flower of a blameful life.  If you do literally go on till all is blue,
you will not be able to distinguish the special and delicate
blueness even of the decadents' blue roses and blue wine.
These are laws of the mind, analogous to laws of the eye.
And the laws of the eye are not altered by everybody putting on
the same sort of horned spectacles, that each one of them may look
separate and distinguished.

But there is one particular form of this modern simplicity that has
always puzzled me very much.  I mean the way in which those who dislike
certain old things, such as war or discipline or various forms
of danger, talk about ending them without asking how they begin.
They always assume an association between these things, which none of us
particularly likes, and other things which they particularly dislike.
They say, for instance, that kings or capitalists, or some
other privileged class, have invented flags and frontiers,
that we may be drilled to defend them with guns and bayonets.
They do not seem to see that they might need the guns and bayonets
even if they were not defending the frontiers and flags.
They might need them if they were defending anything.
They might need them if they were defending their own ideal
social state.  And, as a matter of historical fact, they always
do find that they need them to defend the very state that was
invented to do away with them.  But I am very much puzzled by
the childlike simplicity with which idealists walk into this trap.
It was true to some extent of the eighteenth century republicans,
though those old republicans were a hundred times more intelligent
than most of our twentieth century sceptics.  Still, some of
those charming philosophical gentlemen, of the age of Rousseau
and Voltaire, did tend to talk as if the Natural Man would find
it easy to break the sword when once he had broken the sceptre.
They did talk as if nobody but kings would ever want cannons, and battles
could only arise out of the dynastic ambitions of despotic states.
We all know the ironic but very inspiring sequel.  The sequel
was that the Republic was born amid the roar of its own cannons;
that it could only manage to survive by fighting battle after battle
with merciless valour and armies growing more military every day;
until the final fury of that militancy sent forth the greatest
warrior of the world.

In the face of this example, the Bolshevists did exactly the same.
In face even of the Bolshevist example, our own English Communists
are doing exactly the same.  The Russian revolutionists
also began by being pacifists.  They also set all their hopes
on merely dissolving the discipline of the despotic armies.
They also seem never to have reflected that they would want to
have revolutionist armies, if only to fight the despotic armies.
And of course, in an incredibly short period of time, they found
out the very simple fact that revolutionists cannot be pacifists.
They may set up what they call a peaceful republic, but they have
to make up their minds what to do, if other people will not leave
it in peace.

Suppose the Utopian has founded his Utopia, and another country
makes war on Utopia.  What, when all is said and done, is he to do?
Is he to allow his perfect state (or what he is so simple
as to think his perfect state) to be destroyed and disappear?
Or is he to defend it by the only weapons that will defend it?
One would think this dilemma was so staringly obvious that anybody must
have seen it from the very first.  That dilemma has nothing in the world
to do with crowns or sceptres or capitalism or private property.
Let anybody imagine any sort of simplified society, and I can imagine it
being attacked.  That fact seems simple enough for an infant to see.
Yet I have read scores of young pacifist poets and prophets
who could not see it.  That is an example of what I mean by a
sort of simplicity almost more exasperating than sophistry.
That is a case of the same sort of simplicity as supposing that
cocktails can be unlimited or gate-crashing continue when there
are no gates.

XXXVII.  On Dress and Decorum

T HE newspapers very frequently, perhaps too frequently, describe to us
the Victorian Girl, who was always covered with blushes and confusion.
On the other hand, the Modern Girl has more and more of the confusion,
as she has less and less of the blushes.  Confusion of thought,
confusion of phraseology, confusion of philosophy, deepen and darken
upon her as she advances into what she regards as the daylight,
or the sunlight of the Sun Cure.  She and all her world seem to
have got into a hopeless chaos about deciding the real principles
of convention and civilization.  Whatever theory we may hold,
we find that she holds all the theories and none of the theories;
that her theories contradict each other and cancel out.  The ordinary
argument in the newspapers, on the subject of Dress and Decorum,
for instance, is a hash of half a hundred inconsistent philosophies.
It may be worth while that some of them should be sorted out,
before there are too many of them to be counted.

To begin with, there is the great contradiction that the modern
person pretends to be at once too innocent and too sophisticated.
First he says that certain sins are so remote and repulsive
that only a low-minded spy would suspect their existence.
Then he goes on to say that these sins are not so very bad,
even if they exist.  He shouts at the top of his voice `To the pure
in heart all things are pure'; and then goes on to explain that there
is really no such thing as purity.  He calls the moralist a Puritan,
as the most withering of all terms of abuse; which is very amusing
to some of us, who remember how recently we were called upon
to admire the Puritanism of the Mayflower and the execution
of Charles the First, and to pardon the massacre of Wexford
and the witch-smelling of Salem merely because they were Puritan.
He describes any decent citizen as Nosey Parker or (with a touch
of fierce anti-feminism) as Mrs. Grundy; all with the object of
suggesting that nobody but a person with an impure imagination could
see anything but spotless purity in the pagan habits of our time.

Well, all that is applicable enough, when there is really anybody to
apply it to.  I have myself protested against Puritanism and Parkerism
and the sour vigilance that would arrest the amusements of the populace.
I entirely agree that it is disgusting to be nosey about anything
that is normal; such as dancing or swimming, considered in themselves.
My position on that point is what it has always been, and my
position is perfectly clear.  But the position of the New Pagan
is not in the least clear.  For the New Pagan attempts to maintain,
at the same time, that the real violation of Christian morals is
unimportant to the Pagan moralist.  But in that case, how can it
be wrong for the Christian moralist to accuse the Pagan moralist?
The Christian cannot be merely morbid in saying that sin is involved,
if the Pagan says that sin is irrelevant even if it is involved.
I may be mad if I accuse my friend Smith of stealing the spoons,
when he is a respectable person with the ordinary respect
for private property.  But I cannot be morbidly and insanely
malicious when I say he might steal the spoons, if he says himself
that he will steal the spoons.  I may call it being a thief,
and he may call it being a Class-conscious Communist Expropriator.
But it is absurd to pretend that property does not matter, and then
to be indignant at the charge of thinking it does not matter.
It is equally absurd to deny propriety as to deny property,
and then to say that only a fiend would suspect you of disregarding
the property or propriety that you deny.

This is an obvious example of the modern muddle, but it
is an annoying one.  Whether certain acts are wicked or no
we will debate when the statement is clearly made to us.
But a thing cannot be so wicked that it is insane to suggest it,
and so innocent that it is blameless to do it.  There are, however,
a large number of other confusions which any clear-thinking man can
see in the modern commentary.  We talk about the pagan philosophy;
but the trouble with our own pagans is that they have no philosophy.
We talk, by a sort of habit, about Modern Thought, forgetting
the familiar fact that moderns do not think.  They only feel,
and that is why they are so much stronger in fiction than in facts;
why their novels are so much better than their newspapers.
The current comment on all these things is not even pagan; it is
the queerest sort of patchwork of pagan and purely Christian ideas.

For instance, somebody is sure to say in the debate about Decorum:
`Is not the human body beautiful?'  To which somebody a little more
sensible will be quite entitled to answer `No'. If he is a Scot,
and therefore a Socratic philosopher, he will be entitled to answer
the question with a question, and say:  `Is the hippopotamus beautiful?'
The hippopotamus is certainly natural, even if he looks unnatural.
He is certainly naked, and accepts no regulations about bathing-tents
or bathing-costumes. But the mere fact that he is natural does
not make us, in the ordinary sense, admit that he is beautiful.
Personally, for my own part, I think he is beautiful; but then,
I have a Gothic taste for the grotesque, nourished upon gargoyles.
I know what I mean by saying that gargoyles may be beautiful.
But the modern materialists do not know what they mean by saying
that men must be beautiful.

All that talk about the divinity and dignity of the human body is
stolen from theology, and is quite meaningless without theology.
It dates from the Garden of Eden, and the idea (which I happen to
hold firmly) that God created Man in His own image.  But, if you remove
that religious idea, there is no more sense in saying that every human
being is lovely than in saying that every hippopotamus is lovely.
It is a matter of taste; and many of us, after watching a sufficient
number of human beings at Brighton, might prefer the hippopotamus.

The old atheists had a theory of life, that could be stated
as a connected train of thought.  The old theologians had a theory
of life, that could be stated as a connected train of thought.
But the moderns who call themselves Pagans have no connected theory
that can be stated at all.  Their view of life is a hotch-potch
of human and superhuman and subhuman ideas, collected everywhere
and connected nowhere.  The modern muddler likes to think
he is the Superman; likes to think he is the image of God;
likes to think as he pleases; but prefers not to think at all.
If he had the humility to behave like a beast, we should at
least be free from the obligation to regard him as a god.
We should not be bound to admit that every beast is beautiful;
having religious doubts, perhaps, about the hippopotamus or the hornbill.
If he would clearly and consistently aspire to beauty, we might ask
him to add to it a little dignity.  But in fact he has returned
to chaos, where there is no asking, nor is there any answer.
If man comes out of chaos, by blind evolution or merely groping growth,
there is no more sense in calling his body noble than in calling
any lump of fungus or cactus noble.  If it is noble, it is so by
some patent of nobility; and nobility is conferred by a King.
But I advise such writers to defer the study of the Body and begin
to employ the Mind.

XXXVIII.  On Algernon Charles Swinburne

I

MOST modern titles and slogans have to say the precise opposite
of what they mean, for the sake of brevity.  Sometimes the organizers
are so sincere as to explain this immediately afterwards
and use the sub-title to prove that the title is not true.
A little while ago a series of short stories appeared, proclaiming in
its editorial title that each author had chosen his best story.
But the editor, who evidently suffered from intelligence (and it does
sometimes entail suffering) was perfectly well aware that no sane
author would say that any one story was absolutely and in all aspects
the best; indeed, a sane author is more likely to be hag-ridden
with the horrid memory of the worst.  So the editor put in a note
to explain his own title, which he said was necessary, because it
was so much shorter.  It is true that the phrase `My Best Story'
is very much shorter than the more accurate phrase, `I think this
story is one of the relatively few by which I might possibly consent
that people should judge my general intelligence, such as it is.'
It is also true that the phrase, `This story is utter trash,'
is very much shorter than the phrase, `This story is not,
fairly considered, quite absolute and utter trash.'
But they do not, to say the least of it, mean the same thing.
And selecting the shorter would be unwise, even in a publicity expert.

A rather similar problem arose about a recent selection of
English essays, made and introduced by the late Lord Birkenhead;
it was a very good selection, and it was not alone in suffering
from the particular problem.  In large letters on the title-page
it had to bear the title of `The Hundred Best English Essays';
and in the very first words of the introduction Lord Birkenhead
very sensibly said that there could not possibly be any such
thing as `The Hundred Best English Essays'.  He proceeded,
in a very frank and sympathetic manner, to explain that it was not
only impossible for anybody to do anything except make a reasonable
collection of very good essays, but that he (for his part)
had practically put in all the essays simply because he liked them.
I really do not know what else any one can do with essays but
like them--except, of course, if one has such darker reactions,
dislike them.  Of all forms of literature they are perhaps
the least to be fitted into the old standards of judgment,
by which it was in some sense possible to legislate for the drama
or the ode.  But, anyhow, there is something a little amusing
about the claims of publicity and business requiring us to reverse
all that we mean, in order to get anybody to listen to what we say.
There is something comic about sacrificing everything to the headline,
and letting it insist that the article should stand on its head.

I did not mention this book of essays, however, with the purpose of
passing in review all its essays, still less the nature of the essay.
I have to thank the compiler for bringing back many good things I
may have missed or forgotten; but the one which especially caught
my eye and concerns my pen is an excellent study by a critic lately
dead of a poet whom he knew well and of whom he writes admirably.
I refer to the essay on Swinburne by Sir Edmund Gosse.
It contains any amount of matter upon which others could pronounce
with much more authority than I. I only met Swinburne once; and though
I met Gosse a great many times, I would never claim to have got
past the guard of that polished rapier any more than anybody else.
I had one letter from him about Stevenson, which I count one
of the great honours of my life; for the rest, I was only one
of a crowd of younger men to whom he was both ironical and kind.
But there is something in the general and very vivid picture
of Swinburne which he presents, which makes me inclined to linger
perhaps belatedly on that name and on the poetry which, as poetry,
was as straight as a singing arrow; but, considered as philosophy,
has always puzzled me very much.  In other words, if we consider
the target of the arrow, we find that there is nothing to consider;
it is not even so clear a concentric scheme as a labyrinth;
it is rather a labyrinth without a centre.

In plain words, after reading Gosse's essay again, I asked myself:
`What on earth did Swinbume mean?  Or did he mean anything?'
It is easy enough after reading some of the poems, especially the later,
longer and generally lesser poems, to say that he did not mean anything;
that he was simply a musician gone wrong; a lunatic with something
singing in his head; a creature throbbing with suppressed dancing;
a creature who could not help foaming at the mouth with flowers
and flames and blood and blossoms and the sea.  But it is not easy,
after reading Gosse's essay, to deny that he did in some way take
something seriously; and something not himself, if his contemporaries
doubted whether it was something for making righteousness.
He did take counsel with Landor and Hugo as if they were grave gods
making a world of justice or right reason.  He did seem really
to believe that some Utopia depended on the success of Cavour
or the failure of Louis Bonaparte.  But exactly how he connected it
in his own mind with the queer licentious pessimism, like the last
debauch of a suicide, which fills his other verses, I cannot make out;
nor how he supposed that anything, even a Utopia, could be made
of such flames and foamings.  Surely he was not hoping for a republic
in which all the citizens should be free to bite each other.
Surely the hounds of spring, so hopefully upon winter's traces,
were not all of them frothing at the mouth like mad dogs?

Yet it is his taste in virtue rather than his taste in vice that
puzzles me.  In the worst and most world-famous of all his lines
he wrote something about the raptures and roses of vice and the lilies
and languors of virtue.  The obvious thing to say is that he cannot
have known much about virtue, if he thought it was languid.  But, to do
him justice, his own appeals to public virtue were anything but languid.
When talking of his own favourite type, which used to be called
Republican Virtue, he seems to have understood all that Roman
dignity and decency which he tore to rags in his ravings about sex.
He used another nonsensical tag about somebody being `noble and nude
and antique'.  So good a scholar ought to have known that, in the real
world of the antique, a noble would never have desired to be nude.
He would have regarded it as the mark, not of a noble, but a slave.
In reality Swinburne knew all this; indeed one could hardly be
a friend of so very ancient a Roman as Landor without knowing it.

Then, again, the Pagan philosophy he pitted against Christianity
is a mass of such inconsistencies.  In Songs Before Sunrise
he offers Pantheism as the religion of the revolution.
Pantheism may or may not be a good creed for a philosopher; Pantheism is
certainly in one sense a very good creed for a Pagan philosopher.
But Pantheism is a hopeless creed for a revolutionist.  If all things
are equally divine, then the tyrant and the bigot are as divine as
the tribune and the truth-seeker. In `Hertha' he imagines the universe
as a vast tree, out of which all things in turn bud and bloom;
and then takes refuge in the miserable metaphor of saying that `creeds'
are merely worms that have got into the bark--the devil knows how.
If all things are equally unfolded from one natural root,
the worms of oppression are as natural as the flowers of freedom.
If they came otherwise, then the universe is not universal;
and the worm in the tree of nature is as theological as the snake in
the tree of knowledge.  There might indeed be a war of spring sproutings
against dead leaves or decayed fruit; but that only means that each is
equally good in its season.  And what is the good of a revolutionary
creed that cannot denounce a tyrant in his season of strength?
I believe that this folly of making Pantheism the creed of liberals
has a great deal to do with the decline of liberal politics and
the reactions against it to-day. Hertha, explaining (at some length)
that she is everything, remarks, if I remember right:

    I the mark that is missed
    And the arrows that miss.

It will strike a thoughtful mind that such arrows are rather
likely to miss.  William Tell will not fight well for Freedom,
if he thinks that he and his bow and the target and the tyrant
are all the same thing.

II

When I say that Swinburne's praise of virtue puzzles me more than his
praise of vice, I do not (I may respectfully explain) mean that my
natural taste in villainy makes me regard it as normal to be a villain,
or that my brain reels with mystification when I contemplate any
proved and public act of decency.  I do not mean that crime is second
nature to me, or that I set myself like a sleuth to track down a man
and discover why he is not a murderer.  What I mean is this:
that in the case of Swinburne the loose poetry was really loose.
It was flowing, both in form and spirit, and rather after
the fashion of the flowing of tears.  It was self-expression,
but it was not self-assertion; and it certainly was not any other kind
of assertion, like the assertion of a definite heresy or sophistry.
In so far as there was some thing indefensible, he was not defending it.
He was, perhaps, describing it, and it may be a bad thing that such
things should be described; but such things are not in any case
the materials of a moral or political system.  Such hysterical,
half-involuntary confession is not uncommon in literature,
especially when (as is almost certainly the case with Swinburne)
the literary man is confessing what he has never done.
Anyhow, over the whole of this department of the poet's work there
is a spirit of appealing and almost engaging despair, a pessimism
about the impotence of man.  He does not pretend that the pagan gods
are good; he only confesses that they are strong--or, in other words,
that he is weak.  What puzzled me was how he really reconciled
this part of his work with the other part, in which he professed
to see a new hope for men in the virile and universal Republic,
in which men should become heroes in becoming citizens.
There is hardly a hopeful line in Songs Before Sunrise that could
not be answered with a hopeless line from Poems and Ballads.
Perhaps the most musical and magical verse in `Dolores'
is that in open glorification of `the implacable beautiful tyrant';
and what is the use, after that, of denouncing all tyrants as implacable?
What is the good of remaining rigid with horror of Napoleon,
when you have flung yourself in a lyric ecstasy before Nero?  What is
the use of saying that you bring seed by night to sow, that men
to come may reap and eat by day, when it is apparently so very easy
for anybody at any moment to be tired of `what may come hereafter
to men that sow and reap'?  What is the sense of shouting about
crowning man as the king of all things, if `the crown of his life,
as it closes, is darkness; the fruit thereof dust'?

Nevertheless, there is another sense in which I would not dwell
harshly upon the looser type of verse, as part of the real problem
of this strange personality.  I say that the poet in the poem does
not defend himself.  The poet in prose was less wise, and defended
himself indefensibly.  I do not care so much as Gosse did for the ranting
and railing prose in which Swinburne accused his critics of being
unjust to him; nevertheless, I think that they were unjust to him.
I do not mean that he was right; but I do mean that they were wrong.
The critics were wrong in the worst way in which a critic can
be wrong about a poem:  in being wrong about the point of it.
The poem may contain a great deal that is pointless or beside the point;
it may contain a great deal that is lawless and shameless and really
at enmity with morals--in which case I am so old-fashioned as to
think that it ought to be denounced and even destroyed as such.
But even in condemning it we must condemn its point; and to condemn
its point we must comprehend its point.  We must understand what
the man has really said, and not hang him as a heretic for saying
something he never said.  Now much of the wilder part of Poems
and Ballads is not meant to describe merely a rush towards the antics
of animal love, but a reaction from the tragedy of true love.
The poet, in a morbid mood of mockery, is bitterly professing
(we might say pretending) to prefer the gutter to the palaces
of ideal enchantment, from which he has been cast forth
by fickleness or pride.  It is not a nice state of mind.
it is a very nasty state of mind; but it is that state of mind
and no other, and not the state of one who always preferred
gutters because he was a gutter-snipe. To put the point shortly,
we cannot understand the poem called `Dolores' without reading
it side by side with the poem called `The Triumph of Time'.
For instance, I have condemned, as every sane critic has condemned,
all that hydrophobiac nonsense of Swinburne about people `biting'
each other.  But it is not quite fair, even to that infernal nonsense,
to read it without remembering the verse to which it in some sense
leads up, and which is the true inner burden of the poem:

    In yesterday's reach and to-morrow's,
    Out of sight though they lie of to-day,
    There have been and there yet shall be sorrows
    That smite not and bite not in play.
    The life and the love thou despisest,
    These hurt us indeed, and in vain--
    O wise among women, and wisest,
    Our Lady of Pain.

I do not think the heartless woman is the wisest woman; I venture
to doubt whether Swinburne thought so.  But Swinburne did say so;
and this is what he said; and what he meant was that the pains
of a nobler love are so much more terrible that perhaps the coarse
person has the best of it, after all.  He repeats this main theme
again and again in the poem, so that it is incredible that the critics
did not see the point, even if they were right to condemn it.
He says it plainly in the lines

    No thorns go as deep as a rose's,
    And love is more cruel than lust;
    Time turns the old days to derision,
    Our loves into corpses and wives,
    And marriage and death and division
    Make barren our lives.

And it is then only that he says, in words horrible enough,
but with something of a moral horror:

    And pale with the past we draw nigh thee
    And satiate with comfortless hours:
    And we know thee, how all men belie thee,
    And we gather the fruit of thy flowers.

Or again, elsewhere:

    Of languors rekindled and rallied,
    Of barren delights and unclean;
    Things monstrous and fruitless; a pallid
    And poisonous queen.

This is not praising sin, though it may be practising it.
This is rather emphasizing the disgust that is the alternative
to the disappointment.  It is about as idolatrous as a disappointed
lover talking to a bottle of gin, and saying, `Damn your ugly face,
I believe you're my only friend, after all!'

I have dwelt a little on this particular point about the poet,
because it involves this very vital matter of the point about a poem.
Even when it is understood, the attitude may be condemned--
indeed, it should be condemned.  But it should not be condemned
for being something else.  It is a morbid view, an unmanly view,
a view immoral in its practical effects.  But, above all, as seems to me
most striking in this connexion, it is the very worst possible view
of life for anybody proposing to raise a political revolution and to
found a perfect Republic.  That is the question which I asked first:
why it is that men who seem so keen on reforming the world equip
themselves with the worst possible philosophies for doing it?
It is hard to say whether poor Swinburne was a more hopeless
revolutionist in being a pessimist or in being an optimist.
His pantheism could only prove that the worst things are good,
because they are a part of nature; and his pessimism only proved
that the best things are bad, because they are doomed to disappointment
and sorrow.  It seems either way a weak motive for dying on a
barricade for the belief that one thing is better than another.
We need a fixed idea of truth to establish a reign of justice.
But though Swinburne could hardly have given justice to men, he has
a right to get justice from them.  And I say this to show that on one
point he did not receive justice--not even the justice that condemns.

III

`I have lived long enough to have seen one thing; that love hath an end'
: so runs, as every one will remember, the first line of Swinburne's
beautiful `Hymn to Proserpine', the dirge of a Pagan farewell
to Paganism.  I have lived long enough to have seen one thing:
that the love of Swinburne hath an end.  Not the admiration
for Swinburne, not the reasonable appreciation of Swinburne;
but that particular sort of love of Swinburne which is like first
love in youth; perhaps (one is sometimes tempted to think) the only
sort of real love that Swinburne had ever known anything about.
I mean that sort of mere magic spell or enchantment by Swinburne
which so many young people had in the period when, as Mr. Maurice Baring
has very truly said, Swinburne seems to them not so much the best
poet as simply the only poet.  That sort of love certainly hath
an end, and most of us have lived long enough to have seen it.
But it is symbolic of something larger; something that is connected
not only with Swinburne but with Swinburnianism.

Any man who has `lived long enough', and not actually stiffened with
negative prejudices, must know by this time that the modern movement,
and every sort of movement, revolves round and round the central
pillar of the old Christian tradition.  It is emphatically not
leaving that pillar behind and rushing right away towards some
other winning-post. He knows it, for the perfectly simple reason
that he has seen it careering in two totally opposite directions,
and neither of them has succeeded in getting away from the post.
He knows by this time, if he is honest with himself, that the whole
thing is like a Giddy-go-Round at a country fair; full of rush and
romantic enjoyment, but revolving upon one centre that supports all the
movement by being immovable.  It is a glorious experience for children,
and therefore for poets, who share some of the wisdom of children.
It consists of concentric rings of hobby-horses, and a hobby-horse,
like a hobby, is a very good thing to make a thinking man happy.
In most Giddy-go-Rounds there are outer and inner rings of horses,
nearer or farther from the centre; and this also is an allegory.
In some Giddy-go-Rounds there are revolving rings going opposite
ways which greatly increase the godlike quality of giddiness.
In youth or childhood especially it is quite natural to be giddy,
even if it sometimes begins to approximate to being sick.
Of recent literature we might not unfairly say that for the first
half of the time most of the modern poets were giddy; and now,
in the second half of the time, most of the modern poets are sick.

Anyhow, Swinburne certainly rode his hobby-horse with great fire
and galloping energy; but, when he fancied that he was leaving
the central pillar of his childhood and his ancestry far behind him,
he was really very far from the truth and very close to the pillar.
And this is proved by the fact that both poetical and political energy
has since galloped in exactly the contrary direction, and is still
at about the same distance from the ancestral pillar as before.
If anything, the more recent poets have tended to take their
seats in the ring rather nearer to the pillar.  I imagine that,
if a man had gone round during the last ten years asking the young
people in the literary world whom they regarded as their hope
and hero and leader, as the young of my youth regarded Swinburne,
it is about ten to one that most of them would mention Mr. T. S. Eliot.
Wilde said that Swinburne was the only true Laureate, for the poet praised
by all other poets must always wear the laurel.  Laurels and Laureates
are not so much in the style of our more cynical and realistic time.
But the young would probably support a young writer like Mr. Eliot,
even if both the young writer and the young admirers strike older
people as being rather prematurely old.  Anyhow, the two poets
will serve very well for the purpose of the parallel about poetry,
or even about polities.

Swinburne was quite certain that he and the world were galloping
nearer and nearer to the new Republic and farther and farther from
the old Church.  If he had been right, it would follow that, by this time,
a man like Mr. Eliot would be even more Republican than Swinburne.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Eliot has actually walked out of a real
live Republic and loudly announced that he is a Royalist.
He has also declared himself an Anglo-Catholic; but I will
leave the religious issue as far as possible on one side,
because though even more cogent, it is much more controversial.
But even in the matter of politics alone it is quite obvious that there
has been a complete turn of the tide.  The Giddy-go-Round is going round
in the reverse direction, but, I am glad to say, almost as giddily.
The wooden horses are galloping with their accustomed fervour,
and I hope the children who ride on them are happy.  But one who has
seen this complete reversal of direction since his own childhood
will not be able to believe that the horses broke loose from the post
and fled farther and farther from it for ever merely because he was
told so in childhood.  Swinburne's hobby-horse, for instance,
had a perpetual impulse to gallop away over the Alps into Italy.
But suppose he were really still galloping into Italy,
like Hannibal or Napoleon, what sort of Italy would he find?
The political ideas of Swinburne were the ideas of the period of Mazzini.
The political ideas of T. S. Eliot are the ideas of the period
of Mussolini.  It might be maintained that the new poet is
nearer than the old poet to the old Roman pillar of the past.
It is stark nonsense to pretend that he is farther away.

I am not dealing directly here with things that I myself accept
or reject.  Many people know that my own religion is even more Roman
than Mr. Eliot's. Yet in many ways my polities are much more Republican
than Mr. Eliot's; perhaps much more really Republican than Swinburne's.
But I am not arguing about what is right or wrong in any of these views.
I am merely remarking on an actual revolution in the ideas of a large
number of other people, and noting that it is more like the real
revolution of a Giddy-go-Round than the mere riot of a gallop.
In one sense it has been revolution against revolution; that is,
revolution in one sense reversing revolution in the other.
But nobody who notes the real movements in the intellectual world
just now can doubt that there has been the sort of revolution that
is called a reaction.  In every country there has been a reaction,
either practical or theoretical, in the direction of order
or authority or classical proportion.  In France there has been
the influence of Maurras in polities or Maritain in religion.
In Germany the Dictator is a vision; in Italy he is a fact.
In America, the very last place where most people would look
for classicism, there has arisen an influential school of classicists.
Those who most fiercely denounce the fact most clearly confess the fact,
and even their denunciations are witness that it is a universal fact.
The enemies of Humanism denounce it as intellectual Fascism.
The enemies of Fascism make fun of its appeal to classicism.
Of course a man may quite reasonably like some of these things
and dislike others, or like some parts of these things and
dislike others, as I do myself.  But, as I say, I am not talking
about likes or dislikes, and I am not talking about myself.
I am talking about the way the world goes round, and pointing out
that the moral world does not always go round from right to left.
It is, at this moment, most certainly going round from left to right.
The sort of political party that used to be called the Extreme Right
contains more of the really original modern thinkers than the party
called the Extreme Left.  I only say that the return to traditionalism
is obviously strong enough to be recognized.  I think it very possible
that it may soon be strong enough to be resisted.  But when strange
survivals of the Swinburnian epoch, imagining themselves to be young,
actually come and tell me that the world is on an endless march
towards wild liberty and indefinite relaxation of everything,
I really do not know how to answer, except with a melancholy smile.
`I have lived long enough to have seen one thing . . .'