in nature by saying boldly, “Bats do not fly.” It is as if he solved
the problem of whales by bluntly declaring that whales live on land.
There is a problem of vows, as of bats and whales. What Miss Farr
says about it is quite lucid and explanatory; it simply happens to be
flatly untrue. It is not the fact that young lovers have no desire to
swear on the Book. They are always at it. It is not the fact that every
young love is born free of traditions about binding and promising,
about bonds and signatures and seals. On the contrary, lovers wallow
in the wildest pedantry and precision about these matters. They do
the craziest things to make their love legal and irrevocable. They
tattoo each other with promises; they cut into rocks and oaks with
their names and vows; they bury ridiculous things in ridiculous places
to be a witness against them; they bind each other with rings, and
inscribe each other in Bibles; if they are raving lunatics (which is
not untenable), they are mad solely on this idea of binding and on
nothing else. It is quite true that the tradition of their fathers and
mothers is in favour of fidelity; but it is emphatically not true that
the lovers merely follow it; they invent it anew. It is quite true
that the lovers feel their love eternal, and independent of oaths;
but it is emphatically not true that they do not desire to take the
oaths. They have a ravening thirst to take as many oaths as possible.
Now this is the paradox; this is the whole problem. It is not true, as
Miss Farr would have it, that young people feel free of vows, being
confident of constancy; while old people invent vows, having lost that
confidence. That would be much too simple; if that were so there would
be no problem at all. The startling but quite solid fact is that young
people are especially fierce in making fetters and final ties at the
very moment when they think them unnecessary. The time when they want
the vow is exactly the time when they do not need it. That is worth
thinking about.
Nearly all the fundamental facts of mankind are to be found in its
fables. And there is a singularly sane truth in all the old stories of
the monsters--such as centaurs, mermaids, sphinxes, and the rest. It
will be noted that in each of these the humanity, though imperfect in
its extent, is perfect in its quality. The mermaid is half a lady and
half a fish; but there is nothing fishy about the lady. A centaur is
half a gentleman and half a horse. But there is nothing horsey about
the gentleman. The centaur is a manly sort of man--up to a certain
point. The mermaid is a womanly woman--so far as she goes. The human
parts of these monsters are handsome, like heroes, or lovely, like
nymphs; their bestial appendages do not affect the full perfection of
their humanity--what there is of it. There is nothing humanly wrong
with the centaur, except that he rides a horse without a head. There
is nothing humanly wrong with the mermaid; Hood put a good comic
motto to his picture of a mermaid: “All’s well that ends well.” It
is, perhaps, quite true; it all depends which end. Those old wild
images included a crucial truth. Man is a monster. And he is all the
more a monster because one part of him is perfect. It is not true,
as the evolutionists say, that man moves perpetually up a slope from
imperfection to perfection, changing ceaselessly, so as to be suitable.
The immortal part of a man and the deadly part are jarringly distinct,
and have always been. And the best proof of this is in such a case as
we have considered--the case of the oaths of love.
A man’s soul is as full of voices as a forest; there are ten thousand
tongues there like all the tongues of the trees: fancies, follies,
memories, madnesses, mysterious fears, and more mysterious hopes. All
the settlement and sane government of life consists in coming to the
conclusion that some of those voices have authority and others not.
You may have an impulse to fight your enemy or an impulse to run away
from him; a reason to serve your country or a reason to betray it; a
good idea for making sweets or a better idea for poisoning them. The
only test I know by which to judge one argument or inspiration from
another is ultimately this: that all the noble necessities of man talk
the language of eternity. When man is doing the three or four things
that he was sent on this earth to do, then he speaks like one who shall
live for ever. A man dying for his country does not talk as if local
preferences could change. Leonidas does not say, “In my present mood,
I prefer Sparta to Persia.” William Tell does not remark, “The Swiss
civilization, so far as I can yet see, is superior to the Austrian.”
When men are making commonwealths, they talk in terms of the absolute,
and so they do when they are making (however unconsciously) those
smaller commonwealths which are called families. There are in life
certain immortal moments, moments that have authority. Lovers are right
to tattoo each other’s skins and cut each other’s names about the
world; they do belong to each other, in a more awful sense than they
know.
Mormonism
There is inevitably something comic (comic in the broad and vulgar
style which all men ought to appreciate in its place) about the panic
aroused by the presence of the Mormons and their supposed polygamous
campaign in this country. It calls up the absurd image of an enormous
omnibus, packed inside with captive English ladies, with an Elder on
the box, controlling his horses with the same patriarchal gravity as
his wives, and another Elder as conductor calling out “Higher up,”
with an exalted and allegorical intonation. And there is something
highly fantastic to the ordinary healthy mind in the idea of any
precaution being proposed; in the idea of locking the Duchess in the
boudoir and the governess in the nursery, lest they should make a
dash for Utah, and become the ninety-third Mrs. Abraham Nye, or the
hundredth Mrs. Hiram Boke. But these frankly vulgar jokes, like most
vulgar jokes, cover a popular prejudice which is but the bristly hide
of a living principle. Elder Ward, recently speaking at Nottingham,
strongly protested against these rumours, and asserted absolutely
that polygamy had never been practised with the consent of the Mormon
Church since 1890. I think it only just that this disclaimer should be
circulated; but though it is most probably sincere, I do not find it
very soothing. The year 1890 is not very long ago, and a society that
could have practised so recently a custom so alien to Christendom must
surely have a moral attitude which might be repellent to us in many
other respects. Moreover, the phrase about the consent of the Church
(if correctly reported) has a little the air of an official repudiating
responsibility for unofficial excesses. It sounds almost as if Mr.
Abraham Nye might, on his own account, come into church with a hundred
and fourteen wives, but people were supposed not to notice them. It
might amount to little more than this, that the chief Elder may allow
the hundred and fourteen wives to walk down the street like a girls’
school, but he is not officially expected to take off his hat to each
of them in turn. Seriously speaking, however, I have little doubt that
Elder Ward speaks the substantial truth, and that polygamy is dying, or
has died, among the Mormons. My reason for thinking this is simple: it
is that polygamy always tends to die out. Even in the East I believe
that, counting heads, it is by this time the exception rather than the
rule. Like slavery, it is always being started, because of its obvious
conveniences. It has only one small inconvenience, which is that it is
intolerable.
Our real error in such a case is that we do not know or care about
the creed itself, from which a people’s customs, good or bad, will
necessarily flow. We talk much about “respecting” this or that person’s
religion; but the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a
religion: to ask what are its tenets and what are their consequences.
But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance. The old religious
authorities, at least, defined a heresy before they condemned it, and
read a book before they burned it. But we are always saying to a Mormon
or a Moslem--“Never mind about your religion, come to my arms.” To
which he naturally replies--“But I do mind about my religion, and I
advise you to mind your eye.”
About half the history now taught in schools and colleges is made
windy and barren by this narrow notion of leaving out the theological
theories. The wars and Parliaments of the Puritans made absolutely
no sense if we leave out the fact that Calvinism appeared to them to
be the absolute metaphysical truth, unanswerable, unreplaceable, and
the only thing worth having in the world. The Crusades and dynastic
quarrels of the Norman and Angevin Kings make absolutely no sense
if we leave out the fact that these men (with all their vices)
were enthusiastic for the doctrine, discipline, and endowment of
Catholicism. Yet I have read a history of the Puritans by a modern
Nonconformist in which the name of Calvin was not even mentioned,
which is like writing a history of the Jews without mentioning either
Abraham or Moses. And I have never read any popular or educational
history of England that gave the slightest hint of the motives in the
human mind that covered England with abbeys and Palestine with banners.
Historians seem to have completely forgotten the two facts--first,
that men act from ideas; and second, that it might, therefore, be as
well to discover which ideas. The mediævals did not believe primarily
in “chivalry,” but in Catholicism, as producing chivalry among other
things. The Puritans did not believe primarily in “righteousness,”
but in Calvinism, as producing righteousness among other things. It
was the creed that held the coarse or cunning men of the world at both
epochs. William the Conqueror was in some ways a cynical and brutal
soldier, but he did attach importance to the fact that the Church
upheld his enterprise; that Harold had sworn falsely on the bones of
saints, and that the banner above his own lances had been blessed by
the Pope. Cromwell was in some ways a cynical and brutal soldier; but
he did attach importance to the fact that he had gained assurance from
on high in the Calvinistic scheme; that the Bible seemed to support
him--in short, the most important moment in his own life, for him, was
not when Charles I lost his head, but when Oliver Cromwell did not lose
his soul. If you leave these things out of the story, you are leaving
out the story itself. If William Rufus was only a red-haired man who
liked hunting, why did he force Anselm’s head under a mitre, instead
of forcing his head under a headsman’s axe? If John Bunyan only cared
for “righteousness,” why was he in terror of being damned, when he knew
he was rationally righteous? We shall never make anything of moral
and religious movements in history until we begin to look at their
theory as well as their practice. For their practice (as in the case
of the Mormons) is often so unfamiliar and frantic that it is quite
unintelligible without their theory.
I have not the space, even if I had the knowledge, to describe the
fundamental theories of Mormonism about the universe. But they are
extraordinarily interesting; and a proper understanding of them would
certainly enable us to see daylight through the more perplexing or
menacing customs of this community; and therefore to judge how far
polygamy was in their scheme a permanent and self-renewing principle
or (as is quite probable) a personal and unscrupulous accident. The
basic Mormon belief is one that comes out of the morning of the earth,
from the most primitive and even infantile attitude. Their chief dogma
is that God is material, not that He was materialized once, as all
Christians believe; nor that He is materialized specially, as all
Catholics believe; but that He was materially embodied from all time;
that He has a local habitation as well as a name. Under the influence
of this barbaric but violently vivid conception, these people crossed
a great desert with their guns and oxen, patiently, persistently, and
courageously, as if they were following a vast and visible giant who
was striding across the plains. In other words, this strange sect, by
soaking itself solely in the Hebrew Scriptures, had really managed
to reproduce the atmosphere of those Scriptures as they are felt by
Hebrews rather than by Christians. A number of dull, earnest, ignorant,
black-coated men with chimney-pot hats, chin beards or mutton-chop
whiskers, managed to reproduce in their own souls the richness and the
peril of an ancient Oriental experience. If we think from this end we
may possibly guess how it was that they added polygamy.
Pageants and Dress ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The only objection to the excellent series of Pageants that has adorned
England of late is that they are made too expensive. The mass of the
common people cannot afford to see the Pageant; so they are obliged
to put up with the inferior function of acting in it. I myself got in
with the rabble in this way. It was to the Church Pageant; and I was
much impressed with certain illuminations which such an experience
makes possible. A Pageant exhibits all the fun of a Fancy Dress Ball,
with this great difference: that its motive is reverent instead of
irreverent. In the one case a man dresses up as his great-grandfather
in order to make game of his great-grandfather; in the other case, in
order to do him honour. What the great-grandfather himself would think
of either of them we fortunately have not to conjecture. The alteration
is important and satisfactory. All natural men regard their ancestors
as dignified because they are dead; it was a great pity and folly that
we had fallen into the habit of regarding the Middle Ages as a mere
second-hand shop for comic costumes. Mediæval costume and heraldry had
been meant as the very manifestation of courage and publicity and a
decent pride. Colours were worn that they might be conspicuous across
a battle-field; an animal was rampant on a helmet that he might stand
up evident against the sky. The mediæval time has been talked of too
much as if it were full of twilight and secrecies. It was a time of
avowal and of what many modern people call vulgarity. A man’s dress was
that of his family or his trade or his religion; and these are exactly
the three things which we now think it bad taste to discuss. Imagine a
modern man being dressed in green and orange because he was a Robinson.
Or imagine him dressed in blue and gold because he was an auctioneer.
Or imagine him dressed in purple and silver because he was an agnostic.
He is now dressed only in the ridiculous disguise of a gentleman;
which tells one nothing at all, not even whether he is one. If ever he
dresses up as a cavalier or a monk it is only as a joke--very often
as a disreputable and craven joke, a joke in a mask. That vivid and
heraldic costume which was meant to show everybody who a man was is now
chiefly worn by people at Covent Garden masquerades who wish to conceal
who they are. The clerk dresses up as a monk in order to be absurd. If
the monk dressed up as a clerk in order to be absurd I could understand
it; though the escapade might disturb his monastic superiors. A man in
a sensible gown and hood might possibly put on a top-hat and a pair of
trousers in order to cover himself with derision, in some extravagance
of mystical humility. But that a man who calmly shows himself to the
startled sky every morning in a top-hat and trousers should think it
comic to put on a simple and dignified robe and hood is a situation
which almost splits the brain. Things like the Church Pageant may do
something towards snubbing this silly and derisive view of the past.
Hitherto the young stockbroker, when he wanted to make a fool of
himself, dressed up as Cardinal Wolsey. It may now begin to dawn on him
that he ought rather to make a wise man of himself before attempting
the impersonation.
Nevertheless, the truth which the Pageant has to tell the British
public is rather more special and curious than one might at first
assume. It is easy enough to say in the rough that modern dress
is dingy, and that the dress of our fathers was more bright and
picturesque. But that is not really the point. At Fulham Palace one can
compare the huge crowd of people acting in the Pageant with the huge
crowd of people looking at it. There is a startling difference, but
it is not a mere difference between gaiety and gloom. There is many a
respectable young woman in the audience who has on her own hat more
colours than the whole Pageant put together. There are belts of brown
and black in the Pageant itself: the Puritans round the scaffold of
Laud, or the black-robed doctors of the eighteenth century. There are
patches of purple and yellow in the audience: the more select young
ladies and the less select young gentlemen. It is not that our age has
no appetite for the gay or the gaudy--it is a very hedonistic age. It
is not that past ages--even the rich symbolic Middle Ages--did not feel
any sense of safety in what is sombre or restrained. A friar in a brown
coat is much more severe than an 'Arry in a brown bowler. Why is it
that he is also much more pleasant?
I think the whole difference is in this: that the first man is brown
with a reason and the second without a reason. If a hundred monks
wore one brown habit it was because they felt that their toil and
brotherhood were well expressed in being clad in the coarse, dark
colour of the earth. I do not say that they said so, or even clearly
thought so; but their artistic instinct went straight when they chose
the mud-colour for laborious brethren or the flame-colour for the
first princes of the Church. But when 'Arry puts on a brown bowler he
does not either with his consciousness or his subconsciousness (that
rich soil) feel that he is crowning his brows with the brown earth,
clasping round his temples a strange crown of clay. He does not wear
a dust-coloured hat as a form of strewing dust upon his head. He
wears a dust-coloured hat because the nobility and gentry who are his
models discourage him from wearing a crimson hat or a golden hat or a
peacock-green hat. He is not thinking of the brownness of brown. It
is not to him a symbol of the roots, of realism, or of autochthonous
humility; on the contrary, he thinks it looks rather “classy.”
The modern trouble is not that the people do not see splendid colours
or striking effects. The trouble is that they see too much of them
and see them divorced from all reason. It is a misfortune of modern
language that the word “insignificant” is vaguely associated with the
words “small” or “slight.” But a thing is insignificant when we do
not know what it signifies. An African elephant lying dead in Ludgate
Circus would be insignificant. That is, one could not recognize it
as the sign or message of anything. One could not regard it as an
allegory or a love-token. One could not even call it a hint. In the
same way the solar system is insignificant. Unless you have some
special religious theory of what it means, it is merely big and silly,
like the elephant in Ludgate Circus. And similarly, modern life, with
its vastness, its energy, its elaboration, its wealth, is, in the
exact sense, insignificant. Nobody knows what we mean; we do not know
ourselves. Nobody could explain intelligently why a coat is black,
why a waistcoat is white, why asparagus is eaten with the fingers, or
why Hammersmith omnibuses are painted red. The mediævals had a much
stronger idea of crowding all possible significance into things. If
they had consented to waste red paint on a large and ugly Hammersmith
omnibus it would have been in order to suggest that there was some sort
of gory magnanimity about Hammersmith. A heraldic lion is no more like
a real lion than a chimney-pot hat is like a chimney-pot. But the lion
was meant to be a lion. And the chimney-pot hat was not meant to be
like a chimney-pot or like anything else. The resemblance only struck
certain philosophers (probably gutter-boys) afterwards. The top-hat
was not intended as a high uncastellated tower; it was not intended
at all. This is the real baseness of modernity. This is, for example,
the only real vulgarity of advertisements. It is not that the colours
on the posters are bad. It is that they are much too good for the
meaningless work which they serve. When at last people see--as at the
Pageant--crosses and dragons, leopards and lilies, there is scarcely
one of the things that they now see as a symbol which they have not
already seen as a trade-mark. If the great “Assumption of the Virgin”
were painted in front of them they might remember Blank’s Blue. If the
Emperor of China were buried before them, the yellow robes might remind
them of Dash’s Mustard. We have not the task of preaching colour and
gaiety to a people that has never had it, to Puritans who have neither
seen nor appreciated it. We have a harder task. We have to teach those
to appreciate it who have always seen it.
On Stage Costume ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
While watching the other evening a very well-managed reproduction of
_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, I had the sudden conviction that the play
would be much better if it were acted in modern costume, or, at any
rate, in English costume. We all remember hearing in our boyhood about
the absurd conventionality of Garrick and Mrs. Siddons, when he acted
Macbeth in a tie-wig and a tail-coat, and she acted Lady Macbeth in a
crinoline as big and stiff as a cartwheel. This has always been talked
of as a piece of comic ignorance or impudent modernity; as if Rosalind
appeared in rational dress with a bicycle; as if Portia appeared with
a horsehair wig and side-whiskers. But I am not so sure that the great
men and women who founded the English stage in the eighteenth century
were quite such fools as they looked; especially as they looked to the
romantic historians and eager archæologists of the nineteenth century.
I have a queer suspicion that Garrick and Siddons knew nearly as much
about dressing as they did about acting.
One distinction can at least be called obvious. Garrick did not care
much for the historical costume of Macbeth; but he cared as much as
Shakespeare did. He did not know much about that prehistoric and
partly mythical Celtic chief; but he knew more than Shakespeare;
and he could not conceivably have cared less. Now the Victorian age
was honestly interested in the dark and epic origins of Europe; was
honestly interested in Picts and Scots, in Celts and Saxons; in
the blind drift of the races and the blind drive of the religions.
Ossian and the Arthurian revival had interested people in distant
dark-headed men who probably never existed. Freeman, Carlyle, and the
other Teutonists had interested them in distant fair-headed men who
almost certainly never existed. Pusey and Pugin and the first High
Churchmen had interested them in shaven-headed men, dark or fair,
men who did undoubtedly exist, but whose real merits and defects
would have startled their modern admirers very considerably. Under
these circumstances it is not strange that our age should have felt
a curiosity about the solid but mysterious Macbeth of the Dark Ages.
But all this does not alter the ultimate fact: that the only Macbeth
that mankind will ever care about is the Macbeth of Shakespeare,
and not the Macbeth of history. When England was romantic it was
interested in Macbeth’s kilt and claymore. In the same way, if
England becomes a Republic, it will be specially interested in the
Republicans in _Julius Cæsar_. If England becomes Roman Catholic, it
will be specially interested in the theory of chastity in _Measure
for Measure_. But being interested in these things will never be the
same as being interested in Shakespeare. And for a man interested in
Shakespeare, a man merely concerned about what Shakespeare meant, a
Macbeth in powdered hair and knee-breeches is perfectly satisfactory.
For Macbeth, as Shakespeare shows him, is much more like a man in
knee-breeches than a man in a kilt. His subtle hesitations and his
suicidal impenitence belong to the bottomless speculations of a
highly civilized society. The “Out, out, brief candle” is far more
appropriate to the last wax taper after a ball of powder and patches
than to the smoky but sustained fires in iron baskets which probably
flared and smouldered over the swift crimes of the eleventh century.
The real Macbeth probably killed Duncan with the nearest weapon, and
then confessed it to the nearest priest. Certainly, he may never have
had any such doubts about the normal satisfaction of being alive.
However regrettably negligent of the importance of Duncan’s life, he
had, I fancy, few philosophical troubles about the importance of his
own. The men of the Dark Ages were all optimists, as all children and
all animals are. The madness of Shakespeare’s Macbeth goes along with
candles and silk stockings. That madness only appears in the age of
reason.
So far, then, from Garrick’s anachronism being despised, I should like
to see it imitated. Shakespeare got the tale of Theseus from Athens,
as he got the tale of Macbeth from Scotland; and having reluctantly
seen the names of those two countries in the record, I am convinced
that he never gave them another thought. Macbeth is not a Scotchman; he
is a man. But Theseus is not only not an Athenian; he is actually and
unmistakably an Englishman. He is the Super-Squire; the best version
of the English country gentleman; better than Wardle in _Pickwick_.
The Duke of Athens is a duke (that is, a dook), but not of Athens. That
free city is thousands of miles away.