I.
Introductory Remarks on the
Importance of Orthodoxy
Nothing more strangely indicates
an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the
extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word "orthodox." In
former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was
the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were
heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled
against them; they had rebelled against him. The armies with their
cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous
processes of State, the reasonable processes of law--all these like
sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was
proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he
was more than a man; he was a church.
He was the centre of the
universe; it was round him that the stars swung. All the tortures
torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was
heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He
says, with a conscious laugh, "I suppose I am very heretical," and
looks round for applause.
The word "heresy" not only means
no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and
courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being
right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one
thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for
whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought
to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The
Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his
orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that,
whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox.
It is foolish, generally
speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in
Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the
universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of
the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there
is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than
burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that
his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the
twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary
period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of
the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of
Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution
itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a
restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has
put the view in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule is that there
is no golden rule." We are more and more to discuss details in art,
politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters;
his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does
not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he
must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he
will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters--except
everything.
Examples are scarcely needed of
this total levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy. Examples
are scarcely needed to show that, whatever else we think of as
affecting practical affairs, we do not think it matters whether a
man is a pessimist or an optimist, a Cartesian or a Hegelian, a
materialist or a spiritualist. Let me, however, take a random
instance. At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say,
"Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the statement
that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly
have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if
that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its
head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life;
firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons
would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people
were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a
horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the
conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society;
for we are convinced that theories do not matter.
This was certainly not the idea
of those who introduced our freedom. When the old Liberals removed
the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and
philosophical discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that
cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear
independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so
unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. The former
freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry
as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never has
there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now,
when, for the first time, any one can discuss it. The old
restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss
religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss
it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has
succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. Sixty
years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist. Then came the
Bradlaughites, the last religious men, the last men who cared about
God; but they could not alter it. It is still bad taste to be an
avowed atheist. But their agony has achieved just his--that
now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of
silence as the heresiarch. Then we talk about Lord Anglesey and the
weather, and call it the complete liberty of all the creeds.
But there are some people,
nevertheless--and I am one of them--who think that the most
practical and important thing about a man is still his view of
the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger,
it is important to know his income, but still more important to
know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an
enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more
important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is
not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether
in the long run, anything else affects them. In the fifteenth
century men cross-
examined and tormented a man
because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth
century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such
an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude
because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the two
methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which
was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at
least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol
of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it
made him a convict for practising.
Now, in our time, philosophy or
religion, our theory, that is, about ultimate things, has been
driven out, more or less simultaneously, from two fields which it
used to occupy. General ideals used to dominate literature. They
have been driven out by the cry of "art for art's sake." General
ideals used to dominate politics. They have been driven out by the
cry of "efficiency," which may roughly be translated as "politics
for politics' sake." Persistently for the last twenty years the
ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books; the
ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments.
Literature has purposely become less political; politics have
purposely become less literary. General theories of the relation of
things have thus been extruded from both; and we are in a position
to ask, "What have we gained or lost by this extrusion? Is
literature better, is politics better, for having discarded the
moralist and the philosopher?"
When everything about a people is
for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about
efficiency. So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins,
for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk
not about their processes, but about their aims. There cannot be
any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he
talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world. And there
cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency of a nation
than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of the world,
a journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem. There can be
no stronger sign of a coarse material health than the tendency to
run after high and wild ideals; it is in the first exuberance of
infancy that we cry for the moon. None of the strong men in the
strong ages would have understood what you meant by working for
efficiency. Hildebrand would have said that he was working not for
efficiency, but for the Catholic Church. Danton would have said
that he was working not for efficiency, but for liberty, equality,
and fraternity. Even if the ideal of such men were simply the ideal
of kicking a man downstairs, they thought of the end like men, not
of the process like paralytics. They did not say, "Efficiently
elevating my right leg, using, you will notice, the muscles of the
thigh and calf, which are in excellent order, I--" Their feeling
was quite different. They were so filled with the beautiful vision
of the man lying flat at the foot of the staircase that in
that ecstasy the rest followed in a flash. In practice, the habit
of generalizing and idealizing did not by any means mean worldly
weakness. The time of big theories
was the time of big results. In
the era of sentiment and fine words, at the end of the
eighteenth century, men were really robust and effective. The
sentimentalists conquered Napoleon. The cynics could not catch
De Wet. A hundred years ago our affairs for good or evil were
wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians. Now our affairs are
hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men. And just as this
repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a race
of small men in politics, so it has brought forth a race of
small men in the arts. Our modern politicians claim the
colossal license of Caesar and the Superman, claim that they are
too practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral; but the
upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Chancellor of the
Exchequer. Our new artistic philosophers call for the same moral
license, for a freedom to wreck heaven and earth with their energy;
but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Poet Laureate. I
do not say that there are no stronger men than these; but will any
one say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who
were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion?
Whether bondage be better than freedom may be discussed. But that
their bondage came to more than our freedom it will be
difficult for any one to deny.
The theory of the unmorality of
art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes.
They are free to produce anything they like. They are free to
write a "Paradise Lost" in which Satan shall conquer God. They are
free to write a "Divine Comedy" in which heaven shall be under the
floor of hell. And what have they done? Have they produced in their
universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things
uttered by the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan
schoolmaster? We know that they have produced only a few
roundels.
Milton does not merely beat them
at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence. In all their
little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God
than Satan's. Nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as
that fiery Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting his
head as in disdain of hell. And the reason is very obvious.
Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a
philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is
fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously
and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his
family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some
exhaustion.
Neither in the world of politics
nor that of literature, then, has the rejection of general theories
proved a success. It may be that there have been many moonstruck
and misleading ideals that have from time to time perplexed
mankind. But assuredly there has been no ideal in practice so
moonstruck and misleading as the ideal of practicality. Nothing has
lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of Lord Rosebery. He
is, indeed, a standing symbol of this epoch--the man who is
theoretically a practical man, and practically more unpractical
than any theorist. Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that
kind
of worship of worldly wisdom. A
man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race
is strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the
man who will never believe in anything long enough to make it
succeed. The opportunist politician is like a man who should
abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards, and abandon
golf because he was beaten at golf. There is nothing which is so
weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to
immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.
And having discovered that
opportunism does fail, I have been induced to look at it more
largely, and in consequence to see that it must fail. I perceive
that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss
theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the
orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people
who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian
dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying
to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern
educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without
attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If the
old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously
took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern
mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine
without even stating it.
For these reasons, and for many
more, I for one have come to believe in going back to fundamentals.
Such is the general idea of this book. I wish to deal with my most
distinguished contemporaries, not personally or in a merely
literary manner, but in relation to the real body of doctrine which
they teach. I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a vivid
artist or a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as a
Heretic--that is to say, a man whose view of things has the
hardihood to differ from mine. I am not concerned with Mr.
Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most
honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic--that is to
say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and
quite wrong. I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth
century, inspired by the general hope of getting something
done.
Suppose that a great commotion
arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which
many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad
monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the
matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen,
"Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If
Light be in itself good--" At this point he is somewhat excusably
knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp- post,
the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about
congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as
things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have
pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light;
some because they wanted old iron; some because they
wanted darkness, because their
deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some
too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal
machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there
is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually
and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes
back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all
depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have
discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark
.
II.
On the negative
spirit
Much has been said, and said
truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which as often
gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But let us never forget
that this visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily more
wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It is more
wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of
success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical
ideal, in what Stevenson called, with his usual startling felicity,
"the lost fight of virtue." A modern morality, on the other hand,
can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow
breaches of law; its only certainty is a certainty of ill. It can
only point to imperfection. It has no perfection to point to. But
the monk meditating upon Christ or Buddha has in his mind an image
of perfect health, a thing of clear colours and clean air. He
may contemplate this ideal wholeness and happiness far more than
he ought; he may contemplate it to the neglect of exclusion of
essential THINGS he may contemplate it until he has become a
dreamer or a driveller; but still it is wholeness and happiness
that he is contemplating. He may even go mad; but he is going mad
for the love of sanity.
But the modern student of ethics,
even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread of
insanity.
The anchorite rolling on the
stones in a frenzy of submission is a healthier person
fundamentally than many a sober man in a silk hat who is walking
down Cheapside. For many such are good only through a withering
knowledge of evil. I am not at this moment claiming for the
devotee anything more than this primary advantage, that though he
may be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is
still fixing his thoughts largely on gigantic strength and
happiness, on a strength that has no limits, and a happiness that
has no end.
Doubtless there are other
objections which can be urged without unreason against the
influence of gods and visions in morality, whether in the cell or
street. But this advantage the mystic morality must always have--it
is always jollier. A young man may keep himself from vice by
continually thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it
also by continually thinking of the Virgin Mary. There may be
question about which method is the more reasonable, or even about
which is the more efficient. But surely there can be no question
about which is the more wholesome.
I remember a pamphlet by that
able and sincere secularist, Mr. G. W. Foote, which contained a
phrase sharply symbolizing and dividing these two methods. The
pamphlet was called BEER AND BIBLE, those two very noble things,
all the nobler for a conjunction which Mr. Foote, in his stern old
Puritan way, seemed to think sardonic, but which I confess to
thinking appropriate and charming. I have
not the work by me, but I
remember that Mr. Foote dismissed very contemptuously any attempts
to deal with the problem of strong drink by religious offices or
intercessions, and said that a picture of a drunkard's liver
would be more efficacious in the matter of temperance than any
prayer or praise. In that picturesque expression, it seems to me,
is perfectly embodied the incurable morbidity of modern ethics. In
that temple the lights are low, the crowds kneel, the solemn
anthems are uplifted. But that upon the altar to which all men
kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the body and substance of the
perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is diseased. It is the
drunkard's liver of the New Testament that is marred for us, which
we take in remembrance of him.
Now, it is this great gap in
modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and
spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection
felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the
nineteenth century. If any ordinary man ever said that he was
horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by
the plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man
was lying. The average conversation of average men throughout the
whole of modern civilization in every class or trade is such as
Zola would never dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing
thus of these things a new habit. On the contrary, it is the
Victorian prudery and silence which is new still, though it is
already dying. The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very
early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is
that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have
given of his feelings, was not either disgusted or even annoyed at
the candour of the moderns. What disgusted him, and very justly,
was not the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear
idealism. Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any
objection to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic
thing, the brutal thing, the thing that called names. This is
the great difference between some recent developments of
Nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the seventeenth century.
It was the whole point of the Puritans that they cared nothing
for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves
by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which the
founders of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at
kings and queens. But if it was a chief claim of religion that it
spoke plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it
spoke plainly about good. The thing which is resented, and,
as I think, rightly resented, in that great modern literature of
which Ibsen is typical, is that while the eye that can perceive
what are the wrong things increases in an uncanny and devouring
clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing
mistier and mistier every moment, till it goes almost blind with
doubt. If we compare, let us say, the morality of the DIVINE COMEDY
with the morality of Ibsen's GHOSTS, we shall see all that modern
ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author
of the INFERNO of an Early Victorian prudishness or a
Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral
instruments--Heaven, Purgatory,
and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and
the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one--Hell. It is often said,
and with perfect truth, that no one could read a play like GHOSTS
and remain indifferent to the necessity of an ethical self-command.
That is quite true, and the same is to be said of the most
monstrous and material descriptions of the eternal fire. It is
quite certain the realists like Zola do in one sense promote
morality-- they promote it in the sense in which the hangman
promotes it, in the sense in which the devil promotes it. But they
only affect that small minority which will accept any virtue of
courage. Most healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they
dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes. Modern realists are
indeed Terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much
in their effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters
are well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously
ultimately hopeless, of using science to promote morality.
I do not wish the reader to
confuse me for a moment with those vague persons who imagine that
Ibsen is what they call a pessimist. There are plenty of wholesome
people in Ibsen, plenty of good people, plenty of happy people,
plenty of examples of men acting wisely and things ending well.
That is not my meaning. My meaning is that Ibsen has throughout,
and does not disguise, a certain vagueness and a changing attitude
as well as a doubting attitude towards what is really wisdom and
virtue in this life--a vagueness which contrasts very remarkably
with the decisiveness with which he pounces on something which he
perceives to be a root of evil, some convention, some deception,
some ignorance. We know that the hero of GHOSTS is mad, and we know
why he is mad. We do also know that Dr. Stockman is sane; but we do
not know why he is sane. Ibsen does not profess to know how virtue
and happiness are brought about, in the sense that he professes to
know how our modern sexual tragedies are brought about. Falsehood
works ruin in THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY, but truth works equal ruin in
THE WILD DUCK. There are no cardinal virtues of Ibsenism. There is
no ideal man of Ibsen. All this is not only admitted, but vaunted
in the most valuable and thoughtful of all the eulogies upon Ibsen,
Mr. Bernard Shaw's QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM. Mr. Shaw sums up
Ibsen's teaching in the phrase, "The golden rule is that there is
no golden rule." In his eyes this absence of an enduring and
positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key to virtue, is the
one great Ibsen merit. I am not discussing now with any fullness
whether this is so or not. All I venture to point out, with an
increased firmness, is that this omission, good or bad, does leave
us face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled
with very definite images of evil, and with no definite image of
good. To us light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of
which we cannot speak. To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium,
it is darkness that is visible. The human race, according to
religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of
evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of
evil remains to us.
A great silent collapse, an
enormous unspoken disappointment, has in our time fallen on our
Northern civilization. All previous ages have sweated and been
crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life,
what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern world
has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no answer
to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a few
notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for
instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the
mere existence of their neighbours. Ibsen is the first to return
from the baffled hunt to bring us the tidings of great
failure.
Every one of the popular modern
phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what
is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk
of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of
talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what
is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge
to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us
leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This
is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it
be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old
moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means,
"Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are
getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my
friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly
expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give
it to our children."
Mr. H.G. Wells, that exceedingly
clear-sighted man, has pointed out in a recent work that this
has happened in connection with economic questions. The old
economists, he says, made generalizations, and they were (in Mr.
Wells's view) mostly wrong. But the new economists, he says, seem
to have lost the power of making any generalizations at all. And
they cover this incapacity with a general claim to be, in specific
cases, regarded as "experts", a claim "proper enough in a
hairdresser or a fashionable physician, but indecent in a
philosopher or a man of science." But in spite of the refreshing
rationality with which Mr. Wells has indicated this, it must also
be said that he himself has fallen into the same enormous modern
error. In the opening pages of that excellent book MANKIND IN THE
MAKING, he dismisses the ideals of art, religion, abstract
morality, and the rest, and says that he is going to consider men
in their chief function, the function of parenthood. He is going to
discuss life as a "tissue of births." He is not going to ask what
will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory heroes, but what
will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers. The whole is set
forward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least before the
reader realises that it is another example of unconscious shirking.
What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled what is
the good of being a man? You are merely handing on
to him a problem you dare not
settle yourself. It is as if a man were asked, "What is the use of
a hammer?" and answered, "To make hammers"; and when asked, "And of
those hammers, what is the use?" answered, "To make hammers again".
Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the question of
the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the rest of us
are by these phrases successfully putting off the question of the
ultimate value of the human life.
The case of the general talk
of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today,
"progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the
superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty,
or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress--that is
to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know
about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of
nobody knows what. Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a
most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in opposition
to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it being
the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that
of ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody
has any business to use the word "progress" unless he has a
definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be
progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody
can be progressive without being infallible--at any rate, without
believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name
indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least
doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful
about the progress.