In the last lecture we began the study of the modern aspects of our
subject with Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_. Now, in a rapid sketch, we
shall look at some of the writings which followed that great book; and,
with it as background, we shall see them in stronger relief. It is
impossible to over-estimate the importance of the influence which was
wielded by Carlyle, and especially by his _Sartor Resartus_. His was a
gigantic power, both in literature and in morals. At first, as we have
already noted, he met with neglect and ridicule in abundance, but
afterwards these passed into sheer wonder, and then into a wide and
devoted worship. Everybody felt his power, and all earnest thinkers were
seized in the strong grip of reality with which he laid hold upon his
time.
The religious thought and faith both of England and of Scotland felt
him, but his mark was deepest upon Scotland, because of two interesting
facts. First of all, Carlyle represented that old Calvinism which had
always fitted so exactly the national character and spirit; and second,
there were in Scotland many people who, while retaining the Calvinistic
spirit, had lost touch with the old definite creed. Nothing could be
more characteristic of Carlyle than this Calvinism of the spirit which
had passed beyond the letter of the old faith. He stands like an old
Covenanter in the mist; and yet a Covenanter grasping his father's iron
sword. It is because of these two facts _Sartor Resartus_ has taken so
prominent a place in our literature. It stands for a kind of conscience
behind the manifold modern life of our day. Beneath the shrieks and the
laughter of the time we hear in it the boom of great breakers. Never
again can we forget, amidst the gaieties of any island paradise, the
solemn ocean that surrounds it. Carlyle's teaching sounds and recurs
again and again like the Pilgrims' March in _Tannhäuser_ breaking
through the overture, and rivalling until it vanquishes the music of the
Venusberg.
Yet it was quite inevitable that there should be strong reaction from
any such work as this. To the warm blood and the poignant sense of the
beauty of the world it brought a sense of chill, a forbidding sombreness
and austerity. Carlyle's conception of Christianity was that of the
worship of sorrow; and, while the essence of his gospel was labour, yet
to many minds self-denial seemed to be no longer presented, as in the
teaching of Jesus, as a means towards the attainment of further
spiritual ends. It had become an end in itself, and one that few would
desire or feel to be justified. In the reaction it was felt that
self-development had claims upon the human spirit as well as
self-denial, and indeed that the happy instincts of life had no right to
be so winsome unless they were meant to be obeyed. The beauty of the
world could not be regarded as a mere trap for the tempting of people,
if one were to retain any worthy conception of the Powers that govern
the world. From this point of view the Carlylians appeared to enter into
life maimed. That, indeed, we all must do, as Christ told us; but they
seemed to do it like the beggars of Colombo, with a deliberate and
somewhat indecent exhibition of their wounds.
Carlyle found many men around him pagan, worshipping the earth without
any spiritual light in them. He feared that many others were about to go
in the same direction, so he cried aloud that the earth was too small,
and that they must find a larger object of worship. For the earth he
substituted the universe, and led men's eyes out among the immensities
and eternities. Professor James tells a story of Margaret Fuller, the
American transcendentalist, having said with folded hands, "I accept the
universe," and how Carlyle, hearing this, had answered, "Gad, she'd
better!" It was this insistence upon the universe, as distinguished from
the earth, which was the note of _Sartor Resartus_.
The reactionaries took Carlyle at his word. They said, "Yes, we shall
worship the universe"; but they went on to add that Carlyle's universe
is not universal. It is at once too vague and too austere. There are
other elements in life besides those to which he called
attention--elements very definite and not at all austere--and they too
have a place in the universe and a claim upon our acceptance. Many of
these are in every way more desirable to the type of mind that rebelled
than the aspects of the universe on which Carlyle had insisted, and so
they went out freely among these neglected elements, set them over
against his kind of idealism, and became themselves idealists of other
sorts.
Matthew Arnold, the apostle of culture, found his idealism in the purely
mental region. Rossetti was the idealist of the heart, with its whole
world of emotions, and that subtle and far-reaching inter-play between
soul and body for which Carlyle had always made too little allowance.
Mr. H.G. Wells and Mr. Bernard Shaw, proclaiming themselves idealists of
the social order, have been reaching conclusions and teaching doctrines
at which Carlyle would have stood aghast. These are but random examples,
but they are one in this, that each has protested against that
one-sidedness for which Carlyle stood. Yet each is a one-sided protest,
and falls again into the snare of setting the affections upon things
which are not eternal, and so wedding man to the green earth again.
Thus we find paganism--in some quarters paganism quite openly
confessed--occupying a prominent place in our literature to-day. Before
we examine some of its aspects in detail a word or two of preliminary
warning may be permissible. It is a mistake to take the extremer forms
of this reaction too seriously, although at the present time this is
very frequently done. One must remember that such a spirit as this is to
be found in every age, and that it always creates an ephemeral
literature which imagines itself to be a lasting one. It is nothing new.
It is as old and as perennial as the complex play of the human mind and
human society.
Another reason for not taking this phase too seriously is that it was
quite inevitable that some such reaction should follow upon the huge
solemnities of Carlyle. Just as in literature, after the classic
formality of Johnson and his contemporaries, there must come the
reaction of the Romantic School, which includes Sir Walter Scott, Byron,
and Burns; so here there must be an inevitable reaction from austerity
to a daring freedom which will take many various forms. From Carlyle's
solemnising liturgy we were bound to pass to the slang and colloquialism
of the man in the street and the woman in the modern novel. Body and
spirit are always in unstable equilibrium, and an excess of either at
once swings the fashion back to the other extreme. Carlyle had his day
largely in consequence of what one may call the eighteenth-century
glut--the Georgian society and its economics, and the Byronic element in
literature. The later swing back was as inevitable as Carlyle had been.
Perhaps it was most clearly noticed after the deaths of Browning and
Tennyson, in the late eighties and the early nineties. But both before
and since that time it has been very manifest in England.
But beyond all these things there is the general fact that before any
literature becomes pagan the land must first have been paganised. Of
course there is always here again a reaction of mutual cause and effect
between literature and national spirit. Carlyle himself, in his doctrine
of heroes, was continually telling us that it is the personality which
produces the _zeitgeist_, and not _vice versa_. On the other hand it is
equally certain that no personality is independent of his age and the
backing he finds in it, or the response which he may enlist for his
revolt from it. Both of these are true statements of the case; as to
which is ultimate, that is the old and rather academic question of
whether the oak or the acorn comes first. We repeat that it is
impossible, in this double play of cause and effect, to say which is the
ultimate cause and which the effect. The controversy which was waged in
the nineteenth century between the schools of Buckle and Carlyle is
likely to go on indefinitely through the future. But what concerns us at
present is this, that all paganism which finds expression in a
literature has existed in the age before it found that expression. The
literature is indeed to some extent the creator of the age, but to a far
greater extent it is the expression of the age, whose creation is due to
a vast multiplicity of causes.
Among these causes one of the foremost was political advance and
freedom--the political doctrines, and the beginnings of Socialistic
thought, which had appeared about the time when _Sartor Resartus_ was
written. The Reform Bill of 1832 tended to concentrate men's attention
upon questions of material welfare. Commercial and industrial prosperity
followed, keeping the nation busy with the earth. In very striking
language Lord Morley describes this fact, in language specially striking
as coming from so eminently progressive a man.[4] "Far the most
penetrating of all the influences that are impairing the moral and
intellectual nerve of our generation, remain still to be mentioned. The
first of them is the immense increase of material prosperity, and the
second is the immense decline in sincerity of spiritual interest. The
evil wrought by the one fills up the measure of the evil wrought by the
other. We have been, in spite of momentary declensions, on a flood-tide
of high profits and a roaring trade, and there is nothing like a roaring
trade for engendering latitudinarians. The effect of many possessions,
especially if they be newly acquired, in slackening moral vigour, is a
proverb. Our new wealth is hardly leavened by any tradition of public
duty such as lingers among the English nobles, nor as yet by any common
custom of devotion to public causes, such as seems to live and grow in
the United States. Under such conditions, with new wealth come luxury
and love of ease and that fatal readiness to believe that God has placed
us in the best of possible worlds, which so lowers men's aims and
unstrings their firmness of purpose. Pleasure saps high interests, and
the weakening of high interests leaves more undisputed room for
pleasure." "The political spirit has grown to be the strongest element
in our national life; the dominant force, extending its influence over
all our ways of thinking in matters that have least to do with politics,
or even nothing at all to do with them. There has thus been engendered
among us the real sense of political responsibility. In a corresponding
degree has been discouraged ... the sense of intellectual
responsibility.... Practically, and as a matter of history, a society is
seldom at the same time successfully energetic both in temporals and
spirituals; seldom prosperous alike in seeking abstract truth and
nursing the political spirit."
The result of the new phase of English life was, on the one hand,
industrialism with its material values, and on the other hand the
beginnings of a Socialism equally pagan. The motto of both schools was
that a man's life consisteth in the abundance of the things that he
possesseth, that you should seek first all these things, and that the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness may be added unto you, if you have
any room for them. Make yourself secure of all these other things; seek
comfort whether you be rich or poor; make this world as agreeable to
yourself as your means will allow, and seek to increase your means of
making it still more agreeable. After you have done all that, anything
that is left over will do for your idealism. Your God can be seen to
after you have abundantly provided for the needs of your body. Nothing
could be more characteristic paganism than this, which makes material
comfort the real end of life, and all spiritual things a residual
element. It is the story which Isaiah tells, with such sublimity of
sarcasm, of the huntsman and craftsman who warms his hands and cries to
himself, "Aha! I am warm. I have seen the fire." He bakes bread and
roasts flesh, and, with the residue of the same log which he has used
for kindling his fire, he maketh a god. So this modern god of England,
when England had become materialised, was just that ancient fire-worship
and comfort-worship in its nineteenth-century phase. In the first demand
of life there is no thought of God or of idealism of any kind. These, if
they appear at all, have to be made out of what is left. "Of the residue
he maketh a god."
It is by insidious degrees that materialism invades a nation's life. At
first it attacks the externals, appearing mainly in the region of work,
wealth, and comfort. But, unless some check is put upon its progress, it
steadily works its way to the central depths, attacking love and sorrow,
and changing them to sensuality and cynicism. Then the nation's day is
over, and its men and women are lost souls. Many instances might be
quoted in which this progress has actually been made in the literature
of England. At present we are only pointing to the undoubted fact that
the forces of materialism have been at work among us. If proof of this
were needed, nothing could afford it more clearly than our loss of peace
and dignity in modern society. Many costly luxuries have become
necessities, and they have increased the pace of life to a rush and fury
which makes business a turmoil and social life a fever. A symbolic
embodiment of this spirit may be seen in the motor car and the aeroplane
as they are often used. These indeed need not be ministers of paganism.
The glory of swift motion and the mounting up on wings as eagles reach
very near to the spiritual, if not indeed across its borderland, as
exhilarating and splendid stimuli to the human spirit. But, on the other
hand, they may be merely instruments for gratifying that insane human
restlessness which is but the craving for new sensations. Along the
whole line of our commercial and industrial prosperity there runs one
great division. There are some who, in the midst of all change, have
preserved their old spiritual loyalties, and there are others who have
substituted novelty for loyalty. These are the idealists and the pagans
of the twentieth century.
Another potent factor in the making of the new times was the scientific
advance which has made so remarkable a difference to the whole outlook
of man upon the earth. Darwin's great discovery is perhaps the most
epoch-making fact in science that has yet appeared upon the earth. The
first apparent trend of evolution seemed to be an entirely materialistic
reaction. This was due to the fact that believers in the spiritual had
identified with their spirituality a great deal that was unnecessary and
merely casual. If the balloon on which people mount up above the earth
is any such theory as that of the six days' creation, it is easy to see
how when that balloon is pricked the spiritual flight of the time
appears to have ended on the ground.
Of course all that has long passed by. Of late years Haeckel has been
crying out that all his old friends have deserted him and have gone over
to the spiritual side--a cry which reminds one of the familiar juryman
who finds his fellows the eleven most obstinate men he has ever known.
The conception of evolution has long since been taken over by the
idealists, and has become perhaps the most splendidly Christian and
idealistic idea of the new age. When Darwin published his _Origin of
Species_, Hegel cried out in Germany, "Darwin has destroyed design."
To-day Darwin and Hegel stand together as the prophets of the
unconquerable conviction of the reality of spirit. From the days of
Huxley and Haeckel we have passed over to the days of Bergson and Sir
Oliver Lodge.
The effect of all this upon individuals is a very interesting phenomenon
to watch. Every one of us has been touched by the pagan spirit which has
invaded our times at so many different points of entrance. It has become
an atmosphere which we have all breathed more or less. If some one were
to say to any company of British people, one by one, that they were
pagans, doubtless many of them would resent it, and yet more or less it
would be true. We all are pagans; we cannot help ourselves, for every
one of us is necessarily affected by the spirit of his generation.
Nobody indeed says, "Go to, I will be a pagan"; but the old story of
Aaron's golden calf repeats itself continually. Aaron, when Moses
rebuked him, said naïvely, "There came out this calf." That exactly
describes the situation. That calf is the only really authentic example
of spontaneous generation, of effect without cause. Nobody expected it.
Nobody wanted it. Everybody was surprised to see it when it came. It was
the Melchizedek among cattle--without father, without mother, without
descent. Unfortunately it seems also to have been without beginning of
days or end of life. Every generation simply puts in its gold and there
comes out this calf--it is a way such calves have.
Thus it is with our modern paganism. We all of us want to be idealists,
and we sometimes try, but there are hidden causes which draw us back
again to the earth. These causes lie in the opportunities that occur one
by one: in politics, in industrial and commercial matters, in scientific
theories, or by mere reaction. The earth is more habitable than once it
was, and we all desire it. It masters us, and so the golden calf
appears.
We shall now glance very rapidly at a few out of the many literary
forces of our day in which we may see the various reactions from
Carlyle. First, there was the Early Victorian time, the eighteenth
century in homespun. It was not great and pompous like that century, but
it lived by formality, propriety, and conventionality. It was horribly
shocked when George Eliot published _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and _Adam
Bede_ in 1858 and 1859. Outwardly it was eminently respectable, and its
respectability was its particular method of lapsing into paganism. It
was afraid of ideals, and for those who cherish this fear the worship of
respectability comes to be a very dangerous kind of worship, and its
idol is perhaps the most formidable of all the gods.
Meanwhile that glorious band of idealists, whose chief representatives
were Tennyson, Browning, and Ruskin, to be joined later by George
Meredith, were fighting paganism in the spirit of Arthur's knights, keen
to drive the heathen from the land. Tennyson, the most popular of them
all, probably achieved more than any other in this conflict. Ruskin was
too contradictory and bewildering, and so failed of much of his effect.
Browning and Meredith at first were reckoned unintelligible, and had to
wait their day for a later understanding. Still, all these, and many
others of lesser power than theirs, were knights of the ideal, warring
against the domination of dead and unthinking respectability.
Matthew Arnold came upon the scene, with his great protest against the
preponderance of single elements in life, and his plea for wholeness. In
this demand for whole and not one-sided views of the world, he is more
nearly akin to Goethe than perhaps any other writer of our time. His
great protest was against the worship of machinery, which he believed to
be taking the place of its own productions in England. He conceived of
the English people as being under a general delusion which led them to
mistake means for ends. He spoke of them as "Barbarians, Philistines,
and Populace," according to the rank in life they held; and accused them
of living for such ends as field sports, the disestablishment of the
Church of England, and the drinking of beer. He pointed out that, so far
as real culture is concerned, these can at best be but means towards
other ends, and can never be in themselves sufficient to satisfy the
human soul. He protested against Carlyle, although in the main thesis
the two are entirely at one. "I never liked Carlyle," he said; "he
always seemed to me to be carrying coals to Newcastle." He took Carlyle
for the representative of what he called "Hebraism," and he desired to
balance the undue preponderance of that by insisting upon the necessity
of the Hellenistic element in culture. Both of these are methods of
idealism, but Arnold protested that the human spirit is greater than any
of the forces that bear it onwards; and that after you have said all
that Carlyle has to say, there still remains on the other side the
intellect, with rights of its own. He did not exclude conscience, for he
held that conduct made up three-fourths of life. He was the idealist of
a whole culture as against all one-sidedness; but curiously, by flinging
himself upon the opposite side from Carlyle, he became identified in the
popular mind with what it imagined to be Hellenic paganism. This was
partly due to his personal idiosyncrasies, his fastidiousness of taste,
and the somewhat cold style of the _exquisite_ in expression. These
deceived many of his readers, and kept them from seeing how great and
prophetic a message it was that came to England beneath Arnold's
mannerisms.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti appeared, and many more in his train. He, more
perfectly than any other, expressed the marriage of sense and soul in
modern English poetry. He was the idealist of emotion, who, in the
far-off dim borderlands between sense and spirit, still preserved the
spiritual search, nor ever allowed himself to be completely drugged with
the vapours of the region. There were others, however, who tended
towards decadence. Some of Rossetti's readers, whose sole interest lay
in the lower world, claimed him as well as the rest for their guides,
and set a fashion which is not yet obsolete. There is no lack of
solemnity among these. The scent of sandalwood and of incense is upon
their work, and you feel as you read them that you are worshipping in
some sort of a temple with strange and solemnising rites. Indeed they
insist upon this, and assiduously cultivate a kind of lethargic and
quasi-religious manner which is supposed to be very impressive. But
their temple is a pagan temple, and their worship, however much they may
borrow for it the language of a more spiritual cult, is of the earth,
earthy.
Mr. Thomas Hardy was the inevitable sequel to George Eliot. Everybody
knows how beautiful and how full of charm his lighter writings can be;
and in his more tragic work there is much that is true, terrifically
expressed. Yet he has got upon the wrong side of the world, and can
never see beyond the horror of its tragedy. Consequently in him we have
another form of paganism, not this time that which the seductive earth
with its charms is suggesting, but the hopeless paganism which sees the
earth only in its bitterness. In _The Return of the Native_ he says:
"What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Aeschylus
imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned revelling in the
general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects
of natural laws, and see the quandary man is in by their operation." It
is no wonder that he who expressed the spirit of the modern age in these
words should have closed his well-known novel with the bitter saying
that the upper powers had finished their sport with _Tess_. "To have
lost the God-like conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have
acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temper
which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a mind that,
though disappointed, forswears compromise." Here is obviously a man who
would love the highest if he saw it, who would fain welcome and proclaim
the ideals if he could only find them on the earth; but who has found
instead the bitterness of darkness, the sarcasm and the sensationalism
of an age that the gods have left. He is too honest to shout _pour
encourager les autres_ when his own heart has no hope in it; and his
greater books express the wail and despair of our modern paganism.
Breaking away from him and all such pessimistic voices came the glad
soul of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose old-fashioned revelling in the
situation is the exact counter-blast to Hardy's modernism, and is one of
those perennial human things which are ever both new and old. It is not
that Stevenson has not seen the other side of life. He has seen it and
he has suffered from it deeply, both in himself and in others; yet still
indomitably he "clings to his paddle." "I believe," he says, "in an
ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still
believe it."
Then there came the extraordinary spirit of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. At
first sight some things that he has written appear pagan enough, and
have been regarded as such. The God of Christians seems to inhabit and
preside over an amazing Valhalla of pagan divinities; and indeed
throughout Mr. Kipling's work the heavens and the earth are mingled in a
most inextricable and astonishing fashion. It is said that not long ago,
during the launch of a Chinese battleship at one of our British yards,
they were burning papers to the gods in a small joss-house upon the
pier, while the great vessel, fitted with all the most modern machinery,
was leaving the stocks. There is something about the tale that reminds
us of Mr. Kipling. Now he is the prophet of Jehovah, now the Corybantic
pagan priest, now the interpreter of the soul of machines. He is
everything and everybody. He knows the heart of the unborn, and, telling
of days far in the future, can make them as living and real as the hours
of to-day. It was the late Professor James who said of him, "Kipling is
elemental; he is down among the roots of all things. He is universal
like the sun. He is at home everywhere. When he dies they won't be able
to get any grave to hold him. They will have to bury him under a
pyramid." In our reckoning such a man hardly counts. It would be most
interesting, if it were as yet possible, to speculate as to whether his
permanent influence has been more on the side of a kind of a wild
Titanic paganism, or of that ancient Calvinistic God whom Macandrew
worships in the temple of his engine-room.
We now come to a later phase, for which we may take as representative
writers the names of Mr. H.G. Wells and Mr. Bernard Shaw. Science, for
the meantime at least, has disentangled herself from her former
materialism, and a nobly ideal and spiritual view of science has come
again. It may even be hoped that the pagan view will never be able again
to assert itself with the same impressiveness as in the past. But social
conditions are to-day in the throes of their strife, and from that
quarter of the stage there appear such writers as those we are now to
consider. They both present themselves as idealists. Mr. Wells has
published a long volume about his religion, and Mr. Shaw prefaces his
plays with essays as long or even longer than the plays themselves,
dealing with all manner of the most serious subjects. The surface
flippancy both of prefaces and plays has repelled some readers in spite
of all their cleverness, and tended towards an unjust judgment that he
is upsetting the universe with his tongue in his cheek all the time.
Later one comes to realise that this is not the case, that Mr. Shaw does
really take himself and his message seriously, and from first to last
conceives himself as the apostle of a tremendous creed. Among many other
things which they have in common, these writers have manifested the
tendency to regard all who ever went before them as, in a certain sense,
thieves and robbers; at least they give one the impression that the
present has little need for long lingering over the past. Mr. Wells, for
instance, cannot find words strong enough to describe the emancipation
of the modern young man from Mr. Kipling with his old-fashioned
injunction, "Keep ye the law." There are certain laws which Mr. Wells
proclaims on the housetops that he sees no necessity for keeping, and so
Mr. Kipling is buried under piles of opprobrium--"the tumult and the
bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and the
inconsistency," and so on. As for Mr. Bernard Shaw, we all know his own
view of the relation in which he stands to William Shakespeare.
Mr. Wells has written many interesting books, and much could be said of
him from the point of view of science, or of style, or of social theory.
That, however, is not our present concern, either with him or with Mr.
Shaw. It is as idealist or pagan influences that we are discussing them
and the others. Mr. Wells boasts a new morality in his books, and Mr.
Shaw in his plays. One feels the same startling sense of a _volte face_
in morality as a young recruit is said to do when he finds all the
precepts of his childhood reversed by the ethics of his first
battlefield. Each in his own way falls back upon crude and primitive
instincts and justifies them.[5]
Mr. Wells takes the change with zest, and seems to treat the adoption of
a new morality in the same light-hearted spirit as he might consider the
buying of a new hat. From the first he has a terrifying way of dealing
familiarly with vast things. Somehow he reminds one of those jugglers
who, for a time, toss heavy balls about, and then suddenly astonish the
audience by introducing a handkerchief, which flies lightly among its
ponderous companions. So Mr. Wells began to juggle with worlds. He has
latterly introduced that delicate thing, the human soul and conscience,
into the play, and you see it precariously fluttering among the
immensities of leaping planets. He persuades himself that the common
morality has not gripped people, and that they really don't believe in
it at all. He aims at a way of thinking which will be so great as to be
free from all commonplace and convention. Honesty is to be practically
the only virtue in the new world. If you say what you mean, you will
earn the right to do anything else that you please. Mr. Wells in this is
the counterpart of those plain men in private life so well known to us
all, who perpetually remind us that they are people who call a spade a
spade. Such men are apt to interpret this dictum as a kind of charter
which enables a man to say anything foolish, or rude, or bad that may
occur to him, and earn praise for it instead of blame. Some of us fail
to find the greatness of this way of thinking, however much we may be
impressed by its audacity. Indeed there seems to be much smallness in it
which masquerades as immensity.
This smallness is due first of all to sheer ignorance. When a man tells
us that he prefers Oliver Goldsmith to Jesus Christ, he merely shows
that upon the subject he is discussing he is not educated, and does not
know what he is talking about. A second source of pettiness is to be
found in the mistake of imagining that mere smartness of diction and
agility of mind are signs of intellectual keenness. The mistake is as
obvious as it is unfortunate. Smartness can be learned with perhaps the
least expenditure of intellect that is demanded by any literary exercise
of the present day. It is a temptation which a certain kind of clever
man always has to face, and it only assumes a serious aspect when it
leads the unthinking to mistake it for a new and formidable element of
opposition to things which he has counted sacred.
The whole method is not so very subtle after all. Pick out a vice or a
deformity. Do not trouble to acquaint yourself too intimately with the
history of morals in the past, but boldly canonise your vice or your
deformity with ritual of epigram and paradox. Proclaim loudly and
eloquently that this is your faith, and give it a pathetic aspect by
dwelling tenderly upon any trouble which it may be likely to cost those
who venture to adopt it. It is not perhaps a very admirable way to deal
with such subjects. The whole world of tradition and the whole
constitution of human nature are against you. Men have wrestled with
these things for thousands of years, and they have come to certain
conclusions which the experience of all time has enforced upon them. By
a dash of bold imagination you may discount all that laborious past, and
leave an irrevocable stain upon the purity of the mind of a generation.
Doubtless you will have a following--such teachers have ever had those
who followed them--and yet time is always on the side of great
traditions. If enlightened thought has in any respect to change them, it
changes them reverently, and knowing what their worth has been. Sooner
or later all easy ignoring of them is condemned as sheer impertinence.
There is singularly little reason for being impressed by this hasty,
romantic, and loud-sounding crusade against Christian morality and its
Ideal.
In Mr. George Bernard Shaw we have a very different man. Nobody denies
Mr. Shaw's cleverness, least of all Mr. Shaw himself. He is depressingly
clever. He exhibits the spectacle of a man trying to address his
audience while standing on his head--and succeeding.
He has been singularly fortunate in his biographer, Mr. Chesterton, and
one of the things that make this biography such pleasing reading is the
personal element that runs through it all. The introduction is
characteristic and delightful: "Most people either say that they agree
with Bernard Shaw, or that they do not understand him. I am the only
person who understands him, and I do not agree with him." It is not
unnatural that he should take his friend a little more seriously than
most of us will be prepared to do. It really is a big thing to stand on
the shoulders of William Shakespeare, and we shall need time to consider
it before we subscribe to the statue.
For there is here an absolutely colossal egotism. There are certain
newspapers which usually begin with a note of the hours of sunrise and
sunset. During the recent coal strike, some of these newspapers inserted
first of all a notice that they would not be sent out so early as usual,
and then cheered our desponding hearts by assuring us that the sun rises
at 5.37 notwithstanding--as if by permission of the newspaper. Mr. Shaw
somehow gives us a similar impression. Most things in the universe seem
to go on by his permission, and some of them he is not going to allow to
go on much longer. He will tilt without the slightest vestige of
humility against any existing institution, and the tourney is certainly
one of the most entertaining and most extraordinary of our time.
No one can help admiring Mr. Shaw. The dogged persistence which has
carried him, unflinching, through adversity into his present fame,
without a single compromise or hesitation, is, apart altogether from the
question of the truth of his opinions, an admirable quality in a man. We
cannot but admire his immense forcefulness and agility, the fertility of
his mind, and the swiftness of its play. But we utterly refuse to fall
down and worship him on account of these. Indeed the kind of awe with
which he is regarded in some quarters seems to be due rather to the
eccentricities of his expression than to the greatness of his message or
the brilliance of his achievements.
There is no question of his earnestness. The Puritan is deep in Mr.
Shaw, in his very blood. He has indeed given to the term Puritan a
number of unexpected meanings, and yet no one can justly question his
right to it. His _Plays for Puritans_ are not exceptional in this
matter, for all his work is done in the same spirit. His favourite
author is John Bunyan, about whom he tells us that he claims him as the
precursor of Nietzsche, and that in his estimation John Bunyan's life
was one long tilt against morality and respectability. The claim is
sufficiently grotesque, yet there is a sense in which he has a right to
John Bunyan, and is in the same line as Thomas Carlyle. He is trying
sincerely to speak the truth and get it spoken. He appears as another of
the destroyers of shams, the breakers of idols. He may indeed be claimed
as a pagan, and his influence will certainly preponderate in that
direction; and yet there is a strain of high idealism which runs
perplexingly through it all.
The explanation seems to be, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, that the man is
incomplete. There are certain elementary things which, if he had ever
seen them as other people do, would have made many of his positions
impossible. "Shaw is wrong," says Mr. Chesterton, "about nearly all the
things one learns early in life while one is still simple." Among those
things which he has never seen are the loyalties involved in love,
country, and religion. The most familiar proof of this in regard to
religion is his extraordinary tirade against the Cross of Calvary. It is
one of the most amazing passages in print, so far as either taste or
judgment is concerned. It is significant that in this very passage he
actually refers to the "stable at Bethany," and the slip seems to
indicate from what a distance he is discussing Christianity. It is
possible for any of us to measure himself against the Cross and Him who
hung upon it, only when we have travelled very far away from them. When
we are sufficiently near, we know ourselves to be infinitesimal in
comparison. Nor in regard to home, and all that sanctifies and defends
it, does Mr. Shaw seem ever to have understood the real morality that is
in the heart of the average man. The nauseating thing which he quotes as
morality is a mere caricature of that vital sense of honour and
imperative conscience of righteousness which, thank God, are still alive
among us. "My dear," he says, "you are the incarnation of morality, your
conscience is clear and your duty done when you have called everybody
names." Similar, and no less unfortunate, is his perversion of that
instinct of patriotism which, however mistaken in some of its
expressions, has yet proved its moral and practical worth during many a
century of British history. There is the less need to dwell upon this,
because those who discard patriotism have only to state their case
clearly in order to discredit it.
We do not fear greatly the permanent influence of these fundamental
errors. The great heart of the civilised world still beats true, and is
healthy enough to disown so maimed an account of human nature. Yet there
is danger in any such element in literature as this. Mr. Shaw's
biographer has virtually told us that in these matters he is but a child
in whom "Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental." The pleadings of
the nurse for the precocious and yet defective infant are certainly very
touching. He may be the innocent creature that Mr. Chesterton takes him
for, but he has said things which will exactly suit the views of
libertines who read him. Such pleadings are quite unavailing to excuse
any such child if he does too much innocent mischief. His puritanism and
his childlikeness only make his teaching more dangerous because more
piquant. It has the air of proceeding from the same source as the ten
commandments, and the effect of this upon the unreflecting is always
considerable. If a child is playing in a powder magazine, the more
childish and innocent he is the more dangerous he will prove; and the
explosion, remember, will be just as violent if lit by a child's hand as
if it had been lit by an anarchist's. We have in England borne long
enough with people trifling with the best intentions among explosives,
moral and social, and we must consider our own safety and that of
society when we are judging them.
As to the relation in which Mr. Shaw stands to paganism, his relations
to anything are so "extensive and peculiar" that they are always
difficult to define. But the later phase of his work, which has become
famous in connection with the word "Superman," is due in large part to
Nietzsche, whose strange influence has reversed the Christian ideals for
many disciples on both sides of the North Sea. So this idealist, who, in
_Major Barbara_, protests so vigorously against paganism, has become one
of its chief advocates and expositors. One of his characters somewhere
says, "I wish I could get a country to live in where the facts were not
brutal and the dreams were not unreal." It may be admitted that there
are many brutal facts and perhaps more unreal dreams; but, for our part,
that which keeps us from becoming pagans is that we have found facts
that are not brutal and dreams which are the realest things in life.