There are some people of great value and importance in their own
spheres, who, on the strength of the distinction gained there, are apt
to intrude on other spheres of which they have no knowledge, where in
fact they are irrelevant, and often indeed ridiculously out of place.
This, however, does not prevent their trying to assert an authority
gained in their own sphere in those other spheres where they simply do
not belong; and such is the power of a name that is won for any one
thing that the multitude, unaccustomed to make distinctions, accepts
them as authorities on the hundred other things of which they know
nothing. Thus, to take a crude example, the New York Police, which is,
without doubt, learned in its own world, and well-adapted and equipped
for asserting its authority there, sometimes intrudes, with its
well-known _bonhomie_, into the worlds of drama and sculpture, and,
because it is an acknowledged judge of crooks and grafters, presumes
to be a judge and censor also of new plays and nude statues.
Of course, the New York Police is absurd in such a character, absurd as
a bull in a china-shop is absurd; yet, as in the case of the bull with
the china, it is capable of doing quite a lot of damage.
I take the New York Police merely, as I said, as a crude example of,
doubtless, well-meant, but entirely misplaced energy. Actually, however,
it is scarcely more absurd than many similar, if more distinguished,
bulls gaily crashing about on higher planes.
Such are statesmen who, because they are Prime Ministers or Presidents,
deem themselves authorities on everything within the four winds, doctors
of divinity, and general _arbitri elegantiarum_.
Such a bull in a china-shop in regard to literature was the late Mr.
Gladstone. It is no disrespect towards his great and estimable character
to say, that while, of course, he was technically a scholar--"great
Homeric scholar" was the accepted phrase for him--there were probably
few men in England so devoid of the literary sense. Yet for an author to
receive a post-card of commendation from Mr. Gladstone meant at least
the sale of an edition or two, and a certain permanency in public
appreciation. Her late Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria was Mr.
Gladstone's only rival as the literary destiny of the time. To Mr.
Gladstone we owe Mrs. Humphry Ward, to Her Majesty we owe Miss Marie
Corelli.
John Ruskin, much as we may admire him for his moral influence, and
admire, or not admire, him for his prose, was a bull in a china-shop
when he made his famous criticism on Whistler, and thus inadvertantly
added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial,
which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from
Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of
critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn
awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness
on the strange mission of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the
status of those "eccentric" ministers of it called artists.
I do not mean to say that bulls in china-shops are without their uses.
John Ruskin is a shining example to the contrary.
One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on
one important subject--that of poetry--as much of a bull in a china-shop
as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous
anecdote _à propos_ of Tennyson's publication of _The Idylls of the
King_--"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some
work"--and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how
absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may
be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English
literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats.
Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who,
according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely
permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist
of Chelsea and Ecclefechan.
A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of
English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to
be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than
Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King
Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject,
however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would
hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion.
But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a
distinction that has made him immortal.
He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness,
with such engaging sturdiness of character, strangely displaying all the
time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all
china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked
with that good old-time quality called "the fear of God," that in
his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that
Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His
opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to
little--though they are far from being without their shrewd insight--and
much of the china--such as Milton's poetry--among which he gambolled,
after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china
he broke was all to the ultimate good of the china-shop. Yet, if we
accept him so, is it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the
china-shop of the world?
There have been other such bulls but hardly another so great, and with
his name I will, for the moment at least, put personalities aside, and
refer to droves rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type of
the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman, who, apparently,
insecure in his status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual
sphere which so many confiding human beings have given into his
keeping, will be forever pushing his way like an unwelcome, yet quite
unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil of human affairs--of which
politics is a sort of summary--where his opinion is not of the smallest
value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary
respect--as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery
of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer
her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns. The modern
clergyman's interference in the working out of the secular problems
of modern life has no such picturesque beauty--and it is even less
effective.
One would have thought that to have the care of men's souls would be
enough. What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase "a
cure of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much today as ever. Perhaps
they were never in greater danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place
for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the
clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices
for which he is presumably "chosen." His vows do not call upon him
either to be a politician or a matinée idol, nor is it his business to
sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith. If the Church is losing
its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference
in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real
spirituality amongst its clergy.
But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular
affairs. There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small
materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or
priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life,
which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so
many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible,
from Plato to Newman. I have too much respect for their courageous
sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if
superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no
little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert
Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them
merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both
of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent--that they
confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one
religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred
book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the
letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem
to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or
"the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was
no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away
the mysterious religious sense in man--however, or wherever expressed.
Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo
idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport
between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious
sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by
what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence.
One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse,
though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew
Arnold:
What girl
Now reads in her bosom as clear
As Rebekah read, when she sate
At eve by the palm-shaded well?
Who guards in her breast
As deep, as pellucid a spring
Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?
What bard,
At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul,
With a plainness as near,
As flashing as Moses felt
When he lay in the night by his flock
On the starlit Arabian waste?
Can rise and obey
The beck of the Spirit like him.
Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a
hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae
and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that
needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you
remember, that of Browning's _Sordello_--
one eye
In all Verona cared for the soft sky.
In these imponderable and invisible matters, many are in a like case
with Hamlet's mother, when she was unable to see the ghost of his
father which he so plainly saw. "Yet all there is I see!" exclaimed the
queen--though she was quite wrong, as wrong as Mr. Ruskin when he could
see nothing in that painting of Whistler's but a cocks-comb throwing a
paint-pot at a canvas and calling it a picture!
Many people who have sharp enough eyes and ears for their own worlds are
absolutely blind and deaf when introduced into other worlds for which
nature has not equipped them. But this by no means prevents their
pronouncing authoritative opinions in those worlds, opinions which
would be amazing if they were not so impertinent. Many literary people
proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music--as if their
announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their
unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his
preference for the pianola over the piano--as if that proved anything
against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the
china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted
creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and social value
without deserving even in a critic the approach of some respect.
But humorists are privileged persons. That, no doubt, accounts for the
astonishing toleration of Bernard Shaw. Were it not that he is a
_farceur_, born to write knock-about comedies--his plays, by the way,
might be termed knock-about comedies of the middle-class mind--he would
never have got a hearing for his common-place blasphemies, and cheap
intellectual antics. He is undeniably "funny," so we cannot help
laughing, though we are often ashamed of ourselves for our laughter; for
to him there is nothing sacred--except his press-notices, and--his
royalties.
His so-called "philosophy" has an air of dangerous novelty only to those
innocent middle-classes born but yesterday, to whom any form of thought
is a novelty. Methusaleh himself was not older than Mr. Shaw's "original
ideas." In England, twenty years ago, we were long since weary of his
egotistic buffooneries. Of anything "fine" in literature or art he is
contemptuously ignorant, and from understanding of any of the finer
shades of human life, or of the meaning of such words as "honour,"
"gentleman," "beauty," "religion," he is by nature utterly shut out. He
laughs and sneers to make up for his deficiencies, like that Pietro
Aretino who threw his perishable mud at Michael Angelo. So is it always
with the vulgarian out of his sphere. Once he dared to talk vulgarly of
God to a great man who believed in God--Count Tolstoi.
He had written to Tolstoi _à propos_ his insignificant little play _The
Showing up of Blanco Posnet_, and in the course of his letter had said:
"Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any less
to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?" Tolstoi had hitherto been
favourably inclined towards Shaw, owing to his friend and biographer Mr.
Aylmer Maude; but this cheap-jack sacrilege was too much for the great
old man, who seemed to know God with almost Matthew Arnold's
plainness as near
As flashing as Moses felt,
and he closed the correspondence with a rebuke which would have abashed
any one but the man to whom it was sent.
Tolstoi was like Walt Whitman--he "argued not concerning God." It is a
point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more
than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling
over which for him and other such bulls in china-shops should be posted
the delicate Americanism--KEEP OUT.