seems somewhat indifferent to public opinion on this point. Nor do I
mean that mere fatness is the only beauty of the pig. The beauty of the
best pigs lies in a certain sleepy perfection of contour which links
them especially to the smooth strength of our south English land in
which they live. There are two other things in which one can see this
perfect and piggish quality: one is in the silent and smooth swell of
the Sussex downs, so enormous and yet so innocent. The other is in the
sleek, strong limbs of those beech trees that grow so thick in their
valleys. These three holy symbols, the pig, the beech tree, and the
chalk down, stand for ever as expressing the one thing that England
as England has to say--that power is not inconsistent with kindness.
Tears of regret come into my eyes when I remember that three lions
or leopards, or whatever they are, sprawl in a fantastic, foreign
way across the arms of England. We ought to have three pigs passant,
gardant, or on gules. It breaks my heart to think that four commonplace
lions are couched around the base of the Nelson Column. There ought to
be four colossal Hampshire hogs to keep watch over so national a spot.
Perhaps some of our sculptors will attack the conception; perhaps the
lady’s pig, which weighs forty stone and seems to be something of a
domestic problem, might begin to earn its living as an artist’s model.
Again, we do not know what fascinating variations might happen in the
pig if once the pig were a pet. The dog has been domesticated--that
is, destroyed. Nobody now in London can form the faintest idea of what
a dog would look like. You know a Dachshund in the street; you know
a St. Bernard in the street. But if you saw a Dog in the street you
would run from him screaming. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years
no one has looked at the horrible hairy original thing called Dog.
Why, then, should we be hopeless about the substantial and satisfying
thing called Pig? Types of Pig may also be differentiated; delicate
shades of Pig may also be produced. A monstrous pig as big as a pony
may perambulate the streets like a St. Bernard without attracting
attention. An elegant and unnaturally attenuated pig may have all the
appearance of a greyhound. There may be little, frisky, fighting pigs
like Irish or Scotch terriers; there may be little pathetic pigs like
King Charles spaniels. Artificial breeding might reproduce the awful
original pig, tusks and all, the terror of the forests--something
bigger, more mysterious, and more bloody than the bloodhound. Those
interested in hairdressing might amuse themselves by arranging the
bristles like those of a poodle. Those fascinated by the Celtic mystery
of the Western Highlands might see if they could train the bristles to
be a veil or curtain for the eye, like those of a Skye terrier; that
sensitive and invisible Celtic spirit. With elaborate training one
might have a sheep-pig instead of a sheep-dog, a lap-pig instead of a
lap-dog.
What is it that makes you look so incredulous? Why do you still feel
slightly superior to the poor lady who would not be parted from her
pig? Why do you not at once take the hog to your heart? Reason suggests
his evident beauty. Evolution suggests his probable improvement. Is it,
perhaps, some instinct, some tradition ...? Well, apply that to women,
children, animals, and we will argue again.
The Romance of Rostand
Rostand, the romantic dramatist of France, and a very national poet,
died almost on the day of the great national triumph. He had lived,
to use his own imaginative heraldry, to see the golden eagles of Gaul
and Rome drive back the black eagles of Prussia and Austria. He was
too much of an earlier generation to take the precise part of Pequy or
Claudel in the process which banished the birds of barbaric night from
the land of the Eagles of the sun. But the part he had played in that
earlier time might well merit the use of a kindred metaphor, drawn from
his own fairyland of ornithology. He had a special claim to use as one
of his titles the noble mediæval name of Chantecler. He might well be
called the Gallic cock in that earlier twilight of vultures and bats.
The end of the nineteenth century was a time of pessimism for Europe,
and especially of pessimism for France; for pessimism was the shadow of
Prussianism. Rostand was really a cock that crowed before the coming of
sunrise. When it came it was red as blood; but the sun rose.
But that mediæval nickname of the cock contains a still more
appropriate criticism. The word “clear” is always a clue to Rostand’s
country, and to Rostand’s work. He suffered in the decadent days, he
suffers to some extent still, from a strange blunder which supposes
that what is clear must be shallow. It is chiefly founded on false
figures of speech; and is akin to the mysteriously meaningless saying
that still waters run deep. It is repeated without the least reference
to the evident fact that the stillest of all waters do not run at all.
They lie about in puddles, which are none the less shallow because
they are covered with scum. Such were the North German philosophies
fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century; men believed in the
puddle’s profundity solely because of its opacity. When the decadent
critics sneered at Rostand’s popularity, they were simply sneering at
his lucidity. They were protesting against his power of conveying what
he meant in the most direct and telling fashion. They were complaining
bitterly because he did not think with a German accent, which is nearly
the same thing as an impediment in the speech. The wit with which
all his dialogues blazed was also a positive disadvantage in that
muddle-headed modern world, which even now will only begin to realize
gradually the greatness of France. Nothing has been so senselessly
underrated as wit, even when it seems to be the mere wit of words. It
is dismissed as merely verbal; but, in fact, it is more solemn writing
that is merely verbal, or rather merely verbose. A joke is always a
thought; it is grave and formal writing that can be quite literally
thoughtless. This applies to jokes when they are not only quite verbal
but quite vulgar. A good pun, or even a bad pun, is more intellectual
than mere polysyllables. The man, the presumably prehistoric man, who
invented the phrase, “When is a door not a door; when it’s ajar,” made
a serious and successful mental effort of selection and combination.
But a Prussian professor might begin on the same problem, “When is
a door not a door; when its doorishness is a becoming rather than a
being, and when the relativity of doorishness is co-ordinated with the
evolution of doors from windows and skylights, of which approximation
to new function, etc. etc.”--and the Prussian professor might go on
like that for ever, and never come to the end because he would never
come to the point. A pun or a riddle can never be in that sense a
fraud. Real wisdom may be better than real wit, but there is much more
sham wisdom than there is sham wit.
This is the immediate point about Rostand, who had very real wit,
but wit of a very poetic and sometimes epic order. It is very
characteristic of him, and very puzzling to his critics, that he was
witty even in repudiating wit. In the scene of _Cyrano de Bergerac_,
in which the hero pleads in his friend’s name against the preciosity
of the heroine, he quite naturally uses the phrase touching the
evaporation of truth in artificial terminology, “Et que le fin du
fin ne soit la fin des fins.” That involves a pun and also involves
a point; and it is a subject on which it would be quite easy to be
earnest and pointless. A philosopher need never come to an end in
talking about ends; precisely because he is not required to amuse
anybody, he is not really required to mean anything. Every page,
every paragraph, almost every line of Rostand’s plays bristles with
these points, which are both verbal and vital. If any critic thinks
it was easy to produce them by the hundred, there is an exceedingly
easy test; let him try to produce one. In attempting to joke in this
fashion, he will probably find himself thinking for the first time.
For that matter, merely to make one of the better puns of _Punch_ or
_Hood’s Annual_ would be enough to stump most of the sceptics who have
been taught in the Teutonic schools to think a thing creative because
it is chaotic, and vast because it is vague. A modern “thinker” will
find it easier to make up a hundred problems than to make up one
riddle. For in the case of the riddle he has to make up the answer.
The drama of Rostand was full of answers, if they seem to the
superficial merely to be ringing repartees. In the ballade of the duel
the hero says that the sword-thrust shall come at the end of the envoi,
but something like it seems to come continually at the end of the line.
But these retorts are really much more than superficial, because they
have the ring of dogma, of affirmation and certainty, and therefore of
triumph. The wit is heroic wit; and his sub-title was strictly correct
when he called _Cyrano_ a heroic comedy. It was written in a literary
period which was far too pessimistic to rise even to heroic Tragedy.
It will grow in value in a more virile time, when the air has been
cleared by a great crusade. Rostand’s poetry will certainly remain.
It may not remain among the very greatest poetry, for the very reason
that he fulfilled the office rather of the trumpet than the lyre. But
he himself may well have shared the spirited taste of his own hero, and
have preferred that something even more noble than the laurel should
remain as a feather in his cap.
Wishes
Most of us, I suppose, have amused ourselves with the old and flippant
fancy of what poets or orators would feel like if their wild wishes
came true. The poet would be not a little surprised if the (somewhat
inadequate) wings of a dove suddenly sprouted from his shoulder-blades.
And I suspect that even the baby who cries for the moon would be rather
frightened if it fell out of the sky, crushing forests and cities like
a colossal snowball, shutting out the stars and darkening the earth
it had illuminated. Shelley was magnificently moved when he wished to
be a cloud driven before the wild West Wind: but even Shelley would
have been not a little disconcerted if he had found himself turning
head-over-heels in mid-air the instant he had written the line. He
would even be somewhat relieved, I fancy, to fall upon the thorns of
life and bleed a little more. When Keats, the human nightingale, lay
listening to the feathered one, he expressed a strong desire for a long
drink of red wine. In this I believe him to have accurately analysed
his own sentiments. But when he proceeds to explain that he is strongly
inclined at that moment to wish himself dead, I entertain strong doubts
as to whether he is equally exact, and am by no means certain that he
would really like “to cease upon the midnight” even “with no pain.”
Such sceptical fantasies, I say, have occurred to most of us; they do
not spoil fine poetry for those who really like it; they only salt
it with humour and human fellowship. Things seriously beautiful are,
perhaps, the only things that we can jest about with complete spiritual
safety. One cannot insult the poem except by being afraid of the parody.
But I think there is another and more curious cause for this common
human fancy of a wild wish which is disappointed by being fulfilled.
The idea is very common, of course, in popular tradition: in the tale
of King Midas; in the tale of the Black Pudding; in the tale of the
Goloshes of Fortune. My own personal feeling about it, I think, is that
a world in which all one’s wishes were fulfilled would, quite apart
from disappointments, be an unpleasant world to live in. The world
would be too like a dream, and the dream too like a nightmare. The Ego
would be too big for the Cosmos; it would be a bore to be so important
as that. I believe a great part of such poetic pleasure as I have
comes from a certain disdainful indifference in actual things. Demeter
withered up the cornfields: I like the cornfields because they grow in
spite of me. At least, I can lay my hand on my heart and say that no
cornfield ever grew with my assistance. Ajax defied the lightning; but
I like the lightning because it defies me. I enjoy stars and the sun
or trees and the sea, because they exist in spite of me; and I believe
the sentiment to be at the root of all that real kind of romance
which makes life not a delusion of the night, but an adventure of the
morning. It is, indeed, in the clash of circumstances that men are
most alive. When we break a lance with an opponent the whole romance is
in the fact that the lance does break. It breaks because it is real: it
does not vanish like an elfin spear. And even when there is an element
of the marvellous or impossible in true poetry, there is always also
this element of resistance, of actuality and shock. The most really
poetical impossibility is an irresistible force colliding with an
immovable post. When that happens it will be the end of the world.
It is true, of course, that marvels, even marvels of transformation,
illustrate the noblest histories and traditions. But we should notice
a rather curious difference which the instinct of popular legend has
in almost all cases kept. The wonder-working done by good people,
saints and friends of man, is almost always represented in the form
of restoring things or people to their proper shapes. St. Nicholas,
the Patron Saint of Children, finds a boiling pot in which two
children have been reduced to a sort of Irish stew. He restores them
miraculously to life; because they ought to be children and ought not
to be Irish stew. But he does not turn them into angels; and I can
remember no case in hagiology of such an official promotion. If a woman
were blind, the good wonder-workers would give her back her eyes; if
a man were halt, they would give him back his leg. But they did not,
I think, say to the man: “You are so good that you really ought to be
a woman”; or to the woman: “You are so bothered it is time you had
a holiday as a man.” I do not say there are no exceptions; but this
is the general tone of the tales about good magic. But, on the other
hand, the popular tales about bad magic are specially full of the idea
that evil alters and destroys the personality. The black witch turns a
child into a cat or a dog; the bad magician keeps the Prince captive
in the form of a parrot, or the Princess in the form of a hind; in
the gardens of the evil spirits human beings are frozen into statues
or tied to the earth as trees. In all such instinctive literature the
denial of identity is the very signature of Satan. In that sense it is
true that the true God is the God of things as they are--or, at least,
as they were meant to be. And I think that something of this healthy
fear of losing self through the supernatural is behind the widespread
sentiment of the Three Wishes; the sentiment which says, in the words
of Thackeray:
Fairy roses, fairy rings
Turn out sometimes troublesome things.
Now the transition may seem queer; but this power of seeing that a tree
is _there_, in spite of you and me, that it holds of God and its own
treeishness, is of great importance just now in practical politics. We
are in sharp collision with a large number of things, some of which are
real facts and all of which are real faiths. We must see these things
objectively, as we do a tree; and understand that they exist whether
we like them or not. We must not try and turn them into something
different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches.
I happen to think, for instance, that it is silly of Orangemen to think
they would be persecuted under Home Rule. But I think it is sillier to
think that the Orangemen do not think so. It is sillier not to see
that a man can fire off a gun for a prejudice as well as he can for
an ideal. I disagree with the Orangemen; I don’t disagree with the
Nationalists; but I deny neither. I sympathize with the Labour revolt;
I don’t sympathize with the Feminist revolt; but I deny neither.
Then, again, both these latter tendencies have succeeded in colliding
violently with another reality, the priests of the ancient popular
creed of Ireland. They achieved that catastrophe, not because they did
not believe the creed, but because they could not even believe that it
was believed.
Now you can, if you choose, pass your life in a wizard dream, in which
all your enemies are turned into something else. You can insist that a
priest is only a parrot, or a Suffragette always a wandering hind: but
if you do, you will sooner or later get into your head what is meant by
an immovable post.
The Futurists
There are still people talking about Futurism, though I should have
thought it was now a thing of the past, exploded by its own silly
gunpowder train of progressive theory. If a man only believed the world
was round because his grandmother said it was flat, another man had
only to say it was spiral in order to be a more advanced idiot than
either of them. But, after all, the world is one shape and not another
(I don’t care which myself, but certainly one), and will be when we
all die, and would have been if no worm or weed had ever lived. And it
amuses me to notice that the very Agnostics who still quote Galileo’s
phrase about the earth, “And yet it moves!” are the very people who
talk as if truth could be different from age to age--as if the whole
world was a different shape when you or I were in a different frame of
mind. Progressives of this kind _cannot_ say “And yet it moves” save
in the sense that their own foot can roll it about like a football, or
that their own finger can stop it as Joshua’s stopped the moon. They
may control Nature like witches; but they cannot appeal to Nature like
Galileo. They have no abiding objective fact to which to appeal. On
the mere progressive theory there is no more immortality about the
astronomy of Galileo than the medicine of Galen.
But one or two interesting ideas can be found in Futurist speculations,
essays, lectures, books, etc.--indeed, the Futurists can be interesting
everywhere but in their pictures. And this is the difficulty of all
such movements--the lack of the final fulfilment. I will not put it
offensively, as by saying that they write a beautiful prospectus,
but there are no funds. I do not mean it like that. I will put it
poetically by saying that there are beautiful leaves and flowers,
but there is no fruit. There are leaves of learning enough to fill a
library; there are flowers of rhetoric enough to last a session. They
are all about a picture: and there is no picture. Thus Mr. Nevinson,
the eminent English Futurist, has explained that pictorial art should
be as independent of natural facts as music is: it should not imitate,
but utter. Of music, of course, the remark is true, and fairly
familiar. Certainly three notes on a piano can bring tears to the eyes
by reminding us of a dead friend: though certainly the first noise
is not the noise he made when whistling to his dog, nor the second
the noise he made when kicking his boots off, nor the third the noise
he made when blowing his nose. Perhaps the three notes are noises he
could never have made: perhaps he was unmusical, like many magnificent
people--I am unmusical myself. Perhaps, I say, he was unmusical: yet
music can express him. This is an interesting fact; but it is only one
fact, and the examination of a few others would have shown Mr. Nevinson
the shallowness of his artistic philosophy.
But Mr. Nevinson and the Futurists, having never seen a fact before in
their lives, clutch hold of this one and rush after the car of progress
like poor baby-laden charwomen after a motor-bus. Their deduction is
this: As his favourite song recalls the friend, though it contains none
of his grunts, snorts, or sneezes, so his portrait would better recall
his appearance if it contained no trace of his eyes, nose, mouth,
hair (if any), masculine sex, anthropoid or erect posture, or any
other oddity by which his friends were in the habit of distinguishing
him from a lamp-post or a large whale, or from the works of Creation
in general. Mr. Nevinson says that the most pungent and passionate
emotions (such, presumably, as we have about friendship and even about
love) can be conveyed by planes, mathematical proportions, arbitrary or
abstract colours, arrangements of line, and all the things we most of
us instinctively associate with carpets, if not with oilcloth. “It is
possible,” he says. It is. It is not a contradiction in terms. But if I
say, “It is possible by arranging a tomato, ten pearl buttons, a copy
of the second and last number of a Tariff Reform weekly, one wooden
leg, three odd boots, and a bag with a hole in it, to induce your worst
enemy to burst into tears and give you a million pounds in conscience
money,” then, if you are a Monist and a fool, you will answer that it
could not happen. But if you are an Agnostic and a Christian, you will
answer that you tried it on with your worst creditor, and it didn’t
work with him. Nor would the planes, angles, abstract colours work with
him. They don’t work with you; they don’t work with me; they don’t work
with anybody. And the reason simply is that these philosophers, like
so many modern philosophers, do not possess the patience to see what
they are taking for granted. Have you ever seen a fellow fail at the
high jump because he had not gone far enough back for his run? That is
Modern Thought. It is so confident of where it is going to that it does
not know where it comes from.
The quite simple fallacy is this. The only thing we know about the
things we call the Arts is that when they are good they all stir the
soul in a somewhat similar way. Their roots in savagery or civilization
are so different and so dark, their relations to utility or practical
life are so prodigiously contrasted, the mere time or space they occupy
is so unequal in every case, the psychological explanations of their
very existence are so inconsistent and anarchic, that we simply do not
know whether in one single point we can argue from one art to another.
We do not know enough about it, and there is an end of the matter. For
instance, many have compared classic poetry with classic architecture;
and anyone who has ever felt the virginity and dignity of either will
know what such a comparison means. Milton spoke of “building” a line
of poetry; and nobody seems able to talk about sonnets without talking
about marble. But in technical fact the analogy is only a fancy,
after all. Treat it for one moment as Mr. Nevinson treats the analogy
between music and painting, and it is pure, preposterous nonsense--like
Futurism.
Who will deny that height, or the appearance of height, is one of the
effects of architecture? Who has not read or said or felt that some
wall seemed too enormous for any mortals to have made, that some domes
seemed to occupy heaven, or that some spire seemed to strike him out
of the sky? But who, on the other hand, ever said that his sonnet was
printed higher up on the page than somebody else’s sonnet? Who ever
either praised or disliked a piece of verse according to its vertical
longitude? Who ever said, “My sonnet occupied five volumes of the
_Times_, but you _should_ see it pasted all in one piece”? Who ever
said, “I have written the tallest triolet on earth”?
Mr. Nevinson will bring a tear to my eye by exhibiting a pattern
and calling it a picture on the same day when he induces me to read
two hundred leading articles in the _Times_ simply by calling them
a tower. They have many of the qualities of a tower: they are long;
they are symmetrical; they are all built out of the same old bricks;
they sometimes stand upright, like the Tower of Giotto; they more
often lean very much, like the Tower of Pisa; they most frequently
fall down altogether, and fall on the wrong people, like the Tower
of Siloam. One could pursue such abstract fancies for ever, but the
simple fact remains--and it is a fact of the senses. The thing is not
a tower, because it does not tower. And the Futurist picture is not a
picture, because it does not depict. Why one art can do without shapes,
and another without words, and another without movement, and another
without massiveness, and why each of these is necessary to one or other
of them separately--all this we shall know when we know what art means.
And I cannot say that the Futurists have helped us much in finding out.
The Evolution of Emma