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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERETICS ***
+
+
+
+HERETICS
+
+
+by
+
+Gilbert K. Chesterton
+
+
+
+
+“To My Father”
+
+
+
+
+Source
+
+Heretics was copyrighted in 1905 by the John Lane Company. This
+electronic text is derived from the twelfth (1919) edition published by
+the John Lane Company of New York City and printed by the Plimpton
+Press of Norwood, Massachusetts.  The text carefully follows that of
+the published edition (including British spelling).
+
+
+The Author
+
+Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of
+May, 1874.  Though he considered himself a mere “rollicking
+journalist,” he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually
+every area of literature.  A man of strong opinions and enormously
+talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless
+allowed him to maintain warm friendships with people—such as George
+Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells—with whom he vehemently disagreed.
+
+Chesterton had no difficulty standing up for what he believed. He was
+one of the few journalists to oppose the Boer War. His 1922 “Eugenics
+and Other Evils” attacked what was at that time the most progressive of
+all ideas, the idea that the human race could and should breed a
+superior version of itself. In the Nazi experience, history
+demonstrated the wisdom of his once “reactionary” views.
+
+His poetry runs the gamut from the comic 1908 “On Running After One’s
+Hat” to dark and serious ballads.  During the dark days of 1940, when
+Britain stood virtually alone against the armed might of Nazi Germany,
+these lines from his 1911 Ballad of the White Horse were often quoted:
+
+    I tell you naught for your comfort,
+    Yea, naught for your desire,
+    Save that the sky grows darker yet
+    And the sea rises higher.
+
+Though not written for a scholarly audience, his biographies of authors
+and historical figures like Charles Dickens and St. Francis of Assisi
+often contain brilliant insights into their subjects. His Father Brown
+mystery stories, written between 1911 and 1936, are still being read
+and adapted for television.
+
+His politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and
+power of any sort.  Along with his friend Hilaire Belloc and in books
+like the 1910 “What’s Wrong with the World” he advocated a view called
+“Distributionism” that was best summed up by his expression that every
+man ought to be allowed to own “three acres and a cow.” Though not known
+as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world.
+Some see in him the father of the “small is beautiful” movement and a
+newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a
+“genuine” nationalism for India rather than one that imitated the
+British.
+
+Heretics belongs to yet another area of literature at which Chesterton
+excelled.  A fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless
+troubled in his adolescence by thoughts of suicide.  In Christianity he
+found the answers to the dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. Other
+books in that same series include his 1908 Orthodoxy (written in
+response to attacks on this book) and his 1925 The Everlasting Man.
+Orthodoxy is also available as electronic text.
+
+Chesterton died on the 14th of June, 1936 in Beaconsfield,
+Buckinghamshire, England.  During his life he published 69 books and at
+least another ten based on his writings have been published after his
+death.  Many of those books are still in print. Ignatius Press is
+systematically publishing his collected writings.
+
+
+
+
+Table of Contents
+
+
+   1. Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy
+   2. On the Negative Spirit
+   3. On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small
+   4. Mr. Bernard Shaw
+   5. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants
+   6. Christmas and the Esthetes
+   7. Omar and the Sacred Vine
+   8. The Mildness of the Yellow Press
+   9. The Moods of Mr. George Moore
+  10. On Sandals and Simplicity
+  11. Science and the Savages
+  12. Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson
+  13. Celts and Celtophiles
+  14. On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family
+  15. On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set
+  16. On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity
+  17. On the Wit of Whistler
+  18. The Fallacy of the Young Nation
+  19. Slum Novelists and the Slums
+  20. Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy
+
+
+
+
+I. Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy
+
+
+Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern
+society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word
+“orthodox.”  In former days the heretic was proud of not being a
+heretic.  It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the
+judges who were heretics. He was orthodox.  He had no pride in having
+rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him.  The armies with
+their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous
+processes of State, the reasonable processes of law—all these like
+sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud
+of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more
+than a man; he was a church.  He was the centre of the universe; it was
+round him that the stars swung.  All the tortures torn out of forgotten
+hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern
+phrases have made him boast of it.  He says, with a conscious laugh, “I
+suppose I am very heretical,” and looks round for applause.  The word
+“heresy” not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means
+being clear-headed and courageous. The word “orthodoxy” not only no
+longer means being right; it practically means being wrong.  All this
+can mean one thing, and one thing only.  It means that people care less
+for whether they are philosophically right.  For obviously a man ought
+to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The
+Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The
+dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at
+least he is orthodox.
+
+It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to
+another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in
+their theory of the universe.  That was done very frequently in the
+last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its
+object.  But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and
+unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of
+saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done
+universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great
+revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the
+doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the
+Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day.
+Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much
+of a restraint. We will have no generalizations.  Mr. Bernard Shaw has
+put the view in a perfect epigram:  “The golden rule is that there is
+no golden rule.” We are more and more to discuss details in art,
+politics, literature. A man’s opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion
+on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter.  He
+may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that
+strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion,
+and be lost. Everything matters—except everything.
+
+Examples are scarcely needed of this total levity on the subject of
+cosmic philosophy.  Examples are scarcely needed to show that, whatever
+else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do not think it
+matters whether a man is a pessimist or an optimist, a Cartesian or a
+Hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist. Let me, however, take a
+random instance.  At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man
+say, “Life is not worth living.” We regard it as we regard the
+statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly
+have any serious effect on the man or on the world.  And yet if that
+utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head.
+Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would
+be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as
+medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal
+Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we
+never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will
+strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories
+do not matter.
+
+This was certainly not the idea of those who introduced our freedom.
+When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their
+idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be
+made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one
+ought to bear independent testimony.  The modern idea is that cosmic
+truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. The
+former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees
+inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never
+has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now,
+when, for the first time, any one can discuss it.  The old restriction
+meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern
+liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the
+last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us
+where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be
+an avowed atheist. Then came the Bradlaughites, the last religious men,
+the last men who cared about God; but they could not alter it.  It is
+still bad taste to be an avowed atheist.  But their agony has achieved
+just this—that now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
+Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as
+the heresiarch.  Then we talk about Lord Anglesey and the weather, and
+call it the complete liberty of all the creeds.
+
+But there are some people, nevertheless—and I am one of them—who
+think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still
+his view of the universe.  We think that for a landlady considering a
+lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to
+know his philosophy.  We think that for a general about to fight an
+enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more
+important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not
+whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the
+long run, anything else affects them. In the fifteenth century men
+cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral
+attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde
+because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal
+servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the
+two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which
+was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the
+disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very
+same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict
+for practising.
+
+Now, in our time, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is, about
+ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously, from
+two fields which it used to occupy.  General ideals used to dominate
+literature.  They have been driven out by the cry of “art for art’s
+sake.”  General ideals used to dominate politics. They have been driven
+out by the cry of “efficiency,” which may roughly be translated as
+“politics for politics’ sake.” Persistently for the last twenty years
+the ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books; the
+ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments.
+Literature has purposely become less political; politics have purposely
+become less literary. General theories of the relation of things have
+thus been extruded from both; and we are in a position to ask, “What
+have we gained or lost by this extrusion?  Is literature better, is
+politics better, for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?”
+
+When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and
+ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency.  So it is that when a
+man’s body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about
+health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about
+their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency
+of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the
+world. And there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency
+of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of
+the world, a journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem. There
+can be no stronger sign of a coarse material health than the tendency
+to run after high and wild ideals; it is in the first exuberance of
+infancy that we cry for the moon. None of the strong men in the strong
+ages would have understood what you meant by working for efficiency.
+Hildebrand would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but
+for the Catholic Church. Danton would have said that he was working not
+for efficiency, but for liberty, equality, and fraternity.  Even if the
+ideal of such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs,
+they thought of the end like men, not of the process like paralytics.
+They did not say, “Efficiently elevating my right leg, using, you will
+notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf, which are in excellent
+order, I—” Their feeling was quite different. They were so filled with
+the beautiful vision of the man lying flat at the foot of the staircase
+that in that ecstasy the rest followed in a flash.  In practice, the
+habit of generalizing and idealizing did not by any means mean worldly
+weakness. The time of big theories was the time of big results.  In the
+era of sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century,
+men were really robust and effective.  The sentimentalists conquered
+Napoleon. The cynics could not catch De Wet.  A hundred years ago our
+affairs for good or evil were wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians. Now
+our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men. And just as
+this repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a race
+of small men in politics, so it has brought forth a race of small men
+in the arts.  Our modern politicians claim the colossal license of
+Caesar and the Superman, claim that they are too practical to be pure
+and too patriotic to be moral; but the upshot of it all is that a
+mediocrity is Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our new artistic
+philosophers call for the same moral license, for a freedom to wreck
+heaven and earth with their energy; but the upshot of it all is that a
+mediocrity is Poet Laureate. I do not say that there are no stronger
+men than these; but will any one say that there are any men stronger
+than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and
+steeped in their religion? Whether bondage be better than freedom may
+be discussed. But that their bondage came to more than our freedom it
+will be difficult for any one to deny.
+
+The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in
+the strictly artistic classes.  They are free to produce anything they
+like.  They are free to write a “Paradise Lost” in which Satan shall
+conquer God.  They are free to write a “Divine Comedy” in which heaven
+shall be under the floor of hell. And what have they done?  Have they
+produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than
+the things uttered by the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid
+Puritan schoolmaster? We know that they have produced only a few
+roundels. Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them
+at their own irreverence.  In all their little books of verse you will
+not find a finer defiance of God than Satan’s. Nor will you find the
+grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described
+Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. And the reason is very
+obvious.  Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends
+upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is
+fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and
+try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.  I think his family will
+find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.
+
+Neither in the world of politics nor that of literature, then, has the
+rejection of general theories proved a success. It may be that there
+have been many moonstruck and misleading ideals that have from time to
+time perplexed mankind.  But assuredly there has been no ideal in
+practice so moonstruck and misleading as the ideal of practicality.
+Nothing has lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of Lord
+Rosebery.  He is, indeed, a standing symbol of this epoch—the man who
+is theoretically a practical man, and practically more unpractical than
+any theorist.  Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that kind of
+worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is perpetually thinking of whether
+this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause
+is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough
+to make it succeed. The opportunist politician is like a man who should
+abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf
+because he was beaten at golf.  There is nothing which is so weak for
+working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate
+victory. There is nothing that fails like success.
+
+And having discovered that opportunism does fail, I have been induced
+to look at it more largely, and in consequence to see that it must
+fail. I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the
+beginning and discuss theories.  I see that the men who killed each
+other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than
+the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the
+Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and
+trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our
+modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty
+without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty.  If
+the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously
+took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern
+mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine
+without even stating it.
+
+For these reasons, and for many more, I for one have come to believe in
+going back to fundamentals.  Such is the general idea of this book.  I
+wish to deal with my most distinguished contemporaries, not personally
+or in a merely literary manner, but in relation to the real body of
+doctrine which they teach. I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling
+as a vivid artist or a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as
+a Heretic—that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihood
+to differ from mine.  I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one
+of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am
+concerned with him as a Heretic—that is to say, a man whose philosophy
+is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong. I revert to the
+doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general
+hope of getting something done.
+
+Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something,
+let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull
+down.  A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is
+approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of
+the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of
+Light.  If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat
+excusably knocked down.  All the people make a rush for the lamp-post,
+the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating
+each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they
+do not work out so easily.  Some people have pulled the lamp-post down
+because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old
+iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil.
+Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted
+because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they
+wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man
+knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day,
+to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the
+monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the
+philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the
+gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+II.  On the negative spirit
+
+
+Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the
+hysteria which as often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But
+let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense,
+necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It
+is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of
+success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal, in
+what Stevenson called, with his usual startling felicity, “the lost
+fight of virtue.”  A modern morality, on the other hand, can only point
+with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of law;
+its only certainty is a certainty of ill. It can only point to
+imperfection.  It has no perfection to point to. But the monk
+meditating upon Christ or Buddha has in his mind an image of perfect
+health, a thing of clear colours and clean air. He may contemplate this
+ideal wholeness and happiness far more than he ought; he may
+contemplate it to the neglect of exclusion of essential THINGS; he may
+contemplate it until he has become a dreamer or a driveller; but still
+it is wholeness and happiness that he is contemplating. He may even go
+mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity. But the modern student
+of ethics, even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread
+of insanity.
+
+The anchorite rolling on the stones in a frenzy of submission is a
+healthier person fundamentally than many a sober man in a silk hat who
+is walking down Cheapside.  For many such are good only through a
+withering knowledge of evil. I am not at this moment claiming for the
+devotee anything more than this primary advantage, that though he may
+be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his
+thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that
+has no limits, and a happiness that has no end. Doubtless there are
+other objections which can be urged without unreason against the
+influence of gods and visions in morality, whether in the cell or
+street.  But this advantage the mystic morality must always have—it is
+always jollier.  A young man may keep himself from vice by continually
+thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it also by continually
+thinking of the Virgin Mary.  There may be question about which method
+is the more reasonable, or even about which is the more efficient. But
+surely there can be no question about which is the more wholesome.
+
+I remember a pamphlet by that able and sincere secularist, Mr. G. W.
+Foote, which contained a phrase sharply symbolizing and dividing these
+two methods.  The pamphlet was called BEER AND BIBLE, those two very
+noble things, all the nobler for a conjunction which Mr. Foote, in his
+stern old Puritan way, seemed to think sardonic, but which I confess to
+thinking appropriate and charming. I have not the work by me, but I
+remember that Mr. Foote dismissed very contemptuously any attempts to
+deal with the problem of strong drink by religious offices or
+intercessions, and said that a picture of a drunkard’s liver would be
+more efficacious in the matter of temperance than any prayer or praise.
+In that picturesque expression, it seems to me, is perfectly embodied
+the incurable morbidity of modern ethics. In that temple the lights are
+low, the crowds kneel, the solemn anthems are uplifted.  But that upon
+the altar to which all men kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the
+body and substance of the perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is
+diseased. It is the drunkard’s liver of the New Testament that is
+marred for us, which we take in remembrance of him.
+
+Now, it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid
+pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the
+real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of
+the nineteenth century.  If any ordinary man ever said that he was
+horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by the
+plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was
+lying.  The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of
+modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never
+dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a
+new habit. On the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence
+which is new still, though it is already dying.  The tradition of
+calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes
+down very late.  But the truth is that the ordinary honest man,
+whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not
+either disgusted or even annoyed at the candour of the moderns. What
+disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear
+realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine
+religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the
+contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing
+that called names.  This is the great difference between some recent
+developments of Nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the
+seventeenth century.  It was the whole point of the Puritans that they
+cared nothing for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish
+themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which
+the founders of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at
+kings and queens. But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke
+plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly
+about good. The thing which is resented, and, as I think, rightly
+resented, in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical, is
+that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things
+increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what
+things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it
+goes almost blind with doubt.  If we compare, let us say, the morality
+of the DIVINE COMEDY with the morality of Ibsen’s GHOSTS, we shall see
+all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse
+the author of the INFERNO of an Early Victorian prudishness or a
+Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral
+instruments—Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the
+vision of improvement, and the vision of failure.  Ibsen has only
+one—Hell. It is often said, and with perfect truth, that no one could
+read a play like GHOSTS and remain indifferent to the necessity of an
+ethical self-command. That is quite true, and the same is to be said of
+the most monstrous and material descriptions of the eternal fire. It is
+quite certain the realists like Zola do in one sense promote
+morality—they promote it in the sense in which the hangman promotes
+it, in the sense in which the devil promotes it. But they only affect
+that small minority which will accept any virtue of courage.  Most
+healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the
+possibility of bombs or microbes. Modern realists are indeed
+Terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their
+effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters are
+well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously ultimately
+hopeless, of using science to promote morality.
+
+I do not wish the reader to confuse me for a moment with those vague
+persons who imagine that Ibsen is what they call a pessimist. There are
+plenty of wholesome people in Ibsen, plenty of good people, plenty of
+happy people, plenty of examples of men acting wisely and things ending
+well.  That is not my meaning. My meaning is that Ibsen has throughout,
+and does not disguise, a certain vagueness and a changing attitude as
+well as a doubting attitude towards what is really wisdom and virtue in
+this life—a vagueness which contrasts very remarkably with the
+decisiveness with which he pounces on something which he perceives to
+be a root of evil, some convention, some deception, some ignorance. We
+know that the hero of GHOSTS is mad, and we know why he is mad. We do
+also know that Dr. Stockman is sane; but we do not know why he is sane.
+Ibsen does not profess to know how virtue and happiness are brought
+about, in the sense that he professes to know how our modern sexual
+tragedies are brought about. Falsehood works ruin in THE PILLARS OF
+SOCIETY, but truth works equal ruin in THE WILD DUCK.  There are no
+cardinal virtues of Ibsenism. There is no ideal man of Ibsen.  All this
+is not only admitted, but vaunted in the most valuable and thoughtful
+of all the eulogies upon Ibsen, Mr. Bernard Shaw’s QUINTESSENCE OF
+IBSENISM. Mr. Shaw sums up Ibsen’s teaching in the phrase, “The golden
+rule is that there is no golden rule.”  In his eyes this absence of an
+enduring and positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key to virtue,
+is the one great Ibsen merit. I am not discussing now with any fulness
+whether this is so or not. All I venture to point out, with an
+increased firmness, is that this omission, good or bad, does leave us
+face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very
+definite images of evil, and with no definite image of good. To us
+light must be henceforward the dark thing—the thing of which we cannot
+speak.  To us, as to Milton’s devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness
+that is visible.  The human race, according to religion, fell once, and
+in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil. Now we have fallen a
+second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us.
+
+A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment, has in
+our time fallen on our Northern civilization.  All previous ages have
+sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the
+right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern
+world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no
+answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a
+few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for
+instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere
+existence of their neighbours.  Ibsen is the first to return from the
+baffled hunt to bring us the tidings of great failure.
+
+Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order
+to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about
+“liberty”; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what
+is good.  We are fond of talking about “progress”; that is a dodge to
+avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about
+“education”; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good.  The
+modern man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and
+embrace liberty.” This is, logically rendered, “Let us not decide what
+is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.”  He says,
+“Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.” This, logically
+stated, means, “Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle
+whether we are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither in religion nor
+morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.”
+This, clearly expressed, means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let
+us give it to our children.”
+
+Mr. H.G. Wells, that exceedingly clear-sighted man, has pointed out in
+a recent work that this has happened in connection with economic
+questions. The old economists, he says, made generalizations, and they
+were (in Mr. Wells’s view) mostly wrong.  But the new economists, he
+says, seem to have lost the power of making any generalizations at all.
+And they cover this incapacity with a general claim to be, in specific
+cases, regarded as “experts”, a claim “proper enough in a hairdresser
+or a fashionable physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of
+science.” But in spite of the refreshing rationality with which Mr.
+Wells has indicated this, it must also be said that he himself has
+fallen into the same enormous modern error.  In the opening pages of
+that excellent book MANKIND IN THE MAKING, he dismisses the ideals of
+art, religion, abstract morality, and the rest, and says that he is
+going to consider men in their chief function, the function of
+parenthood. He is going to discuss life as a “tissue of births.”  He is
+not going to ask what will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory
+heroes, but what will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers.  The
+whole is set forward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least
+before the reader realises that it is another example of unconscious
+shirking.  What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled
+what is the good of being a man? You are merely handing on to him a
+problem you dare not settle yourself. It is as if a man were asked,
+“What is the use of a hammer?” and answered, “To make hammers”; and
+when asked, “And of those hammers, what is the use?” answered, “To make
+hammers again”. Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the
+question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the
+rest of us are by these phrases successfully putting off the question
+of the ultimate value of the human life.
+
+The case of the general talk of “progress” is, indeed, an extreme one.
+As enunciated to-day, “progress” is simply a comparative of which we
+have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion,
+patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of
+progress—that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something
+that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great
+deal more of nobody knows what.  Progress, properly understood, has,
+indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning.  But as used in
+opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous.  So far from it
+being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of
+ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody has any
+business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and
+a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being
+doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without
+being infallible—at any rate, without believing in some infallibility.
+For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we
+are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same
+degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning
+of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word
+“progress” than we. In the Catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic
+eighteenth century, the direction may have been a good or a bad one,
+men may have differed more or less about how far they went, and in what
+direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree, and
+consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress. But it is
+precisely about the direction that we disagree. Whether the future
+excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less
+liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut
+up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin
+intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love
+everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche;—these are the
+things about which we are actually fighting most.  It is not merely
+true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this
+“progressive” age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have
+settled least what is progress are the most “progressive” people in it.
+The ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress,
+might be trusted perhaps to progress.  The particular individuals who
+talk about progress would certainly fly to the four winds of heaven
+when the pistol-shot started the race. I do not, therefore, say that
+the word “progress” is unmeaning; I say it is unmeaning without the
+previous definition of a moral doctrine, and that it can only be
+applied to groups of persons who hold that doctrine in common.
+Progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that
+it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word which could only
+rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith.
+
+
+
+
+III.  On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small
+
+
+There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only
+thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly
+required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the
+bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist
+entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he
+counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn
+happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical.  The bored
+has certainly proved himself prosaic.
+
+We might, no doubt, find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass
+or all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of our
+boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. The
+bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as
+splendid as the swords of an army.  The bore is stronger and more
+joyous than we are; he is a demigod—nay, he is a god. For it is the
+gods who do not tire of the iteration of things; to them the nightfall
+is always new, and the last rose as red as the first.
+
+The sense that everything is poetical is a thing solid and absolute; it
+is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion.  It is not merely
+true, it is ascertainable.  Men may be challenged to deny it; men may
+be challenged to mention anything that is not a matter of poetry. I
+remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to me with a
+book in his hand, called “Mr. Smith,” or “The Smith Family,” or some
+such thing.  He said, “Well, you won’t get any of your damned mysticism
+out of this,” or words to that effect.  I am happy to say that I
+undeceived him; but the victory was too obvious and easy. In most cases
+the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetical. In the case of
+Smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic
+matter for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of
+the one trade that even kings respected, it could claim half the glory
+of that arma virumque which all epics acclaimed.  The spirit of the
+smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million
+poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith.
+
+Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is
+poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast
+on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that
+creative violence.  The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning
+of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the wierdest of earthly
+elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the
+wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying
+of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written,
+briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith.
+Yet our novelists call their hero “Aylmer Valence,” which means
+nothing, or “Vernon Raymond,” which means nothing, when it is in their
+power to give him this sacred name of Smith—this name made of iron and
+flame. It would be very natural if a certain hauteur, a certain
+carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, distinguished every
+one whose name is Smith.  Perhaps it does; I trust so. Whoever else are
+parvenus, the Smiths are not parvenus. From the darkest dawn of history
+this clan has gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every hand; its
+name is everywhere; it is older than the nations, and its sign is the
+Hammer of Thor. But as I also remarked, it is not quite the usual case.
+It is common enough that common things should be poetical; it is not so
+common that common names should be poetical. In most cases it is the
+name that is the obstacle. A great many people talk as if this claim of
+ours, that all things are poetical, were a mere literary ingenuity, a
+play on words. Precisely the contrary is true.  It is the idea that
+some things are not poetical which is literary, which is a mere product
+of words. The word “signal-box” is unpoetical.  But the thing
+signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of
+vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from
+death. That is the plain, genuine description of what it is; the prose
+only comes in with what it is called.  The word “pillar-box” is
+unpoetical. But the thing pillar-box is not unpoetical; it is the place
+to which friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious that when
+they have done so they are sacred, and not to be touched, not only by
+others, but even (religious touch!) by themselves. That red turret is
+one of the last of the temples.  Posting a letter and getting married
+are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be
+entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable. We think a pillar-box
+prosaic, because there is no rhyme to it. We think a pillar-box
+unpoetical, because we have never seen it in a poem.  But the bold fact
+is entirely on the side of poetry. A signal-box is only called a
+signal-box; it is a house of life and death. A pillar-box is only
+called a pillar-box; it is a sanctuary of human words.  If you think
+the name of “Smith” prosaic, it is not because you are practical and
+sensible; it is because you are too much affected with literary
+refinements.  The name shouts poetry at you. If you think of it
+otherwise, it is because you are steeped and sodden with verbal
+reminiscences, because you remember everything in Punch or Comic Cuts
+about Mr. Smith being drunk or Mr. Smith being henpecked.  All these
+things were given to you poetical. It is only by a long and elaborate
+process of literary effort that you have made them prosaic.
+
+Now, the first and fairest thing to say about Rudyard Kipling is that
+he has borne a brilliant part in thus recovering the lost provinces of
+poetry.  He has not been frightened by that brutal materialistic air
+which clings only to words; he has pierced through to the romantic,
+imaginative matter of the things themselves. He has perceived the
+significance and philosophy of steam and of slang. Steam may be, if you
+like, a dirty by-product of science. Slang may be, if you like, a dirty
+by-product of language. But at least he has been among the few who saw
+the divine parentage of these things, and knew that where there is
+smoke there is fire—that is, that wherever there is the foulest of
+things, there also is the purest. Above all, he has had something to
+say, a definite view of things to utter, and that always means that a
+man is fearless and faces everything. For the moment we have a view of
+the universe, we possess it.
+
+Now, the message of Rudyard Kipling, that upon which he has really
+concentrated, is the only thing worth worrying about in him or in any
+other man.  He has often written bad poetry, like Wordsworth.  He has
+often said silly things, like Plato. He has often given way to mere
+political hysteria, like Gladstone. But no one can reasonably doubt
+that he means steadily and sincerely to say something, and the only
+serious question is, What is that which he has tried to say?  Perhaps
+the best way of stating this fairly will be to begin with that element
+which has been most insisted by himself and by his opponents—I mean
+his interest in militarism. But when we are seeking for the real merits
+of a man it is unwise to go to his enemies, and much more foolish to go
+to himself.
+
+Now, Mr. Kipling is certainly wrong in his worship of militarism, but
+his opponents are, generally speaking, quite as wrong as he. The evil
+of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierce and haughty
+and excessively warlike.  The evil of militarism is that it shows most
+men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. The professional
+soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community
+declines.  Thus the Pretorian guard became more and more important in
+Rome as Rome became more and more luxurious and feeble.  The military
+man gains the civil power in proportion as the civilian loses the
+military virtues. And as it was in ancient Rome so it is in
+contemporary Europe. There never was a time when nations were more
+militarist. There never was a time when men were less brave.  All ages
+and all epics have sung of arms and the man; but we have effected
+simultaneously the deterioration of the man and the fantastic
+perfection of the arms. Militarism demonstrated the decadence of Rome,
+and it demonstrates the decadence of Prussia.
+
+And unconsciously Mr. Kipling has proved this, and proved it admirably.
+For in so far as his work is earnestly understood the military trade
+does not by any means emerge as the most important or attractive. He
+has not written so well about soldiers as he has about railway men or
+bridge builders, or even journalists. The fact is that what attracts
+Mr. Kipling to militarism is not the idea of courage, but the idea of
+discipline. There was far more courage to the square mile in the Middle
+Ages, when no king had a standing army, but every man had a bow or
+sword. But the fascination of the standing army upon Mr. Kipling is not
+courage, which scarcely interests him, but discipline, which is, when
+all is said and done, his primary theme.  The modern army is not a
+miracle of courage; it has not enough opportunities, owing to the
+cowardice of everybody else.  But it is really a miracle of
+organization, and that is the truly Kiplingite ideal. Kipling’s subject
+is not that valour which properly belongs to war, but that
+interdependence and efficiency which belongs quite as much to
+engineers, or sailors, or mules, or railway engines. And thus it is
+that when he writes of engineers, or sailors, or mules, or
+steam-engines, he writes at his best.  The real poetry, the “true
+romance” which Mr. Kipling has taught, is the romance of the division
+of labour and the discipline of all the trades. He sings the arts of
+peace much more accurately than the arts of war. And his main
+contention is vital and valuable.  Every thing is military in the sense
+that everything depends upon obedience.  There is no perfectly
+epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere
+men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. We may fling
+ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. But we are
+glad that the net-maker did not make the hammock in a fit of divine
+carelessness.  We may jump upon a child’s rocking-horse for a joke. But
+we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it unglued for
+a joke.  So far from having merely preached that a soldier cleaning his
+side-arm is to be adored because he is military, Kipling at his best
+and clearest has preached that the baker baking loaves and the tailor
+cutting coats is as military as anybody.
+
+Being devoted to this multitudinous vision of duty, Mr. Kipling is
+naturally a cosmopolitan.  He happens to find his examples in the
+British Empire, but almost any other empire would do as well, or,
+indeed, any other highly civilized country. That which he admires in
+the British army he would find even more apparent in the German army;
+that which he desires in the British police he would find flourishing,
+in the French police. The ideal of discipline is not the whole of life,
+but it is spread over the whole of the world.  And the worship of it
+tends to confirm in Mr. Kipling a certain note of worldly wisdom, of
+the experience of the wanderer, which is one of the genuine charms of
+his best work.
+
+The great gap in his mind is what may be roughly called the lack of
+patriotism—that is to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of
+attaching himself to any cause or community finally and tragically; for
+all finality must be tragic.  He admires England, but he does not love
+her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons.
+He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.
+There is no harshness in saying this, for, to do him justice, he avows
+it with his usual picturesque candour.  In a very interesting poem, he
+says that—
+
+  “If England was what England seems”
+
+—that is, weak and inefficient; if England were not what (as he
+believes) she is—that is, powerful and practical—
+
+  “How quick we’d chuck ’er! But she ain’t!”
+
+He admits, that is, that his devotion is the result of a criticism, and
+this is quite enough to put it in another category altogether from the
+patriotism of the Boers, whom he hounded down in South Africa. In
+speaking of the really patriotic peoples, such as the Irish, he has
+some difficulty in keeping a shrill irritation out of his language. The
+frame of mind which he really describes with beauty and nobility is the
+frame of mind of the cosmopolitan man who has seen men and cities.
+
+  “For to admire and for to see,
+   For to be’old this world so wide.”
+
+He is a perfect master of that light melancholy with which a man looks
+back on having been the citizen of many communities, of that light
+melancholy with which a man looks back on having been the lover of many
+women.  He is the philanderer of the nations. But a man may have learnt
+much about women in flirtations, and still be ignorant of first love; a
+man may have known as many lands as Ulysses, and still be ignorant of
+patriotism.
+
+Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked in a celebrated epigram what they can
+know of England who know England only.  It is a far deeper and sharper
+question to ask, “What can they know of England who know only the
+world?” for the world does not include England any more than it
+includes the Church.  The moment we care for anything deeply, the
+world—that is, all the other miscellaneous interests—becomes our
+enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one’s self
+“unspotted from the world;” but lovers talk of it just as much when
+they talk of the “world well lost.”  Astronomically speaking, I
+understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose
+that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers
+inhabitants of that orb.  But they all felt a certain truth—the truth
+that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. Thus Mr.
+Kipling does certainly know the world; he is a man of the world, with
+all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He
+knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice. He has
+been to England a great many times; he has stopped there for long
+visits.  But he does not belong to it, or to any place; and the proof
+of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are
+rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the
+whole strength of the universe.
+
+The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is
+always breathing, an air of locality.  London is a place, to be
+compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo.
+But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who
+regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the
+winds of the world.  The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the
+races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men—diet,
+dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in
+Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern
+Britons.  The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he
+is thinking of the things that unite men—hunger and babies, and the
+beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.  Mr. Kipling,
+with all his merits, is the globe-trotter; he has not the patience to
+become part of anything. So great and genuine a man is not to be
+accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism; still, his cosmopolitanism
+is his weakness. That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his
+finest poems, “The Sestina of the Tramp Royal,” in which a man declares
+that he can endure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not
+permanent presence in one place.  In this there is certainly danger.
+The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about;
+dust is like this and the thistle-down and the High Commissioner in
+South Africa.  Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy
+fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile.  In the heated idleness of
+youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of
+that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss.  We were
+inclined to ask, “Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?”
+But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The
+rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is
+dead.  The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
+
+The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller.
+The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope
+makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it
+larger.  Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the
+telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and
+live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a
+large world.  It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car
+round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash
+of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a
+flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange
+virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must
+not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of
+children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to
+lose them.  The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland
+opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas.  His mind creates
+distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it.  Moderns think of the
+earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of
+a schoolmistress. This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made
+about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say that he may have had large ideas,
+but he was a bad man. His friends say that he may have been a bad man,
+but he certainly had large ideas.  The truth is that he was not a man
+essentially bad, he was a man of much geniality and many good
+intentions, but a man with singularly small views.  There is nothing
+large about painting the map red; it is an innocent game for children.
+It is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobble-stones.
+The difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of
+them. Rhodes’ prophecies about the Boer resistance are an admirable
+comment on how the “large ideas” prosper when it is not a question of
+thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men. And
+under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its
+empires and its Reuter’s agency, the real life of man goes on concerned
+with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song,
+totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its
+splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car
+civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming
+space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture
+of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars
+suburban.
+
+
+
+
+IV.  Mr. Bernard Shaw
+
+
+In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities, when
+genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and the kindly
+tales of the forgotten Emile Zola kept our firesides merry and pure, it
+used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood. It may be
+doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage. The man
+who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies, that
+they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. They go out
+against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows. There are
+several modern examples of this situation.  Mr. Chamberlain, for
+instance, is a very good one.  He constantly eludes or vanquishes his
+opponents because his real powers and deficiencies are quite different
+to those with which he is credited, both by friends and foes. His
+friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponents depict
+him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neither one nor
+the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor. He has
+one power which is the soul of melodrama—the power of pretending, even
+when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall. For
+all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must make some show of
+misfortune—that sort of hypocrisy is the homage that strength pays to
+weakness.  He talks foolishly and yet very finely about his own city
+that has never deserted him. He wears a flaming and fantastic flower,
+like a decadent minor poet. As for his bluffness and toughness and
+appeals to common sense, all that is, of course, simply the first trick
+of rhetoric. He fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of
+Mark Antony—
+
+  “I am no orator, as Brutus is;
+   But as you know me all, a plain blunt man.”
+
+It is the whole difference between the aim of the orator and the aim of
+any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor. The aim of the
+sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the
+orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator. Once let Mr.
+Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and his game is won.  He
+has only to compose a theme on empire, and people will say that these
+plain men say great things on great occasions. He has only to drift in
+the large loose notions common to all artists of the second rank, and
+people will say that business men have the biggest ideals after all.
+All his schemes have ended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did
+not confuse. About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like the Gaels
+in Matthew Arnold’s quotation, “he went forth to battle, but he always
+fell.” He is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures; but still
+a mountain.  And a mountain is always romantic.
+
+There is another man in the modern world who might be called the
+antithesis of Mr. Chamberlain in every point, who is also a standing
+monument of the advantage of being misunderstood. Mr. Bernard Shaw is
+always represented by those who disagree with him, and, I fear, also
+(if such exist) by those who agree with him, as a capering humorist, a
+dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist. It is said that he cannot be
+taken seriously, that he will defend anything or attack anything, that
+he will do anything to startle and amuse. All this is not only untrue,
+but it is, glaringly, the opposite of the truth; it is as wild as to
+say that Dickens had not the boisterous masculinity of Jane Austen.
+The whole force and triumph of Mr. Bernard Shaw lie in the fact that he
+is a thoroughly consistent man. So far from his power consisting in
+jumping through hoops or standing on his head, his power consists in
+holding his own fortress night and day. He puts the Shaw test rapidly
+and rigorously to everything that happens in heaven or earth.  His
+standard never varies. The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and
+weak-minded Conservatives really hate (and fear) in him, is exactly
+this, that his scales, such as they are, are held even, and that his
+law, such as it is, is justly enforced.  You may attack his principles,
+as I do; but I do not know of any instance in which you can attack
+their application. If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the
+lawlessness of Socialists as much as that of Individualists.  If he
+dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen
+as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of
+marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that
+are made by lawless love. If he laughs at the authority of priests, he
+laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science.  If he condemns the
+irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the
+equal irresponsibility of art. He has pleased all the bohemians by
+saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by
+suggesting that men are equal to women. He is almost mechanically just;
+he has something of the terrible quality of a machine.  The man who is
+really wild and whirling, the man who is really fantastic and
+incalculable, is not Mr. Shaw, but the average Cabinet Minister.  It is
+Sir Michael Hicks-Beach who jumps through hoops.  It is Sir Henry
+Fowler who stands on his head. The solid and respectable statesman of
+that type does really leap from position to position; he is really
+ready to defend anything or nothing; he is really not to be taken
+seriously. I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be saying
+thirty years hence; he will be saying what he has always said. If
+thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent being with a silver
+beard sweeping the earth, and say to him, “One can never, of course,
+make a verbal attack upon a lady,” the patriarch will lift his aged
+hand and fell me to the earth. We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be,
+saying thirty years hence. But is there any one so darkly read in stars
+and oracles that he will dare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be
+saying thirty years hence?
+
+The truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of
+definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who
+believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons
+about him.  He can apply his test in an instant. The man engaged in
+conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw may fancy he has ten faces;
+similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy that the
+sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand.  But this is not
+really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is
+aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief
+always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he
+has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a
+zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and
+sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity,
+because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of
+the world.
+
+People accuse Mr. Shaw and many much sillier persons of “proving that
+black is white.”  But they never ask whether the current
+colour-language is always correct.  Ordinary sensible phraseology
+sometimes calls black white, it certainly calls yellow white and green
+white and reddish-brown white. We call wine “white wine” which is as
+yellow as a Blue-coat boy’s legs. We call grapes “white grapes” which
+are manifestly pale green. We give to the European, whose complexion is
+a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a “white man”—a picture
+more blood-curdling than any spectre in Poe.
+
+Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a
+restaurant for a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes,
+the waiter would think him mad.  It is undoubtedly true that if a
+Government official, reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said, “There
+are only two thousand pinkish men here” he would be accused of cracking
+jokes, and kicked out of his post.  But it is equally obvious that both
+men would have come to grief through telling the strict truth. That too
+truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful man in Burmah, is Mr.
+Bernard Shaw.  He appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not
+accept the general belief that white is yellow. He has based all his
+brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact
+that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of
+necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit
+ourselves.
+
+So much then a reasonable appreciation will find in Mr. Shaw to be
+bracing and excellent.  He claims to see things as they are; and some
+things, at any rate, he does see as they are, which the whole of our
+civilization does not see at all. But in Mr. Shaw’s realism there is
+something lacking, and that thing which is lacking is serious.
+
+Mr. Shaw’s old and recognized philosophy was that powerfully presented
+in “The Quintessence of Ibsenism.”  It was, in brief, that conservative
+ideals were bad, not because they were conservative, but because they
+were ideals.  Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the
+particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual;
+the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this
+is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from
+doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling a
+community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws?
+The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.  And what
+is the good of telling a man (or a philosopher) that he has every
+liberty except the liberty to make generalizations.  Making
+generalizations is what makes him a man. In short, when Mr. Shaw
+forbids men to have strict moral ideals, he is acting like one who
+should forbid them to have children. The saying that “the golden rule
+is that there is no golden rule,” can, indeed, be simply answered by
+being turned round. That there is no golden rule is itself a golden
+rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule.  It is an iron
+rule; a fetter on the first movement of a man.
+
+But the sensation connected with Mr. Shaw in recent years has been his
+sudden development of the religion of the Superman. He who had to all
+appearance mocked at the faiths in the forgotten past discovered a new
+god in the unimaginable future.  He who had laid all the blame on
+ideals set up the most impossible of all ideals, the ideal of a new
+creature.  But the truth, nevertheless, is that any one who knows Mr.
+Shaw’s mind adequately, and admires it properly, must have guessed all
+this long ago.
+
+For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really
+are. If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them. He has
+always had a secret ideal that has withered all the things of this
+world.  He has all the time been silently comparing humanity with
+something that was not human, with a monster from Mars, with the Wise
+Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians, with Julius
+Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman.  Now, to have this inner and
+merciless standard may be a very good thing, or a very bad one, it may
+be excellent or unfortunate, but it is not seeing things as they are.
+It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a
+hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two.
+It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus
+with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if
+he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a
+demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the
+latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.  And this
+is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done.  When we really see
+men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly.
+For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange
+dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that
+baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It is only the quite
+arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with something else which
+makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. A sentiment of
+superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make our
+knees knock under as with religious fear.  It is the fact that every
+instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy. It is the fact
+that every face in the street has the incredible unexpectedness of a
+fairy-tale. The thing which prevents a man from realizing this is not
+any clear-sightedness or experience, it is simply a habit of pedantic
+and fastidious comparisons between one thing and another.  Mr. Shaw, on
+the practical side perhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense
+inhumane. He has even been infected to some extent with the primary
+intellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strange notion
+that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other
+things.  The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be
+inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. That Mr. Shaw keeps
+a lifted head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of
+empires and civilizations, this does not in itself convince one that he
+sees things as they are. I should be most effectively convinced that he
+did if I found him staring with religious astonishment at his own feet.
+“What are those two beautiful and industrious beings,” I can imagine
+him murmuring to himself, “whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not
+why? What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when I
+was born?  What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must
+I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?”
+
+The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery
+of humility and almost of darkness.  The man who said, “Blessed is he
+that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,” put the
+eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely.  The truth “Blessed is he
+that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.” The man
+who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and
+greener grass, and a more startling sun.  Blessed is he that expecteth
+nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is
+the meek, for he shall inherit the earth.  Until we realize that things
+might not be we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the
+background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and
+created thing.  As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is
+lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we
+underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of
+His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we
+know nothing until we know nothing.
+
+Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of
+Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is
+not easily pleased.  He is an almost solitary exception to the general
+and essential maxim, that little things please great minds. And from
+this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes
+incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman. After belabouring
+a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr.
+Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very
+doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be
+progressive at all.  Having come to doubt whether humanity can be
+combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected
+to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being
+easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations
+and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is
+incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new
+kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man.  It is rather as if a
+nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on
+discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food
+and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a
+new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable
+and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making,
+fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have
+been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have
+been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying
+civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a
+symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its
+corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a
+shuffler, a snob a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has
+built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it.
+All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent
+and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon
+strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was
+founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no
+chain is stronger than its weakest link.
+
+
+
+
+V. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants
+
+
+We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.
+We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man
+in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues
+that he cannot.  And the more we approach the problems of human history
+with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we
+shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind. The hypocrites shall not
+deceive us into thinking them saints; but neither shall they deceive us
+into thinking them hypocrites. And an increasing number of cases will
+crowd into our field of inquiry, cases in which there is really no
+question of hypocrisy at all, cases in which people were so ingenuous
+that they seemed absurd, and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous.
+
+There is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy. It is
+always urged against the religious in the past, as a point of
+inconsistency and duplicity, that they combined a profession of almost
+crawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and
+considerable triumph in attaining it.  It is felt as a piece of humbug,
+that a man should be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable
+sinner, and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France.
+But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between
+the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there
+is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The
+truth is that there are no things for which men will make such
+herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.
+There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained
+every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there
+never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to
+have it.  The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies
+in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled. For with the
+removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly
+released for incredible voyages.  If we ask a sane man how much he
+merits, his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously. It is
+doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth. But if you ask him what
+he can conquer—he can conquer the stars. Thus comes the thing called
+Romance, a purely Christian product. A man cannot deserve adventures;
+he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs. The mediaeval Europe which
+asserted humility gained Romance; the civilization which gained Romance
+has gained the habitable globe. How different the Pagan and Stoical
+feeling was from this has been admirably expressed in a famous
+quotation.  Addison makes the great Stoic say—
+
+  “’Tis not in mortals to command success;
+   But we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”
+
+But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is in every
+lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with European
+adventure, is quite opposite.  ’Tis not in mortals to deserve success.
+But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll obtain it.
+
+And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready
+for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that
+every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and
+mysterious. Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be
+a vice. Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. It is
+mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a
+certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity. Humility will
+always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold; pride is that which
+refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much.  In a
+word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is
+too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue.
+Humility is not merely too good for this world; it is too practical for
+this world; I had almost said it is too worldly for this world.
+
+The instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humility of
+the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as well as a
+modern one.  Men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who
+is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down
+temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old
+gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby
+and follow his harmless old nose. When a man splits a grain of sand and
+the universe is turned upside down in consequence, it is difficult to
+realize that to the man who did it, the splitting of the grain is the
+great affair, and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one.  It is
+hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a
+new earth in the light of a by-product. But undoubtedly it was to this
+almost eerie innocence of the intellect that the great men of the great
+scientific period, which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous
+power and triumph. If they had brought the heavens down like a house of
+cards their plea was not even that they had done it on principle; their
+quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident. Whenever
+there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done, there
+was a good ground for attacking them; but so long as they were wholly
+humble, they were wholly victorious. There were possible answers to
+Huxley; there was no answer possible to Darwin.  He was convincing
+because of his unconsciousness; one might almost say because of his
+dulness.  This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the
+world of science. Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as
+the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of
+their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of
+the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk
+of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the
+discoveries that their forbears made.  Like the modern English, they
+are beginning to be soft about their own hardness. They are becoming
+conscious of their own strength—that is, they are growing weaker.  But
+one purely modern man has emerged in the strictly modern decades who
+does carry into our world the clear personal simplicity of the old
+world of science.  One man of genius we have who is an artist, but who
+was a man of science, and who seems to be marked above all things with
+this great scientific humility. I mean Mr. H. G. Wells.  And in his
+case, as in the others above spoken of, there must be a great
+preliminary difficulty in convincing the ordinary person that such a
+virtue is predicable of such a man. Mr. Wells began his literary work
+with violent visions—visions of the last pangs of this planet; can it
+be that a man who begins with violent visions is humble?  He went on to
+wilder and wilder stories about carving beasts into men and shooting
+angels like birds. Is the man who shoots angels and carves beasts into
+men humble? Since then he has done something bolder than either of
+these blasphemies; he has prophesied the political future of all men;
+prophesied it with aggressive authority and a ringing decision of
+detail. Is the prophet of the future of all men humble?  It will indeed
+be difficult, in the present condition of current thought about such
+things as pride and humility, to answer the query of how a man can be
+humble who does such big things and such bold things. For the only
+answer is the answer which I gave at the beginning of this essay.  It
+is the humble man who does the big things. It is the humble man who
+does the bold things.  It is the humble man who has the sensational
+sights vouchsafed to him, and this for three obvious reasons:  first,
+that he strains his eyes more than any other men to see them; second,
+that he is more overwhelmed and uplifted with them when they come;
+third, that he records them more exactly and sincerely and with less
+adulteration from his more commonplace and more conceited everyday
+self. Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected—that
+is, most romantic.  Adventures are to the shy:  in this sense
+adventures are to the unadventurous.
+
+Now, this arresting, mental humility in Mr. H. G. Wells may be, like a
+great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult to
+illustrate by examples, but if I were asked for an example of it, I
+should have no difficulty about which example to begin with. The most
+interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he is the only one of
+his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing.  One can
+lie awake at night and hear him grow. Of this growth the most evident
+manifestation is indeed a gradual change of opinions; but it is no mere
+change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to
+another like that of Mr. George Moore.  It is a quite continuous
+advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction.  But
+the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the
+fact that it has been upon the whole an advance from more startling
+opinions to more humdrum opinions.  It has been even in some sense an
+advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This
+fact fixes Mr. Wells’s honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr.
+Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be
+so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the
+other.  Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments
+for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except for
+something yet more startling.  Mr. Wells has deserted it in favour of
+the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated
+or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class, a class of
+engineers.  He has abandoned the sensational theory with the same
+honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he
+thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the
+most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion
+that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and
+wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand
+people and tell them that twice two is four.
+
+Mr. H. G. Wells exists at present in a gay and exhilarating progress of
+conservativism.  He is finding out more and more that conventions,
+though silent, are alive.  As good an example as any of this humility
+and sanity of his may be found in his change of view on the subject of
+science and marriage.  He once held, I believe, the opinion which some
+singular sociologists still hold, that human creatures could
+successfully be paired and bred after the manner of dogs or horses.  He
+no longer holds that view. Not only does he no longer hold that view,
+but he has written about it in “Mankind in the Making” with such
+smashing sense and humour, that I find it difficult to believe that
+anybody else can hold it either. It is true that his chief objection to
+the proposal is that it is physically impossible, which seems to me a
+very slight objection, and almost negligible compared with the others.
+The one objection to scientific marriage which is worthy of final
+attention is simply that such a thing could only be imposed on
+unthinkable slaves and cowards.  I do not know whether the scientific
+marriage-mongers are right (as they say) or wrong (as Mr. Wells says)
+in saying that medical supervision would produce strong and healthy
+men. I am only certain that if it did, the first act of the strong and
+healthy men would be to smash the medical supervision.
+
+The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it
+connects the idea of health with the idea of care.  What has health to
+do with care?  Health has to do with carelessness.  In special and
+abnormal cases it is necessary to have care.  When we are peculiarly
+unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But
+even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless. If
+we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men, and they
+ought to be told to be careful.  But when we are sociologists we are
+addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity. And humanity
+ought to be told to be recklessness itself. For all the fundamental
+functions of a healthy man ought emphatically to be performed with
+pleasure and for pleasure; they emphatically ought not to be performed
+with precaution or for precaution. A man ought to eat because he has a
+good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a body to
+sustain.  A man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but
+because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for
+their own sake. And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love,
+and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated. The
+food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking
+about his tissues.  The exercise will really get him into training so
+long as he is thinking about something else.  And the marriage will
+really stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if
+it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement. It is the
+first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as
+necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be
+careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness,
+or anything that can be managed with care. But in the name of all
+sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as
+marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail.
+
+Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower
+scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually
+ought not to be scientific.  He is still slightly affected with the
+great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not with the
+human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some
+such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in
+his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow
+for the stuff or material of men. In his new Utopia he says, for
+instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in
+original sin.  If he had begun with the human soul—that is, if he had
+begun on himself—he would have found original sin almost the first
+thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter
+shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the
+mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or
+ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take
+the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then
+give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They
+first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are
+very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by
+motor-car or balloon.  And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells’s
+indifference to the human psychology can be found in his
+cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic
+boundaries.  He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a
+world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to
+occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we
+should still make war on it to the end of the world. For if we admit
+that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in
+thinking there will not be varieties in government? The fact is very
+simple.  Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being
+good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible
+to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is
+impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were
+no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a
+strife between Utopias.  For the highest thing does not tend to union
+only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. You can often
+get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from
+fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest
+thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism
+of the great European civilization. It is also, incidentally, the
+meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.
+
+But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells’s philosophy is a somewhat
+deeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining manner in the
+introductory part of the new Utopia.  His philosophy in some sense
+amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself. At least,
+he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we
+can rest with a final mental satisfaction. It will be both clearer,
+however, and more amusing to quote Mr. Wells himself.
+
+He says, “Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the
+mind of a pedant)....  Being indeed!—there is no being, but a
+universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back on
+truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals.” Mr. Wells
+says, again, “There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from
+weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our
+hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities
+below.”  Now, when Mr. Wells says things like this, I speak with all
+respect when I say that he does not observe an evident mental
+distinction. It cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we
+know. For if that were so we should not know it all and should not call
+it knowledge.  Our mental state may be very different from that of
+somebody else some thousands of years back; but it cannot be entirely
+different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference. Mr.
+Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxes that
+sit by the springs of truth.  He must surely see that the fact of two
+things being different implies that they are similar. The hare and the
+tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree in
+the quality of motion.  The swiftest hare cannot be swifter than an
+isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. When we say the hare moves
+faster, we say that the tortoise moves. And when we say of a thing that
+it moves, we say, without need of other words, that there are things
+that do not move. And even in the act of saying that things change, we
+say that there is something unchangeable.
+
+But certainly the best example of Mr. Wells’s fallacy can be found in
+the example which he himself chooses.  It is quite true that we see a
+dim light which, compared with a darker thing, is light, but which,
+compared with a stronger light, is darkness. But the quality of light
+remains the same thing, or else we should not call it a stronger light
+or recognize it as such. If the character of light were not fixed in
+the mind, we should be quite as likely to call a denser shadow a
+stronger light, or vice versa If the character of light became even for
+an instant unfixed, if it became even by a hair’s-breadth doubtful, if,
+for example, there crept into our idea of light some vague idea of
+blueness, then in that flash we have become doubtful whether the new
+light has more light or less.  In brief, the progress may be as varying
+as a cloud, but the direction must be as rigid as a French road. North
+and South are relative in the sense that I am North of Bournemouth and
+South of Spitzbergen.  But if there be any doubt of the position of the
+North Pole, there is in equal degree a doubt of whether I am South of
+Spitzbergen at all.  The absolute idea of light may be practically
+unattainable.  We may not be able to procure pure light. We may not be
+able to get to the North Pole.  But because the North Pole is
+unattainable, it does not follow that it is indefinable. And it is only
+because the North Pole is not indefinable that we can make a
+satisfactory map of Brighton and Worthing.
+
+In other words, Plato turned his face to truth but his back on Mr. H.
+G. Wells, when he turned to his museum of specified ideals. It is
+precisely here that Plato shows his sense.  It is not true that
+everything changes; the things that change are all the manifest and
+material things.  There is something that does not change; and that is
+precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea. Mr. Wells says
+truly enough, that a thing which we have seen in one connection as dark
+we may see in another connection as light. But the thing common to both
+incidents is the mere idea of light—which we have not seen at all.
+Mr. Wells might grow taller and taller for unending aeons till his head
+was higher than the loneliest star. I can imagine his writing a good
+novel about it.  In that case he would see the trees first as tall
+things and then as short things; he would see the clouds first as high
+and then as low. But there would remain with him through the ages in
+that starry loneliness the idea of tallness; he would have in the awful
+spaces for companion and comfort the definite conception that he was
+growing taller and not (for instance) growing fatter.
+
+And now it comes to my mind that Mr. H. G. Wells actually has written a
+very delightful romance about men growing as tall as trees; and that
+here, again, he seems to me to have been a victim of this vague
+relativism.  “The Food of the Gods” is, like Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play,
+in essence a study of the Superman idea.  And it lies, I think, even
+through the veil of a half-pantomimic allegory, open to the same
+intellectual attack.  We cannot be expected to have any regard for a
+great creature if he does not in any manner conform to our standards.
+For unless he passes our standard of greatness we cannot even call him
+great.  Nietszche summed up all that is interesting in the Superman
+idea when he said, “Man is a thing which has to be surpassed.”  But the
+very word “surpass” implies the existence of a standard common to us
+and the thing surpassing us. If the Superman is more manly than men
+are, of course they will ultimately deify him, even if they happen to
+kill him first. But if he is simply more supermanly, they may be quite
+indifferent to him as they would be to another seemingly aimless
+monstrosity. He must submit to our test even in order to overawe us.
+Mere force or size even is a standard; but that alone will never make
+men think a man their superior.  Giants, as in the wise old
+fairy-tales, are vermin.  Supermen, if not good men, are vermin.
+
+“The Food of the Gods” is the tale of “Jack the Giant-Killer” told from
+the point of view of the giant.  This has not, I think, been done
+before in literature; but I have little doubt that the psychological
+substance of it existed in fact.  I have little doubt that the giant
+whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely
+enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished
+to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not
+unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would
+point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than
+one.  He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment,
+enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to
+correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the
+enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head and one
+man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the
+single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the
+giant was a particularly gigantic giant.  All he wished to know was
+whether he was a good giant—that is, a giant who was any good to us.
+What were the giant’s religious views; what his views on politics and
+the duties of the citizen?  Was he fond of children—or fond of them
+only in a dark and sinister sense?  To use a fine phrase for emotional
+sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him
+up with a sword in order to find out. The old and correct story of Jack
+the Giant-Killer is simply the whole story of man; if it were
+understood we should need no Bibles or histories. But the modern world
+in particular does not seem to understand it at all. The modern world,
+like Mr. Wells is on the side of the giants; the safest place, and
+therefore the meanest and the most prosaic. The modern world, when it
+praises its little Caesars, talks of being strong and brave:  but it
+does not seem to see the eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of
+these ideas. The strong cannot be brave.  Only the weak can be brave;
+and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted,
+in time of doubt, to be strong.  The only way in which a giant could
+really keep himself in training against the inevitable Jack would be by
+continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself. That is
+by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a Jack. Thus that sympathy with
+the small or the defeated as such, with which we Liberals and
+Nationalists have been often reproached, is not a useless
+sentimentalism at all, as Mr. Wells and his friends fancy.  It is the
+first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in
+the strongest school. Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity
+more good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like
+dragons. If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight
+him; but in that case, why not call him the Saint?  But if he is merely
+stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do not
+care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for
+all the strength we have.  If we are weaker than he, that is no reason
+why we should be weaker than ourselves. If we are not tall enough to
+touch the giant’s knees, that is no reason why we should become shorter
+by falling on our own. But that is at bottom the meaning of all modern
+hero-worship and celebration of the Strong Man, the Caesar the
+Superman. That he may be something more than man, we must be something
+less.
+
+Doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this. But the
+old hero was a being who, like Achilles, was more human than humanity
+itself.  Nietzsche’s Superman is cold and friendless. Achilles is so
+foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of
+his bereavement.  Mr. Shaw’s sad Caesar says in his desolate pride, “He
+who has never hoped can never despair.” The Man-God of old answers from
+his awful hill, “Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?”  A great man is
+not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so
+strong that he feels more. And when Nietszche says, “A new commandment
+I give to you, ‘be hard,’” he is really saying, “A new commandment I
+give to you, ‘be dead.’” Sensibility is the definition of life.
+
+I recur for a last word to Jack the Giant-Killer. I have dwelt on this
+matter of Mr. Wells and the giants, not because it is specially
+prominent in his mind; I know that the Superman does not bulk so large
+in his cosmos as in that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have dwelt on it for
+the opposite reason; because this heresy of immoral hero-worship has
+taken, I think, a slighter hold of him, and may perhaps still be
+prevented from perverting one of the best thinkers of the day.  In the
+course of “The New Utopia” Mr. Wells makes more than one admiring
+allusion to Mr. W. E. Henley. That clever and unhappy man lived in
+admiration of a vague violence, and was always going back to rude old
+tales and rude old ballads, to strong and primitive literatures, to
+find the praise of strength and the justification of tyranny.  But he
+could not find it. It is not there.  The primitive literature is shown
+in the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is all
+in praise of the weak. The rude old tales are as tender to minorities
+as any modern political idealist.  The rude old ballads are as
+sentimentally concerned for the under-dog as the Aborigines Protection
+Society. When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks
+and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only
+two kinds of songs.  The first was a rejoicing that the weak had
+conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for
+once in a way, conquered the weak.  For this defiance of the statu quo,
+this constant effort to alter the existing balance, this premature
+challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature and inmost secret of the
+psychological adventure which is called man. It is his strength to
+disdain strength.  The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the
+only real hope of mankind. In the coarsest ballads of the greenwood men
+are admired most when they defy, not only the king, but what is more to
+the point, the hero. The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of Superman,
+that moment the chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor
+tinker whom he thought to thrust aside.  And the chivalrous chronicler
+makes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration. This
+magnanimity is not a product of modern humanitarianism; it is not a
+product of anything to do with peace. This magnanimity is merely one of
+the lost arts of war. The Henleyites call for a sturdy and fighting
+England, and they go back to the fierce old stories of the sturdy and
+fighting English. And the thing that they find written across that
+fierce old literature everywhere, is “the policy of Majuba.”
+
+
+
+
+VI.  Christmas and the Aesthetes
+
+
+The world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and pessimism
+have been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way up.
+The difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good and
+evil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly from
+the fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what
+evil. Hence the difficulty which besets “undenominational religions.”
+They profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds, but they
+appear to many to have collected all that is dull in them. All the
+colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white. Mixed
+together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and a
+thing very like many new religions.  Such a blend is often something
+much worse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the
+Thugs. The error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is really
+the good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion.
+And this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who have the
+misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the parts commonly
+counted good are bad, and the parts commonly counted bad are good.
+
+It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admire
+it in a photographic negative.  It is difficult to congratulate all
+their whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness.
+This will often happen to us in connection with human religions. Take
+two institutions which bear witness to the religious energy of the
+nineteenth century.  Take the Salvation Army and the philosophy of
+Auguste Comte.
+
+The usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army is expressed
+in some such words as these:  “I have no doubt they do a great deal of
+good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style; their aims are
+excellent, but their methods are wrong.” To me, unfortunately, the
+precise reverse of this appears to be the truth.  I do not know whether
+the aims of the Salvation Army are excellent, but I am quite sure their
+methods are admirable. Their methods are the methods of all intense and
+hearty religions; they are popular like all religion, military like all
+religion, public and sensational like all religion.  They are not
+reverent any more than Roman Catholics are reverent, for reverence in
+the sad and delicate meaning of the term reverence is a thing only
+possible to infidels. That beautiful twilight you will find in
+Euripides, in Renan, in Matthew Arnold; but in men who believe you will
+not find it—you will find only laughter and war.  A man cannot pay
+that kind of reverence to truth solid as marble; they can only be
+reverent towards a beautiful lie.  And the Salvation Army, though their
+voice has broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape, are
+really the old voice of glad and angry faith, hot as the riots of
+Dionysus, wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism, not to be mistaken for
+a philosophy. Professor Huxley, in one of his clever phrases, called
+the Salvation Army “corybantic Christianity.”  Huxley was the last and
+noblest of those Stoics who have never understood the Cross.  If he had
+understood Christianity he would have known that there never has been,
+and never can be, any Christianity that is not corybantic.
+
+And there is this difference between the matter of aims and the matter
+of methods, that to judge of the aims of a thing like the Salvation
+Army is very difficult, to judge of their ritual and atmosphere very
+easy.  No one, perhaps, but a sociologist can see whether General
+Booth’s housing scheme is right. But any healthy person can see that
+banging brass cymbals together must be right.  A page of statistics, a
+plan of model dwellings, anything which is rational, is always
+difficult for the lay mind. But the thing which is irrational any one
+can understand. That is why religion came so early into the world and
+spread so far, while science came so late into the world and has not
+spread at all. History unanimously attests the fact that it is only
+mysticism which stands the smallest chance of being understanded of the
+people. Common sense has to be kept as an esoteric secret in the dark
+temple of culture.  And so while the philanthropy of the Salvationists
+and its genuineness may be a reasonable matter for the discussion of
+the doctors, there can be no doubt about the genuineness of their brass
+bands, for a brass band is purely spiritual, and seeks only to quicken
+the internal life.  The object of philanthropy is to do good; the
+object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment, amid a crash of
+brass.
+
+And the same antithesis exists about another modern religion—I mean
+the religion of Comte, generally known as Positivism, or the worship of
+humanity.  Such men as Mr. Frederic Harrison, that brilliant and
+chivalrous philosopher, who still, by his mere personality, speaks for
+the creed, would tell us that he offers us the philosophy of Comte, but
+not all Comte’s fantastic proposals for pontiffs and ceremonials, the
+new calendar, the new holidays and saints’ days. He does not mean that
+we should dress ourselves up as priests of humanity or let off
+fireworks because it is Milton’s birthday. To the solid English Comtist
+all this appears, he confesses, to be a little absurd.  To me it
+appears the only sensible part of Comtism. As a philosophy it is
+unsatisfactory.  It is evidently impossible to worship humanity, just
+as it is impossible to worship the Savile Club; both are excellent
+institutions to which we may happen to belong. But we perceive clearly
+that the Savile Club did not make the stars and does not fill the
+universe.  And it is surely unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the
+Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism, and then to ask men to
+worship a being who is ninety million persons in one God, neither
+confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
+
+But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comte was
+wisdom.  In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought of as
+something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible, he alone saw
+that men must always have the sacredness of mummery. He saw that while
+the brutes have all the useful things, the things that are truly human
+are the useless ones.  He saw the falsehood of that almost universal
+notion of to-day, the notion that rites and forms are something
+artificial, additional, and corrupt. Ritual is really much older than
+thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought.  A feeling
+touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there
+are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are
+certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of
+dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable,
+of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. But
+everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man
+was a ritualist before he could speak.  If Comtism had spread the world
+would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy, but by the
+Comtist calendar.  By discouraging what they conceive to be the
+weakness of their master, the English Positivists have broken the
+strength of their religion.  A man who has faith must be prepared not
+only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man
+is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready
+to wear a wreath round his head for them. I myself, to take a corpus
+vile, am very certain that I would not read the works of Comte through
+for any consideration whatever. But I can easily imagine myself with
+the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.
+
+That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has
+succeeded. There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist
+ecstasy. Men are still in black for the death of God.  When
+Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point
+was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its
+alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies
+have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered
+it.  They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world’s
+merriment to rally to. They have not given a name or a new occasion of
+gaiety. Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the
+birthday of Victor Hugo.  Mr. William Archer does not sing carols
+descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people’s doors in the snow.
+In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out
+of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth.
+Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or
+Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In
+all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.
+
+The strange truth about the matter is told in the very word “holiday.”
+A bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy. A
+half-holiday means, I suppose, a day on which a schoolboy is only
+partially holy.  It is hard to see at first sight why so human a thing
+as leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin.
+Rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and give each
+other presents in honour of anything—the birth of Michael Angelo or
+the opening of Euston Station.  But it does not work. As a fact, men
+only become greedily and gloriously material about something
+spiritualistic.  Take away the Nicene Creed and similar things, and you
+do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages. Take away the strange
+beauty of the saints, and what has remained to us is the far stranger
+ugliness of Wandsworth. Take away the supernatural, and what remains is
+the unnatural.
+
+And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter.  There are in the
+modern world an admirable class of persons who really make protest on
+behalf of that antiqua pulchritudo of which Augustine spoke, who do
+long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.
+William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter were the dark
+ages than the age of Manchester.  Mr. W. B. Yeats frames his steps in
+prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to forgotten
+choruses that no one but he can hear.  Mr. George Moore collects every
+fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic
+Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved. There are innumerable
+persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of
+the maypole or the Olympian games. But there is about these people a
+haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible
+that they do not keep Christmas. It is painful to regard human nature
+in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore
+does not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight. It is
+even possible that Mr. W. B. Yeats never pulls crackers. If so, where
+is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions? Here is a solid
+and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in the
+streets, and they think it vulgar. If this is so, let them be very
+certain of this, that they are the kind of people who in the time of
+the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of
+the Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage
+vulgar; who in the time of the Olympian games would have thought the
+Olympian games vulgar. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that they
+were vulgar. Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean
+coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and
+some heavy drinking, vulgarity there always was wherever there was joy,
+wherever there was faith in the gods.  Wherever you have belief you
+will have hilarity, wherever you have hilarity you will have some
+dangers.  And as creed and mythology produce this gross and vigorous
+life, so in its turn this gross and vigorous life will always produce
+creed and mythology. If we ever get the English back on to the English
+land they will become again a religious people, if all goes well, a
+superstitious people. The absence from modern life of both the higher
+and lower forms of faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and
+the trees and clouds. If we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly
+from the lack of turnips.
+
+
+
+
+VII.  Omar and the Sacred Vine
+
+
+A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with
+the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from
+the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the lady who smashes
+American bars with an axe.  In these discussions it is almost always
+felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or
+such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. With this I should
+venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely
+dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a
+medicine.  And for this reason, If a man drinks wine in order to obtain
+pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional, something he
+does not expect every hour of the day, something which, unless he is a
+little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day.  But if a
+man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get
+something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without;
+something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being
+without.  The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being
+ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of
+being ordinary. If there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a
+strong man, and said, “This will enable you to jump off the Monument,”
+doubtless he would jump off the Monument, but he would not jump off the
+Monument all day long to the delight of the City. But if we took it to
+a blind man, saying, “This will enable you to see,” he would be under a
+heavier temptation.  It would be hard for him not to rub it on his eyes
+whenever he heard the hoof of a noble horse or the birds singing at
+daybreak.  It is easy to deny one’s self festivity; it is difficult to
+deny one’s self normality. Hence comes the fact which every doctor
+knows, that it is often perilous to give alcohol to the sick even when
+they need it. I need hardly say that I do not mean that I think the
+giving of alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily
+unjustifiable. But I do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is
+the proper use of it, and a great deal more consistent with health.
+
+The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound
+rules—a paradox.  Drink because you are happy, but never because you
+are miserable.  Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you
+will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you
+would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of
+Italy.  Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking,
+and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it,
+for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.
+
+For more than thirty years the shadow and glory of a great Eastern
+figure has lain upon our English literature. Fitzgerald’s translation
+of Omar Khayyam concentrated into an immortal poignancy all the dark
+and drifting hedonism of our time. Of the literary splendour of that
+work it would be merely banal to speak; in few other of the books of
+men has there been anything so combining the gay pugnacity of an
+epigram with the vague sadness of a song. But of its philosophical,
+ethical, and religious influence which has been almost as great as its
+brilliancy, I should like to say a word, and that word, I confess, one
+of uncompromising hostility. There are a great many things which might
+be said against the spirit of the Rubaiyat, and against its prodigious
+influence. But one matter of indictment towers ominously above the
+rest—a genuine disgrace to it, a genuine calamity to us.  This is the
+terrible blow that this great poem has struck against sociability and
+the joy of life.  Some one called Omar “the sad, glad old Persian.” Sad
+he is; glad he is not, in any sense of the word whatever. He has been a
+worse foe to gladness than the Puritans.
+
+A pensive and graceful Oriental lies under the rose-tree with his
+wine-pot and his scroll of poems.  It may seem strange that any one’s
+thoughts should, at the moment of regarding him, fly back to the dark
+bedside where the doctor doles out brandy. It may seem stranger still
+that they should go back to the grey wastrel shaking with gin in
+Houndsditch. But a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil
+bond. Omar Khayyam’s wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is
+wine-bibbing. It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical
+wine-bibbing. It is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not
+happy. His is the wine that shuts out the universe, not the wine that
+reveals it. It is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and
+instinctive; it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as an
+investment, as unsavoury as a dose of camomile.  Whole heavens above
+it, from the point of view of sentiment, though not of style, rises the
+splendour of some old English drinking-song—
+
+  “Then pass the bowl, my comrades all,
+   And let the zider vlow.”
+
+For this song was caught up by happy men to express the worth of truly
+worthy things, of brotherhood and garrulity, and the brief and kindly
+leisure of the poor.  Of course, the great part of the more stolid
+reproaches directed against the Omarite morality are as false and
+babyish as such reproaches usually are.  One critic, whose work I have
+read, had the incredible foolishness to call Omar an atheist and a
+materialist.  It is almost impossible for an Oriental to be either; the
+East understands metaphysics too well for that. Of course, the real
+objection which a philosophical Christian would bring against the
+religion of Omar, is not that he gives no place to God, it is that he
+gives too much place to God. His is that terrible theism which can
+imagine nothing else but deity, and which denies altogether the
+outlines of human personality and human will.
+
+  “The ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
+   But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
+   And He that tossed you down into the field,
+   He knows about it all—he knows—he knows.”
+
+A Christian thinker such as Augustine or Dante would object to this
+because it ignores freewill, which is the valour and dignity of the
+soul. The quarrel of the highest Christianity with this scepticism is
+not in the least that the scepticism denies the existence of God; it is
+that it denies the existence of man.
+
+In this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker the Rubaiyat stands
+first in our time; but it does not stand alone. Many of the most
+brilliant intellects of our time have urged us to the same
+self-conscious snatching at a rare delight. Walter Pater said that we
+were all under sentence of death, and the only course was to enjoy
+exquisite moments simply for those moments’ sake.  The same lesson was
+taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar
+Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is
+not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy
+does, not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the
+immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of
+immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all
+space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in
+“Tristram Shandy” or “Pickwick”, there is this sense of space and
+incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an
+endless tale.
+
+It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in
+certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of
+them as passing, or enjoy them simply “for those moments’ sake.” To do
+this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it.
+Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
+Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do
+not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean something
+with a violent happiness in it—an almost painful happiness. A man may
+have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of
+victory in battle.  The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for
+the moment’s sake.  He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake.
+The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he
+enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for
+may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last a
+week.  But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks
+of his love as something that cannot end.  These moments are filled
+with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem
+momentary. Once look at them as moments after Pater’s manner, and they
+become as cold as Pater and his style.  Man cannot love mortal things.
+He can only love immortal things for an instant.
+
+Pater’s mistake is revealed in his most famous phrase. He asks us to
+burn with a hard, gem-like flame.  Flames are never hard and never
+gem-like—they cannot be handled or arranged. So human emotions are
+never hard and never gem-like; they are always dangerous, like flames,
+to touch or even to examine. There is only one way in which our
+passions can become hard and gem-like, and that is by becoming as cold
+as gems. No blow then has ever been struck at the natural loves and
+laughter of men so sterilizing as this carpe diem of the aesthetes. For
+any kind of pleasure a totally different spirit is required; a certain
+shyness, a certain indeterminate hope, a certain boyish expectation.
+Purity and simplicity are essential to passions—yes even to evil
+passions.  Even vice demands a sort of virginity.
+
+Omar’s (or Fitzgerald’s) effect upon the other world we may let go, his
+hand upon this world has been heavy and paralyzing. The Puritans, as I
+have said, are far jollier than he. The new ascetics who follow Thoreau
+or Tolstoy are much livelier company; for, though the surrender of
+strong drink and such luxuries may strike us as an idle negation, it
+may leave a man with innumerable natural pleasures, and, above all,
+with man’s natural power of happiness. Thoreau could enjoy the sunrise
+without a cup of coffee.  If Tolstoy cannot admire marriage, at least
+he is healthy enough to admire mud. Nature can be enjoyed without even
+the most natural luxuries. A good bush needs no wine.  But neither
+nature nor wine nor anything else can be enjoyed if we have the wrong
+attitude towards happiness, and Omar (or Fitzgerald) did have the wrong
+attitude towards happiness. He and those he has influenced do not see
+that if we are to be truly gay, we must believe that there is some
+eternal gaiety in the nature of things. We cannot enjoy thoroughly even
+a pas-de-quatre at a subscription dance unless we believe that the
+stars are dancing to the same tune.  No one can be really hilarious but
+the serious man.  “Wine,” says the Scripture, “maketh glad the heart of
+man,” but only of the man who has a heart. The thing called high
+spirits is possible only to the spiritual. Ultimately a man cannot
+rejoice in anything except the nature of things. Ultimately a man can
+enjoy nothing except religion.  Once in the world’s history men did
+believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and
+they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan
+eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he
+has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a
+saint.  Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre
+like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a
+sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a
+sacrament. But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine.  He
+feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad.
+“Drink,” he says, “for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for
+you know not when you go nor where.  Drink, because the stars are cruel
+and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing
+worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things
+are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.”  So he stands
+offering us the cup in his hand. And at the high altar of Christianity
+stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine.
+“Drink” he says “for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the
+crimson of the love and wrath of God.  Drink, for the trumpets are
+blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my
+blood of the new testament that is shed for you.  Drink, for I know of
+whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where.”
+
+
+
+
+VIII.  The Mildness of the Yellow Press
+
+
+There is a great deal of protest made from one quarter or another
+nowadays against the influence of that new journalism which is
+associated with the names of Sir Alfred Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson. But
+almost everybody who attacks it attacks on the ground that it is very
+sensational, very violent and vulgar and startling. I am speaking in no
+affected contrariety, but in the simplicity of a genuine personal
+impression, when I say that this journalism offends as being not
+sensational or violent enough.  The real vice is not that it is
+startling, but that it is quite insupportably tame. The whole object is
+to keep carefully along a certain level of the expected and the
+commonplace; it may be low, but it must take care also to be flat.
+Never by any chance in it is there any of that real plebeian pungency
+which can be heard from the ordinary cabman in the ordinary street.  We
+have heard of a certain standard of decorum which demands that things
+should be funny without being vulgar, but the standard of this decorum
+demands that if things are vulgar they shall be vulgar without being
+funny.  This journalism does not merely fail to exaggerate life—it
+positively underrates it; and it has to do so because it is intended
+for the faint and languid recreation of men whom the fierceness of
+modern life has fatigued. This press is not the yellow press at all; it
+is the drab press. Sir Alfred Harmsworth must not address to the tired
+clerk any observation more witty than the tired clerk might be able to
+address to Sir Alfred Harmsworth.  It must not expose anybody (anybody
+who is powerful, that is), it must not offend anybody, it must not even
+please anybody, too much.  A general vague idea that in spite of all
+this, our yellow press is sensational, arises from such external
+accidents as large type or lurid headlines. It is quite true that these
+editors print everything they possibly can in large capital letters.
+But they do this, not because it is startling, but because it is
+soothing.  To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted
+train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in
+this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in
+dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents
+and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to
+spell. The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoe in
+order to make the child jump; on the contrary, they use it to put the
+child at his ease, to make things smoother and more evident. Of the
+same character is the dim and quiet dame school which Sir Alfred
+Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson keep.  All their sentiments are
+spelling-book sentiments—that is to say, they are sentiments with
+which the pupil is already respectfully familiar. All their wildest
+posters are leaves torn from a copy-book.
+
+Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and
+in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in
+Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking
+about.  He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he
+charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy.
+When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he
+discovers, let us say, that the President of the Republic has murdered
+three wives. Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as
+this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the
+same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they
+can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version
+of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not
+interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or
+sorrow.  It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the
+Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be
+impressive except a great deal of blood.  Real sensationalism, of which
+I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when
+it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the
+most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody.  If you
+make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable
+that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no
+moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in
+saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody
+else says casually, and without remembering what they have said.  When
+they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point
+of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with
+the shock.  They do not attack the army as men do in France, or the
+judges as men do in Ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in
+England a hundred years ago. They attack something like the War
+Office—something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers
+to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers.
+Just as a man shows he has a weak voice by straining it to shout, so
+they show the hopelessly unsensational nature of their minds when they
+really try to be sensational. With the whole world full of big and
+dubious institutions, with the whole wickedness of civilization staring
+them in the face, their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the
+War Office. They might as well start a campaign against the weather, or
+form a secret society in order to make jokes about mothers-in-law. Nor
+is it only from the point of view of particular amateurs of the
+sensational such as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the words
+of Cowper’s Alexander Selkirk, that “their tameness is shocking to me.”
+The whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational
+journalism. This has been discovered by that very able and honest
+journalist, Mr. Blatchford, who started his campaign against
+Christianity, warned on all sides, I believe, that it would ruin his
+paper, but who continued from an honourable sense of intellectual
+responsibility. He discovered, however, that while he had undoubtedly
+shocked his readers, he had also greatly advanced his newspaper. It was
+bought—first, by all the people who agreed with him and wanted to read
+it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him, and wanted
+to write him letters.  Those letters were voluminous (I helped, I am
+glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generally inserted
+with a generous fulness.  Thus was accidentally discovered (like the
+steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim—that if an editor can only
+make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him
+for nothing.
+
+Some hold that such papers as these are scarcely the proper objects of
+so serious a consideration; but that can scarcely be maintained from a
+political or ethical point of view. In this problem of the mildness and
+tameness of the Harmsworth mind there is mirrored the outlines of a
+much larger problem which is akin to it.
+
+The Harmsworthian journalist begins with a worship of success and
+violence, and ends in sheer timidity and mediocrity. But he is not
+alone in this, nor does he come by this fate merely because he happens
+personally to be stupid.  Every man, however brave, who begins by
+worshipping violence, must end in mere timidity. Every man, however
+wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity.
+This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual,
+but in the philosophy, in the point of view. It is not the folly of the
+man which brings about this necessary fall; it is his wisdom.  The
+worship of success is the only one out of all possible worships of
+which this is true, that its followers are foredoomed to become slaves
+and cowards. A man may be a hero for the sake of Mrs. Gallup’s ciphers
+or for the sake of human sacrifice, but not for the sake of success.
+For obviously a man may choose to fail because he loves Mrs. Gallup or
+human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to fail because he loves success.
+When the test of triumph is men’s test of everything, they never endure
+long enough to triumph at all. As long as matters are really hopeful,
+hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is
+hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all.  Like all the
+Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.
+
+It was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all
+these modern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and
+acquiescence. They desired strength; and to them to desire strength was
+to admire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu
+quo. They thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the
+strong. They did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to
+be strong must despise the strong.  They sought to be everything, to
+have the whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have an energy that
+would drive the stars.  But they did not realize the two great
+facts—first, that in the attempt to be everything the first and most
+difficult step is to be something; second, that the moment a man is
+something, he is essentially defying everything. The lower animals, say
+the men of science, fought their way up with a blind selfishness.  If
+this be so, the only real moral of it is that our unselfishness, if it
+is to triumph, must be equally blind. The mammoth did not put his head
+on one side and wonder whether mammoths were a little out of date.
+Mammoths were at least as much up to date as that individual mammoth
+could make them. The great elk did not say, “Cloven hoofs are very much
+worn now.” He polished his own weapons for his own use.  But in the
+reasoning animal there has arisen a more horrible danger, that he may
+fail through perceiving his own failure.  When modern sociologists talk
+of the necessity of accommodating one’s self to the trend of the time,
+they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of
+people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it
+consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating
+themselves to a trend that is not there. And that is becoming more and
+more the situation of modern England. Every man speaks of public
+opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.
+Every man makes his contribution negative under the erroneous
+impression that the next man’s contribution is positive.  Every man
+surrenders his fancy to a general tone which is itself a surrender. And
+over all the heartless and fatuous unity spreads this new and wearisome
+and platitudinous press, incapable of invention, incapable of audacity,
+capable only of a servility all the more contemptible because it is not
+even a servility to the strong. But all who begin with force and
+conquest will end in this.
+
+The chief characteristic of the “New journalism” is simply that it is
+bad journalism.  It is beyond all comparison the most shapeless,
+careless, and colourless work done in our day.
+
+I read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of gold
+and adamant; it is the very motto of the new philosophy of Empire. I
+found it (as the reader has already eagerly guessed) in Pearson’s
+Magazine, while I was communing (soul to soul) with Mr. C. Arthur
+Pearson, whose first and suppressed name I am afraid is Chilperic. It
+occurred in an article on the American Presidential Election. This is
+the sentence, and every one should read it carefully, and roll it on
+the tongue, till all the honey be tasted.
+
+“A little sound common sense often goes further with an audience of
+American working-men than much high-flown argument.  A speaker who, as
+he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won
+hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential Election.”
+
+I do not wish to soil this perfect thing with comment; the words of
+Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. But just think for a
+moment of the mind, the strange inscrutable mind, of the man who wrote
+that, of the editor who approved it, of the people who are probably
+impressed by it, of the incredible American working-man, of whom, for
+all I know, it may be true. Think what their notion of “common sense”
+must be!  It is delightful to realize that you and I are now able to
+win thousands of votes should we ever be engaged in a Presidential
+Election, by doing something of this kind.  For I suppose the nails and
+the board are not essential to the exhibition of “common sense;” there
+may be variations. We may read—
+
+“A little common sense impresses American working-men more than
+high-flown argument.  A speaker who, as he made his points, pulled
+buttons off his waistcoat, won thousands of votes for his side.” Or,
+“Sound common sense tells better in America than high-flown argument.
+Thus Senator Budge, who threw his false teeth in the air every time he
+made an epigram, won the solid approval of American working-men.” Or
+again, “The sound common sense of a gentleman from Earlswood, who stuck
+straws in his hair during the progress of his speech, assured the
+victory of Mr. Roosevelt.”
+
+There are many other elements in this article on which I should love to
+linger.  But the matter which I wish to point out is that in that
+sentence is perfectly revealed the whole truth of what our
+Chamberlainites, hustlers, bustlers, Empire-builders, and strong,
+silent men, really mean by “commonsense.”  They mean knocking, with
+deafening noise and dramatic effect, meaningless bits of iron into a
+useless bit of wood.  A man goes on to an American platform and behaves
+like a mountebank fool with a board and a hammer; well, I do not blame
+him; I might even admire him. He may be a dashing and quite decent
+strategist.  He may be a fine romantic actor, like Burke flinging the
+dagger on the floor. He may even (for all I know) be a sublime mystic,
+profoundly impressed with the ancient meaning of the divine trade of
+the Carpenter, and offering to the people a parable in the form of a
+ceremony. All I wish to indicate is the abyss of mental confusion in
+which such wild ritualism can be called “sound common sense.” And it is
+in that abyss of mental confusion, and in that alone, that the new
+Imperialism lives and moves and has its being. The whole glory and
+greatness of Mr. Chamberlain consists in this: that if a man hits the
+right nail on the head nobody cares where he hits it to or what it
+does.  They care about the noise of the hammer, not about the silent
+drip of the nail.  Before and throughout the African war, Mr.
+Chamberlain was always knocking in nails, with ringing decisiveness.
+But when we ask, “But what have these nails held together? Where is
+your carpentry?  Where are your contented Outlanders? Where is your
+free South Africa?  Where is your British prestige? What have your
+nails done?” then what answer is there? We must go back (with an
+affectionate sigh) to our Pearson for the answer to the question of
+what the nails have done: “The speaker who hammered nails into a board
+won thousands of votes.”
+
+Now the whole of this passage is admirably characteristic of the new
+journalism which Mr. Pearson represents, the new journalism which has
+just purchased the Standard.  To take one instance out of hundreds, the
+incomparable man with the board and nails is described in the Pearson’s
+article as calling out (as he smote the symbolic nail), “Lie number
+one. Nailed to the Mast!  Nailed to the Mast!”  In the whole office
+there was apparently no compositor or office-boy to point out that we
+speak of lies being nailed to the counter, and not to the mast. Nobody
+in the office knew that Pearson’s Magazine was falling into a stale
+Irish bull, which must be as old as St. Patrick. This is the real and
+essential tragedy of the sale of the Standard. It is not merely that
+journalism is victorious over literature. It is that bad journalism is
+victorious over good journalism.
+
+It is not that one article which we consider costly and beautiful is
+being ousted by another kind of article which we consider common or
+unclean. It is that of the same article a worse quality is preferred to
+a better. If you like popular journalism (as I do), you will know that
+Pearson’s Magazine is poor and weak popular journalism.  You will know
+it as certainly as you know bad butter.  You will know as certainly
+that it is poor popular journalism as you know that the Strand, in the
+great days of Sherlock Holmes, was good popular journalism. Mr. Pearson
+has been a monument of this enormous banality. About everything he says
+and does there is something infinitely weak-minded. He clamours for
+home trades and employs foreign ones to print his paper.  When this
+glaring fact is pointed out, he does not say that the thing was an
+oversight, like a sane man. He cuts it off with scissors, like a child
+of three.  His very cunning is infantile.  And like a child of three,
+he does not cut it quite off. In all human records I doubt if there is
+such an example of a profound simplicity in deception.  This is the
+sort of intelligence which now sits in the seat of the sane and
+honourable old Tory journalism. If it were really the triumph of the
+tropical exuberance of the Yankee press, it would be vulgar, but still
+tropical.  But it is not. We are delivered over to the bramble, and
+from the meanest of the shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars of
+Lebanon.
+
+The only question now is how much longer the fiction will endure that
+journalists of this order represent public opinion. It may be doubted
+whether any honest and serious Tariff Reformer would for a moment
+maintain that there was any majority for Tariff Reform in the country
+comparable to the ludicrous preponderance which money has given it
+among the great dailies. The only inference is that for purposes of
+real public opinion the press is now a mere plutocratic oligarchy.
+Doubtless the public buys the wares of these men, for one reason or
+another. But there is no more reason to suppose that the public admires
+their politics than that the public admires the delicate philosophy of
+Mr. Crosse or the darker and sterner creed of Mr. Blackwell. If these
+men are merely tradesmen, there is nothing to say except that there are
+plenty like them in the Battersea Park Road, and many much better.  But
+if they make any sort of attempt to be politicians, we can only point
+out to them that they are not as yet even good journalists.
+
+
+
+
+IX.  The Moods of Mr. George Moore
+
+
+Mr. George Moore began his literary career by writing his personal
+confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them
+for the remainder of his life.  He is a man of genuinely forcible mind
+and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction
+which excites and pleases. He is in a perpetual state of temporary
+honesty.  He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until
+they could stand it no longer.  Everything he writes, it is to be fully
+admitted, has a genuine mental power.  His account of his reason for
+leaving the Roman Catholic Church is possibly the most admirable
+tribute to that communion which has been written of late years. For the
+fact of the matter is, that the weakness which has rendered barren the
+many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually that weakness which the
+Roman Catholic Church is at its best in combating. Mr. Moore hates
+Catholicism because it breaks up the house of looking-glasses in which
+he lives.  Mr. Moore does not dislike so much being asked to believe in
+the spiritual existence of miracles or sacraments, but he does
+fundamentally dislike being asked to believe in the actual existence of
+other people. Like his master Pater and all the aesthetes, his real
+quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that can be moulded by the
+dreamer. It is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that
+troubles him, but the dogma of the reality of this world.
+
+The truth is that the tradition of Christianity (which is still the
+only coherent ethic of Europe) rests on two or three paradoxes or
+mysteries which can easily be impugned in argument and as easily
+justified in life. One of them, for instance, is the paradox of hope or
+faith—that the more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be
+the man. Stevenson understood this, and consequently Mr. Moore cannot
+understand Stevenson.  Another is the paradox of charity or chivalry
+that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected, that the
+more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal to us for a
+certain kind of defence.  Thackeray understood this, and therefore Mr.
+Moore does not understand Thackeray.  Now, one of these very practical
+and working mysteries in the Christian tradition, and one which the
+Roman Catholic Church, as I say, has done her best work in singling
+out, is the conception of the sinfulness of pride. Pride is a weakness
+in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up
+chivalry and energy. The Christian tradition understands this;
+therefore Mr. Moore does not understand the Christian tradition.
+
+For the truth is much stranger even than it appears in the formal
+doctrine of the sin of pride.  It is not only true that humility is a
+much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride. It is also true that
+vanity is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride.  Vanity is
+social—it is almost a kind of comradeship; pride is solitary and
+uncivilized.  Vanity is active; it desires the applause of infinite
+multitudes; pride is passive, desiring only the applause of one person,
+which it already has. Vanity is humorous, and can enjoy the joke even
+of itself; pride is dull, and cannot even smile.  And the whole of this
+difference is the difference between Stevenson and Mr. George Moore,
+who, as he informs us, has “brushed Stevenson aside.”  I do not know
+where he has been brushed to, but wherever it is I fancy he is having a
+good time, because he had the wisdom to be vain, and not proud.
+Stevenson had a windy vanity; Mr. Moore has a dusty egoism. Hence
+Stevenson could amuse himself as well as us with his vanity; while the
+richest effects of Mr. Moore’s absurdity are hidden from his eyes.
+
+If we compare this solemn folly with the happy folly with which
+Stevenson belauds his own books and berates his own critics, we shall
+not find it difficult to guess why it is that Stevenson at least found
+a final philosophy of some sort to live by, while Mr. Moore is always
+walking the world looking for a new one. Stevenson had found that the
+secret of life lies in laughter and humility. Self is the gorgon.
+Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. Pride studies it
+for itself and is turned to stone.
+
+It is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr. Moore, because it is
+really the weakness of work which is not without its strength. Mr.
+Moore’s egoism is not merely a moral weakness, it is a very constant
+and influential aesthetic weakness as well. We should really be much
+more interested in Mr. Moore if he were not quite so interested in
+himself.  We feel as if we were being shown through a gallery of really
+fine pictures, into each of which, by some useless and discordant
+convention, the artist had represented the same figure in the same
+attitude.  “The Grand Canal with a distant view of Mr. Moore,” “Effect
+of Mr. Moore through a Scotch Mist,” “Mr. Moore by Firelight,” “Ruins
+of Mr. Moore by Moonlight,” and so on, seems to be the endless series.
+He would no doubt reply that in such a book as this he intended to
+reveal himself. But the answer is that in such a book as this he does
+not succeed. One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies
+precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys
+self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try
+to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will
+try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality
+will be lost in that false universalism. Thinking about himself will
+lead to trying to be the universe; trying to be the universe will lead
+to ceasing to be anything. If, on the other hand, a man is sensible
+enough to think only about the universe; he will think about it in his
+own individual way. He will keep virgin the secret of God; he will see
+the grass as no other man can see it, and look at a sun that no man has
+ever known. This fact is very practically brought out in Mr. Moore’s
+“Confessions.” In reading them we do not feel the presence of a
+clean-cut personality like that of Thackeray and Matthew Arnold. We
+only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions
+which might be uttered by any clever person, but which we are called
+upon to admire specifically, because they are uttered by Mr. Moore. He
+is the only thread that connects Catholicism and Protestantism, realism
+and mysticism—he or rather his name.  He is profoundly absorbed even
+in views he no longer holds, and he expects us to be. And he intrudes
+the capital “I” even where it need not be intruded—even where it
+weakens the force of a plain statement. Where another man would say,
+“It is a fine day,” Mr. Moore says, “Seen through my temperament, the
+day appeared fine.” Where another man would say “Milton has obviously a
+fine style,” Mr. Moore would say, “As a stylist Milton had always
+impressed me.” The Nemesis of this self-centred spirit is that of being
+totally ineffectual.  Mr. Moore has started many interesting crusades,
+but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin. Even when
+he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children of
+falsehood.  Even when he has found reality he cannot find rest. One
+Irish quality he has which no Irishman was ever without—pugnacity; and
+that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age. But he
+has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit
+in a man like Bernard Shaw.  His weakness of introspection and
+selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting; but they
+will always prevent him winning.
+
+
+
+
+X. On Sandals and Simplicity
+
+
+The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are
+more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are
+boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of
+without losing them.  A Frenchman can be proud of being bold and
+logical, and still remain bold and logical. A German can be proud of
+being reflective and orderly, and still remain reflective and orderly.
+But an Englishman cannot be proud of being simple and direct, and still
+remain simple and direct. In the matter of these strange virtues, to
+know them is to kill them. A man may be conscious of being heroic or
+conscious of being divine, but he cannot (in spite of all the
+Anglo-Saxon poets) be conscious of being unconscious.
+
+Now, I do not think that it can be honestly denied that some portion of
+this impossibility attaches to a class very different in their own
+opinion, at least, to the school of Anglo-Saxonism. I mean that school
+of the simple life, commonly associated with Tolstoy. If a perpetual
+talk about one’s own robustness leads to being less robust, it is even
+more true that a perpetual talking about one’s own simplicity leads to
+being less simple. One great complaint, I think, must stand against the
+modern upholders of the simple life—the simple life in all its varied
+forms, from vegetarianism to the honourable consistency of the
+Doukhobors. This complaint against them stands, that they would make us
+simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things.
+They would make us simple in the things that do not matter—that is, in
+diet, in costume, in etiquette, in economic system. But they would make
+us complex in the things that do matter—in philosophy, in loyalty, in
+spiritual acceptance, and spiritual rejection. It does not so very much
+matter whether a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato; it does
+very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind.
+The only kind of simplicity worth preserving is the simplicity of the
+heart, the simplicity which accepts and enjoys. There may be a
+reasonable doubt as to what system preserves this; there can surely be
+no doubt that a system of simplicity destroys it. There is more
+simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who
+eats grape-nuts on principle. The chief error of these people is to be
+found in the very phrase to which they are most attached—“plain living
+and high thinking.” These people do not stand in need of, will not be
+improved by, plain living and high thinking.  They stand in need of the
+contrary. They would be improved by high living and plain thinking. A
+little high living (I say, having a full sense of responsibility, a
+little high living) would teach them the force and meaning of the human
+festivities, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the
+world.  It would teach them the historic fact that the artificial is,
+if anything, older than the natural. It would teach them that the
+loving-cup is as old as any hunger. It would teach them that ritualism
+is older than any religion. And a little plain thinking would teach
+them how harsh and fanciful are the mass of their own ethics, how very
+civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the Tolstoyan who
+really believes it to be evil to love one’s country and wicked to
+strike a blow.
+
+A man approaches, wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held
+firmly in his right hand, and says, “The affections of family and
+country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;”
+but the plain thinker will only answer him, with a wonder not untinged
+with admiration, “What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in
+order to feel like that.” High living will reject the tomato.  Plain
+thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable
+sinfulness of war. High living will convince us that nothing is more
+materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material.  And plain
+thinking will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to
+reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds.
+
+The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart. If
+that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular
+clothing; but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not
+quenched. If that remain, it matters very little if a few Early
+Victorian armchairs remain along with it.  Let us put a complex entree
+into a simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entree into a
+complex old gentleman.  So long as human society will leave my
+spiritual inside alone, I will allow it, with a comparative submission,
+to work its wild will with my physical interior.  I will submit to
+cigars. I will meekly embrace a bottle of Burgundy.  I will humble
+myself to a hansom cab.  If only by this means I may preserve to myself
+the virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with astonishment and fear. I
+do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it. I incline
+to the belief that there are others.  But I will have nothing to do
+with simplicity which lacks the fear, the astonishment, and the joy
+alike.  I will have nothing to do with the devilish vision of a child
+who is too simple to like toys.
+
+The child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide.
+And in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothing does
+he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity, than in the
+fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex
+things.  The false type of naturalness harps always on the distinction
+between the natural and the artificial. The higher kind of naturalness
+ignores that distinction. To the child the tree and the lamp-post are
+as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them
+are natural but both supernatural.  For both are splendid and
+unexplained. The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame
+with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the
+gold of fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most
+rustic child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only
+spiritual or philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men
+pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men
+are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. The evil
+is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain. The wrong is
+not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired
+enough.  The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are
+mechanical.
+
+In this matter, then, as in all the other matters treated in this book,
+our main conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view, a
+philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change in habit or
+social routine.  The things we need most for immediate practical
+purposes are all abstractions.  We need a right view of the human lot,
+a right view of the human society; and if we were living eagerly and
+angrily in the enthusiasm of those things, we should, ipso facto, be
+living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense. Desire and danger
+make every one simple.  And to those who talk to us with interfering
+eloquence about Jaeger and the pores of the skin, and about Plasmon and
+the coats of the stomach, at them shall only be hurled the words that
+are hurled at fops and gluttons, “Take no thought what ye shall eat or
+what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed.  For after all
+these things do the Gentiles seek. But seek first the kingdom of God
+and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
+Those amazing words are not only extraordinarily good, practical
+politics; they are also superlatively good hygiene.  The one supreme
+way of making all those processes go right, the processes of health,
+and strength, and grace, and beauty, the one and only way of making
+certain of their accuracy, is to think about something else. If a man
+is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven, he may be quite easy about
+the pores of his skin.  If he harnesses his waggon to a star, the
+process will have a most satisfactory effect upon the coats of his
+stomach.  For the thing called “taking thought,” the thing for which
+the best modern word is “rationalizing,” is in its nature, inapplicable
+to all plain and urgent things. Men take thought and ponder
+rationalistically, touching remote things—things that only
+theoretically matter, such as the transit of Venus. But only at their
+peril can men rationalize about so practical a matter as health.
+
+
+
+
+XI. Science and the Savages
+
+
+A permanent disadvantage of the study of folk-lore and kindred subjects
+is that the man of science can hardly be in the nature of things very
+frequently a man of the world.  He is a student of nature; he is
+scarcely ever a student of human nature. And even where this difficulty
+is overcome, and he is in some sense a student of human nature, this is
+only a very faint beginning of the painful progress towards being
+human.  For the study of primitive race and religion stands apart in
+one important respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary scientific
+studies. A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he
+can understand entomology only by being an entomologist (or, perhaps,
+an insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely
+by being a man.  He is himself the animal which he studies. Hence
+arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of
+ethnology and folk-lore—the fact that the same frigid and detached
+spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads
+to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary
+to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not
+necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men.  That
+same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or
+guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the
+stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing
+with the heart of man. He is making himself inhuman in order to
+understand humanity. An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many
+men of science; but in this matter their defect arises, not from
+ignorance of the other world, but from ignorance of this world.  For
+the secrets about which anthropologists concern themselves can be best
+learnt, not from books or voyages, but from the ordinary commerce of
+man with man. The secret of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or
+the moon is not to be found even by travelling among those savages and
+taking down their answers in a notebook, although the cleverest man
+may pursue this course.  The answer to the riddle is in England; it is
+in London; nay, it is in his own heart.  When a man has discovered why
+men in Bond Street wear black hats he will at the same moment have
+discovered why men in Timbuctoo wear red feathers. The mystery in the
+heart of some savage war-dance should not be studied in books of
+scientific travel; it should be studied at a subscription ball.  If a
+man desires to find out the origins of religions, let him not go to the
+Sandwich Islands; let him go to church. If a man wishes to know the
+origin of human society, to know what society, philosophically
+speaking, really is, let him not go into the British Museum; let him go
+into society.
+
+This total misunderstanding of the real nature of ceremonial gives rise
+to the most awkward and dehumanized versions of the conduct of men in
+rude lands or ages.  The man of science, not realizing that ceremonial
+is essentially a thing which is done without a reason, has to find a
+reason for every sort of ceremonial, and, as might be supposed, the
+reason is generally a very absurd one—absurd because it originates not
+in the simple mind of the barbarian, but in the sophisticated mind of
+the professor.  The teamed man will say, for instance, “The natives of
+Mumbojumbo Land believe that the dead man can eat and will require food
+upon his journey to the other world.  This is attested by the fact that
+they place food in the grave, and that any family not complying with
+this rite is the object of the anger of the priests and the tribe.” To
+any one acquainted with humanity this way of talking is topsy-turvy. It
+is like saying, “The English in the twentieth century believed that a
+dead man could smell.  This is attested by the fact that they always
+covered his grave with lilies, violets, or other flowers. Some priestly
+and tribal terrors were evidently attached to the neglect of this
+action, as we have records of several old ladies who were very much
+disturbed in mind because their wreaths had not arrived in time for the
+funeral.”  It may be of course that savages put food with a dead man
+because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with a dead man
+because they think that a dead man can fight. But personally I do not
+believe that they think anything of the kind. I believe they put food
+or weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because
+it is an exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do.  We do not
+understand, it is true, the emotion which makes us think it obvious and
+natural; but that is because, like all the important emotions of human
+existence it is essentially irrational.  We do not understand the
+savage for the same reason that the savage does not understand himself.
+And the savage does not understand himself for the same reason that we
+do not understand ourselves either.
+
+The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the
+human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of
+science.  It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this
+mortal has put on immortality.  Even what we call our material desires
+are spiritual, because they are human. Science can analyse a pork-chop,
+and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but
+science cannot analyse any man’s wish for a pork-chop, and say how much
+of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a
+haunting love of the beautiful.  The man’s desire for the pork-chop
+remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven.
+All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science
+of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by
+their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain
+in economic history that a man’s desire for money was merely a desire
+for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint’s desire
+for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the
+primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything
+in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few
+instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could
+construct a science with unreliable instruments.  A man might work out
+the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a
+handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and
+falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and
+earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.
+
+As one of the enormous follies of folk-lore, let us take the case of
+the transmigration of stories, and the alleged unity of their source.
+Story after story the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place
+in history, and pinned side by side with similar stories in their
+museum of fables.  The process is industrious, it is fascinating, and
+the whole of it rests on one of the plainest fallacies in the world.
+That a story has been told all over the place at some time or other,
+not only does not prove that it never really happened; it does not even
+faintly indicate or make slightly more probable that it never happened.
+That a large number of fishermen have falsely asserted that they have
+caught a pike two feet long, does not in the least affect the question
+of whether any one ever really did so.  That numberless journalists
+announce a Franco-German war merely for money is no evidence one way or
+the other upon the dark question of whether such a war ever occurred.
+Doubtless in a few hundred years the innumerable Franco-German wars
+that did not happen will have cleared the scientific mind of any belief
+in the legendary war of ’70 which did. But that will be because if
+folk-lore students remain at all, their nature will be unchanged; and
+their services to folk-lore will be still as they are at present,
+greater than they know. For in truth these men do something far more
+god-like than studying legends; they create them.
+
+There are two kinds of stories which the scientists say cannot be true,
+because everybody tells them.  The first class consists of the stories
+which are told everywhere, because they are somewhat odd or clever;
+there is nothing in the world to prevent their having happened to
+somebody as an adventure any more than there is anything to prevent
+their having occurred, as they certainly did occur, to somebody as an
+idea. But they are not likely to have happened to many people. The
+second class of their “myths” consist of the stories that are told
+everywhere for the simple reason that they happen everywhere. Of the
+first class, for instance, we might take such an example as the story
+of William Tell, now generally ranked among legends upon the sole
+ground that it is found in the tales of other peoples. Now, it is
+obvious that this was told everywhere because whether true or
+fictitious it is what is called “a good story;” it is odd, exciting,
+and it has a climax.  But to suggest that some such eccentric incident
+can never have happened in the whole history of archery, or that it did
+not happen to any particular person of whom it is told, is stark
+impudence.  The idea of shooting at a mark attached to some valuable or
+beloved person is an idea doubtless that might easily have occurred to
+any inventive poet. But it is also an idea that might easily occur to
+any boastful archer. It might be one of the fantastic caprices of some
+story-teller. It might equally well be one of the fantastic caprices of
+some tyrant. It might occur first in real life and afterwards occur in
+legends. Or it might just as well occur first in legends and afterwards
+occur in real life.  If no apple has ever been shot off a boy’s head
+from the beginning of the world, it may be done to-morrow morning, and
+by somebody who has never heard of William Tell.
+
+This type of tale, indeed, may be pretty fairly paralleled with the
+ordinary anecdote terminating in a repartee or an Irish bull. Such a
+retort as the famous “je ne vois pas la necessite” we have all seen
+attributed to Talleyrand, to Voltaire, to Henri Quatre, to an anonymous
+judge, and so on.  But this variety does not in any way make it more
+likely that the thing was never said at all. It is highly likely that
+it was really said by somebody unknown. It is highly likely that it was
+really said by Talleyrand. In any case, it is not any more difficult to
+believe that the mot might have occurred to a man in conversation than
+to a man writing memoirs. It might have occurred to any of the men I
+have mentioned. But there is this point of distinction about it, that
+it is not likely to have occurred to all of them.  And this is where
+the first class of so-called myth differs from the second to which I
+have previously referred.  For there is a second class of incident
+found to be common to the stories of five or six heroes, say to Sigurd,
+to Hercules, to Rustem, to the Cid, and so on. And the peculiarity of
+this myth is that not only is it highly reasonable to imagine that it
+really happened to one hero, but it is highly reasonable to imagine
+that it really happened to all of them. Such a story, for instance, is
+that of a great man having his strength swayed or thwarted by the
+mysterious weakness of a woman. The anecdotal story, the story of
+William Tell, is as I have said, popular, because it is peculiar.  But
+this kind of story, the story of Samson and Delilah of Arthur and
+Guinevere, is obviously popular because it is not peculiar.  It is
+popular as good, quiet fiction is popular, because it tells the truth
+about people. If the ruin of Samson by a woman, and the ruin of
+Hercules by a woman, have a common legendary origin, it is gratifying
+to know that we can also explain, as a fable, the ruin of Nelson by a
+woman and the ruin of Parnell by a woman.  And, indeed, I have no doubt
+whatever that, some centuries hence, the students of folk-lore will
+refuse altogether to believe that Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert
+Browning, and will prove their point up to the hilt by the
+unquestionable fact that the whole fiction of the period was full of
+such elopements from end to end.
+
+Possibly the most pathetic of all the delusions of the modern students
+of primitive belief is the notion they have about the thing they call
+anthropomorphism.  They believe that primitive men attributed phenomena
+to a god in human form in order to explain them, because his mind in
+its sullen limitation could not reach any further than his own clownish
+existence.  The thunder was called the voice of a man, the lightning
+the eyes of a man, because by this explanation they were made more
+reasonable and comfortable. The final cure for all this kind of
+philosophy is to walk down a lane at night.  Any one who does so will
+discover very quickly that men pictured something semi-human at the
+back of all things, not because such a thought was natural, but because
+it was supernatural; not because it made things more comprehensible,
+but because it made them a hundred times more incomprehensible and
+mysterious. For a man walking down a lane at night can see the
+conspicuous fact that as long as nature keeps to her own course, she
+has no power with us at all.  As long as a tree is a tree, it is a
+top-heavy monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one
+leg. But so long as a tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all.
+It begins to be something alien, to be something strange, only when it
+looks like ourselves.  When a tree really looks like a man our knees
+knock under us.  And when the whole universe looks like a man we fall
+on our faces.
+
+
+
+
+XII. Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson
+
+
+Of the New Paganism (or neo-Paganism), as it was preached flamboyantly
+by Mr. Swinburne or delicately by Walter Pater, there is no necessity
+to take any very grave account, except as a thing which left behind it
+incomparable exercises in the English language.  The New Paganism is no
+longer new, and it never at any time bore the smallest resemblance to
+Paganism. The ideas about the ancient civilization which it has left
+loose in the public mind are certainly extraordinary enough. The term
+“pagan” is continually used in fiction and light literature as meaning
+a man without any religion, whereas a pagan was generally a man with
+about half a dozen.  The pagans, according to this notion, were
+continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an
+irresponsible state, whereas, if there were two things that the best
+pagan civilization did honestly believe in, they were a rather too
+rigid dignity and a much too rigid responsibility. Pagans are depicted
+as above all things inebriate and lawless, whereas they were above all
+things reasonable and respectable. They are praised as disobedient when
+they had only one great virtue—civic obedience.  They are envied and
+admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin—despair.
+
+Mr. Lowes Dickinson, the most pregnant and provocative of recent
+writers on this and similar subjects, is far too solid a man to have
+fallen into this old error of the mere anarchy of Paganism. In order to
+make hay of that Hellenic enthusiasm which has as its ideal mere
+appetite and egotism, it is not necessary to know much philosophy, but
+merely to know a little Greek. Mr. Lowes Dickinson knows a great deal
+of philosophy, and also a great deal of Greek, and his error, if error
+he has, is not that of the crude hedonist.  But the contrast which he
+offers between Christianity and Paganism in the matter of moral
+ideals—a contrast which he states very ably in a paper called “How
+long halt ye?” which appeared in the Independent Review—does, I think,
+contain an error of a deeper kind.  According to him, the ideal of
+Paganism was not, indeed, a mere frenzy of lust and liberty and
+caprice, but was an ideal of full and satisfied humanity. According to
+him, the ideal of Christianity was the ideal of asceticism. When I say
+that I think this idea wholly wrong as a matter of philosophy and
+history, I am not talking for the moment about any ideal Christianity
+of my own, or even of any primitive Christianity undefiled by after
+events.  I am not, like so many modern Christian idealists, basing my
+case upon certain things which Christ said. Neither am I, like so many
+other Christian idealists, basing my case upon certain things that
+Christ forgot to say. I take historic Christianity with all its sins
+upon its head; I take it, as I would take Jacobinism, or Mormonism, or
+any other mixed or unpleasing human product, and I say that the meaning
+of its action was not to be found in asceticism.  I say that its point
+of departure from Paganism was not asceticism.  I say that its point of
+difference with the modern world was not asceticism. I say that St.
+Simeon Stylites had not his main inspiration in asceticism. I say that
+the main Christian impulse cannot be described as asceticism, even in
+the ascetics.
+
+Let me set about making the matter clear.  There is one broad fact
+about the relations of Christianity and Paganism which is so simple
+that many will smile at it, but which is so important that all moderns
+forget it.  The primary fact about Christianity and Paganism is that
+one came after the other.  Mr. Lowes Dickinson speaks of them as if
+they were parallel ideals—even speaks as if Paganism were the newer of
+the two, and the more fitted for a new age. He suggests that the Pagan
+ideal will be the ultimate good of man; but if that is so, we must at
+least ask with more curiosity than he allows for, why it was that man
+actually found his ultimate good on earth under the stars, and threw it
+away again. It is this extraordinary enigma to which I propose to
+attempt an answer.
+
+There is only one thing in the modern world that has been face to face
+with Paganism; there is only one thing in the modern world which in
+that sense knows anything about Paganism: and that is Christianity.
+That fact is really the weak point in the whole of that hedonistic
+neo-Paganism of which I have spoken. All that genuinely remains of the
+ancient hymns or the ancient dances of Europe, all that has honestly
+come to us from the festivals of Phoebus or Pan, is to be found in the
+festivals of the Christian Church. If any one wants to hold the end of
+a chain which really goes back to the heathen mysteries, he had better
+take hold of a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of sausages at
+Christmas. Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin,
+even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French Revolution
+is of Christian origin.  The newspaper is of Christian origin. The
+anarchists are of Christian origin.  Physical science is of Christian
+origin.  The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is
+one thing, and one thing only, in existence at the present day which
+can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is
+Christianity.
+
+The real difference between Paganism and Christianity is perfectly
+summed up in the difference between the pagan, or natural, virtues, and
+those three virtues of Christianity which the Church of Rome calls
+virtues of grace.  The pagan, or rational, virtues are such things as
+justice and temperance, and Christianity has adopted them. The three
+mystical virtues which Christianity has not adopted, but invented, are
+faith, hope, and charity.  Now much easy and foolish Christian rhetoric
+could easily be poured out upon those three words, but I desire to
+confine myself to the two facts which are evident about them.  The
+first evident fact (in marked contrast to the delusion of the dancing
+pagan)—the first evident fact, I say, is that the pagan virtues, such
+as justice and temperance, are the sad virtues, and that the mystical
+virtues of faith, hope, and charity are the gay and exuberant virtues.
+And the second evident fact, which is even more evident, is the fact
+that the pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues, and that the
+Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity are in their essence as
+unreasonable as they can be.
+
+As the word “unreasonable” is open to misunderstanding, the matter may
+be more accurately put by saying that each one of these Christian or
+mystical virtues involves a paradox in its own nature, and that this is
+not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues. Justice
+consists in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving
+it to him.  Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit of a
+particular indulgence and adhering to that.  But charity means
+pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means
+hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith
+means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.
+
+It is somewhat amusing, indeed, to notice the difference between the
+fate of these three paradoxes in the fashion of the modern mind.
+Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time; it is lit up by the
+gigantic firelight of Dickens.  Hope is a fashionable virtue to-day;
+our attention has been arrested for it by the sudden and silver trumpet
+of Stevenson.  But faith is unfashionable, and it is customary on every
+side to cast against it the fact that it is a paradox. Everybody
+mockingly repeats the famous childish definition that faith is “the
+power of believing that which we know to be untrue.” Yet it is not one
+atom more paradoxical than hope or charity. Charity is the power of
+defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of
+being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.  It is
+true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects
+and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope
+exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. It is true that there is a
+thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving
+poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice.
+It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not
+exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is
+at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue
+either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment.
+Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to
+be useful. Now the old pagan world went perfectly straightforward until
+it discovered that going straightforward is an enormous mistake. It was
+nobly and beautifully reasonable, and discovered in its death-pang this
+lasting and valuable truth, a heritage for the ages, that
+reasonableness will not do.  The pagan age was truly an Eden or golden
+age, in this essential sense, that it is not to be recovered. And it is
+not to be recovered in this sense again that, while we are certainly
+jollier than the pagans, and much more right than the pagans, there is
+not one of us who can, by the utmost stretch of energy, be so sensible
+as the pagans. That naked innocence of the intellect cannot be
+recovered by any man after Christianity; and for this excellent reason,
+that every man after Christianity knows it to be misleading. Let me
+take an example, the first that occurs to the mind, of this impossible
+plainness in the pagan point of view.  The greatest tribute to
+Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” The poet
+reads into the story of Ulysses the conception of an incurable desire
+to wander.  But the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He
+desires to get home.  He displays his heroic and unconquerable
+qualities in resisting the misfortunes which baulk him; but that is
+all. There is no love of adventure for its own sake; that is a
+Christian product.  There is no love of Penelope for her own sake; that
+is a Christian product.  Everything in that old world would appear to
+have been clean and obvious.  A good man was a good man; a bad man was
+a bad man.  For this reason they had no charity; for charity is a
+reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. For this
+reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel; for the
+novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity. For them a
+pleasant landscape was pleasant, and an unpleasant landscape
+unpleasant.  Hence they had no idea of romance; for romance consists in
+thinking a thing more delightful because it is dangerous; it is a
+Christian idea.  In a word, we cannot reconstruct or even imagine the
+beautiful and astonishing pagan world. It was a world in which common
+sense was really common.
+
+My general meaning touching the three virtues of which I have spoken
+will now, I hope, be sufficiently clear. They are all three
+paradoxical, they are all three practical, and they are all three
+paradoxical because they are practical. It is the stress of ultimate
+need, and a terrible knowledge of things as they are, which led men to
+set up these riddles, and to die for them. Whatever may be the meaning
+of the contradiction, it is the fact that the only kind of hope that is
+of any use in a battle is a hope that denies arithmetic.  Whatever may
+be the meaning of the contradiction, it is the fact that the only kind
+of charity which any weak spirit wants, or which any generous spirit
+feels, is the charity which forgives the sins that are like scarlet.
+Whatever may be the meaning of faith, it must always mean a certainty
+about something we cannot prove.  Thus, for instance, we believe by
+faith in the existence of other people.
+
+But there is another Christian virtue, a virtue far more obviously and
+historically connected with Christianity, which will illustrate even
+better the connection between paradox and practical necessity. This
+virtue cannot be questioned in its capacity as a historical symbol;
+certainly Mr. Lowes Dickinson will not question it. It has been the
+boast of hundreds of the champions of Christianity. It has been the
+taunt of hundreds of the opponents of Christianity. It is, in essence,
+the basis of Mr. Lowes Dickinson’s whole distinction between
+Christianity and Paganism.  I mean, of course, the virtue of humility.
+I admit, of course, most readily, that a great deal of false Eastern
+humility (that is, of strictly ascetic humility) mixed itself with the
+main stream of European Christianity. We must not forget that when we
+speak of Christianity we are speaking of a whole continent for about a
+thousand years.  But of this virtue even more than of the other three,
+I would maintain the general proposition adopted above.  Civilization
+discovered Christian humility for the same urgent reason that it
+discovered faith and charity—that is, because Christian civilization
+had to discover it or die.
+
+The great psychological discovery of Paganism, which turned it into
+Christianity, can be expressed with some accuracy in one phrase. The
+pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of
+his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and
+continue to enjoy anything else. Mr. Lowes Dickinson has pointed out in
+words too excellent to need any further elucidation, the absurd
+shallowness of those who imagine that the pagan enjoyed himself only in
+a materialistic sense. Of course, he enjoyed himself, not only
+intellectually even, he enjoyed himself morally, he enjoyed himself
+spiritually. But it was himself that he was enjoying; on the face of
+it, a very natural thing to do.  Now, the psychological discovery is
+merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that the fullest
+possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the
+truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing
+our ego to zero.
+
+Humility is the thing which is for ever renewing the earth and the
+stars. It is humility, and not duty, which preserves the stars from
+wrong, from the unpardonable wrong of casual resignation; it is through
+humility that the most ancient heavens for us are fresh and strong. The
+curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be
+weary of wonders.  If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the
+most fearful and beautiful of meteors. Now that we see it for the
+hundredth time we call it, in the hideous and blasphemous phrase of
+Wordsworth, “the light of common day.” We are inclined to increase our
+claims.  We are inclined to demand six suns, to demand a blue sun, to
+demand a green sun. Humility is perpetually putting us back in the
+primal darkness. There all light is lightning, startling and
+instantaneous. Until we understand that original dark, in which we have
+neither sight nor expectation, we can give no hearty and childlike
+praise to the splendid sensationalism of things.  The terms “pessimism”
+and “optimism,” like most modern terms, are unmeaning. But if they can
+be used in any vague sense as meaning something, we may say that in
+this great fact pessimism is the very basis of optimism.  The man who
+destroys himself creates the universe. To the humble man, and to the
+humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to
+the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all the
+faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he
+realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead.
+
+I have not spoken of another aspect of the discovery of humility as a
+psychological necessity, because it is more commonly insisted on, and
+is in itself more obvious.  But it is equally clear that humility is a
+permanent necessity as a condition of effort and self-examination. It
+is one of the deadly fallacies of Jingo politics that a nation is
+stronger for despising other nations.  As a matter of fact, the
+strongest nations are those, like Prussia or Japan, which began from
+very mean beginnings, but have not been too proud to sit at the feet of
+the foreigner and learn everything from him.  Almost every obvious and
+direct victory has been the victory of the plagiarist. This is, indeed,
+only a very paltry by-product of humility, but it is a product of
+humility, and, therefore, it is successful. Prussia had no Christian
+humility in its internal arrangements; hence its internal arrangements
+were miserable.  But it had enough Christian humility slavishly to copy
+France (even down to Frederick the Great’s poetry), and that which it
+had the humility to copy it had ultimately the honour to conquer.  The
+case of the Japanese is even more obvious; their only Christian and
+their only beautiful quality is that they have humbled themselves to be
+exalted. All this aspect of humility, however, as connected with the
+matter of effort and striving for a standard set above us, I dismiss as
+having been sufficiently pointed out by almost all idealistic writers.
+
+It may be worth while, however, to point out the interesting disparity
+in the matter of humility between the modern notion of the strong man
+and the actual records of strong men.  Carlyle objected to the
+statement that no man could be a hero to his valet. Every sympathy can
+be extended towards him in the matter if he merely or mainly meant that
+the phrase was a disparagement of hero-worship. Hero-worship is
+certainly a generous and human impulse; the hero may be faulty, but the
+worship can hardly be.  It may be that no man would be a hero to his
+valet.  But any man would be a valet to his hero. But in truth both the
+proverb itself and Carlyle’s stricture upon it ignore the most
+essential matter at issue.  The ultimate psychological truth is not
+that no man is a hero to his valet. The ultimate psychological truth,
+the foundation of Christianity, is that no man is a hero to himself.
+Cromwell, according to Carlyle, was a strong man.  According to
+Cromwell, he was a weak one.
+
+The weak point in the whole of Carlyle’s case for aristocracy lies,
+indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were
+mostly fools.  Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism,
+says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the
+doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of
+the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that
+whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect
+all men. All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes,
+if inspired. And this doctrine does away altogether with Carlyle’s
+pathetic belief (or any one else’s pathetic belief) in “the wise few.”
+There are no wise few.  Every aristocracy that has ever existed has
+behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob. Every
+oligarchy is merely a knot of men in the street—that is to say, it is
+very jolly, but not infallible.  And no oligarchies in the world’s
+history have ever come off so badly in practical affairs as the very
+proud oligarchies—the oligarchy of Poland, the oligarchy of Venice.
+And the armies that have most swiftly and suddenly broken their enemies
+in pieces have been the religious armies—the Moslem Armies, for
+instance, or the Puritan Armies.  And a religious army may, by its
+nature, be defined as an army in which every man is taught not to exalt
+but to abase himself.  Many modern Englishmen talk of themselves as the
+sturdy descendants of their sturdy Puritan fathers. As a fact, they
+would run away from a cow.  If you asked one of their Puritan fathers,
+if you asked Bunyan, for instance, whether he was sturdy, he would have
+answered, with tears, that he was as weak as water.  And because of
+this he would have borne tortures. And this virtue of humility, while
+being practical enough to win battles, will always be paradoxical
+enough to puzzle pedants. It is at one with the virtue of charity in
+this respect. Every generous person will admit that the one kind of sin
+which charity should cover is the sin which is inexcusable.  And every
+generous person will equally agree that the one kind of pride which is
+wholly damnable is the pride of the man who has something to be proud
+of. The pride which, proportionally speaking, does not hurt the
+character, is the pride in things which reflect no credit on the person
+at all. Thus it does a man no harm to be proud of his country, and
+comparatively little harm to be proud of his remote ancestors. It does
+him more harm to be proud of having made money, because in that he has
+a little more reason for pride. It does him more harm still to be proud
+of what is nobler than money—intellect.  And it does him most harm of
+all to value himself for the most valuable thing on earth—goodness.
+The man who is proud of what is really creditable to him is the
+Pharisee, the man whom Christ Himself could not forbear to strike.
+
+My objection to Mr. Lowes Dickinson and the reassertors of the pagan
+ideal is, then, this.  I accuse them of ignoring definite human
+discoveries in the moral world, discoveries as definite, though not as
+material, as the discovery of the circulation of the blood. We cannot
+go back to an ideal of reason and sanity. For mankind has discovered
+that reason does not lead to sanity. We cannot go back to an ideal of
+pride and enjoyment.  For mankind has discovered that pride does not
+lead to enjoyment.  I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident
+modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea
+of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of
+independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic
+thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all
+probability, just as far as his father before him.  But if there really
+be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things,
+the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.  I accuse
+Mr. Lowes Dickinson and his school of reaction in the only real sense.
+If he likes, let him ignore these great historic mysteries—the mystery
+of charity, the mystery of chivalry, the mystery of faith. If he likes,
+let him ignore the plough or the printing-press. But if we do revive
+and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we
+shall end—where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in
+destruction.  I mean that we shall end in Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.  Celts and Celtophiles
+
+
+Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is
+to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. The word
+“kleptomania” is a vulgar example of what I mean. It is on a par with
+that strange theory, always advanced when a wealthy or prominent person
+is in the dock, that exposure is more of a punishment for the rich than
+for the poor.  Of course, the very reverse is the truth. Exposure is
+more of a punishment for the poor than for the rich. The richer a man
+is the easier it is for him to be a tramp. The richer a man is the
+easier it is for him to be popular and generally respected in the
+Cannibal Islands.  But the poorer a man is the more likely it is that
+he will have to use his past life whenever he wants to get a bed for
+the night.  Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity
+for hall-porters. This is a secondary matter, but it is an example of
+the general proposition I offer—the proposition that an enormous
+amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the
+indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these
+defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of
+appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or
+pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is
+none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races.
+
+When a wealthy nation like the English discovers the perfectly patent
+fact that it is making a ludicrous mess of the government of a poorer
+nation like the Irish, it pauses for a moment in consternation, and
+then begins to talk about Celts and Teutons.  As far as I can
+understand the theory, the Irish are Celts and the English are Teutons.
+Of course, the Irish are not Celts any more than the English are
+Teutons. I have not followed the ethnological discussion with much
+energy, but the last scientific conclusion which I read inclined on the
+whole to the summary that the English were mainly Celtic and the Irish
+mainly Teutonic.  But no man alive, with even the glimmering of a real
+scientific sense, would ever dream of applying the terms “Celtic” or
+“Teutonic” to either of them in any positive or useful sense.
+
+That sort of thing must be left to people who talk about the
+Anglo-Saxon race, and extend the expression to America. How much of the
+blood of the Angles and Saxons (whoever they were) there remains in our
+mixed British, Roman, German, Dane, Norman, and Picard stock is a
+matter only interesting to wild antiquaries. And how much of that
+diluted blood can possibly remain in that roaring whirlpool of America
+into which a cataract of Swedes, Jews, Germans, Irishmen, and Italians
+is perpetually pouring, is a matter only interesting to lunatics.  It
+would have been wiser for the English governing class to have called
+upon some other god. All other gods, however weak and warring, at least
+boast of being constant.  But science boasts of being in a flux for
+ever; boasts of being unstable as water.
+
+And England and the English governing class never did call on this
+absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no
+other god to call on.  All the most genuine Englishmen in history would
+have yawned or laughed in your face if you had begun to talk about
+Anglo-Saxons. If you had attempted to substitute the ideal of race for
+the ideal of nationality, I really do not like to think what they would
+have said.  I certainly should not like to have been the officer of
+Nelson who suddenly discovered his French blood on the eve of
+Trafalgar.  I should not like to have been the Norfolk or Suffolk
+gentleman who had to expound to Admiral Blake by what demonstrable ties
+of genealogy he was irrevocably bound to the Dutch.  The truth of the
+whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the
+world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret
+society; it is a product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual
+product. And there are men in the modern world who would think anything
+and do anything rather than admit that anything could be a spiritual
+product.
+
+A nation, however, as it confronts the modern world, is a purely
+spiritual product.  Sometimes it has been born in independence, like
+Scotland.  Sometimes it has been born in dependence, in subjugation,
+like Ireland.  Sometimes it is a large thing cohering out of many
+smaller things, like Italy.  Sometimes it is a small thing breaking
+away from larger things, like Poland. But in each and every case its
+quality is purely spiritual, or, if you will, purely psychological.  It
+is a moment when five men become a sixth man.  Every one knows it who
+has ever founded a club.  It is a moment when five places become one
+place. Every one must know it who has ever had to repel an invasion.
+Mr. Timothy Healy, the most serious intellect in the present House of
+Commons, summed up nationality to perfection when he simply called it
+something for which people will die, As he excellently said in reply to
+Lord Hugh Cecil, “No one, not even the noble lord, would die for the
+meridian of Greenwich.” And that is the great tribute to its purely
+psychological character. It is idle to ask why Greenwich should not
+cohere in this spiritual manner while Athens or Sparta did.  It is like
+asking why a man falls in love with one woman and not with another.
+
+Now, of this great spiritual coherence, independent of external
+circumstances, or of race, or of any obvious physical thing, Ireland is
+the most remarkable example.  Rome conquered nations, but Ireland has
+conquered races.  The Norman has gone there and become Irish, the
+Scotchman has gone there and become Irish, the Spaniard has gone there
+and become Irish, even the bitter soldier of Cromwell has gone there
+and become Irish.  Ireland, which did not exist even politically, has
+been stronger than all the races that existed scientifically. The
+purest Germanic blood, the purest Norman blood, the purest blood of the
+passionate Scotch patriot, has not been so attractive as a nation
+without a flag.  Ireland, unrecognized and oppressed, has easily
+absorbed races, as such trifles are easily absorbed. She has easily
+disposed of physical science, as such superstitions are easily disposed
+of.  Nationality in its weakness has been stronger than ethnology in
+its strength.  Five triumphant races have been absorbed, have been
+defeated by a defeated nationality.
+
+This being the true and strange glory of Ireland, it is impossible to
+hear without impatience of the attempt so constantly made among her
+modern sympathizers to talk about Celts and Celticism. Who were the
+Celts?  I defy anybody to say.  Who are the Irish? I defy any one to be
+indifferent, or to pretend not to know. Mr. W. B. Yeats, the great
+Irish genius who has appeared in our time, shows his own admirable
+penetration in discarding altogether the argument from a Celtic race.
+But he does not wholly escape, and his followers hardly ever escape,
+the general objection to the Celtic argument. The tendency of that
+argument is to represent the Irish or the Celts as a strange and
+separate race, as a tribe of eccentrics in the modern world immersed in
+dim legends and fruitless dreams. Its tendency is to exhibit the Irish
+as odd, because they see the fairies.  Its trend is to make the Irish
+seem weird and wild because they sing old songs and join in strange
+dances. But this is quite an error; indeed, it is the opposite of the
+truth. It is the English who are odd because they do not see the
+fairies. It is the inhabitants of Kensington who are weird and wild
+because they do not sing old songs and join in strange dances. In all
+this the Irish are not in the least strange and separate, are not in
+the least Celtic, as the word is commonly and popularly used. In all
+this the Irish are simply an ordinary sensible nation, living the life
+of any other ordinary and sensible nation which has not been either
+sodden with smoke or oppressed by money-lenders, or otherwise corrupted
+with wealth and science. There is nothing Celtic about having legends.
+It is merely human. The Germans, who are (I suppose) Teutonic, have
+hundreds of legends, wherever it happens that the Germans are human.
+There is nothing Celtic about loving poetry; the English loved poetry
+more, perhaps, than any other people before they came under the shadow
+of the chimney-pot and the shadow of the chimney-pot hat.  It is not
+Ireland which is mad and mystic; it is Manchester which is mad and
+mystic, which is incredible, which is a wild exception among human
+things. Ireland has no need to play the silly game of the science of
+races; Ireland has no need to pretend to be a tribe of visionaries
+apart. In the matter of visions, Ireland is more than a nation, it is a
+model nation.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family
+
+
+The family may fairly be considered, one would think, an ultimate human
+institution.  Every one would admit that it has been the main cell and
+central unit of almost all societies hitherto, except, indeed, such
+societies as that of Lacedaemon, which went in for “efficiency,” and
+has, therefore, perished, and left not a trace behind.  Christianity,
+even enormous as was its revolution, did not alter this ancient and
+savage sanctity; it merely reversed it. It did not deny the trinity of
+father, mother, and child. It merely read it backwards, making it run
+child, mother, father. This it called, not the family, but the Holy
+Family, for many things are made holy by being turned upside down. But
+some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the
+family.  They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders
+have defended it, and defended it wrongly. The common defence of the
+family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful,
+pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which
+is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not
+peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.
+
+It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the
+small community.  We are told that we must go in for large empires and
+large ideas.  There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the
+city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The
+man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He
+knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences
+of men.  The reason is obvious.  In a large community we can choose our
+companions.  In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
+Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into
+existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real
+world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing
+really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the
+clique.  The men of the clan live together because they all wear the
+same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their
+souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours
+than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because
+they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness
+of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.
+A big society exists in order to form cliques.  A big society is a
+society for the promotion of narrowness.  It is a machinery for the
+purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all
+experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the
+most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of
+Christian knowledge.
+
+We can see this change, for instance, in the modern transformation of
+the thing called a club.  When London was smaller, and the parts of
+London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is
+in villages, the opposite of what it is now in great cities. Then the
+club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable. Now the club
+is valued as a place where a man can be unsociable. The more the
+enlargement and elaboration of our civilization goes on the more the
+club ceases to be a place where a man can have a noisy argument, and
+becomes more and more a place where a man can have what is somewhat
+fantastically called a quiet chop. Its aim is to make a man
+comfortable, and to make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite
+of sociable.  Sociability, like all good things, is full of
+discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the
+most degraded of all combinations—the luxurious anchorite, the man who
+combines the self-indulgence of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of
+St. Simeon Stylites.
+
+If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live,
+we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than
+we have ever known.  And it is the whole effort of the typically modern
+person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents
+modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and
+goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to
+Timbuctoo.  He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth.  He pretends
+to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel.  And in all this he is
+still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of
+this flight he is always ready with his own explanation.  He says he is
+fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying.  He is really
+fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is
+exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He
+can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the
+people in his own street are men.  He can stare at the Chinese because
+for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares
+at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to
+flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals—of free
+men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself.  The
+street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and
+quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles.  These
+creatures are indeed very different from himself.  But they do not put
+their shape or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual
+competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles
+and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do
+seek to do this. The camel does not contort his features into a fine
+sneer because Mr. Robinson has not got a hump; the cultured gentleman
+at No. 5 does exhibit a sneer because Robinson has not got a dado. The
+vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the
+major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke.
+The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they
+will not, as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really
+mean that they will not mind their own business. If our neighbours did
+not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their
+rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours. What we really mean
+when we say that they cannot mind their own business is something much
+deeper.  We do not dislike them because they have so little force and
+fire that they cannot be interested in themselves.  We dislike them
+because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in
+us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the
+narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it.
+And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character.
+They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its
+energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its
+weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.
+
+Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety
+of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as
+it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls
+itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie
+that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out.
+Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most
+unpardonable of virtues.  Nietzsche, who represents most prominently
+this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description
+somewhere—a very powerful description in the purely literary sense—of
+the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common
+people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common
+minds.  As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may
+regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche’s aristocracy has about it all the
+sacredness that belongs to the weak.  When he makes us feel that he
+cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the
+overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the
+sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a
+crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a
+man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog,
+humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell.  But when Nietzsche
+has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to
+believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an
+aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It
+is an aristocracy of weak nerves.
+
+We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door
+neighbour.  Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of
+nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as
+the rain.  He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the
+old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom
+when they spoke, not of one’s duty towards humanity, but one’s duty
+towards one’s neighbour.  The duty towards humanity may often take the
+form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty
+may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the East
+End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or
+because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international
+peace because we are very fond of fighting. The most monstrous
+martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the result of choice
+or a kind of taste.  We may be so made as to be particularly fond of
+lunatics or specially interested in leprosy. We may love negroes
+because they are black or German Socialists because they are pedantic.
+But we have to love our neighbour because he is there—a much more
+alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of
+humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be
+anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident.
+
+Doubtless men flee from small environments into lands that are very
+deadly.  But this is natural enough; for they are not fleeing from
+death.  They are fleeing from life.  And this principle applies to ring
+within ring of the social system of humanity. It is perfectly
+reasonable that men should seek for some particular variety of the
+human type, so long as they are seeking for that variety of the human
+type, and not for mere human variety. It is quite proper that a British
+diplomatist should seek the society of Japanese generals, if what he
+wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants is people different
+from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with
+the housemaid. It is quite reasonable that the village genius should
+come up to conquer London if what he wants is to conquer London.  But
+if he wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile
+and also very strong, he had much better remain where he is and have a
+row with the rector. The man in the suburban street is quite right if
+he goes to Ramsgate for the sake of Ramsgate—a difficult thing to
+imagine. But if, as he expresses it, he goes to Ramsgate “for a
+change,” then he would have a much more romantic and even melodramatic
+change if he jumped over the wall into his neighbours garden. The
+consequences would be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities
+of Ramsgate hygiene.
+
+Now, exactly as this principle applies to the empire, to the nation
+within the empire, to the city within the nation, to the street within
+the city, so it applies to the home within the street. The institution
+of the family is to be commended for precisely the same reasons that
+the institution of the nation, or the institution of the city, are in
+this matter to be commended. It is a good thing for a man to live in a
+family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be
+besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in
+the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to
+be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is
+not a thing from outside, but a thing from inside.  Above all, they all
+insist upon the fact that life, if it be a truly stimulating and
+fascinating life, is a thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of
+ourselves. The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less
+open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally
+confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or
+pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course
+the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is
+wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and
+varieties.  It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom,
+and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of
+something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George
+is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in
+the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing
+qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry
+does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that
+the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons
+and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad,
+simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like
+mankind.  Papa is excitable, like mankind Our youngest brother is
+mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is
+old, like the world.
+
+Those who wish, rightly or wrongly, to step out of all this, do
+definitely wish to step into a narrower world.  They are dismayed and
+terrified by the largeness and variety of the family. Sarah wishes to
+find a world wholly consisting of private theatricals; George wishes to
+think the Trocadero a cosmos.  I do not say, for a moment, that the
+flight to this narrower life may not be the right thing for the
+individual, any more than I say the same thing about flight into a
+monastery.  But I do say that anything is bad and artificial which
+tends to make these people succumb to the strange delusion that they
+are stepping into a world which is actually larger and more varied than
+their own. The best way that a man could test his readiness to
+encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a
+chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with
+the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on
+the day that he was born.
+
+This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family.  It is
+romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is
+everything that its enemies call it.  It is romantic because it is
+arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there.  So long as you have
+groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian
+atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that
+you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an
+adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us.  It is a thing
+that chooses us, not a thing that we choose.  Falling in love has been
+often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident.
+In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of
+a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and
+transfigure and torture us.  It does break our hearts with an
+unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far
+as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we
+are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into
+it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even
+judge—in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly
+adventurous at all.  In this degree the supreme adventure is not
+falling in love.  The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk
+suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something
+of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in
+wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush.  Our uncle
+is a surprise.  Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt
+from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born,
+we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has
+its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a
+world that we have not made.  In other words, when we step into the
+family we step into a fairy-tale.
+
+This colour as of a fantastic narrative ought to cling to the family
+and to our relations with it throughout life. Romance is the deepest
+thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality.  For even if
+reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved
+to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they
+are still very strange. And this strangeness of life, this unexpected
+and even perverse element of things as they fall out, remains incurably
+interesting. The circumstances we can regulate may become tame or
+pessimistic; but the “circumstances over which we have no control”
+remain god-like to those who, like Mr. Micawber, can call on them and
+renew their strength.  People wonder why the novel is the most popular
+form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of
+science or books of metaphysics.  The reason is very simple; it is
+merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes
+legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear,
+and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics.  But life
+is always a novel.  Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease
+even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible
+justice, or even a recognizable wrong.  But our existence is still a
+story.  In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, “to be
+continued in our next.” If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish
+a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are
+finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any
+scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right.
+But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest
+or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That
+is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly
+mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative
+writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter
+but one.  He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the
+author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he
+chooses.  And the same civilization, the chivalric European
+civilization which asserted freewill in the thirteenth century,
+produced the thing called “fiction” in the eighteenth. When Thomas
+Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad
+novels in the circulating libraries.
+
+But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is
+necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for
+us without our permission.  If we wish life to be a system, this may be
+a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential.  It
+may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody
+else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the
+author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the
+whole trouble of inventing the next act.  A man has control over many
+things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of
+a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much
+hero that there would be no novel.  And the reason why the lives of the
+rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can
+choose the events.  They are dull because they are omnipotent. They
+fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures. The thing
+which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the
+existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to
+meet the things we do not like or do not expect.  It is vain for the
+supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To
+be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into
+this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be
+born into a romance.  Of all these great limitations and frameworks
+which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is
+the most definite and important. Hence it is misunderstood by the
+moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a
+complete state of what they call liberty. They think that if a man
+makes a gesture it would be a startling and romantic matter that the
+sun should fall from the sky. But the startling and romantic thing
+about the sun is that it does not fall from the sky.  They are seeking
+under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations—that
+is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there
+are no shapes. There is nothing baser than that infinity.  They say
+they wish to be as strong as the universe, but they really wish the
+whole universe as weak as themselves.
+
+
+
+
+XV. On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set
+
+
+In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature
+than good literature.  Good literature may tell us the mind of one man;
+but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells
+us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about
+its author.  It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about
+its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more
+cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.  The more
+dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public
+document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular
+man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The
+pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in
+scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men’s basic assumptions
+and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and
+halfpenny novelettes.  Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our
+day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to
+appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to
+govern empires and look over the map of mankind.
+
+There is one rather interesting example of this state of things in
+which the weaker literature is really the stronger and the stronger the
+weaker.  It is the case of what may be called, for the sake of an
+approximate description, the literature of aristocracy; or, if you
+prefer the description, the literature of snobbishness. Now if any one
+wishes to find a really effective and comprehensible and permanent case
+for aristocracy well and sincerely stated, let him read, not the modern
+philosophical conservatives, not even Nietzsche, let him read the Bow
+Bells Novelettes. Of the case of Nietzsche I am confessedly more
+doubtful. Nietzsche and the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously
+the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with
+curling moustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship
+him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical. Even here,
+however, the Novelette easily maintains its philosophical superiority,
+because it does attribute to the strong man those virtues which do
+commonly belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kindliness and a
+rather reckless benevolence, and a great dislike of hurting the weak.
+Nietzsche, on the other hand, attributes to the strong man that scorn
+against weakness which only exists among invalids.  It is not, however,
+of the secondary merits of the great German philosopher, but of the
+primary merits of the Bow Bells Novelettes, that it is my present
+affair to speak. The picture of aristocracy in the popular sentimental
+novelette seems to me very satisfactory as a permanent political and
+philosophical guide. It may be inaccurate about details such as the
+title by which a baronet is addressed or the width of a mountain chasm
+which a baronet can conveniently leap, but it is not a bad description
+of the general idea and intention of aristocracy as they exist in human
+affairs. The essential dream of aristocracy is magnificence and valour;
+and if the Family Herald Supplement sometimes distorts or exaggerates
+these things, at least, it does not fall short in them. It never errs
+by making the mountain chasm too narrow or the title of the baronet
+insufficiently impressive.  But above this sane reliable old literature
+of snobbishness there has arisen in our time another kind of literature
+of snobbishness which, with its much higher pretensions, seems to me
+worthy of very much less respect.  Incidentally (if that matters), it
+is much better literature.  But it is immeasurably worse philosophy,
+immeasurably worse ethics and politics, immeasurably worse vital
+rendering of aristocracy and humanity as they really are. From such
+books as those of which I wish now to speak we can discover what a
+clever man can do with the idea of aristocracy. But from the Family
+Herald Supplement literature we can learn what the idea of aristocracy
+can do with a man who is not clever. And when we know that we know
+English history.
+
+This new aristocratic fiction must have caught the attention of
+everybody who has read the best fiction for the last fifteen years. It
+is that genuine or alleged literature of the Smart Set which represents
+that set as distinguished, not only by smart dresses, but by smart
+sayings.  To the bad baronet, to the good baronet, to the romantic and
+misunderstood baronet who is supposed to be a bad baronet, but is a
+good baronet, this school has added a conception undreamed of in the
+former years—the conception of an amusing baronet. The aristocrat is
+not merely to be taller than mortal men and stronger and handsomer, he
+is also to be more witty. He is the long man with the short epigram.
+Many eminent, and deservedly eminent, modern novelists must accept some
+responsibility for having supported this worst form of snobbishness—an
+intellectual snobbishness.  The talented author of “Dodo” is
+responsible for having in some sense created the fashion as a fashion.
+Mr. Hichens, in the “Green Carnation,” reaffirmed the strange idea that
+young noblemen talk well; though his case had some vague biographical
+foundation, and in consequence an excuse.  Mrs. Craigie is considerably
+guilty in the matter, although, or rather because, she has combined the
+aristocratic note with a note of some moral and even religious
+sincerity.  When you are saving a man’s soul, even in a novel, it is
+indecent to mention that he is a gentleman. Nor can blame in this
+matter be altogether removed from a man of much greater ability, and a
+man who has proved his possession of the highest of human instinct, the
+romantic instinct—I mean Mr. Anthony Hope. In a galloping, impossible
+melodrama like “The Prisoner of Zenda,” the blood of kings fanned an
+excellent fantastic thread or theme. But the blood of kings is not a
+thing that can be taken seriously. And when, for example, Mr. Hope
+devotes so much serious and sympathetic study to the man called
+Tristram of Blent, a man who throughout burning boyhood thought of
+nothing but a silly old estate, we feel even in Mr. Hope the hint of
+this excessive concern about the oligarchic idea. It is hard for any
+ordinary person to feel so much interest in a young man whose whole aim
+is to own the house of Blent at the time when every other young man is
+owning the stars.
+
+Mr. Hope, however, is a very mild case, and in him there is not only an
+element of romance, but also a fine element of irony which warns us
+against taking all this elegance too seriously. Above all, he shows his
+sense in not making his noblemen so incredibly equipped with impromptu
+repartee.  This habit of insisting on the wit of the wealthier classes
+is the last and most servile of all the servilities.  It is, as I have
+said, immeasurably more contemptible than the snobbishness of the
+novelette which describes the nobleman as smiling like an Apollo or
+riding a mad elephant. These may be exaggerations of beauty and
+courage, but beauty and courage are the unconscious ideals of
+aristocrats, even of stupid aristocrats.
+
+The nobleman of the novelette may not be sketched with any very close
+or conscientious attention to the daily habits of noblemen.  But he is
+something more important than a reality; he is a practical ideal. The
+gentleman of fiction may not copy the gentleman of real life; but the
+gentleman of real life is copying the gentleman of fiction. He may not
+be particularly good-looking, but he would rather be good-looking than
+anything else; he may not have ridden on a mad elephant, but he rides a
+pony as far as possible with an air as if he had. And, upon the whole,
+the upper class not only especially desire these qualities of beauty
+and courage, but in some degree, at any rate, especially possess them.
+Thus there is nothing really mean or sycophantic about the popular
+literature which makes all its marquises seven feet high.  It is
+snobbish, but it is not servile. Its exaggeration is based on an
+exuberant and honest admiration; its honest admiration is based upon
+something which is in some degree, at any rate, really there.  The
+English lower classes do not fear the English upper classes in the
+least; nobody could. They simply and freely and sentimentally worship
+them. The strength of the aristocracy is not in the aristocracy at all;
+it is in the slums.  It is not in the House of Lords; it is not in the
+Civil Service; it is not in the Government offices; it is not even in
+the huge and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a
+certain spirit.  It is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise a
+man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a
+gentleman.  From a democratic point of view he might as well say that
+he had behaved like a viscount. The oligarchic character of the modern
+English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the
+cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness
+of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing
+kindness of the poor to the rich.
+
+The snobbishness of bad literature, then, is not servile; but the
+snobbishness of good literature is servile.  The old-fashioned
+halfpenny romance where the duchesses sparkled with diamonds was not
+servile; but the new romance where they sparkle with epigrams is
+servile. For in thus attributing a special and startling degree of
+intellect and conversational or controversial power to the upper
+classes, we are attributing something which is not especially their
+virtue or even especially their aim.  We are, in the words of Disraeli
+(who, being a genius and not a gentleman, has perhaps primarily to
+answer for the introduction of this method of flattering the gentry),
+we are performing the essential function of flattery which is
+flattering the people for the qualities they have not got. Praise may
+be gigantic and insane without having any quality of flattery so long
+as it is praise of something that is noticeably in existence.  A man
+may say that a giraffe’s head strikes the stars, or that a whale fills
+the German Ocean, and still be only in a rather excited state about a
+favourite animal. But when he begins to congratulate the giraffe on his
+feathers, and the whale on the elegance of his legs, we find ourselves
+confronted with that social element which we call flattery. The middle
+and lower orders of London can sincerely, though not perhaps safely,
+admire the health and grace of the English aristocracy. And this for
+the very simple reason that the aristocrats are, upon the whole, more
+healthy and graceful than the poor. But they cannot honestly admire the
+wit of the aristocrats. And this for the simple reason that the
+aristocrats are not more witty than the poor, but a very great deal
+less so.  A man does not hear, as in the smart novels, these gems of
+verbal felicity dropped between diplomatists at dinner.  Where he
+really does hear them is between two omnibus conductors in a block in
+Holborn.  The witty peer whose impromptus fill the books of Mrs.
+Craigie or Miss Fowler, would, as a matter of fact, be torn to shreds
+in the art of conversation by the first boot-black he had the
+misfortune to fall foul of. The poor are merely sentimental, and very
+excusably sentimental, if they praise the gentleman for having a ready
+hand and ready money. But they are strictly slaves and sycophants if
+they praise him for having a ready tongue.  For that they have far more
+themselves.
+
+The element of oligarchical sentiment in these novels, however, has, I
+think, another and subtler aspect, an aspect more difficult to
+understand and more worth understanding. The modern gentleman,
+particularly the modern English gentleman, has become so central and
+important in these books, and through them in the whole of our current
+literature and our current mode of thought, that certain qualities of
+his, whether original or recent, essential or accidental, have altered
+the quality of our English comedy. In particular, that stoical ideal,
+absurdly supposed to be the English ideal, has stiffened and chilled
+us.  It is not the English ideal; but it is to some extent the
+aristocratic ideal; or it may be only the ideal of aristocracy in its
+autumn or decay. The gentleman is a Stoic because he is a sort of
+savage, because he is filled with a great elemental fear that some
+stranger will speak to him.  That is why a third-class carriage is a
+community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits. But
+this matter, which is difficult, I may be permitted to approach in a
+more circuitous way.
+
+The haunting element of ineffectualness which runs through so much of
+the witty and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or
+ten years, which runs through such works of a real though varying
+ingenuity as “Dodo,” or “Concerning Isabel Carnaby,” or even “Some
+Emotions and a Moral,” may be expressed in various ways, but to most of
+us I think it will ultimately amount to the same thing. This new
+frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an
+unuttered joy.  The men and women who exchange the repartees may not
+only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them
+might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next.  They are
+joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of
+the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh. Even when they talk pure
+nonsense it is a careful nonsense—a nonsense of which they are
+economical, or, to use the perfect expression of Mr. W. S. Gilbert in
+“Patience,” it is such “precious nonsense.” Even when they become
+light-headed they do not become light-hearted. All those who have read
+anything of the rationalism of the moderns know that their Reason is a
+sad thing.  But even their unreason is sad.
+
+The causes of this incapacity are also not very difficult to indicate.
+The chief of all, of course, is that miserable fear of being
+sentimental, which is the meanest of all the modern terrors—meaner
+even than the terror which produces hygiene.  Everywhere the robust and
+uproarious humour has come from the men who were capable not merely of
+sentimentalism, but a very silly sentimentalism.  There has been no
+humour so robust or uproarious as that of the sentimentalist Steele or
+the sentimentalist Sterne or the sentimentalist Dickens. These
+creatures who wept like women were the creatures who laughed like men.
+It is true that the humour of Micawber is good literature and that the
+pathos of little Nell is bad.  But the kind of man who had the courage
+to write so badly in the one case is the kind of man who would have the
+courage to write so well in the other. The same unconsciousness, the
+same violent innocence, the same gigantesque scale of action which
+brought the Napoleon of Comedy his Jena brought him also his Moscow.
+And herein is especially shown the frigid and feeble limitations of our
+modern wits. They make violent efforts, they make heroic and almost
+pathetic efforts, but they cannot really write badly.  There are
+moments when we almost think that they are achieving the effect, but
+our hope shrivels to nothing the moment we compare their little
+failures with the enormous imbecilities of Byron or Shakespeare.
+
+For a hearty laugh it is necessary to have touched the heart. I do not
+know why touching the heart should always be connected only with the
+idea of touching it to compassion or a sense of distress. The heart can
+be touched to joy and triumph; the heart can be touched to amusement.
+But all our comedians are tragic comedians. These later fashionable
+writers are so pessimistic in bone and marrow that they never seem able
+to imagine the heart having any concern with mirth.  When they speak of
+the heart, they always mean the pangs and disappointments of the
+emotional life. When they say that a man’s heart is in the right place,
+they mean, apparently, that it is in his boots.  Our ethical societies
+understand fellowship, but they do not understand good fellowship.
+Similarly, our wits understand talk, but not what Dr. Johnson called a
+good talk.  In order to have, like Dr. Johnson, a good talk, it is
+emphatically necessary to be, like Dr. Johnson, a good man—to have
+friendship and honour and an abysmal tenderness. Above all, it is
+necessary to be openly and indecently humane, to confess with fulness
+all the primary pities and fears of Adam. Johnson was a clear-headed
+humorous man, and therefore he did not mind talking seriously about
+religion.  Johnson was a brave man, one of the bravest that ever
+walked, and therefore he did not mind avowing to any one his consuming
+fear of death.
+
+The idea that there is something English in the repression of one’s
+feelings is one of those ideas which no Englishman ever heard of until
+England began to be governed exclusively by Scotchmen, Americans, and
+Jews.  At the best, the idea is a generalization from the Duke of
+Wellington—who was an Irishman.  At the worst, it is a part of that
+silly Teutonism which knows as little about England as it does about
+anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings. As a matter of
+fact, the Vikings did not repress their feelings in the least.  They
+cried like babies and kissed each other like girls; in short, they
+acted in that respect like Achilles and all strong heroes the children
+of the gods.  And though the English nationality has probably not much
+more to do with the Vikings than the French nationality or the Irish
+nationality, the English have certainly been the children of the
+Vikings in the matter of tears and kisses. It is not merely true that
+all the most typically English men of letters, like Shakespeare and
+Dickens, Richardson and Thackeray, were sentimentalists.  It is also
+true that all the most typically English men of action were
+sentimentalists, if possible, more sentimental. In the great
+Elizabethan age, when the English nation was finally hammered out, in
+the great eighteenth century when the British Empire was being built up
+everywhere, where in all these times, where was this symbolic stoical
+Englishman who dresses in drab and black and represses his feelings?
+Were all the Elizabethan palladins and pirates like that?  Were any of
+them like that? Was Grenville concealing his emotions when he broke
+wine-glasses to pieces with his teeth and bit them till the blood
+poured down? Was Essex restraining his excitement when he threw his hat
+into the sea? Did Raleigh think it sensible to answer the Spanish guns
+only, as Stevenson says, with a flourish of insulting trumpets? Did
+Sydney ever miss an opportunity of making a theatrical remark in the
+whole course of his life and death?  Were even the Puritans Stoics? The
+English Puritans repressed a good deal, but even they were too English
+to repress their feelings.  It was by a great miracle of genius
+assuredly that Carlyle contrived to admire simultaneously two things so
+irreconcilably opposed as silence and Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was the
+very reverse of a strong, silent man. Cromwell was always talking, when
+he was not crying.  Nobody, I suppose, will accuse the author of “Grace
+Abounding” of being ashamed of his feelings.  Milton, indeed, it might
+be possible to represent as a Stoic; in some sense he was a Stoic, just
+as he was a prig and a polygamist and several other unpleasant and
+heathen things. But when we have passed that great and desolate name,
+which may really be counted an exception, we find the tradition of
+English emotionalism immediately resumed and unbrokenly continuous.
+Whatever may have been the moral beauty of the passions of Etheridge
+and Dorset, Sedley and Buckingham, they cannot be accused of the fault
+of fastidiously concealing them. Charles the Second was very popular
+with the English because, like all the jolly English kings, he
+displayed his passions. William the Dutchman was very unpopular with
+the English because, not being an Englishman, he did hide his emotions.
+He was, in fact, precisely the ideal Englishman of our modern theory;
+and precisely for that reason all the real Englishmen loathed him like
+leprosy. With the rise of the great England of the eighteenth century,
+we find this open and emotional tone still maintained in letters and
+politics, in arts and in arms.  Perhaps the only quality which was
+possessed in common by the great Fielding, and the great Richardson was
+that neither of them hid their feelings. Swift, indeed, was hard and
+logical, because Swift was Irish. And when we pass to the soldiers and
+the rulers, the patriots and the empire-builders of the eighteenth
+century, we find, as I have said, that they were, If possible, more
+romantic than the romancers, more poetical than the poets.  Chatham,
+who showed the world all his strength, showed the House of Commons all
+his weakness. Wolfe walked about the room with a drawn sword calling
+himself Caesar and Hannibal, and went to death with poetry in his
+mouth. Clive was a man of the same type as Cromwell or Bunyan, or, for
+the matter of that, Johnson—that is, he was a strong, sensible man
+with a kind of running spring of hysteria and melancholy in him. Like
+Johnson, he was all the more healthy because he was morbid. The tales
+of all the admirals and adventurers of that England are full of
+braggadocio, of sentimentality, of splendid affectation. But it is
+scarcely necessary to multiply examples of the essentially romantic
+Englishman when one example towers above them all. Mr. Rudyard Kipling
+has said complacently of the English, “We do not fall on the neck and
+kiss when we come together.” It is true that this ancient and universal
+custom has vanished with the modern weakening of England.  Sydney would
+have thought nothing of kissing Spenser.  But I willingly concede that
+Mr. Broderick would not be likely to kiss Mr. Arnold-Foster, if that be
+any proof of the increased manliness and military greatness of England.
+But the Englishman who does not show his feelings has not altogether
+given up the power of seeing something English in the great sea-hero of
+the Napoleonic war.  You cannot break the legend of Nelson. And across
+the sunset of that glory is written in flaming letters for ever the
+great English sentiment, “Kiss me, Hardy.”
+
+This ideal of self-repression, then, is, whatever else it is, not
+English. It is, perhaps, somewhat Oriental, it is slightly Prussian,
+but in the main it does not come, I think, from any racial or national
+source. It is, as I have said, in some sense aristocratic; it comes not
+from a people, but from a class.  Even aristocracy, I think, was not
+quite so stoical in the days when it was really strong. But whether
+this unemotional ideal be the genuine tradition of the gentleman, or
+only one of the inventions of the modern gentleman (who may be called
+the decayed gentleman), it certainly has something to do with the
+unemotional quality in these society novels. From representing
+aristocrats as people who suppressed their feelings, it has been an
+easy step to representing aristocrats as people who had no feelings to
+suppress.  Thus the modern oligarchist has made a virtue for the
+oligarchy of the hardness as well as the brightness of the diamond.
+Like a sonneteer addressing his lady in the seventeenth century, he
+seems to use the word “cold” almost as a eulogium, and the word
+“heartless” as a kind of compliment.  Of course, in people so incurably
+kind-hearted and babyish as are the English gentry, it would be
+impossible to create anything that can be called positive cruelty; so
+in these books they exhibit a sort of negative cruelty. They cannot be
+cruel in acts, but they can be so in words. All this means one thing,
+and one thing only.  It means that the living and invigorating ideal of
+England must be looked for in the masses; it must be looked for where
+Dickens found it—Dickens among whose glories it was to be a humorist,
+to be a sentimentalist, to be an optimist, to be a poor man, to be an
+Englishman, but the greatest of whose glories was that he saw all
+mankind in its amazing and tropical luxuriance, and did not even notice
+the aristocracy; Dickens, the greatest of whose glories was that he
+could not describe a gentleman.
+
+
+
+
+XVI. On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity
+
+
+A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant
+reasonableness, “If you must make jokes, at least you need not make
+them on such serious subjects.”  I replied with a natural simplicity
+and wonder, “About what other subjects can one make jokes except
+serious subjects?”  It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting.
+All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the
+sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so
+very solemn after all. If a joke is not a joke about religion or
+morals, it is a joke about police-magistrates or scientific professors
+or undergraduates dressed up as Queen Victoria.  And people joke about
+the police-magistrate more than they joke about the Pope, not because
+the police-magistrate is a more frivolous subject, but, on the
+contrary, because the police-magistrate is a more serious subject than
+the Pope. The Bishop of Rome has no jurisdiction in this realm of
+England; whereas the police-magistrate may bring his solemnity to bear
+quite suddenly upon us.  Men make jokes about old scientific
+professors, even more than they make them about bishops—not because
+science is lighter than religion, but because science is always by its
+nature more solemn and austere than religion.  It is not I; it is not
+even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about
+the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race.
+If there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who
+has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always
+speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about
+the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about
+the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of
+cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party
+politics. But all the most grave and dreadful things in the world are
+the oldest jokes in the world—being married; being hanged.
+
+One gentleman, however, Mr. McCabe, has in this matter made to me
+something that almost amounts to a personal appeal; and as he happens
+to be a man for whose sincerity and intellectual virtue I have a high
+respect, I do not feel inclined to let it pass without some attempt to
+satisfy my critic in the matter. Mr. McCabe devotes a considerable part
+of the last essay in the collection called “Christianity and
+Rationalism on Trial” to an objection, not to my thesis, but to my
+method, and a very friendly and dignified appeal to me to alter it.  I
+am much inclined to defend myself in this matter out of mere respect
+for Mr. McCabe, and still more so out of mere respect for the truth
+which is, I think, in danger by his error, not only in this question,
+but in others. In order that there may be no injustice done in the
+matter, I will quote Mr. McCabe himself.  “But before I follow Mr.
+Chesterton in some detail I would make a general observation on his
+method. He is as serious as I am in his ultimate purpose, and I respect
+him for that.  He knows, as I do, that humanity stands at a solemn
+parting of the ways.  Towards some unknown goal it presses through the
+ages, impelled by an overmastering desire of happiness. To-day it
+hesitates, lightheartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how
+momentous the decision may be.  It is, apparently, deserting the path
+of religion and entering upon the path of secularism. Will it lose
+itself in quagmires of sensuality down this new path, and pant and toil
+through years of civic and industrial anarchy, only to learn it had
+lost the road, and must return to religion? Or will it find that at
+last it is leaving the mists and the quagmires behind it; that it is
+ascending the slope of the hill so long dimly discerned ahead, and
+making straight for the long-sought Utopia? This is the drama of our
+time, and every man and every woman should understand it.
+
+“Mr. Chesterton understands it.  Further, he gives us credit for
+understanding it.  He has nothing of that paltry meanness or strange
+density of so many of his colleagues, who put us down as aimless
+iconoclasts or moral anarchists. He admits that we are waging a
+thankless war for what we take to be Truth and Progress.  He is doing
+the same. But why, in the name of all that is reasonable, should we,
+when we are agreed on the momentousness of the issue either way,
+forthwith desert serious methods of conducting the controversy? Why,
+when the vital need of our time is to induce men and women to collect
+their thoughts occasionally, and be men and women—nay, to remember
+that they are really gods that hold the destinies of humanity on their
+knees—why should we think that this kaleidoscopic play of phrases is
+inopportune? The ballets of the Alhambra, and the fireworks of the
+Crystal Palace, and Mr. Chesterton’s Daily News articles, have their
+place in life. But how a serious social student can think of curing the
+thoughtlessness of our generation by strained paradoxes; of giving
+people a sane grasp of social problems by literary sleight-of-hand; of
+settling important questions by a reckless shower of rocket-metaphors
+and inaccurate ‘facts,’ and the substitution of imagination for
+judgment, I cannot see.”
+
+I quote this passage with a particular pleasure, because Mr. McCabe
+certainly cannot put too strongly the degree to which I give him and
+his school credit for their complete sincerity and responsibility of
+philosophical attitude.  I am quite certain that they mean every word
+they say.  I also mean every word I say.  But why is it that Mr. McCabe
+has some sort of mysterious hesitation about admitting that I mean
+every word I say; why is it that he is not quite as certain of my
+mental responsibility as I am of his mental responsibility? If we
+attempt to answer the question directly and well, we shall, I think,
+have come to the root of the matter by the shortest cut.
+
+Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr.
+McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the
+opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. The question of whether a
+man expresses himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseology, or in a
+stately and restrained phraseology, is not a question of motive or of
+moral state, it is a question of instinctive language and
+self-expression. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long
+sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses
+to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his
+gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he
+preaches it in prose or verse. The question of whether Swift was funny
+in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question of
+whether Swift was serious in his pessimism. Surely even Mr. McCabe
+would not maintain that the more funny “Gulliver” is in its method the
+less it can be sincere in its object. The truth is, as I have said,
+that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have
+nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable
+than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere.  Mr.
+George Robey is funny and not sincere.  Mr. McCabe is sincere and not
+funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.
+
+In short, Mr. McCabe is under the influence of a primary fallacy which
+I have found very common in men of the clerical type. Numbers of
+clergymen have from time to time reproached me for making jokes about
+religion; and they have almost always invoked the authority of that
+very sensible commandment which says, “Thou shalt not take the name of
+the Lord thy God in vain.” Of course, I pointed out that I was not in
+any conceivable sense taking the name in vain.  To take a thing and
+make a joke out of it is not to take it in vain.  It is, on the
+contrary, to take it and use it for an uncommonly good object.  To use
+a thing in vain means to use it without use.  But a joke may be
+exceedingly useful; it may contain the whole earthly sense, not to
+mention the whole heavenly sense, of a situation.  And those who find
+in the Bible the commandment can find in the Bible any number of the
+jokes. In the same book in which God’s name is fenced from being taken
+in vain, God himself overwhelms Job with a torrent of terrible
+levities. The same book which says that God’s name must not be taken
+vainly, talks easily and carelessly about God laughing and God winking.
+Evidently it is not here that we have to look for genuine examples of
+what is meant by a vain use of the name.  And it is not very difficult
+to see where we have really to look for it. The people (as I tactfully
+pointed out to them) who really take the name of the Lord in vain are
+the clergymen themselves.  The thing which is fundamentally and really
+frivolous is not a careless joke. The thing which is fundamentally and
+really frivolous is a careless solemnity.  If Mr. McCabe really wishes
+to know what sort of guarantee of reality and solidity is afforded by
+the mere act of what is called talking seriously, let him spend a happy
+Sunday in going the round of the pulpits.  Or, better still, let him
+drop in at the House of Commons or the House of Lords.  Even Mr. McCabe
+would admit that these men are solemn—more solemn than I am. And even
+Mr. McCabe, I think, would admit that these men are frivolous—more
+frivolous than I am.  Why should Mr. McCabe be so eloquent about the
+danger arising from fantastic and paradoxical writers? Why should he be
+so ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers? There are not so very
+many fantastic and paradoxical writers. But there are a gigantic number
+of grave and verbose writers; and it is by the efforts of the grave and
+verbose writers that everything that Mr. McCabe detests (and everything
+that I detest, for that matter) is kept in existence and energy. How
+can it have come about that a man as intelligent as Mr. McCabe can
+think that paradox and jesting stop the way?  It is solemnity that is
+stopping the way in every department of modern effort. It is his own
+favourite “serious methods;” it is his own favourite “momentousness;”
+it is his own favourite “judgment” which stops the way everywhere.
+Every man who has ever headed a deputation to a minister knows this.
+Every man who has ever written a letter to the Times knows it.  Every
+rich man who wishes to stop the mouths of the poor talks about
+“momentousness.”  Every Cabinet minister who has not got an answer
+suddenly develops a “judgment.” Every sweater who uses vile methods
+recommends “serious methods.” I said a moment ago that sincerity had
+nothing to do with solemnity, but I confess that I am not so certain
+that I was right. In the modern world, at any rate, I am not so sure
+that I was right. In the modern world solemnity is the direct enemy of
+sincerity. In the modern world sincerity is almost always on one side,
+and solemnity almost always on the other.  The only answer possible to
+the fierce and glad attack of sincerity is the miserable answer of
+solemnity. Let Mr. McCabe, or any one else who is much concerned that
+we should be grave in order to be sincere, simply imagine the scene in
+some government office in which Mr. Bernard Shaw should head a
+Socialist deputation to Mr. Austen Chamberlain.  On which side would be
+the solemnity? And on which the sincerity?
+
+I am, indeed, delighted to discover that Mr. McCabe reckons Mr. Shaw
+along with me in his system of condemnation of frivolity. He said once,
+I believe, that he always wanted Mr. Shaw to label his paragraphs
+serious or comic.  I do not know which paragraphs of Mr. Shaw are
+paragraphs to be labelled serious; but surely there can be no doubt
+that this paragraph of Mr. McCabe’s is one to be labelled comic.  He
+also says, in the article I am now discussing, that Mr. Shaw has the
+reputation of deliberately saying everything which his hearers do not
+expect him to say. I need not labour the inconclusiveness and weakness
+of this, because it has already been dealt with in my remarks on Mr.
+Bernard Shaw. Suffice it to say here that the only serious reason which
+I can imagine inducing any one person to listen to any other is, that
+the first person looks to the second person with an ardent faith and a
+fixed attention, expecting him to say what he does not expect him to
+say. It may be a paradox, but that is because paradoxes are true. It
+may not be rational, but that is because rationalism is wrong. But
+clearly it is quite true that whenever we go to hear a prophet or
+teacher we may or may not expect wit, we may or may not expect
+eloquence, but we do expect what we do not expect.  We may not expect
+the true, we may not even expect the wise, but we do expect the
+unexpected. If we do not expect the unexpected, why do we go there at
+all? If we expect the expected, why do we not sit at home and expect it
+by ourselves?  If Mr. McCabe means merely this about Mr. Shaw, that he
+always has some unexpected application of his doctrine to give to those
+who listen to him, what he says is quite true, and to say it is only to
+say that Mr. Shaw is an original man. But if he means that Mr. Shaw has
+ever professed or preached any doctrine but one, and that his own, then
+what he says is not true. It is not my business to defend Mr. Shaw; as
+has been seen already, I disagree with him altogether.  But I do not
+mind, on his behalf offering in this matter a flat defiance to all his
+ordinary opponents, such as Mr. McCabe.  I defy Mr. McCabe, or anybody
+else, to mention one single instance in which Mr. Shaw has, for the
+sake of wit or novelty, taken up any position which was not directly
+deducible from the body of his doctrine as elsewhere expressed.  I have
+been, I am happy to say, a tolerably close student of Mr. Shaw’s
+utterances, and I request Mr. McCabe, if he will not believe that I
+mean anything else, to believe that I mean this challenge.
+
+All this, however, is a parenthesis.  The thing with which I am here
+immediately concerned is Mr. McCabe’s appeal to me not to be so
+frivolous. Let me return to the actual text of that appeal.  There are,
+of course, a great many things that I might say about it in detail. But
+I may start with saying that Mr. McCabe is in error in supposing that
+the danger which I anticipate from the disappearance of religion is the
+increase of sensuality.  On the contrary, I should be inclined to
+anticipate a decrease in sensuality, because I anticipate a decrease in
+life.  I do not think that under modern Western materialism we should
+have anarchy.  I doubt whether we should have enough individual valour
+and spirit even to have liberty. It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy
+to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the
+discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes
+the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere
+restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.  The McCabe
+school advocates a political liberty, but it denies spiritual liberty.
+That is, it abolishes the laws which could be broken, and substitutes
+laws that cannot.  And that is the real slavery.
+
+The truth is that the scientific civilization in which Mr. McCabe
+believes has one rather particular defect; it is perpetually tending to
+destroy that democracy or power of the ordinary man in which Mr. McCabe
+also believes.  Science means specialism, and specialism means
+oligarchy.  If you once establish the habit of trusting particular men
+to produce particular results in physics or astronomy, you leave the
+door open for the equally natural demand that you should trust
+particular men to do particular things in government and the coercing
+of men.  If, you feel it to be reasonable that one beetle should be the
+only study of one man, and that one man the only student of that one
+beetle, it is surely a very harmless consequence to go on to say that
+politics should be the only study of one man, and that one man the only
+student of politics. As I have pointed out elsewhere in this book, the
+expert is more aristocratic than the aristocrat, because the aristocrat
+is only the man who lives well, while the expert is the man who knows
+better. But if we look at the progress of our scientific civilization
+we see a gradual increase everywhere of the specialist over the popular
+function. Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man
+sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If
+scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man
+will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
+
+I do not know that I can express this more shortly than by taking as a
+text the single sentence of Mr. McCabe, which runs as follows: “The
+ballets of the Alhambra and the fireworks of the Crystal Palace and Mr.
+Chesterton’s Daily News articles have their places in life.” I wish
+that my articles had as noble a place as either of the other two things
+mentioned.  But let us ask ourselves (in a spirit of love, as Mr.
+Chadband would say), what are the ballets of the Alhambra? The ballets
+of the Alhambra are institutions in which a particular selected row of
+persons in pink go through an operation known as dancing.  Now, in all
+commonwealths dominated by a religion—in the Christian commonwealths
+of the Middle Ages and in many rude societies—this habit of dancing
+was a common habit with everybody, and was not necessarily confined to
+a professional class. A person could dance without being a dancer; a
+person could dance without being a specialist; a person could dance
+without being pink. And, in proportion as Mr. McCabe’s scientific
+civilization advances—that is, in proportion as religious civilization
+(or real civilization) decays—the more and more “well trained,” the
+more and more pink, become the people who do dance, and the more and
+more numerous become the people who don’t. Mr. McCabe may recognize an
+example of what I mean in the gradual discrediting in society of the
+ancient European waltz or dance with partners, and the substitution of
+that horrible and degrading oriental interlude which is known as
+skirt-dancing. That is the whole essence of decadence, the effacement
+of five people who do a thing for fun by one person who does it for
+money. Now it follows, therefore, that when Mr. McCabe says that the
+ballets of the Alhambra and my articles “have their place in life,” it
+ought to be pointed out to him that he is doing his best to create a
+world in which dancing, properly speaking, will have no place in life
+at all.  He is, indeed, trying to create a world in which there will be
+no life for dancing to have a place in. The very fact that Mr. McCabe
+thinks of dancing as a thing belonging to some hired women at the
+Alhambra is an illustration of the same principle by which he is able
+to think of religion as a thing belonging to some hired men in white
+neckties. Both these things are things which should not be done for us,
+but by us.  If Mr. McCabe were really religious he would be happy. If
+he were really happy he would dance.
+
+Briefly, we may put the matter in this way.  The main point of modern
+life is not that the Alhambra ballet has its place in life. The main
+point, the main enormous tragedy of modern life, is that Mr. McCabe has
+not his place in the Alhambra ballet. The joy of changing and graceful
+posture, the joy of suiting the swing of music to the swing of limbs,
+the joy of whirling drapery, the joy of standing on one leg,—all these
+should belong by rights to Mr. McCabe and to me; in short, to the
+ordinary healthy citizen. Probably we should not consent to go through
+these evolutions. But that is because we are miserable moderns and
+rationalists. We do not merely love ourselves more than we love duty;
+we actually love ourselves more than we love joy.
+
+When, therefore, Mr. McCabe says that he gives the Alhambra dances (and
+my articles) their place in life, I think we are justified in pointing
+out that by the very nature of the case of his philosophy and of his
+favourite civilization he gives them a very inadequate place. For (if I
+may pursue the too flattering parallel) Mr. McCabe thinks of the
+Alhambra and of my articles as two very odd and absurd things, which
+some special people do (probably for money) in order to amuse him. But
+if he had ever felt himself the ancient, sublime, elemental, human
+instinct to dance, he would have discovered that dancing is not a
+frivolous thing at all, but a very serious thing. He would have
+discovered that it is the one grave and chaste and decent method of
+expressing a certain class of emotions. And similarly, if he had ever
+had, as Mr. Shaw and I have had, the impulse to what he calls paradox,
+he would have discovered that paradox again is not a frivolous thing,
+but a very serious thing. He would have found that paradox simply means
+a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief.  I should regard any
+civilization which was without a universal habit of uproarious dancing
+as being, from the full human point of view, a defective civilization.
+And I should regard any mind which had not got the habit in one form or
+another of uproarious thinking as being, from the full human point of
+view, a defective mind. It is vain for Mr. McCabe to say that a ballet
+is a part of him. He should be part of a ballet, or else he is only
+part of a man. It is in vain for him to say that he is “not quarrelling
+with the importation of humour into the controversy.” He ought himself
+to be importing humour into every controversy; for unless a man is in
+part a humorist, he is only in part a man. To sum up the whole matter
+very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a
+discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part
+of the nature of man.  If he asks me why I introduce what he calls
+paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all
+philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my
+treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot.  And I say
+that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the
+fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy.
+About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity—like
+preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something.  I
+never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a
+schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. On the Wit of Whistler
+
+
+That capable and ingenious writer, Mr. Arthur Symons, has included in a
+book of essays recently published, I believe, an apologia for “London
+Nights,” in which he says that morality should be wholly subordinated
+to art in criticism, and he uses the somewhat singular argument that
+art or the worship of beauty is the same in all ages, while morality
+differs in every period and in every respect.  He appears to defy his
+critics or his readers to mention any permanent feature or quality in
+ethics. This is surely a very curious example of that extravagant bias
+against morality which makes so many ultra-modern aesthetes as morbid
+and fanatical as any Eastern hermit.  Unquestionably it is a very
+common phrase of modern intellectualism to say that the morality of one
+age can be entirely different to the morality of another. And like a
+great many other phrases of modern intellectualism, it means literally
+nothing at all.  If the two moralities are entirely different, why do
+you call them both moralities? It is as if a man said, “Camels in
+various places are totally diverse; some have six legs, some have none,
+some have scales, some have feathers, some have horns, some have wings,
+some are green, some are triangular. There is no point which they have
+in common.”  The ordinary man of sense would reply, “Then what makes
+you call them all camels? What do you mean by a camel?  How do you know
+a camel when you see one?” Of course, there is a permanent substance of
+morality, as much as there is a permanent substance of art; to say that
+is only to say that morality is morality, and that art is art.  An
+ideal art-critic would, no doubt, see the enduring beauty under every
+school; equally an ideal moralist would see the enduring ethic under
+every code. But practically some of the best Englishmen that ever lived
+could see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry piety of the
+Brahmin. And it is equally true that practically the greatest group of
+artists that the world has ever seen, the giants of the Renaissance,
+could see nothing but barbarism in the ethereal energy of Gothic.
+
+This bias against morality among the modern aesthetes is nothing very
+much paraded.  And yet it is not really a bias against morality; it is
+a bias against other people’s morality.  It is generally founded on a
+very definite moral preference for a certain sort of life, pagan,
+plausible, humane.  The modern aesthete, wishing us to believe that he
+values beauty more than conduct, reads Mallarme, and drinks absinthe in
+a tavern.  But this is not only his favourite kind of beauty; it is
+also his favourite kind of conduct. If he really wished us to believe
+that he cared for beauty only, he ought to go to nothing but Wesleyan
+school treats, and paint the sunlight in the hair of the Wesleyan
+babies.  He ought to read nothing but very eloquent theological sermons
+by old-fashioned Presbyterian divines.  Here the lack of all possible
+moral sympathy would prove that his interest was purely verbal or
+pictorial, as it is; in all the books he reads and writes he clings to
+the skirts of his own morality and his own immorality.  The champion of
+l’art pour l’art is always denouncing Ruskin for his moralizing. If he
+were really a champion of l’art pour l’art, he would be always
+insisting on Ruskin for his style.
+
+The doctrine of the distinction between art and morality owes a great
+part of its success to art and morality being hopelessly mixed up in
+the persons and performances of its greatest exponents. Of this lucky
+contradiction the very incarnation was Whistler. No man ever preached
+the impersonality of art so well; no man ever preached the
+impersonality of art so personally. For him pictures had nothing to do
+with the problems of character; but for all his fiercest admirers his
+character was, as a matter of fact far more interesting than his
+pictures. He gloried in standing as an artist apart from right and
+wrong. But he succeeded by talking from morning till night about his
+rights and about his wrongs.  His talents were many, his virtues, it
+must be confessed, not many, beyond that kindness to tried friends, on
+which many of his biographers insist, but which surely is a quality of
+all sane men, of pirates and pickpockets; beyond this, his outstanding
+virtues limit themselves chiefly to two admirable ones—courage and an
+abstract love of good work.  Yet I fancy he won at last more by those
+two virtues than by all his talents. A man must be something of a
+moralist if he is to preach, even if he is to preach unmorality.
+Professor Walter Raleigh, in his “In Memoriam: James McNeill Whistler,”
+insists, truly enough, on the strong streak of an eccentric honesty in
+matters strictly pictorial, which ran through his complex and slightly
+confused character. “He would destroy any of his works rather than
+leave a careless or inexpressive touch within the limits of the frame.
+He would begin again a hundred times over rather than attempt by
+patching to make his work seem better than it was.”
+
+No one will blame Professor Raleigh, who had to read a sort of funeral
+oration over Whistler at the opening of the Memorial Exhibition, if,
+finding himself in that position, he confined himself mostly to the
+merits and the stronger qualities of his subject. We should naturally
+go to some other type of composition for a proper consideration of the
+weaknesses of Whistler. But these must never be omitted from our view
+of him. Indeed, the truth is that it was not so much a question of the
+weaknesses of Whistler as of the intrinsic and primary weakness of
+Whistler. He was one of those people who live up to their emotional
+incomes, who are always taut and tingling with vanity.  Hence he had no
+strength to spare; hence he had no kindness, no geniality; for
+geniality is almost definable as strength to spare. He had no god-like
+carelessness; he never forgot himself; his whole life was, to use his
+own expression, an arrangement. He went in for “the art of living”—a
+miserable trick. In a word, he was a great artist; but emphatically not
+a great man. In this connection I must differ strongly with Professor
+Raleigh upon what is, from a superficial literary point of view, one of
+his most effective points.  He compares Whistler’s laughter to the
+laughter of another man who was a great man as well as a great artist.
+“His attitude to the public was exactly the attitude taken up by Robert
+Browning, who suffered as long a period of neglect and mistake, in
+those lines of ‘The Ring and the Book’—
+
+ “‘Well, British Public, ye who like me not,
+   (God love you!) and will have your proper laugh
+   At the dark question; laugh it!  I’d laugh first.’
+
+“Mr. Whistler,” adds Professor Raleigh, “always laughed first.” The
+truth is, I believe, that Whistler never laughed at all. There was no
+laughter in his nature; because there was no thoughtlessness and
+self-abandonment, no humility.  I cannot understand anybody reading
+“The Gentle Art of Making Enemies” and thinking that there is any
+laughter in the wit.  His wit is a torture to him. He twists himself
+into arabesques of verbal felicity; he is full of a fierce carefulness;
+he is inspired with the complete seriousness of sincere malice.  He
+hurts himself to hurt his opponent. Browning did laugh, because
+Browning did not care; Browning did not care, because Browning was a
+great man.  And when Browning said in brackets to the simple, sensible
+people who did not like his books, “God love you!” he was not sneering
+in the least. He was laughing—that is to say, he meant exactly what he
+said.
+
+There are three distinct classes of great satirists who are also great
+men—that is to say, three classes of men who can laugh at something
+without losing their souls.  The satirist of the first type is the man
+who, first of all enjoys himself, and then enjoys his enemies. In this
+sense he loves his enemy, and by a kind of exaggeration of Christianity
+he loves his enemy the more the more he becomes an enemy. He has a sort
+of overwhelming and aggressive happiness in his assertion of anger; his
+curse is as human as a benediction. Of this type of satire the great
+example is Rabelais.  This is the first typical example of satire, the
+satire which is voluble, which is violent, which is indecent, but which
+is not malicious. The satire of Whistler was not this.  He was never in
+any of his controversies simply happy; the proof of it is that he never
+talked absolute nonsense.  There is a second type of mind which
+produces satire with the quality of greatness.  That is embodied in the
+satirist whose passions are released and let go by some intolerable
+sense of wrong. He is maddened by the sense of men being maddened; his
+tongue becomes an unruly member, and testifies against all mankind.
+Such a man was Swift, in whom the saeva indignatio was a bitterness to
+others, because it was a bitterness to himself.  Such a satirist
+Whistler was not.  He did not laugh because he was happy, like
+Rabelais. But neither did he laugh because he was unhappy, like Swift.
+
+The third type of great satire is that in which he satirist is enabled
+to rise superior to his victim in the only serious sense which
+superiority can bear, in that of pitying the sinner and respecting the
+man even while he satirises both.  Such an achievement can be found in
+a thing like Pope’s “Atticus” a poem in which the satirist feels that
+he is satirising the weaknesses which belong specially to literary
+genius.  Consequently he takes a pleasure in pointing out his enemy’s
+strength before he points out his weakness. That is, perhaps, the
+highest and most honourable form of satire. That is not the satire of
+Whistler.  He is not full of a great sorrow for the wrong done to human
+nature; for him the wrong is altogether done to himself.
+
+He was not a great personality, because he thought so much about
+himself.  And the case is stronger even than that. He was sometimes not
+even a great artist, because he thought so much about art.  Any man
+with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most
+profound suspicion of anybody who claims to be an artist, and talks a
+great deal about art. Art is a right and human thing, like walking or
+saying one’s prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very
+solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into a
+congestion and a kind of difficulty.
+
+The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a
+disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression
+to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is
+healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is
+essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all
+costs.  Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art
+easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of
+less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain,
+which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are
+able to be ordinary men—men like Shakespeare or Browning.  There are
+many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or
+violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is
+that it cannot produce any art.
+
+Whistler could produce art; and in so far he was a great man. But he
+could not forget art; and in so far he was only a man with the artistic
+temperament.  There can be no stronger manifestation of the man who is
+a really great artist than the fact that he can dismiss the subject of
+art; that he can, upon due occasion, wish art at the bottom of the sea.
+Similarly, we should always be much more inclined to trust a solicitor
+who did not talk about conveyancing over the nuts and wine.  What we
+really desire of any man conducting any business is that the full force
+of an ordinary man should be put into that particular study.  We do not
+desire that the full force of that study should be put into an ordinary
+man. We do not in the least wish that our particular law-suit should
+pour its energy into our barrister’s games with his children, or rides
+on his bicycle, or meditations on the morning star. But we do, as a
+matter of fact, desire that his games with his children, and his rides
+on his bicycle, and his meditations on the morning star should pour
+something of their energy into our law-suit. We do desire that if he
+has gained any especial lung development from the bicycle, or any
+bright and pleasing metaphors from the morning star, that the should be
+placed at our disposal in that particular forensic controversy. In a
+word, we are very glad that he is an ordinary man, since that may help
+him to be an exceptional lawyer.
+
+Whistler never ceased to be an artist.  As Mr. Max Beerbohm pointed out
+in one of his extraordinarily sensible and sincere critiques, Whistler
+really regarded Whistler as his greatest work of art. The white lock,
+the single eyeglass, the remarkable hat—these were much dearer to him
+than any nocturnes or arrangements that he ever threw off.  He could
+throw off the nocturnes; for some mysterious reason he could not throw
+off the hat. He never threw off from himself that disproportionate
+accumulation of aestheticism which is the burden of the amateur.
+
+It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing
+which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the
+extreme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many great geniuses in
+history. Their behaviour was so ordinary that it was not recorded;
+hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious.  Hence people say
+that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.  The modern artistic temperament cannot
+understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote,
+could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a
+little town in Warwickshire.  The explanation is simple enough; it is
+that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so
+got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did
+not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a
+sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an
+ordinary man.
+
+All very great teachers and leaders have had this habit of assuming
+their point of view to be one which was human and casual, one which
+would readily appeal to every passing man. If a man is genuinely
+superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the
+equality of man.  We can see this, for instance, in that strange and
+innocent rationality with which Christ addressed any motley crowd that
+happened to stand about Him. “What man of you having a hundred sheep,
+and losing one, would not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness,
+and go after that which was lost?” Or, again, “What man of you if his
+son ask for bread will he give him a stone, or if he ask for a fish
+will he give him a serpent?” This plainness, this almost prosaic
+camaraderie, is the note of all very great minds.
+
+To very great minds the things on which men agree are so immeasurably
+more important than the things on which they differ, that the latter,
+for all practical purposes, disappear.  They have too much in them of
+an ancient laughter even to endure to discuss the difference between
+the hats of two men who were both born of a woman, or between the
+subtly varied cultures of two men who have both to die. The first-rate
+great man is equal with other men, like Shakespeare. The second-rate
+great man is on his knees to other men, like Whitman. The third-rate
+great man is superior to other men, like Whistler.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. The Fallacy of the Young Nation
+
+
+To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man;
+but, nevertheless, it might be possible to effect some valid
+distinction between one kind of idealist and another. One possible
+distinction, for instance, could be effected by saying that humanity is
+divided into conscious idealists and unconscious idealists. In a
+similar way, humanity is divided into conscious ritualists and
+unconscious ritualists.  The curious thing is, in that example as in
+others, that it is the conscious ritualism which is comparatively
+simple, the unconscious ritual which is really heavy and complicated.
+The ritual which is comparatively rude and straightforward is the
+ritual which people call “ritualistic.”  It consists of plain things
+like bread and wine and fire, and men falling on their faces. But the
+ritual which is really complex, and many coloured, and elaborate, and
+needlessly formal, is the ritual which people enact without knowing it.
+It consists not of plain things like wine and fire, but of really
+peculiar, and local, and exceptional, and ingenious things—things like
+door-mats, and door-knockers, and electric bells, and silk hats, and
+white ties, and shiny cards, and confetti. The truth is that the modern
+man scarcely ever gets back to very old and simple things except when
+he is performing some religious mummery. The modern man can hardly get
+away from ritual except by entering a ritualistic church.  In the case
+of these old and mystical formalities we can at least say that the
+ritual is not mere ritual; that the symbols employed are in most cases
+symbols which belong to a primary human poetry.  The most ferocious
+opponent of the Christian ceremonials must admit that if Catholicism
+had not instituted the bread and wine, somebody else would most
+probably have done so. Any one with a poetical instinct will admit that
+to the ordinary human instinct bread symbolizes something which cannot
+very easily be symbolized otherwise; that wine, to the ordinary human
+instinct, symbolizes something which cannot very easily be symbolized
+otherwise. But white ties in the evening are ritual, and nothing else
+but ritual. No one would pretend that white ties in the evening are
+primary and poetical.  Nobody would maintain that the ordinary human
+instinct would in any age or country tend to symbolize the idea of
+evening by a white necktie.  Rather, the ordinary human instinct would,
+I imagine, tend to symbolize evening by cravats with some of the
+colours of the sunset, not white neckties, but tawny or crimson
+neckties—neckties of purple or olive, or some darkened gold.  Mr. J.
+A. Kensit, for example, is under the impression that he is not a
+ritualist. But the daily life of Mr. J. A. Kensit, like that of any
+ordinary modern man, is, as a matter of fact, one continual and
+compressed catalogue of mystical mummery and flummery.  To take one
+instance out of an inevitable hundred:  I imagine that Mr. Kensit takes
+off his hat to a lady; and what can be more solemn and absurd,
+considered in the abstract, than, symbolizing the existence of the
+other sex by taking off a portion of your clothing and waving it in the
+air? This, I repeat, is not a natural and primitive symbol, like fire
+or food. A man might just as well have to take off his waistcoat to a
+lady; and if a man, by the social ritual of his civilization, had to
+take off his waistcoat to a lady, every chivalrous and sensible man
+would take off his waistcoat to a lady.  In short, Mr. Kensit, and
+those who agree with him, may think, and quite sincerely think, that
+men give too much incense and ceremonial to their adoration of the
+other world. But nobody thinks that he can give too much incense and
+ceremonial to the adoration of this world.  All men, then, are
+ritualists, but are either conscious or unconscious ritualists.  The
+conscious ritualists are generally satisfied with a few very simple and
+elementary signs; the unconscious ritualists are not satisfied with
+anything short of the whole of human life, being almost insanely
+ritualistic. The first is called a ritualist because he invents and
+remembers one rite; the other is called an anti-ritualist because he
+obeys and forgets a thousand.  And a somewhat similar distinction to
+this which I have drawn with some unavoidable length, between the
+conscious ritualist and the unconscious ritualist, exists between the
+conscious idealist and the unconscious idealist. It is idle to inveigh
+against cynics and materialists—there are no cynics, there are no
+materialists.  Every man is idealistic; only it so often happens that
+he has the wrong ideal. Every man is incurably sentimental; but,
+unfortunately, it is so often a false sentiment.  When we talk, for
+instance, of some unscrupulous commercial figure, and say that he would
+do anything for money, we use quite an inaccurate expression, and we
+slander him very much. He would not do anything for money.  He would do
+some things for money; he would sell his soul for money, for instance;
+and, as Mirabeau humorously said, he would be quite wise “to take money
+for muck.” He would oppress humanity for money; but then it happens
+that humanity and the soul are not things that he believes in; they are
+not his ideals. But he has his own dim and delicate ideals; and he
+would not violate these for money.  He would not drink out of the
+soup-tureen, for money. He would not wear his coat-tails in front, for
+money.  He would not spread a report that he had softening of the
+brain, for money. In the actual practice of life we find, in the matter
+of ideals, exactly what we have already found in the matter of ritual.
+We find that while there is a perfectly genuine danger of fanaticism
+from the men who have unworldly ideals, the permanent and urgent danger
+of fanaticism is from the men who have worldly ideals.
+
+People who say that an ideal is a dangerous thing, that it deludes and
+intoxicates, are perfectly right.  But the ideal which intoxicates most
+is the least idealistic kind of ideal. The ideal which intoxicates
+least is the very ideal ideal; that sobers us suddenly, as all heights
+and precipices and great distances do. Granted that it is a great evil
+to mistake a cloud for a cape; still, the cloud, which can be most
+easily mistaken for a cape, is the cloud that is nearest the earth.
+Similarly, we may grant that it may be dangerous to mistake an ideal
+for something practical. But we shall still point out that, in this
+respect, the most dangerous ideal of all is the ideal which looks a
+little practical. It is difficult to attain a high ideal; consequently,
+it is almost impossible to persuade ourselves that we have attained it.
+But it is easy to attain a low ideal; consequently, it is easier still
+to persuade ourselves that we have attained it when we have done
+nothing of the kind.  To take a random example. It might be called a
+high ambition to wish to be an archangel; the man who entertained such
+an ideal would very possibly exhibit asceticism, or even frenzy, but
+not, I think, delusion. He would not think he was an archangel, and go
+about flapping his hands under the impression that they were wings. But
+suppose that a sane man had a low ideal; suppose he wished to be a
+gentleman.  Any one who knows the world knows that in nine weeks he
+would have persuaded himself that he was a gentleman; and this being
+manifestly not the case, the result will be very real and practical
+dislocations and calamities in social life. It is not the wild ideals
+which wreck the practical world; it is the tame ideals.
+
+The matter may, perhaps, be illustrated by a parallel from our modern
+politics.  When men tell us that the old Liberal politicians of the
+type of Gladstone cared only for ideals, of course, they are talking
+nonsense—they cared for a great many other things, including votes.
+And when men tell us that modern politicians of the type of Mr.
+Chamberlain or, in another way, Lord Rosebery, care only for votes or
+for material interest, then again they are talking nonsense—these men
+care for ideals like all other men. But the real distinction which may
+be drawn is this, that to the older politician the ideal was an ideal,
+and nothing else. To the new politician his dream is not only a good
+dream, it is a reality. The old politician would have said, “It would
+be a good thing if there were a Republican Federation dominating the
+world.” But the modern politician does not say, “It would be a good
+thing if there were a British Imperialism dominating the world.” He
+says, “It is a good thing that there is a British Imperialism
+dominating the world;” whereas clearly there is nothing of the kind.
+The old Liberal would say “There ought to be a good Irish government in
+Ireland.”  But the ordinary modern Unionist does not say, “There ought
+to be a good English government in Ireland.”  He says, “There is a good
+English government in Ireland;” which is absurd. In short, the modern
+politicians seem to think that a man becomes practical merely by making
+assertions entirely about practical things. Apparently, a delusion does
+not matter as long as it is a materialistic delusion.  Instinctively
+most of us feel that, as a practical matter, even the contrary is true.
+I certainly would much rather share my apartments with a gentleman who
+thought he was God than with a gentleman who thought he was a
+grasshopper. To be continually haunted by practical images and
+practical problems, to be constantly thinking of things as actual, as
+urgent, as in process of completion—these things do not prove a man to
+be practical; these things, indeed, are among the most ordinary signs
+of a lunatic. That our modern statesmen are materialistic is nothing
+against their being also morbid.  Seeing angels in a vision may make a
+man a supernaturalist to excess.  But merely seeing snakes in delirium
+tremens does not make him a naturalist.
+
+And when we come actually to examine the main stock notions of our
+modern practical politicians, we find that those main stock notions are
+mainly delusions.  A great many instances might be given of the fact.
+We might take, for example, the case of that strange class of notions
+which underlie the word “union,” and all the eulogies heaped upon it.
+Of course, union is no more a good thing in itself than separation is a
+good thing in itself.  To have a party in favour of union and a party
+in favour of separation is as absurd as to have a party in favour of
+going upstairs and a party in favour of going downstairs. The question
+is not whether we go up or down stairs, but where we are going to, and
+what we are going, for?  Union is strength; union is also weakness.  It
+is a good thing to harness two horses to a cart; but it is not a good
+thing to try and turn two hansom cabs into one four-wheeler. Turning
+ten nations into one empire may happen to be as feasible as turning ten
+shillings into one half-sovereign. Also it may happen to be as
+preposterous as turning ten terriers into one mastiff. The question in
+all cases is not a question of union or absence of union, but of
+identity or absence of identity. Owing to certain historical and moral
+causes, two nations may be so united as upon the whole to help each
+other.  Thus England and Scotland pass their time in paying each other
+compliments; but their energies and atmospheres run distinct and
+parallel, and consequently do not clash.  Scotland continues to be
+educated and Calvinistic; England continues to be uneducated and happy.
+But owing to certain other Moral and certain other political causes,
+two nations may be so united as only to hamper each other; their lines
+do clash and do not run parallel.  Thus, for instance, England and
+Ireland are so united that the Irish can sometimes rule England, but
+can never rule Ireland. The educational systems, including the last
+Education Act, are here, as in the case of Scotland, a very good test
+of the matter. The overwhelming majority of Irishmen believe in a
+strict Catholicism; the overwhelming majority of Englishmen believe in
+a vague Protestantism. The Irish party in the Parliament of Union is
+just large enough to prevent the English education being indefinitely
+Protestant, and just small enough to prevent the Irish education being
+definitely Catholic. Here we have a state of things which no man in his
+senses would ever dream of wishing to continue if he had not been
+bewitched by the sentimentalism of the mere word “union.”
+
+This example of union, however, is not the example which I propose to
+take of the ingrained futility and deception underlying all the
+assumptions of the modern practical politician. I wish to speak
+especially of another and much more general delusion. It pervades the
+minds and speeches of all the practical men of all parties; and it is a
+childish blunder built upon a single false metaphor. I refer to the
+universal modern talk about young nations and new nations; about
+America being young, about New Zealand being new.  The whole thing is a
+trick of words.  America is not young, New Zealand is not new. It is a
+very discussable question whether they are not both much older than
+England or Ireland.
+
+Of course we may use the metaphor of youth about America or the
+colonies, if we use it strictly as implying only a recent origin. But
+if we use it (as we do use it) as implying vigour, or vivacity, or
+crudity, or inexperience, or hope, or a long life before them or any of
+the romantic attributes of youth, then it is surely as clear as
+daylight that we are duped by a stale figure of speech. We can easily
+see the matter clearly by applying it to any other institution parallel
+to the institution of an independent nationality. If a club called “The
+Milk and Soda League” (let us say) was set up yesterday, as I have no
+doubt it was, then, of course, “The Milk and Soda League” is a young
+club in the sense that it was set up yesterday, but in no other sense.
+It may consist entirely of moribund old gentlemen.  It may be moribund
+itself. We may call it a young club, in the light of the fact that it
+was founded yesterday.  We may also call it a very old club in the
+light of the fact that it will most probably go bankrupt to-morrow. All
+this appears very obvious when we put it in this form. Any one who
+adopted the young-community delusion with regard to a bank or a
+butcher’s shop would be sent to an asylum. But the whole modern
+political notion that America and the colonies must be very vigorous
+because they are very new, rests upon no better foundation.  That
+America was founded long after England does not make it even in the
+faintest degree more probable that America will not perish a long time
+before England. That England existed before her colonies does not make
+it any the less likely that she will exist after her colonies.  And
+when we look at the actual history of the world, we find that great
+European nations almost invariably have survived the vitality of their
+colonies. When we look at the actual history of the world, we find,
+that if there is a thing that is born old and dies young, it is a
+colony. The Greek colonies went to pieces long before the Greek
+civilization. The Spanish colonies have gone to pieces long before the
+nation of Spain—nor does there seem to be any reason to doubt the
+possibility or even the probability of the conclusion that the colonial
+civilization, which owes its origin to England, will be much briefer
+and much less vigorous than the civilization of England itself.  The
+English nation will still be going the way of all European nations when
+the Anglo-Saxon race has gone the way of all fads.  Now, of course, the
+interesting question is, have we, in the case of America and the
+colonies, any real evidence of a moral and intellectual youth as
+opposed to the indisputable triviality of a merely chronological youth?
+Consciously or unconsciously, we know that we have no such evidence,
+and consciously or unconsciously, therefore, we proceed to make it up.
+Of this pure and placid invention, a good example, for instance, can be
+found in a recent poem of Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s. Speaking of the
+English people and the South African War Mr. Kipling says that “we
+fawned on the younger nations for the men that could shoot and ride.”
+Some people considered this sentence insulting.  All that I am
+concerned with at present is the evident fact that it is not true. The
+colonies provided very useful volunteer troops, but they did not
+provide the best troops, nor achieve the most successful exploits. The
+best work in the war on the English side was done, as might have been
+expected, by the best English regiments. The men who could shoot and
+ride were not the enthusiastic corn merchants from Melbourne, any more
+than they were the enthusiastic clerks from Cheapside.  The men who
+could shoot and ride were the men who had been taught to shoot and ride
+in the discipline of the standing army of a great European power.  Of
+course, the colonials are as brave and athletic as any other average
+white men. Of course, they acquitted themselves with reasonable credit.
+All I have here to indicate is that, for the purposes of this theory of
+the new nation, it is necessary to maintain that the colonial forces
+were more useful or more heroic than the gunners at Colenso or the
+Fighting Fifth.  And of this contention there is not, and never has
+been, one stick or straw of evidence.
+
+A similar attempt is made, and with even less success, to represent the
+literature of the colonies as something fresh and vigorous and
+important. The imperialist magazines are constantly springing upon us
+some genius from Queensland or Canada, through whom we are expected to
+smell the odours of the bush or the prairie.  As a matter of fact, any
+one who is even slightly interested in literature as such (and I, for
+one, confess that I am only slightly interested in literature as such),
+will freely admit that the stories of these geniuses smell of nothing
+but printer’s ink, and that not of first-rate quality. By a great
+effort of Imperial imagination the generous English people reads into
+these works a force and a novelty. But the force and the novelty are
+not in the new writers; the force and the novelty are in the ancient
+heart of the English. Anybody who studies them impartially will know
+that the first-rate writers of the colonies are not even particularly
+novel in their note and atmosphere, are not only not producing a new
+kind of good literature, but are not even in any particular sense
+producing a new kind of bad literature.  The first-rate writers of the
+new countries are really almost exactly like the second-rate writers of
+the old countries.  Of course they do feel the mystery of the
+wilderness, the mystery of the bush, for all simple and honest men feel
+this in Melbourne, or Margate, or South St. Pancras. But when they
+write most sincerely and most successfully, it is not with a background
+of the mystery of the bush, but with a background, expressed or
+assumed, of our own romantic cockney civilization. What really moves
+their souls with a kindly terror is not the mystery of the wilderness,
+but the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.
+
+Of course there are some exceptions to this generalization. The one
+really arresting exception is Olive Schreiner, and she is quite as
+certainly an exception that proves the rule. Olive Schreiner is a
+fierce, brilliant, and realistic novelist; but she is all this
+precisely because she is not English at all. Her tribal kinship is with
+the country of Teniers and Maarten Maartens—that is, with a country of
+realists.  Her literary kinship is with the pessimistic fiction of the
+continent; with the novelists whose very pity is cruel.  Olive
+Schreiner is the one English colonial who is not conventional, for the
+simple reason that South Africa is the one English colony which is not
+English, and probably never will be. And, of course, there are
+individual exceptions in a minor way. I remember in particular some
+Australian tales by Mr. McIlwain which were really able and effective,
+and which, for that reason, I suppose, are not presented to the public
+with blasts of a trumpet. But my general contention if put before any
+one with a love of letters, will not be disputed if it is understood.
+It is not the truth that the colonial civilization as a whole is giving
+us, or shows any signs of giving us, a literature which will startle
+and renovate our own.  It may be a very good thing for us to have an
+affectionate illusion in the matter; that is quite another affair. The
+colonies may have given England a new emotion; I only say that they
+have not given the world a new book.
+
+Touching these English colonies, I do not wish to be misunderstood. I
+do not say of them or of America that they have not a future, or that
+they will not be great nations.  I merely deny the whole established
+modern expression about them.  I deny that they are “destined” to a
+future.  I deny that they are “destined” to be great nations. I deny
+(of course) that any human thing is destined to be anything. All the
+absurd physical metaphors, such as youth and age, living and dying,
+are, when applied to nations, but pseudo-scientific attempts to conceal
+from men the awful liberty of their lonely souls.
+
+In the case of America, indeed, a warning to this effect is instant and
+essential.  America, of course, like every other human thing, can in
+spiritual sense live or die as much as it chooses. But at the present
+moment the matter which America has very seriously to consider is not
+how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to
+its end.  It is only a verbal question whether the American
+civilization is young; it may become a very practical and urgent
+question whether it is dying. When once we have cast aside, as we
+inevitably have after a moment’s thought, the fanciful physical
+metaphor involved in the word “youth,” what serious evidence have we
+that America is a fresh force and not a stale one?  It has a great many
+people, like China; it has a great deal of money, like defeated
+Carthage or dying Venice. It is full of bustle and excitability, like
+Athens after its ruin, and all the Greek cities in their decline.  It
+is fond of new things; but the old are always fond of new things.
+Young men read chronicles, but old men read newspapers.  It admires
+strength and good looks; it admires a big and barbaric beauty in its
+women, for instance; but so did Rome when the Goth was at the gates.
+All these are things quite compatible with fundamental tedium and
+decay. There are three main shapes or symbols in which a nation can
+show itself essentially glad and great—by the heroic in government, by
+the heroic in arms, and by the heroic in art.  Beyond government, which
+is, as it were, the very shape and body of a nation, the most
+significant thing about any citizen is his artistic attitude towards a
+holiday and his moral attitude towards a fight—that is, his way of
+accepting life and his way of accepting death.
+
+Subjected to these eternal tests, America does not appear by any means
+as particularly fresh or untouched.  She appears with all the weakness
+and weariness of modern England or of any other Western power. In her
+politics she has broken up exactly as England has broken up, into a
+bewildering opportunism and insincerity.  In the matter of war and the
+national attitude towards war, her resemblance to England is even more
+manifest and melancholy.  It may be said with rough accuracy that there
+are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small
+power, and fights small powers.  Then it is a great power, and fights
+great powers.  Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but
+pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of
+its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become
+a small power itself. England exhibited this symptom of decadence very
+badly in the war with the Transvaal; but America exhibited it worse in
+the war with Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than
+anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a
+strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. America added
+to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the
+Caracallan triumph, the triumph over nobody.
+
+But when we come to the last test of nationality, the test of art and
+letters, the case is almost terrible.  The English colonies have
+produced no great artists; and that fact may prove that they are still
+full of silent possibilities and reserve force. But America has
+produced great artists.  And that fact most certainly proves that she
+is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. Whatever the
+American men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young
+world.  Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and
+headlong?  Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a
+schoolboy?  No; the colonies have not spoken, and they are safe. Their
+silence may be the silence of the unborn.  But out of America has come
+a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.
+
+
+
+
+XIX. Slum Novelists and the Slums
+
+
+Odd ideas are entertained in our time about the real nature of the
+doctrine of human fraternity.  The real doctrine is something which we
+do not, with all our modern humanitarianism, very clearly understand,
+much less very closely practise.  There is nothing, for instance,
+particularly undemocratic about kicking your butler downstairs. It may
+be wrong, but it is not unfraternal.  In a certain sense, the blow or
+kick may be considered as a confession of equality: you are meeting
+your butler body to body; you are almost according him the privilege of
+the duel.  There is nothing, undemocratic, though there may be
+something unreasonable, in expecting a great deal from the butler, and
+being filled with a kind of frenzy of surprise when he falls short of
+the divine stature.  The thing which is really undemocratic and
+unfraternal is not to expect the butler to be more or less divine.  The
+thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is to say, as so
+many modern humanitarians say, “Of course one must make allowances for
+those on a lower plane.” All things considered indeed, it may be said,
+without undue exaggeration, that the really undemocratic and
+unfraternal thing is the common practice of not kicking the butler
+downstairs.
+
+It is only because such a vast section of the modern world is out of
+sympathy with the serious democratic sentiment that this statement will
+seem to many to be lacking in seriousness. Democracy is not
+philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is
+not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on
+reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him.  It
+does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is
+so sublime.  It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a
+slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of
+the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.
+
+Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a
+hereditary despotism.  I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely
+no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness
+for the post. Rational despotism—that is, selective despotism—is
+always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man
+misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect
+for him at all.  But irrational despotism is always democratic, because
+it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that
+which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man
+as despot because he is suitable.  For that means that men choose a
+representative, not because he represents them, but because he does
+not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV. because
+they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an
+ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man
+because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great
+men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of
+great men until the time when all other men are small.
+
+Hereditary despotism is, then, in essence and sentiment democratic
+because it chooses from mankind at random. If it does not declare that
+every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing; it
+declares that any man may rule. Hereditary aristocracy is a far worse
+and more dangerous thing, because the numbers and multiplicity of an
+aristocracy make it sometimes possible for it to figure as an
+aristocracy of intellect. Some of its members will presumably have
+brains, and thus they, at any rate, will be an intellectual aristocracy
+within the social one. They will rule the aristocracy by virtue of
+their intellect, and they will rule the country by virtue of their
+aristocracy. Thus a double falsity will be set up, and millions of the
+images of God, who, fortunately for their wives and families, are
+neither gentlemen nor clever men, will be represented by a man like Mr.
+Balfour or Mr. Wyndham, because he is too gentlemanly to be called
+merely clever, and just too clever to be called merely a gentleman. But
+even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit, by a sort of accident, from
+time to time some of the basically democratic quality which belongs to
+a hereditary despotism.  It is amusing to think how much conservative
+ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House of Lords by men
+who were desperately endeavouring to prove that the House of Lords
+consisted of clever men.  There is one really good defence of the House
+of Lords, though admirers of the peerage are strangely coy about using
+it; and that is, that the House of Lords, in its full and proper
+strength, consists of stupid men. It really would be a plausible
+defence of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the
+clever men in the Commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in
+the last resort to be checked by the average man in the Lords, who owed
+their power to accident. Of course, there would be many answers to such
+a contention, as, for instance, that the House of Lords is largely no
+longer a House of Lords, but a House of tradesmen and financiers, or
+that the bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote, and so leave the
+chamber to the prigs and the specialists and the mad old gentlemen with
+hobbies.  But on some occasions the House of Lords, even under all
+these disadvantages, is in some sense representative. When all the
+peers flocked together to vote against Mr. Gladstone’s second Home Rule
+Bill, for instance, those who said that the peers represented the
+English people, were perfectly right. All those dear old men who
+happened to be born peers were at that moment, and upon that question,
+the precise counterpart of all the dear old men who happened to be born
+paupers or middle-class gentlemen. That mob of peers did really
+represent the English people—that is to say, it was honest, ignorant,
+vaguely excited, almost unanimous, and obviously wrong.  Of course,
+rational democracy is better as an expression of the public will than
+the haphazard hereditary method. While we are about having any kind of
+democracy, let it be rational democracy.  But if we are to have any
+kind of oligarchy, let it be irrational oligarchy.  Then at least we
+shall be ruled by men.
+
+But the thing which is really required for the proper working of
+democracy is not merely the democratic system, or even the democratic
+philosophy, but the democratic emotion.  The democratic emotion, like
+most elementary and indispensable things, is a thing difficult to
+describe at any time. But it is peculiarly difficult to describe it in
+our enlightened age, for the simple reason that it is peculiarly
+difficult to find it. It is a certain instinctive attitude which feels
+the things in which all men agree to be unspeakably important, and all
+the things in which they differ (such as mere brains) to be almost
+unspeakably unimportant.  The nearest approach to it in our ordinary
+life would be the promptitude with which we should consider mere
+humanity in any circumstance of shock or death. We should say, after a
+somewhat disturbing discovery, “There is a dead man under the sofa.”
+We should not be likely to say, “There is a dead man of considerable
+personal refinement under the sofa.” We should say, “A woman has fallen
+into the water.”  We should not say, “A highly educated woman has
+fallen into the water.”  Nobody would say, “There are the remains of a
+clear thinker in your back garden.” Nobody would say, “Unless you hurry
+up and stop him, a man with a very fine ear for music will have jumped
+off that cliff.” But this emotion, which all of us have in connection
+with such things as birth and death, is to some people native and
+constant at all ordinary times and in all ordinary places.  It was
+native to St. Francis of Assisi.  It was native to Walt Whitman. In
+this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected, perhaps, to
+pervade a whole commonwealth or a whole civilization; but one
+commonwealth may have it much more than another commonwealth, one
+civilization much more than another civilization. No community,
+perhaps, ever had it so much as the early Franciscans. No community,
+perhaps, ever had it so little as ours.
+
+Everything in our age has, when carefully examined, this fundamentally
+undemocratic quality.  In religion and morals we should admit, in the
+abstract, that the sins of the educated classes were as great as, or
+perhaps greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant. But in
+practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is
+that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the
+ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the
+educated are sins at all. We are always talking about the sin of
+intemperate drinking, because it is quite obvious that the poor have it
+more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such
+thing as the sin of pride, because it would be quite obvious that the
+rich have it more than the poor. We are always ready to make a saint or
+prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little
+kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or
+prophet was something quite different. The mediaeval saint or prophet
+was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little
+kindly advice to the educated. The old tyrants had enough insolence to
+despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them.
+It was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that
+admonished the gentleman.  And just as we are undemocratic in faith and
+morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude in such matters,
+undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics. It is a sufficient
+proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are
+always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats,
+we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the
+governing class is always saying to itself, “What laws shall we make?”
+In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, “What laws can
+we obey?”  A purely democratic state perhaps there has never been.  But
+even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every
+feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all
+probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for
+breaking a sumptuary law. His head might be cut off for high treason.
+But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed
+class, but not the governing. We have public-house licensing laws, but
+not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity
+and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and
+hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy—that is,
+against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a
+rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge.  But we have no laws
+against heresy—that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the
+whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be
+likely to be successful.  The evil of aristocracy is not that it
+necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of
+sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the
+hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never
+suffer. Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad,
+they become equally frivolous.  The case against the governing class of
+modern England is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like, you
+may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. The case
+against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they
+always omit themselves.
+
+We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts
+to “raise” the poor.  We are undemocratic in our government, as is
+proved by our innocent attempt to govern them well. But above all we
+are undemocratic in our literature, as is proved by the torrent of
+novels about the poor and serious studies of the poor which pour from
+our publishers every month. And the more “modern” the book is the more
+certain it is to be devoid of democratic sentiment.
+
+A poor man is a man who has not got much money.  This may seem a simple
+and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern
+fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists
+and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an
+alligator.  There is no more need to study the psychology of poverty
+than to study the psychology of bad temper, or the psychology of
+vanity, or the psychology of animal spirits. A man ought to know
+something of the emotions of an insulted man, not by being insulted,
+but simply by being a man.  And he ought to know something of the
+emotions of a poor man, not by being poor, but simply by being a man.
+Therefore, in any writer who is describing poverty, my first objection
+to him will be that he has studied his subject. A democrat would have
+imagined it.
+
+A great many hard things have been said about religious slumming and
+political or social slumming, but surely the most despicable of all is
+artistic slumming.  The religious teacher is at least supposed to be
+interested in the costermonger because he is a man; the politician is
+in some dim and perverted sense interested in the costermonger because
+he is a citizen; it is only the wretched writer who is interested in
+the costermonger merely because he is a costermonger.  Nevertheless, so
+long as he is merely seeking impressions, or in other words copy, his
+trade, though dull, is honest. But when he endeavours to represent that
+he is describing the spiritual core of a costermonger, his dim vices
+and his delicate virtues, then we must object that his claim is
+preposterous; we must remind him that he is a journalist and nothing
+else. He has far less psychological authority even than the foolish
+missionary. For he is in the literal and derivative sense a journalist,
+while the missionary is an eternalist.  The missionary at least
+pretends to have a version of the man’s lot for all time; the
+journalist only pretends to have a version of it from day to day. The
+missionary comes to tell the poor man that he is in the same condition
+with all men.  The journalist comes to tell other people how different
+the poor man is from everybody else.
+
+If the modern novels about the slums, such as novels of Mr. Arthur
+Morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maugham, are
+intended to be sensational, I can only say that that is a noble and
+reasonable object, and that they attain it.  A sensation, a shock to
+the imagination, like the contact with cold water, is always a good and
+exhilarating thing; and, undoubtedly, men will always seek this
+sensation (among other forms) in the form of the study of the strange
+antics of remote or alien peoples.  In the twelfth century men obtained
+this sensation by reading about dog-headed men in Africa. In the
+twentieth century they obtained it by reading about pig-headed Boers in
+Africa.  The men of the twentieth century were certainly, it must be
+admitted, somewhat the more credulous of the two. For it is not
+recorded of the men in the twelfth century that they organized a
+sanguinary crusade solely for the purpose of altering the singular
+formation of the heads of the Africans.  But it may be, and it may even
+legitimately be, that since all these monsters have faded from the
+popular mythology, it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of
+the horrible and hairy East-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful
+and childlike wonder at external peculiarities. But the Middle Ages
+(with a great deal more common sense than it would now be fashionable
+to admit) regarded natural history at bottom rather as a kind of joke;
+they regarded the soul as very important. Hence, while they had a
+natural history of dog-headed men, they did not profess to have a
+psychology of dog-headed men. They did not profess to mirror the mind
+of a dog-headed man, to share his tenderest secrets, or mount with his
+most celestial musings. They did not write novels about the semi-canine
+creature, attributing to him all the oldest morbidities and all the
+newest fads. It is permissible to present men as monsters if we wish to
+make the reader jump; and to make anybody jump is always a Christian
+act. But it is not permissible to present men as regarding themselves
+as monsters, or as making themselves jump.  To summarize, our slum
+fiction is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction; it is not defensible
+as spiritual fact.
+
+One enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality. The men who
+write it, and the men who read it, are men of the middle classes or the
+upper classes; at least, of those who are loosely termed the educated
+classes.  Hence, the fact that it is the life as the refined man sees
+it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man lives it.
+Rich men write stories about poor men, and describe them as speaking
+with a coarse, or heavy, or husky enunciation. But if poor men wrote
+novels about you or me they would describe us as speaking with some
+absurd shrill and affected voice, such as we only hear from a duchess
+in a three-act farce.  The slum novelist gains his whole effect by the
+fact that some detail is strange to the reader; but that detail by the
+nature of the case cannot be strange in itself. It cannot be strange to
+the soul which he is professing to study. The slum novelist gains his
+effects by describing the same grey mist as draping the dingy factory
+and the dingy tavern.  But to the man he is supposed to be studying
+there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the
+tavern that there is to a middle-class man between a late night at the
+office and a supper at Pagani’s. The slum novelist is content with
+pointing out that to the eye of his particular class a pickaxe looks
+dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. But the man he is supposed to be
+studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the
+difference between a ledger and an edition de luxe.  The chiaroscuro of
+the life is inevitably lost; for to us the high lights and the shadows
+are a light grey. But the high lights and the shadows are not a light
+grey in that life any more than in any other.  The kind of man who
+could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind
+of man who could share them.  In short, these books are not a record of
+the psychology of poverty.  They are a record of the psychology of
+wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a
+description of the state of the slums.  They are only a very dark and
+dreadful description of the state of the slummers. One might give
+innumerable examples of the essentially unsympathetic and unpopular
+quality of these realistic writers. But perhaps the simplest and most
+obvious example with which we could conclude is the mere fact that
+these writers are realistic. The poor have many other vices, but, at
+least, they are never realistic. The poor are melodramatic and romantic
+in grain; the poor all believe in high moral platitudes and copy-book
+maxims; probably this is the ultimate meaning of the great saying,
+“Blessed are the poor.” Blessed are the poor, for they are always
+making life, or trying to make life like an Adelphi play.  Some
+innocent educationalists and philanthropists (for even philanthropists
+can be innocent) have expressed a grave astonishment that the masses
+prefer shilling shockers to scientific treatises and melodramas to
+problem plays. The reason is very simple.  The realistic story is
+certainly more artistic than the melodramatic story.  If what you
+desire is deft handling, delicate proportions, a unit of artistic
+atmosphere, the realistic story has a full advantage over the
+melodrama. In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the
+realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama.  But, at
+least, the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic
+story. The melodrama is much more like life.  It is much more like man,
+and especially the poor man.  It is very banal and very inartistic when
+a poor woman at the Adelphi says, “Do you think I will sell my own
+child?” But poor women in the Battersea High Road do say, “Do you think
+I will sell my own child?”  They say it on every available occasion;
+you can hear a sort of murmur or babble of it all the way down the
+street.  It is very stale and weak dramatic art (if that is all) when
+the workman confronts his master and says, “I’m a man.” But a workman
+does say “I’m a man” two or three times every day. In fact, it is
+tedious, possibly, to hear poor men being melodramatic behind the
+footlights; but that is because one can always hear them being
+melodramatic in the street outside. In short, melodrama, if it is dull,
+is dull because it is too accurate. Somewhat the same problem exists in
+the case of stories about schoolboys. Mr. Kipling’s “Stalky and Co.”
+is much more amusing (if you are talking about amusement) than the late
+Dean Farrar’s “Eric; or, Little by Little.”  But “Eric” is immeasurably
+more like real school-life. For real school-life, real boyhood, is full
+of the things of which Eric is full—priggishness, a crude piety, a
+silly sin, a weak but continual attempt at the heroic, in a word,
+melodrama. And if we wish to lay a firm basis for any efforts to help
+the poor, we must not become realistic and see them from the outside.
+We must become melodramatic, and see them from the inside. The novelist
+must not take out his notebook and say, “I am an expert.”  No; he must
+imitate the workman in the Adelphi play. He must slap himself on the
+chest and say, “I am a man.”
+
+
+
+
+XX.  Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy
+
+
+Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little
+discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social
+philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated.
+But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the
+past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement
+of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to
+be raised against the modern version of that improvement.  The vice of
+the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something
+concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the
+casting away of dogmas.  But if there be such a thing as mental growth,
+it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into
+more and more dogmas.  The human brain is a machine for coming to
+conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear
+of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having
+almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of
+a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too
+strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the
+fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and
+many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an
+apparatus.  Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas.  As he
+piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the
+formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is,
+in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable,
+becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another
+in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system,
+when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he
+disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God,
+holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very
+process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant
+animals and the unconsciousness of the grass.  Trees have no dogmas.
+Turnips are singularly broadminded.
+
+If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental
+advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life.  And that
+philosophy of life must be right and the other philosophies wrong. Now
+of all, or nearly all, the able modern writers whom I have briefly
+studied in this book, this is especially and pleasingly true, that they
+do each of them have a constructive and affirmative view, and that they
+do take it seriously and ask us to take it seriously. There is nothing
+merely sceptically progressive about Mr. Rudyard Kipling. There is
+nothing in the least broad minded about Mr. Bernard Shaw. The paganism
+of Mr. Lowes Dickinson is more grave than any Christianity. Even the
+opportunism of Mr. H. G. Wells is more dogmatic than the idealism of
+anybody else.  Somebody complained, I think, to Matthew Arnold that he
+was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied, “That may be true; but
+you overlook an obvious difference. I am dogmatic and right, and
+Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong.” The strong humour of the remark ought
+not to disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and common sense;
+no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks
+that he is in truth and the other man in error.  In similar style, I
+hold that I am dogmatic and right, while Mr. Shaw is dogmatic and
+wrong.  But my main point, at present, is to notice that the chief
+among these writers I have discussed do most sanely and courageously
+offer themselves as dogmatists, as founders of a system.  It may be
+true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most interesting to me, is the fact
+that Mr. Shaw is wrong. But it is equally true that the thing in Mr.
+Shaw most interesting to himself, is the fact that Mr. Shaw is right.
+Mr. Shaw may have none with him but himself; but it is not for himself
+he cares. It is for the vast and universal church, of which he is the
+only member.
+
+The two typical men of genius whom I have mentioned here, and with
+whose names I have begun this book, are very symbolic, if only because
+they have shown that the fiercest dogmatists can make the best artists.
+In the fin de siecle atmosphere every one was crying out that
+literature should be free from all causes and all ethical creeds. Art
+was to produce only exquisite workmanship, and it was especially the
+note of those days to demand brilliant plays and brilliant short
+stories. And when they got them, they got them from a couple of
+moralists. The best short stories were written by a man trying to
+preach Imperialism. The best plays were written by a man trying to
+preach Socialism. All the art of all the artists looked tiny and
+tedious beside the art which was a by-product of propaganda.
+
+The reason, indeed, is very simple.  A man cannot be wise enough to be
+a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A
+man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the
+energy to wish to pass beyond it.  A small artist is content with art;
+a great artist is content with nothing except everything. So we find
+that when real forces, good or bad, like Kipling and G. B. S., enter
+our arena, they bring with them not only startling and arresting art,
+but very startling and arresting dogmas.  And they care even more, and
+desire us to care even more, about their startling and arresting dogmas
+than about their startling and arresting art. Mr. Shaw is a good
+dramatist, but what he desires more than anything else to be is a good
+politician.  Mr. Rudyard Kipling is by divine caprice and natural
+genius an unconventional poet; but what he desires more than anything
+else to be is a conventional poet. He desires to be the poet of his
+people, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh, understanding
+their origins, celebrating their destiny. He desires to be Poet
+Laureate, a most sensible and honourable and public-spirited desire.
+Having been given by the gods originality—that is, disagreement with
+others—he desires divinely to agree with them. But the most striking
+instance of all, more striking, I think, even than either of these, is
+the instance of Mr. H. G. Wells. He began in a sort of insane infancy
+of pure art.  He began by making a new heaven and a new earth, with the
+same irresponsible instinct by which men buy a new necktie or
+button-hole. He began by trifling with the stars and systems in order
+to make ephemeral anecdotes; he killed the universe for a joke.  He has
+since become more and more serious, and has become, as men inevitably
+do when they become more and more serious, more and more parochial.  He
+was frivolous about the twilight of the gods; but he is serious about
+the London omnibus. He was careless in “The Time Machine,” for that
+dealt only with the destiny of all things; but he is careful, and even
+cautious, in “Mankind in the Making,” for that deals with the day after
+to-morrow. He began with the end of the world, and that was easy. Now
+he has gone on to the beginning of the world, and that is difficult.
+But the main result of all this is the same as in the other cases. The
+men who have really been the bold artists, the realistic artists, the
+uncompromising artists, are the men who have turned out, after all, to
+be writing “with a purpose.”  Suppose that any cool and cynical
+art-critic, any art-critic fully impressed with the conviction that
+artists were greatest when they were most purely artistic, suppose that
+a man who professed ably a humane aestheticism, as did Mr. Max
+Beerbohm, or a cruel aestheticism, as did Mr. W. E. Henley, had cast
+his eye over the whole fictional literature which was recent in the
+year 1895, and had been asked to select the three most vigorous and
+promising and original artists and artistic works, he would, I think,
+most certainly have said that for a fine artistic audacity, for a real
+artistic delicacy, or for a whiff of true novelty in art, the things
+that stood first were “Soldiers Three,” by a Mr. Rudyard Kipling; “Arms
+and the Man,” by a Mr. Bernard Shaw; and “The Time Machine,” by a man
+called Wells. And all these men have shown themselves ingrainedly
+didactic. You may express the matter if you will by saying that if we
+want doctrines we go to the great artists.  But it is clear from the
+psychology of the matter that this is not the true statement; the true
+statement is that when we want any art tolerably brisk and bold we have
+to go to the doctrinaires.
+
+In concluding this book, therefore, I would ask, first and foremost,
+that men such as these of whom I have spoken should not be insulted by
+being taken for artists.  No man has any right whatever merely to enjoy
+the work of Mr. Bernard Shaw; he might as well enjoy the invasion of
+his country by the French.  Mr. Shaw writes either to convince or to
+enrage us.  No man has any business to be a Kiplingite without being a
+politician, and an Imperialist politician. If a man is first with us,
+it should be because of what is first with him. If a man convinces us
+at all, it should be by his convictions. If we hate a poem of Kipling’s
+from political passion, we are hating it for the same reason that the
+poet loved it; if we dislike him because of his opinions, we are
+disliking him for the best of all possible reasons. If a man comes into
+Hyde Park to preach it is permissible to hoot him; but it is
+discourteous to applaud him as a performing bear. And an artist is only
+a performing bear compared with the meanest man who fancies he has
+anything to say.
+
+There is, indeed, one class of modern writers and thinkers who cannot
+altogether be overlooked in this question, though there is no space
+here for a lengthy account of them, which, indeed, to confess the
+truth, would consist chiefly of abuse.  I mean those who get over all
+these abysses and reconcile all these wars by talking about “aspects of
+truth,” by saying that the art of Kipling represents one aspect of the
+truth, and the art of William Watson another; the art of Mr. Bernard
+Shaw one aspect of the truth, and the art of Mr. Cunningham Grahame
+another; the art of Mr. H. G. Wells one aspect, and the art of Mr.
+Coventry Patmore (say) another. I will only say here that this seems to
+me an evasion which has not even had the sense to disguise itself
+ingeniously in words. If we talk of a certain thing being an aspect of
+truth, it is evident that we claim to know what is truth; just as, if
+we talk of the hind leg of a dog, we claim to know what is a dog.
+Unfortunately, the philosopher who talks about aspects of truth
+generally also asks, “What is truth?”  Frequently even he denies the
+existence of truth, or says it is inconceivable by the human
+intelligence.  How, then, can he recognize its aspects? I should not
+like to be an artist who brought an architectural sketch to a builder,
+saying, “This is the south aspect of Sea-View Cottage. Sea-View
+Cottage, of course, does not exist.”  I should not even like very much
+to have to explain, under such circumstances, that Sea-View Cottage
+might exist, but was unthinkable by the human mind. Nor should I like
+any better to be the bungling and absurd metaphysician who professed to
+be able to see everywhere the aspects of a truth that is not there.  Of
+course, it is perfectly obvious that there are truths in Kipling, that
+there are truths in Shaw or Wells. But the degree to which we can
+perceive them depends strictly upon how far we have a definite
+conception inside us of what is truth. It is ludicrous to suppose that
+the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything.  It is
+clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see
+good in everything.
+
+I plead, then, that we should agree or disagree with these men.  I
+plead that we should agree with them at least in having an abstract
+belief. But I know that there are current in the modern world many
+vague objections to having an abstract belief, and I feel that we shall
+not get any further until we have dealt with some of them. The first
+objection is easily stated.
+
+A common hesitation in our day touching the use of extreme convictions
+is a sort of notion that extreme convictions specially upon cosmic
+matters, have been responsible in the past for the thing which is
+called bigotry. But a very small amount of direct experience will
+dissipate this view. In real life the people who are most bigoted are
+the people who have no convictions at all.  The economists of the
+Manchester school who disagree with Socialism take Socialism seriously.
+It is the young man in Bond Street, who does not know what socialism
+means much less whether he agrees with it, who is quite certain that
+these socialist fellows are making a fuss about nothing. The man who
+understands the Calvinist philosophy enough to agree with it must
+understand the Catholic philosophy in order to disagree with it. It is
+the vague modern who is not at all certain what is right who is most
+certain that Dante was wrong.  The serious opponent of the Latin Church
+in history, even in the act of showing that it produced great infamies,
+must know that it produced great saints. It is the hard-headed
+stockbroker, who knows no history and believes no religion, who is,
+nevertheless, perfectly convinced that all these priests are knaves.
+The Salvationist at the Marble Arch may be bigoted, but he is not too
+bigoted to yearn from a common human kinship after the dandy on church
+parade. But the dandy on church parade is so bigoted that he does not
+in the least yearn after the Salvationist at the Marble Arch. Bigotry
+may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.  It is
+the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people
+whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the
+appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the indifferent is
+in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely
+pervading persecutions. In this degree it was not the people who cared
+who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently
+numerous.  It was the people who did not care who filled the world with
+fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the
+faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack.
+There have come some persecutions out of the pain of a passionate
+certainty; but these produced, not bigotry, but fanaticism—a very
+different and a somewhat admirable thing.  Bigotry in the main has
+always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing
+out those who care in darkness and blood.
+
+There are people, however, who dig somewhat deeper than this into the
+possible evils of dogma.  It is felt by many that strong philosophical
+conviction, while it does not (as they perceive) produce that sluggish
+and fundamentally frivolous condition which we call bigotry, does
+produce a certain concentration, exaggeration, and moral impatience,
+which we may agree to call fanaticism. They say, in brief, that ideas
+are dangerous things. In politics, for example, it is commonly urged
+against a man like Mr. Balfour, or against a man like Mr. John Morley,
+that a wealth of ideas is dangerous.  The true doctrine on this point,
+again, is surely not very difficult to state.  Ideas are dangerous, but
+the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is
+acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas
+are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man
+of no ideas.  The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his
+head like wine to the head of a teetotaller. It is a common error, I
+think, among the Radical idealists of my own party and period to
+suggest that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire
+because they are so sordid or so materialistic. The truth is that
+financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they can
+be sentimental about any sentiment, and idealistic about any ideal, any
+ideal that they find lying about. Just as a boy who has not known much
+of women is apt too easily to take a woman for the woman, so these
+practical men, unaccustomed to causes, are always inclined to think
+that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is proved to be the ideal.
+Many, for example, avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had a
+vision. They might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a
+man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a
+monstrosity as a noseless man.  People say of such a figure, in almost
+feverish whispers, “He knows his own mind,” which is exactly like
+saying in equally feverish whispers, “He blows his own nose.” Human
+nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as
+the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision
+the people perisheth.  But it is precisely because an ideal is
+necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of
+fanaticism.  There is nothing which is so likely to leave a man open to
+the sudden and irresistible inroad of an unbalanced vision as the
+cultivation of business habits. All of us know angular business men who
+think that the earth is flat, or that Mr. Kruger was at the head of a
+great military despotism, or that men are graminivorous, or that Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare. Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as
+dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of
+danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against
+the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy
+and soaked in religion.
+
+Briefly, then, we dismiss the two opposite dangers of bigotry and
+fanaticism, bigotry which is a too great vagueness and fanaticism which
+is a too great concentration.  We say that the cure for the bigot is
+belief; we say that the cure for the idealist is ideas. To know the
+best theories of existence and to choose the best from them (that is,
+to the best of our own strong conviction) appears to us the proper way
+to be neither bigot nor fanatic, but something more firm than a bigot
+and more terrible than a fanatic, a man with a definite opinion.  But
+that definite opinion must in this view begin with the basic matters of
+human thought, and these must not be dismissed as irrelevant, as
+religion, for instance, is too often in our days dismissed as
+irrelevant. Even if we think religion insoluble, we cannot think it
+irrelevant. Even if we ourselves have no view of the ultimate verities,
+we must feel that wherever such a view exists in a man it must be more
+important than anything else in him.  The instant that the thing ceases
+to be the unknowable, it becomes the indispensable. There can be no
+doubt, I think, that the idea does exist in our time that there is
+something narrow or irrelevant or even mean about attacking a man’s
+religion, or arguing from it in matters of politics or ethics.  There
+can be quite as little doubt that such an accusation of narrowness is
+itself almost grotesquely narrow. To take an example from comparatively
+current events:  we all know that it was not uncommon for a man to be
+considered a scarecrow of bigotry and obscurantism because he
+distrusted the Japanese, or lamented the rise of the Japanese, on the
+ground that the Japanese were Pagans.  Nobody would think that there
+was anything antiquated or fanatical about distrusting a people because
+of some difference between them and us in practice or political
+machinery. Nobody would think it bigoted to say of a people, “I
+distrust their influence because they are Protectionists.”  No one
+would think it narrow to say, “I lament their rise because they are
+Socialists, or Manchester Individualists, or strong believers in
+militarism and conscription.”  A difference of opinion about the nature
+of Parliaments matters very much; but a difference of opinion about the
+nature of sin does not matter at all.  A difference of opinion about
+the object of taxation matters very much; but a difference of opinion
+about the object of human existence does not matter at all. We have a
+right to distrust a man who is in a different kind of municipality; but
+we have no right to mistrust a man who is in a different kind of
+cosmos.  This sort of enlightenment is surely about the most
+unenlightened that it is possible to imagine. To recur to the phrase
+which I employed earlier, this is tantamount to saying that everything
+is important with the exception of everything. Religion is exactly the
+thing which cannot be left out—because it includes everything.  The
+most absent-minded person cannot well pack his Gladstone-bag and leave
+out the bag. We have a general view of existence, whether we like it or
+not; it alters or, to speak more accurately, it creates and involves
+everything we say or do, whether we like it or not.  If we regard the
+Cosmos as a dream, we regard the Fiscal Question as a dream. If we
+regard the Cosmos as a joke, we regard St. Paul’s Cathedral as a joke.
+If everything is bad, then we must believe (if it be possible) that
+beer is bad; if everything be good, we are forced to the rather
+fantastic conclusion that scientific philanthropy is good.  Every man
+in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The
+possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to
+have forgotten all about its existence.
+
+This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the
+situation of the whole modern world.  The modern world is filled with
+men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they
+are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate
+body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they
+are dogmas.  It may be thought “dogmatic,” for instance, in some
+circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement
+of man in another world.  But it is not thought “dogmatic” to assume
+the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of
+progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a
+rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be
+one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought
+dogmatic.  Or, again, we see nothing “dogmatic” in the inspiring, but
+certainly most startling, theory of physical science, that we should
+collect facts for the sake of facts, even though they seem as useless
+as sticks and straws. This is a great and suggestive idea, and its
+utility may, if you will, be proving itself, but its utility is, in the
+abstract, quite as disputable as the utility of that calling on oracles
+or consulting shrines which is also said to prove itself. Thus, because
+we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or
+sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to
+find the sepulchre of Christ.  But being in a civilization which does
+believe in this dogma of fact for facts’ sake, we do not see the full
+frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole.  I am not
+speaking of a tenable ultimate utility which is true both of the
+Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see the
+superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the
+idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where
+a man died. But we do not see the aesthetic singularity and startling
+quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can
+live—a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the
+meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.
+
+Let us, then, go upon a long journey and enter on a dreadful search.
+Let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own
+opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and,
+perhaps, far more beautiful than we think.  In the course of these
+essays I fear that I have spoken from time to time of rationalists and
+rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense.  Being full of that
+kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book,
+I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists.
+There are no rationalists.  We all believe fairy-tales, and live in
+them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of
+the lady clothed with the sun.  Some, with a more rustic, elvish
+instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself.
+Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the
+equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door.
+
+Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every
+man who utters a doubt defines a religion.  And the scepticism of our
+time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives
+them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are
+Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been
+disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in
+patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little
+more about it.  Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be
+right.  We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common
+sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers
+pointed it out to us.  The great march of mental destruction will go
+on.  Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed.  It is
+a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a
+religious dogma to assert them.  It is a rational thesis that we are
+all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all
+awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.
+Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall
+be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of
+human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible
+universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible
+prodigies as if they were invisible.  We shall look on the impossible
+grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who
+have seen and yet have believed.
+
+
+THE END
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERETICS ***