neighbourhood. The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to
love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
And there is a real human reason for this. You think of a remote man
merely as a man; that is, you think of him in the right way. Suppose
I say to you suddenly--“Oblige me by brooding on the soul of the man
who lives at 351 High Street, Islington.” Perhaps (now I come to think
of it) you _are_ the man who lives at 351 High Street, Islington.
In that case substitute some other unknown address and pursue the
intellectual sport. Now you will probably be broadly right about the
man in Islington whom you have never seen or heard of, because you will
begin at the right end--the human end. The man in Islington is at least
a man. The soul of the man in Islington is certainly a soul. He also
has been bewildered and broadened by youth; he also has been tortured
and intoxicated by love; he also is sublimely doubtful about death.
You can think about the soul of that nameless man who is a mere number
in Islington High Street. But you do not think about the soul of your
next-door neighbour. He is not a man; he is an environment. He is the
barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about
a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are
better than yours. Now, all these are the wrong ends of a man; and a
man, like many other things in this world, such as a cat-o’-nine-tails,
has a large number of wrong ends, and only one right one. These
adjuncts are all tails, so to speak. A dog is a sort of curly tail to
a man; a substitute for that which man so tragically lost at an early
stage of evolution. And though I would rather myself go about trailing
a dog behind me than tugging a pianola or towing a rose-garden, yet
this is a matter of taste, and they are all alike appendages or things
dependent upon man. But besides his twenty tails, every man really
has a head, a centre of identity, a soul. And the head of a man is
even harder to find than the head of a Skye terrier, for man has nine
hundred and ninety-nine wrong ends instead of one. It is no question
of getting hold of the sow by the right ear; it is a question of
getting hold of the hedgehog by the right quill, of the bird by the
right feather, of the forest by the right leaf. If we have never known
the forest we shall know at least that it is a forest, a thing grown
grandly out of the earth; we shall realize the roots toiling in the
terrestrial darkness, the trunks reared in the sylvan twilight.
But to find the forest is to find the fringe of the forest. To approach
it from without is to see its mere accidental outline ragged against
the sky. It is to come close enough to be superficial. The remote man,
therefore, may stand for manhood; for the glory of birth or the dignity
of death. But it is difficult to get Mr. Brown next door (with whom
you have quarrelled about the creepers) to stand for these things in
any satisfactorily symbolic attitude. You do not feel the glory of his
birth; you are more likely to hint heatedly at its ingloriousness.
You do not, on purple and silver evenings, dwell on the dignity and
quietude of his death; you think of it, if at all, rather as sudden.
And the same is true of historical separation and proximity. I look
forward to the same death as a Chinaman; barring one or two Chinese
tortures, perhaps. I look back to the same babyhood as an ancient
Phoenician; unless, indeed, it were one of that special Confirmation
class of Sunday-school babies who were passed through the fire to
Moloch. But these distant or antique terrors seem merely tied on to the
life: they are not part of its texture. Babylonian mothers (however
they yielded to etiquette) probably loved their children; and Chinamen
unquestionably reverenced their dead. It is far different when two
peoples are close enough to each other to mistake all the acts and
gestures of everyday life. It is far different when the Baptist baker
in Islington thinks of Irish infancy, passed amid Popish priests and
impossible fairies. It is far different when the tramp from Tipperary
thinks of Irish death, coming often in dying hamlets, in distant
colonies, in English prisons or on English gibbets. There childhood and
death have lost all their reconciling qualities; the very details of
them do not unite, but divide. Hence England and Ireland see the facts
of each other without guessing the meaning of the facts. For instance,
we may see the fact that an Irish housewife is careless. But we fancy
falsely that this is because she is scatter-brained; whereas it is, on
the contrary, because she is concentrated--on religion, or conspiracy,
or tea. You may call her inefficient, but you certainly must not call
her weak. In the same way, the Irish see the fact that the Englishman
is unsociable; they do not see the reason, which is that he is romantic.
This seems to me the real value of such striking national sketches as
those by Lady Gregory and Mr. Synge, which I saw last week. Here is
a case where mere accidental realism, the thing written on the spot,
the “slice of life,” may, for once in a way, do some good. All the
signals, all the flags, all the declaratory externals of Ireland we are
almost certain to mistake. If the Irishman speaks to us, we are sure to
misunderstand him. But if we hear the Irishman talking to himself, it
may begin to dawn on us that he is a man.
Ireland and the Domestic Drama
In a sense so gigantic that it would have staggered the statesman who
once used the phrase, we have called in the new world to redress the
balance of the old. The new world has found new worlds to conquer;
it has new tasks not only drastic but delicate, not only political
but psychological. Among the things which America may yet help us to
achieve is one about which I feel strongly and even painfully--the
reconciliation, a thousand times thwarted but now a thousand times
more necessary, between the English and the Irish. The triangular
table of such a peace conference need not, and perhaps had better not,
be found in any public building. Rather it should be found in every
public house and even in every private house. The change should come
through something which is far nobler and more eternal than diplomacy
or politics; talk. It should come through the only real public opinion,
which is always uttered in private; the public opinion that is a mass
of private opinions. A famous Irishman said of the Irish that they were
too poetical to be poets, but that they were the greatest talkers since
the Greeks. My personal memory does not stretch back to the greatest
period of Greece; and perhaps the best talker I ever knew was an
Irishman, who is now living in America and (I will confidently affirm)
talking in America. It may be true that he is too poetical to be a
poet; anyhow, he is not too poetical to be the father of a poet. He is
Mr. J. B. Yeats, the father of Mr. W. B. Yeats; and he has lately been
persuaded to write and print some of the good things he has said all
his life--first in the form of a book of letters, and later of a book
of essays, _Essays Irish and American_, published by Mr. Fisher Unwin.
But my real satisfaction, in the social and political sense, is to know
not that he has written a little, but that he has spoken much; for out
of such seemingly lost and wasted words come the real international
understandings.
There was a type of detachment during the late war, not to be confused
with what I can only call the view of the vulgar peacemonger. It was
not the patronizing pacifism of the gentleman who took a holiday in
the Alps and said he was “above the struggle”; as if there were any
Alp from which the soul can look down on Calvary. There is, indeed,
one mountain among them that might be very appropriate to so detached
an observer--the mountain named after Pilate, the man who washed his
hands. The isolation I mean is far removed from such impudence. The
defence of this detachment is that it is not really detached; it was
not indifference, but indignation. It was not without foundation; it
was only without proportion. Indeed, the real case against it was
that while its expression was largely cynical, its motive was largely
sentimental. Such was the irritation of Mr. Bernard Shaw; such was the
irritation of many Irishmen much more national than Mr. Bernard Shaw.
Their irritation can be analysed in a simple phrase; it annoyed them
that the men who were wrong should be right. It annoyed them that all
the snobs and sneaks of our corrupt parliamentarianism should free the
world by accident. In the quarrel with Prussia, they could not really
doubt--they did not really doubt--that England was right. But they did
doubt whether England had any right to be right.
It is a view I think self-stultifying and even suicidal. For the
great work will be remembered and the meaner workers forgotten; and
it is madness to praise the Persians on the eve of Marathon because
one has quarrelled with some silly archon at Athens, whose very name
will be lost in a few years. But it is not a treasonable, far less
a treacherous view; and its anger is the same as the popular anger
it arouses. This is the Irish mood which common sense and common
sympathy must deal with; and this is the peculiar value of real Irish
intellectual detachment like that of Mr. Yeats. First of all, a man
like Mr. Yeats is so genuinely detached that he can be definite and
clear in his sympathy with the Allies. He would be capable of the
supreme impartiality of seeing that England could be right although she
had been wrong; and even that Ireland could be wrong although she had
been wronged. But all the time he would play with a perennial fount of
satire and insight on the fundamental spiritual facts that falsify the
English position in Ireland. He would make us feel that we were only
right in one thing because we were so wrong in many things. There are
many examples of this in his little book of essays; but the one I would
emphasize here especially is his very vital point about the domestic
nature of the whole sociology of Ireland. Here again he is all the
more impressive for being in a sense impartial, or even what some would
call indifferent. He is not what is called orthodox; he might well be
called sceptical. He has cultivated rather Continental æsthetics than
Catholic apologetics. It is solely by a serene insight into what his
French teachers would call the _vraie verité_ that he sees the way the
world ought to go; and pauses upon the phrase, “the return to the home.”
Irish education, he declares, must always depend on the fact that the
child’s mind is full of “the drama of the home.” It marks his judicial
emancipation that he contrasts this domestic drama favourably with two
other types of teaching, one of which would be called conventional
and conservative, while the other would be called unconventional and
advanced. He criticizes the old English public-school boy; he also
criticizes (I grieve to state) the new American woman. The two things
called in England the “public school” and the “high school” are counted
almost contraries, merely because one is old and the other new. But
the critic sees them to be essentially the same; because in both cases
the school overshadows the home. Here is a profound practical instance
of the root realities of the Irish national claim. Here is a case in
which Home Rule literally means the rule of the home. It will never be
possible to establish the English fashion in Ireland, and I for one
should not pretend to be sorry if it were possible to spread the Irish
fashion to England.
For the drama of the home is really very dramatic. It is one of those
facts that are confused and hidden by the modern fuss about social
machinery, which is the mere scene-shifting and stage-carpentering
of the domestic drama. The household is the lighted stage, on which
the actors appeal literally to the gods. It is in private life that
things happen. A human being is born at home; he generally dies at
home, and the social philosophy that can deal with nothing but his
coffin carried out of the house is merely a philosophy of boxes and
parcels, a philosophy of luggage and labels. Half our human effort is
now wasted on mere transit, transport, and exchange; the commonwealth
is a clearing-house of cases we never open and presents we never enjoy.
Rulers and reformers are a race of rather pedantic porters, always
carrying an unknown present to an unknown person, not unfrequently (I
fancy) the wrong present to the wrong person. Some of our strenuous
social organizers may be content to spend Christmas at Charing Cross
Station for the pride of controlling the traffic and the luggage. But I
confess I find it more exciting to be at the end of the journey where
the Christmas gifts can be seen.
The Japanese
Is it not time that we western people protested against being
perpetually browbeaten with the high morality of the Orient--especially
of Japan? I remember a curious occasion some years ago when certain
able journalists on a Socialist paper in Fleet Street suddenly burst
into a blazing excitement about King Asoka. Their relations with this
prince could not be called intimate; in point of fact, he died some
thousands of years ago somewhere in the middle of Asia. But it seemed
that in him we had lost our only reliable moral guide. Religion was a
failure, and human life, on the whole, a tragedy; but King Asoka was
all right. He was faultlessly just, infinitely merciful, the mirror of
the virtues, the prop of the poor. Outsiders were naturally interested
in the sources of this revelation. And after some discussion it was
discovered and mildly pointed out that this description of the King’s
virtues is only found on a few of the King’s own official inscriptions.
Old Asoka may have been a very nice man, but we have only his own word
for it that he was so nice as all that. And even in the benighted
West it might not be impossible to find monarchs who were very just
and mighty according to their own proclamations; and courts that
were quite exemplary in the _Court Circular_. It had never struck
these simple Asokites in Fleet Street that the pompous enunciation of
ideals probably meant no more in Bengal than in Birmingham, in the
ancient East than in the modern West. It is as if a Hindoo should
say that under the sublime French monarchy every King had to be a
good Christian; for he was called on coins and parchments “the most
Christian King.” It is as if an Arab said that honour was so high and
sensitive among English M.P.’s that they constantly called each other,
with a burst of admiration, “The Honourable Member for Tooting.” It
could hardly be more absurd if the Japanese declared that an English
Duke must have an elegant figure, for they had seen an allusion to “His
Grace.” And yet it is with just this comic solemnity that we are asked
to accept the moral pretensions of the East to-day, and especially the
moral pretensions of Japan. My eye has just fallen upon two newspaper
paragraphs, each of which exclaimed mournfully what a pity it was
that we had not the high conception of chivalric devotion which the
Japanese call “Bushido,” or some such name. As if we had no chivalrous
principles in Europe! And as if they had no unchivalrous practices
in the Far East! If we see no beauty in Excalibur, are we likely to
take more seriously the two swords of some outlandish Daimio? If we
are truly dumb after the death of Roland, are we likely to shout with
enthusiasm at the sight of a _hara-kiri_?
Here is, perhaps, the queerest case of all. Many of these Orientalists
have lately been filled with horror at finding that Young Turks still
propose to be Turkish, and that advanced Japan is still unaccountably
Japanese. Dr. Parker damned Abdul Hamid. These modern humanitarians
cannot understand any people wishing to get rid of Abdul Hamid without
also wishing to become exactly like Dr. Parker. In the same way they
are horrified that the Japanese Government has very abruptly condemned
some criminals said to be conspiring against the sacred person of the
Mikado. It never seems to occur to them that you can take off a Turk’s
turban without taking off his head; and that, under a Brixton bowler,
the head would go on thinking the same thoughts. It never seems to
strike them that the man of the Far East still has a yellow skin, even
when you have also given him a yellow press. But the most astounding
version of the thing I found in the following paragraph, the opening
paragraph of an article on the Japanese condemnations in an influential
weekly paper:
“Japan has followed Western ways in a great many respects, but it
is saddening to learn that she is adopting the most reprehensible
methods of Russia and Spain in dealing with men and women who have the
intelligence to be ahead of their time and have the courage to avow
their opinions.”
This really strikes me as colossal. I quite agree that Japan has
imitated many Western things; I also think that Japan has mostly
imitated the worst Western things. That is the cause of my very
defective sympathy with Japan. If the Japanese had imitated Dante or
mediæval architecture, if they had imitated Michelangelo or Italian
painting, if they had imitated Rousseau and the French Revolution--then
I, as a European, should have felt at least flattered. But the
Japanese have only imitated the worst things of our worst period:
the inhuman commercialism of Birmingham; the inhuman militarism of
Berlin. I feel as if I had looked in a mirror and seen a monkey. Or,
if this metaphor be counted uncharitable, I feel just as some coarse
but kindly man might feel if a little brother began to imitate only
his vices. I say this to show how easily I embrace the idea that Japan
might borrow from us bad things as well as good; and then I turn with
astonishment--nay, consternation--to the paragraph I have quoted.
Japan (it seems) has borrowed from Russia and Spain the reprehensible
habit of executing people without adequate trial. Trial by jury, with
complete reports in the newspapers next day, was the common practice
all over the Far East until the dreadful example of Spain somehow crept
across two continents and destroyed it. Such a thing as autocratic
execution was unknown in the East. Such a notion as that of despotism
had never occurred to the Japanese. Up to that last lost moment when
they heard of Russia, County Councils had been buzzing in every town,
republics established in every island of the East. Before the European
came, polling-booths were at the end of every street and ballot-boxes
rattled over all Asia. But, alas! they heard of Spain. They heard that
in Spain the trials of rebels in arms had occasionally been conducted
in secret; and this was enough to destroy the long and famous tradition
of free democracy in the Far East.
Now I do think that, compared with this amazing bosh, Gilbert’s
_Mikado_, with his punishment “lingering, with boiling oil in it,”
might be called a good, solid, sensible picture of Japan. Eastern
despotism has many advantages; and I do not doubt that many of its
decisions were not “lingering,” but as rough and rapid as they were
just. But to what mental state have people come if they cannot see that
Europe has been, upon the whole, the home of democracy, and Asia, upon
the whole, the home of despotism? Really, Japan is not so barren of
resource as this writer supposes. The Far East really has no need to
go to Russia for autocracy, or to Spain for torture. It has done very
artistic things in that way itself. And if Spain and Russia have indeed
terrorized and tortured, it is much more historically likely that they
got it from Asia than that Asia ever had the slightest need to borrow
it from them.
The plain facts, of course, are perfectly simple. Japan has borrowed
our guns and telephones, but she has not borrowed our morality; and,
morally speaking, I really do not see why she should. Under all Japan’s
elaborate armour-plating she is still the same strange, heathen,
sinister, and heroic thing: she has still the two deep Oriental habits,
prostration before despotism and ferocity of punishment. She still
thinks, in the Eastern style, that a king is infinitely sublime: the
brother of the sun and moon. She still thinks, in the Eastern style,
that a criminal is infinitely punishable; “something with boiling
oil in it.” Why on earth should Japan abandon the adoration of the
Mikado and the destruction of his enemies, merely because a scientific
apparatus has made the Mikado more victorious and the destruction of
his enemies more easy?
Christian Science
I have read recently, within a short period of each other, two
books that stand in an odd relation, and illustrate the two ways of
dealing with the same truth. The first was Mrs. Eddy’s _Science and
Health_, and the other a very interesting collection of medical and
ecclesiastical opinion called _Medicine and the Church_. It is edited
by Mr. Geoffrey Rhodes, and published by Kegan Paul. Of the first work,
the Christian Science Bible, my recollections are somewhat wild and
whirling. My most vivid impression is of one appalling passage to the
effect that the continued perusal of this book through the crisis of
an illness had always been followed by recovery. The idea of reading
any book “through the crisis of an illness” is rather alarming. But
I incline to agree that anyone who could read _Science and Health_
through the crisis of an illness must be made of an adamant which
no malady could dissolve. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to oppose
Christian Science on the impossibility or even the improbability of
its cures. There is always this tendency for normal men to attack
abnormalities on the wrong ground; their arguments are as wrong as
their antagonism is right. Thus the only sensible argument against
Female Suffrage is that, with her social and domestic powers, woman
is as strong as man. But silly people will attack Female Suffrage on
the ground that she is weaker than man. Or, again, the only sensible
argument against Socialism is that every man ought to have private
property. But the wretched Anti-Socialists will give themselves away by
trying to maintain that only a few people ought to have property, and
even that only in the shape of monstrous American trusts. In the same
way, there is great danger that the modern world may give battle to
Mrs. Eddy upon the wrong _terrain_, and give her the opportunity (or,
rather, her more clear-headed lieutenants) of claiming some popular
success. There is such a thing as spiritual healing. No one has ever
doubted it except one dingy generation of materialists in chimney-pot
hats. If we seem to stand with the materialists, and Mrs. Eddy seems
to stand for the healing, she will have a chance of success. A man
whose toothache has left off will think with gratitude of the healer,
and with some indifference of the scientist explaining the difference
between functional and organic toothaches. I will grant what Mrs. Eddy
does to people’s bodies. It is what she does to their souls that I
object to.
Mrs. Eddy summarizes the substance of her creed in the characteristic
sentence: “But in order to enter into the kingdom, the anchor of Hope
must be cast beyond the veil of matter into the Shekinah into which
Jesus has passed before us.” Now personally I should prefer to sow the
anchor of Hope in the furrows of primeval earth; or to fill the anchor
to the brim with the wine of human passion; or to urge the anchor of
hope to a gallop with the spurs of moral energy; or simply to pluck
the anchor, petal by petal, or spell it out letter by letter. But
whatever slightly entangled metaphor we take to express our meaning,
the essential difference between Mrs. Eddy’s creed and mine is that she
anchors in the air, while I put an anchor where the groping race of
men have generally put it, in the ground. And this very fact, that we
have always thought of hope under so rooted and realistic a figure, is
a good working example of how the popular religious sense of mankind
has always flowed in the opposite direction to Christian Science. It
has flowed from spirit to flesh, and not from flesh to spirit. Hope has
not been thought of as something light and fanciful, but as something
wrought in iron and fixed in rock.