a religion claiming to be purely spiritual. Now, being purely spiritual
is opposed to the very essence of religion. All religions, high and
low, true and false, have always had one enemy, which is the purely
spiritual. Faith-healing has existed from the beginning of the world;
but faith-healing without a material act or sacrament--never. It may
be the ancient priest, curing with holy water, or the modern doctor
curing with coloured water. In either case you cannot do without the
water. It may be the upper religion with its bread and wine, or the
under religion with its eye of newt and toe of frog: in both cases what
is essential is the right materials. Savages may invoke their demons
over the dying, but they do something else as well. To do them justice,
they dance round the dying, or yell, or do something with their bodies.
The Quakers (I mean the really admirable, old-fashioned Quakers) were
far more ritualistic than any Ritualists. The only difference between
a Ritualist curate and a Quaker was that the Quaker wore his queer
vestments all the time. The Peculiar People do without doctors; but
they do not do without oil. They are not so peculiar as all that.
The book which Mr. Geoffrey Rhodes has edited is just what was wanted
for the fixing of these facts of flesh and spirit. When I was a boy,
people used to talk about something which they called the quarrel
between religion and science. It would be very tedious to recount the
quarrel now; the rough upshot of it was something like this: that
some traditions too old to be traced came in vague conflict with some
theories much too new to be tested. Many things three thousand years
old had forgotten their reason for existing; many things a few years
old had not yet discovered theirs. To this day this remains roughly
true of all the relations between science and religion. The truths of
religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved.
It really looks just now as if a reconciliation would be made between
religion and science, a reconciliation well embodied in Mr. Rhodes’s
work. I will not any longer dispute the divine mission of Mrs. Eddy. I
think she was supernaturally sent on earth to reconcile all the parsons
and all the doctors in a healthy hatred of herself. Here _is_ the
reconciliation of science and religion; you will find it in _Medicine
and the Church_. In this interesting book all the clerics become as
medical as they can, and all the doctors become as clerical as they
can, with the one honourable object of keeping out the healer. The
chaplain sits on one side of the bed and the physician on the other,
while the healer hovers around, baffled and furious. And they do well;
for there really is a great link between them. It is the link of the
union of flesh and spirit, which the heresy of the healer blasphemes.
The priest may have taken his spirit with a little flesh, or the doctor
his flesh with a little spirit; but the union was essential to both.
With the religious there might be much prayer and a little oil; with
the scientific there might be much oil (castor oil) and precious little
prayer. But no religion disowned sacraments and no doctors disowned
sympathy. And they are right to combine together against the great and
horrible heresy--the horrible heresy that there can be such a thing as
a purely spiritual religion.
The Lawlessness of Lawyers
Judge Parry is one of the men who have done mountains of good merely by
being alive; while many judges act as if they were already dead, not
to say ... but Judge Parry might misunderstand a misuse of theological
imagery. He is somewhat anti-clerical; which seems a waste of talent
in a country where there is no clericalism. In his last book, _Law and
the Woman_, I find much with which I do not agree, yet nothing which is
not agreeable. Not only does he say everything with a disarming humour
and candour; but even in error he never loses sight of the large fact:
that sex relations do not depend on the exceptional action of law, but
on the normal action of creed and custom. Alone among such lawyers he
understands that the poor live on laughter as on a fairy-tale; and
can be more scientifically studied in the fictions of Jacobs than the
facts of Webb. I might pursue the view further than he on some points;
as when he would infer the mere enslavement of women from some stories
about the selling of wives. He is doubtless correct in detail; but the
rhyme he gives to prove his point may almost be said to disprove it.
He quotes a jolly ballad about a man who tried to sell his wife with a
halter round her neck and, failing to do so, tried to hang himself in
the halter rather than go on living with her. Obviously this is simply
the fable of the grey mare; and does not mean that the man ruled his
wife, but rather that she ruled him. I do not agree about divorce; but
I am not going to argue about it here, or about any such problem of the
sexes. This is partly because I should have to begin about the nature
of a vow, and it feels like talking to a judge about the nature of an
oath, and might almost be contempt of court. But it is more, I hope,
for the manlier reason that I do want to argue about something else.
I think this delightful book might really mislead by a view of progress
which over-simplifies history: the view that “the thoughts of men are
widened by the process of the suns”--a monotonous process which cannot
even widen itself. He begins his story of the subjection of women from
the Bible story of Adam and Eve. He then proceeds at once to quote,
not the Bible, but John Milton, and says it is almost exactly in the
form “in which mediæval man was wont to explain to mediæval woman
the kind of thing she really was.” Now whatever Milton was, he was
not mediæval. He was, in his own opinion and in real though relative
truth, highly modern and rationalistic. And he would have regarded
his somewhat contemptuous view of woman as part of his emancipation
from mediævalism. Probably the very same attitude made him approve of
divorce; and makes the difference between woman’s place in his epic
and her place in Dante’s. On either side of that Gothic gateway of
the Middle Ages out of which he had emerged (as he would have said)
into the daylight, there had stood two symbolic statues of women, at
least of equal importance in the scheme. One represented the weak woman
by whom Satan had entered the world; the other the strong woman by
whom God had entered the world. Milton and his Puritans deliberately
battered and obliterated the image of the good woman and carefully
preserved the bad woman, to be a standing reproach to womanhood. But
they unquestionably thought their anti-feminist iconoclasm was a great
step in progress; and the fact illustrates what an uncommonly crooked
and even backward path the path called progress has really been. Nor
is it difficult to discover, even in the writer’s own account, whence
this anti-feminism iconoclasm drew its force; which was certainly not
merely from the Book of Genesis. Judge Parry says, perhaps disputably,
that the rude Saxons had more legal regard for women than the Romans.
But assuming for the sake of argument that the heathen Romans did give
a low status to woman, they clearly cannot have got it either from the
Hebrew Scriptures or the mediæval Church. If he will ask where they did
get it, he will probably also find where Milton got it. The truth is
that there was an element of intellectual brutality in the Renaissance
and revival of the pagan world. The very worship of power and reason
embodied itself in a preference for the sex that was supposed superior
in them. New tyrannies as well as new liberties were encouraged by the
New Learning; and Cervantes was laughing at the unreal adventurer who
fancied he was unchaining captives, at the very time when Hawkins, the
real adventurer, was first leading negroes in chains.
Those chains may be linked up again presently in the chain of my own
argument: here I use the matter merely to show the danger of trusting
each ethical fashion as it comes. There is one matter on which I would
respectfully and seriously differ from Judge Parry; and that does
not concern laws about women, but rather law itself. In praising the
judgment in the Jackson Case, despite its technical irregularity, he
speaks of a fine example of our judge-made law, and says: “But that
is one of the sane and healthy attributes of our judicial system.
There comes a breaking-point where a great judge recognizes that the
precedents in the books are obsolete, and what has to be stated is the
justice of the case according to the now existing standard of human
righteousness.” Now it is surely as plain as a pikestaff that this
doctrine makes a small number of very wealthy old gentlemen in wigs
absolute despots over the whole commonwealth. The Emperor of China was
supposed to state the justice of the case. The Sultan of the Indies was
supposed to judge by the existing standard of human righteousness. If
the judges are not restrained by the law, what are they restrained by,
which every autocrat on earth has not claimed to be restrained by?
Now there is certainly a case for personal and arbitrary government;
and as there are good sultans, so there are good judges. I should not
be afraid to appear before Judge Parry (if I may presume to imagine
myself innocent) though he were surrounded with janissaries in a secret
divan, or delivering dooms under an oak tree in a wild, prehistoric
forest. I should not mind his having the power to skin me or boil
me in oil; for I feel sure he would “recognize that these precedents
were obsolete” and not do it. But it is by no means true that the
confidence I should feel in Judge Parry would be extended to any judge
who talked about obsolete precedents and human righteousness. Quite
the contrary, if anything. I trust him because he often takes the side
of the under-dog. I should not trust a man who always took the side of
the opinion which happened to be top-dog. He understood, for instance,
the case for “Pro-Boers”; but in the mafficking time a dozen great
judges would have strained any law to make a case against Pro-Boers.
Feminism was the fashion and may have produced some acts of justice;
but Imperialism was also the fashion and might have produced any acts
of any injustice. There is, let us suppose, an old statute that certain
prisoners may be tortured for evidence; but the judges disregard it,
and Judge Parry is satisfied. But there are three very vital reasons
why he should not be satisfied. First, it encourages legislators to
be lazy and leave a bad statute they ought to repeal. Second, they
leave it so that it can be resharpened in some reaction or panic
against particular people, who _will_ be tortured. And third, and most
important of all, the same judge who has said that prisoners must not
be tortured for evidence may say some fine morning that prisoners may
be vivisected for scientific inquiry; and he may have the same reason
for saying the one as the other, the simple reason that such talk is
fashionable in his set. And the set is very small and very rich; we
are dealing strictly with fashion and not even, in any large sense,
with public opinion. The standards of that world are often special
and sometimes rather secretive. Judge Parry even quotes a “paradox” of
Lord Reading to the effect that persons like himself should administer
justice and not law. Law is narrow and national, and might possibly
lead a British Minister to look no further than the British Parliament
as an appropriate place for telling the truth. But justice, being
international and surveying the world from China to Peru, perceives
without difficulty the office of the one particular Parisian newspaper
which has the right to insist on an explanation.
But the vital point is this. Judge Parry gives the instance of a
judgment in which Mansfield, overriding certain remote precedents and
quaint survivals, declared that there cannot be slaves in England.
I am sorry to mention such a detail, but the fact is that the same
judge made law is now declaring in the same way that there _can_ be
slaves in England. A magistrate has forbidden men to leave an employer,
though the contract had admittedly terminated. Practical courts are
overriding the obsolete and remote precedent of some man, far in the
mists of mediævalism, who is said to have made a free contract with a
wealthier fellow-creature. They are disregarding the quaint survivals
in our language, whereby the hand holding the tool is described as
“his” hand. Our more vivid modern speech calls the man himself a hand;
merely one of the many hands of his Briarean master. “There comes a
breaking-point”; and it is liberty that is broken.
Whether the silent millions approve this judgment, or the other
judgments, liberal or servile, feminist or anti-feminist, which Judge
Parry quotes, I will not debate, but I leave the query to his very
fair consideration. For if those silent millions spoke, I fancy they
would surprise us in many matters, but most of all in the discovery of
how little they think of all of us, judges, lawyers, literary fellows,
and the rest. But I am very certain that Judge Parry would be found
among the few, among the very few, who amid all the insolence of our
inconsistencies have never lost that rare and even awful thing, the
respect of the poor.
Our Latin Relations
It is odd how often one may hear, in the middle of a very old and
genuine English town, the remark, that it looks like a foreign town. I
heard it only yesterday, standing on the ramparts of the noble hill of
Rye, which overlooks the flats like a Mount of St. Michael left inland.
Most people know that Rye contains a mediæval monument which might
almost be called a mediæval prophecy--a prophecy of modern things more
awful than anything mediæval. It is an ancient tower, which has not
only always been marked on maps with the name of Ypres, but has always
been actually pronounced by the name of Wipers. Nothing could mark
a thing as more continuously national than that Englishmen sundered
by vast centuries should actually make the same mistake and should
mispronounce the same word in the same way.
There is in this small point a paradox we must understand, especially
just now, if we are to have a really patriotic foreign policy. It
is very unlucky that for some time our teaching of history has been
rather the unteaching of history, because it has been the unteaching of
tradition. Our histories told us we were Teuton; our legends told us we
were Roman--and, as usual, the legends were right. It is not only true
that England is nowhere more really English than where she is Roman--it
is even true that she is nowhere more really English than where she
is French. To take only the chance example, with which I began above,
you could find nothing more national, more typical, more traditional,
as a real piece of English history, than the very phrase “The Cinq
Ports.” And it is all the more English because the word “cinq” is
French and the word “port” is Latin. A Teutonist professor, full of
some folly about “folk-speech,” might insist on our calling them “The
Five Harbours,” or (for all I know) “The Five Holes.” But his version
would be less popular, and only more pedantic. The Latin was always the
popular element, which may not sound so odd if we happen to remember
that the very word “popular” is Latin.
Thus our alliance with the French and the Italians is not something
to be supported for the sake of the last five years. It is something
to be solidified for the sake of more than a thousand. The fact has
been hidden by the historical accident that we have often been the
antagonists of the French in particular rivalries for particular
things. But we were always much nearer to the French when we were their
antagonists than to the Germans when we were their Allies. There was
much more resemblance between a knight like the Black Prince and a
knight like Bertrand du Guesclin than there ever was between a sailor
like Nelson and a soldier like Blücher. A town like Rye is full of
memories of fighting with the French, especially in the Middle Ages;
of raids to and fro across the narrow seas, in which the bells of
the coast-town churches were captured and recaptured; and there are
spirited stories about the Abbot of Battle, worthy to be turned into
ballads. But the very fact of these coast-town raids suggests that it
was coast against coast, and even seaman against seaman. But the whole
point of Prussian war was that it was an inland thing; the whole point
of English war that it was an island thing. The alliance with Prussia
was never either popular or natural; it was wholly aristocratic and
artificial. Compared with that, the mediæval war was as friendly as a
mediæval tournament. Nor was it peculiar to the case of France; it was
true of all we call Latin--all that remains of the Roman Empire. The
Latins, even when treated as foes in politics, were treated almost as
friends in popular tradition. The English sailors sang in their idle
moments “Farewell and adieu to you, fine Spanish ladies,” even when
they had devoted their working hours to singeing the beards of the fine
Spanish gentlemen. The children in the nurseries sang in imaginative
triumph “The King of Spain’s daughter came to visit me,” though their
Elizabethan parents might have been lighting the beacons and calling
out the train-bands to prevent the King of Spain’s son, the noble Don
John of Austria, from paying them such a visit. A thousand nursery
rhymes and nonsense tags testify to a vast popular tradition that
Southern Europe was the world to which we belonged. We belonged to a
system of which Rome was the sun, and of which the old Roman provinces
were planets. We were never meant to pursue a meteor out of empty
space, the comet of Teutonism. Our place was in an order and a watch
of stars, though one star might differ from another in glory. Our place
was with that red star of Gaul which might well bear the name of Mars;
or that morning and evening star which the Latins themselves named
Lucifer, last to fade and first to return in every twilight of history;
Italy, the light of the world.
A Latin alliance is founded on our history, though not on our
historians. The French and English who fought each other round these
southern harbours were also ready to help each other, and often did
help each other. Not only did they frequently go crusading together
against the Turks, but they would have been ready at any moment to
go crusading against the Prussians. Chaucer was exceedingly English,
and therefore partly French; and he sends his ideal knight to fight
the heathen in Prussia. Froissart was highly French, and therefore
respectful to the English; and he says that the French and English
always do courtesy, but the Germans never. The truth is that all the
old English traditions, scholarly and legendary, chivalric and vulgar,
were at one in referring back to Roman culture, until we come to a new
crop of very crude pedants in the nineteenth century.
Most of them were prigs, and many of them were snobs--for it was
largely a Court fashion, spread by Court poets and Court chaplains. It
was like a huge, hideous, gilded German monument; and, fortunately,
it has already fallen down. But I think it undesirable that the mere
discredited litter and lumber of it, left lying about, should for ever
prevent us from building anything else.
Even after the ghastly enlightenment of the war there are people
who cannot clear their minds of the notion that the Prussian is the
Progressive. They think he is progressing now, because he is picking
up new things. Picking up new things is not the way to progress, any
more than picking up grass by the roots is the way to make it grow.
The northern barbarian always has picked up new things, especially
when they were other people’s things. It was still only picking up new
things, whether it was picking pockets or picking brains. And there was
always one other note about the new things--that they never lived to be
old. The barbarians followed the creed of Arius as they followed the
ensign of Attila. But nobody remembers Attila as everybody remembered
Alfred; and, though some modern people object to hearing the Athanasian
Creed, they have no opportunity of objecting to hearing the Arian
Creed. The enthusiasms of semi-savages do not last.
On Pigs as Pets
A dream of my pure and aspiring boyhood has been realized in the
following paragraph, which I quote exactly as it stands:
A complaint by the Epping Rural District Council against a spinster
keeping a pig in her house has evoked the following reply: “I received
your letter, and felt very much cut up, as I am laying in the pig’s
room. I have not been able to stand up or get on my legs; when I can,
I will get him in his own room, that was built for him. As to getting
him off the premises, I shall do no such thing, as he is no nuisance
to anyone. We have had to be in the pig’s room now for three years. I
am not going to get rid of my pet. We must all live together. I will
move him as soon as God gives me strength to do so.”
The Rev. T. C. Spurgin observed: “The lady will require a good deal of
strength to move her pet, which weighs forty stone.”
It appears to me that the Rev. T. C. Spurgin ought, as a matter of
chivalry, to assist the lady to move the pig, if it is indeed too
heavy for her strength; no gentleman should permit a lady, who is
already very much cut up, to lift forty stone of still animated and
recalcitrant pork; he should himself escort the animal downstairs. It
is an unusual situation, I admit. In the normal life of humanity the
gentleman gives his arm to the lady, and not to the pig; and it is the
pig who is very much cut up. But the situation seems to be exceptional
in every way. It is all very well for the lady to say that the pig is
no nuisance to anyone: as it seems that she has established herself in
the pig’s private suite of apartments, the question rather is whether
she is a nuisance to the pig. But indeed I do not think that this poor
woman’s fad is an inch more fantastic than many such oddities indulged
in by rich and reputable people; and, as I say, I have from my boyhood
entertained the dream. I never could imagine why pigs should not be
kept as pets. To begin with, pigs are very beautiful animals. Those
who think otherwise are those who do not look at anything with their
own eyes, but only through other people’s eyeglasses. The actual lines
of a pig (I mean of a really fat pig) are among the loveliest and most
luxuriant in nature; the pig has the same great curves, swift and yet
heavy, which we see in rushing water or in rolling cloud. Compared to
him, the horse, for instance, is a bony, angular, and abrupt animal.
I remember that Mr. H. G. Wells, in arguing for the relativity of
things (a subject over which even the Greek philosophers went to sleep
until Christianity woke them up), pointed out that, while a horse is
commonly beautiful if seen in profile, he is excessively ugly if seen
from the top of a dogcart, having a long, lean neck, and a body like a
fiddle. Now, there is no point of view from which a really corpulent
pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves. You can look down
on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dogcart; you can
(if not pressed for time) allow the pig to draw the dogcart; and I
suppose a dogcart has as much to do with pigs as it has with dogs. You
can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the
Monument, from a balloon, or an airship; and as long as he is visible
he will be beautiful. In short, he has that fuller, subtler, and more
universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking (gazing at pigs
and distinguished journalists) mistake for a mere absence of shape.
For fatness itself is a valuable quality. While it creates admiration
in the onlookers, it creates modesty in the possessor. If there is
anything on which I differ from the monastic institutions of the past,
it is that they sometimes sought to achieve humility by means of
emaciation. It may be that the thin monks were holy, but I am sure it
was the fat monks who were humble. Falstaff said that to be fat is not
to be hated; but it certainly is to be laughed at, and that is a more
wholesome experience for the soul of man.