had not known them would have said they were out of hand. Several were
limping as they went, one or two, recognising the gunners and the
drivers, waved their hands. The rest still sang. No one had fallen out.
Their arms they carried anyhow, and more than one man was carrying
two rifles (probably for money), and more than one man was carrying
none, and some had their rifles slung across their backs, and some
tucked under their arms. So they went forward, and again we heard
their singing dwindle, but this time it continued much longer than
before, and I think we heard it up to the halt, when their task was
accomplished and the march was done.
They are an incredible people!
On Saturnalia
One of the bothers of writing is that words carry about upon their
backs nowadays a great pack of past meanings and derivations, and
that--particularly to-day--no word is standing still as it were and
meaning something once and for all which a plain man can say without
being laughed at for ignorance or for affectation. For instance,
Saturnalia. To one man it means a certain bundle of ritual many
centuries dead, common to a particular district of Italy and practised
in midwinter. To another man it means a lot of poor people having an
exaggerated beanfeast and thereby annoying the rich people. But it does
not mean either of these things to the plain man. It means to the plain
man occasion and specific occasion for turning things upside down and
getting breathing space for a while from the crushing order of this
world. That is what “Saturnalia” means to the ordinary user of the
word, and note, he has no other word by which to express the idea--so
thoroughly has the thing died out since modern English was formed.
I suppose the nearest word for it in English--when such feasts were
still known in England--was the vague word “Misrule.” Anyhow, it is
Saturnalia now, and Saturnalia it shall be here.
If a man were to come back from the past and watch the modern world
into which he had tumbled he would note any number of things that
would, I am certain, intoxicate him with wonder and delight. Just
as one is intoxicated with wonder and delight on landing in youth
upon the quays of a foreign port for the first time--that is, if the
foreign port is well governed, for there is no wonder or delight either
in barbarism or in decay. Such a man would be perpetually running
to telephones, those curious toys, and marvelling at cinematographs
and rejoicing in express trains and clear print and big guns and
phonographs; he couldn’t help it. Motor-cars moving by themselves would
fill him with magic--but he would bitterly mislike certain absences,
and he would complain that half a dozen things were very wrong with the
world. So many men free and yet owning nothing--so much the greater
part of men free and yet owning nothing--would seem to him a monstrous
and perilous thing. The exact and mechanical accuracy that clocks and
railways have made would offend him; he would see it as a disease
wearing out men’s nerves. The modern arguments all in a circle round
and round the old insoluble problems would bore him dreadfully, and
still more perhaps the fresh discoveries every week of principles and
plain truths as old as the Mediterranean--but nothing surely would
astonish him or grieve him or frighten him more than the absence of
topsy-turvydom without some recurrent breath of which the soul of man
perishes.
And why? There is a question you may ask some time before it will be
answered. One thing is sure, though the sureness of it reposes on some
base we cannot see: in the proportion that men are secure of their
philosophy and social scheme, in that proportion they must in some
fixed manner turn it upside down from time to time for their delight
and show it on a stage or enact it in a religious ritual with all
its rules reversed and the whole thing wrong way about. They have
always done this in healthy States, and if ever our State gets healthy
they will begin to do it again. It is a human craving, an intense
craving--but why, it would be a business to say.
It must not be imagined that the craving or the expression of it has
passed from us to-day. They have no more passed from us than the desire
for property or for the tilling of the land. But their corporate
character is broken up, they appear sporadically in individuals only,
and are therefore often evil. They appear in the irony which is an
increasing feature of our letters, in mad freaks and outbreaks for
which men strained beyond bearing are punished, and they appear in
fantastic prophecies of a changed world.
One sees that craving for a burst of misrule in quite unexpected
enthusiasms for things remote from our lives, in great senseless
mobs furious about minor things--the minor actions of a campaign or
the minor details of law-making--in the public clamour about the
misfortunes of some foreign prisoner or the politics of some alien
State. One sees it in the men who suddenly start rules of life based on
some careful negation of what all around them do, in the leaders and
teachers who first note exactly what nearly all their fellow-beings
eat or drink or wear, and then most loudly proclaim salvation to
lie in _not_ eating, drinking, or wearing these obviously necessary
things. The neighbours stare! And no wonder--for private Saturnalia are
dangerously near to vice in the sane, in the weak to insanity.
But true Saturnalia, public Saturnalia, were healthy because they were
corporate. Custom and religion had dug a sort of channel into which
all that emotion could commonly run, and in midwinter, when it had
long been very dark, the mischiefs, the comic spirits came out of the
woods and for some days possessed the souls of men, and these, by that
possession, were purged and freed. So it was for hundreds upon hundreds
of years--until quite the modern time. Why have we lost it, and how
long must we wait for it to return?
When the relations of slave and master seemed as obvious and necessary
as seem to us (let us say) the reading of a daily paper or the taking
of a train, yet the obvious and necessary routine was broken in
midwinter, the slave was the master for a moment and the master a slave.
When the ritual of the Church was as much a commonplace as the ritual
of social life is to us to-day, there was a season (it was this season
between Christmas and the Epiphany) when the dead weight of order was
lifted and a boy was dressed as a bishop or a donkey was put to chaunt
the office, and the people sang:--
Plebs autem respondet:
Hé sire Ane, ho! Chantez!
Vous aurez du foin assez
Et de l’avoine à manger!
When the awful authority of civil and hereditary powers was
unquestioned they yet set up in English halls Lords of Misrule who
governed that season. The Inns of Court, I believe, delighted in them,
and certainly till quite late in the seventeenth century the peasantry
of the villages.
It has gone. It will return. During its absence (and may that absence
not be much prolonged) perhaps one can see its nature the more
clearly because one sees it from the outside and as a distant though
a desired thing. Perhaps we, living in a very unreasonable age, when
realities are forgotten and imaginaries preferred, when we solemnly
reiterate impossibilities, affirm our faith in scientific guesswork
and our doubts upon the plain rules of arithmetic, can understand
why our much more reasonable fathers thirsted for and obtained these
feasts of unreason. It seems to have been a little like the natural
craving for temporary oblivion (sleep--a chaos) once in every day;
a sort of bath in that muddle or nothingness out of which the world
was made. Equality, which lies at the base of society, was brought
to surface by a paradox and shown at large. Intensity of conviction
and of organisation took refuge in the relief of a momentary--and not
meant--denial of that conviction and organisation, and the whole of
society collectively expanded its soul by one collective foolery at
high pressure, as does the healthy individual by one good farce or peal
of laughter when occasion serves.
How the Saturnalia will return (as return they will) no one can say.
The seeds of reaction from the tangle of the modern world lie all
around in the customs and the demands of the populace: but seeds
are never known or perceived till they have sprouted. Sometimes one
catches the echo of the return in a chance jest; especially if it be a
cabman’s. Sometimes in a solemn hoax largely indulged in by many poor
men against one richer than themselves. Sometimes in the voluntary
humour and cynical goodness of heart of a powerful or wealthy man
exposing the illusions of his kind.
Anyhow, one way or another, sooner or later, the Saturnalia will
return; may it be sooner rather than later, and at the latest not later
than 1938, when so many of us will be so very old.
For my part I shall look for the first signs in the provinces of rich
and riotous blood as on the Border (and especially just north of it)
or in Flanders, or, better still, in Burgundy from Nuits and Beaune
northward and eastward. I have especially great hopes of the town of
Dijon.
A Little Conversation in Herefordshire
There is a country house (as the English phrase goes) in the County
of Hereford, at a little distance from the River Wye; the people who
live in this house are very rich. They are not rich precariously,
nor with doubts here and there, nor for the time, but in a solid
manner; that is, they believe their riches to be eternal. Their income
springs from very many places, of which they have not an idea; it is
spent in a straightforward manner, which they fully comprehend. It is
spent in relieving the incompetence--the economic incompetence--of
all those about them; in causing wine to come into England from Ay,
Vosne, Barsac, and (though they do not know it) from the rougher soil
of Algiers. It also causes (does the way in which they exercise what
only pedants call their Potential Demand) tea to be grown in Ceylon
for their servants and in China for themselves, horses to be bred in
Ireland, and wheat to be sown and most laboriously garnered in Western
Canada, Ohio, India, South Russia, the Argentine, and other places.
Also, were you to seek out every economic cause and effect, you would
find missionaries living where no man can live, save by artifice, and
living upon artificial supply in a strange climate by the strength of
this Potential Demand rooted in the meadows of the Welsh March.
Then, also, if you were to follow the places whence their wealth is
derived, it would interest you very much. You would see one man earning
so much in the docks and handing on a Saturday evening so much of his
wages into their fund. You would see another clipping off cloth in
Manchester and offering it to them, and another plucking cotton in
Egypt and exchanging it, at their order, against something which they,
not he, needed. Altogether you would see the whole world paying tithe,
and a stream flowing into Hereford as into a reservoir, and a stream
flowing out again by many channels.
These good people were at dinner; upon the 5th of October, to be
accurate. Parliament had not yet met, but football had begun, and there
was shooting, also a little riding upon horses, though this is not
to-day a popular amusement, and few will practise it. As for the women,
one wrote and the other read--which was a fair division of labour; but
the woman who wrote was not read by the woman who read, for the woman
who wrote (and she was the daughter) preferred to write upon problems.
But her mother, who did the reading, preferred what is called fiction,
and Mr. Meredith was a favourite author of hers; but, indeed, she would
read all fiction so only that it was in her native tongue.
Now the men of the family were very different from this, and the things
they liked were hunting of a particular kind (which I shall not here
describe), shooting of a similar kind, their country, and politics,
which last interest it would have been abominable to deny them, for the
two men, both father and son, were actively engaged in the making of
laws, each in a different place; the laws they made (it is true in the
company of, and with the advice of, others) are to be found in what is
called the Statute Book, which neither you nor I have ever seen.
All these four, the father, the son, the mother, and the daughter, in
different ways intelligent, but all four very kind and good, were at
dinner upon this day of which I speak, the 5th of October, but they
were not alone. They had to meet them several people who were staying
in the house. The one was a satirist who had been born in Lithuania.
He was poor and proud and had learnt the English tongue, and he wrote
books upon the pride of race and upon battling with the sea. He was an
envious sort of man, but as he never had nor ever would have any home
or lineage, England was much the same to him as any other place. He
hated all our nations with an equal hatred.
Another guest was a little man called Copp. He was a lord; his title
was not Copp. Only his name was Copp, and even this name he hid, for
old father Copp, who had married a Miss Billings in the eighteenth
century, had had a son John Billings, since the Billings were richer
than the Copps. And John Billings had married Mary Steyning, who was
the Squire’s daughter, and they had had a son John Steyning, since
John was by this time the hereditary name. Now John Steyning was in the
Parliament that worked for the Regent, and a short one it was, and he
became plain Lord Steyning, and then he and his son and his grandson
married in all sorts of ways, and the title now was Bramber, but the
family name was Steyning, and the real name was Copp. So much for
Copp. He was as lively as a grig, he had travelled everywhere, and he
knew about ten languages. He was peculiarly brave, and as a boy he had
stoutly refused to go to the University.
Then also there was the Doctor, who was absurdly nervous and could ill
afford to dine out, and there was a young man who was in Parliament
with the son of the family; this young man had been to Oxford with
him also, not at Cambridge; he was a lawyer, and he was making three
thousand pounds a year, but he said he was making six when he talked to
his wife and mother, and most serious men believed that he was making
ten. The women of these were also present with them, saving always that
Copp, who was called Steyning, and whose title was Bramber, was not
married.
These then, sitting round the table, came to talk of something after
all not remote from the interest of their lives. They talked of
Socialists, and it all began by Copp (who called himself Steyning,
while his title was Bramber) saying that his uncle Gwilliam had just
missed being a Socialist because he was too stupid.
The Head of the Family, who had most imperfectly caught the
pronouncement of Copp as to his relative, said, “Yes, Bramber; got to
be pretty stupid to be that!” By which the Head of the House meant that
one had to be pretty stupid to be a Socialist, whereas what Copp had
said was that his uncle had been too stupid to be a Socialist. But it
was all one.
The Son of the House said that there were lots of Socialists going
about, and the young lawyer friend said there were a lot of people who
said they were Socialists but who were not Socialists.
The Daughter of the House said that it was very interesting the way in
which Socialism went up and down. She said: “Look at the Fabians!” The
Mother of the House looked all round, smiling genially, for she thought
that her daughter was speaking of the name of a book.
The Doctor said: “It’s all a pose, those sort of people.” But which
sort he did not say, so the Daughter of the House said sharply: “Which
sort of people?” For she loved to cross-examine struggling professional
men, and the Doctor got quite red, and said; “Oh, all that sort of
people!”
The young lawyer, who was quick to see a difficulty, helped him out by
saying, “He means people like Bensington!”
The Doctor, who had never heard of Bensington, nodded eagerly, and
the Head of the House, frowning a healthy frown, said, “What, not John
Bensington, old William Bensington’s son?”
“Yes,” said the young lawyer. “That’s the kind of man he means,” and
the Doctor nodded again.
His enemy was dropping farther and farther behind him with every
stride, but she made a brilliant rally. “Do you mean John Bensington?”
she said. The Doctor, in some alarm, and with his mouth full, nodded
vigorously for the third time. The Head of the House, still frowning,
broke into all this with a solid roar: “I don’t believe a word of
it.” He sat leaning back again, not relaxing his frown and trying to
connect the son of his old friend with a gang of treasonable robbers.
He remembered Jock’s marriage--for it was a bad one--and a silly book
of verses he had written, and how keen he had been against his father’s
selling the bit of land along the coast, because it was bound to go up.
He could fit Jock in with many unpleasant things, but he couldn’t fit
him in with the very definite picture that rose in his mind whenever he
heard the word “Socialist.” There was something adventurous and violent
and lean about the word--something like a wolf. There was nothing of
all that in Jock. So much thought matured at last into living words,
and the Head of the House said, “Why, he’s on the County Council.”
The Daughter of the House turned to the lawyer and said, “How would
you define a Socialist, Mr. Layton?”
Mr. Layton defined a Socialist, and his silent wife, who was sitting
opposite, looked at him happily on account of the power of his mind.
The Lithuanian, who had said nothing all this while, but had been
glancing with eyes as bright as a bird’s, now at one speaker, now
at another, nerved himself to intervene. Then there passed over his
little soul the vivid pictures of things he had seen and known: the
dens in Riga, the pain, the flight upon a Danish ship, the assumption
first of German, then of English nationality, the easy gullibility of
the large-hearted wealthy people of this land. He remembered his own
confidence, his own unwavering talent, and his contempt of, and hatred
for, other men. He could have trusted himself to speak, for he was in
full command of his little soul, and there was not a trace of anything
in his accent definitely foreign. But the virtue and the folly of these
happy luxurious people about him pleased him too much and pleased him
wickedly.
He went on tasting them in silence, until the Daughter of the House,
who felt awe for him alone of all those present--much more awe than she
did for her strong and good father--said to him, almost with reverence,
that he should take to writing now of the meadows of England, since he
had so wonderfully described her battles at sea. And the Lithuanian
was ready to turn the talk upon letters, his bright eyes darting all
the while. The old man, the Head of the House, sighed and muttered:
“Jock was no Socialist.” That was the one thing that he retained;
... and meanwhile wealth continued to pour in from all corners of
the world into his house, and to pour out again over the four seas,
doing his will, and no one in the world, not even the chief victims
of that wealth, hated it as the little Lithuanian did, and no one in
the world--not even of them who had seen most of that wealth--hungered
bestially for it as did he.
On the Rights of Property
There is in the dark heart of Soho, not far from a large stable
where Zebras, Elephants, and trained Ponies await their turn for the
footlights and the inebriation of public applause, a little tavern,
divided, as are even the meanest of our taverns, into numerous
compartments, each corresponding to some grade in the hierarchy of our
ancient and orderly society.
For many years the highest of these had been called “the Private
Bar,” and was distinguished from its next fellow by this, that the
cushions upon its little bench were covered with sodden velvet, not
with oilcloth. Here, also, the drink provided by the politician who
owned this and many other public-houses was served in glasses of
uncertain size and not by imperial measure. This, I say, had been the
chief or summit of the place for many years; from the year of the
great Exhibition, in fact until that great change in London life which
took place towards the end of the eighties and brought us, among other
things, a new art and a new conception of world-wide power. In those
years, as the mind of London changed so did this little public-house
(which was called “the Lord Benthorpe”), and it added yet another step
to its hierarchy of pens. This new place was called “the Saloon Bar.”
It was larger and better padded, and there was a tiny table in it.
Then the years went on and wars were fought and the modern grip of man
over natural forces marvellously extended, and the wealth of a world’s
Metropolis greatly swelled, and “The Lord Benthorpe” found room for yet
another and final reserve wherein it might receive the very highest of
its clients. This was built upon what had been the backyard, it had
several tables, and it was called “the Lounge.”
So far so good. Here late one evening when the music-halls had just
discharged their thousands, and when the Elephants, the Zebras, and
the Ponies near by were retiring to rest, sat two men, both authors;
the one was an author who had written for now many years upon social
subjects, and notably upon the statistics of our industrial conditions.
He had come nearer than any other to the determination of the Incidence
of Economic Rent upon Retail Exchange and had been the first to show
(in an essay, now famous) that the Ricardian Theory of Surplus did not
apply in the anarchic competition of Retail Dealing, at least in our
main thoroughfares.
His companion wielded the pen in another manner. It was his to analyse
into its last threads of substance the human mind. Rare books proceeded
from him at irregular and lengthy intervals packed with a close
observation of the ultimate motives of men and an exact portrayal
of their labyrinth of deed; nor could he achieve his ideal in this
province of letters save by the use of words so unusual and, above all,
arranged in an order so peculiar to himself, as to bring upon his few
readers often perplexity and always awe.
Neither of these two men was wealthy. Such incomes as they gained had
not even that quality of regular flow which, more than mere volume,
impresses the years with security. Each was driven to continual
expedients, and each had lost such careful habits as only a regular
supply can perpetuate. The consequence of this impediment was
apparent in the clothing of both men and in the grooming of each;
for the Economist, who was the elder, wore a frock-coat unsuited to
the occasion, marked in many places with lighter patches against its
original black, and he had upon his head a top hat of no great age and
yet too familiar and rough, and dusty at the brim. The Psychologist,
upon the other hand, sprawled in a suit of wool, grey and in places
green, which was most slipshod and looked as though at times he slept
in it, which indeed at times he did. Unlike his elder companion he wore
no stiff collar round his throat, a negligence which saved him from
the reproach of frayed linen worn through too many days; his shirt
was a grey woollen shirt with a grey woollen collar of such a sort as
scientific men assure us invigorates the natural functions and prolongs
the life of man.
These two fell at once to a discussion upon that matter which absorbs
the best of modern minds. I mean the organisation of Production in
the modern world. It was their favourite theme. Their drink was Port,
which, carelessly enough, they continued to order in small glasses
instead of beginning boldly with the bottle. The Port was bad, or
rather it was not Port, yet had they bought one bottle of it they would
have saved the earnings of many days.