THE POET AND THE CHEESE
There is something creepy in the
flat Eastern Counties; a brush of the white feather. There is a
stillness, which is rather of the mind than of
the bodily senses. Rapid changes
and sudden revelations of scenery, even when they are soundless,
have something in them analogous to a movement of music, to a crash
or a cry. Mountain hamlets spring out on us with
a shout like mountain brigands.
Comfortable valleys accept us with open arms and warm words, like
comfortable innkeepers. But travelling in the great level lands has
a curiously still and lonely quality; lonely even when there
are plenty of people on the road and in the market-place.
One's voice seems to break an
almost elvish silence, and something unreasonably weird in the
phrase of the nursery tales, "And he went a little farther and came
to another place," comes back into the mind.
In some such mood I came along a
lean, pale road south of the fens, and found myself in a large,
quiet, and seemingly forgotten village. It was one of those
places that instantly produce a frame of mind which, it may be, one
afterwards decks out with unreal details. I dare say that grass did
not really grow in the streets, but I came away with a curious
impression that it did. I dare say the marketplace was not
literally
lonely and without sign of life,
but it left the vague impression of being so. The place was large
and even loose in design, yet it had the
air of something hidden away and
always overlooked. It seemed shy, like a big yokel; the low roofs
seemed to be ducking behind the hedges and railings; and the
chimneys holding their breath. I came into it in that
dead hour of the afternoon which
is neither after lunch nor before tea, nor anything else even on a
half-holiday; and I had a fantastic feeling that I had strayed into
a lost and extra hour that is not numbered in the
twenty-four.
I entered an inn which stood
openly in the market-place yet was almost as private as a private
house. Those who talk of "public-houses" as if
they were all one problem would
have been both puzzled and pleased with such a place. In the front
window a stout old lady in black with an elaborate cap sat
doing a large piece of needlework. She had a kind of comfortable
Puritanism about her; and might have been (perhaps she was) the
original Mrs. Grundy. A little more withdrawn into the parlour
sat
a tall, strong, and serious girl,
with a face of beautiful honesty and
a pair of scissors stuck in her
belt, doing a small piece of needlework. Two feet behind them
sat a hulking labourer with a humorous face like wood painted
scarlet, with a huge mug of mild beer which he had not touched, and
probably would not touch for hours. On the hearthrug there was an
equally motionless cat; and on the table a copy of 'Household
Words'.
I was conscious of some
atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I had met somewhere in
literature. There was poetry in it as well as piety; and yet it
was not poetry after my particular taste. It was somehow at once
solid and airy. Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere in
some of Wordsworth's rural poems; which are full of genuine
freshness and wonder, and yet are in some incurable way
commonplace. This was
curious; for Wordsworth's men
were of the rocks and fells, and not of the fenlands or flats. But
perhaps it is the clearness of still water
and the mirrored skies of meres
and pools that produces this crystalline virtue. Perhaps that is
why Wordsworth is called a Lake Poet instead
of a mountain poet. Perhaps it is
the water that does it. Certainly the whole of that town was like a
cup of water given at morning.
After a few sentences exchanged
at long intervals in the manner of rustic courtesy, I inquired
casually what was the name of the town. The old lady answered that
its name was Stilton, and composedly continued
her needlework. But I had paused
with my mug in air, and was gazing at her with a suddenly arrested
concern. "I suppose," I said, "that it has nothing to do with the
cheese of that name." "Oh, yes," she answered, with a staggering
indifference, "they used to make it here."
I put down my mug with a gravity
far greater than her own. "But this place is a Shrine!" I said.
"Pilgrims should be pouring into it from wherever the English
legend has endured alive. There ought to be a colossal statue in
the market-place of the man who invented Stilton cheese. There
ought to be another colossal statue of the first cow who provided
the foundations of it. There should be a burnished tablet let into
the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton
cheese, and survived. On the top of a neighbouring hill (if
there
are any neighbouring hills) there
should be a huge model of a Stilton cheese, made of some rich
green marble and engraven with some haughty
motto: I suggest something like
'Ver non semper viret; sed Stiltonia semper virescit.'" The old
lady said, "Yes, sir," and continued her domestic
occupations.
After a strained and emotional
silence, I said, "If I take a meal here tonight can you give me any
Stilton?"
"No, sir; I'm afraid we haven't
got any Stilton," said the immovable one, speaking as if it were
something thousands of miles away.
"This is awful," I said: for it
seemed to me a strange allegory of England as she is now; this
little town that had lost its glory; and forgotten, so to speak,
the meaning of its own name. And I thought it yet more symbolic
because from all that old and full and virile life, the great
cheese was gone; and only the beer remained. And even that will be
stolen by the Liberals or adulterated by the Conservatives.
Politely disengaging myself, I
made my way as quickly as possible to the nearest large, noisy,
and nasty town in that neighbourhood, where I sought out the
nearest vulgar, tawdry, and avaricious restaurant.
There (after trifling with beef,
mutton, puddings, pies, and so on) I
got a Stilton cheese. I was so
much moved by my memories that I wrote a sonnet to the cheese. Some
critical friends have hinted to me that my sonnet is not strictly
new; that it contains "echoes" (as they express
it) of some other poem that they
have read somewhere. Here, at least, are the lines I wrote:
SONNET TO A STILTON CHEESE
Stilton, thou shouldst be living
at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so
have I— She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from
Lincoln tower To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice
of fenland men, Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking
are no more, And pure religion reading 'Household Words', And
sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that
crumbles to its core; While my digestion, like the House of
Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself
doth lay.
I confess I feel myself as if
some literary influence, something that
has haunted me, were present in
this otherwise original poem; but it is hopeless to disentangle it
now.
THE THING
The wind awoke last night with so
noble a violence that it was like
the war in heaven; and I thought
for a moment that the Thing had broken free. For wind never seems
like empty air. Wind always sounds full and physical, like the big
body of something; and I fancied that the Thing itself was
walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of
beech.
Let me explain. The vitality and
recurrent victory of Christendom have been due to the power of the
Thing to break out from time to time from its enveloping words and
symbols. Without this power all civilisations tend to perish under
a load of language and ritual. One instance of this we hear much in
modern discussion: the separation of the form from the spirit of
religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of
the same stiffening and
falsification; we are far too seldom reminded that just as
church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are not
knowledge, and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to
find people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough
to be clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements
of the sun and moon.
The case of self-government is
even more curious, especially as one watches it for the first time
in a country district. Self-government
arose among men (probably among
the primitive men, certainly among the ancients) out of an idea
which seems now too simple to be understood.
The notion of self-government was
not (as many modern friends and foes of it seem to think) the
notion that the ordinary citizen is to be
consulted as one consults an
Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked a lot of fancy
questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows are to
be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own
lives.
They shall decide whether they
shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of the spade or the spear.
The men of the valley shall settle whether the valley shall be
devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the men of the
town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or
splendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall
gather under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political
market-place. And in case the word "man" be misunderstood, I may
remark that in this moral atmosphere, this original soul of
self-government, the women always have quite as much influence as
the men. But in modern England neither the men nor the women have
any influence at all. In this primary matter, the moulding of the
landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people
are utterly impotent. They stand
and stare at imperial and economic processes going on, as they
might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.
Round about where I live, for
instance, two changes are taking place which really affect the land
and all things that live on it, whether for good or evil. The first
is that the urban civilisation (or whatever
it is) is advancing; that the
clerks come out in black swarms and the villas advance in red
battalions. The other is that the vast estates
into which England has long been
divided are passing out of the hands of the English gentry into the
hands of men who are always upstarts and
often actually foreigners.
Now, these are just the sort of
things with which self-government was really supposed to grapple.
People were supposed to be able to indicate whether they wished to
live in town or country, to be represented by a gentleman or a cad.
I do not presume to prejudge their decision; perhaps they would
prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say that
the filling of a man's native sky
with smoke or the selling of his roof over his head illustrate the
sort of things he ought to have some say in, if he is supposed
to be governing himself. But owing to the strange
trend of recent society, these
enormous earthquakes he has to pass over and treat as private
trivialities. In theory the building of a villa
is as incidental as the buying of
a hat. In reality it is as if all Lancashire were laid waste for
deer forests; or as if all Belgium were flooded by the sea. In
theory the sale of a squire's land to a moneylender is a minor and
exceptional necessity. In reality it is a thing like a German
invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion.
Upon this helpless populace,
gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes round about every five
years a thing called a General Election. It
is believed by antiquarians to be
the remains of some system of
self-government; but it consists
solely in asking the citizen questions about everything except
what he understands. The examination paper of the Election
generally consists of some such queries as these: "I. Are
the green biscuits eaten by the
peasants of Eastern Lithuania in your opinion fit for human food?
II. Are the religious professions of the
President of the Orange Free
State hypocritical or sincere? III. Do you
think that the savages in
Prusso-Portuguese East Bunyipland are as happy and hygienic as the
fortunate savages in Franco-British West Bunyipland?
IV. Did the lost Latin Charter
said to have been exacted from Henry III reserve the right of the
Crown to create peers? V. What do you think of what America thinks
of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks of what Sir Eldon Gorst thinks of the
state of the Nile? VI. Detect some difference between the
two persons in frock-coats placed
before you at this election."
Now, it never was supposed in any
natural theory of self-government that the ordinary man in my
neighbourhood need answer fantastic questions like these. He is a
citizen of South Bucks, not an editor of 'Notes and Queries'. He
would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whether farmsteads
or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whether
stupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village.
But
these are precisely the things
which the oligarchs will not allow him to touch with his finger.
Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny and divine mission to
alter, under their guidance, all the things that he knows
nothing about. The name of self-government is noisy everywhere: the
Thing is throttled.
The wind sang and split the sky
like thunder all the night through; in scraps of sleep it filled my
dreams with the divine discordances
of martyrdom and revolt; I heard
the horn of Roland and the drums of Napoleon and all the tongues of
terror with which the Thing has gone forth: the spirit of our race
alive. But when I came down in the morning
only a branch or two was broken
off the tree in my garden; and none of
the great country houses in the
neighbourhood were blown down, as would have happened if the Thing
had really been abroad.
THE MAN WHO THINKS
BACKWARDS
The man who thinks backwards is a
very powerful person to-day: indeed, if he is not omnipotent, he is
at least omnipresent. It is he who writes nearly all the learned
books and articles, especially of the scientific
or skeptical sort; all the
articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution and Prison Reform and
the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But especially it is
this strange and tortuous being who does most of the
writing about female emancipation
and the reconsidering of marriage. For the man who thinks backwards
is very frequently a woman.
Thinking backwards is not quite
easy to define abstractedly; and, perhaps, the simplest method is
to take some object, as plain as possible, and from it
illustrate the two modes of thought: the right mode in which
all real results have been rooted; the wrong mode, which is
confusing all our current discussions, especially our
discussions about the relations of the sexes. Casting my eye
round the room, I notice an object which is often mentioned in the
higher and subtler of these debates about the sexes: I mean a
poker. I will take a poker and
think about it; first forwards
and then backwards; and so, perhaps, show what I mean.
The sage desiring to think well
and wisely about a poker will begin somewhat as follows: Among the
live creatures that crawl about this star the queerest is the thing
called Man. This plucked and plumeless bird, comic and forlorn, is
the butt of all the philosophies. He is the only
naked animal; and this quality,
once, it is said, his glory, is now his shame. He has to go
outside himself for everything that he wants. He might almost be
considered as an absent-minded person who had gone bathing and left
his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hat
upon the beaver and his coat upon
the sheep. The rabbit has white warmth for a waistcoat, and the
glow-worm has a lantern for a head. But man has no heat in his
hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he must
look for light and warmth in the
wild, cold universe in which he is cast. This is equally true
of his soul and of his body; he is the one creature that has lost
his heart as much as he has lost his hide. In a spiritual sense he
has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literal sense he has
been unable to keep his hair on. And just as this external need of
his has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called
religion,
so it has lit in his hand the
only adequate symbol of it: I mean the red flower called Fire.
Fire, the most magic and startling of all material things, is a
thing known only to man and the expression of his sublime
externalism. It embodies all that is human in his hearths and all
that is divine on his altars. It is the most human thing in the
world; seen across wastes of marsh or medleys of forest, it is
veritably the purple and golden flag of the sons of Eve. But there
is about this generous and rejoicing thing an alien and awful
quality: the quality of torture. Its presence is life; its touch is
death. Therefore, it is always necessary
to have an intermediary between
ourselves and this dreadful deity; to have a priest to intercede
for us with the god of life and death; to send an ambassador to the
fire. That priest is the poker. Made of
a material more merciless and
warlike than the other instruments of
domesticity, hammered on the
anvil and born itself in the flame, the poker is strong enough to
enter the burning fiery furnace, and, like the holy children, not
be consumed. In this heroic service it is often battered and
twisted, but is the more honourable for it, like any other soldier
who has been under fire.
Now all this may sound very
fanciful and mystical, but it is the right view of pokers, and no
one who takes it will ever go in for any wrong view of pokers, such
as using them to beat one's wife or torture one's children, or even
(though that is more excusable) to make a policeman
jump, as the clown does in the
pantomime. He who has thus gone back to the beginning, and seen
everything as quaint and new, will always see things in their
right order, the one depending on the other in degree of purpose
and importance: the poker for the fire and the fire for the man and
the man for the glory of God.
This is thinking forwards. Now
our modern discussions about everything,
Imperialism, Socialism, or Votes
for Women, are all entangled in
an opposite train of thought,
which runs as follows:—A modern intellectual comes in and
sees a poker. He is a positivist; he will not
begin with any dogmas about the
nature of man, or any day-dreams about the mystery of fire. He will
begin with what he can see, the poker; and
the first thing he sees about the
poker is that it is crooked. He says, "Poor poker; it's
crooked." Then he asks how it came to be crooked; and is told that
there is a thing in the world (with which his temperament has
hitherto left him unacquainted)—a thing called fire. He
points
out, very kindly and clearly, how
silly it is of people, if they want
a straight poker, to put it into
a chemical combustion which will very probably heat and warp it.
"Let us abolish fire," he says, "and then we shall have
perfectly straight pokers. Why should you want a fire at all?"
They explain to him that a creature called Man wants a fire,
because he has no fur or
feathers. He gazes dreamily at the embers for a few seconds, and
then shakes his head. "I doubt if such an animal is worth
preserving," he says. "He must eventually go under in the
cosmic
struggle when pitted against
well-armoured and warmly protected species, who have wings and
trunks and spires and scales and horns and shaggy hair. If Man
cannot live without these luxuries, you had better abolish Man."
At this point, as a rule, the crowd is convinced; it heaves up
all
its clubs and axes, and abolishes
him. At least, one of him.
Before we begin discussing our
various new plans for the people's welfare, let us make a kind of
agreement that we will argue in a straightforward way, and not in a
tail-foremost way. The typical modern
movements may be right; but let
them be defended because they are right, not because they are
typical modern movements. Let us begin with the actual woman or man
in the street, who is cold; like mankind before the finding of
fire. Do not let us begin with the end of the last red-hot
discussion—like the end of a red hot poker. Imperialism
may be right. But if it is right, it is right because England has
some divine authority like Israel, or some human authority like
Rome; not because we have saddled ourselves with South Africa, and
don't know how to get rid of it. Socialism may be true. But if it
is true, it is true because the
tribe or the city can really
declare all land to be common land, not because Harrod's Stores
exist and the commonwealth must copy them.
Female suffrage may be just. But
if it is just, it is just because women
are women, not because women are
sweated workers and white slaves and all sorts of things that they
ought never to have been. Let not the Imperialist accept a colony
because it is there, nor the Suffragist
seize a vote because it is lying
about, nor the Socialist buy up an industry merely because it is
for sale.
Let us ask ourselves first what
we really do want, not what recent legal decisions have told us to
want, or recent logical philosophies proved that we must want, or
recent social prophecies predicted that we shall some day want. If
there must be a British Empire, let it be British, and not, in mere
panic, American or Prussian. If there ought to be female suffrage,
let it be female, and not a mere imitation as coarse as
the male blackguard or as dull as
the male clerk. If there is to be Socialism, let it be social; that
is, as different as possible from all
the big commercial departments of
to-day. The really good journeyman tailor does not cut his coat
according to his cloth; he asks for more cloth. The really
practical statesman does not fit himself to existing conditions, he
denounces the conditions as unfit. History is like some deeply
planted tree which, though gigantic in girth, tapers away at
last into tiny twigs; and we are
in the topmost branches. Each of us is trying to bend the tree by a
twig: to alter England through a distant colony, or to capture the
State through a small State department, or to destroy all voting
through a vote. In all such bewilderment he is wise
who resists this temptation of
trivial triumph or surrender, and happy (in an echo of the Roman
poet) who remembers the roots of things.
THE NAMELESS MAN
There are only two forms of
government the monarchy or personal government, and the republic or
impersonal government. England is not a government; England is an
anarchy, because there are so many kings.
But there is one real advantage
(among many real disadvantages) in the method of abstract
democracy, and that is this: that under impersonal government
politics are so much more personal. In France and America, where
the State is an abstraction, political argument is quite full
of human details—some
might even say of inhuman details. But in England, precisely
because we are ruled by personages, these personages do not permit
personalities. In England names are honoured, and therefore
names are suppressed. But in the republics, in France
especially, a man can put his enemies' names into his article and
his
own name at the end of it.
This is the essential condition
of such candour. If we merely made our anonymous articles more
violent, we should be baser than we are now. We should only be
arming masked men with daggers instead of cudgels. And I, for one,
have always believed in the more general signing of articles,
and have signed my own articles
on many occasions when, heaven knows, I had little reason to be
vain of them. I have heard many arguments for anonymity; but they
all seem to amount to the statement that anonymity is safe, which
is just what I complain of. In matters of truth the fact
that you don't want to publish
something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to
publish it.
But there is one answer to my
perpetual plea for a man putting his name to his writing. There is
one answer, and there is only one answer, and
it is never given. It is that in
the modern complexity very often a
man's name is almost as false as
his pseudonym. The prominent person today is eternally trying to
lose a name, and to get a title. For
instance, we all read with
earnestness and patience the pages of the 'Daily Mail', and there
are times when we feel moved to cry, "Bring to us the man who
thought these strange thoughts! Pursue him, capture him, take great
care of him. Bring him back to us tenderly, like some precious bale
of silk, that we may look upon the face of the man who desires such
things to be printed. Let us know his name; his social and
medical pedigree." But in the modern muddle (it might be said) how
little should we gain if those frankly fatuous sheets were
indeed
subscribed by the man who had
inspired them. Suppose that after every article stating that the
Premier is a piratical Socialist there were
printed the simple word
"Northcliffe." What does that simple word suggest to the simple
soul? To my simple soul (uninstructed otherwise) it suggests a
lofty and lonely crag somewhere in the wintry seas towards the
Orkheys or Norway; and barely clinging to the top of this crag the
fortress of some forgotten chieftain. As it happens, of course,
I
know that the word does not mean
this; it means another Fleet Street journalist like myself or only
different from myself in so far as he has sought to secure money
while I have sought to secure a jolly time.
A title does not now even serve
as a distinction: it does not
distinguish. A coronet is not
merely an extinguisher: it is a hiding-place.
But the really odd thing is this.
This false quality in titles does not merely apply to the new and
vulgar titles, but to the old and historic titles also. For
hundreds of years titles in England have been
essentially unmeaning; void of
that very weak and very human instinct in which titles originated.
In essential nonsense of application there is nothing to choose
between Northcliffe and Norfolk. The Duke of Norfolk means (as my
exquisite and laborious knowledge of Latin informs me) the Leader
of Norfolk. It is idle to talk against representative
government
or for it. All government is
representative government until it begins to decay. Unfortunately
(as is also evident) all government begins to decay the instant it
begins to govern. All aristocrats were first meant
as envoys of democracy; and most
envoys of democracy lose no time in becoming aristocrats. By the
old essential human notion, the Duke of Norfolk ought simply to be
the first or most manifest of Norfolk men.
I see growing and filling out
before me the image of an actual Duke of Norfolk. For instance,
Norfolk men all make their voices run up very high at the end of a
sentence. The Duke of Norfolk's voice, therefore, ought to end in a
perfect shriek. They often (I am told) end sentences with the word
"together"; entirely irrespective of its meaning. Thus
I shall expect the Duke of
Norfolk to say: "I beg to second the motion together"; or "This is
a great constitutional question together." I
shall expect him to know much
about the Broads and the sluggish rivers
above them; to know about the
shooting of water-fowl, and not to
know too much about anything
else. Of mountains he must be wildly and ludicrously ignorant. He
must have the freshness of Norfolk; nay, even the flatness of
Norfolk. He must remind me of the watery expanses, the great square
church towers and the long level sunsets of East England.
If he does not do this, I decline
to know him.
I need not multiply such cases;
the principle applies everywhere. Thus I lose all interest in the
Duke of Devonshire unless he can assure me that his soul is filled
with that strange warm Puritanism, Puritanism shot with romance,
which colours the West Country. He must eat nothing but clotted
cream, drink nothing but cider, reading nothing but 'Lorna
Doone', and be unacquainted with
any town larger than Plymouth, which he must regard with some awe,
as the Central Babylon of the world. Again, I should expect the
Prince of Wales always to be full of the mysticism and dreamy
ardour of the Celtic fringe.
Perhaps it may be thought that
these demands are a little extreme; and that our fancy is running
away with us. Nevertheless, it is not my Duke of Devonshire who is
funny; but the real Duke of Devonshire. The point is that the
scheme of titles is a misfit throughout: hardly anywhere do
we find a modern man whose name
and rank represent in any way his type, his locality, or his mode
of life. As a mere matter of social comedy,
the thing is worth noticing. You
will meet a man whose name suggests a gouty admiral, and you will
find him exactly like a timid organist:
you will hear announced the name
of a haughty and almost heathen grande
dame, and behold the entrance of
a nice, smiling Christian cook. These are light complications of
the central fact of the falsification of all names and ranks.
Our peers are like a party of mediaeval knights who
should have exchanged shields,
crests, and pennons. For the present rule seems to be that the Duke
of Sussex may lawfully own the whole of Essex; and that the Marquis
of Cornwall may own all the hills and valleys so
long as they are not
Cornish.
The clue to all this tangle is as
simple as it is terrible. If England is an aristocracy, England is
dying. If this system IS the country,
as some say, the country is
stiffening into more than the pomp and paralysis of China. It is
the final sign of imbecility in a people that
it calls cats dogs and describes
the sun as the moon—and is very particular about the
preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and to be carefully
wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The disease called
aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean
coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort
is
the chief mark of the powerful
parts of modern society. They all seem straining to keep things in
rather than to let things out. For the kings of finance
speechlessness is counted a way of being strong, though it
should rather be counted a way of
being sly. By this time the Parliament does not parley any more
than the Speaker speaks. Even the newspaper editors and proprietors
are more despotic and dangerous by what they do not utter than by
what they do. We have all heard the expression "golden silence."
The expression "brazen silence" is the only adequate phrase
for our editors. If we wake out
of this throttled, gaping, and wordless
nightmare, we must awake with a
yell. The Revolution that releases England from the fixed falsity
of its present position will be not less noisy than other
revolutions. It will contain, I fear, a great deal of
that rude accomplishment
described among little boys as "calling names"; but that will not
matter much so long as they are the right names.
THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA
Strictly speaking, there is no
such thing as an English Peasant.
Indeed, the type can only exist
in community, so much does it depend on cooperation and common
laws. One must not think primarily of a French Peasant; any more
than of a German Measle. The plural of the word is its proper form;
you cannot have a Peasant till you have a peasantry. The essence of
the Peasant ideal is equality; and you cannot be equal all by
yourself.
Nevertheless, because human
nature always craves and half creates the things necessary to
its happiness, there are approximations and suggestions of the
possibility of such a race even here. The nearest approach I know
to the temper of a Peasant in England is that of the country
gardener; not, of course, the great scientific gardener attached to
the great houses; he is a rich man's servant like any other. I mean
the small jobbing gardener who works for two or three
moderate-sized
gardens; who works on his own;
who sometimes even owns his house; and who frequently owns his
tools. This kind of man has really some of the characteristics of
the true Peasant—especially the characteristics that
people don't like. He has none of that irresponsible mirth
which
is the consolation of most poor
men in England. The gardener is even disliked sometimes by the
owners of the shrubs and flowers; because (like Micaiah) he
prophesies not good concerning them, but evil. The English gardener
is grim, critical, self-respecting; sometimes even economical. Nor
is this (as the reader's lightning wit will flash back
at me) merely because the English
gardener is always a Scotch gardener. The type does exist in pure
South England blood and speech; I have spoken to the type. I was
speaking to the type only the other evening, when a rather odd
little incident occurred.
It was one of those wonderful
evenings in which the sky was warm and radiant while the earth was
still comparatively cold and wet. But it
is of the essence of Spring to be
unexpected; as in that heroic and hackneyed line about coming
"before the swallow dares." Spring never is Spring unless it comes
too soon. And on a day like that one might pray, without any
profanity, that Spring might come on earth as it was in heaven. The
gardener was gardening. I was not gardening. It is needless to
explain the causes of this difference; it would be to tell the
tremendous history of two souls. It is needless because there is a
more immediate explanation of the case: the gardener and I, if not
equal in agreement, were at least equal in difference. It is quite
certain that
he would not have allowed me to
touch the garden if I had gone down
on my knees to him. And it is by
no means certain that I should have consented to touch the garden
if he had gone down on his knees to me. His activity and my
idleness, therefore, went on steadily side by side through the long
sunset hours.
And all the time I was thinking
what a shame it was that he was not sticking his spade into his own
garden, instead of mine: he knew about the earth and the underworld
of seeds, the resurrection of Spring and the flowers that appear
in order like a procession marshalled by a herald. He possessed the
garden intellectually and spiritually, while
I only possessed it politically.
I know more about flowers than
coal-owners know about coal; for
at least I pay them honour when they are brought above the surface
of the earth. I know more about gardens than railway shareholders
seem to know about railways: for at least I
know that it needs a man to make
a garden; a man whose name is Adam. But as I walked on that grass
my ignorance overwhelmed me—and yet that phrase is false,
because it suggests something like a storm from the sky above. It
is truer to say that my ignorance exploded underneath me,
like
a mine dug long before; and
indeed it was dug before the beginning of the ages. Green bombs of
bulbs and seeds were bursting underneath me everywhere; and, so far
as my knowledge went, they had been laid by
a conspirator. I trod quite
uneasily on this uprush of the earth; the Spring is always only a
fruitful earthquake. With the land all alive
under me I began to wonder more
and more why this man, who had made the garden, did not own the
garden. If I stuck a spade into the ground, I
should be astonished at what I
found there...and just as I thought this
I saw that the gardener was
astonished too.
Just as I was wondering why the
man who used the spade did not profit by the spade, he brought me
something he had found actually in my soil. It was a thin worn gold
piece of the Georges, of the sort which are called,
I believe, Spade Guineas. Anyhow,
a piece of gold.
If you do not see the parable as
I saw it just then, I doubt if I can explain it just now. He
could make a hundred other round yellow fruits: and this flat
yellow one is the only sort that I can make. How it came
there I have not a
notion—unless Edmund Burke dropped it in his hurry to get
back to Butler's Court. But there it was: this is a cold
recital of facts. There may be a
whole pirate's treasure lying under the earth there, for all I know
or care; for there is no interest in a treasure without a Treasure
Island to sail to. If there is a treasure it
will never be found, for I am not
interested in wealth beyond the dreams of avarice since I know that
avarice has no dreams, but only insomnia. And, for the other party,
my gardener would never consent to dig up the garden.
Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed
with intellectual emotions when I saw that answer to my question;
the question of why the garden did not belong to the gardener. No
better epigram could be put in reply than simply putting the Spade
Guinea beside the Spade. This was the only underground seed that I
could understand. Only by having a little more of that dull,
battered yellow substance could I manage to be idle while
he was active. I am not
altogether idle myself; but the fact remains that the power is in
the thin slip of metal we call the Spade Guinea, not in the strong
square and curve of metal which we call the Spade.
And then I suddenly remembered
that as I had found gold on my ground by accident, so richer men in
the north and west counties had found coal in their ground, also by
accident.
I told the gardener that as he
had found the thing he ought to keep it, but that if he cared to
sell it to me it could be valued properly, and then sold. He said
at first, with characteristic independence, that he would like to
keep it. He said it would make a brooch for his wife. But a little
later he brought it back to me without explanation. I could not get
a ray of light on the reason of his refusal; but he looked lowering
and unhappy. Had he some mystical instinct that it is just such
accidental and irrational wealth that is the doom of all
peasantries?
Perhaps he dimly felt that the
boy's pirate tales are true; and that buried treasure is a thing
for robbers and not for producers. Perhaps he thought there was a
curse on such capital: on the coal of the
coal-owners, on the gold of the
gold-seekers. Perhaps there is.
THE VOTER AND THE TWO
VOICES
The real evil of our Party System
is commonly stated wrong. It was stated wrong by Lord Rosebery,
when he said that it prevented the best men from devoting
themselves to politics, and that it encouraged a fanatical
conflict. I doubt whether the best men ever would devote themselves
to politics. The best men devote themselves to pigs and babies and
things like that. And as for the fanatical conflict in
party politics, I wish there was
more of it. The real danger of the two parties with their two
policies is that they unduly limit the outlook of the ordinary
citizen. They make him barren instead of creative, because he is
never allowed to do anything except prefer one existing policy
to
another. We have not got real
Democracy when the decision depends upon the people. We shall have
real Democracy when the problem depends upon the people. The
ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but what he is
going to vote about.
It is this which involves some
weakness in many current aspirations towards the extension of the
suffrage; I mean that, apart from all questions of abstract
justice, it is not the smallness or largeness of the suffrage that
is at present the difficulty of Democracy. It is not the quantity
of voters, but the quality of the thing they are voting
about. A certain alternative is
put before them by the powerful houses and the highest political
class. Two roads are opened to them; but they must go down one or
the other. They cannot have what they choose, but only which they
choose. To follow the process in practice we may put it
thus. The
Suffragettes—if one may judge by their frequent ringing
of his bell—want to do something to Mr. Asquith. I have
no notion what it is. Let us say (for the sake of argument) that
they want to
paint him green. We will suppose
that it is entirely for that simple purpose that they are always
seeking to have private interviews with him; it seems as profitable
as any other end that I can imagine to such an interview. Now, it
is possible that the Government of the day might go in for a
positive policy of painting Mr. Asquith green; might give that
reform a prominent place in their programme. Then the party in
opposition would adopt another policy, not a policy of leaving
Mr.
Asquith alone (which would be
considered dangerously revolutionary), but some alternative course
of action, as, for instance, painting him red.
Then both sides would fling
themselves on the people, they would both cry that the appeal was
now to the Caesar of Democracy. A dark and dramatic air of conflict
and real crisis would arise on both sides; arrows of satire
would fly and swords of eloquence flame. The Greens would say that
Socialists and free lovers might well want to paint Mr. Asquith
red; they wanted to paint the whole town red. Socialists would
indignantly reply that Socialism was the reverse of disorder, and
that they only wanted to paint Mr. Asquith red so that he might
resemble the red pillar-boxes which typified State control. The
Greens would
passionately deny the charge so
often brought against them by the Reds; they would deny that they
wished Mr. Asquith green in order that he might be invisible on the
green benches of the Commons, as certain terrified animals take the
colour of their environment.
There would be fights in the
street perhaps, and abundance of ribbons, flags, and badges, of the
two colours. One crowd would sing, "Keep the Red Flag Flying," and
the other, "The Wearing of the Green." But when the last effort had
been made and the last moment come, when two crowds were waiting in
the dark outside the public building to hear the declaration of the
poll, then both sides alike would say that it was now for democracy
to do exactly what it chose. England herself, lifting her
head in awful loneliness and
liberty, must speak and pronounce judgment. Yet this might not be
exactly true. England herself, lifting her head in awful
loneliness and liberty, might really wish Mr. Asquith to be
pale
blue. The democracy of England in
the abstract, if it had been allowed to make up a policy for
itself, might have desired him to be black
with pink spots. It might even
have liked him as he is now. But a huge apparatus of wealth, power,
and printed matter has made it practically impossible for them to
bring home these other proposals, even if they would really prefer
them. No candidates will stand in the spotted interest; for
candidates commonly have to produce money either from their own
pockets or the party's; and in such circles spots are not worn.
No man in the social position of a Cabinet Minister, perhaps,
will commit himself to the pale-blue theory of Mr. Asquith;
therefore it cannot be a Government measure, therefore it cannot
pass.
Nearly all the great newspapers,
both pompous and frivolous, will declare dogmatically day after
day, until every one half believes
it, that red and green are the
only two colours in the paint-box. THE OBSERVER will say: "No one
who knows the solid framework of politics or
the emphatic first principles of
an Imperial people can suppose for
a moment that there is any
possible compromise to be made in such a matter; we must either
fulfil our manifest racial destiny and crown the edifice of ages
with the august figure of a Green Premier, or we must abandon our
heritage, break our promise to the Empire, fling ourselves into
final anarchy, and allow the flaming and demoniac image of a Red
Premier to hover over our dissolution and our doom." The DAILY MAIL
would say: "There is no halfway house in this matter; it must be
green or red. We wish to see every honest Englishman one colour or
the other." And then some funny man in the popular Press would star
the sentence with a pun, and say that the DAILY MAIL liked its
readers to be green and its paper to be read. But no one would even
dare to whisper that there is such a thing as yellow.
For the purposes of pure logic it
is clearer to argue with silly
examples than with sensible ones:
because silly examples are simple. But I could give many grave and
concrete cases of the kind of thing to which
I refer. In the later part of the
Boer War both parties perpetually
insisted in every speech and
pamphlet that annexation was inevitable and that it was only a
question whether Liberals or Tories should do it. It
was not inevitable in the least;
it would have been perfectly easy to
make peace with the Boers as
Christian nations commonly make peace with their conquered enemies.
Personally I think that it would have been
better for us in the most selfish
sense, better for our pocket and prestige, if we had never effected
the annexation at all; but that is a matter of opinion. What is
plain is that it was not inevitable; it was
not, as was said, the only
possible course; there were plenty of other courses; there were
plenty of other colours in the box. Again, in the discussion about
Socialism, it is repeatedly rubbed into the public mind that we
must choose between Socialism and some horrible thing that they
call Individualism. I don't know what it means, but it seems to
mean
that anybody who happens to pull
out a plum is to adopt the moral philosophy of the young
Horner—and say what a good boy he is for helping
himself.
It is calmly assumed that the
only two possible types of society are a Collectivist type of
society and the present society that exists at this moment and
is rather like an animated muck-heap. It is quite unnecessary to
say that I should prefer Socialism to the present state of things.
I
should prefer anarchism to the
present state of things. But it is simply not the fact that
Collectivism is the only other scheme for a more equal order. A
Collectivist has a perfect right to think it the only sound
scheme; but it is not the only plausible or possible scheme. We
might have peasant proprietorship; we might have the compromise of
Henry George; we might have a number of tiny communes; we might
have
co-operation; we might have
Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred things. I am not
saying that any of these are right, though I cannot
imagine that any of them could be
worse than the present social madhouse, with its top-heavy rich and
its tortured poor; but I say that it is an evidence of the stiff
and narrow alternative offered to the
civic mind, that the civic mind
is not, generally speaking, conscious of these other possibilities.
The civic mind is not free or alert enough
to feel how much it has the world
before it. There are at least ten solutions of the Education
question, and no one knows which Englishmen really want. For
Englishmen are only allowed to vote about the two
which are at that moment offered
by the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition. There are ten
solutions of the drink question; and no one knows which the
democracy wants; for the democracy is only allowed to fight about
one Licensing Bill at a time.
So that the situation comes to
this: The democracy has a right to answer questions, but it has no
right to ask them. It is still the political aristocracy that
asks the questions. And we shall not be unreasonably cynical if we
suppose that the political aristocracy will always be
rather careful what questions it
asks. And if the dangerous comfort and self-flattery of modern
England continues much longer there will be less democratic value
in an English election than in a Roman saturnalia of slaves. For
the powerful class will choose two courses of action, both
of them safe for itself, and then
give the democracy the gratification
of taking one course or the
other. The lord will take two things so much alike that he
would not mind choosing from them blindfold—and then for
a great jest he will allow the slaves to choose.
THE MAD OFFICIAL