On my last morning on the Flemish coast, when I knew that in a few hours
I should be in England, my eye fell upon one of the details of Gothic
carving of which Flanders is full. I do not know whether the thing is
old, though it was certainly knocked about and indecipherable, but at
least it was certainly in the style and tradition of the early Middle
Ages. It seemed to represent men bending themselves (not to say twisting
themselves) to certain primary employments. Some seemed to be
sailors tugging at ropes; others, I think, were reaping; others were
energetically pouring something into something else. This is entirely
characteristic of the pictures and carvings of the early thirteenth
century, perhaps the most purely vigorous time in all history. The great
Greeks preferred to carve their gods and heroes doing nothing. Splendid
and philosophic as their composure is there is always about it something
that marks the master of many slaves. But if there was one thing
the early mediaevals liked it was representing people doing
something--hunting or hawking, or rowing boats, or treading grapes, or
making shoes, or cooking something in a pot. “Quicquid agunt homines,
votum, timor, ira voluptas.” (I quote from memory.) The Middle Ages
is full of that spirit in all its monuments and manuscripts. Chaucer
retains it in his jolly insistence on everybody’s type of trade and
toil. It was the earliest and youngest resurrection of Europe, the time
when social order was strengthening, but had not yet become oppressive;
the time when religious faiths were strong, but had not yet been
exasperated. For this reason the whole effect of Greek and Gothic
carving is different. The figures in the Elgin marbles, though often
reining their steeds for an instant in the air, seem frozen for ever at
that perfect instant. But a mass of mediaeval carving seems actually
a sort of bustle or hubbub in stone. Sometimes one cannot help feeling
that the groups actually move and mix, and the whole front of a great
cathedral has the hum of a huge hive.
.....
But about these particular figures there was a peculiarity of which I
could not be sure. Those of them that had any heads had very curious
heads, and it seemed to me that they had their mouths open. Whether or
no this really meant anything or was an accident of nascent art I do not
know; but in the course of wondering I recalled to my mind the fact that
singing was connected with many of the tasks there suggested, that there
were songs for reapers and songs for sailors hauling ropes. I was
still thinking about this small problem when I walked along the pier
at Ostend; and I heard some sailors uttering a measured shout as they
laboured, and I remembered that sailors still sing in chorus while they
work, and even sing different songs according to what part of their work
they are doing. And a little while afterwards, when my sea journey was
over, the sight of men working in the English fields reminded me
again that there are still songs for harvest and for many agricultural
routines. And I suddenly wondered why if this were so it should be quite
unknown, for any modern trade to have a ritual poetry. How did people
come to chant rude poems while pulling certain ropes or gathering
certain fruit, and why did nobody do anything of the kind while
producing any of the modern things? Why is a modern newspaper never
printed by people singing in chorus? Why do shopmen seldom, if ever,
sing?
.....
If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while
auditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all the
separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songs
for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank? As the train
from Dover flew through the Kentish gardens, I tried to write a few
songs suitable for commercial gentlemen. Thus, the work of bank clerks
when casting up columns might begin with a thundering chorus in praise
of Simple Addition.
“Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o’er. Hear the
Stars of Morning shouting: ‘Two and Two are four.’ Though the creeds and
realms are reeling, though the sophists roar, Though we weep and pawn
our watches, Two and Two are Four.”
“There’s a run upon the Bank--Stand away! For the Manager’s a crank and
the Secretary drank, and the
Upper Tooting Bank
Turns to bay!
Stand close: there is a run
On the Bank.
Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run,
That she fired with every gun
Ere she sank.”
.....
And as I came into the cloud of London I met a friend of mine who
actually is in a bank, and submitted these suggestions in rhyme to him
for use among his colleagues. But he was not very hopeful about the
matter. It was not (he assured me) that he underrated the verses, or in
any sense lamented their lack of polish. No; it was rather, he felt, an
indefinable something in the very atmosphere of the society in which we
live that makes it spiritually difficult to sing in banks. And I think
he must be right; though the matter is very mysterious. I may observe
here that I think there must be some mistake in the calculations of the
Socialists. They put down all our distress, not to a moral tone, but
to the chaos of private enterprise. Now, banks are private; but
post-offices are Socialistic: therefore I naturally expected that the
post-office would fall into the collectivist idea of a chorus. Judge of
my surprise when the lady in my local post-office (whom I urged to sing)
dismissed the idea with far more coldness than the bank clerk had done.
She seemed indeed, to be in a considerably greater state of depression
than he. Should any one suppose that this was the effect of the verses
themselves, it is only fair to say that the specimen verse of the
Post-Office Hymn ran thus:
“O’er London our letters are shaken like snow,
Our wires o’er the world like the thunderbolts go.
The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.”
Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):
“Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.”
And the more I thought about the matter the more painfully certain it
seemed that the most important and typical modern things could not be
done with a chorus. One could not, for instance, be a great financier
and sing; because the essence of being a great financier is that you
keep quiet. You could not even in many modern circles be a public man
and sing; because in those circles the essence of being a public man is
that you do nearly everything in private. Nobody would imagine a chorus
of money-lenders. Every one knows the story of the solicitors’ corps of
volunteers who, when the Colonel on the battlefield cried “Charge!” all
said simultaneously, “Six-and-eightpence.” Men can sing while charging
in a military, but hardly in a legal sense. And at the end of my
reflections I had really got no further than the sub-conscious feeling
of my friend the bank-clerk--that there is something spiritually
suffocating about our life; not about our laws merely, but about our
life. Bank-clerks are without songs, not because they are poor, but
because they are sad. Sailors are much poorer. As I passed homewards I
passed a little tin building of some religious sort, which was shaken
with shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own tongue. THEY were
singing anyhow; and I had for an instant a fancy I had often had before:
that with us the super-human is the only place where you can find the
human. Human nature is hunted and has fled into sanctuary.