A Manx Minstrel

--October 20, 1900, The Speaker

Letters Of T. E. Brown*. Westminster:  A. Constable and Co.
Poems Of T. E. Brown.  London:  Macmillan.

The letters of T. E. Brown, author of Fo'c's'le Yarns,
letters that are in many ways singularly exuberant and entertaining,
are further interesting because they raise in a new way
the whole problem of the publication of private letters.
Let no reader imagine, however, that there is anything lurid about them.
Nothing worse is discovered against the morality of Mr. Brown
than an admiration of Mr. Hall Caine.  No skeleton in the family
cupboard is revealed, except the one appalling figure of a father
who was such a lover of style that he had a page of some
English classic read to him before he answered an invitation.
This latter anecdote we have a sort of terror in repeating,
because it is so obviously the kind of story that may go
the round of the newspapers and the French translation books,
and Lord Roberts, Mr. Vanderbilt, Talleyrand and Henri Quatre be
successively credited with the habit of giving to the phrase "has
much pleasure in accepting" some concentrated flavour of Burke.

There is, we say, nothing moral or immoral about the correspondence:
it is mostly full of uproarious levity, and yet, we will venture to say,
not altogether in paradox, that it is somewhat too sacred for the light
of day.  It seems to us that frivolity is, in the secretive sense,
far more sacred than seriousness; it is more fragile, more personal,
more occult.  Any one can see St. Paul's Cathedral, but there may
be only two people in the world who can see a particular joke.
Biographers are sometimes accused of obtruding themselves:
Mr. Irvine's nobler error is rather that he forgets that he, who received
most of these letters, was spiritually a collaborator in them.
His friend, T. E. Brown, was playing upon his memories and purposes
as on a piano:  to us he is too often fingering on a dumb keyboard.
We fear, as we say, that the rampant camaraderie of these communications
will be misunderstood and undervalued:  it is not possible,
properly speaking, to laugh irreverently at time, death and judgment--
for they laugh best who laugh last; but it is possible to laugh
very irreverently at a joke.

T. E. Brown, a perfect Celt, has no restraint; his letters
are full of "Ho!  Ho's!" and "Ha!  Ha's!" like the refrain
of an Elizabethan lyric.  With schoolboy abruptness
he makes remarks like "Isn't Browning a ripper?"
Throughout the work one feels that Kingsley is a ripper,
that Newman is a ripper, that Dr. George Macdonald is a ripper.
Now a letter like this is a bond between two men, and when
one of them is cut off it, it flaps dismally in the wind.
We are quite sure the letter was splendid when Mr. Irvine
received it; we wish we had been Mr. Irvine; but we were not,
and therefore do not read what he read.  The very essence
of friendship is in this intermixture, in those great midnight
conversations in which the primary colours of separate
personalities are mingled into incredible greens and purples,
as rich and unrecoverable as a sunset.

The author of Fo'c's'le Yarns was a Manxman, and his poetry
and letters are full of a somewhat new and original interpretation
of the theory that the proper study of mankind is Man.
He speaks of that island as if England and Ireland were dangerous
rocks making its approach difficult for the Manx mariner.
He was a typical Celt, and the hilarity to which we have alluded
was only one side of this walking bundle of emotions, "I am
a born sobber," he said.  But the most fascinating inconsistency
of his character in this respect are the bursts of Chaucerian
plainness of speech which give salt to his mystic piety.
The born sobber exhibits himself at times with the greatest cheerfulness
as a born swearer.  There is nothing in him of that mournful
wealth of mind and translucient delicacy which give to certain
modern Celtophiles the appearance, in the eye of the Philistine,
of having a head full of religions and no leg to stand on.
Brown had plenty of legs to stand on, like the escutcheon
of his own Isle of Man.  In fact, the only imaginary portrait we
have formed of Mr. Brown is founded on that famous hieroglyph;
we are sure that he would stand on one leg and dance with
the other two.

Even in the letters, frantic and random as they are, T. E. Brown
gives innumerable instances of a genuine literary instinct.
The delightful apologue of Matthew Arnold "in one of his raids"
carrying away a Philistine maiden is worthy of that great man himself.
The remark about his father's literary taste, "to him style was an
instinct of personal cleanliness," hits the right nail on the head
and is an excellent instance of the thing it describes.

In an appropriate manner we are in a position at the same time to
consider the full and handsome edition of Brown's poems which Messrs.
Macmillan have published.  Those poems are far too voluminous to be
accorded a detailed criticism here, but they are also far too remarkable
to be passed over without some attempt at a general estimate.
They exhibit in a singular manner most of the same merits and defects
as the letters, and this is a good sign, for it shows that Brown
was that not too common figure, what may be called a unanimous man.
On the failing side, for example, they show that buoyant garrulity,
that tendency to say too much, that quaint confidence that masses
of personal reminiscence will be interesting to a reader,
which we have remarked in the letters, but without the excuse
of letter-writing. In their exclusive Manx spirit they often show
that breezy delusion, not uncommon in small sects and nations,
that they have the monopoly of the most obvious things,
the spirit which once led a friend of ours to tell us that it was
one of the inner doctrines of his church that lying was wrong.
One mysterious detail we cannot help thinking is an instance of this,
the note on p.  99:- "Jackdaw, Manx pronunciation, jackdaw."
It is gratifying to us to learn that in this matter we have been
talking the most exquisite Manx from our cradle.  On the side
of merit, again, they have a racial flavour in a far higher sense.
Mr. Yeats himself might not be ashamed of the expression of the Celtic
spirit in the lines about "an empty laugh":-

  ".... God
  Who has within himself the secret springs
  Of all the lovely, causeless, unclaimed things,
  And loves them in his very heart of hearts."

But again, as we have said, there is nothing pallid or frail about
his Celticism.  It is rather that spirit "brave and gay and faithful"
which Stevenson, in his noble speech to the Samoan chiefs,
attributed to his ancestor the Gael.  The raw materials, at least,
for one of the strongest poems that could be written are to be
found in the verses called "Risus Dei."  The dialect poems,
the actual Fo'c's'le Yarns, we may seem to have unduly subordinated,
but they are pre-eminently things to be read and not criticised.
They suffer from the poet's fluency, but their truth gradually
tightens its grip:-

  Now the beauty of the thing when children plays is
  The terrible wonderful length the days is

is a sentence from all our autobiographies.  Altogether, Mr. T. E. Brown
may be hailed as one of our recent lyric exponents of what Lord Salisbury
called "the Celtic Fringe"--a fringe which is (to the credit
of that statesman's humour) considerably wider than the garment.
He is smaller than Mr. W. B. Yeats, as Man is smaller than Ireland.
But we confess to some personal relief in finding one of our bards
of the Gael cocking his feather with full-blooded vanity, as a contrast
to those Irish poets who, in dwelling on the memory and wisdom
of the green island, have too often forgotten that green is also,
throughout her unconquerable history, the colour of folly and of hope.

G. K. C.


How the Church Stands To-Day

--October 27, 1900

The Crisis In The English Church.  By the Rev. W. E. Bowen.  With an
Introduction by the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies.  London:  Nisbet and Co.

Mr. Bowen's book is a typical and almost symbolic publication.
It is calculated to impress on the mind the irrevocable
conviction that the Church crisis has reached a stage in which
no alternative remains except that between disestablishment
and a sudden and disturbing irruption of Christian charity.
Between these two neither side is likely to hesitate and
the Establishment is, we fear, doomed.  We say we fear it
because it is not without regret that we see any historic
compromise which has long subsisted on common sense giving
way under the assaults of logic.  But, however much one
may defend an anomaly so long as it is sympathetically and
rationally interpreted, it is ridiculous to sound the praises
of its practicality while a host of insane mathematicians
are busily engaged in working it to a reductio ad absurdum.
Mr. Llewelyn Davies, in an able introduction which he contributes
to Mr. Bowen's volume, says plausibly in reply to the charge
of "persecution" brought against Protestants:-

"I have always thought that the comprehensiveness of our Church consisted
not in its being a Liberty Hall in which every clergyman was free
to deprave its doctrine and discipline as he pleased, but in the fact
that its doctrine and discipline were themselves comprehensive."

The distinction is sound and logical, but we doubt whether
it is accurate or complete in the particular case.
It is not true that the Anglican form is a lucid and systematic
latitudinarian scheme marked out in wide but clear divisions.
The problem chiefly arises from the complex mosaic of forms found
in the Prayer-book. Upon the whole, the nobler and more popular
parts of our Prayer-book are rather High Church than Low.
But it is foolish to maintain (as is done by some ritualists)
that the Prayer-book is entirely Tractarian when the greatest
of the Tractarians defended their acceptation of certain Articles by
interpretations which they did not pretend were natural or obvious.
And the liberty of the Church has not, as a matter of fact,
rested on a scientific scheme of comprehensiveness, but on
a compromise founded on the impossibility either of altering
or of pressing too hard an august and beautiful but archaic
and perplexing system.  All sections have felt their position
anomalous in something and the proverbial pot and kettle have
been our chief vessels of salvation.  Now it is obvious that one
of these English compromises of ours cannot exist an instant
after two formidable sections set to work to argue about it.
If a Judge were to insist on the bodily appearance of
John Doe and Richard Roe, nothing would remain to be done
except to explain to him the unique and delicate character
of those gentlemen and to remove them from our legal system.
If the Queen, in the exercise of her indisputable legal rights,
were to pardon all the murderers and make them peers,
nothing could be done except to abolish the Monarchy.
It does not follow, however, that we should not regret having
to do so; and we may all as Englishmen look back with pride
at the great experiment of a tolerant National Church,
even if it has failed at last.

Mr. Bowen's book, which is written from the moderate Protestant
standpoint, is a peculiar example of what we may be permitted
without offence to call degeneration in the course of 300 pages.
It opens with an estimate of the good and evil in the Oxford Movement,
which is not only just and thoughtful, but genuinely original;
its thesis that Tractarianism was in its highest function a somewhat
austere moral movement, an almost Puritanic protest against slovenly
and luxurious religion, is a ray of honest historic daylight.
But instead of pursuing the high and fruitful work of disentangling
the spiritual and essential from the irrelevant and malicious
in this controversy, he turns the latter part of his book into
the familiar Kensit catalogue of horrible revelations in high life,
a mass of barren and bitter anecdotes which only serve to remind us,
if they are untrue, that there are a great many liars in the world,
if they are true, that there are a great many repulsive lunatics.
There may be "Catholics" (we leave the matter to the police)
who flog nuns almost to death, but that is no reason for
flogging the subject to death also, as if it had anything
to do with the two theories of ecclesiastical history.
There may be "Catholics" who teach children that the Dissenters
found "little sham churches" which the Holy Ghost never inspires,
but we are prevented from admitting this into the Church controversy
by our firm conviction that Canon Gore or Canon MacColl would
regard the view of Dissenters with as much contempt as we do.
Our own definite and even earnest opinion is that this discussion
will never have either profit or solution until each party
respectively abandons identifying Protestantism with Mr. Kensit
or Catholicism with the idiots above mentioned, and, frankly,
admits the really interesting historic fact that Catholicism
and Protestantism are two moral and intellectual forces standing
for tendencies that are as old as life and equally worth living.
Catholicism stands for the instinct, for clothing the unutterable
in noble systems, enduring images and worthy language, Protestantism
for the recurrent necessity of rending the loveliest veils and
refreshing human nature in the terrible simplicity of monotheism.
But from this view one very obvious deduction follows,
which has a very clear bearing on a book like that of Mr. Bowen.
It is not common sense to suppose that the adherents of Protestantism,
the glory of which is in a certain impatience of formulae,
will be as good authorities upon rites and ceremonies as the people
who regard them as of vast importance.  A plain man is within
his rights in expressing an indifference to heraldry, but if
he begins to argue about it it is not improbable that he will put
metal on metal and call a chevron a bend.  Now the evil genius
of most Protestants in this discussion has been ignorance:
they do not understand the facts of the case as the party
who are immersed in ecclesiastical history understands them.
And this has given rise to the fault which hag-rides the work
of Mr. Bowen and Mr. Llewelyn Davies, a fault that has dwarfed
and vulgarised militant Protestantism to a degree inconceivable,
and which we will venture to call the idolatrous tendency
of Protestantism.  The ignorant Protestants and the ignorant
Catholics are the only people who worship stocks and stones,
for the former think a dead stick diabolic and the latter holy.
If the gods of the heathen are stone and brass the same must
be said of the devils of Mr. Kensit.  This extraordinary tendency
to quote material objects as if they were sinful in themselves,
to whisper in an awe-struck voice a rumour of the presence of certain
candles or pictures as if the candles were stolen or the pictures
pornographic is one of the worst results of the grotesque
seriousness of which we speak.  Mr. Llewelyn Davies, for example,
says in his preface not that there is confession in the Church,
but that there are "confessional-boxes," and from the manner
in which these objects are often spoken of, one would imagine
that a confessional-box was something like a musical-box,
an ingenious piece of clock-work which confessed and absolved a man
by machinery, and without which it was impossible for a confessor
to ply his trade.  As a matter of fact, a confessional-box bears
the same relation to confession that a bathing-machine bears
to bathing; it makes it slightly safer and more decorous.
As bathing would exist everywhere if there were no machines,
so confession would, as things stand, exist if there were no boxes.
The real trouble is that those who embark on the genuinely
necessary work of attacking the evils of ritualism get no further
than these material symbols, and never realise the real problem.
The real problem of confession, for example, may be stated
in three short sentences, and it has nothing to do with boxes.
The Prayer-book leaves the matter entirely to the layman, saying that,
if he is unable to quiet his conscience, he shall come to confession.
This obviously does not contemplate, and by implication discourages,
the idea of universal systematic confession.  But, if there be
a strong movement among the laity for such systematic confession,
how can such systematic confession be stopped in a free country?
No one has any right to say that every member of a vast crowd
is not at a particular psychological crisis.  If any Protestant
writer can really solve this problem of the letter and the spirit,
he will do more than we can.

Let us take another example from Mr. Bowen's pages-the passage
which he quotes from the letters of Pusey, in which that great
man discusses self-flagellation, describes a scourge "of
a very sacred character" with five lashes, discusses the parts
of his anatomy, lungs, &c, on which it was safe to employ it,
and goes into the matter of hair shirts like a man choosing waistcoats.
The passage is, to a healthy man, somewhat emetic.
But we think that Mr. Bowen is yielding again to Kensitite
materialism in imagining that it is the mere use of a rod
that seems unworthy of Pusey.  His self-discipline was probably
neither more voluntary nor more painful than that of an ordinary
young man who nearly bursts a blood-vessel in his college boat.
What disgusts us is the lower spirit of Catholicism, the spirit
of mysteries and minutiae, the solemn treatment of inane details,
the tendency of all doors to lead inwards and none outwards.
Pusey discussing various expedients of bodily discomfort represents
the ugly side of poetic and inexhaustible Catholicism, just as
the ugly side of the simplicity and centrality of Protestantism
is represented by the cant and monotony of the ecstatic bore
who asks innumerable strangers if they have found Jesus.
Nothing will ever come of this controversy until these two religious
tendencies are recognised as things that are essential always,
and which on the highest plane are not even inconsistent.
When a voice from the Bible says, "Will God be pleased
with the fat of rams .... shall I give my firstborn for
my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"
in that voice speaks the highest spirit of Protestantism.
When a voice says, "Shall I offer to the Lord that which costs me
nothing?" in that voice speaks the highest spirit of Catholicism.
And if Mr. Bowen and his friends grow impatient with such hymnal
phraseology as "O, Sweet Sacrament!" just as his opponents grow
impatient with, "Give us the blood of the Lamb!" can they not both
remember that religion is a secret passion audaciously made public;
it is not strange if its hymns have something of the splendid
folly of love-letters?  Can we not make one more effort to solve
this riddle by the introduction of Christianity?

--G.K.C.

Our Reasonable Imperialist

--November 10, 1900, The Speaker

The Great Boer War.  By A. Conan Doyle.  London:  Smith and Elder.

This occasionally mistaken, but always moderate and dignified
work can only be properly appreciated if we consider who and
what Mr. Conan Doyle is.  He is something more than the only
author since Dickens who has created a character of whom every
one has heard.  He is one of the embodiments of that tendency,
sound and useful originally, towards the poetry of the Savage,
otherwise called the Bachelor; the poetry of masculine sport
and independence which was the really healthful and necessary
work of the late Mr. Rudyard Kipling.

Mr. Conan Doyle's defence of prize-fighting and Mr. Kipling's
defence of the war were, of course, only wild allegoric paradoxes,
intended to emphasise by their very oddity a genuine tendency in the
cultured as well as the uncultured, towards the masculine standpoint
of the ethics of war and hunting, the idea that we, in praising
the poetry of womanhood and the romantic relations, have, perhaps,
neglected the dumb primeval poetry of our own friendships and feuds.
Even Stevenson, in so long keeping the feminine excitement out
of his stories, belongs to this movement; and "Sherlock Holmes"
is, in lighter matters, the best type we have of cunning and
self-reliance in civilization, of the romance of savagery in a city.
No one expects that a writer like Mr. Doyle can have a hyper-ideal
view of life, and it is not surprising if both he and Mr. Kipling
tend in politics in a somewhat tribal and militant direction.
But the difference in their two fates is quite startling.
At a certain point of this river of average manhood it is crossed
by the shallow and frothy stream of a temporary Jingoism.
Mr. Kipling has been completely whirled away on the smaller stream,
and is now somewhere making observations, dangerously fresh
and brilliant, about the Boers reading the Bible and only shooting
from behind rocks.  Mr. Conan Doyle goes on down the main
stream of his philosophy, such as it is, of an admiration
for manliness, and therefore an admiration for the Boers.
Mr. Kipling is an Imperialist, and he calls the last slaughter
of Cronje's forces at Paardeberg "a satisfactory big killing."
Mr. Doyle is also an Imperialist and he says of those forces,
"Thus they passed out of their ten days of glorious history."

Mr. Conan Doyle is a supporter of the war, and consequently
on a large number of points his conclusions are not ours.
But in the presence of the general ferocious triviality which
confuses this question, we are far more inclined to congratulate
Mr. Doyle upon the honourable reverence that he again
and again expresses for the conquered than to argue with him
about threadbare diplomatic points.  It is curious, perhaps,
to hear any man apply the adjectives "grave and measured"
to Sir Alfred Milner's remarks about the Outlanders being helots,
a remark the only excuse for which is that Sir Alfred Milner
is old enough to have forgotten what helots were.
But we almost invariably find (what is not too common)
that Mr. Doyle's Imperialism is a matter of opinion, not a
matter of moral colour-blindness. For example, he considers
the Majuba Settlement unwise and expresses that view firmly,
but he indulges in no childish goriness about "avenging Majuba."
Whether or no he is a Christian, he is at any rate a sportsman.
He knows that the coarsest prize-fighter that came of our blood
was expected to bear no malice for a fair beating.

In his description of the war itself Mr. Conan Doyle shows,
as a pure artist, the same virile simplicity.  He does
not indulge in that extraordinary art of "wordpainting"
which has poisoned the work of so many war-correspondents,
the literary lunacy which hunts the wrong word as simple
people hunt the right, and avoids the vulgarity of speaking
of crafty generals and bursting shells by the simple expedient
of speaking of crafty shells and bursting generals.
Mr. Conan Doyle tells the tale of war simply and he has
the reward of success for a very obvious reason.
The essence of warlike poetry is rapidity.  This dainty
and elaborate movement of the diction is open to objection,
even when the writer is engaged on the higher work of describing
the profligacies of some neurotic of Upper Tooting; but when
the whole force of the situation is in its instantaneousness
and dazzling decision, a clever adjective is like a calthrop to a
charge of cavalry.  It interrupts and even unseats the warrior.
Mr. Conan Doyle's descriptions have the true military rush
and simplicity like the line of an old war-ballad:-

  "And dark with winter was the flow--
  Of Iser rolling rapidly."

The "descriptive" correspondent would have written it:-

  "And fat with frost-mud was the flow
  Of Iser tottering huskily."

If guns "sneeze" at a man no doubt he is struck by the
artistic comparison.  If they shoot at him, they hit him.

We value profoundly, as we have said, the chivalrous
tone of Mr. Doyle's book, because he represents,
since Mr. Kipling's mysterious collapse, that muscular school
which should take the Boers under its particular protection.
A man like Cronje should have been and would have been,
in Mr. Kipling's best days, a delight to that author.
He has all Mr. Kipling's favourite virtues and, by a supreme
touch of fascination, he has committed all Mr. Kipling's
favourite crimes.  Mr. Doyle, however, stands forth
to-day as the champion of the secrets of a strong race.
The question is far deeper than mere negative morality.
Cronje is not filled with moral delicacies, and he is by no
means a favourable specimen of the Boer.  But comparing,
in the broadest human and anthropological spirit, the hero
of the tremendous Thermopylae of Paarderberg with Mr. Beit
or the late Mr. Barnato, what can any thinking person say
of the transfer of influence in that country except the two
lines of Goldsmith?--

  "Ill fares the land to hastening woes a prey
  Where wealth accumulates and men decay."

Have we realised that these ragged folk are the real riches
of the Transvaal?  Can we work the mines of the human gold?


Buddha Versus Buddhism

--November 17, 1900, The Speaker

Buddha And Buddhism.  By Arthur Lillie.  Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.

Mr. Arthur Lillie calls his book Buddha and Buddhism, and much of it
is devoted to explaining that they are very different things.
His primary and most interesting thesis amounts to this:
that so far from the great nihilistic philosophy which attracts
European pessimists to Buddhism being, as is maintained,
the pure metaphysic of Gautama himself since corrupted
into a mere religion, it is this nihilism which is itself
a vast decadent development of the words of a teacher who was
as primal, ethical and direct as the Founder of Christianity.
Mr. Lillie has a lively instinct for literature, and he opens
his case with a telling and amusing apologue in which he describes
some future historian proving conclusively that mediaeval Catholicism
must have been a priestly corruption of the religion of Comte.
Nightmare speculations on the essential non-existence of everything
are the chief hobby of the Pyhrro-Buddhic pessimists-if,
indeed, pessimism can be properly attributed to them, for it
is difficult to believe in the worst of all possible worlds
if you do not believe that any worlds are possible at all.
But we think Mr. Lillie has done a great service in clearing
the character of the great Gautama of this war upon Nature-this
matricidal mysticism.  The question affects not only Buddhism,
but Christianity also, which is now constantly accused of nihilism
by its enemies as Buddhism is accused by its friends.

Schopenhauer, with that brilliant futility which made him so striking
considered merely as a literary man, maintains that Christianity is akin
to his own pessimism because it rejects the vanities of the world.
The remark is a good instance of that class of ingenious observations
against which we can say nothing except that they are obviously not true.
Any one can see that a man floating in visions of certain felicity is not
in the same state of mind as a man who believes all felicity impossible:
and the two are not made essentially any more similar by the accident
that they both take the same attitude towards something else.
Schopenhauer and the most maniacal ascetic of the middle ages are
no more like each other than a man who does not take an omnibus
because he cannot afford it and a man who does not take an omnibus
because he prefers his landau.  Buddhism might be called an
intermediary link, for the Buddhist felicity was in a sense negative;
but the monkish felicity was full of the fieriest human images,
and if he scoffed at non-religious pleasures it was as a lover might
scoff at the mass of women or a patriot at the mass of nations.
We say this of the most evil forms of actual Christian asceticism.
That the religion of Jesus was not Pyhrro-Buddhic (though it is
sometimes called so) is clear from the somewhat obvious distinction
that Pyhrro-Buddhism encourages poverty because it takes a man out
of the natural order, whereas Jesus encouraged poverty avowedly because
it united him with the natural order-with the birds and the lilies
of the field.  No mortal ingenuity can make an "Anti-Cosmic Nihilist"
of a teacher who recommended a certain course on the express ground
that it was the law of the animal and vegetable world.  It is highly
possible that ambition, commerce and much that civilisation values
appeared to Jesus a huge and grotesque excrescence on the face of life.
But to Pyhrro-Buddhism it is life itself that is the excrescence:
being is a disease:  the stars are a disfigurement to the purity of night,
a kind of cosmic rash, and the eternal hills are mere protuberances,
as shameful as the boils of Job.  It is the iniquitous completeness
of this imaginative conception that has really attracted men like
Schopenhauer to metaphysical Buddhism, for the Indian pessimist holds
it with an appalling sweetness and calm which the fretful German could
only envy as he pursued the impossible paradox of using cosmic energy
in defiance of the Cosmos and not so much cutting off his nose to spite
his face as cutting the rest of himself off his nose that he might turn
up his nose at it.

But though we can well believe, with Mr. Lillie, that the real Buddha
was a noble elemental moralist and that his teachings were very
different from the bewildering rhetoric of annihilation which fills
later Indian metaphysics, we think that there is, perhaps, a more
natural connection between them than he is inclined to allow.
To us, at least, the Buddhist peoples, especially of India,
seem to present the unfathomable spiritual tragedy of a people
who have looked upon God and lived.  They have stared at
the white light too long and their intellects have suffered.
The Jews, with their wonderful instinct for practical religion,
swore that he who looked upon Jehovah died; but in a large
number of transcendental schools and sages the sentence
of death has been commuted to a doom of gibbering idiotcy.
To the Buddhists was given a conception of God of extraordinary
intellectual purity; but, in growling familiar with
the featureless splendour, they have lost their heads:
they babble; they say that everything is nothing and nothing
is everything, that black is white because white is black.
We fancy that the frightful universal negatives, at which,
as we have seen, they have at last arrived, are really
little more than the final mental collapse of men trying
always to find an abstraction big enough for all things.
"I have said what I understood not:  things too great for me,
that I knew not.  I will put my hand upon my mouth."
Job was a wise man.

Perhaps the most unsatisfactory part of Mr. Lillie's very satisfactory
book is the chapter devoted to the parallels between Christ and Buddha,
upon which are founded the theories that Christianity was borrowed
from Buddhism.  Historically we do not think this probable, if for no
other reason than for the reason that the basic scheme of ideas on which
Christ reared His Gospel may be found in Isaiah and the ancient Jews;
but there can be no doubt that there are very interesting resemblances.
Mr. Lillie, however, in the excitement of finding parallels, provides a
list of which nine-tenths are parallels of no significance whatever.
To say of two Eastern teachers that they were both concerned on
one occasion with the washing of feet is not even a coincidence;
we might as well call it a coincidence that they both had feet to wash.
Sometimes Mr. Lillie's parallels are not even parallel as far as they go.
He tells us as a pendant to the text, "They parted my garments,"
that "on the death of the Bokte' Lama his garments are cut into little
stripes and prized immensely."  This is the very reverse of a similarity;
the parting of Christ's garments was done by his enemies; it was an
expression of contempt, and the garments were not "prized immensely,"
except for what they would fetch in the rag-shops of Jerusalem.
Mr. Lillie quotes the fact that in Buddhist scripture the divine
voice speaks "out of the sky," as if in any religion one would
expect it to come out of the coal-cellar. He makes a more
radical error in comparing the Gospel "house on the sand"
with the Buddhist saying, "The seen world is like a city of sand."
Not only does the Christian parable not enunciate the latter sentiment,
it enunciates something like the opposite.  The man who built on the sand
was the man who did not carry out his conceptions into the seen world.
We can only refer Mr. Lillie to the passage.

Mr. Lillie speaks with just dissent of some distinctions made
by Christians between the two creeds founded merely on doctrines,
even such central doctrines as personal deity and immortality.
But whereas Mr. Lillie seems to think the difference more
or less imaginary, we fancy it is deeper than any doctrines.
Both Christianity and Buddhism do indeed stand for simplicity,
for the fact that it is in the primal part of us that we are
nearest to the unseen.  But Buddhism stands for a simplification
of the mind and a reliance on the most indestructible ideas;
Christianity stands for a simplification of the heart
and a reliance on the most indestructible sentiments.
The greater Christian insistance upon personal deity and
immortality is not, we fancy, the cause so much as the effect
of this essential trend towards an ancient passion and pathos
as the power that most nearly rends the veil from the nature
of things.  Both creeds grope after the same secret sun,
but Buddhism dreams of its light and Christianity of its heat.
Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find,
the all-producing and all-absorbing Om; Christianity seeks
for God with the most elementary passion it can find;
the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills.
It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry
of a lost child.

G. K. C.

Literature and Childhood

--November 24, 1900, The Speaker

The Junior Temple Reader.  By Clara Linklater Thomson and
E. E. Speight, B.A. London:  Horace Marshall.

The compilers of this collection have laid down for themselves
in the preface a genuine and seriously needed principle,
and have from time to time observed it admirably,
and with dramatic suddenness.  They say, with perfect truth,
that "such reading-books are too often written down to children,
instead of being made the models by which their taste is formed."
Undoubtedly looking down and speaking down and writing down to
the human soul have been the sterilising curses of education.
That everything should look up to everything else may be a little
bewildering as geometry, but like many other impossibilities,
it is simple and successful in morals.  But we cannot imagine
that the compilers mean that all things are equally suitable
in a book for children or that they would cheerfully bring out
a sequel consisting of selections from The Amazing Marriage,
interspersed with popular recitations from Mallarme.
They have so far fulfilled their own excellent principle
that they have collected in this volume a number of noble
fragments of literary art which it is highly probable
that the most adventurous child might not find in the family
book-case. The pleasure of reading a manly English translation
of the death of the great Paladin at Roncesvaux, for example,
is sufficient to wipe out one's annoyance at finding a piece
of sentimental German romanticism, like Wieland's Huon of Bordeaux,
placed like an artificial rockery beside the morning mountain
of the Song of Roland.

But the compilers of this educational work have violated
their own principle in a more subtle and a more universal way.
They have yielded to that singular delusion which dominates
books with a far less logical intention, the delusion
that the child as such is interesting to children.
This is a mistake which any hack-journalist would despise.
Every one is interested in the local colour of foreign travel,
but a book entitled Strange Adventures among the Aborigines
of Clapham would not gratify the inhabitants of that suburb.
Yet the customs of Clapham are, to the true philosophic traveller,
weird and even terrifying.  So the eternal value of children
to maturity is that they are a palpable scientific elfland,
but the essence of elves is unconsciousness and utter solemnity.
The books that should be set before children are books of play
and ceremonial, and pomp and war:  the whole gloria mundi,
the whole pageant of history, full of blood and pride,
may safely be told them-everything but the secret of their own
incomparable influence.  Children need to be taught primarily
the grandeur of the whole world.  It is merely the whole world
that needs to be taught the grandeur of children.

Upon this error a great part of this collection, like most
other collections, splits like a ship upon a rock.  The compilers
have honourably rejected bad literature, but they seem to have had
the idea that they had only to find a piece of good literature
referring to children and to submit it affectionately to the child.
They might as well take a copy of Marshall on The Frog and affectionately
throw it into a frog-pond. How grotesque it is, when once the mind
is set seriously on the matter, to put before a child, as here, a poem
like Blake's "Little Black Boy," or, for the matter of that, any poem
of Blake's. A child appreciates rhythm, and Blake hardly observes prosody;
a child loves pomp and battle, and Blake was a worshipper of nudity
and crudity and peace at any price; a child is censorious of detail,
and Blake is often, to a censorious mind, mere doggerel.
The splendours of his poetry are a clarity which is more unfathomable
than darkness and a purity which is like the purity of white hair.
He called some of his poems "Songs of Innocence," but in truth all
of them, and more especially the simplest, were "Songs of Experience."
There was not one rhyme that a boy could have written, except, perhaps,
the gorgeous and swaggering tragedy of Edward III.

The same fault must be found with the insertion of the beautiful
"Cradle Song" of Mr. W. B. Yeats, called here (for some dark
educational reason) Mr. W. A. Yeats.  It is the song of a mother,
and any child should be sent to bed who pretended to understand it.
The fallacy extends even to the illustrations.  The compilers have been
foolish enough to employ largely an artist who works in a style of pure
line-illustration as pale as the silver point of Raphael and aspiring
after the manner of Burne-Jones. Even where this is done excellently
it is wholly unfitted for children, for it requires a technical
luxuriousness to appreciate the billowing beauty of a single line;
it is a perfect instance of the unfitness of simplicity for the simple.
The most distressing example is a picture from that portentous
Scandinavian fable about the travels of Thor-how he could not drink
from a horn because the horn was the sea and could not lift a cat
because the cat was the world-serpent. No mortal should dare to depict
that story, for it belongs to that tremendous borderland where
the shapes of things hang loosely on them like disguises, and life
is a metaphysical masquerade.  But when we are shown a pre-Raphaelite
youth like an emaciated Galahad and asked to believe that it is Thor,
our "Berserker blood-rage" makes one of its rare appearances.
This insolent lucidity will not do for children.  It is the glory of the
child as the type of the celestial that his mind is a house of windows.
To surround him with child poems and pictures is to paint the panes
outside with silver and make his mind, like the mind of a maniac,
a house of mirrors.

G.K.C.

Christmas Books for Children

December 8, 1900, The Speaker

Time should be turned tail foremost as we approach Christmas
and all of us grow younger every day:  even the educational
reviewer like ourselves may suddenly become possessed of a sense
of humour and perceive in his position as "mother's adviser"
an unsuspected source of mental delight.  We may at least
throw off that burden of incomparable conscientiousness
which is the curse of all educationalists, since it prevents
them from sympathising with those whom they have to educate.
It is manifestly impossible to criticise children's books,
as we hope to prove in the course of doing so; it is bringing
a dingy and artificial fastidiousness to bear on a point
of view which is perfectly capable of taking care of itself,
which has a power of extracting a certain nameless excitement
from one material almost as much as another.  There are, we can
fully believe, educationalists who are capable of investigating
sandcastles with a view to the strict principles of architecture
and mud-pies with a view to the strict principles of cookery.
But to us, we must confess, the two questions about a book
for a child which would seem important would always be "Does
it obviously give him imaginative pleasure?" and "Will it
poison him when he licks the binding?"

Of all such books the easiest to criticise are the more or less
frankly instructive, such as Mr. George Gomme's The Princess's
Story Book (Constable). The idea is a bold and by no means
a bad one:  that of making a mosaic history of England,
not from the chapters of historians (as it was done in the
Greene series), but from the chapters of writers of fiction.
The portrait of James I, for example, is from The Fortunes of Nigel,
and assuredly there is no better portrait in the whole of Scott:
the fight with the Armada is told in the words of Kingsley,
and the defeat of Wallace in those of Miss Jane Porter.
Modern historians are far too craven to adopt the manner
of Herodotus, and report long fictitious conversations embodying
the general spirit of what passed between two historical figures.
But from the point of view of childhood they probably lose enormously
by clinging to the oratio obliqua.  We are not concerned to quarrel
with the amount of error in such a narrative, for the lies
of fiction convey truth and the lies of history convey nothing.
But there is obviously a distinction between romances in this matter:
all good romances convey truth, but not always about the period
they describe.  Esmond, which the compiler regrets he had
to exclude, is a true romance:  it is written by a man
steeped in the literature and spirit of Queen Anne's time.
Miss Porter's Scottish Chiefs does depict a period; but it
is not the period of Wallace, but the period of Miss Porter:
the period of sentimental sympathy with the heroes of liberty.

Mr. Thomas Cobb's little book, The Bountiful Lady;
or, How Mary was Changed from a Very Miserable Little Girl
to a Very Happy One (Grant Richards) is amusing in its way
and the morality is not obscenely prominent.  Still, we are
a little tired of the enormous number of books directed
by grown people against sulky and unhappy children.
Considering that two-thirds of the children of the world
are courageously happy in the filthiest slums and corners
and that quite one-third of the grown-up people are offensively
discontented in first-class hotels, the claim of the adult to
preach contentment to infancy appears to us a piece of indecent
hypocritical impudence.  Mr. Cobb, however, can put in the sound
dramatic claim that he is only describing an individual,
and the little fairy-tale of the boy who never liked anything
when he got it is both humorous and profitable, if we remember
always that it is vastly more applicable to men than to boys.
If the adults are useful in their way (as we may generously admit)
in order to teach children to work, children are quite as much
specialists in teaching the adult to play.

Mr. John Ingold has a very genuine poetic instinct and one that
should fit him to write fairy-tales (perhaps the highest form
of art), but he has not quite sufficiently realised the nature
of the literary form in question.  His imagery and allegory are
confused and unreliable, sometimes daring and sometimes trivial.
The whole essence of the true fairy-tale is that it happens
not at night, like a ghost story, but in broad daylight:
that the most preposterous figures and incidents stand out clear,
defiant and unconscious, the lawful denizens of a lawless planet.
This clean-cutting workmanship, this simple grouping is absolutely
essential to a good fairytale, and sometimes Mr. Ingold in his
Glimpses from Wonderland (John Long) really achieves it.
The following sentence is a piece of literary plain carpentry
which hits the right nail on the head almost with the hammer
of Stevenson:-

"On a throne, formed of twisted men turned to stone and in which
thousands of sinister eyes gleamed like emeralds, rubies and
sapphires, reclined the Necromancer."  This is a clear picture;
but elsewhere we can form no picture of what occurs, creatures with
Lewis Carroll names carrying widows' tears, a man's soul taken
from his body as mere afterthought, these are futile misshapen
incidents which prove there is a law in Elfland by breaking it.
The story of The Necromancer seems one that might stop at any point;
it lacks the simple architecture of the old stories with their chorus,
little recurrences and triads of brothers.  Mr. Ingold should remember
that true miracles are most inscrutable standing in the glare of the sun.
Some other stories in this book, which are not fairy-tales, show ability,
but we advise Mr. Ingold strongly to go on writing about magicians.
He has unquestionable imagination.

When we read the title of Mr. Chapman's little book,
Proverbs Improved (John Lane), we had a momentary hope that
the proverbs really were improved, for there is ample room
for improvement in what seems to be, with few exceptions,
the crystallised wisdom of cowards.  "Waste not, want not,"
"A fool and his money are soon parted," these and the majority
of their like seem always texts from the Bible of Laodicaea,
the maxims of the comfortable who never know either the joy
of danger or the joy of joy.  Mr. Chapman does indeed rebel,
by a verse in praise of wandering against the maxim "A
rolling stone gathers no moss," and we fully agree with him.
A stone which had the unwonted pleasure of a good roll would
know better than to settle down as a botanical "collector."
It would leave that to gravestones.  "All is not gold that glitters,"
he accepts, however, in all its infamy-as if, to the healthy soul
of youth, glittering were not infinitely better than being common gold.
Mr. Chapman has, unfortunately, no really revolutionary design.
Both his verses and Miss Grace May's designs are graceful
and appropriate and neither pretend to be anything more.
A good specimen of both is on the page illustrating the proverb
"Faint heart never won fair lady."  The existence of this saying,
again, is a singular proof of the power of masculine concealment,
for certainly if it had been true no fair lady would ever have
been won in this world.

G.K.C.


"Puritan and Anglican"

--December 15, 1900, The Speaker

Puritan And Anglican.  By Edward Dowden.  London:  Kegan Paul.

Professor Dowden's new book, Puritan and Anglican, deals with the
literary aspect of the two great movements of the seventeenth century,
the political aspect of which was represented by the Civil War.
The word "Anglican" is a little misleading, and even,
in these days of Church crises, alarming.  We cannot help
thinking that Professor Dowden would have done better
to have employed the loose, but familiar, phrase "Cavalier"
for the loyalist section, despite the fact that it calls up rather
humorous images of George Herbert swaggering in big top-boots,
and Jeremy Taylor draining flagons and fighting watchmen.

The reader need go no further than the first page in order
to convince himself that Dowden has a grip on the whole subject.
Such a sentence as this on the Elizabethan age, "The literature
of pleasure never attained to such seriousness," has a fine and
scornful edge for the present age, of which it may be truly said
that the literature of pain never attained so garrulous a frivolity.
Professor Dowden, as a great Shakesperian student has, in studying
the Puritans and Cavaliers, the enormous advantage of thoroughly
comprehending the fountain-head.

While Professor Dowden fully realises the broad and noble ideals
of the school who may be called the Cavalier mystics, such as Vaughan
and Sir Thomas Browne, he does full justice to the Puritans.
We hardly think, however, that he quite realises one great point
of difference between the Cavalier religious movement and the Puritan
religious movement.  They were not only different movements,
they were movements in two different senses of the word.
It is highly probable that the religious ideals of Oliver Cromwell
were infinitely inferior to those of Sir Thomas Browne.
But the point of Puritanism was this: that however Cromwell
might stand alone in genius or policy, his religious ideals
practically united him with the meanest drummer in his army.
On the other hand, we should laugh at the mere idea of Browne's
archaeological emotions and mystical charity being shared
by his butler or keeping his gardener awake at night.
The footmen of the learned physician were not, we may be sure,
interested in the smallest degree in the question of whether
the soul was miraculously remade at the Resurrection, or whether
the elephant slept standing upright.  The Puritan movement,
if it be judged side by side with the best types of
Cavalier ethics, can only appear clumsy, bitter and offensive.
If justice is to be done to it, we must remember that it was a
movement in the sense that we speak of the movement that produced
the Reform Bill; while the movement of Cavalier idealism was
merely a movement in the sense that we speak of the movement
that produced The Yellow Book.  This element in the matter,
the question of the numbers involved, is rather kept out of sight
by Professor Dowden's constant comparison of the two schools.
It is, indeed, an element in history that we constantly forget,
that we forget when we talk of the Athenians as democrats,
instead of as aristocrats ruling crowds of slaves,
or when we compare the morality of a mob of early Christians
with the morality of a single pagan like Marcus Aurelius.
It is not only important in any historic crisis whether the voting
was black or white, it is also important whether there was,
in election language, a heavy poll.  Of the various movements
whereby new masses of men have been brought on to the stage
of serious action Puritanism was one of the most remarkable.
It had the unique value of theology, that it brought a
philosophical problem of some sort to knock at every man's door.
On the other hand, it had all the disadvantages of a revolution.
Cavalier idealism had all the advantages of a fad.

In dealing with the Religio Medici Professor Dowden is just
and sympathetic, but not frantic with admiration, as he ought to be.
A man can always find fresh and noble principles of criticism in a work
that he really loves, and Professor Dowden's Sir Thomas Browne leaves
us vaguely unsatisfied.  He can see that Browne was an exalted mystic,
but he does not give the peculiar flavour of his mysticism,
a mysticism which, to our mind, owed much to his literary style.
Style, in his sense, did not mean merely sound, but an attempt to give
some twist of wit or symbolism to every clause or parenthesis:
when he went over his work again he did not merely polish brass,
he fitted in gold.  This habit of working with a magnifying-glass,
this turning and twisting of minor words, is the true parent
of mysticism, for the mystic is not (as Professor Dowden,
in this essay, seems to indicate) a man who reverences large
things so much as a man who reverences small ones, who reduces
himself to a point, without parts or magnitude, so that to him
the grass is really a forest and the grasshopper a dragon.
Little things please great minds.

Professor Dowden's study of George Herbert is altogether admirable.
Nothing in the book is better than the fine passage
in which he points out that Herbert's ideal of a priest,
"amiably inquisitorial and benevolently despotic," was suited to
any other age rather than that crisis of strenuous individualism.
But perhaps Professor Dowden takes Herbert's political
aspect too seriously.  Herbert was a child in the best sense
of the word.  His Temple was built with a box of bricks.
His charm and power lie not in his views on any subject,
but in that infantile familiarity with celestial things
which made him, with an almost irreverent lightheartedness,
praise his Creator in rebuses and charades.  We may leave him
safely in a divine nursery.  Sir Thomas Browne was a grown man,
grey with learning and experience, but the two had this in common,
that they both suggest the idea of shelter; to them the Church
was a fortress and storehouse of learning, dignity and peace.
And as we think of this image and seek to fairly appreciate
the two schools, there cannot but rise before us the terrible
scene in Grace Abounding in which Bunyan, cowering in the church,
was struck down by a blinding fear that the church itself would
fall down upon him, because his conscience was not clear.

With Professor Dowden's forcible study of Bunyan no fault can
be found, but in his long and able treatment of Milton we do
not by any means always find ourselves in agreement with him.
Especially we fail to follow his attempt to prove the spirit
and theories of Paradise Lost to be mainly Hebraic and Scriptural.
To our mind Lecky's European Morals and Dante's Divine Comedy are vastly
more similar than the beauty of the Old Testament and the beauty
of Paradise Lost.  There are no theories in the Old Testament.
The conception that gives a grand artistic unity to the Hebrew books,
the conception of a great and mysterious protagonist toiling
amid cloud and darkness towards an end of which only fragments
are revealed to his agents, has no counterpart in Milton.
The "With whom hath he taken counsel?" of the prophet
is not there:  the God of the Old Testament never explains
himself intellectually; the God of Milton never does anything else.
The much-quoted object "to justify the ways of God to men"
would have appeared mere ridiculous blasphemy to Isaiah.
This sublime Jewish sentiment of the loneliness of God ("I have
trodden the wine-press alone and of the peoples there was no man
with me") is perpetually violated in Milton, whose Deity is always
clearing Himself from charges as if He were at the Old Bailey.
The least superstitious of us can feel the thrill of the elemental
faith of the Jews, can imagine a voice thundering out of
the sky in mysterious wrath or more mysterious benediction.
But who can help laughing at the idea of a voice out of
the midnight sky suddenly beginning to explain itself and set
right an unfortunate misunderstanding?

We wish that Professor Dowden had given the large space which he has
devoted to defending the frigid and repellent Miltonic religion to a
more exhaustive study of the towering and intoxicating Miltonic style.
Poets commonly say something with their style vastly different
and vastly superior to what they say with their mere meaning.
And whenever Professor Dowden treats Milton in this aspect he would
be a bold man who would seek to add anything to the judgment.

Perhaps the finest article in the whole book is that on Butler,
the author of Hudibras.  In him we see the gradual chilling
of the national heart by the ice-fiends of judgment and prudence,
which went on until the nation which had once produced the two
great schools of faith and valour to which Professor Dowden's work
is devoted, reached in the rationalism of the earlier eighteenth
century that impartiality which is a pompous name for indifference,
which is an elegant name for ignorance.

G. K. C.

The Christmas Story

--December 29, 1900, The Speaker

The Beloved Son.  By Mrs. Francis Rye.  London:  Heineniann.

The success which Mrs. Rye achieves in delivering a suggestive
narrative of the life of Jesus for children is all the more
creditable as she has to steer her way with immeasurable cunning
between the two most dominant and serious factors of the age-the
profound unspirituality of the spiritualist and the astonishing
irrationality of the rationalist.  On the one hand she contrives
to avoid dogma without the error of dogmatising against dogma.
If we may venture to guess, we fancy that Mrs. Rye has already
suffered many things from the everlasting doctors of theology,
who never fail to propound to all expositors of Jesus the same class
of idiotic riddles which they once propounded to Jesus Himself.
But she has successfully eluded the pack of pursuing scribes,
and in this work we are no more troubled about the origin and nature
of Christ than we were about the origin and nature of our own mothers.
There are some people who require no letters of introduction.
On the other hand, again, she has been equally successful in eluding
the bigotry which is in mortal fear of bigotry, the pompous orthodoxy
of the agnostic.  Wherever a frankly theological or supernatural
story obviously assisted the portraiture of the Divine Figure,
she has employed it fearlessly and with incomparable common sense.
The terror in which many excellent educationalists stand of
the supernatural in religious narrative certainly finds no welcome
in Mrs. Rye, or in us.  These worthy persons (when they are not
quite mad) have no hesitation in teaching those axioms of education,
the old fairy-tales. They inform children with the gravest face
that a beanstalk grew up into the sky, that a giant turned
into a mouse, that a pumpkin turned into a state-coach. But
the imaginative and merciful wonders told in the book which has
made our literature, the stories which no one can ignore who wishes
to understand three sentences of our plainest prose-writers,
are the wonders which are, by a unique and ludicrous timidity,
excluded from education by these blameless but amusing men.
Mrs. Rye has pursued the wise course of the old nurses;
she has realised that a beanstalk growing up to heaven is not
more surprising than a beanstalk growing at all; that water being
turned into wine is not, upon the whole, so incredible as a cloud
being turned into water.

The best element in Mrs. Rye's work lies probably in the mere names of
the chapters.  This cannot be dismissed as a small matter, if only because
Christianity itself conquered not by its miracles nor its doctrines,
but by its names.  "The Son of Man"--"The Kingdom of Heaven"--
humanity will have exhausted a thousand theologies and philosophies
before it has exhausted these.  And in this faculty of naming, which is
itself a kind of poetic definition, Mrs. Rye shows her best inspiration.
We were fully convinced that the book was in some degree a good one,
from the mere fact that the first chapter was called "Christmas Day."
These two words express better than any religious periphrasis the peculiar
richness and intensity which clings round the story of Bethlehem.
They express that hilarious and obvious reconciliation which destroys
the utterly fanciful opposition between Paganism and Christianity,
the reconciliation under which Christianity drops its affectation
of rigour and Paganism its affectation of frivolity.  Above all,
it expresses that quality of instantaneousness, of urgency and excitement,
which distinguishes Christmas from so many of the earth's festivals:
the sentiment that it does not celebrate some event a thousand years back,
but some event that has just happened, some event that happens every year.

Again, Mrs. Rye is fortunate in her title for the chapter
on the parables, "The Wonderful Stories He Told."
By a magnificent and justifiable contempt, the word "parable,"
dear to the Sunday-school teacher, is entirely omitted.
We are not told that it is an earthly story with a heavenly
meaning, nor provoked, like the little boy in the anecdote,
to assert that it is a heavenly story with no earthly meaning.
The earthly meaning is primarily narrated and emphasised and this
is profoundly right, for it is the whole point of the parabolic
method that if the earthly meaning fail to touch the heart
and head the spiritual meaning is useless and worthless.
If a woman were really indifferent to the loss of sixpence,
if shepherds were diverted humorously with the thought of a lost
sheep in the snow, if sowers, instead of scattering the seed,
laid it delicately with a pair of tweazers in the right spot,
if fathers were really in the habit of serving up to their
sons an elegantly grilled stone, preceded by a fish-course
of boiled serpent, the parables would be empty and immoral.
It is as stories that they are primarily valuable, as pictures
of the truths of human life, and as stories they touch that profound
need for stories that has flowed everlastingly out of the East.
It seems to remind us that Christ sat down to teach.
The one connecting link between the Book of Job and the
Arabian Nights lies in the fact that the Oriental author must
have sat down to tell them both.

The title of the last chapter, "How in the End He Won," strikes the
true note of Mrs. Rye's story.  She largely succeeds in giving
to Jesus His neglected place at the head of the heroes of mankind.
She has told the story as if it were new in all men's ears:
the only possible justification for telling it at all.
Thus the noble but familiar figure is gilded with a colour of dawn
which is not common in devotional works.  It is the deepest
of our tragedies that we do not feel the great revolution
which founded modern civilisation as a revolution at all.
There was more compliment in those who crucified Christ as a
novelty than in those who worship Him as a commonplace.

The passage which Mrs. Rye writes about "Darkness"
shows that she has a fine literary instinct.  Yet the chief
fault we have to find with her lies in the fact that she
scarcely reports enough of the actual diction of Jesus.
That diction is not to be distorted or neglected on the supposition
that it exists solely for the furtherance of truths.
The words of Christ were like the lilies of which He spoke.
They were doubtless not produced by any conscious artistic process,
but they have unfathomable artistic value.  They toiled not,
neither did they spin.  But Epipsychidion in all its glory
is not arrayed like one of these.

G. K. C.

Ad Astra--January 5, 1901, The Speaker

Ad Astra.  By Charles Whitworth Wynne.  London:  Grant Richards.

"Let not his arrogance go unreproved."--Ad Astra. 

Of the novel methods by which this work has been brought to the public
notice we will say little.  Suffice it to say that until lately we
have been under the impression that "Ad Astra" was a kind of soap.
It is, however, a poem, though soap would probably be more poetical.
With every allowance for difference of taste and the strongest
natural leaning towards lenience in criticism, we cannot understand
why this work should have gone into several editions.  It is a long,
rambling poem which starts from the subject of natural landscape,
wanders through love, theology, and Imperial politics, and seems unable
to fix itself firmly even upon a prejudice, not to speak of an idea.
A poem may be written about everything, but not about things in general.
To a poet who sings of the universe, the universe must be for
the moment one thing-as much one thing as a daisy or a butterfly.
Thus Lucretius had a vision of the universe; Dante had a vision
of the universe.  Mr. Wynne simply has a stroll through the universe,
picking up odds and ends for no conceivable reason.  If we ourselves
wrote a poem which opened with a discussion on tobacco, went on
to describe the death of Julius Caesar, and ended with a comparison
between fighting duels and learning Hindustani the whole work would be
something like Ad Astra.  Mr. Wynne should either write on some detail
that interests him or wait till he has the vision of everything.
We may warn him, however, that the vision of everything is a rather
curious thing, and a man who has it generally either dies of terror
or is happy for the rest of his days.

Chaos in the scheme, however, could be easily forgiven if there
were merit in the parts.  But we must confess that reading these long
metrical meditations reminds us of nothing so much as drinking
innumerable gallons of luke-warm water.  The cold water of reason
is good and the boiling water of religious passion is good;
but this is not fully and sincerely either logical or religious.
It is made up of the reflections of one of those gentlemen
who occupy their very numerous spare hours by having spiritual
doubts with which no reasonable person ought to be troubled
and crushing them with replies with which no reasonable person
ought to be satisfied.

Of the diction very few examples will suffice.  Mr. Wynne
in the opening verses discusses in his vague way the question of
Nature and her sympathetic or unsympathetic attitude towards man.
He describes what happens when "we look behind her lustrous eyes,"
which would seem a delicate surgical proceeding:-

  "But when we look behind her lustrous eyes
  We find scant echo to our deepening sighs."

It would surely be a little unreasonable of us to expect to find
echoes behind a person's eyes.  We have heard of "cavernous eyes,"
but not so cavernous as all that.

Later on, he writes:-

  "Though factory smoke and noise of whirring looms
  Obscure his perfect vision for a while."

We do not quite understand why noise should obscure his vision,
but we can understand it, of course, if the echoes get into his eyes.
He is evidently constructed on the same physiological principle
as Bottom the Weaver, who went to see a noise that he heard.

This extraordinary confusion of mind runs riot in the diction.
In a simple-minded passage about British Imperialism being the refuge
of the Jews, which we fear may "produce in the sinful a smile,"
Mr. Wynne says--

"For if we be not of the lost Ten Tribes At least we have
procured them harbourage"

If the "Tribes" are still lost it is a little difficult to tell
whether we have procured them harbourage or not.

Lastly, to complete our examples in technique, we should be
pleased to offer the customary sewing-machine for the explanation
of the following:-

  "O Father give me back my childhood's Faith,
  That faith that saw Thee in the brightening cloud
  And deemed it but the mirror of thy breath."

This would certainly seem to be faith of a very high and difficult order.

If these were mere verbal errors or mixed metaphors, they would
matter little.  The trouble is that they are produced not
by a number of images jostling each other, but by the entire
absence of any image at all.  What picture in the mind either
of writer or reader can possibly be made up of echoes behind eyes,
of clouds that are like mirrors, of mirrors that reflect breath?
If we spoke of finding an echo in a bag of flour or a cloud
that was like a single eyeglass, the image would not be more
shapeless and devoid of suggestion.

The truth is that we should have the greatest respect for
Mr. Wynne's work, with all its crudities, if it bore the impress
even of the vulgarest fanaticism.  If he had one thing which
could be called an opinion we could forgive him everything.
But he seems to dawdle round all sides of a question, like a drunkard
going continually round a house because he cannot find the door.
For example, he enunciates, as we have said, a rather
innocently complimentary view of the Jews, and declares that
"God still loveth them," because "whate'er they touch turns
golden in their hands"--a somewhat poor and snobbish reason
for doing justice to the countrymen of Isaiah.  But while in this
passage he seems as Semitic as a South African Imperialist,
we find him a few verses back offering in a confused way
an insult to Israel of which M. Drumont would be ashamed.
He says they have a "shifty trace" in their eyes and that they are--

  "Wanderers upon the face of God's fair earth,
  And cursed, like Cain, with murder from their birth."

Whether this means that a Jew is from his birth continually murdering,
or continually being murdered, we cannot tell; but in either case it
seems a trifle indecent.

This is only one instance, but it is typical of Mr. Wynne's
attitude on all subjects.  It is not that he does not say anything,
but that he does not think anything--that is the outrage.

It would be difficult to say which is the most unpoetical line
in the poem.  In a work which contains such lines as "We judge
from our own standpoint--that of sin," "Consider too, the progress
man has made I" and "The atheist argues that the Christian Creed,"
the difficulty will be easily understood.  But, upon the whole,
we think the palm must be given to the couplet:-

  "The natural order of development
  Is from the unit to the family."

There are some lines, indeed, which might lay Mr. Wynne
open to a severer charge than that of being prosaic.
We do not believe him to be guilty of deliberate plagiarism.
But certainly a great deal of carelessness and vagueness of mind
is required to excuse such lines as "The paths of pleasure flower
but to the grave"--"For God reveals himself in many ways"
and the almost precise repetition of one of Mr. William Watson's
phrases in the line "lights to the lily, reddens to the rose."

We wish to say as little as possible on the subject
of the long, loose, and wearisome argument on the subject
of religion which takes up so many pages of Ad Astra.
We will only remark that we sincerely hope that the time will come
when preachers, hymn-writers, and pious poets will realise that there
is a very deep and menacing truth at the bottom of the commandment,
"Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."
That a man shall not use the strongest words so as to make them
weak is emphatically one of the ten commandments of literature.
The law against taking the Name in vain is, for some strange reason,
generally understood as dealing with jokes upon serious subjects.
But a joke is not necessarily vain, it is generally highly significant.
Job and Elijah jest constantly on serious subjects.  But to use
the greatest names in our language, the words that are, as it were,
too great for the mouth, again and again like a worn-out stamp,
in trivial arguments, in cocksure explanations, in mere
rhetorical padding; this, which resounds from hundreds of pulpits
and sacred lyres, is indeed, to our minds, the sin against the Name,
and it is this that Mr. Wynne never ceases from committing.

Since the appearance, or appearances, of Ad Astra, Mr. Wynne has
published a volume of lyrics.  Of these we will quite only one poem,
and that a short one:-

  "Home returning in a shower
  Found that I was smiling,
  Just the very time and hour
  Most men would be riling.
  Thus, though Nature prove unkind,
  Only a poetic mind
  Can laugh without reviling."

That is all.  It will be noticed that Mr. Wynne is not ill
satisfied with himself, despite the strange modesty which leads
him to deprive the second line of a nominative personal pronoun.
It is, indeed, this astonishing haughtiness of his
which has led us to consider his claims at such length.
Posters and sky-signs are, we are told, to be seen all over
London stating that Ad Astra is the "Book of the Year,"
and even, as one dark humourist (perhaps Mr. Max Beerbohm)
is reported to have said "the finest religious poem of the century."
To permit this gentleman to dance upon the graves of Browning
and Tennyson was a feat beyond our tolerably tough clemency.
Nevertheless, we do not wish to take the matter too solemnly,
and we have endeavoured to prove that we possess a "poetic mind"
by a fixed endeavour to "laugh without reviling."

G. K. C.

Mark Rutherford--January 12, 1901, The Speaker

Pages From A Journal.  By Mark Rutherford.  London:  T. Fisher Unwin.

If there are faults to be found with Pages from a Journal they are
all summed up in the title.  Fragmentary, incomplete, and sometimes
positively inept, they certainly have the appearance of being
genuine excerpts from a diary.  It may be doubted, perhaps,
whether the public has much to do with diaries.  The public has
its own diary, the daily press, and that certainly is healthily
idiotic enough to be the diary of the most romantic schoolgirl.
But when an author of the genuine type of Mark Rutherford publishes
such fragments they demand consideration.

In all the subjects, however, upon which these notes are written
there is, unquestionably, the trace of the disadvantages of this
form of composition.  An idea is pursued up to a certain point
and then, for no apparent reason, the pursuit is abandoned.
As a trait of the diary we can perfectly understand this:
the philosophical inquiry ceased because the dinner-bell rang.
But if we regard these fragments as things definitely
suited for publication, we are reduced to the statement
that hardly one of them genuinely works out its idea.
We are reduced, indeed, to the yet gloomier conviction
that we ourselves can see very clearly the point around which
Mark Rutherford seems blundering in comparative blindness.
Let us take an instance.  The author devotes one chapter
to a very interesting defence of the morality of Byron,
all the more striking and serious because it proceeds from
a mind of the typically Puritan education and character.
He maintains, with admirable truth (if we understand him rightly),
that all great prophets have been largely concerned with the
substitution of a "divine scale" of morals, culminating in a
general magnanimity, for the trivial scale of mere negative ethics.
But by a confusion natural enough from a superficial point of view,
he joins on to this a claim that Byron was "sincere"--that
is to say, that he was not affected or self-deceiving. Now
we are perfectly ready to maintain that if Byron was sincere
in this sense he was one of the most despicable curs born.
His heroes certainly boast of being blase and there
is nothing in the least magnanimous about being blase.
Men's souls do not expand in the cold any more than
water-pipes. If we are to take Byron on his own estimate,
if his heart was really withered and his power of joy gone,
he cannot possibly be called a teacher of magnanimity.
We might have infinite pity for his loss of freshness
as we might have infinite pity for his club foot.
But to ask mankind to bow down to an aristocracy of club feet
would be a little unreasonable.

We believe, however, that the author's literary and ethical instinct does
not mislead him in telling him that Byron was a teacher of magnanimity.
The real explanation, as it appears to us, does not seem to have
struck him.  Byron was magnanimous because he was self-deceptive.
While he imagined that he was feeling and preaching a desolate creed
of premature old age, he was really feeling and preaching the fierce
joy of youth in dark and lonely and elemental things.  It is the joyful
spirit that loves the wilderness and the tempest:  the man who is really
forlorn and bitter generally takes refuge in the nearest restaurant.
Byron dressed up his profound poetic pleasure in a vile dress,
the funeral trappings of a vulgar stage conspirator, but the real
power and charm in his work lies in the splendid affectation of a boy,
which is merely the expression of that primal "delight of the eyes"
to which the fiercest flames are golden and darkness itself is only
too dense a purple.

Mark Rutherford leaves his defence of Byron defective and almost immoral
by this hurried and misleading defence of the "sincerity" of his despair.
Byron wept his way through romance after romance; but until
he reached Don Juan we do not feel that he was really miserable.
Then he began to laugh.

We have treated at some length this one instance of the incomplete
nature of these reflections, for the sake of better explaining
our meaning, but many other instances might be taken.  There is,
for example, an able and interesting paper on "Judas Iscariot,"
but in this again the writer has not time to get to the root
of the matter, and the problem is rather stated than solved.
Mark Rutherford points out truly enough the mystery of the presence
among Christ's chosen of a wretch capable of betraying for a few
pence and the inconsistency between the trivial dirtiness
of the murder and the almost noble agony of the suicide.
The explanation occurs to us as very simple.  It was necessary
in the dawn of the Church to put all the lieutenants of Christ
into halos and describe them as living in idyllic accord.
But in the New Testament we read that they contended who should
be greatest, and the smallest acquaintance with small sects
inspired with great ideas would tell us that there would
be disagreements and rivalries bringing the body to the verge
of disruption.  There was, doubtless, a conservative section
and an "anti-clerical" section.  In some dramatic collision Judas
seceded in a fury and became the deadly enemy of the whole movement.
The money payment was either a distorted rumour or a mere form,
a paying of "party expenses."  It is unfortunate that the tendency
of all the piety of centuries should be to make the work
of Christ seem to have been easier instead of more difficult.
We shall never know with how much He had to strive.
But we must confess that we should like to know how many times
St. Peter was persuaded to rejoin the society.

Among other items in the book is "A Supplementary Note on the Devil."
The previous article is on "Spinoza," and at first sight
the conjunction seems a little severe.  In his argument on
the former question, the writer hardly sufficiently distingushes
believing in devils from believing in the Devil.  Here the part
is certainly greater than the whole.  To believe in devils is simply
to believe in unclean souls and wills loose in the universe.
To believe in the Devil is to believe in an infinite evil,
a well of wickedness as deep as the tower of holiness is high.
To us personally, we admit, it seems a healthier and more
religious doctrine that goodness is the only unfathomable thing,
and that he that hides himself in the well of evil will not
fall eternally through homeless abysses, but will be fished
out in proper season, damp, and looking very much of a fool.

G.K.C.

Woman and the Philosophers

--January 26, 1901, The Speaker

Woman: A Scientific Study And Defence.  Adapted from
the French of M. Alfred Fouillee by Rev. T. A. Seed.
Greening and Co.

The title of the work before us is Woman:  a Scientific Study
and Defence.  It never occurred to us before that woman
stood in need of a defence of any kind; and what the women
of our acquaintance would think of being made the subject
of a "scientific defence" we shudder to conceive.
The work which Mr. Seed has adapted from M. Fouillee contains
a considerable amount of sound and suggestive argument
against the scientific theories of the inferiority of woman;
but the plan of the book is a mistake.  Instead of attempting
to base the equality of the sexes on the domestic habits
of some wretched amoeba in the primeval twilight, the author
should have turned on the men of science and told them,
with all possible respect, that they have nothing whatever
to do with questions of superiority and inferiority.
Obviously they have not.  Whether woman is structurally different
to man is a matter of physical science, whether she is superior
or inferior or equal is not a matter of physical science;
it is a question of what you happen to want.  Science does
its duty in saying that monkeys have tails and men have not;
but as for saying that it is better not to have tails,
that is a matter of taste and imagination, and by no means
certain even at that.

The author himself quotes incidentally a remarkable instance
of this in a citation from Herbert Spencer, but he does not
seem to see the full fallacy that he is trying to expose.
Herbert Spencer says, truly enough, that the interest of women
is generally directed rather to persons than to ideas, and gives
this as showing their inferiority, since the last products of human
evolution are "abstract reasoning and the abstract emotion of justice."
Here we have in full operation that strange religious dogma which crept
into the minds of so many evolutionists-the notion that the last
thing must be the highest.  In this case it is clearly untrue.
To understand a man (as many women do) is to understand one
of the most complex and untranslatable cryptograms conceivable,
to understand a "cause" is to understand the clumsiest thing created,
a mere alphabet of thought.  What is "abstract justice"?
Personally we know nothing about it, except that in proportion as it
becomes abstract it generally becomes unjust.  If a preference
for personal over abstract criticism be a mark of inferiority,
the great novelist must be inferior to the political wirepuller.
But all this staring common sense is swept away by the philosopher
who wishes to make biology prove what it can never prove and the sole
test he applies is to ask what is the last product of human evolution.
By that argument playing on the typewriter would be superior
to playing on the organ.

In any discussion of philosophic strictures upon women it was
inevitable that Schopenhauer should be involved, though we fancy
most women and most believers in womanhood would be much more
annoyed by Schopenhauer's approval than by his denunciation.
When a gentleman wishes for the destruction of the human race,
and may therefore, presumably, reserve his affections for such
things as assassination and typhoid fever, to be regarded by him
with a loving smile would be rather disquieting than complimentary.
But the particular passage quoted in this book is so remarkable
an instance of Schopenhauer's astonishing literary ingenuity
and still more astonishing unreality of experience and outlook,
that it is worth a moment's consideration.  Women, says Schopenhauer,
in effect, are the best guardians of children, because they
are themselves children, "puerile, futile, limited."
Now we know what women do for children; they nearly kill
themselves over them with work and anxiety; the simple and
obvious way, therefore, of testing the truth of Schopenhauer's
comparison is to ask what children do for children.
If the "futility" and "limitation" of a little boy of seven
lead him naturally to martyr himself for another little boy
of seven, then the comparison is sound.  But as we all know
that they lead him to kick his shins and run away with his toys,
the comparison is nonsense.  It is surely strange that the name
of philosopher should ever have been given to a literary man,
however brilliant, who was capable of basing an argument upon
the amazing notion that people love what is like themselves.
In fact, the whole of Schopenhauer's theory of the childishness
of women is capable of the shortest and simplest answer.
If women are childish because they love children, it follows
that men are womanish because they love women.

The author speaks with just contempt of these efforts to discredit
women by biological parallels.  If it be true that certain baboons
have a large amount of the maternal instinct, rational ethics have
nothing to say to it except, "So much the better for the baboons."
They may be inferior to us in other respects; so are the birds
of the air.  But a mortal with the wings of a bird is an angel,
and a mortal with the maternal instinct is a mother.

We think this book would have been better if it had been purely
scientific or purely poetic and moral.  Its biological thesis,
that from the earliest dawn of life the two sexes have certain
types and functions which may still be traced in their moral
and mental attitudes, may be true and is very probable.
The scope of the book and its dallyings with other matters, however,
leave no space for the serious scientific demonstration of this.
But while we suspend our judgment on the truth of the biological
contention we are heartily in agreement with the moral contention,
and cannot see that it requires any biological machinery at all.
The divinity of woman is to be decided by what she is, not by how
she was made.  It has always seemed to us truly extraordinary
that Christians should have raised such a shriek of disgust at
the "degrading" notion that man was made out of the lower animals,
when the very Bible they defended described him, with splendid
common sense, as made out of red mud.  But it is stranger still
that philosophers who have accepted in a healthier spirit
the genial fact of our kinship with the other creatures, should try
to revive the silly and vulgar prejudice against the animal world
in order to throw discredit on the moral dignity of man or woman.
To refuse to judge of souls, laws, creeds or tendencies
on their own merits is the perfection of cosmic snobbery.
To inquire whether a man's father did not keep a shop is far less
snobbish than to inquire whether his ancestor did not keep a tail.

The question is far too large a one to be treated here,
but we have a strong conviction that the world will gradually,
by a beneficent revolution, turn this idea upside down.
Hitherto it seems to have been thought that in proportion as a
phenomenon detached itself from the background, ceased to be serene,
inevitable and obvious and became strange, diverse and audacious,
an interesting development, it became less sacred and more profane.
We venture to prophecy that the tendency now in progress
to show everything, no matter how fundamental, as a growth,
an experiment, a choice among alternatives, will at length result
in a religious sense of wonder passing all the religions of the earth.
The age of miracles will have returned; for a man come from the womb
will be as strange as a man risen from the dead and the sun rising
in its season as startling as the sun standing still upon Gibeon.

This is at least the true light in which to regard woman.
If it were proved to us ten thousand times over (it has not yet
been proved once) that woman laboured under eternal mental as
well as physical disadvantages, it would not make us think less
but rather more of that brilliant instinct of chivalry which saw
in her peculiar possibilities and put her to higher uses.
The whole romance of life and all the romances of poetry
lie in this motion of the utterly weak suddenly developing
advantages over the strong.  It is the curse of the modern
philosophy of strength that it is ridden with the fallacy that
there is only one kind of strength and one kind of weakness.
It forgets that size is a weakness as well as littleness;
that the camel is just as weak for the purpose of going through
the eye of a needle as the microbe for carrying a load of hay.

As to what form this peculiar dignity of woman is to take
at the present day, a question to which many pages of this
book are devoted, we think it a matter for much more serious
consideration than it has yet received.  We do not mean
that we are out of sympathy with the modern movements.
We believe firmly in the equality of the sexes, and we agree,
moreover, that to use woman merely as a wooden idol is as bad
as to use her as a wooden broom.  But, in the interests of equality,
we must say that we doubt whether the mere equalisation
of sports and employments will bring us much further.
There is nothing so certain to lead to inequality as identity.
A mere struggle between the sexes as to who will make
the best tinkers, tailors, or soldiers, is very likely indeed
to result in a subordination of women infinitely more gross
and heartless than that which disgraced the world up to now.
What we really require is a revised and improved division of labour.
Whatever solution may be best (we do not pretend for a moment
to have decided) it must emphatically not be based upon any idea
so paltry and small-minded as the idea that there is anything
noble in professional work or anything degrading in domestic.
Woman must not be elevated as the worst type of working man
is elevated, merely (to use the silly phrase) "to a better kind
of work," to choke the memory of his own class in a stick-up collar.
If this is the only end of the noble promise of female emancipation,
the intellectual woman's lot will certainly be an ironic one,
for she will have toiled to reach the haughtiest eminence from
which she can look down upon the housemaid, only to discover
that world has become sane and discovered that the housemaid
is as good as she.

G. K. C.

Science and Patriotism

--February 2, 1901

National Life From The Standpoint Of Science.
By Karl Pearson, F.R.S. London: Adam and Charles Black.

Professor Pearson, in his view of national life, is a well-meaning and
vigorous upholder of the great principle of the survival of the nastiest.
His remarks on the danger of allowing a physically "bad stock"
to multiply, though not very precisely expressed, seem certainly
to tend towards the idea of conducting the lives and loves of mankind
on strict cattle-breeding principles.  To our own simple minds it
appears rather to depend on whether we wish to produce the same
tone of thought and degree of culture in men and in cattle.
The virtues which we demand from cows are at present few and simple,
and, therefore, we pursue a certain physical regime:  if ever we should
particularly wish to see cows writing poetry, cows building hotels,
and cows speaking in Parliament, we should probably adopt another regime.
A random example of the unsuitability of a biological test of so
intellectual a matter as civilization springs at once to the mind.
There was born early in this century a man who scarcely had a day's
complete health in his life, a perfect example of the "unfit"
creature whom some sages would strangle in pure compassion.  That man
was Charles Darwin, on whose discovery the sages base their action.
Their principle would never have been heard of if it had not been
the custom to violate it.  If this is not a reductio ad absurdum,
we do not know what is.

But the error of Professor Pearson's philosophy lies deeper.
In one sense, indeed, the fight is always to the strong;
but strength is exhibited by sticking like a limpet to our
own claims, selfish or unselfish, not by trying to alter
our claims in order to curry favour with nature.  The mammoth
would not have been more efficient in the primal competition,
but less, if he had suddenly put his head on one side
and reflected whether mammoths were on the down grade.
The varieties of biology have been produced by animals
asserting with blind bravery their ideals of self or family,
not by their following the cosmic fashion-plates. The Elk
did not go about saying, "Horns are very much worn now,"
or "All the best people have a divided hoof;" he simply
perfected his own weapons for his own defence.  The first
element in conquering nature is to be natural, and it is not
natural to us to become a race of placid scientific murderers.
We have, as a race, developed our own set of ideas, one of
which is that to a mind of large range the weak are often
as valuable as the strong.  A sparrow-hawk would not hesitate
to eat a thrush, for the simple reason that a sparrow-hawk
(having no ear for music) is ignorant of its vocal power,
and the only possible use to which he can put a thrush is to eat it.
But there is no more biological reason for a poet eating
a thrush than there is for his eating Paderewski.

It is the same with Professor Pearson's view of
international politics, in which, of course, he approves
of crushing and driving out weaker or more barbarous nations.
The real objection to the great biological morality of
kicking a man when he is down is not merely that it is cruel
or insolent, but that it is timid.  It is doing something
which we none of us like doing or respect ourselves for doing,
merely because our hearts are alive with a bestial fear of Nature.
Generations of human cattle-breeding will not give a grain
of courage to a people who have no moral independence,
whose knees knock under them at the sight of a stronger race.
We shall be foolish indeed if we think that Nature will
be deceived-that, because we have a lion on our crest, she will
not know that the heart is a hunted hare.  That is the damning
and destructive weakness of the modern struggle of nations.
The great Empires advance resplendently with their banners
and their engines of war, all coming forward at a sublime gallop,
to take possession of the world.  But, though it seems
as if nothing could withstand such an onset of human valour,
it is only a moment after that we realise the truth that this
magnificent rush of nations is not a charge at all, but a rout;
and through the sound of all the trumpets we can hear roaring
in the rear the great devil who is to catch the hindmost.

We warmly sympathise with Professor Pearson in saying that patriotic
feeling is "not a thing to be ashamed of;" but we cannot agree
with him that it is a protest especially required just now.
The trouble at present is not that people think patriotism
a thing to be ashamed of, but that they have developed a certain
brand of patriotism which is a thing to be ashamed of.
But when Professor Pearson says that his attitude is not repellent
or immoral, because he desires to see peace and amity between
fellow citizens, he falls into one of the oldest errors of rationalism,
the notion that the soul is in watertight compartments.
He says that we are to oppress and exterminate smaller peoples,
but to cultivate the greatest generosity and sympathy towards
our countrymen.  He might as well say that a father should cut
the throat of every other child born to him, but cultivate
the greatest generosity and sympathy towards the rest.
The common sense of the thing is that if a father were really
bullied by any philosophy into pursuing such a course,
so sickening would be the humiliation of the process, so dark
the conflict between an unbearable shame and a debasing fear,
that he could only keep on the right side of a lunatic
asylum by hardening himself against every genial sentiment.
So it is with the national conscience.  If ever we do arrive
at such an emotional condition that we hear with perfect
indifference or frigid pleasure of a race of brave barbarians
dying with pitiful heroism around their rude ensigns,
we may be practically certain that a freezing process has set
in and that we shall end by hearing with equal coolness of brave
Englishmen dying around the Union Jack.

It is true that in old times men could kill their enemies
without moral collapse; but that was because they had no
intellectual comprehension of what they did.  As long as men
really believed Frenchmen to be devils it is obvious that they
could wipe French blood from their hands like so much mire.
But now that they know that Frenchmen are nothing of the sort,
that which was once natural becomes unnatural.  It was perfectly
natural for the mediaeval Catholics to harry the Albigenses
as the detestable deceivers of mankind, but surely it would
be ludicrous to infer that if English Churchmen were suddenly
to commence burning and torturing the Wesleyan Methodists,
they would suffer no ethical degeneration from so doing.
If they did it at all, it would not be from faith, but from fear,
from the oppressive philosophy of Professor Pearson.
This ethical terrorism is an atmosphere in which health and
strength are impossible.  We ourselves believe in a sentimental
basis of moral action for one very simple reason, that it
is the basis most favourable to sanity and fulness of life.
A man who is continent, for example, from a contemplation
of the Virgin Mary, is in a vastly better condition of moral
hygiene than a man who is continent from reading Ibsen's Ghosts,
for the very obvious reason that the first man's attention is
turned to beauty, strength, and the obvious good, and the second
man's attention to deformity, impotence, and diseased perversity.
Here, as is generally the case, sentiment is found to be
vastly more practical than "practicality." The Terrorist,
whether he be the realist teaching us chastity by terror,
or the sociological professor, teaching us virility by terror,
or the common bomb-throwing anarchist teaching us humanity
and benevolence by terror, is the same man in spirit everywhere.
He will never succeed, because he begins by drawing out
the backbone like a linch-pin.

And just as what produces health in a man is enthusiasm
for something healthy, so what produces courage in a nation
is enthusiasm for something honourable.  Napoleon uttered
the fundamental principle of Professor Pearson's school of thought
when he said that God was on the side of the big battalions.
But the reason why Napoleon fell even before so ordinary
a man as Wellington is simply that by inevitable reason
the man of principle tends to outlast the man of destiny.
Wellington was the type of national strength because he held
fast by something beyond the reach of circumstance,
even if it were nothing more than a somewhat poker-backed
conception of.a gentleman.  Men in the old times could
often be cruel to their enemies without moral collapse,
because their minds being limited, their desires were cruel.
But nothing except moral collapse can come of actions being
cruel when desires are humane.  Here, then, is the weakness
in practice of Professor Pearson's theory of national life.
It is in the people of principle that the bull-dog quality is bred,
not in the people who are always, consciously or unconsciously,
watching to see which way the cosmic cat jumps.  There is
a shrewd secular truth hidden under a theological language
in the old saying that man's extremity is God's opportunity.
For it is only on those in the struggle for existence who hang on
for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.
A man who loves his country for her power will always be
as weak an adorer as a man who loves a woman for her money.
A great appearance of national or imperial strength may
be founded on this fair-weather philosophy, but the crown
of ultimate triumph and the real respect of Nature will always
be reserved for the man for whom the fight is never finished,
who disregards the omens and disdains the stars.

G. K. C.

The War of the Ghosts and Gods

--February 9, 1901, The Speaker

The Making Of Religion.  By Andrew Lang, M.A., LL.D. London
: Longmans Green.

Supreme among the lost arts of mankind, larger and more completely
lost than those connected with pottery or stained glass,
is the lost art of mythology.  Races in early times invented cosmic
systems with the fancy and independence of a set of architects
submitting to the Deity the plans of a prospective universe.
One thought the world could be best arranged in the form of a huge tree;
another that it could be placed on an elephant and the elephant
on a tortoise.  Great as is our gain from science, we have lost
something in losing this gigantesque scope of the human fancy;
there must have been no little education in audacity and
magnanimity in thus juggling with the stars.  We have lost
something in being tied to the solar system like a treadmill.
It is especially hard upon those, like ourselves, whose peculiar
talents, entirely useless in a civilised age, would have been,
we are convinced, a great success in a time of impenetrable ignorance.
In early childhood we manufactured many excellent mythologies.
The best, from a savage point of view, was one in which the whole
world was a giant with the sun for one eye and the moon for
the other, which he opened alternately in an everlasting wink.
This prose idyll would have made us head medicine man in a happier age.
But we fear that the Royal Society, even if informed of the hypothesis,
would remain cold.

There is, we fancy, too much tendency among able students of mythology
to overlook the vagueness and aesthetic impalpability of these
savage ideas, and this fault is almost the only fault we can find
with Mr. Andrew Lang's admirable book which now lies before us.
Mr. Andrew Lang and any one of his opponents--such, for example,
as Mr. Grant Allen-in the endless retorts and repetitions
of controversy, tend more and more to speak in a hard, fixed way
of what savages really believe; whereas the truth is, we imagine,
that they do not believe anything in the sense that Mr. Grant Allen
believed in Evolution or Mr. Andrew Lang in Homeric Unity.
It is not so much that an old Scandinavian peasant believed
in the tree Ygdrasil as that he never doubted it.
He had never brought the thing into that clear intellectual
presentment in which doubt or denial are conceived or required.
This, as we say, is the only point in which we think Mr. Lang's
argument demands a continuous check or allowance.  The great part
of Mr. Lang's book is devoted to an attack, and, as it seems to us,
a rather successful attack, on the latest theory of savage deities,
that they are all derived from the worship of ancestors,
from ghosts rather than from gods.  Mr. Lang maintains that this
leaves wholly unexplained a vast mass of barbaric beliefs,
which point to the idea of a general creator, a being who made
the world.  Against Mr. Allen's and Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory,
Mr. Andrew Lang sets a number of facts, which are certainly
very striking, in favour of the theory that ancestor-worship
was a half-civilized development, a kind of fashionable craze,
which more or less obliterated a more primitive and obvious worship
of creative deities whose existence explained the existence of things.
To take one example at random, from Mr. Lang's stores, there is
a tribe of polytheistic savages one of whose gods, "an old serpent,"
is described as having made everything, and as being, apparently,
exceedingly sulky because he is not paid a proper degreee of attention.
It is very hard, he thinks, when he put himself to the trouble
of making the sun and stars, that the people desert their old
friend for a race of new and dandified deities.  This certainly
looks like the traces of a monotheism choked by a polytheism.
Another more familiar instance is the case of the Jews.
If Jehovah was originally an ancestral deity, why were the Jews,
who were more obsessed than any other nation with the idea of
their deity, more indifferent than any other nation to the fate
of the dead?  If, as Professor Huxley maintained, the Jews borrowed
their religious idealism from Egypt, why were they entirely
without the one dominant and picturesque Egyptian conception,
the conception of the judgments of another world?

But we ourselves, as we have said, conceive that the question
is somewhat too genuinely savage to be settled by black and white
civilised definitions.  To express something deeper and older
than language itself in mere language is a thing to be attempted
humbly and tentatively; it is, on the whole, rather like trying
to convey the text of "Hamlet" by a code of naval signals.
As far as we can see, the chances are that a savage's religion existed
long before the oldest ancestor-worship or the simplest teleology.
Long before he said that the thing which plagued him and
blessed him and drove him before it was either his great
grandfather or the First Cause, he probably said it was "Bonk"
or "Chunk," a "circumstance over which he had no control."
Probably he began by feeling the eternal fact that it rained whether
he liked it or not; then this benignant insolence in the rain
extended to the whole creation, and then, for all we know,
it may have been attributed to the spirit of some one dead.
But at the beginning the savage stood face to face with
the fact that the very mercies which sustained his own being
came by a kind of scornful miracle quite unexplained to him;
he stood at the beginning face to face with the fact that he could
not make a tree grow, and that, when all is said and done,
is pretty much where we stand at the end.

This, for example, is very much what we think of the problem,
discussed at some length by Mr. Lang, about the origin of Jehovah,
the highest of all historic deities.  We think it improbable that Moses
thought Jehovah was a philosophical First Cause and still more improbable
that he thought Jehovah was his great-uncle. But suppose that Moses said
(or rather felt), not "Jehovah is the ultimate cause of all things"
or "Jehovah is my family god," but simply "Jehovah is with me:
there was one who drove down the great lions so that I could slay them
and who smote me with the evil pain when I ate the unlawful berries."
At the beginning and at the end of all life, learned and ignorant,
there is the abiding truth, that in the inmost theatre of the soul of man,
with a scenery of bottomless infinities and appalling abstractions,
there is always going forward one ancient mystery-play, in which there
are only two characters.

There is one aspect of the thesis of gods against ghosts which we
should be inclined to suggest to Mr. Andrew Lang rather as a query
than a divergence of opinion.  Both Mr. Lang and his opponents seem
to assume that the terminology of ancestor-worship must indicate
a lower spiritual condition than the terminology of theistic creation.
The case of Mr. Andrew Lang is, we imagine, that men in pursuing
a race of mere tribal heroes forgot the humble Deity who, in creating
all things, had become the servant of all.  The case of Mr. Spencer
and the rest of Mr. Lang's opponents is, we imagine, that the title
of "Creator of all Things" was ultimately bestowed on some ancestral
hero somewhat as the title of "Brother of the Sun and Moon" might be
bestowed on the Emperor of Japan.  In both cases terms of paternity
and procreation are assumed to represent a tribal superstition.
But surely it is not impossible that the title of "father" or "procreator"
might be a higher title for a cosmic creator, instead of "creator"
being a higher title for a father.  This is at least supported
by the case of the noblest of religious reformers.  Jesus of Nazareth
found a conception of an universal creator and deliberately bestowed
on him the title of an ancestor-he called him "Our Father," which any
old Campbell would have called Diarmid or any old Jew called Abraham.
This was surely not a degradation:  it was one of the three or four
dazzling strokes of religious genius which made Jesus what he was.
By thus raising before all men the vast and generous conception,
not of a Creator, but of a Begetter of all things, he touched with one
hand the oldest and with the other the newest philosophy.  He embraced
ancestor-worship by propounding a Deity with a touch of kinship.
He reached out to evolution by announcing a creation by natural causes.
Surely, even in dealing with the unquestionable superiority of the idea
of a Creator to the idea of a mere ancestor, one ought not to forget
that at one stage of religious evolution the two positions are reversed;
and the name taken from any common father of four babies becomes
the loftiest of all the crowns of God.

There is only one other fault of Mr. Lang's work, besides this
common tendency to take too scientifically the floating fancies of
the barbarian.  This latter indeed is equally typical of his opponents:
Mr. Herbert Spencer, in particular, is an admirable writer,
but it must be candidly said of him that he is a very poor savage.
He has not in him the eternal savage who is in every poet:
and this is what throws him out when he comes to deal with elementary
and poetic things.  But the other fault in Mr. Lang's book is that it
is really two books.  He joins on to the first thesis that aboriginal
religion came from creative and not ancestral gods, the totally
distinct thesis, also very interesting in itself, that the savage
legends of shades and spirits might be much better understood
if we took them in conjunction with recent psychical research.
We should not complain if Mr. Andrew Lang wrote two books:
indeed we should rejoice if he wrote twenty.  But we cannot see
sufficient organic connection between the thesis that ghosts
might be explained by modern philosophy and the thesis that
original savage philosophy had nothing to do with ghosts at all.
We must admit, however, that we think Mr. Andrew Lang's protest
against the tone of many scientists towards psychical inquiry
very reasonable.  Spiritualism in itself may be a very poor religion:
no really religious person would think a dead stockbroker
any more convincing than a live one.  But no sort of reason
can be rationally alleged against spiritualism as a form of
psychological inquiry.  Sufficiently large discoveries have been
made in the field of mentality to justify any one who likes
a dull science in considering it an entirely genuine one.
Huxley was surely amazingly illogical when he declined to hear
messages from the dead on the ground of their general futility,
saying that he would take no trouble "to hear the conversation
of curates and old women in the nearest cathedral town."
The answer is almost staringly obvious.  However low may be
the mental level of a cathedral town, it can hardly be lower than
that of the animal world, which Huxley spent his life in studying:
even a curate is probably wittier than a jelly-fish; and an old woman
would probably be more fertile in information than an aged amoeba.
The reason why Huxley studied these brainless creatures was because
they were things to be studied, and, like a true man of science,
he neither knew nor cared to what the inquiry would ultimately lead him.
Why the same process should not be applied to psychical phenomena
we cannot conceive.  It is true that, for all we ourselves know
(or care), no evidences of purely spectral influences have yet
been found in this department.  But no honest man can deny
that the old, common-sense hypothesis has been as much upset
by hypnotism and suggestion as it could be by a thousand spectres.
If any rationalist of the dawn of the century had been asked
to believe that a hypnotist, by thinking hard at another man,
could produce a blister on his leg, he would have said immediately
that he would as soon believe in the ghost of Banquo at once.

We do not feel any disrespect towards this book because it contains
two distinct ideas.  It is a sufficiently sensational event
in the life of a reviewer to find a book which contains even one.
But we think it an unfortunate thing that two purely scientific
conceptions should be mixed together, and we think it an inexpressibly
unfortunate thing that any purely scientific conception
should be treated (as sometimes seems the case with Mr. Lang)
as if its assertion or negation could possibly affect spirituality.
We think spiritualistic inquiry legitimate and interesting,
but there is nothing particularly spiritual about spiritualism.
If a human soul on earth does not strike us as a thing of splendour,
it will not be made more splendid by such a trifle as death.
We think Mr. Andrew Lang's theory that monotheism preceded
polytheism perfectly tenable; but it does not matter one rap
to religion which came first.  The idea of a forgotten omnipotence
is certainly a thrilling one.  But, surely, there would be as sublime
a thrill for the man who, having long worshipped the tree as one
god and the river as another, suddenly realised, with a shock
fit for a detective story, that, under a hundred disguises,
they were all the same person.

G. K. C.



"What We All Mean"

February 16, 1901, The Speaker

The Meaning Of Good.  By G. Lowes Dickinson.
Glasgow James Maclehose and Sons.

In this striking Platonic dialogue Mr. Lowes Dickinson presents,
in his own personality, quite apart from all logical fencing,
a deep and curious problem as to the uses and limits of philosophy.
He discusses the idea of good and shows that this fundamental idea
may be defined variously as an instinct, a compromise, a discipline,
an indulgence, a truth, an illusion, a science or an art.
At first sight this would seem like speaking of an object in front
of our eyes and discussing, with some heat, whether it was a tree, a dog,
a hat, a cloud, a problem of Euclid, a cathedral, a broomstick or a
Conservative M.P. If a discussion about this latter point really occurred,
there would undoubtedly arise a reasonable doubt as to the existence
of the object and the personal sobriety of the philosopher.
But the remarkable fact is, and it goes to the roots of the nature
of verbal philosophy, that any one who reads between the lines can see
that Mr. Lowes Dickinson never has at any moment any shadow of real doubt
as to the existence of good in the most supreme and spiritual sense.
He answers and inquires calmly and fearlessly, he canvasses the most
heaven-shaking hypotheses with the bland toleration of a sceptic;
but all the time we have an abiding consciousness that he believes
in a supreme good for the same reason that we do-i.e., that he could
not by any effort of his being do anything else.

This is no mere personality, it is a most interesting question.
Mr. Lowes Dickinson is certainly neither a mystic nor a sentimentalist;
he has none of that cheap contempt for logic and philosophy-that kind
of contempt, as some one wittily said, which is not bred by familiarity.
He treats all the wildest doubts of his interlocutors with
sincere respect.  But when all is said and done he suggests and,
in fact, almost confesses, the truth of the conclusion of which we
speak-that he is a man perfectly willing to discuss the possibility
of tobacco if he may smoke all the while.

In a philosopher so acute and stringent as Mr. Dickinson this
apparent contradiction must go down into the deeps of philosophy.
And we must admit that to our mind there runs through
the whole of the discussion in this book one initial and
most simple difficulty, the difficulty of human language.
Human language has been wrought by centuries of poets and orators
into so fluid and searching a medium that we are apt to forget
that it is only a code of signs and a crude one at that.
That a man can give no reason for the faith that is in him
is not necessarily the fault of the faith; it may be the fault
of the tongue he speaks.  We talk of our language, but we forget
that we have many languages in various stages of advance.
For example, railway signals constitute a language;
but it is a language at so primitive a stage that it has
not yet got beyond the two primal ideas-good and evil,
yes and no, safe and unsafe.  Any one who chooses may imagine
the language of railway signals developed into delicacy
and variety as the language of the tongue has developed.
A particular tint of peacock green in the night signals might
mean "The chairman of the board is recovering from influenza,"
a certain tinge of purple in the red light might convey "An old
gentleman wearing white spats has just fallen out of the train."
But to whatever extent the language of signals might be amplified,
it is obvious, from their nature, that sooner or later a crisis
might arise, an unprecedented event might happen, such, let us say,
as the engine-driver going mad and thinking he was the Archbishop
of Canterbury, the symbols for which were not down in the code,
and which, therefore, however obvious it might be, it would
be impossible to signal down the line.  Now it is surely
equally possible that something might happen in the human
soul which was simply not down in the old code of language:
to ask a man to tell you what had happened would simply be absurd;
to ask him to think it had not happened, much more so.
Unless we are very much mistaken, Mr. Lowes Dickinson and every
other man has precisely such a dumb certainty in his soul
and the only name we can give to it is "the universal good."

Whether Mr. Dickinson agrees with our view of language or no,
it is very remarkable that he acts in this philosophic
drama of his in strict accordance with it.  If logical
language be abandoned as an ancient and clumsy machinery,
the one thing left to check it by is practical action.
If a man acts persistently and cheerfully in defiance of his
philosophic summary of life, it is not unreasonable to infer
that some alien and contrary force has arisen in him somehow;
if a train, when everything signals it as stopped, still runs
on at full speed, it is not unreasonable to trace in it
the individuality of some such person as our engine-driver,
engaged at the moment in discharging archiepiscopal functions.
It is precisely this test of action that Mr. Lowes Dickinson
applies with that polished and quiet shrewdness which marks all
his progress through this intricate maze of cobwebs.  He says
(if we may associate him with the first person in the narrative)
to the debater who denies altogether any validity in our
individual conceptions of good, "But do you not yourself act
systematically on the assumption that your good is really good?"
The man cannot deny that he does.  To the man who admits
individual ideas of good, but denies that there is any common
or general good, he says, "But do not you in speaking, voting,
supporting charities, in fact act on the assumption that there
is a general good?"  The man cannot deny that he does.
To some this may seem a mere argumentum ad hominem; to us
it appears, properly considered, exceedingly to the point.
The truth is that there is a force in all of them, either below
or above language, which is vaguely expressed by the general
drift of action.  The entertaining young men who discuss this
matter with Mr. Dickinson deal with all these points lightly,
demur and quibble and elude pursuit in a very charming way.
But if one of them had suddenly spoken out exactly what he really
felt and knew, we fancy they would have all started at the strange
and new voice.  He might have said suddenly--"It is no good.
Something has happened inside me:  something has happened,
I think, inside all of us.  We do believe in a general good,
only that is a silly name.  I cannot tell you why I believe
in good, because the signals all say the wrong things:
they say old things and this is a new thing-perhaps only
eighteen hundred years old.  But we have emerged into
an air and world where we cannot be solitary or selfish.
All laws apart, I should no more torment or oppress another man
than I should dye my beard blue or do anything else that I knew
in my soul to be silly.  No, there is something inside me.
We cannot be utterly evil, even if we try.  The kingdom
of heaven is within us."

If this view be correct and the universal good be essentially
a new and nameless thing, we can easily explain the diverse
and contradictory definitions of good which Mr. Dickinson's
friends give in turn.  One man finds good in science,
and says therefore that goodness is a science; another finds it
in instincts, and says therefore that goodness is an instinct.
If a man could possibly remember nothing at all except a tame elephant
that had saved his life, he would say that goodness was an elephant.
So it is, among other things.

Mr. Lowes Dickinson states all the various points of view with conspicuous
eloquence and justice.  If there is one point that we should be inclined
to criticise it is his stricture upon Walt Whitman, when he quotes him
as an example of the untenable optimism which equalises all things.
Walt Whitman has been singularly misunderstood on this point.
Surely no one imagines that he really thought that all distinctions
were unmeaning, that he drank coffee and arsenic in idle alternation,
and went to bed on the kitchen fire as a change from his bedstead.
What he did say and mean was that there was one plane on which all things
were equal, one point from which everything was the same, the point
of view of unfathomable wonder at the energy of Being, the power of God.
There is no inconsistency in ranking things in ascending order on
the practical plane and equalising them on the religious plane.

We may take a familiar parallel.  There is nothing inconsistent in saying,
"For what we are about to receive the Lord make us truly thankful,"
and then complaining that the champagne is corked or the mutton raw.
There is such a thing as a bad dinner and such a thing as a good one,
and criticism is quite justified in comparing one with the other:
but it remains true that both become good the moment we compare them
with the hypothesis of no dinner at all.  So it was with Whitman,
good and bad lives became equal to him in relation to the hypothesis of no
life at all.  A man, let us say a soldier of the Southern Confederacy,
was considered as a man, a miracle that swallowed up all moral
distinctions, in the realm of religion.  But in the realm of criticism,
otherwise called the Battle of Gettysburg, Whitman would strain every
nerve to blow the man into a thousand pieces.

We hope we shall hear more from the author of The Greek View of Life.
We think the present volume a singularly good one, and, as we
have explained above, we have an arrogant conviction that we know
the Meaning of Good.

G.K.C.

Our English Goblins

--February 23, 1901, The Speaker

Ballads Of Ghostly Shires.  By George Bartram.  London:  Greening.

In a remote and secluded corner of the British Empire,
much neglected by the Imperial student, there is a little island,
or rather peninsula, which has in its way contributed something
even to the greatness of colonial expansion, and to which,
in spite of its insignificance, its own inhabitants are deeply
and mysteriously attached.  This little outpost (which is called
by its denizens England) has been almost incredibly neglected
in the matter of poetical study.  One section of modern poets,
under the leadership of Mr. W. B. Yeats, revives the poetry of
the small and unhappy peoples, such as the Irish and the Bretons,
and swaggers about their misfortunes and enslavement until any
one who has a vote or an income begins to feel quite degraded.
The other section, under the leadership of Mr. Rudyard Kipling,
seems to find English life only tolerable in remote and curious
continents, exults in their flora and fauna and would appear
almost to credit the British Empire with the humorous exploit
of creating the kangaroo.  Between these two extremes English
legend and local colour would seem to be entirely neglected,
and it is for this reason that we hail with the greatest
pleasure Mr. George Bartram's Ballads of Ghostly Shires,
in which he makes a manly and spirited attempt to build again
on the old foundations of English ballad and country tale,
more especially those connected with the supernatural.
This is not the first form in which Mr. George Bartram has
attempted this wise and much-needed work of genuine patriotism:
we have a pleasant remembrance of that quaint and vigorous
tale of old rustic life, The People of Clopton.  But it
is in connection with fable rather than truth that the chief
need exists, for error seems closer to the earth and the blood
of nationality than any facts.  Nations may safely import whole
philosophies and constitutions, like so much tea or tobacco;
but it goes ill with a people that has to import its superstition.
The justly exultant discoverers of Celtic lore say that the English
have no fine folk-lore. It may be our own English partiality,
but we fancy that this only means they have no folk-lore
at all like the Celtic.  At the back of the Irish poetry and
mythology there is an infinite hunger after beauty and rest:
the Irish spirit is for ever working to disentangle from the rope
of life the one blue thread, like the thread in the Jewish
priest's garment, which represents the eternal and the fulfilled.
This is a great moral truth, and it has produced the noble
folk-lore of the Secret Rose and the Country of the Young.
But it is not the only splendid and eternal strand in the rope
of life; through that rope there runs everlastingly a strand
of the grotesque, the fierce and humorous energy in things,
the defiant and wholesome ugliness of courage and experience.
It is this exuberant twist or gnarl in the wood that is our
English speciality, and it gives as much of a definite philosophic
character to "Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham"
as the thirst for perfection gives to the legends of the Gael.
It is this spirit, the spirit of Robin Goodfellow,
that Mr. George Bartram finely embodies in these ballads.
"How the Youth was cured of his Mazedness" is a genial human interlude.
With a certain coarse universalism which smacks of old England
to the bone, he accepts the grotesqueness of the world,
even in its tragedies, gibbets, cudgels, broken skulls,
and men hanging are swallowed with the appetite of a giant:
but the feeling is not a love of death, but a love of life;
it is not cruel, it is rather a sort of daredevil kindness.
Stevenson had this amicable bloodymindedness and the neurotics
have never understood it.  It is very significant that Mr. Bartram
approaches the supernatural world in a very different tone and
spirit from that in which it is approached by the average mystic.
In a faulty but spirited poem which might be called an introduction
to his whole work he describes himself as taking the kingdom
of mystery, like the Kingdom of Heaven, by storm:-

"They have shunned the naked steel; we have scattered wide their picket:
There is light athwart the track; see the gate is close at hand.
In a struggle brief and stern we have broken from the thicket To
a flood of roseate sheen by an arch of cypress spanned We have forced
the golden wicket:  we are lords of Glamourland."

The idea of colonising Fairyland may seem to some to be
marked with some of the more foolish of the English traits.
But we confess that we have much sympathy with the idea
that there is, upon the whole, no likelihood of there being
any district of the material or spiritual world in which a man
will get on any the better for discarding his natural strength
and his national virtues.  Some of the more mystical decadents
have tended at times to exhibit Fairyland as a kind of Botany Bay,
in which the moral refuse of humanity would stand the best chance.
Mr. Bartram's verse may be too crude and bellicose, but we
thank him for suggesting, consciously or unconsciously,
that it is at least tenable that the entrance to the world of
wonder is not a keyhole that only the thinnest can get through,
but a wall that only the strongest can vault.  At any rate, we hope
that Mr. Bartram's enthusiasm for English ghosts may be infectious.
It is not that we care one rap for the supernatural element:
but we know that in history, and especially in literature,
it is only the supernatural life which will induce men to study
and value the natural.  We do not desire to create a general
awe and reverence for turnip-ghosts, but we do desire to create
a general awe and reverence for turnips.

--G.K.C.


"The Morality of the Hat" March 2, 1901, The Speaker

There was a time when we (like most ill-dressed people)
were reformers of dress:  we had indeed several proposals
for which little can be urged but their originality.
We thought that the waistcoat in morning dress might be
constructed with a kind of flap which should fall down
in the form of a tray to support the cup at afternoon tea.
We thought that at private views and other such uproariously
public occasions, the man of fashion might wear round his neck
a simple and not ungraceful label inscribed "I beg your pardon.
It is a fine day," to save him the trouble of addressing
all the valued acquaintances upon whose toes he trod.
But as both these young ideals were accepted somewhat coldly
(by the aristocrats among whom we move) we have fallen back
rather upon the historic and conservative contemplation of things
as they have actually developed.  And here, as in every other
department that we have studied, we have found that Radicals
like ourselves are the only people left who have any reverence
for the past.

We have concentrated our souls upon the hat:  the loftiest,
the most holy of questions: for was not swearing by
the head in numberless countries almost a religious oath?
But the particular ceremonial function which the hat fulfils
in Western countries is somewhat peculiar.

Of course this use of the hat as a salute has, in modern life,
an obvious practical convenience.  There is no other part of dress
that could be used as a sword or bayonet is used in military saluting.
The French, with their genius for a natural ritual, have precisely
expressed the matter in speaking of a coup de chapeau.
The human mind cannot seriously contemplate a gentleman taking
off his cuffs to a lady, or stopping in the middle of the street
to detach his necktie and wave it respectfully in the air.
Even the French would not wish any one to salute a neighbour
with "a blow of the waistcoat."  But all this concentration
of courtesy in the hat is merely a local accident of dress:
other races of men have really expressed respect by the removal
of other appendages.  In the East, for example, the shoes
are removed as an expression of reverence:  and this is really
quite as strange to our conceptions as those we have mentioned.
We have only to imagine the condition of Bond Street if every
time a gentleman met a lady he sat down on the pavement and began
to unlace his boots.

The East and West seem condemned to be topsyturveydoms to each other,
and it is but one of the thousand symbols of the fact that in one case
the headgear is immovable and the foot-gear constantly shifted, and in
the other the head-gear is constantly shifted and the footgear immovable.
But the whole matter goes much deeper than this.  The Eastern custom
of removing the shoes on entering a house or temple has an obvious
practical meaning.  The Western custom of removing the hat can only,
to our mind, have a meaning entirely philosophic, abstract and religious.

The meaning of the removal of shoes is clear:  it is to preserve
the house from the defilements of the street.  But no one can
suppose that a visitor can defile anything with his hat.
It is unusual to see a gentleman rubbing his head on the road
before entering a house or rubbing his hat on the carpet after
entering it.  If these customs are known, they are at least
very recent developments of the fashion of "familiarity."
It seems to us that the whole question of the hat belongs
(we use the phrase with no base intention) to a higher level.

It is not only true that many Eastern civilizations do not remove
the hat as a sign of respect.  One of the greatest, for example,
the Jewish civilisation, assumes the hat as a sign of respect.  And this,
when we come to think of it, is a very natural and a very fine idea.
To hide the face, to cover oneself from the terror of perfection,
seems the natural movement of self-subordination. And if the actual
appearance presented by a synagogue, where all the worshippers wear
the black silk "stovepipe" is not poetic, this is certainly not
the fault of the Semitic idea, but of the Aryan hat.  At any rate,
it is sufficient for the purpose of our argument to point out that
this great people do connect worship with the wearing of the hat:
some individuals, indeed, push the matter so far as to wear several hats;
which may be taken as an expression of almost exaggerated reverence
for the universe.

If, by the operation of other causes, it has become natural to us
to uncover ourselves to anything or any one that we respect,
the causes of this difference in the instinct of courtesy
cannot be uninteresting to consider, though it would probably
be hopeless to finally explore them.  But it is at least to be
suggested that reverence is in all cases compounded of the two
elements of fear and trust.  The old Hebrews had the element
of fear just tinged and made dramatic by a touch of trust.
The modern world has had, through Christianity, the element
of trust just tinged and made dramatic by a touch of fear.
The great danger of the life of our age is that in losing that
one touch of fear in all its pleasures, it may lose the whole
structure of happiness, like a palace in the Arabian Nights.
But this new or Christian element of confidence in the beauty
of things, rather than fear of it, is bound to have a suitable ritual.
It is its nature, in its highest form, to love the beauty
of the thunderbolt as much as the ancients feared the beauty
of the flowers.  It is possible then that this general instinct
in modern civilization to uncover in the presence of the holy
thing is an instinct towards simplicity and self-exposure,
a modified form as it were of being "naked and not ashamed."
The modern black hat is instinct with the sense of shelter,
protection, and privilege; it is itself a kind of portable roof.
If it is true that the Englishman's house is his castle, it is
at least equally true that the Englishman's hat is his house.
Not in vain is it called a "chimney-pot" hat; the same
beautiful object which lifts itself to the stars on the top
of the middle-class house is carried in its lighter and
more symbolic form on the top of the middle-class head.
It seems to us at least possible that when an Englishman takes
his hat off to a lady he is essentially coming out of his house;
that impenetrable house of privacy, and self-approval, and consuming
fear of humanity.  He is believing, if for a single moment,
that he may be crowned with the stars.

G. K. C.

Jews Old and New

--March 2, 1901, The Speaker

The Ancient Scriptures And The Modern Jew.
By David Baron.  London:  Hodder and Stoughton.

It is certainly a singular fact that the more mysterious a matter is
the more popular it is with the mass of humanity:  this fact is perhaps
the root of religions and is at any rate a very gratifying thing.
Pure matters of fact which any one could find out who took the trouble,
such as the number of Lord Roberts's proclamations or the number
of lamp-posts in the Borough Road, are treated with a semi-mystical
terror and respect, as the prerogatives of a priesthood of specialists.
But the things which are inscrutable and immeasurable in themselves-as
enigmatic in a hard-boiled egg as in an Eocene rock, in a Star poster
as in a row of Egyptian hieroglyphics-in these everybody feels at home.
The cheapest, the most numerous, the most personal and frivolous
class of books are probably those dealing with the Bible, the most
tremendous of works on the most tremendous of subjects.  The greater
the book the more the average man feels himself capable of editing it.
The man who turns out a little tract on Daniel or Saul every month would
be worried if asked to interpret Spenser, completely embarrassed if asked
to interpret Maeterlinck, and struck with mere grovelling terror if asked
to interpret Mr. Stephen Phillips.  Thus Mr. David Baron has written
an interesting book called The Ancient Scriptures and the Modern Jew,
in the whole course of which it never seems to strike him for a moment
that he is dealing with a riddle of ethics and history compared with
which squaring the circle would be trivial; that if there is one thing
that is more dark and remote to us than even the Ancient Scriptures,
that thing is the Modern Jew.

He never seems to realise, even for one dazzling instant,
the idea that a bland, black-coated Aryan gentleman sitting
in his arm-chair with a creed formulated at the Reformation
and a political system diluted from the ideas of 1740,
may possibly not be in complete possession of all the abysmal
spiritual divisions and eternal spiritual energies which alone
could finally throw light on the destiny of an immemorial people,
whose strange discoveries in the world of the soul,
discoveries embedded whole and often undeciphered in our
later systems, were made under strange stars and lost temples,
as alien as the landscapes of another planet.

The first part of Mr. Baron's work deals with the ancient writings,
on which he argues ingeniously enough, but about which he ignores
two small points-first, that they are ancient, and, secondly,
that they are writings.  A man cannot comprehend even the form
and language of the Psalms without a literary sense.  For what are
the essential facts?  A great though rude and wandering people lived
thousands of years ago who had, by what, from any point of view,
may truly be called an inspiration, a sudden and startling glimpse
of an enormous philosophic truth.  These bloodthirsty Bedouins
realised the last word of scientific thought, the unity of creation.
Opulent empires and brilliant republics all round them were still
in the nets of polytheism; but this band of outlaws knew better.
This is the immortality of the Jews.  Them we can never dethrone:
they discovered the one central thing no modern man can help believing:
whatever we think, or do, or say we are all bound to the wheel
of the stars which can only have a single centre.

This awful simplification of things they discovered,
as it has since been discovered by innumerable sages.
But their unique historic interest lies in this:
that by a strange circumstance, that has every resemblance
to a miracle, they discovered it in the morning of the world,
in an age when men had and needed no philosophic language.
Hence they threw it into poetical language.  They spoke
of this startling speculative theory with the same bold,
brisk, plain-coloured imagery with which primitive ballads
commonly speak of war and hunting, women and gold.
If we imagine Spinoza's philosophy written with enormous vividness
in the literary style of "Chevy Chace," we shall have some idea
of that confounding marvel which is called the Old Testament.
But Mr. Baron, in attempting an estimate of the relation
of the Jews to the Old Testament, is merely interested
in the theological and dogmatic side of the matter.
He does not seem to be aware that the Bible is rather a fine book.
He deals with the central interest of the whole matter,
the gradual emergence (in Job and the Prophets) of this sublime
monism out of a tribal creed and still under the literary
forms of a tribal poem:  but he does not seem to see it.
He thinks, like all conventional dogmatists, that a sentence or two
in the style of the Daily Telegraph will "elucidate" the style
of Scripture, which is as straightforward as a nursery rhyme.
He really supposes that to say that God is not "under obligation"
for an "animal sacrifice" contains all that is contained
in such a daring, simple, and unfathomable sentence as
"If I were hungry, I would not tell thee."

Another curious example of facile argument on an insufficient
comprehension of the spirit of the matter under discussion lies
in Mr. Baron's arguments for a second Advent vitally different
from the first.  This is not the place, nor are we the arbiters,
for the decision of such a matter in its religious aspect.
But Mr. Baron's own particular arguments show, in the literary aspect,
a singular failure to grasp the nature of Jewish expression.
He argues that, because there are prophecies which refer
to a deliverer coming "in glory," as well as those referring
to a deliverer coming in simplicity, there must be another
appearance of the Divine besides the historic appearance of Jesus.
Never was there so irrational or, we may add, so common
a misinterpretation of the tone of Christ's utterances.
The idea that Christ did not invariably act and speak
"in glory" is simply a mark of being unable to read.
He walked always with the full glory of heroic life; His habits
were happy and liberal; His spirit was high and eloquent;
His very literary imagery was (though no one seems to see it)
large and impetuous, full of devils falling from heaven and mountains
cast into the sea.  Does Mr. Baron really think He would have been
more "glorious" if He had sat on a hill and waved a sceptre?
There was never anything ignominious about the Son of Man.
He died upon the Cross; but He was not born on it, as some
theologians would seem to imply.

The second part of Mr. Baron's work, that which deals
with the modern Jew, is infinitely more satisfactory.
It would be quite unfair to Mr. Baron to say that this
was because it contains two very interesting articles
contributed by other people, for his own remarks on the Semitic
problem of to-day are genuinely good in themselves.
But he has certainly elucidated the problem in no small
degree by including two chapters in quotation marks, one by a
distinguished Jew, and another by a distinguished Christian.
The modern Jew is unpopular in Europe, but chiefly, we fear,
for his virtues.  No one has the pleasure of the friendship
of any Jews who has not noticed that almost weird domesticity,
that terrible contentment which makes the life of parlour
and nursery quite satisfactory to a Jew of the calibre of spirit
and intellect which, if he were a Gentile, would make it
a devouring necessity to him to "see life."

It is this fomidable normality that constitutes the real power
of the Jew.  It is the survival of the blinding simplification
of existence of which we have spoken.  It is no mere accident
that the most brilliant Jew of this age is Dr. Max Nordau;
a man with whom, to speak paradoxically, sanity has become a madness.
He spares nothing in his application of the religion
of commonsense, the law that is written in men's bones.
Neither the hardness of Tolstoi nor the fragility of Maeterlinck;
neither the bitter simplicity of Ibsen nor the drunken glory of
Whitman can lure this old Hebrew from the strait path of judgment.
Dr. Max Nordau, in the passage which Mr. Baron quotes, speaks with
splendid scorn of decadents even of his own race-and the decadents
of his own race are, in his opinion, the Jewish millionaires.
No Gentile certainly would dare to speak of them as they are
spoken of by a Jew

"These money-pols who despise what we honour and honour what we despise.
Many of them forsake Judaism and we wish them God-speed, only regretting
that they are at all of Jewish blood, though but of the dregs."

In connection with this matter of the awful and indestructible
sanity in the Jewish people, which strikes us chiefly, we must
protest against some of the remarks of Mr. Baron's Christian witness,
Mr. C. A. Schonberger, as to the spirit of the Jewish Law.
For the sake of backing up a particular Evangelical doctrine
(with which, of course, we have nothing to do) Mr. Schonberger says:-

"It (the Law) was not given for life, but for death, to bring
people to despair about the depravity of their moral nature.
In one word it was given that the heart should be broken
and not that it should become proud."

We can only say that is not the impression left on any rational
man by the Old Testament.  "The law of the Lord is right,
rejoicing the heart!"--"My delight is in Thy statutes;" we believe we
could overwhelm Mr. Schonberger with quotations merely from memory.
The truth is that the very soul of the Jewish Scriptures
is in this idea of the rapture of cleanliness and obedience;
the idea that if a man once gets into the right path he may dance
down it all the way.

There is one lesson that remains to be drawn, more especially
from the case of those Semitic plutocrats of whom Dr. Max Nordau
speaks so disdainfully:-

"In an ordinary independent Jewish community," . . . . he says with sharp,
but just sarcasm, "they would not receive titles of honour such as those
by which they are decorated by Christian societies."

But the real lesson of the Jewish plutocratic problem seems
to us a simple one, and one very much needed at present.
It is the lesson of the utter futility of attempting to crush
a fine race.  In science men know that no force is ever destroyed;
but the fact has yet to be learnt in politics.  There are
a thousand things that a wronged people may become-a rival,
like America; a clog, like Ireland; an internal disease,
like Jewish commerce; but it always becomes something.
We forbade to the Jews all natural callings except commerce,
and to-day commerce is what might be expected from being
eternally recruited with all the most intellectual sons
of a most intellectual people.  We pray that the error
may not be repeated in certain corners of the earth.
To avoid a repetition of it would be far worthier than that
frivolous Continental anti-Semitism which can find no answer
to Jewish triumphs, except to flourish tauntingly the image
of a martyred Jew upon an Aryan gibbet.

G.K.C.


A Denunciation of Parents

--March 9, 1901, The Speaker

Concerning Children.  By Mrs. Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman.
London:  G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Mrs. Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman is a good example of a good class,
the women whose ethical enthusiasm and readiness to remake heaven
and earth constitute one of the few symptoms of that youth of the world
which luxury and levity always miss and only moral severity can give.
She has ideas, controversial ability, literary liveliness and hope.
But she has also all the besetting faults of the school.
She has, like her sisters in arms, a wholly insufficient sense
of the complexity of life:  it seems never to strike her that as it
is almost impossible to say that any single man is wholly bad,
it is even more difficult to say that any institution, the aggregate
of a million varying men, is wholly bad.  She has, again, that queer
faith in the "expert" which is the mark of the complete amateur.
She is very anxious that we should hire educational experts to tend
our children.  We might do so:  we might hire distinguished prose
writers to write our love-letters. No doubt they would be done better:
but there are some things that should be done by an individual
for himself, or not at all.  Lastly, and it is the most important point,
Mrs. Stetson Gilman is at one with the intellectual women of her
type in attaching an enormous importance to the domain of "science"
in ethics and politics and in manifestly not having the most remote
or glimmering notion of what "science" means.

This ignorance as to the meaning of science most particularly
vitiates Mrs. Stetson Gilman's latest book, Concerning Children.
The case rests almost entirely upon one statement which she
makes with even more than her usual courage and clearness,
and which is almost bewilderingly untrue.  "Ethics," she says,
"is as plain a science as physics, and as easy of application."
As we should be sorry to think that Mrs. Gilman knows nothing
about ethics, we take refuge in the assumption that she knows
nothing about physics.  But the remark itself is as wild as saying
that Brighton is as big as the moon.  Physics is a science:
it has fixed methods, and final and demonstrated conclusions.
Ethics is not a science at all in that sense; it is universally
admitted and discussed, like literature or politeness,
but no single iota of it has ever been demonstrated
as the circulation of the blood has been demonstrated.
Mrs. Stetson Gilman goes on to speak of explaining to children
the value of truth.  Can she prove to any opponent, small or big,
by actual experiment, that truth-telling, with all its
toils and troubles, is advantageous in the sense that she
could prove, by actual experiment, the principle of the lever?
A child can, and does, become convinced of the value of truth,
as he becomes convinced of the kindness of a particular uncle,
or the beauty of a particular meadow.  These conclusions are
quite as sure, or more sure, than the conclusions of science;
but to call them science is to juggle with words and, in enlarging
the realm of science, to dilute with sentiment and degrade
with obscurities its own peculiar glory of certitude and calm.
Talking wildly about the similarity of physics and ethics can
only result in two exceedingly vile things, a sentimental
science and a cold morality.

Hence comes the very peculiar quality of this book.  Mrs. Gilman
offers a number of suggestions which considered as suggestions
are not only able and original, but sympathetic and true.
Nothing could be better, for example, than the righteous
eloquence with which she pleads for courtesy to children.
But her unfortunate notion that she is dealing with fixed quantities
leads her into that maniacal dance which is called "following
a thing to its legitimate conclusion."  This peculiar pastime leads,
in the case of the question of courtesy, to a cut-and-dried
theory that people should never laugh at children.  In discussing
this she uses the words "laugh" and "jeer" as interchangeable:
an admirable example of the blundering of exact ethics.
Laughing and jeering are as different as throwing snowballs
and firing Lyddite shells.  To jeer at a child is contemptible;
but not much more so than to jeer at a man.  But to laugh at a
child is simply the natural thing to do and a great compliment.
Whence came this extraordinary idea that laughing at a thing is hostile?
Friends laugh at each other; lovers laugh at each other;
all people who love each other laugh at each other.
And if Mrs. Stetson Gilman can by any possibility help laughing
at a child the moment he puts his preposterous face into
the door, she has a different sense of humour from ourselves.
Does not Mrs. Gilman see that to suppress so essential a sentiment,
to treat a baby painting his nose blue with portentous silence
and solemnity is to create an atmosphere far more false, a cloud
of lies a hundred times thicker than all the conventions against
which she protests?  The lovable grotesqueness of children is a part
of their essential poetry, it symbolises the foolish freshness
of life itself, it goes down to the mysterious heart of man;
the heart out of which came elves and fairies and gnomes.
So far from wishing that children should be treated with the ridiculous
and pompous gravity with which civilised men treat each other,
we ourselves wish that civilised men were treated as children are,
that their blundering utterances were always laughed at in kindness,
that their futile amusements were relished as quaint and graceful
instead of vulgar and eccentric, that their sins were punished
without morbid exaggeration, and their whole life frankly admitted
to be a stumbling and groping and stammering after better things.
If a stockbroker were gaily patted on the head when he had made
a million, perhaps he would think less of his triumph; if a poet
only had his hair pulled affectionately when he cursed God,
it is probable that he would not do it again.

The same profoundly unnatural rationalism marks the author's
observations on the virtue of Obedience, of which she
profoundly disapproves.  And yet the substitute that she offers
for obedience is a hundred times more cowardly and fictitious.
"The child can be far better protected by removing all danger:
which our present civilization is quite competent to do."  Let us take
the case of fire.  The child is not to be told, what is an eternal
and typical truth, "This is the most beautiful thing in the world:
but you must not touch it.  It is the thing which warms if you
obey it, but bites if you disobey."  But the child is to be told,
in effect, what is a silly lie, "There is no such thing as fire:
you have never seen it in your nursery."  Mrs. Gilman complains
that obedience discourages will and personality and then proposes
to encourage those qualities by removing all danger and difficulty!
Mrs. Gilman does not really understand what is meant by obedience.
She always uses the word as identical with slavery,
whereas it is inconsistent with it.  A slave cannot be obedient;
we might as well speak of a tree being taciturn or an oyster being
good-tempered. A thing which cannot disobey is not obedient:
obedience is a choice:  and it is a choice involved in civilization.
Mrs. Gilman is singularly out in her bearings in saying that the
upholders of obedience have to fall back on the case of soldiers
and sailors and that "they do not speak of it as particularly
desirable among farmers and merchants."  Whether they do or not,
it certainly is.  Without some compromise of obedience in the matter,
the farmer and merchant would both be bankrupt in a month.
Every train that Mrs. Gilman travels in would be smashed up,
every bank in which she put her money would ruin her, every house
she lived in would fall down, if there were no established principle
of one man promptly acting on the signals of another man.
And this is all obedience is.

Obedience is simply a division of labour; and we do not know
why it should be so impossible to let an intelligent child
see that you really do know something that he does not.
Mrs. Gilman takes the case of teaching a child arithmetic
and not explaining the reason for a certain process.
But will Mrs. Gilman tell us what she would do if a child
chose to deny that a curly figure meant eight and a straight
figure meant one?

We are warmly in sympathy with those parts of Mrs. Gilman's book in
which she protests against the foolish restrictions under which children
are placed; the idiotic idea, for example, that it is disgraceful
to be sandy in playing in a sand-pit or muddy in making mud pies.
We might as well think it dirty to be all over soap when we are washing.
But we think these follies are the faults of individuals and periods,
not of the institution of the family.  We see no conceivable reason
for supposing that State educational officials would not be as shallow,
as hasty, as self-important and as childish as any parents;
and with this horrible further touch, that in them there would
be nothing to appeal to, no basic morality of blood and bone
which might survive insult and division.  So that we come back to
Mrs. Stetson Gilman's fundamental error, that she tries to preserve
the salutary coldness of science in the midst of a subject which is
simply not to be comprehended except in the furnaces of primal passion.
Morality is not merely a matter of what is done; it is a matter
of the heat and altitude with which it is done.  No person can talk
about children (unless he is merely talking about whooping-cough)
if he has not clearly in mind the huge mass of tribal love and
tragedy under which this globe has groaned from the beginning.
If ever mothers like Mrs. Stetson become educationalists primarily,
then, in rising to that height of moral cultivation, they will
have sunk lower than the pole-cat or the wolf.  In the vast sea
of living humanity, upon which the whole of our educated class
is a mere flake of foam, the family instinct is the indestructible
mimimum of morality; the one germ of social seriousness.
To kick down the ladder by which we have climbed is ungrateful,
but to kick down the ladder when we are half-way up it is something
else as well.  If Mrs. Stetson Gilman carries too far her trust
in education as a science in a great State temple of knowledge,
she will indeed kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
The builder of that cold temple shall see his folly in the gradual
dehumanization of his own children before his own eyes.
Upon the builder of that temple shall descend the literal fulfilment
of that ancient and mysterious curse which was pronounced upon the
rebuilder of Jericho:  "He shall lay the foundation on his first-born;
and on his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it."

G.K.C.

The Literature of Death

--March 16, 1901, The Speaker

Flowers Of The Cave.  Edited by Laurie Magnus and
Cecil Headlam.  Blackwood.

The book which appears under the somewhat mystical and allusive title
of Flowers Of the Cave has not, as might be supposed at the first glance,
any connection either with geology or botany.

It is a collection of extracts upon death, very ably and thoughtfully
compiled by Mr. Laurie Magnus and Mr. Cecil Headlam.  But it is almost
too comprehensive a project to publish an anthology on death.
It is rather like publishing an anthology on Man, in which should
be included "The Man for wisdom's various arts renowned;"
"There was a little man and he had a little gun;" "Man wants
but little here below;" "He was a man, take him for all in all;"
"There was a man in our town and he was wondrous wise;" "What is man,
that thou carest for him?" and the whole text of "The Descent of Man."
Death is about as universal in literature as in human existence,
and is infinitely more respectfully treated.  If we tore the cover
off The Golden Treasury, and substituted the title Flowers
of the Cave, we should hardly find seven poems, we suspect,
which did not contain some allusion to the subject of the mortal end.
Death is involved in the discussion of any conceivable human subject.
It is merely the full stop at the end of the word "life."

In an unpretentious, but singularly able preface, the editors demur
to the notion that the treatment of such a subject is necessarily
very depressing; as they point out, the loftiest, and, we may add,
the most lighthearted men of genius have faced it without a thought
of it prostrating them.  But though we fully applaud the editors
for including all the various points of view from which this
tremendous subject has been considered, no one could expect
the poems and passages which they print to be uniformly or even
generally of a character to elevate either the spirits or the soul.
Death has called forth in literature not only much cheerfulness
and dignity, much chivalrous hope and more chivalrous hopelessness,
but also much panic, much paltry philosophy, much of dismal
asceticism and more dismal frivolity, much of the self-indulgence
of gloom and much of the gloom of self-indulgence.

On the one hand, the scheme of the work admits all the great poems which
gather round the conception of eternal life, such as Wordsworth's "Ode
on the Intimations of Immortality," which is, by the way,
a magnificent example of the right way to sing about a common subject.
Many realists, Wordsworth himself included, fell often into that futile
realistic spirit which merely shows that a common thing is common.
The higher realism shows that a common thing is uncommonly uncommon,
and that all the trumpets of poetic style are not too sublime
for its celebration.  The case of idealism or truth to the soul,
against realism, or truth to the tongue, might be tried on the issue
of Wordsworth alone.  He wrote two poems upon the idea of a child's
conviction of a life beyond death.  When he was writing what,
in his view, the child actually said, he wrote "We are Seven."
When he was writing in his own language what the child meant,
he wrote the "Ode on the Intimations."

But just as there is the white side of the philosophy of death,
as shown in Wordsworth's Ode, so there is the dark side also.
There are poems rightly included in this volume, and adorning
any volume in the literary sense, of which we should say without
hesitation that they are baser than the foulest epigram of Catullus.

Most people know Bacon's vigorous pessimistic poem in
this volume, which begins:-

  "The world's a bubble, and the life of man
  Less than a span."

and which concludes:-

  "What then remains but that we still should cry
  For being born; or being born, to die."

The poem is expressed in terms common enough in philosophy and religion,
and to many its Vanitas Vanitatum will have a dignified and pious sound.
To us, we must confess, this poem is the only one of the literary
works of Bacon in which we see the Bacon of history, the Bacon who
betrayed Essex, the Bacon who cringed to Buckingham, the shuffler,
the coward and the snob.

In order to see how misleading are titles and philosophical
descriptions in dealing with moral atmosphere, we need only
compare Bacon's poem with the exquisite and even more famous
lyric of Shirley, beginning "The glories of our blood and state,"
which is also in this book.  Here there is, in a sense,
a Vanitas Vanitatum attitude, but as different from the querulous
cleverness of Bacon as a rich twilight from a yellow fog.
Shirley's melancholy is not for the ugliness of things,
but for their beauty; it is that delicate and golden melancholy
which is only possible to men with a great power of enjoyment.
And because his sadness is a fullblooded and generous sadness,
because it is a sadness over the goodness of things, he escapes
in the last lines, like Thackeray, out of satire into a healthy
and humble claim for happiness, in two of the most perfect
lines in the language:-

  "Only the actions of the just
  Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."

The poem might be a motto for The Newcomes.

These two forms of melancholy pretty well cover the mass of
extracts on the melancholy view of death.  Melancholy, in the
sound old Miltonic sense, had nothing to do with pessimism.
Sorrow, indeed, is always the opposite of pessimism; for sorrow is
based on the value of something, pessimism on the value of nothing.
Men have never believed genuinely in that idle and fluent philosophy
(a theme for the devil's copybooks) which declares that
earthly things are worthless because they are fleeting.
Men do not fling their cigars into the fire at the thought that
they will only last fifteen minutes, or shoot their favourite
aunts through the head on the reflection that they can only
live fifteen years.  Nor is it from such thankless railing
at this world that men have gained the best hopes for another.
It is strange that sages and saints should have sought so often
to prove the splendour of the house from the darkness of its porch.
If we could really believe in the meanness of the meanest dust-bin,
there would be no reason for not believing in the utter meanness
of the stars.  Surely it is far more credible that death
is precisely the breakdown of our mortal powers of praise:
that when we cease to wonder we die; that we have to be dipped
once more in darkness, before we can see the sun once more.

G. K. C.


How Not To Do It

March 23, 1901, The Speaker

How To Write Fiction.  ("How to" Series.)  London:  Grant Richards.

It is a very extraordinary circumstance that humanity appears
to entertain an everlasting resentment against the fact
that certain things cannot be reduced to a science.
The most remarkable instance is the literary faculty and instinct.
It is perfectly clear to any one who can think for a moment
of the proper meaning of the word literature and the proper
meaning of the word science, that we do not know the psychological
nature of literary pleasure or the rules which will with certainty
govern it.  But yet the whole course of history is strewn with
the ruins of the false sciences of literature, from the fixed
canons of Aristotle to those of the eighteenth century.
Each elaborate and classical edifice only existed until some natural
man of letters trampled it into fragments without seeing it.
But the "Art is Unmoral" school has arisen in our own time
to define the indefinable once more.  Such is the strange enmity
of men towards the mysterious element in man-as if it were not,
in truth, what makes life worth living.

Another school has also arisen to-day with the same idea
in a much grosser form.  It is the school which believes
that everything can be learnt:  that success in art and
commerce is equally an ingenious trick.  A series is issued
entitled the "How To" series.  It teaches in one volume "How
to Choose Your Banker," in another "How to Dine in Paris,"
and in a third, which now lies before us, "How to Write a Novel."
It never seems to strike the writers of this school that there
is some difference between the psychological profundity and
delicacy of choosing your banker and that of choosing your idea.
An idea is a nameless thing; it melts into all other ideas,
whereas a banker is detachable and does not melt into any one.
The same is true, though in a lesser degree, of the comparison
which the author makes in his first chapter.  He says,
with some apparent reason, that as painting and sculpture require
training on fixed lines there is no reason why such training
should not be given in fiction.  Surely the answer is distinct.
Fiction is more dark and chaotic than painting because,
though both arts symbolise spiritual conditions, painting employs
as its symbol the bodily form, which has been measured,
while fiction employs as its symbol the thoughts and actions
which have never been measured.  Painting deals with what
a man looks like, which we can all know; fiction deals
with what he means, which he generally does not know himself.
It is not possible to know how many thoughts a man has;
it is possible to know, with reasonable industry, how many
legs he has.

Painting has an intellectual object also; and may modify physical
facts to attain it, but only within limits.  By giving a figure
unusually long legs a painter may suggest heroic stature;
but in no painting are a gentleman's legs depicted as endless legs;
whereas his thoughts and aspirations, the matter of fiction,
are endless.  It is this uncounted and eternal element in men
that cheats all the sciences of letters, which destroys and
survives all its own definitions.  We have dwelt on this first
thesis of the author because it is very vital to the matter.
The author exhibits no reverence in approaching literature.
He does not seem to realise that so divine has the art
of writing always appeared, that the very word "scripture"
has come to mean a sacred scripture.  No man, as we say,
can define literature at any time; but no man can even
understand it unless he approaches it as a little child.
It does not belong to the class of things that can be gained
by mere experience, such as "How to Dine in Paris."
We understand the next volumes of this series are to be called
"How to Become a Saint," "How to Fall in Love," "How to Die
for One's Country," and "How to Reconcile the More Inspiring Claims
of Ethical Citizenship with the Subtler Phases of the Inner Life."

But if the didactics of literature would be enough to bewilder anybody,
the didactics of fiction are peculiarly shadowy.  For there is no
such form of art as the novel; not, at least, in the sense that there
are such forms of art as the lyric, the epic and the tragedy.
We call any prose narrative of a certain length a novel,
quite apart from the real nature of its structure.  There is really
less artistic kinship between Pickwick and The Scarlet Letter than
there is between AEdipus Tyrannus and The Ode to the West Wind.
And in this matter divisions made by the author of How to Write Fiction
by no means satisfy us.  His account of the "Realistic Novel"
is that it is "life in action, without comment or philosophy,
and minus the pre-eminent factor of art."  If it is really this
(which we cannot think) a writer on the novel has simply no more
concern with it than he has with a furniture catalogue or a Bradshaw,
which is really life in action without comment or philosophy,
and minus the pre-eminent factor of art.  The next section he recognizes
is the novel of manners, on which his remarks are unobjectionable,
and the section after that, the novel of incident or romance.
But romance is not, to our mind, mere incident.  This is the error
which is responsible for the flood of conventional historic romances
in which the hero is never for an instant out of prison or a duel,
in which swords and swordthrusts are innumerable, and in which
the whole clatter of steel is as commonplace as a cutler's shop.
Romance is a condition of the soul, like all other phases of literature:
a broker on a Putney omnibus might possibly be bursting with romance.
But the exact note of place and time which tingles with
romance in a novel is quite as recondite and hard to strike
as the note of fear in Maeterlinck or vitality in Balzac.
We hear much, for example, of the fights in Dumas, but really there
are far fewer fights in The Three Musketeers than one fancies.
Dumas did not employ to enliven his story one half of the combats
which make dull those of his imitators.  What there is in Dumas
always is not fighting, but the sense of the sword at the hip;
the sense of self-reliance and of the possibilities of life.
His heroes pass their time in other matters, the greater part
of it, perhaps, in eating, but in one man of Dumas sitting blandly on
an innbench there is more romance, more sense of the inexhaustibility
of existence, than in all the breathless obstacle-race of battles
common in later stories.  If the reader wishes for another instance
of the same brooding spirit of romance, the disembodied soul,
as it were, of incident, resting on a humdrum scene, we may refer
him to the scene at the Colonel's house in Guy Mannering.
where the supper-party are awaiting the strange carriage that is
to bring the chosen of Meg Merrilies.  The conversation is almost
entirely about ducks and peas, and is conducted between a fantastic
old lawyer and a frivolous girl, and yet we know no scene in fiction
where the cord of romantic excitement is stretched so tight.

Thus the author of How to Write Fiction is in reality wrong at
the very start.  He treats a novel as if it was based on its plot.
There are some novels which are so based: The Moonstone,
for example.  But he does not realise that the real germ
of a novel may be any kind of matter-a man, a society,
a curse, a landscape, a vision, a school of thought, a joke.
When Thackeray called Vanity Fair a novel without a hero,
he spoke the strict truth, for the protagonist in Vanity Fair
is not a man, but a crowd, jostling, noisy, and monstrous.
The hero of Notre Dame is a stone church, the hero of The Wrong Box
is a wooden barrel, the hero of Peleas and Melisandre is an atmosphere.
The author of this book seems to us very much beside the mark
when he says of Maeterlinck that his atmosphere, "put into
bald language, means that he has succeeded in creating an artistic
environment for his weird characters," and proceeds to compare it
with the darkness and strangeness of the first scene in Hamlet.
In Hamlet the sombre background symbolises the human figure:
in Maeterlinck the human figures themselves merely symbolise
the sombre background.  He does not "create an artistic environment
for his characters:"  the environment creates the characters
and then kills them-no very difficult task, for they are a small
and frightened race, like men created by a man and not by God.
And this contradiction is merely typical of the thousand
contradictions which render a science of fiction impossible.
The fact is that every novelist begins to draw his figure at
a different extremity.  There can be no biology of these strange
creatures of the brain in one of which the centre of life is
in the tail, in another in the horns, in another in the stomach,
in another in the wings.

Consequently we have nothing to say to Wilkie Collins
and Sir Walter Besant and other authorities from whom
explanations of artistic method are quoted here, except that,
with the deepest faith in their talents and veracity,
we do not believe a word they say.  We do not believe
that they wrote their books as they say and think they did;
we know that the power to write a good story is one thing,
the power to analyse one's own thoughts quite another, and we
simply find evidence in the books themselves that they had their
origin in infinitely higher and more mysterious forces than
the simple rule of thumb to which their authors ascribe them.
We should not believe that St. Paul's Cathedral was built
especially for a stable even if Sir Christopher Wren said
it was, nor do we believe that The Woman in White was written
by Wilkie Collins because he had invented a certain plot
which required a villain, and that villain must be a foreigner.
A villain is a dull person both in fiction and in real life:
Count Fosco was an inspiration from on high.

Sir Walter Besant gives an outline of an imaginary story
about a jewel robbery, and lays down a series of rules,
by violating each of which consistently admirable stories
could be written.  This is the sort of thing which clever men
write when they conceive it to be their duty to bind the sweet
influence of the Pleiades and loose the bands of Orion.
"You will perceive the robbery must be a big and important thing;
no little shop-lifting business.  Next, the person robbed must
not be a mere diamond merchant, but a person whose loss will
interest the reader."  Why must the robbery be big and important?
We can imagine Balzac or Stevenson making an incomparable story
about the robbery of something that had no value at all.
Why should not the reader be interested in a diamond-merchant
if he was well presented, as much as in anybody else?
These rules impress us as mere solemn gibberish.  We feel as we
should if someone said that every hero who was a Romanist must
have red hair, that three successive scenes must not take place
in Yorkshire, that a heroine may have either a dog or a mother,
but not both, that every fifth chapter must end with the word "hat,"
and that no Scotch accountant must be introduced into a forest scene.
The best that could be said for these rules of ours would be that it
might be possible to write a good novel while observing them.
And that is certainly the best that can be said for
Sir Walter Besant's rules.

We do not wish to convey the idea that this book is without merit.
Many of its remarks, especially towards the end, are useful and
almost valuable.  But in the author's idea of a school of fiction we
cannot concur.  We think it would lead to nothing but a pseudo-science,
like alchemy or astrology, to deceive the world for the hundredth time.
The power of the man with the latest news and the best trick is increasing
around us in many things.  It must be resolutely proclaimed that into
the world of wonder there is no gate but the low gate of humility,
through the arch of which the earth shines like elfland.

G.K.C.


The Problem of Minor Poetry

--March 30, 1901, The Speaker

At The Gates Of Song.  By Lloyd Mifflin.  Deirdre Wed.
By Mr. Trench.

The difficulty of dealing with the poetry which is produced yearly
and daily is seriously increasing.  The problem of minor poetry does
not arise from the fact that the mass of it is bad; it arises from
the dark, bewildering and sinister fact that the mass of it is good.
The fact is, as it appears to us, that writing in verse is
becoming as universal an accomplishment as writing at all.
Moliere makes the ignorant man exult in the discovery that he has been
speaking prose all his life; the ignorant man of a future satirist
will probably exult in the fact that he has been speaking poetry.
We see no reason why the power of expressing all our wants in rhyme
and rhythm should not be attained by any one in the future.
There is no reason why a man wishing his neighbour to pass the potatoes
should not say quite naturally:-

  "Pass me those goblins, in the earth that grew,
  Those hells whose heaven is a blossom blue,"

whereupon the most prosaic of his companions would pass
the potatoes immediately.  A man who suspected another of having
stolen his umbrella would exclaim with righteous indignation--

  "Methinks thou cowerest in that dusky dome
  Wherein I also dared the floods to come:"

whereupon a person of the most impervious moral nature would
immediately return the umbrella.

Such is the general impression produced on the mind by the horrible
facility which a large number of modern men exhibit in the matter
of verse.  Owing to some inexperience of critical effects we are
unable to say whether it would be considered a tribute to any class
of poets to say that they express in language which no one can impugn
sentiments which no one can help having.  But this is assuredly
the case with an enormous number of modern minor writers of verse.
Sometimes, undoubtedly, the matter is somewhat simpler.
One poet among those whose books lie before us at present exclaims
in opening an address to the ocean--

  My feeble powers, O mighty sea,
  I cannot strain to sing to thee,

which seems an excellent, manly and lucid excuse for not writing
a poem to the sea, but not a very good excuse for writing one.
The majority of modern poets, however, are not so conveniently
disposed of.  They have, in spite of generalisations,
protests and criticisms, a decidedly indefensible habit of writing
very good poetry, poetry at least adorned with a degree of style,
dignity and judgment which would not have been possible in every age.
We can only explain it as we say, by the theory that talking in rhyme
is becoming an universal accomplishment, like signing one's own name.
We have no doubt that when language first existed, those persons
who could emit certain screams and grunts expressive of the most simple
necessities went about with long curled hair and a hyper-elegant
demeanour to celebrate their poetic superiority.

An example of how well the thing can be done may be found
in the book called At the Gates of Song, by Mr. Lloyd Miffln.
Mr. Lloyd Mifflin is, we conceive, an American.
His very name is a poem.  And his sonnets are decidedly
good sonnets; yet, such is the perversity of human judgment,
we feel that after the first five every good sonnet decreases
our opinion of the poet.  About things turned out with such
multiplicity and precision there is a strange smell of the factory.
One of Mr. Lloyd Mifflin's sonnets, if we found it alone,
we should feel to possess all the pallid severity of the Parthenon.
But twenty Parthenons in a row would be as commonplace
as twenty Brixton villas.

If we may take Mr. Lloyd Mifflin as the type of the thoroughly polished
and dignified craftsman, the author of Amor Amoris may be said to
represent the opposite type, the type of the man with a personality,
slight or recondite perhaps, but of delicate and individual colour.
The poet is a sentimentalist, perhaps:  indeed, Amor Amoris,
the love of love, is surely the very definition of sentimentalism.
But he has escaped the real hell of sentimentalism, the hell
of least resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness.
He is not doomed, like so many aesthetes, to go mad in the merciless
comfort of a padded cell.  He knows how to show beauty bright
against a black background.

Her hair is clustered bloom Makes fair this borderland of death

is a fine phrase, illuminating like an aureole suddenly lighted round
a woman's head.  The author is always at his best when he brings
the soft and the severe into this sudden and ringing contact,
like two knights at a tournament.

Mr. Trench, in his volume Deirdre Wed follows the most mysterious
section of the Celtic School.  We are not ungrateful for the
information conveyed in the title, for it is as well to know,
at least, on sound external evidence, that whatever else happened
to Deirdre she was really wed at some stage of her affairs.
The poem, though dim and strange, or rather, because dim and strange,
is genuinely fine.  Yet we cannot help vaguely resenting the
excessive gloom which hangs over all the poems of the renaissance
of Celtic mythology.  Ireland may have been as melancholy as this
in the far-off days when she was a centre of civilisation;
but she has certainly improved in spirits under her misfortunes.
Amid all the Regency bombast of Tom Moore, there was far more sound
analysis of the spirit that has kept his country alive:-

"Bid her not shed one tear of sorrow To sully a heart so
gallant and light."

In this connection we may mention another book of poems-The Love Letters
of a Fenian-which is a continuation of the more romantic tradition
of Ireland.  Extravagant and pompous as it is, its gloom is more
young and generous than the light of Deirdre Wed.  It is said that
there is an Irish legend in which a woman was turned into a harp.
We prefer her when the transformation is not quite complete.

G.K.C.


Patriotism and Ethics

--May 18, 1901, The Speaker [Reprinted in The Living Age,
volume 230, July-September 1901]


Every kind of moral and personal credit is due to Mr. Godard for his
courage and conscientiousness in publishing this interesting book
at this time.  I cannot pretend to accept his theory; which is
a proposal for the dethronement of the whole virtue of patriotism.
But the shock of a logical challenge can do nothing but good to a virtue
like patriotism, especially when that virtue is almost trampled
to death, as at present, by inanities disguised in its costume.
We hear much of saying "the right thing at the right time;"
but there is a considerable value in the man who says even the wrong
thing at the right time.

But there is, before I proceed to any details, one error
which spoils much of Mr. Godard's book from a philosophic
point of view.  It is that he, like His Majesty's Ministers,
appears to think the present Transvaal war a great war.
Judging from the enormous amount of space occupied in his pages
by this silly and disastrous adventure, one would think that there
never had been a national enterprise in the world before.
Patriotism can be tested by the Transvaal war just about as much
as Christianity could be tested by Mr. Baxter's prophecies
of the end of the world.  Mr. Godard had undertaken to study
the whole nature of patriotism, and it was necessary for him to take
some great theory of patriotism and systematically examine it.
Some of the greatest men the world has seen have written
upon patriotism-Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Milton, Victor Hugo,
Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin.  And Mr. Godard calmly selects for
detailed study a lecture given by Mr. Chamberlain.  Mr. Chamberlain
does not pretend to be a philosopher; his opinion on patriotism
has no more special value than his opinion on the Royal Academy.
It need hardly be said that I entirely agree with Mr. Godard's
spirited denunciation of the present war, of Jingo intolerance,
of the brutality of the idiots who wrecked Peace meetings.
But what have these things to do with patriotism?
What has Imperialism to do with patriotism?  What have sky-larking
crowds to do with patriotism?  Above all, what particular
connection is there between Mr. Chamberlain and patriotism?

This is the primary and superficial objection to Mr. Godard,
that he has meekly accepted the theory of the Government that the war
is a great trial of English patriotism, instead of being, as it is,
a vulgar and dirty experiment in a corner, different in no way
from other frontier experiments except in the arrogance of its terms
and the magnifying-glass of morbidity through which it is regarded.
Mr. Godard, if he wished to study patriotism, should not have taken one
paltry colonial squabble out of history, as one takes lots out of a hat;
he should have reviewed the great wars of history in something
like their proper proportion.  But one thing is at least certain.
If Mr. Godard does not think patriotism is a precious virtue,
his sympathy with Boer resistance is inexplicable.  He passionately,
and most justly exclaims, "Does 'justice' decimate a nation
because it refuses unconditionally to submit to a foreign yoke?"
But if patriotism has no value a foreign yoke has no injustice.
"Can we contemplate," he continues, "the absolute annexation
of the territory of two foreign States, 'a penalty so extreme
as to be without parallel in the history of modern nations
since the partition of Poland?'"  It is the opinion of many,
including myself, that annexation is far too great a penalty.
But if patriotism has no sanctity, it is not a penalty at all.
If the lines between nations are really as needless and arbitrary
as Mr. Godard represents, it is no more cruel to take over a Boer
farm from the Republic to the Empire than to transfer a particular
street from Fulham to Hammersmith.  If there were a passionate
patriotic feeling in Hammersmith; if the inhabitants delighted
in boasting that the flag of Hammersmith had never fallen
in war, that the women of Hammersmith were the most beautiful
and the wines of Hammersmith the most rejoicing in the world,
then I myself should thoroughly sympathize with Hammersmith,
entertaining, as I probably should, similar convictions
about South Kensington.  But presumably Mr. Godard would not.
He considers any peculiar attachment to a nation narrow and immoral.
He must, therefore, I infer, consider the present resistance
of the Boers a hideous and ghastly thing, the deluging of a whole
country with blood by madmen fighting for a detestable prejudice.
I do not.

I am very little terrified by Mr. Godard's catalogue of the wars
and woes wrought by patriotism.  Of all methods of testing a great idea
this method seems to me the worst.  Mankind have always been ready
to pay a great price for anything they really thought necessary;
catalogues of dead and wounded only show how necessary they
thought it.  Mr. Godard declares that patriotism is, on account
of its cruelties and its pride, inconsistent with Christianity.
But if peace is the test, how will Christianity itself stand it?
Again, he declares patriotism to be inimical to liberty and democracy.
But if peace is the test, how will liberty and democracy stand it?
The French Revolution has led to at least as much bloodshed as any
national sentiment in the world.  Rosseau is at one with a greater,
in that he assuredly did not bring peace but a sword.

Mr. Godard wishes us to dethrone patriotism and substitute love
of all mankind, because patriotism, he says, is only "reflex egoism."
I cannot comprehend this definition.  In what sense is patriotism
reflex egoism in which the love of humanity is not reflex egoism?
If patriotism is exclusive, so is the love of humanity; it stops at
the first ape.  If patriotism includes pride in being an Englishman,
does not the worship of humanity include pride in being a man?
If the pride of being an Englishman makes a merit of something
not in our control, does not the pride of being a man do the same?
If patriotism asserts the interests of the nation, often cruelly,
against other nations, does not the service of man assert his interests,
often cruelly, against the animal world?

And does Mr. Godard really suppose that if the love of humanity became
an universal popular virtue, its expression would not be as vulgar,
as heated, as unscrupulous in many cases as that of patriotism?
Mr. Godard quotes a list of silly and brutal remarks about
President Kruger "singing psalms on the wrong side of his mouth."
and puts them to the account of patriotism.  They belong,
not to the ethics of patriotism, but to the psychology of cads.
Does Mr. Godard suppose that if the love for humanity were made
the basis of national thought, the fool who had just been saying,
"One in the eye for Kruger," would immediately begin to talk
in the language of sublime liberality?  He would merely change
the cant.  It would be as easy to represent Kruger as the enemy
of mankind as to represent him as the enemy of England.
It would be as easy for a ring of financiers with their eyes on a gold
mine to pity Outlanders as men as to pity them as Englishmen.
It would be as easy to break up the meetings of your political
opponents because they were enemies of their kind as because they
were enemies of their country.  The old cosmopolitan Romans
boiled Christians in oil because they were the foes of mankind.
The French Revolutionists burnt priests in straw because they were
the foes of mankind.  These things do not arise either from the love
of country or the love of men, but simply from folly, intemperance,
vagueness and the heart of man deceitful above all things.
Let Mr. Godard look abroad on Europe at this moment.
There exists a school who hold, doubtless with entire sincerity,
the pure love of humanity which he recommends, to the exclusion
of all national preferences.  The form it takes is to blow to pieces
with dynamite hundreds of harmless people whom they have never seen.
"Let patriotism be subdued," says Mr. Godard.  "Let it be removed
from the pinnacle of a virtue and be replaced by humanitarianism,
and there shall dawn the day of peace on earth and goodwill to men."
And of this cosmopolitan philosophy the first fruits are the Dynamiters.

Of some of Mr. Godard's arguments I will not speak at length,
for we think he must have employed them in some haste.
We cannot see the philosophical bearing of such a remark as that
"patriotism fights against the best interests of the patria."
It seems to us like saying that we dislike total abstainers
because we find they all drink.  In that case it would
not be total abstinence that we disliked, but drinking.
If certain so-called "patriots" work against the patria the case
against them does not lie in the charge that they are patriotic,
but in the charge that they are not.

The fact is that Mr. Godard has erred by confusing two things.
Christianity is a symbol, the dim and shifting symbol,
of a certain love of all things, a certain loyalty to
the universe to which we all rise in our higher moments.
It is not the love of humanity, it goes out to cats and tadpoles.
It is an inspiration far too mysterious to be bridled or counted upon;
far too certain to be demonstrated; far too perfect to be praised.
It has nothing to do with practical politics or material privileges;
it extends itself with a calm conscience to the creatures we burden
for transport and slay for food.  It is a moment in which we
realize our kinship with the stars and the stones in the road;
in which our sensitiveness runs like a maze of nerves over the whole
Cosmos until a falling star or a stricken tree is like a wound
upon our bodies.  But this gigantic self is a thing that even
the greatest and purest only realize at certain seasons.
It does not and cannot have anything to do with those working loyalties
which we have to preserve in order to preserve our mode of life.
That terrible truce in which the lion lies down with the lamb is
a vision, not a daily rule.  For natural purposes, we assert our
family against our fellow-countrymen, our country against humanity,
humanity against nature.

Mr. Godard never seems to realize that he does belong to a country.
Great Britain is no more a geographical area than the Order of the
Jesuits or the Cocoa Tree Club.  Like them, it is a centre of power,
numbering certain persons within its rules and responsibilities.
It is not humanity which prevents Mr. Godard from being knocked
down with a bludgeon; it is his country and his country alone.
It is not humanity that makes Mr. Godard pay for a dog-license,
it is his country and his country alone.  The only real error
of Mr. Godard is that he calls upon a mere abstract sentiment,
however natural and beautiful, to take the place of what is a necessary
working sentiment designed for certain definite relations of life.  It is
like saying, "Let a soldier's obedience to his officers be removed from
the pinnacle of a virtue and replaced by a love of all living things."
Patriotism is obviously a virtue so long as there is a patria.
Mr. Godard seems to think that a nation will remain strong and
independent automatically, without any assistance from patriotism.
I should be inclined to ask what is keeping the Boer nation in existence
at this moment.

The bill which Mr. Godard counts up against modern Jingoism
is long and heavy.  But of all the crimes it has committed,
none is so black and ruinous as this; that it has made good
and able men like Mr. Godard turn against patriotism itself.
About patriotism itself I will say one thing only, on behalf
of those like myself who are Nationalists at home and abroad.
We also have had to breathe in a stifling vulgarity;
to see a thousand faces fixed in one fatuous sneer.
We also have had all the temptations possible to intellectual
rebellion or to intellectual pride.  If we have remained
steadfast in a monotonous candor, we cannot claim that we were
strengthened by ethical subtlety or new-fangled emancipation.
We have remained steadfast because voices older than the hills called
us to this spot; here in this island was to be our glory or failure.
We have eaten its bread and been made wise with all its works.
And if we are indeed near the end, and the madness of
cosmopolitan materialism, the spirit of the present war,
be indeed dragging our country to destruction, we can only say
that at the end we must be with her, to claim our portion
in the wrath of God.

G. K. C

* "Patriotism and Ethics," By John Godard.  London:  Grant Richards.  5s.


Mr. William Watson's Poems

--The Speaker, January 14, 1905

The Poems Of William Watson.  Edited and arranged,
with an introduction, by J. A. Spender.  Two volumes.
With portrait and many new poems.  London:  John Lane.
Crown 8vo, 9s.  net.

Any re-issue of Mr. Watson's work is not only a pleasure
in itself but is critically important and desirable,
since he is eminently a man who not only deserves re-consideration
but in some sense demands it.  It may or may not be possible
to decide that a literary work will not last, but it is
generally possible to decide when it is not even meant to last.
And this was true of much of the minor poetry (excellent in itself)
which was springing up on all sides at the time when Mr. Watson
first wrote.  Not only was most of that work fugitive,
but we may say that it was one of its merits to be fugitive,
just as we may say that it is one of the merits of a bird to
be fugitive, or one of the merits of an arrow to be fugitive.
Some of the best of the minor poets were something better
than poets; they were young men; they were comrades and lovers,
so full of life as to be able to be superior to mere immortality.
Others were idiots, but idiots so unique as to be valuable
at least for a moment, for folly is too sacred a thing for man
to enjoy it long.  But of all of them it may be said that their
poetry would not have been so good if it had been more great.
Their work was full of wild and childish experiments,
sometimes successful, sometimes a ruinous failure; but in all
of them the failure was almost as interesting as the success,
and in all of them the success was quite as absurd as the failure.
In this sense extravagance is more modest than moderation,
for extravagance does not claim to endure.  Mr. William Watson
does claim to endure.  They piled their towers sky high,
but they made them openly of earth and sand.  He works more
quietly than they, yet he is the most arrogant of all of them,
for his material is a lump of that marble which was the mother
of all the gods.

A certain amount of the literary importance of Mr. Watson can no
doubt be traced to the bewildering eccentricity of everybody else.
It is possible for originality to be so popular that it becomes vulgar.
It is possible that the whole ground of obvious invention may be
rapidly covered; that every kind of new thing should be brought sharply
to the attention of everybody.  The last man of science has declared not
only that the moon is made of green cheese, but that he has eaten it.
The last poet has declared, on the authority of a vision,
that devils have halos and angels horns.  It seems that there is
nothing further that anyone can say that will make anyone else jump.
The extravagance of what has gone before has made all extravagance tame.
People are not merely at ease in Zion; they are at ease in limbo.
Blood and thunder is so victorious that it cannot succeed;
men are too blinded with blood to see blood.  Men are too deafened
with thunder to hear the thunder.  It seems as if the universe
had shown to men its most startling, and they are not startled.
It seems that nothing will startle them.

But there is something which will startle them.
Sanity will startle them, quietness will startle them,
classical moderation will startle them.  Any man walking easily
and coolly in the conventional paths will touch with an explosion
the deep conventions of the unconventional.  Any contented man
will seem to these discontented ones a sort of Anarchist.
And this is one of the fundamental fascinations of the position
of Mr. William Watson, both as a poet and as a philosopher.
In a time when everyone was original, the only truly
original thing left to do was not to be original at all.
The still small voice of sanity came with a sort of hissing
stab to remind us that the Lord was not in the thunder.
The world caught its breath for a moment at the one genuine
novelty of a man who did not try to be new.

This element in Mr. Watson, of what may be called the arrestingly
ordinary, owes much of its impressiveness, of course, to his own
perfectly placid courage and consistency in maintaining the attitude.
He meets the disdain of the decadents with a disdain equal
to their own; he is fully as proud of being conventional
as they can be of being unconventional.  Some of his finest
work has been written in defence of himself and his method,
and under the impulse of this passionate and pugnacious decency.
Nothing in recent rhetoric has been finer than the whole of the poem
called "Apologia," and especially the passage in which in the middle
of a grave and formal defence of classicism he turns dramatically
upon the decadents:

"For though of faulty and of erring walk, I have not suffered aught
of frail in me To stain my song; I have not paid the world The evil
and the insolent courtesy Of offering it my baseness as a gift."

This haughty and warlike note is more important in
Mr. Watson's work than has, I think, been commonly allowed.
He is a classicist, but, like many other classicists,
from Pope to Matthew Arnold, he is a hard hitter when he deals
with certain matters.  On certain things he is, indeed, a doubter,
but his very confession of doubt on these has that quality
of clearness and severity which characterises the man
who knows when he has a conviction and when he has not.
A great many soothing writers give us the impression of never
having experienced doubt when the quiet unity of their work
really proceeds from their never having experienced belief.
Mr. Watson in stating his uncertainties implies his certainties,
and these latter are never very absent from his mind.
Built into his very bones is that old English last-century
thing which the flimsy moderns cannot endure or understand--
the didactic spirit, the spirit which tells the great man
to tell other men simply and fully the whole of his mind.
As in the great English agnostics of the Huxley period,
even ignorance itself has a responsibility.  Even if he has
nothing to say it is his duty to say so.

The main matter of Mr. Watson's doubt or uncertainty is religion.
The main matter of his faith or certitude is patriotism.
He is absolutely convinced that he is standing,
and rightly standing, for the whole great historic tradition
of English letters and English landscape.  He is defending it
against a host of foreign influences, against the influence,
against the turgidity and obscurity which we have copied
from the literature of Germany, against the cheapness and over
emphasis which we have borrowed from the literature of America,
against the mistiness and melancholy which we have borrowed
from the literature of Norway, against the fastidiousness and
cruelty which we have borrowed from the literature of France.
In fighting for the wholesome and massive qualities of great English
poetry he feels, rightly, that he is fighting for something which is,
like all precious things, in perpetual and incurable peril.
His objection to Imperialism is, of course, wholly of this kind;
he realises what all other serious people will realise
very soon, that if the Imperialist movement goes on for
another twenty years (which, fortunately, it will not do)
it is doubtful whether there will be any English people left at all.
Purely literary as Mr. Watson is, he has in his heart a certain
still vigilance which is as military as that of a sentinel.
His very traditionalism partakes of the nature of warlike obedience.
He follows Milton and Wordsworth as he would follow a volunteer
colonel or an impromptu captain if a foreign army were pouring
through the gate of Dover.

G. K. Chesterton.

Leviathan and the Hook

--The Speaker, September 9, 1905 [Reprinted
in The Living Age, volume CCXLVII, October, November, December 1905]

Because man is a spirit and unfathomable the past is
really as startling and incalculable as the future.
The dead men are as active and dramatic as the men unborn;
we know decisively that the men unborn will be men;
and we cannot decisively know anything more about the dead.
It is not merely true that Nero may have been misunderstood;
he must have been misunderstood, for no man can understand another.
Hence to dive into any very ancient human work is to dive
into a bottomless sea, and the man who seeks old things
will be always finding new things.  Centuries hence the world
will be still seeking for the secret of Job, which is, indeed,
in a sense the secret of everything.  It is no disrespect
to such able and interesting works as Professor Dillon's to say
that they are only stages in an essentially endless process,
the proper appreciation of one of the inexhaustible
religious classics.  None of them says the last word on Job,
for the last word could only be said on the Last Day.
For a great poem like Job is in this respect like life itself.
The explanations are popular for a month or popular for a century.
But they all fall.  The unexplained thing is popular for ever.
There are weaknesses in the Higher Criticism, as a general
phenomenon, which are only gradually unfolding themselves.
There are more defects or difficulties than would at
first appear in the scientific treatment of Scripture.
But after all the greatest defect in the scientific
treatment of Scripture is simply that it is scientific.
The professor of the Higher Criticism is never tired
of declaring that he is detached, that he is disinterested,
that he is concerned only with the facts, that he is
applying to religious books the unbending methods which are
employed by men of science towards the physical order.
If what he says of himself is true, he must be totally unfitted
to criticize any books whatever.

Books exist to produce emotions:  if we are not moved by them
we practically have not read them.  If a real book has
not touched us we might as well not have touched the book.
In literature to be dispassionate is simply to be illiterate.
To be disinterested is simply to be uninterested.
The object of a book on comets, of course, is not to make us
all feel like comets; but the object of a poem about warriors
is to make us all feel like warriors.  It is not merely
true that the right method for one may be the wrong method
for the other; it must be the wrong method for the other.
A critic who takes a scientific view of the Book of Job is exactly
like a surgeon who should take a poetical view of appendicitis:
he is simply an old muddler.

It is said, of course, that this scientific quality is only
applied to the actual facts, which are the department of science.
But what are the actual facts?  There are very few facts
in connection with a work of literature which are really wholly
apart from literary tact and grasp.  That certain words are
on a piece of parchment in a certain order science can say.
Whether in that order they make sense or nonsense only
literature can say.  That in another place (say on a brick)
the same words are in another order science can say.
Whether it is a more likely order only literature can say.
That on two bricks there is the same sentence science can say.
Whether it is the sort of sentence one man would write on two bricks,
or two men happen to write on their own respective bricks,
only literature can say.  Let me take an example from
Professor Dillon's own interesting introduction.  Referring to
a controversy among scholars about the possible indebtedness
of the unknown Hebrew poet to other Hebrew writers, he says:
"On the one hand it is doubtless possible that the words:

"Art thou the first man born?  Or wast thou brought forth
before the hills?

"were suggested by the verses in Proverbs, 'Before the mountains
were settled, before the hills, was I brought forth.'"
Of course it is possible, but I cannot see (as a matter of
literary common sense) why it is in the smallest degree likely.
Surely two independent people or two hundred independent
people might use so natural a phrase as that a thing was older
than the hills.  We might as well bind together in chains
of plagiarism all the people who ever said that a thing
shone like the sun or bloomed and faded like a flower.
Outside the use of hills (those rare objects) and of being
brought forth (that unusual and pathological process), the two
passages are not in spirit or inspiration in the least similar,
for the passage in Proverbs (if I remember it aright) is an abstract,
mystical excursus of which the point is that a Logos or idea,
preceded all physical phenomena, whereas the passage in Job
is simply a sharp, savage joke, of which the point is that a man
is an uncommonly unimportant fungus on the face of the earth.
No poet would naturally take a thing from one to use it in the other:
but then to feel this is simply a matter of poetic sentiment
and science is no more use in the matter than gardening.
Science can only say that the same Hebrew word is used;
but whether the word is common, or natural, or forced,
or affected, or inevitable is a question of pure literature;
and it is the whole question at issue.  The Higher Critic,
as such, can only see that the words are the same; that is,
he can only see what a child could see.

Let it not be supposed that Professor Dillon's work is thus weak;
he makes many wise suggestions and emendations.  But when they are
entirely wise they are also literary and entirely undemonstrable.
To take one instance out of many, at the end of that noble Nihilist
chapter three, in which Job curses his day, which is indeed
the sublimest point of suicide, the very crest and imperial
crown of cowardice, Job says in the authorized version:
"For my sighing cometh before I eat and my roarings are
poured out like the waters."  This is evidently an extremely
literary and ingenious rendering by the original translators
of a passage of which they could not make head or tail.
According to the later version the meaning is simpler and
stronger and more in the manner of good primitive poetry.
In Professor Dillon's book it runs "For sighing is
become my bread, and my crying is unto me as water."
This has all the elemental energy of the primeval phrase;
it would be difficult to express with more directness what is
the worst part of pain or calamity, the fact of the abnormal
thing becoming the normal, disaster becoming a routine.
We can all endure catastrophe as long as it is catastrophic;
it is maddening the moment it is orderly.

In a sense this small matter expresses the whole of Job.
Professor Dillon analyzes very well the main and obvious idea
that it is a protest against that paltry optimism which sees
in suffering a mark of sin.  But he does not, I think, quite pierce
to the further and ultimate point of "Job," which is that the true
secret and hope of human life is something much more dark
and beautiful than it would be if suffering were a mark of sin.
A mere scheme of rewards and punishments would be something much meaner
and more mechanical than this exasperating and inspiring life of ours.
An automatic scheme of Karma, or "reaping what we sow," would be
just as gross and material as sowing beans or reaping barley.
It might satisfy mechanicians or modern monists, or theosophists,
or cautious financiers, but not brave men.  It is no paradox to say
that the one thing which would make suffering intolerable would
be the thought that it was systematically inflicted upon sinners.
The one thing which would make our agony infamous would be the idea
that it was deserved.  On the other hand, the doctrine which makes
it most endurable is exactly the opposite doctrine, that life is
a battle in which the best put their bodies in the front, in which
God sends only His holiest into the hail of the arrows of hell.
In the book of Job is foreshadowed that better doctrine full
of a dark chivalry that he that bore the worst that men can suffer
was the best that bore the form of man.

There is one central conception of the book of Job,
which literally makes it immortal, which will make it survive
our modern time and our modern philosophies as it has
survived many better times and many better philosophies.
That is the conception that the universe, if it is to be admired,
is to be admired for its strangeness and not for its rationality,
for its splendid unreason and not for its reason.
Job's friends attempt to comfort him with philosophical optimism,
like the intellectuals of the eighteenth century.
Job tries to comfort himself with philosophical pessimism
like the intellectuals of the nineteenth century.
But God comforts Job with indecipherable mystery, and for the first
time Job is comforted.  Eliphaz gives one answer, Job gives
another answer, and the question still remains an open wound.
God simply refuses to answer, and somehow the question is answered.
Job flings at God one riddle, God flings back at Job a hundred riddles,
and Job is at peace.  He is comforted with conundrums.
For the grand and enduring idea in the poem, as suggested above,
is that if we are to be reconciled to this great cosmic experience
it must be as something divinely strange and divinely violent,
a quest, or a conspiracy, or some sacred joke.  The last chapters
of the colossal monologue of the Almighty are devoted in a
style superficially queer enough to the detailed description
of two monsters.  Behemoth and Leviathan may, or may not be,
the hippopotamus and the crocodile.  But, whatever they are,
they are evidently embodiments of the enormous absurdity of nature.
They typify that cosmic trait which anyone may see in the
Zoological Gardens, the folly of the Lord, which is wisdom.
And in connection with one of them, God is made to utter a splendid
satire upon the prim and orderly piety of the vulgar optimist.
"Wilt thou play with him as with a bird?  Wilt thou bind him
for thy maidens?"  That is the main message of the book of Job.
Whatever this cosmic monster may be, a good animal or a
bad animal, he is at least a wild animal and not a tame animal;
it is a wild world and not a tame world.

G. K. Chesterton. 
_____________________

* "The Original Poem of Job."  Translated from the Restored Text
by E. T. Dillon.  London:  Fisher Unwin, 5s.