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diff --git a/old/heret11.txt b/old/heret11.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1be2803 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/heret11.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6261 @@ +**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Heretics, by G. K. Chesterton**
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+Heretics +
+by G. K. Chesterton
+
+March, 1996 [Etext #470]
+
+
+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Heretics, by G. K. Chesterton**
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+
+
+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 twelth (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 know 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 Othodoxy
+ 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 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 fullness 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 today, "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 comer-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 in 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. It 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 free-will, 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 note-book, 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 win 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 godlike 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 tomorrow 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 m 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 broad-minded.
+
+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 byproduct 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 be 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 bad 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 this Project Gutenberg Etext of Heretics, by G. K. Chesterton
+
|