THE USES OF DIVERSITY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
CHARLES DICKENS
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
TREMENDOUS TRIFLES
ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS
A MISCELLANY OF MEN
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE
THE USES OF DIVERSITY
A BOOK OF ESSAYS
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
METHUEN & CO. LTD
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1920_
CONTENTS
PAGE
ON SERIOUSNESS 1
LAMP-POSTS 7
THE SPIRITS 13
TENNYSON 18
THE DOMESTICITY OF DETECTIVES 24
GEORGE MEREDITH 30
THE IRISHMAN 34
IRELAND AND THE DOMESTIC DRAMA 39
THE JAPANESE 44
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 49
THE LAWLESSNESS OF LAWYERS 54
OUR LATIN RELATIONS 61
ON PIGS AS PETS 66
THE ROMANCE OF ROSTAND 71
WISHES 75
THE FUTURISTS 80
THE EVOLUTION OF EMMA 85
THE PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 91
THE HUMOUR OF KING HEROD 96
THE SILVER GOBLETS 101
THE DUTY OF THE HISTORIAN 106
QUESTIONS OF DIVORCE 112
MORMONISM 121
PAGEANTS AND DRESS 126
ON STAGE COSTUME 132
THE YULE LOG AND THE DEMOCRAT 138
MORE THOUGHTS ON CHRISTMAS 144
DICKENS AGAIN 149
TAFFY 154
“EGO ET SHAVIUS MEUS” 159
THE PLAN FOR A NEW UNIVERSE 164
GEORGE WYNDHAM 171
FOUR STUPIDITIES 177
ON HISTORICAL NOVELS 182
ON MONSTERS 186
THE USES OF DIVERSITY
THE USES OF DIVERSITY
On Seriousness ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I do not like seriousness. I think it is irreligious. Or, if you prefer
the phrase, it is the fashion of all false religions. The man who takes
everything seriously is the man who makes an idol of everything: he
bows down to wood and stone until his limbs are as rooted as the roots
of the tree or his head as fallen as the stone sunken by the roadside.
It has often been discussed whether animals can laugh. The hyena is
said to laugh: but it is rather in the sense in which the M.P. is said
to utter “an ironical cheer.” At the best, the hyena utters an ironical
laugh. Broadly, it is true that all animals except Man are serious. And
I think it is further demonstrated by the fact that all human beings
who concern themselves in a concentrated way with animals are also
serious; serious in a sense far beyond that of human beings concerned
with anything else. Horses are serious; they have long, solemn faces.
But horsey men are also serious--jockeys or trainers or grooms: they
also have long, solemn faces. Dogs are serious: they have exactly
that combination of moderate conscientiousness with monstrous conceit
which is the make-up of most modern religions. But, however serious
dogs may be, they can hardly be more serious than dog-fanciers--or
dog-stealers. Dog-stealers, indeed, have to be particularly serious,
because they have to come back and say they have found the dog. The
faintest shade of irony, not to say levity, on their features, would
evidently be fatal to their plans. I will not carry the comparison
through all the kingdoms of natural history: but it is true of all who
fix their affection or intelligence on the lower animals. Cats are as
serious as the Sphinx, who must have been some kind of cat, to judge by
the attitude. But the rich old ladies who love cats are quite equally
serious, about cats and about themselves. So also the ancient Egyptians
worshipped cats, also crocodiles and beetles and all kinds of things;
but they were all serious and made their worshippers serious. Egyptian
art was intentionally harsh, clear, and conventional; but it could very
vividly represent men driving, hunting, fighting, feasting, praying.
Yet I think you will pass along many corridors of that coloured and
almost cruel art before you see a man laughing. Their gods did not
encourage them to laugh. I am told by housewives that beetles seldom
laugh. Cats do not laugh--except the Cheshire Cat (which is not found
in Egypt); and even he can only grin. And crocodiles do not laugh. They
weep.
This comparison between the sacred animals of Egypt and the pet animals
of to-day is not so far-fetched as it may seem to some people. There is
a healthy and an unhealthy love of animals: and the nearest definition
of the difference is that the unhealthy love of animals is serious. I
am quite prepared to love a rhinoceros, with reasonable precautions:
he is, doubtless, a delightful father to the young rhinoceroses. But
I will not promise not to laugh at a rhinoceros. I will not worship
the beast with the little horn. I will not adore the Golden Calf;
still less will I adore the Fatted Calf. On the contrary, I will eat
him. There is some sort of joke about eating an animal, or even about
an animal eating you. Let us hope we shall perceive it at the proper
moment, if it ever occurs. But I will not worship an animal. That is, I
will not take an animal quite seriously: and I know why.
Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is,
both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience.
Suppose a thousand black slaves were sacrificed to the blackbeetle;
suppose a million maidens were flung into the Nile to feed the
crocodile; suppose the cat could eat men instead of mice--it could
still be no more than that sacrifice of humanity that so often makes
the horse more important than the groom, or the lap-dog more important
even than the lap. The only right view of the animal is the comic view.
Because the view is comic it is naturally affectionate. And because it
is affectionate, it is never respectful.
I know no place where the true contrast has been more candidly,
clearly, and (for all I know) unconsciously expressed than in an
excellent little book of verse called _Bread and Circuses_ by Helen
Parry Eden, the daughter of Judge Parry, who has inherited both the
humour and the humanity in spite of which her father succeeded as a
modern magistrate. There are a great many other things that might be
praised in the book, but I should select for praise the sane love
of animals. There is, for instance, a little poem on a cat from the
country who has come to live in a flat in Battersea (everybody at some
time of their lives has lived or will live in a flat in Battersea,
except, perhaps, the “prisoner of the Vatican”), and the verses have
a tenderness, with a twist of the grotesque, which seems to me the
exactly appropriate tone about domestic pets:
And now you’re here. Well, it may be
The sun _does_ rise in Battersea
Although to-day be dark;
Life is not shorn of loves and hates
While there are sparrows on the slates
And keepers in the Park.
And you yourself will come to learn
The ways of London; and in turn
Assume your Cockney cares
Like other folk that live in flats,
Chasing your purely abstract rats
Upon the concrete stairs.
That is like Hood at his best; but it is, moreover, penetrated with a
profound and true appreciation of the fundamental idea that all love
of the cat must be founded on the _absurdity_ of the cat, and only
thus can a morbid idolatry be avoided. Perhaps those who appeared to
be witches were those old ladies who took their cats too seriously.
The cat in this book is called “Four-Paws,” which is as jolly as a
gargoyle. But the name of the cat must be something familiar and even
jeering, if it be only Tom or Tabby or Topsy: something that shows man
is not afraid of it. Otherwise the name of the cat will be Pasht.
But when the same poet comes accidentally across an example of the
insane seriousness about animals that some modern “humanitarians”
exhibit, she turns against the animal-lover as naturally and
instinctively as she turns to the animal. A writer on a society paper
had mentioned some rich woman who had appeared on Cup Day “gowned”
in some way or other, and inserted the tearful parenthesis that “she
has just lost a dear dog in London.” The real animal-lover instantly
recognizes the wrong note, and dances on the dog’s grave with a
derision as unsympathetic as Swift:
Dear are my friends, and yet my heart still light is,
Undimmed the eyes that see our set depart,
Snatched from the Season by appendicitis
Or something quite as smart.
But when my Chin-Chin drew his latest breath
On Marie’s outspread apron, slow and wheezily,
I simply sniffed, I could not take _his_ death
So Pekineasily....
... Grief courts these ovations,
And many press my sable-suèded hand,
Noting the blackest of Lucile’s creations
Inquire, and understand.
It is that balance of instincts that is the essence of all satire:
however fantastic satire may be, it must always be potentially rational
and fundamentally moderate, for it must be ready to hit both to right
and to left at opposite extravagances. And the two extravagances which
exist on the edges of our harassed and secretive society to-day are
cruelty to animals and worship of animals. They both come from taking
animals too seriously: the cruel man must hate the animal; the crank
must worship the animal, and perhaps fear it. Neither knows how to love
it.
Lamp-Posts ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In contemplating some common object of the modern street, such as an
omnibus or a lamp-post, it is sometimes well worth while to stop and
think about why such common objects are regarded as commonplace. It is
well worth while to try to grasp what is the significance of them--or
rather, the quality in modernity which makes them so often seem not so
much significant as insignificant. If you stop the omnibus while you
stop to think about it, you will be unpopular. Even if you try to grasp
the lamp-post in your effort to grasp its significance, you will almost
certainly be misunderstood. Nevertheless, the problem is a real one,
and not without bearing upon the most poignant politics and ethics of
to-day. It is certainly not the things themselves, the idea and upshot
of them, that are remote from poetry or even mysticism. The idea of a
crowd of human strangers turned into comrades for a journey is full of
the oldest pathos and piety of human life. That profound feeling of
mortal fraternity and frailty, which tells us we are indeed all in the
same boat, is not the less true if expressed in the formula that we are
all in the same bus. As for the idea of the lamp-post, the idea of the
fixed beacon of the branching thoroughfares, the terrestrial star of
the terrestrial traveller, it not only could be, but actually is, the
subject of countless songs.
Nor is it even true that there is something so trivial or ugly about
the names of the things as to make them commonplace in all connexions.
The word “lamp” is especially beloved by the more decorative and
poetic writers; it is a symbol, and very frequently a title. It is
true that if Ruskin had called his eloquent work “The Seven Lamp-Posts
of Architecture” the effect, to a delicate ear, would not have been
quite the same. But even the word “post” is in no sense impossible in
poetry; it can be found with a fine military ring in phrases like “The
Last Post” or “Dying at his Post.” I remember, indeed, hearing, when
a small child, the line in Macaulay’s “Armada” about “with loose rein
and bloody spur rode inland many a post,” and being puzzled at the
picture of a pillar-box or a lamp-post displaying so much activity. But
certainly it is not the mere sound of the word that makes it unworkable
in the literature of wonder or beauty. “Omnibus” may seem at first
sight a more difficult thing to swallow--if I may be allowed a somewhat
gigantesque figure of speech. This, it may be said, is a Cockney and
ungainly modern word, as it is certainly a Cockney and ungainly modern
thing. But even this is not true. The word “omnibus” is a very noble
word with a very noble meaning and even tradition. It is derived
from an ancient and adamantine tongue which has rolled it with very
authoritative thunders: _quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus_. It
is a word really more human and universal than republic or democracy.
A man might very consistently build a temple for all the tribes of
men, a temple of the largest pattern and the loveliest design, and then
call it an omnibus. It is true that the dignity of this description
has really been somewhat diminished by the illogical habit of clipping
the word down to the last and least important part of it. But that
is only one of many modern examples in which real vulgarity is not
in democracy, but rather in the loss of democracy. It is about as
democratic to call an omnibus a bus as it would be to call a democrat a
rat.
Another way of explaining the cloud of commonplace interpretation upon
modern things is to trace it to that spirit which often calls itself
science but which is more often mere repetition. It is proverbial that
a child, looking out of the nursery window, regards the lamp-post
as part of a fairy-tale of which the lamplighter is the fairy. That
lamp-post can be to a baby all that the moon could possibly be to a
lover or a poet. Now, it is perfectly true that there is nowadays a
spirit of cheap information which imagines that it shoots beyond this
shining point, when it merely tells us that there are nine hundred
lamp-posts in the town, all exactly alike. It is equally true that
there is a spirit of cheap science, which is equally cocksure of its
conclusiveness when it tells us that there are so many thousand moons
and suns, all much more alike than we might have been disposed to
fancy. And we can say of both these calculations that there is nothing
really commonplace except the mind of the calculator. The baby is much
more right about the flaming lamp than the statistician who counts the
posts in the street; and the lover is much more really right about
the moon than the astronomer. Here the part is certainly greater than
the whole, for it is much better to be tied to one wonderful thing
than to allow a mere catalogue of wonderful things to deprive you of
the capacity to wonder. It is doubtless true, to a definite extent,
that a certain sameness in the mechanical modern creations makes them
actually less attractive than the freer recurrences of nature; or, in
other words, that twenty lamp-posts really are much more like each
other than twenty trees. Nevertheless, even this character will not
cover the whole ground, for men do not cease to feel the mystery of
natural things even when they reproduce themselves almost completely,
as in the case of pitch darkness or a very heavy sleep. The mere fact
that we have seen a lamp-post very often, and that it generally looked
very much the same as before, would not of itself prevent us from
appreciating its elfin fire, any more than it prevents the child.
Finally, there is a neglected side of this psychological problem which
is, I think, one aspect of the mystery of the morality of war. It is
not altogether an accident that, while the London lamp-post has always
been mild and undistinguished, the Paris lamp-post has been more
historic because it has been more horrible. It has been a yet more
revolutionary substitute for the guillotine--yet more revolutionary,
because it was the guillotine of the mob, as distinct even from the
guillotine of the Republic. They hanged aristocrats upon it, including
(unless my memory misleads me) that exceedingly unpleasant aristocrat
who promulgated the measure of war economy known as “Let them eat
grass.” Hence it happened that there has been in Paris a fanatical
and flamboyant political newspaper actually called _La Lanterne_, a
paper for extreme Jacobins. If there were a paper in London called the
_Lamp-Post_, I can only imagine it as a paper for children. As for my
other example, I do not know whether even the French Revolution could
manage to do anything with the omnibus; but the Jacobins were quite
capable of using it as a tumbril.
In short, I suspect that Cockney things have become commonplace because
there has been so long lacking in them a certain savour of sacrifice
and peril, which there has been in the nursery tale, for all its
innocence, and which there has been in the Parisian street, for all its
iniquity.
The new wonder that has changed the world before our eyes is that all
this crude and vulgar modern clockwork is most truly being used for a
heroic end. It is most emphatically being used for the slaying of a
dragon. It is being used, much more unquestionably than the lantern of
Paris, to make an end of a tyrant. It was a cant phrase in our cheaper
literature of late to say that the new time will make the romance of
war mechanical. Is it not more probable that it will make the mechanism
of war romantic? As I said at the beginning, the things themselves are
not repulsively prosaic; it was their associations that made them so;
and to-day their associations are as splendid as any that ever blazoned
a shield or embroidered a banner. Much of what made the violation of
Belgium so violent a challenge to every conscience lay unconsciously
in the fact that the country which had thus become tragic had often
been regarded as commonplace. The unpardonable sin was committed in a
place of lamp-posts and omnibuses. In similar places has been prepared
the just wrath and reparation; and a legend of it will surely linger
even in the omnibus that has carried heroes to the mouth of hell, and
even in the lamp-post whose lamp has been darkened against the dragon
of the sky.
The Spirits ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The magazines continue to abound in articles about Spiritualism. Those
articles which expose and explode Spiritualism are certainly calculated
to make converts to that novel creed; but fortunately the balance
is redressed by the articles which defend and expound Spiritualism,
which will probably make any thoughtful convert hastily recant his
conversion. I believe myself that nothing but advantage can accrue to
Spiritualism from all criticisms founded on Materialism. I think there
is a mystical minimum in human history and experience, which is at once
too obscure to be explained and too obvious to be explained away. It
may be admitted that a miracle is rarer than a murder; but they are
made obscure by somewhat similar causes. Thus a medium will insist on
a dark room; and a murderer is said to have a slight preference for a
dark night. A medium is criticized for not submitting to a sufficient
number of scientific and impartial judges; and a murderer seldom
collects any considerable number of impartial witnesses to testify to
his performance. Many supernatural stories rest on the evidence of
rough unlettered men, like fishermen and peasants; and most criminal
trials depend on the detailed testimony of quite uneducated people. It
may be remarked that we never throw a doubt on the value of ignorant
evidence when it is a question of a judge hanging a man, but only when
it is a question of a saint healing him. Morbid and hysterical people
imagine all sorts of ghosts and demons that do not exist. Morbid and
hysterical people also imagine all sorts of crimes and conspiracies
that do not exist. A great many spiritual communications may be
auto-suggestions; and a great many apparent murders may be suicides.
But there is a limit to the probability of self-destruction; so there
is of self-deception.
Now I think it well worth while to concentrate our common sense, not
on where these messages come from, or why they come, but simply on the
messages. Let us consider the thing itself about which there is no
doubt at all. Let us consider, not whether spirits can speak to us, or
how they speak, but simply what they say, or are supposed to say. If
spirits in heaven, or scoundrels on earth, or fiends somewhere else,
have brought us a new religion, let us look at the new religion on its
own merits. Well, this is the sort of thing the spirits are supposed to
write down, and very possibly do write down:
“You make death an impenetrable fog, while it is a mere golden mist,
torn easily aside by the shafts of faith, and revealing life as not
only continuous but as not cut in two by a great change. I cannot
express myself as I wish.... It is more like leaving prison for freedom
and happiness. Not that your present life lacks joy; it is all joy, but
you have to fight with imperfections. Here, we have to struggle only
with lack of development. There is no evil--only different degrees of
spirit.”
The interrogator, Mr. Basil King, who narrates his experiences in an
interesting article in _Nash’s Magazine_, proceeds to ask whether the
lack of development is due to the highly practical thing we call sin.
To this the spirit replies: “They come over with the evil, as it were,
cut out, and leaving blanks in their souls. These have by degrees to be
filled with good.”
Now I will waive the point whether death is a mist or a fog or a front
door or a fire-escape or any other physical metaphor; being satisfied
with the fact that it is there, and not to be removed by metaphors.
But what amuses me about the spirit is that for him it is both there
and not there. Death is non-existent in one sentence, and of the most
startling importance six sentences afterwards. The spirit is positive
that our existence is _not_ cut in two by a great change, at the moment
of death. But the spirit is equally positive, a little lower down, that
the whole of our human evil is instantly and utterly cut out of us,
and all at the moment of death. If a man suddenly and supernaturally
loses about three-quarters of his ordinary character, might it not
be described as “a great change”? Why does so enormous a convulsion
happen at the exact moment of death, if death is non-existent and not
to be considered? The Spiritualist is here contradicting himself, not
only by making death very decidedly a great change, but by actually
making it a greater change than Dante or St. Francis thought it was. A
Christian who thinks the soul carries its sins to Purgatory makes life
much more “continuous” than this Spiritualist, who says that death, and
death alone, alters a man as by a blast of magic. The article bears
the modest title of “The Abolishing of Death”; and the spirit does say
that this is possible, except when he forgets and says the opposite. He
seldom contradicts himself more than twice in a paragraph. But since
he says clearly that death abolishes sin, and equally clearly that he
abolishes death, it becomes an interesting speculation what happens
next, and especially what happens to sin: a subject of interest to many
of us.
Mr. Basil King asked the spirit, who had told him that animals are
human, whether it is wrong to destroy animal life. It may be remarked
that the questions Mr. King asks are always much more acute than the
answers he gets. The answer about the killing of animals is this:
“You can _never_ destroy life. Life is the absolute power which
overrules all else. There can be no cessation. It is impossible.”
And that is all; and for a man considering whether he shall or shall
not kill a tom-cat, it does not seem very helpful. Logically, if it
means anything, it would seem to mean that you may do anything to
the cat, for its nine lives are really an infinite series. In short,
you can kill it because you cannot kill it. But it is obvious that
if a man relies on this reason for killing his cat, it is an equally
good reason for killing his creditor. Creditors also are immortal
(a solemn thought); creditors also pass through a golden mist torn
easily aside by the shafts of faith, and have all the evil of their
souls (including, let us hope, their avarice) cut out of them with
the axe of death, without noticing anything in particular. In short,
Mr. Basil King, when he asks a reasonable question about a real moral
question, the relations of man and the animals, gets no reply except
a hotch-potch of words which might mean anarchy and may mean anything.
From beginning to end the spirit never answers any real question on
which the real religions of mankind have been obliged to legislate
and to teach. The only practical deduction would be that it is _no_
disadvantage to have sinned in this life; as in the other case that
it is _no_ disgrace to kill either a creditor or a cat. If it means
anything, it means that; and if it is spirits and not spifflications,
the spirits mean that: and I do not desire their further acquaintance.
Tennyson
I have been glancing over two or three of the appreciations of Tennyson
appropriate to his centenary, and have been struck with a curious tone
of coldness towards him in almost all quarters. Now this is really a
very peculiar thing. For it is a case of coldness to quite brilliant
and unquestionable literary merit. Whether Tennyson was a great poet
I shall not discuss. I understand that one has to wait about eight
hundred years before discussing that; and my only complaint against
the printers of my articles is that they will not wait even for
much shorter periods. But that Tennyson was a poet is as solid and
certain as that Roberts is a billiard-player. That Tennyson was an
astonishingly good poet is as solid and certain as that Roberts is an
astonishingly good billiard-player. Even in these matters of art there
are some things analogous to matters of fact. It is no good disputing
about tastes--partly because some tastes are beyond dispute. If anyone
tells me that
There is fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate;
or that
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
is not fine poetry, I am quite prepared to treat him as I would one
who said that grass was not green or that I was not corpulent. And by
all common chances Tennyson ought to be preserved as a pleasure--a
sensuous pleasure if you like, but certainly a genuine one. There is
no more reason for dropping Tennyson than for dropping Virgil. We
do not mind Virgil’s view of Augustus, nor need we mind Tennyson’s
view of Queen Victoria. Beauty is unanswerable, in a poem as much as
in a woman. There were Victorian writers whose art is not perfectly
appreciable apart from their enthusiasm. Kingsley’s _Yeast_ is a fine
book, but not quite so fine a book as it seemed when one’s own social
passions were still yeasty. Browning and Coventry Patmore are justly
admired, but they are most admired where they are most agreed with.
But “St. Agnes’ Eve” is an unimpeachably beautiful poem, whether one
believes in St. Agnes or detests her. One would think that a man
who had thus left indubitably good verse would receive natural and
steady gratitude, like a man who left indubitably good wine to his
nephew, or indubitably good pictures to the National Portrait Gallery.
Nevertheless, as I have said, the tone of all the papers, modernist or
old-fashioned, has been mainly frigid. What is the meaning of this?
I will ask permission to answer this question by abruptly and even
brutally changing the subject. My remarks must, first of all, seem
irrelevant even to effrontery; they shall prove their relevance later
on. In turning the pages of one of the papers containing such a light
and unsympathetic treatment of Tennyson, my eye catches the following
sentence: “By the light of modern science and thought, we are in
a position to see that each normal human being in some way repeats
historically the life of the human race.” This is a very typical
modern assertion; that is, it is an assertion for which there is not
and never has been a single spot or speck of proof. We know precious
little about what the life of the human race has been; and none of our
scientific conjectures about it bear the remotest resemblance to the
actual growth of a child. According to this theory, a baby begins by
chipping flints and rubbing sticks together to find fire. One so often
sees babies doing this. About the age of five the child, before the
delighted eyes of his parents, founds a village community. By the time
he is eleven it has become a small city state, the replica of ancient
Athens. Encouraged by this, the boy proceeds, and before he is fourteen
has founded the Roman Empire. But now his parents have a serious
set-back. Having watched him so far, not only with pleasure, but with
a very natural surprise, they must strengthen themselves to endure the
spectacle of decay. They have now to watch their child going through
the decline of the Western Empire and the Dark Ages. They see the
invasion of the Huns and that of the Norsemen chasing each other across
his expressive face. He seems a little happier after he has “repeated”
the Battle of Chalons and the unsuccessful Siege of Paris; and by the
time he comes to the twelfth century, his boyish face is as bright as
it was of old when he was “repeating” Pericles or Camillus. I have no
space to follow this remarkable demonstration of how history repeats
itself in the youth; how he grows dismal at twenty-three to represent
the end of Mediævalism, brightens because the Renaissance is coming,
darkens again with the disputes of the later Reformation, broadens
placidly through the thirties as the rational eighteenth century, till
at last, about forty-three, he gives a great yell and begins to burn
the house down, as a symbol of the French Revolution. Such (we shall
all agree) is the ordinary development of a boy.
Now, seriously, does anyone believe a word of such bosh? Does anyone
think that a child will repeat the periods of human history? Does
anyone ever allow for a daughter in the Stone Age, or excuse a son
because he is in the fourth century B.C. Yet the writer who lays down
this splendid and staggering lie calmly says that “by the light of
modern science and thought we are in a position to _see_” that it is
true. “Seeing” is a strong word to use of our conviction that icebergs
are in the north, or that the earth goes round the sun. Yet anybody can
use it of any casual or crazy biological fancy seen in some newspaper
or suggested in some debating club. This is the rooted weakness of our
time. Science, which means exactitude, has become the mother of all
inexactitude.
This is the failure of the epoch, and this explains the partial failure
of Tennyson. He was _par excellence_ the poet of popular science--that
is, of all such cloudy and ill-considered assertions as the above. He
was the perfectly educated man of classics and the half-educated man
of science. No one did more to encourage the colossal blunder that the
survival of the fittest means the survival of the best. One might as
well say that the survival of the fittest means the survival of the
fattest. Tennyson’s position has grown shaky because it rested not on
any clear dogmas old or new, but on two or three temporary, we might
say desperate, compromises of his own day. He grasped at Evolution, not
because it was definite, but because it was indefinite; not because
it was daring, but because it was safe. It gave him the hope that man
might one day be an angel, and England a free democracy; but it soothed
him with the assurance that neither of these alarming things would
happen just yet. Virgil used his verbal felicities to describe the
eternal idea of the Roman Imperium. Tennyson used his verbal felicities
for the accidental equilibrium of the British Constitution. “To spare
the humble and war down the proud,” is a permanent idea for the
policing of this planet. But that freedom should “slowly broaden down
from precedent to precedent” merely happens to be the policy of the
English upper class; it has no vital sanction; it might be much better
to broaden quickly. One can write great poetry about a truth or even
about a falsehood, but hardly about a legal fiction. The misanthropic
idea, as in Byron, is not a truth, but it is one of the immortal lies.
As long as humanity exists, humanity can be hated. Wherever one shall
gather by himself, Byron is in the midst of him. It is a common and
recurrent mood to regard man as a hopeless Yahoo. But it is not a
natural mood to regard man as a hopeful Yahoo, as the Evolutionists
did, as a creature changing before one’s eyes from bestial to
beautiful, a creature whose tail has just dropped off while he is
staring at a far-off divine event. This particular compromise between
contempt and hope was an accident of Tennyson’s time, and, like his
liberal conservatism, will probably never be found again. His weakness
was not being old-fashioned or new-fashioned, but being fashionable.
His feet were set on things transitory and untenable, compromises and
compacts of silence. Yet he was so perfect a poet that I fancy he will
still be able to stand, even upon such clouds.
The Domesticity of Detectives ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I have just been entertaining myself with the last sensational story by
the author of _The Yellow Room_, which was probably the best detective
tale of our time, except Mr. Bentley’s admirable novel, _Trent’s Last
Case_. The name of the author of _The Yellow Room_ is Gaston Leroux; I
have sometimes wondered whether it is the alternative _nom de plume_ of
the writer called Maurice Leblanc who gives us the stories about Arsène
Lupin, the gentleman burglar. There would be something very symmetrical
in the inversion by which the red gentleman always writes about a
detective, and the white gentleman always writes about a criminal. But
I have no serious reason to suppose the red and white combination to be
anything but a coincidence; and the tales are of two rather different
types. Those of Gaston the Red are more strictly of the type of the
mystery story, in the sense of resolving a single and central mystery.
Those of Maurice the White are more properly adventure stories, in
the sense of resolving a rapid succession of immediate difficulties.
This is inherent in the position of the hero; the detective is always
outside the event, while the criminal is inside the event. Some would
express it by saying that the policeman is always outside the house
when the burglar is inside the house. But there is one very French
quality which both these French writers share, even when their writing
is very far from their best. It is a spirit of definition which is
itself not easy to define. To say it is scientific will only suggest
that it is slow. It is much truer to say it is military; that is, it
is something that has to be both scientific and swift. It can be seen
in much greater Frenchmen, as compared with men still greater who were
not Frenchmen. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, for instance, both wrote
fairy-tales of science; Mr. Wells has much the larger mind and interest
in life; but he often lacks one power which Jules Verne possesses
supremely--the power of going to the point. Verne is very French in
his rigid relevancy; Wells is very English in his rich irrelevance.
He is there as English as Dickens, the best passages in whose stories
are the stoppages, and even stopgaps. In a truly French tale there are
no stoppages; every word, however dull, is deliberate, or directed
towards the end. The comparison could be carried further back among
the classics. The romance of Dumas may seem a mere riot of swords
and feathers; it is often spoken of as a mere revel in adventure and
variety; the madness of romance. But it is not a mere riot, but rather
a military revolution, and even a disciplined revolution; certainly,
a very French revolution. It is not a mere mad revel, but a very
gorgeous and elaborate banquet planned by a great cook; a very French
cook. Scott was a greater man than Dumas; and a greater novelist on
the note of the serious humours of humanity. But he was not so great
a story-teller, because he had less of something that can only be
called the strategy of the soldier. The Three Musketeers advance like
an army; with their three servants and their one ally, they march,
manoeuvre, deploy, wheeling into positions and almost making patterns.
They are always present wherever their author wants them; which is by
no means true of all the characters of all the novelists. Dumas, and
not Scott, ought to have written the life of Napoleon; Dumas was much
nearer to Napoleon, in the fact that there was most emphatically method
in his madness. Nobody ever called Scott mad; and certainly nobody
could ever call him methodical. He was as incapable of the conspiracy
which carried off General Monk in a box as Dumas was incapable of the
curse of Meg Merrilies or the benediction of Di Vernon. But there is
eternally present in the Frenchman something which may truly be called
presence of mind. There to be an artist is not to be absent-minded,
however harmless or happy the holidays of the mind may be. Art is to
have the intellect and all its instruments on the spot and ready to go
to the point; as when, but a little while ago, a great artist stood by
the banks of the Marne and saved the world with one gesture of living
logic--the sword-thrust of the Latin.
But though the strategy of the French story is allied to the strategy
by which the French army has always affected the larger matters of
mankind, I doubt whether such a story ought to deal with such matters.
I mentioned at the beginning M. Gaston Leroux’s last mystery story
because I think I know why it is not anything like so good as his first
mystery story. The truth is that there are two types of sensational
romance between which our wilder sensationalists seem to waver; and I
think they are generally at their strongest in dealing with the first
type, and at their weakest in dealing with the second. For the sake
of a convenient symbol, I may call them respectively the romance of
the Yellow Room and the romance of the Yellow Peril. We might say that
the great detective story deals with small things; while the small
or silly detective story generally deals with great things. It deals
with diabolical diplomatists darting about between Vienna and Paris
and Petrograd; with vast cosmopolitan conspiracies ramifying through
all the cellars of Europe; or worse and most widespread of all, occult
and mystical secret societies from China or Tibet; the vast and vague
Oriental terrorism which I call for convenience here the Yellow Peril.
On the other hand, the good detective story is in its nature a good
domestic story. It is steeped in the sentiment that an Englishman’s
house is his castle; even if, like other castles, it is the scene of a
few quiet tortures or assassinations. In other words, it is concerned
with an enclosure, a plan or problem set within certain defined limits.
And that is where the French writer’s first story was a model for
all such writers; and where it ought to have been, but has not been
a model for himself. The point about the Yellow Room is that it was
a room; that is, it was a box, like the box in which Dumas kidnapped
General Monk. The writer dealt with the quadrate or square which Mrs.
Battle loved; the very plan of the problem looked like a problem in
the Fourth Book of Euclid. He posted four men on four sides of a space
and a murder was done in the middle of them; to all appearance, in
spite of them; in reality, by one of them. Now a sensational novelist
of the more cosmopolitan sort could, of course, have filled the story
with a swarm of Chinese magicians who had the power of walking through
brick walls, or of Indian mesmerists who could murder a man merely by
meditating about him on the peaks of the Himalayas; or merely by so
human and humdrum a trifle as a secret society of German spies which
had made a labyrinth of secret tunnels under all the private houses in
the world. These romantic possibilities are infinite; and because they
are infinite they are really unromantic. The real romance of detection
works inwards towards the household gods, even if they are household
devils. One of the best of the Sherlock Holmes stories turns entirely
on a trivial point of housekeeping: the provision of curry for the
domestic dinner. Curry is, I believe, connected with the East; and
could have been made the excuse for infinities of sham occultism and
Oriental torments. The author could have brought in a million yellow
cooks to poison a yellow condiment. But the author knew his business
much better; and did not let what is called infinity, and should rather
be called anarchy, invade the quiet seclusion of the British criminal’s
home. He did not let the logic of the Yellow Room be destroyed by the
philosophy of the Yellow Peril. That is why I lament the fact that the
ingenious French architect of the original Yellow Room seems to have
made an outward step in this direction; not, indeed, towards the plains
of Tibet, but towards the hardly less barbaric plains of Germany. His
last book, _Rouletabille Chez Krupp_, concerns the manufacture of a
torpedo big enough to smash a town; and an object of that size may be
a sensation, but will not long be a secret. It may be inevitable that
a French patriot should now write even his detective stories about the
war; but I do not think this method will ever make the French mystery
story what the war itself has been--a French masterpiece; _Gesta Dei
per Francos_.
George Meredith
The death of George Meredith was the real end of the Nineteenth
Century, not that empty date that came at the close of 1899. The last
bond was broken between us and the pride and peace of the Victorian
age. Our fathers were all dead. We were suddenly orphans: we all felt
strangely and sadly young. A cold, enormous dawn opened in front of us;
we had to go on to tasks which our fathers, fine as they were, did not
know, and our first sensation was that of cold and undefended youth.
Swinburne was the penultimate, Meredith the ultimate end.
It is not a phrase to call him the last of the Victorians: he really is
the last. No doubt this final phrase has been used about each of the
great Victorians one after another from Matthew Arnold and Browning to
Swinburne and Meredith. No doubt the public has grown a little tired
of the positively last appearance of the Nineteenth Century. But the
end of George Meredith really was the end of that great epoch. No great
man now alive has its peculiar powers or its peculiar limits. Like all
great epochs, like all great things, it is not easy to define. We can
see it, touch it, smell it, eat it; but we cannot state it. It was a
time when faith was firm without being definite. It was a time when
we saw the necessity of reform without once seeing the possibility of
revolution. It was a sort of exquisite interlude in the intellectual
disputes: a beautiful, accidental truce in the eternal war of mankind.
Things could mix in a mellow atmosphere. Its great men were so
religious that they could do without a religion. They were so hopefully
and happily republican that they could do without a republic. They are
all dead and deified; and it is well with them. But we cannot get back
into that well-poised pantheism and liberalism. We cannot be content to
be merely broad: for us the dilemma sharpens and the ways divide.
Of the men left alive there are many who can be admired beyond
expression; but none who can be admired in this way. The name of that
powerful writer, Mr. Thomas Hardy, was often mentioned in company with
that of Meredith; but the coupling of the two names is a philosophical
and chronological mistake. Mr. Hardy is wholly of our own generation,
which is a very unpleasant thing to be. He is shrill and not mellow.
He does not worship the unknown God: he knows the God (or thinks he
knows the God), and dislikes Him. He is not a pantheist: he is a
pandiabolist. The great agnostics of the Victorian age said there
was no purpose in Nature. Mr. Hardy is a mystic; he says there is an
evil purpose. All this is as far as possible from the plenitude and
rational optimism of Meredith. And when we have disposed of Mr. Hardy,
what other name is there that can even pretend to recall the heroic
Victorian age? The Roman curse lies upon Meredith like a blessing:
“Ultimus suorum moriatur”--he has died the last of his own.
The greatness of George Meredith exhibits the same paradox or
difficulty as the greatness of Browning; the fact that simplicity
was the centre, while the utmost luxuriance and complexity was the
expression. He was as human as Shakespeare, and also as affected as
Shakespeare. It may generally be remarked (I do not know the cause of
it) that the men who have an odd or mad point of view express it in
plain or bald language. The men who have a genial and everyday point
of view express it in ornate and complicated language. Swinburne
and Thomas Hardy talk almost in words of one syllable; but the
philosophical upshot can be expressed in the most famous of all
words of one syllable--damn. Their words are common words; but their
view (thank God) is not a common view. They denounce in the style of
a spelling-book; while people like Meredith are unpopular through
the very richness of their popular sympathies. Men like Browning or
like Francis Thompson praise God in such a way sometimes that God
alone could possibly understand the praise. But they mean all men to
understand it: they wish every beast and fish and flying thing to take
part in the applauding chorus of the cosmos. On the other hand, those
who have bad news to tell are much more explicit, and the poets whose
object it is to depress the people take care that they do it. I will
not write any more about those poets, because I do not profess to be
impartial or even to be good-tempered on the subject. To my thinking,
the oppression of the people is a terrible sin; but the depression of
the people is a far worse one.
But the glory of George Meredith is that he combined subtlety with
primal energy: he criticized life without losing his appetite for
it. In him alone, being a man of the world did not mean being a man
disgusted with the world. As a rule, there is no difference between
the critic and ascetic except that the ascetic sorrows with a hope and
the critic without a hope. But George Meredith loved straightness even
when he praised it crookedly: he adored innocence even when he analysed
it tortuously: he cared only for unconsciousness, even when he was
unduly conscious of it. He was never so good as he was about virgins
and schoolboys. In one curious poem, containing many fine lines, he
actually rebukes people for being quaint or eccentric, and rebukes them
quaintly and eccentrically. He says of Nature, the great earth-mother,
whom he worshipped:
... She by one sure sign can read,
Have they but held her laws and nature dear;
They mouth no sentence of inverted wit.
More prizes she her beasts than this high breed
Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.
That is the mark of the truly great man: that he sees the common man
afar off, and worships him. The great man tries to be ordinary, and
becomes extraordinary in the process. But the small man tries to be
mysterious, and becomes lucid in an awful sense--for we can all see
through him.
The Irishman
The other day I went to see the Irish plays, recently acted by real
Irishmen--peasants and poor folk--under the inspiration of Lady Gregory
and Mr. W. B. Yeats. Over and above the excellence of the acting and
the abstract merit of the plays (both of which were considerable),
there emerged the strange and ironic interest which has been the source
of so much fun and sin and sorrow--the interest of the Irishman in
England. Since we have sinned by creating the Stage Irishman, it is
fitting enough that we should all be rebuked by Irishmen on the stage.
We have all seen some obvious Englishman performing a Paddy. It was,
perhaps, a just punishment to see an obvious Paddy performing the comic
and contemptible part of an English gentleman. I have now seen both,
and I can lay my hand on my heart (though my knowledge of physiology is
shaky about its position) and declare that the Irish English gentleman
was an even more abject and crawling figure than the English Irish
servant. The Comic Irishman in the English plays was at least given
credit for a kind of chaotic courage. The Comic Englishman in the Irish
plays was represented not only as a fool, but as a nervous fool; a
fussy and spasmodic prig, who could not be loved either for strength
or weakness. But all this only illustrates the fundamental fact that
both the national views are wrong; both the versions are perversions.
The rollicking Irishman and the priggish Englishman are alike the
mere myths generated by a misunderstanding. It would be rather nearer
the truth if we spoke of the rollicking Englishman and the priggish
Irishman. But even that would be wrong too.