Once upon a time there lived upon
an island a merry and innocent people, mostly shepherds and tillers
of the earth. They were republicans, like all primitive and simple
souls; they talked over their affairs under a tree, and the nearest
approach they had to a personal ruler was a sort of priest or white
witch who said their prayers for them. They worshipped the sun, not
idolatrously, but as the golden crown of the god whom all such
infants see almost as plainly as the sun.
Now this priest was told by his
people to build a great tower, pointing to the sky in salutation of
the Sun-god; and he pondered long and heavily before he picked his
materials. For he was resolved to use nothing that was not almost
as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself; he would use nothing
that was not washed as white as the rain can wash the heavens,
nothing that did not sparkle as spotlessly as that crown of God.
He would have nothing grotesque or obscure; he would not have even
anything emphatic or even anything mysterious. He would have all
the arches as light as laughter and as candid as logic. He
built the temple in three concentric courts, which were cooler and
more exquisite in substance each than the other. For the outer wall
was a hedge of white lilies, ranked so thick that a green stalk
was hardly to be seen; and the wall within that was of crystal,
which smashed the sun into a million stars. And the wall within
that, which was the tower itself, was a tower of pure water, forced
up in an everlasting fountain; and upon the very tip and crest of
that foaming spire was one big and blazing diamond, which the water
tossed up eternally and caught again as a child catches a
ball.
"Now," said the priest, "I have
made a tower which is a little worthy of the sun."
II
But about this time the island
was caught in a swarm of pirates; and the shepherds had to turn
themselves into rude warriors and seamen; and at first they
were utterly broken down in blood and shame; and the pirates might
have taken the jewel flung up for ever from their sacred fount. And
then, after years of horror and humiliation, they gained a little
and began to conquer because they did not mind defeat. And the
pride of the pirates went sick within them after a few unexpected
foils; and at last the invasion rolled back into the empty seas and
the island was delivered. And for some reason after this men began
to talk quite differently about the temple and the sun. Some,
indeed, said, "You must not touch the temple; it is classical;
it is perfect, since it admits no imperfections." But the others
answered, "In that it differs from the sun, that shines on the evil
and the good and on mud and monsters everywhere. The temple is of
the noon; it is made of white marble clouds and sapphire sky. But
the sun is not always of the noon. The sun dies daily, every night
he is crucified in blood and fire." Now the priest had taught and
fought through all the war, and his hair had grown white, but
his eyes had grown young. And he said, "I was wrong and they
are right. The sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all
those earthly things that are full of ugliness and energy. All the
exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let
us point to heaven with tusks and horns and fins and trunks and
tails so long as they all point to heaven. The ugly animals
praise God as much as the beautiful. The frog's eyes stand out of
his head because he is staring at heaven. The giraffe's neck is
long because he is stretching towards heaven. The donkey has ears
to hear--let him hear."
And under the new inspiration
they planned a gorgeous cathedral in the Gothic manner, with all
the animals of the earth crawling over it, and all the
possible ugly things making up one common beauty, because they all
appealed to the god. The columns of the temple were carved like the
necks of giraffes; the dome was like an ugly tortoise; and the
highest pinnacle was a monkey standing on his head with his
tail pointing at the sun. And yet the whole was beautiful, because
it was lifted up in one living and religious gesture as a man
lifts his hands in prayer.
III
But this great plan was never
properly completed. The people had brought up on great wagons the
heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone, and all the
thousand and one oddities that made up that unity, the owls and the
efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideous by
themselves might have been magnificent if reared in one definite
proportion and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, this was
romantic, this was Christian art; this was the whole
advance of Shakespeare upon Sophocles. And that symbol which was to
crown it all, the ape upside down, was really Christian; for man is
the ape upside down.
But the rich, who had grown
riotous in the long peace, obstructed the thing, and in some
squabble a stone struck the priest on the head and he lost his
memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants,
monkeys and giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things of
the universe which he had collected to do honour to God. But he
forgot why he had collected them. He could not remember the design
or the object. He piled them all wildly into one heap fifty feet
high; and when he had done it all the rich and influential went
into a passion of applause and cried, "This is real art! This is
Realism! This is things as they really are!"
That, I fancy, is the only true
origin of Realism. Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost
its reason. This is so not merely in the sense of insanity but
of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason for
existing. The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their
god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship
theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern
realists summon all these million creatures to worship their
god; and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in art
a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created
by controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my
belief was the zenith and the noon. Modern art and science
practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to
control them; and I will venture to call that the disruption
and the decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist
splendid houses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with
its gargoyles and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that
a donkey could go before all the horses of the world when it was
really going to the temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to
the temple. Realism means a lost donkey going nowhere.
The fragments of futile
journalism or fleeting impression which are here collected are very
like the wrecks and riven blocks that were piled in a heap round my
imaginary priest of the sun. They are very like that grey and
gaping head of stone
that I found overgrown with the
grass. Yet I will venture to make even of these trivial fragments
the high boast that I am a medievalist and not a modern. That is, I
really have a notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical
things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the
constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all
these chaotic papers. But it could be stated. This row of shapeless
and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not
consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or
various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a
definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can
carve nothing else; I leave to others the angels and the arches and
the spires. But I am very sure of the style of the architecture,
and of the consecration of the church.
2: THE SURRENDER OF A
COCKNEY
Evert man, though he were born in
the very belfry of Bow and spent his infancy climbing among
chimneys, has waiting for him somewhere a country house which he
has never seen; but which was built for him in the very shape of
his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found, knee-deep in
orchards of Kent or mirrored in pools of Lincoln; and when the man
sees it he remembers it, though he has never seen it before. Even I
have been forced to confess this at last, who am a Cockney, if ever
there was one, a Cockney not only on principle, but with savage
pride. I have always maintained, quite seriously, that the Lord is
not in the wind or thunder of the waste, but if anywhere in the
still small voice of Fleet Street. I sincerely maintain that
Nature-worship is more morally dangerous than the most vulgar
man-worship of the cities; since it can easily be perverted into
the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or cruelty.
Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted himself
to a greengrocer instead of to greens.
Swinburne would have been a
better moralist if he had worshipped a fishmonger instead of
worshipping the sea. I prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar
to the philosophy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may be
playful, but is seldom respectful. But when we wish to pay emphatic
honour to a man, to praise the firmness of his nature, the
squareness of his conduct, the strong humility with which he is
interlocked with his equals in silent mutual support, then we
invoke the nobler Cockney metaphor, and call him a brick.
But, despite all these theories,
I have surrendered; I have struck my colours at sight; at a mere
glimpse through the opening of a hedge. I shall come down to
living in the country, like any common Socialist or Simple Lifer. I
shall end my days in a village, in the character of the Village
Idiot, and be a spectacle and a judgment to mankind. I have already
learnt the rustic manner of leaning upon a gate; and I was thus
gymnastically occupied at the moment when my eye caught the house
that was made for me. It stood well back from the road, and was
built of a good yellow brick; it was narrow for its height, like
the tower of some Border robber; and over the front door was carved
in large letters, "1908." That last burst of sincerity, that superb
scorn of antiquarian sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my
eyes in a kind of ecstasy. My friend (who was helping me to lean on
the gate) asked me with some curiosity what I was doing.
"My dear fellow," I said, with
emotion, "I am bidding farewell to forty-three hansom
cabmen."
"Well," he said, "I suppose they
would think this county rather outside the radius."
"Oh, my friend," I cried
brokenly, "how beautiful London is! Why do they only write poetry
about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into Cockney.
"'My heart leaps up when I behold
A sky-sign in the sky,'
"as I observed in a volume which
is too little read, founded on the older English poets. You never
saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded; or, The Classics Made
Cockney'--it contained some fine lines.
"'O Wild West End, thou breath of
London's being,' "or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning
"'City of smuts and mellow
fogfulness.';
"I have written many such lines
on the beauty of London; yet I never realized that London was
really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why? It is because I have
left it for ever."
"If you will take my advice,"
said my friend, "you will humbly endeavour not to be a fool. What
is the sense of this mad modern notion that every literary man must
live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and the squires?
Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London;
Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had
quite enough of the country. And as for trumpery topical
journalists like you, why, they would cut their throats in the
country. You have confessed it yourself in your own last words. You
hunger and thirst after the streets; you think London the finest
place on the planet. And if by some miracle a Bayswater omnibus
could come down this green country lane you would utter a yell of
joy."
Then a light burst upon my brain,
and I turned upon him with terrible sternness.
"Why, miserable aesthete," I said
in a voice of thunder, "that is the true country spirit! That is
how the real rustic feels. The real rustic does utter a yell of joy
at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real rustic does think
London the finest place on the planet. In the few moments that I
have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here like an ancient
tree; I have been here for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the real
rustic. I believe that the streets of London are paved with gold;
and I mean to see it before I die."
The evening breeze freshened
among the little tossing trees of that lane, and the purple evening
clouds piled up and darkened behind my Country Seat, the
house
that belonged to me, making, by
contrast, its yellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend
said: "To cut it short, then, you mean that you will live in the
country because you won't like it. What on earth will you do here;
dig up the garden?"
"Dig!" I answered, in honourable
scorn. "Dig! Do work at my Country Seat; no, thank you. When I find
a Country Seat, I sit in it. And for your other objection, you are
quite wrong. I do not dislike the country, but I like the town
more.
Therefore the art of happiness
certainly suggests that I should live in the country and think
about the town. Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and
fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought
to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the
country and wants to go to London. I abominate and abjure the man
who lives in London and wants to go to the country; I do it with
all the more heartiness because I am that sort of man myself. We
must learn to love London again, as rustics love it. Therefore (I
quote again from the great Cockney version of The Golden
Treasury)--
"'Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye
asbestos? stoves,
Forbode not any severing of
our loves.
I have relinquished but
your earthly sight,
To hold you dear in a
more distant way.
I'll love the 'buses
lumbering through the wet,
Even more than when I
lightly tripped as they.
The grimy colour of the
London clay
Is lovely yet,'
"because I have found the house
where I was really born; the tall and quiet house from which I can
see London afar off, as the miracle of man that it is."
3: THE NIGHTMARE
A sunset of copper and gold had
just broken down and gone to pieces in the west, and grey colours
were crawling over everything in earth and heaven; also a wind was
growing, a wind that laid a cold finger upon flesh and spirit. The
bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper like conspirators;
and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by
the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent
period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their
blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal faces.
"Or didst thou love the God of
Flies who plagued
the Hebrews and was splashed
With wine unto the
waist, or Pasht who had green
beryls for her eyes?"
I read this poem because I had to
review it for the Daily News; still it was genuine poetry of its
kind. It really gave out an atmosphere, a fragrant and suffocating
smoke that seemed really to come from the Bondage of Egypt or the
Burden of Tyre There is not much in common (thank God) between my
garden with the grey- green English sky-line beyond it, and these
mad visions of painted palaces huge, headless idols and monstrous
solitudes of red or golden sand. Nevertheless (as I confessed to
myself) I can fancy in such a stormy twilight some such smell of
death and fear. The ruined sunset really looks like one of their
ruined temples: a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black
flapping thing detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and
flutters to another. I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I
could fancy it was a black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness,
not with the wings of a bird and the head of a baby, but with the
head of a goblin and the wings of a bat. I think, if there were
light enough, I could sit here and write some very creditable
creepy tale, about how I went up the crooked road beyond the church
and met Something--say a dog, a dog with one eye. Then I should
meet a horse, perhaps, a horse without a rider, the horse also
would have one eye. Then the inhuman silence would be broken; I
should meet a man (need I say, a one-eyed man?) who would ask me
the way to my own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was burnt to
the ground. I could tell a very cosy little tale along some such
lines. Or I might dream of climbing for ever the tall dark trees
above me. They are so tall that I feel as if I should find at their
tops the nests of the angels; but in this mood they would be dark
and dreadful angels; angels of death.
Only, you see, this mood is all
bosh. I do not believe in it in the least. That one- eyed universe,
with its one-eyed men and beasts, was only created with one
universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees I should not find
the Angel's Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest; the dreamy
and divine nest is not there. In the
Mare's Nest I shall discover that
dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the Nightmare.
For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare--when you know it
is a nightmare.
That is the essential. That is
the stern condition laid upon all artists touching this
luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally frivolous. Sanity
may play with insanity; but insanity must not be allowed to play
with sanity. Let such poets as the one I was reading in the
garden, by all means, be free to imagine what outrageous deities
and violent landscapes they like. By all means let them wander
freely amid their opium pinnacles and perspectives. But these huge
gods, these high cities, are toys; they must never for an
instant be allowed to be anything else. Man, a gigantic child,
must play with Babylon and Nineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth.
By all means let him dream of the Bondage of Egypt, so long as he
is free from it. By all means let him take up the Burden of Tyre,
so long as he can take it lightly. But the old gods must be his
dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his true
possessions, should be Christian and simple. And just as a child
would cherish most a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross
of wood, so man, the great child, must cherish most the old plain
things of poetry and piety; that horse of wood that was the epic
end of Ilium, or that cross of wood that redeemed and conquered the
world.
In one of Stevenson's letters
there is a characteristically humorous remark about the appalling
impression produced on him in childhood by the beasts with many
eyes in the Book of Revelations: "If that was heaven, what in the
name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in sober truth there is a
magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse. It is, I
suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more
universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even
confused. Especially they might seem to have senses at once more
multiplex and more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in
the multitude of eyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne
very much. But I like them beneath the throne. It is when one
of them goes wandering in deserts and finds a throne for himself
that evil faiths begin, and there is (literally) the devil to
pay--to pay in dancing girls or human sacrifice. As long as those
misshapen elemental powers are around the throne, remember that the
thing that they worship is the likeness of the appearance of a
man.
That is, I fancy, the true
doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror and such things, which
unless a man of letters do well and truly believe, without doubt he
will end by blowing his brains out or by writing badly. Man, the
central pillar of the world must be upright and straight; around
him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils may crook and
curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginative literature
is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and the
straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes if
he is sure
that he will not worship it; but
there are some so weak that they will worship a thing only because
it is ugly. These must be chained to the beautiful. It is not
always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the brink of the lowest
promontory and look down at hell. It is when you look up at hell
that a serious miscalculation has probably been made.
Therefore I see no wrong in
riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to me from the
rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride
her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the
roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us over
the moon, like that wild amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf.
We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor
down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will answer the
call of chaos and old night. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she
shall not ride on me.
4: THE TELEGRAPH POLES
My friend and I were walking in
one of those wastes of pine-wood which make inland seas of solitude
in every part of Western Europe; which have the true terror of a
desert, since they are uniform, and so one may lose one's way in
them. Stiff, straight, and similar, stood up all around us the
pines of the wood, like the pikes of a silent mutiny. There is a
truth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature
often shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird
rhythm in this very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved
to repeat a single shape until the shape shall turn terrible.
Have you ever tried the
experiment of saying some plain word, such as "dog," thirty times?
By the thirtieth time it has become a word like "snark" or
"pobble." It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition.
In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as
Leviathan or Croquemitaine.
It may be that this explains the
repetitions in Nature, it may be for this reason that there are so
many million leaves and pebbles. Perhaps they are not repeated so
that they may grow familiar. Perhaps they are repeated only in the
hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar. Perhaps a man is not
startled at the first cat he sees, but jumps into the air with
surprise at the seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass through
thousands of pine trees before he finds the one that is really a
pine tree. However this may be, there is something singularly
thrilling, even something urgent and intolerant, about the endless
forest repetitions; there is the hint of something like madness in
that musical monotony of the pines.
I said something like this to my
friend; and he answered with sardonic truth, "Ah, you wait till we
come to a telegraph post."
My friend was right, as he
occasionally is in our discussions, especially upon points of
fact. We had crossed the pine forest by one of its paths which
happened to follow the wires of the provincial telegraphy; and
though the poles occurred at long intervals they made a difference
when they came. The instant we came to the straight pole we could
see that the pines were not really straight. It was like a hundred
straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all brought to judgment
suddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler. All the amateur
lines seemed to reel to right and left. A moment before I could
have sworn they stood as straight as lances; now I could see them
curve and waver everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Compared
with the telegraph post the pines were crooked--and alive. That
lonely vertical rod at once deformed and enfranchised the forest.
It tangled it all together and yet made it free, like any grotesque
undergrowth of oak or holly.
"Yes," said my gloomy friend,
answering my thoughts. "You don't know what a wicked shameful thing
straightness is if you think these trees are straight. You never
will know till your precious intellectual civilization builds a
forty-mile forest of telegraph poles."
We had started walking from our
temporary home later in the day than we intended; and the long
afternoon was already lengthening itself out into a yellow evening
when we came out of the forest on to the hills above a strange town
or village, of which the lights had already begun to glitter in the
darkening valley. The change had already happened which is the test
and definition of evening. I mean that while the sky seemed still
as bright, the earth was growing blacker against it, especially at
the edges, the hills and the pine-tops. This brought out
yet more clearly the owlish secrecy of pine-woods; and my friend
cast a regretful glance at them as he came out under the sky. Then
he turned to the view in front; and, as it happened, one of the
telegraph posts stood up in front of him in the last sunlight. It
was no longer crossed and softened by the more delicate lines of
pine wood; it stood up ugly, arbitrary, and angular as any crude
figure in geometry. My friend stopped, pointing his stick at it,
and all his anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips.
"Demon," he said to me briefly,
"behold your work. That palace of proud trees behind us is what the
world was before you civilized men, Christians or democrats or
the rest, came to make it dull with your dreary rules of morals and
equality. In the silent fight of that forest, tree fights
speechless against tree, branch against branch. And the upshot of
that dumb battle is inequality--and beauty. Now lift up your eyes
and look at equality and ugliness. See how regularly the white
buttons are arranged on that black stick, and defend your dogmas if
you dare."
"Is that telegraph post so much a
symbol of democracy?" I asked. "I fancy that while three men have
made the telegraph to get dividends, about a thousand men have
preserved the forest to cut wood. But if the telegraph pole is
hideous (as I admit) it is not due to doctrine but rather to
commercial anarchy. If any one had a doctrine about a telegraph
pole it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold. Modern
things are ugly, because modern men are careless, not because they
are careful."
"No," answered my friend with his
eye on the end of a splendid and sprawling sunset, "there is
something intrinsically deadening about the very idea of a
doctrine. A straight line is always ugly. Beauty is always
crooked. These rigid posts at regular intervals are ugly because
they are carrying across the world the real message of
democracy."
"At this moment," I answered,
"they are probably carrying across the world the message, 'Buy
Bulgarian Rails.' They are probably the prompt communication
between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of His children
with whom God has ever had patience. No; these telegraph poles are
ugly and detestable, they are inhuman and indecent. But their
baseness lies in their privacy, not in their publicity. That
black stick with white buttons is not the creation of the soul of a
multitude. It is the mad creation of the souls of two
millionaires."
"At least you have to explain,"
answered my friend gravely, "how it is that the hard democratic
doctrine and the hard telegraphic outline have appeared
together; you have... But bless my soul, we must be getting home. I
had no idea it was so late. Let me see, I think this is our way
through the wood. Come, let us both curse the telegraph post for
entirely different reasons and get home before it is dark."
We did not get home before it was
dark. For one reason or another we had underestimated the
swiftness of twilight and the suddenness of night, especially
in the threading of thick woods. When my friend, after the first
five minutes' march, had fallen over a log, and I, ten minutes
after, had stuck nearly to the knees in mire, we began to have
some suspicion of our direction. At last my friend said, in a low,
husky voice:
"I'm afraid we're on the wrong
path. It's pitch dark." "I thought we went the right way," I said,
tentatively.
"Well," he said; and then, after
a long pause, "I can't see any telegraph poles. I've been looking
for them."
"So have I," I said. "They're so
straight."
We groped away for about two
hours of darkness in the thick of the fringe of trees which seemed
to dance round us in derision. Here and there, however, it was
possible to trace the outline of something just too erect and rigid
to be a pine tree. By these we finally felt our way home, arriving
in a cold green twilight before dawn.
5: A DRAMA OF DOLLS
In a small grey town of stone in
one of the great Yorkshire dales, which is full of history, I
entered a hall and saw an old puppet-play exactly as our fathers
saw it five hundred years ago. It was admirably translated from the
old German, and was the original tale of Faust. The dolls were at
once comic and convincing; but if you cannot at once laugh at a
thing and believe in it, you have no business in the Middle Ages.
Or in the world, for that matter.
The puppet-play in question
belongs, I believe, to the fifteenth century; and indeed the
whole legend of Dr. Faustus has the colour of that grotesque but
somewhat gloomy time. It is very unfortunate that we so often
know a thing that is past only by its tail end. We remember
yesterday only by its sunsets. There are many instances. One is
Napoleon. We always think of him as a fat old despot, ruling
Europe with a ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord Rosebery
would say, was only "The Last Phase"; or at least the last but
one. During the strongest and most startling part of his career,
the time that made him immortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy, and
not a bad sort of boy either, bullet-headed and ambitious, but
honestly in love with a woman, and honestly enthusiastic for a
cause, the cause of French justice and equality.
Another instance is the Middle
Ages, which we also remember only by the odour of their ultimate
decay. We think of the life of the Middle Ages as a dance of death,
full of devils and deadly sins, lepers and burning heretics. But
this was not the life of the Middle Ages, but the death of the
Middle Ages. It is the spirit of Louis XI and Richard III, not of
Louis IX and Edward I.
This grim but not unwholesome
fable of Dr. Faustus, with its rebuke to the mere arrogance of
learning, is sound and stringent enough; but it is not a fair
sample of the mediaeval soul at its happiest and sanest. The heart
of the true Middle Ages might be found far better, for instance, in
the noble tale of Tannhauser, in which the dead staff broke into
leaf and flower to rebuke the pontiff who had declared even one
human being beyond the strength of sorrow and pardon.
But there were in the play two
great human ideas which the mediaeval mind never lost its grip on,
through the heaviest nightmares of its dissolution. They were the
two great jokes of mediaevalism, as they are the two eternal jokes
of mankind. Wherever those two jokes exist there is a little health
and hope; wherever they are absent, pride and insanity are present.
The first is the idea that the poor man ought to get the better of
the rich man. The other is the idea that the husband is afraid of
the wife.
I have heard that there is a
place under the knee which, when struck, should produce a sort of
jump; and that if you do not jump, you are mad. I am sure that
there are some such places in the soul. When the human spirit does
not jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, the human
spirit must be struck with incurable paralysis. There is hope for
people who have gone down into the hells of greed and economic
oppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are such a people
ourselves), but there is no hope for a people that does not exult
in the abstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There
is hope for the idle and the adulterous, for the men that desert
their wives and the men that beat their wives. But there is no hope
for men who do not boast that their wives bully them.
The first idea, the idea about
the man at the bottom coming out on top, is expressed in this
puppet-play in the person of Dr. Faustus' servant, Caspar.
Sentimental old Tones, regretting the feudal times, sometimes
complain that in these days Jack is as good as his master. But most
of the actual tales of the feudal times turn on the idea that Jack
is much better than his master, and certainly it is so in the case
of Caspar and Faust. The play ends with the damnation of the
learned and illustrious doctor, followed by a cheerful and animated
dance by Caspar, who has been made watchman of the city.
But there was a much keener
stroke of mediaeval irony earlier in the play. The learned doctor
has been ransacking all the libraries of the earth to find a
certain rare formula, now almost unknown, by which he can control
the infernal deities. At last he procures the one precious volume,
opens it at the proper page, and leaves it on the table while he
seeks some other part of his magic equipment. The servant comes in,
reads off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor of the
elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons and
dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod
working at high speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor's
house and their own more unmentionable residences till they faint
with rage and fatigue. There is all the best of the Middle Ages in
that; the idea of the great levellers, luck and laughter; the idea
of a sense of humour defying and dominating hell.
One of the best points in the
play as performed in this Yorkshire town was that the servant
Caspar was made to talk Yorkshire, instead of the German rustic
dialect which he talked in the original. That also smacks of the
good air of that epoch. In those old pictures and poems they always
made things living by making them local. Thus, queerly enough, the
one touch that was not in the old mediaeval version was the most
mediaeval touch of all.
That other ancient and Christian
jest, that a wife is a holy terror, occurs in the last scene, where
the doctor (who wears a fur coat throughout, to make him seem
more offensively rich and
refined) is attempting to escape from the avenging demons, and
meets his old servant in the street. The servant obligingly points
out a house with a blue door, and strongly recommends Dr. Faustus
to take refuge in it. "My old woman lives there," he says, "and the
devils are more afraid of her than you are of them." Faustus does
not take this advice, but goes on meditating and reflecting (which
had been his mistake all along) until the clock strikes twelve, and
dreadful voices talk Latin in heaven. So Faustus, in his fur coat,
is carried away by little black imps; and serve him right for being
an Intellectual.
6: THE MAN AND HIS
NEWSPAPER
At a little station, which I
decline to specify, somewhere between Oxford and Guildford, I
missed a connection or miscalculated a route in such manner that I
was left stranded for rather more than an hour. I adore waiting at
railway stations, but this was not a very sumptuous specimen. There
was nothing on the platform except a chocolate automatic machine,
which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no corresponding
chocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few remaining copies of a
cheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire. It does not
matter which imperial organ it was, as they all say the same
thing.
Though I knew it quite well
already, I read it with gravity as I strolled out of the station
and up the country road. It opened with the striking phrase that
the Radicals were setting class against class. It went on to remark
that nothing had contributed more to make our Empire happy and
enviable, to create that obvious list of glories which you can
supply for yourself, the prosperity of all classes in our great
cities, our populous and growing villages, the success of our rule
in Ireland, etc., etc., than the sound Anglo-Saxon readiness of all
classes in the State "to work heartily hand-in-hand." It was this
alone, the paper assured me, that had saved us from the horrors of
the French Revolution. "It is easy for the Radicals," it went on
very solemnly, "to make jokes about the dukes. Very few of these
revolutionary gentlemen have given to the poor one half of the
earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, and truly Christian
patience that are given to them by the great landlords of this
country. We are very sure that the English people, with their
sturdy common sense, will prefer to be in the hands of English
gentlemen rather than in the miry claws of Socialistic
buccaneers."
Just when I had reached this
point I nearly ran into a man. Despite the populousness and growth
of our villages, he appeared to be the only man for miles, but the
road up which I had wandered turned and narrowed with equal
abruptness, and I nearly knocked him off the gate on which he was
leaning. I pulled up to apologize, and since he seemed ready for
society, and even pathetically pleased with it, I tossed the Daily
Wire over a hedge and fell into speech with him. He wore a wreck of
respectable clothes, and his face had that plebeian refinement
which one sees in small tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of
sedentary trades. Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood
up as gaunt and tattered as himself, but I do not think that the
tragedy that he symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood.
There was a fixed look in his face which told that he was one of
those who in keeping body and soul together have difficulties not
only with the body, but also with the soul.
He was a Cockney by birth, and
retained the touching accent of those streets from which I am
an exile; but he had lived nearly all his life in this countryside;
and he began to tell me the affairs of it in that formless,
tail-foremost way in which the poor gossip about their great
neighbours. Names kept coming and going in the narrative like
charms or spells, unaccompanied by any biographical explanation. In
particular the name of somebody called Sir Joseph multiplied
itself with the omnipresence of a deity. I took Sir Joseph to be
the principal landowner of the district; and as the confused
picture unfolded itself, I began to form a definite and by no
means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph. He was spoken of in a
strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child might speak of a
stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate, but by no
means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own bed
and board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that,
with a caprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not
appear that
Sir Joseph was popular, but he
was "a household word." He was not so much a public man as a sort
of private god or omnipotence. The particular man to whom I spoke
said he had "been in trouble," and that Sir Joseph had been "pretty
hard on him."
And under that grey and silver
cloudland, with a background of those frost-bitten and
wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me a tale which, true
or false, was as heartrending as Romeo and Juliet.
He had slowly built up in the
village a small business as a photographer, and he was engaged to a
girl at one of the lodges, whom he loved with passion. "I'm the
sort that 'ad better marry," he said; and for all his frail figure
I knew what he meant. But Sir Joseph, and especially Sir Joseph's
wife, did not want a photographer in the village; it made the
girls vain, or perhaps they disliked this particular photographer.
He worked and worked until he had just enough to marry on
honestly; and almost on the eve of his wedding the lease expired,
and Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory. He refused to renew the
lease; and the man went wildly elsewhere. But Sir Joseph was
ubiquitous; and the whole of that place was barred against him.
In all that country he could not find a shed to which to bring
home his bride. The man appealed and explained; but he was disliked
as a demagogue, as well as a photographer. Then it was as if a
black cloud came across the winter sky; for I knew what was coming.
I forget even in what words he told of Nature maddened and set
free. But I still see, as in a photograph, the grey muscles of the
winter trees standing out like tight ropes, as if all Nature were
on the rack.
"She 'ad to go away," he
said.
"Wouldn't her parents," I began,
and hesitated on the word "forgive." "Oh, her people forgave her,"
he said. "But Her Ladyship..."
"Her Ladyship made the sun and
moon and stars," I said, impatiently. "So of course she can come
between a mother and the child of her body."
"Well, it does seem a bit
'ard..." he began with a break in his voice.
"But, good Lord, man," I cried,
"it isn't a matter of hardness! It's a matter of impious and
indecent wickedness. If your Sir Joseph knew the passions he was
playing with, he did you a wrong for which in many Christian
countries he would have a knife in him."
The man continued to look across
the frozen fields with a frown. He certainly told his tale with
real resentment, whether it was true or false, or only exaggerated.
He was certainly sullen and injured; but he did not seem to think
of any avenue of escape. At last he said:
"Well, it's a bad world; let's
'ope there's a better one."
"Amen," I said. "But when I think
of Sir Joseph, I understand how men have hoped there was a worse
one."
Then we were silent for a long
time and felt the cold of the day crawling up, and at last I said,
abruptly:
"The other day at a Budget
meeting, I heard."
He took his elbows off the stile
and seemed to change from head to foot like a man coming out of
sleep with a yawn. He said in a totally new voice, louder but much
more careless, "Ah yes, sir,... this 'ere Budget... the Radicals
are doing a lot of 'arm."
I listened intently, and he went
on. He said with a sort of careful precision, "Settin' class
against class; that's what I call it. Why, what's made our Empire
except the readiness of all classes to work 'eartily
'and-in-'and."
He walked a little up and down
the lane and stamped with the cold. Then he said, "What I say is,
what else kept us from the 'errors of the French Revolution?"
My memory is good, and I waited
in tense eagerness for the phrase that came next. "They may laugh
at Dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf as kind and Christian
and patient as lots of the
landlords are. Let me tell you, sir," he said, facing round at me
with the final air of one launching a paradox. "The English people
'ave some common sense, and they'd rather be in the 'ands of
gentlemen than in the claws of a lot of Socialist thieves."
I had an indescribable sense that
I ought to applaud, as if I were a public meeting. The insane
separation in the man's soul between his experience and his
ready-made theory was but a type of what covers a quarter of
England. As he turned away, I saw the Daily Wire sticking out of
his shabby pocket. He bade me farewell in quite a blaze of
catchwords, and went stumping up the road. I saw his figure grow
smaller and smaller in the great green landscape; even as the Free
Man has grown smaller and smaller in the English countryside.
7: THE APPETITE OF EARTH
I was walking the other day in a
kitchen garden, which I find has somehow got attached to my
premises, and I was wondering why I liked it. After a prolonged
spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion that I like a
kitchen garden because it contains things to eat. I do not mean
that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very
beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous
cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere freakish and
theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the
flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A
kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard; but why is it that
the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful as the word "flower-garden,"
and yet also sounds more satisfactory? I suggest again my
extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery: that it contains
things to eat.
The cabbage is a solid; it can be
approached from all sides at once; it can be realized by all
senses at once. Compared with that the sunflower, which can only be
seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flat wall. Now, it is
this sense of the solidity of things that can only be uttered by
the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of a turnip,
you must be all round it at once. The only way to get all round a
turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that
has loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of
stones, the firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they
were things to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks;
if only white firwood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving
stones for bread: but there are in the Geological Museum certain
rich crimson marbles, certain split stones of blue and green,
that make me wish my teeth were stronger.
Somebody staring into the sky
with the same ethereal appetite declared that the moon was made of
green cheese. I never could conscientiously accept the full
doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of
cheese I have believed from childhood; and in the course of every
month a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of
it. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not
contrary to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some
degree actually contradicted by the senses and the reason; first
because if the moon were made of green cheese it would be
inhabited; and second because if it were made of green cheese it
would be green. A blue moon is said to be an unusual sight; but I
cannot think that a green one is much more common. In
fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other sort of
cheese except a green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a
cream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky
above a cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch
cheese, rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark
waters at Honfleur. I have seen
it look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an ordinary
sensible Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked and
ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere
cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it,
as if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and
unearthly cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green;
and I incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The
moon, like everything else, will ripen by the end of the world; and
in the last days we shall see it taking on those volcanic sunset
colours, and leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.
But this is a parenthesis; and
one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaic actuality. Whatever may be
the value of the above speculations, the phrase about the moon and
green cheese remains a good example of this imagery of eating and
drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancy is in the phrase "if
all the trees were bread and cheese," which I have cited elsewhere
in this connection; and in that noble nightmare of a Scandinavian
legend, in which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out of a horn.
In an essay like the present (first intended as a paper to be read
before the Royal Society) one cannot be too exact; and I will
concede that my theory of the gradual vire-scence of our satellite
is to be regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law
finally demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific
world. It is a hypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists
say of a theory when there is no evidence for it so far.
But the reader need be under no
apprehension that I have suddenly gone mad, and shall start biting
large pieces out of the trunks of trees; or seriously altering
(by large semicircular mouthfuls) the exquisite outline of the
mountains. This feeling for expressing a fresh solidity by the
image of eating is really a very old one. So far from being a
paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest commonplaces of
religion. If any one wandering about wants to have a good trick or
test for separating the wrong idealism from the right, I will give
him one on the spot. It is a mark of false religion that it is
always trying to express concrete facts as abstract; it calls sex
affinity; it calls wine alcohol; it calls brute starvation the
economic problem. The test of true religion is that its energy
drives exactly the other way; it is always trying to make men feel
truths as facts; always trying to make abstract things as plain and
solid as concrete things; always trying to make men, not merely
admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear, and devour the
truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of the invitation
not to test, but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their
phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious
manna and dreadful wine. Worldliness, and the polite society of the
world, has despised this instinct of eating; but religion has never
despised it. When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at
Dover, I do not suggest that we should desire to eat it; that
would be highly abnormal. But I really mean that we should
think it good to eat; good for some one else to eat.
For, indeed, some one else is
eating it; the grass that grows upon its top is devouring it
silently, but, doubtless, with an uproarious appetite.
8: SIMMONS AND THE SOCIAL
TIE
It is a platitude, and none the
less true for that, that we need to have an ideal in our minds with
which to test all realities. But it is equally true, and less
noted, that we need a reality with which to test ideals. Thus I
have selected Mrs.
Buttons, a charwoman in
Battersea, as the touchstone of all modern theories about the mass
of women. Her name is not Buttons; she is not in the least a
contemptible nor entirely a comic figure. She has a powerful stoop
and an ugly, attractive face, a little like that of Huxley--without
the whiskers, of course. The courage with which she supports the
most brutal bad luck has something quite creepy about it. Her irony
is incessant and inventive; her practical charity very large; and
she is wholly unaware of the philosophical use to which I put
her.
But when I hear the modern
generalization about her sex on all sides I simply substitute her
name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on the one side the
mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman be content to be dainty and
exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic ornament,"
then I merely repeat it to myself in the "other form," "Let Mrs.
Buttons be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected
piece of social art, etc." It is extraordinary what a difference
the substitution seems to make. And on the other hand, when some of
the Suffragettes say in their pamphlets and speeches, "Woman,
leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her
tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of empire and the
firebrand of speculative thought"--in order to understand such a
sentence I say it over again in the amended form: "Mrs.
Buttons, leaping to life at the
trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and
demands to grasp the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of
speculative thought." Somehow it sounds quite different. And yet
when you say Woman I suppose you mean the average woman; and if
most women are as capable and critical and morally sound as Mrs.
Buttons, it is as much as we can expect, and a great deal more than
we deserve.
But this study is not about Mrs.
Buttons; she would require many studies. I will take a less
impressive case of my principle, the principle of keeping in the
mind an actual personality when we are talking about types or
tendencies or generalized ideals. Take, for example, the question
of the education of boys.
Almost every post brings me
pamphlets expounding some advanced and suggestive scheme of
education; the pupils are to be taught separate; the sexes are to
be taught together; there should be no prizes; there should be no
punishments; the master should lift the boys to his level; the
master should descend to their level; we should encourage the
heartiest comradeship among boys, and also the tenderest spiritual
intimacy with masters; toil must be
pleasant and holidays must be
instructive; with all these things I am daily impressed and
somewhat bewildered. But on the great Buttons' principle I keep in
my mind and apply to all these ideals one still vivid fact; the
face and character of a particular schoolboy whom I once knew. I am
not taking a mere individual oddity, as you will hear. He was
exceptional, and yet the reverse of eccentric; he was (in a quite
sober and strict sense of the words) exceptionally average. He was
the incarnation and the exaggeration of a certain spirit which
is the common spirit of boys, but which nowhere else became so
obvious and outrageous. And because he was an incarnation he was,
in his way, a tragedy.