is too irrational for moderns to have held, I have the pleasure of
informing him that moderns are now about to announce, or have already
announced, a new heresy somewhat analogous but much less rationalistic
and much less rational. There is a new religion; that is a new fault
being found with the old religion. There is a new plan for a new
universe, which may be expected to last for many a long month to come.
It is the view that seems to have satisfied Mr. Wells, or, at any rate,
Mr. Britling. It is the view which has been more than once suggested
by Mr. Shaw, and is repeated in the skeleton of certain lectures he
is delivering. It is much more supernatural and even superstitious
than my imaginary thesis; for instead of giving to man more of the
powers of God, it arbitrarily imagines a God and then limits him with
the impotence of man. He is not limited, as in the theologies, by his
own reason or justice or desire for the freedom of man. He is limited
by unreason and injustice and the impossibility of freedom even for
himself. But I do not make this note upon the new development with any
intention of discussing it thoroughly in its theological aspect; though
there is one aspect of that aspect which may respectfully be called
amusing. When I was a boy, Christianity was blamed by the freethinkers
for its anthropomorphic demigod, substituted by savages for the Unknown
God who made all things. Now Christianity is blamed for the flat
contrary; because its God is unknown and not anthropomorphic enough.
Thirty years ago we only needed the First Person of the Trinity; and
thirty years later we have discovered that we only need the Second.
This sort of fashion-plate philosophy will no doubt go on as usual. In
a few decades we may be told that our fathers were profoundly right
when they believed in the Archangel Gabriel, but made an inexplicable
mistake when they believed in the Archangel Raphael. We shall learn
that the Seraphim are an exploded superstition, but the Cherubim a
most valuable and novel discovery. And as my note is not concerned
with the theological, neither is it directly concerned with the purely
logical side of it. Here again, it seems obvious that all the doubts
which legitimately attach to the idea of a progressive humanity are
absolutely fatal to the idea of a progressive divinity. A man may be
progressing towards God; but what is a God progressing towards? And
how does he know which of two developments in consciousness is the
better (_e.g._, an imaginative compassion or an imaginative cruelty)
if there be no aboriginal standard in his own nature? I am here only
concerned to note the failure of this fancy where it is parallel to the
failure of the fancy I mentioned first. And it is the weakness which
would instantly be discovered in both of them, not only by every poet
but by every child. It is that unless the sky is beautiful, nothing
is beautiful. Unless the background of all things is good, it is no
substitute to make the foreground better: it may be right to do so for
other reasons, but not for the reason that is the root of religion.
Materialism says the universe is mindless; and faith says it is ruled
by the highest mind. Neither will be satisfied with the new progressive
creed, which declares hopefully that the universe is half-witted.
George Wyndham ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I believe more and more that there are no trivialities but only truths
neglected; but the things I myself neglect accumulate in mountains.
I have made a note of one of them found in turning over the recent
files of the _Nation_. Elsewhere was a reminder about a book I had
long admired and enjoyed, but which had been crowded out of my mind by
less pleasant things; the book of recollections about George Wyndham,
recently written by Mr. Charles Gatty and published by Mr. Murray.[1]
Even now I cannot do justice to the book; but I know Mr. Gatty will
approve of my saying a word to correct an injustice to the subject of
the book.
[Footnote 1: _George Wyndham: Recognita_, by C. T. Gatty. Murray. 7s.
6d. net.]
Some time ago the _Nation_ dismissed Mr. Gatty’s volume, not with
disrespect, but with a certain distance and indifference evidently
founded on a very mistaken idea. It implied that Wyndham was after all
an intellectual aristocrat, whose culture was that of a clique, and who
did not test it enough in popular and practical politics. The point is
interesting; chiefly because it is the precise reverse of the truth.
If anything could narrow a man like Wyndham, it was being political
like the _Nation_; what broadened him to a universal brotherhood was
getting far from politics--like the nation. His private life was much
larger than his public life; though that in turn was larger than most
public lives in the parliamentary decline. Being a politician, he
had to be a parliamentarian; and being a parliamentarian, he had to
be an oligarch. In so far as he did hold the aristocratic theory, it
was exactly that aristocratic theory that forced him into political
practice. He knew well enough, I think, that the English parliament
is an aristocracy. He took the high ground of the responsibility of
privilege; but he was far too sincere to deny that it was privilege. He
said to a friend of mine, who thus lamented his laborious parliamentary
botherations, “You see, I was born paid.” It was the aristocracy the
_Nation_ reproves that necessitated the parliamentarism the _Nation_
desires or demands. Personally, I should not desire either; and I
think the real Wyndham was in a larger world outside both. It was
precisely where he was most domestic that he was most democratic. He
was a poet among poets exactly as he might have been a pedestrian
among pedestrians or, as he would have preferred to put it, a tramp
among tramps. The sympathy with tramps might be taken literally; for I
remember him defending the gipsies, when a more modern spirit wanted
them taught the meaning of progress by being moved on by the police.
He may have been right to work in cabinets and committees; but it was
there, if anywhere, that he was in a clique. He may have been right
not to follow his tastes, but it was his tastes that were popular and
what many cliques would call vulgar. He may have been right not to be
one of the idle rich, but he might have been even more superior to the
limits of the rich, if he had been idler.
The beauty of Mr. Gatty’s book is that it is a brilliant scrap-book,
the very variegated nature of which expresses this almost vagabond
liberality. Even when it merely notes down such things as single lines
of Shakespeare over which Wyndham lingered, or reproduces corners of
carving or painting which arrested his eye, the method seems to me to
work rightly; it seems somehow natural to talk of every other subject
besides the subject himself; as he was always ready to talk of every
other subject. And this aspect, by itself, accentuates the feeling
that his holidays were his most useful days. In this mood one may well
wish that he had never been near what he himself called the cesspool
of politics; and one might well accept the _Nation’s_ suggestion of
his aloofness from its own favourite parliamentary business with a
somewhat dry assent. Wyndham certainly had little to do with the
internal constructive legislation praised in progressive papers. He can
claim none of the glory of the great social reforms of the period just
before the War. He is not responsible for the permission to drag away
a poor man’s child as a raving maniac, if his teacher thinks he is a
little too stupid to learn, or his teacher is a little too stupid to
teach him. He has not the honour of having abolished the Habeas Corpus
Act, in order to allow amateur criminologists to keep a tramp in prison
until they have invented a science of criminology. He did not establish
the Labour Exchanges, and probably did not want to establish them,
any more than the Labour Exchanges vividly described in _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_. It was not he who created by statute a servant class, of men
made to spend their own wages on doctors they might never want, instead
of on tools or tram-tickets they urgently wanted. He was largely
detached from all this; and when reading a real record like Mr. Gatty’s
one is moved to wish that he had been even more detached from it.
Considering the liberty of his philosophical friendships, one respects
but regrets the loyalty of his political friendships; and is sorry that
common sense must be sacrificed to practical politics.
But when a book like Mr. Gatty’s has moved a reviewer to this mood of
mere regret for a poet wasted in politics, there returns upon him after
all one answer which is itself unanswerable. Judged by one ultimate
test, he was after all right to remain in politics; even in the last
putrefaction of parliamentary politics. At the price of nobody knows
what pain and patience and contempt and concessions, he alone among
modern politicians did leave not merely a name but a thing, that will
remain after him as a scientific engine or a geographical discovery
remains. He achieved a work which has changed the whole destiny of
Western Europe; the resurrection of Ireland. There he established
the free peasant; a work organically different from all the modern
reforms that are merely imposed, whether right or wrong, whether
servile or socialist. It is the difference between planting a tree and
building a tower; once planted, the tree lives by its own life. He
and his admirers, myself among the number, might well be content to
contemplate such a work without afterthoughts; if there were not laid
upon us like a load of memories, and almost like a living chain, the
love of England.
For England, alas! has made to-day the worst possible compromise
between aristocracy and democracy. It has kept the aristocracy and lost
the aristocrats. The country is still as much ruled by squires, but
not so much by country gentlemen; and the reform of the House of Lords
seems to mean eliminating gentlemen and carefully preserving noblemen.
It is as if there were a complaint of martial law; and it were met by
keeping the whole machinery of militarism, but giving the arbitrary
power to spies instead of soldiers. Or it is as if reactionaries
erected a despotism, and then called themselves reformers because they
did not care what dirty fellow was despot. But remote as Wyndham was
from the sham gentry of the twentieth century, it would also be an
error merely to merge him with the genuine gentry of the eighteenth.
It would be to mark the type so as to miss the man. What distinguished
him, as an individual, from good and bad squires, was something far
older than squirarchy; the true sense of the squire expectant, eager
to spring into the saddle of knighthood. His courage was far less
static than that of a country gentleman. It was the thing in which a
philologist might recognize that “courage” really means rushing; or
from which a professor will probably some day prove that courage really
means running away. He had that spiritual ambition which is itself the
ascending flame of humility; and which has been wanting to the English
since the squire grew greater than the knight. He seemed to await an
adventure that never quite came to him on earth; and his life and death
were swift, as if he were struck by lightning as with an accolade, or
had won spurs that were wings upon the wind.
Four Stupidities ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I have just seen a newspaper paragraph which, whether it refers to a
fact or merely a suggestion, seems to me to go down pretty well into
that depth of mindlessness which calls itself the modern mind. It is
said that influence is being brought to bear on the American Government
to induce them to break a bottle of water instead of a bottle of
champagne when they christen a battleship. Now it is not easy to deal
adequately with the rich stupidity of that. It is about five follies
thick, stupidity obscuring stupidity until one reader can hardly
see more than one of the jokes at a time. There is something almost
fascinating in the idea of trying to disentangle them.
First Stupidity. Note the notion that there is something so
intrinsically and supernaturally evil about an intoxicant that the
pure temperance man will not touch it even when it cannot intoxicate
anybody. It is as if a man were to insist on having a teetotal
boot-polish or a teetotal printing-ink. A cup of tea, or even of hot
milk, becomes diabolic if you have boiled the kettle with methylated
spirit. Eau-de-Cologne is a blackguard indulgence, though you use it
only to scent your handkerchief. A liquor containing alcohol (such as
ginger-beer) is simply and superstitiously an accursed thing, which
is not only not to be touched with the lips, but not to be touched
with the hands. After this case, the more intemperate “Temperance”
people cannot pretend any longer that their proposal is merely a social
reform; it is obviously and literally a mystical taboo. I do not see
what right such people have to mock at the savage’s fear of a fetish,
still less at the peasant’s respect for the relic of a saint. There
might surely be such a thing as holy water, if it be so certain that
there is such a thing as unholy water.
Second Stupidity. The extraordinary confusion by which it becomes not
only wicked to possess wine (though you never drink it), but becomes
wicked even to destroy it. This goes, I think, much further than this
queer materialist madness has yet gone. If a champagne bottle is
smashed to smithereens over the prow of a ship, I should have thought
the most logical teetotaller would merely have been glad that there
was one champagne bottle less in the world. As he would probably not
be a person with any special sympathy with the old ceremonials of
revelry, that is the only possible way in which I can imagine the
thing affecting him. We in England used to think we could trace a
slight streak of fanaticism in good Mrs. Carrie Nation, who used to go
about breaking other people’s wine and spirit bottles with her little
hatchet. But now it would appear that Mrs. Carrie Nation was a wobbler,
one weakly compromising with the fiend of fermented drink, perhaps
nobbled by the Liquor Trade--or, worse still, verging on the loathly
state of a moderate drinker. She ought to have been summoned before a
tribunal of these New Teetotallers and condemned for ever having gone
near enough to a bottle to touch it, even with a hatchet; condemned for
having so much as hung about the hellish tavern, where the very fumes
of its fiery poisons might have mounted to her head. The principle is
an interesting one, and might be extended to many cases. Thus, when the
common hangman burned a book of treason or heresy, he may be supposed
to have been infected by the intellectual errors it contained. Thus
when a censor blacks out a paragraph in a newspaper, he may be held
to have sinned even in looking to see where the paragraph was. This,
apparently, is the new barbaric fancy: that certain vegetable drinks
are so demonic that we not only are wrong when we drink them, but are
wrong when we do our best to render them undrinkable.
Third Stupidity. The curious deadness of the mind in such men is
illustrated at the next stage; that of clinging convulsively to a mere
form; and not only not knowing, but not so much as wondering--first,
whether the idea is worth preserving; and, secondly, whether they are
preserving it. The mark of this dead and broken traditionalism is
always two-fold. It can be seen in these two facts: that men alter a
thing as if it had no sense in it; and yet they never have the sense to
abolish what is for them a senseless thing. I can see much dignity in
absolute austerity and the refusal of symbol; I can see some dignity
even in dingy utilitarianism and the refusal of art. I could respect
the perfect plainness of an early Quaker like Penn when he would not
take his hat off in the palace, because it was an idle form. I do
not despise him because he came afterwards (I believe) to see that
keeping your hat on is just as much of a form as taking it off; and
took off his hat like other people. But if Penn had strictly confined
himself, say, to taking off his hatband with laborious care, every
time he entered the Royal presence, I should say that he had lost both
his Quakerism and his sociability. He would have lost the independence
that refuses recognition to the world, and he would not have gained
the disputable substitute of good manners. Similarly, I could respect
(though I could not envy) the flinty old Manchester manufacturers
who regarded all expenditure on arms, especially on drums, flags, or
trumpets, as so much babyish waste of money. But I should not even
have respected them if they had proposed that the British Army should
fly the White Flag in every battle because it was cheaper than a
coloured one. Why have a flag at all, if it comes to that? Or, again,
I can understand the unconverted Scrooge with his bowl of gruel; and I
like the converted Scrooge with his bowl of punch. But if Scrooge had
insisted every Christmas on having a punch-bowl with no punch in it, I
should not understand at all.
Fourth Stupidity. Besides this general deadness, there is a strange
special deadness to the human sentiment behind that special sort
of ceremony. Don’t express the sentiment if you think it a silly
sentiment; but don’t so express it as to prove that you haven’t got
it. That sentiment is the ancient sentiment of sacrifice. The thing
sacrificed may be anything: wine, as on the battleship; gold, as when
the Doge threw his ring into the sea; an ox or a sheep, as among the
ancient pagans; and very occasionally, when tribes savage or civilized
are seized with Satanist panic, a man. But it must be something
_valuable_, or the particular thrill, wholesome or unwholesome, is
not obtained. It was generally the best sheep or the best ox; and
in the rare cases of human sacrifice, generally somebody like the
King’s daughter. Like all human appetites, it is both good and evil;
it has many roots, a gesture of generosity, an appeal to the unknown,
a guarantee against arrogance, a dim idea of not taking all one’s
advantage from fortune: but they all depend on the _value_, and these
men evidently understand none of them, when they fill the bottle with
water.
On Historical Novels ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It is very easy, of course, to smile at such schoolboy fiction as the
novels of Mr. Henty, in which the same very English and modern young
gentleman from Rugby or Harrow turns up again and again as a Young
Greek, a Young Carthaginian, a Young Scandinavian, a Young Gaul, a
Young Visigoth, a Young Ancient Briton, and almost everything short
of a Young Negro. But Mr. Henty had the merits of his industry and
fecundity; and one of them was that he did take a boy’s imagination
into many and varied parts of human history, however conventional the
figure he followed through them might be. The English boy will not find
out as much about the soul of Carthage from the _Young Carthaginian_ as
a lover of letters may from _Salammbô_; but at least he will know that
Carthage was conquered--and that is (for various reasons) a good thing
for English people to know. And since the Henty period our historical
novels have fallen with terrible sameness into two or three grooves. We
might almost say that a man is not allowed to write an historical novel
except about four different historical periods, about six different
historical characters; and even about them he is not allowed to take
any view except that taken by the other romances on the same subject.
Now, considering the countless millions of marvellous, amusing, unique,
and picturesque things that have thronged on top of each other through
all our wonderful three thousand years of European history, this state
of affairs is as Byzantine and benighted as if no landscape painter
ever painted anything but a larch tree, or as if none of our sculptors
could model anything except the left leg.
You may write a novel about the time of Henry of Navarre--in fact, it
might almost be said that you must write a novel about the time of
Henry of Navarre. If you go in for writing historical novels at all,
somebody--the publisher or the office-boy--makes you do this. In this
novel, Huguenots must be gallant gentlemen, with a touch of bluffness;
Catholics must also be gallant gentlemen, with a touch of slyness. All
important political questions must be settled by duels fought with long
rapiers at wayside inns. You must stick to one side of the quarrel;
but even in that you must not bring any of the charges that a person
of the period might really have brought. For instance, the Court must
be perpetually engaged in plotting to stab the bluff Huguenot: but you
must not insist that the Huguenot was a Puritan, and his objection
to the Court would largely be that it was a Renaissance Court. You
must not, however delicately, bring in that presence of florid pagan
sensuality and princely indecorum which we feel in Brantome or the
Tales of the Queen of Navarre. The Latins must stick to assassination.
There must be no people to speak of in Paris, though it was the people
of Paris who, for good or evil, changed the whole course of the
history. Men like Sully may be introduced; but their talents must be
entirely occupied in serving the Prince in his personal love-affairs
and in his duels in inns. Above all, slap in the very middle of the
Wars of Religion, nobody must seem to have any clear idea of what his
own religion is about. You may also write a novel about the time of
Richelieu. But it must be governed by the same principles. Richelieu
must be a sinister yet magnanimous enemy of the hero. He must try to
kill the hero, and unaccountably fail. At this stage of the writing of
historical novels, it is important to be an imitator of Dumas. There
are critics who maintain that Dumas was largely written by imitators
of Dumas. This is an exaggeration; but, at the worst, they were good
imitators. There are chapters in the triple tale of the Musketeers
of which I can only say that, if anyone but he wrote them, he could
hire hearts and heads as well as hands. But my warning to the young
writer of entirely useless historical novels is this: He must not go
outside France, or treat that country otherwise than as an insulated
elfland. He must not carry off General Monk in a box. Think what a
frightful mistake would have been made--from the English Puritan point
of view--if d’Artagnan had carried off General Cromwell by mistake!
All this happened in the time of Mazarin and not Richelieu, but the
principle will be found reliable. The principle is that neither
Richelieu nor anybody else should show the faintest interest in the
future of France.
You may write a novel about the French Revolution. You may do it
on your head, as the jolly habitual criminals say. The essential
principles of this sort of novel are: (1) That the populace of Paris
from 1790 to 1794 never had any meals, nor even sat down in a café.
They stood about in the street all night and all day, sufficiently
sustained by the sight of Blood, especially Blue Blood. (2) All power
during the Terror was in the hands of the public executioner and of
Robespierre; and these persons were subject to abrupt changes of mind,
and frequently redeemed their habit of killing people for no apparent
reason by letting them off at the last moment, for no apparent reason
either. (3) Aristocrats are of two kinds--the very wicked and the
entirely blameless; and both are invariably good-looking. Both also
appear rather to prefer being guillotined. (4) Such things as the
invasion of France, the idea of a Republic, the influence of Rousseau,
the nearness of national bankruptcy, the work of Carnot with the
armies, the policy of Pitt, the policy of Austria, the ineradicable
habit of protecting one’s property against foreigners, and the presence
of persons carrying guns at the Battle of Valmy--all these things had
nothing to do with the French Revolution, and should be omitted.
Now, considering the number of picturesque struggles there have been in
the world, it seems to me that these subjects might be given a rest.
There has been next to nothing written, for instance, about the other
Wars of Religion, those that accompanied the construction of Catholic
Europe, rather than its breaking up. There was the Iconoclast invasion
of Italy, which ends with the entrance of Charlemagne. There has been
next to nothing written about riots other than the Parisian; the many
riots of Edinburgh, especially of those few days when it was almost as
dangerous to be a doctor as to be a mad dog. Another advantage would
be that, coming fresh to his historical problem, the writer might even
read a little history.
On Monsters ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I once saw in the newspapers this paragraph, of which I made a note:
“LEPRECHAUN” CAUGHT
Great excitement has been caused in Mullingar, in the west of Ireland,
by the report that the supposed “Leprechaun,” which several children
stated they had seen at Killough, near Delvin, during the past two
months, was captured. Two policemen found a creature of dwarfish
proportions in a wood near the town, and brought the little man to
Mullingar Workhouse, where he is now an inmate. He eats greedily, but
all attempts to interview him have failed, his only reply being a
peculiar sound between a growl and a squeal. The inmates regard him
with interest mixed with awe.