When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is
commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one
has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in
middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief
in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on
with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic
old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a
boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these
philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is
exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I
should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical
politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in
fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old
childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as
ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned
about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at
the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The
vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As
much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But
there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.
I take this instance of one of the enduring faiths because, having now
to trace the roots of my personal speculation, this may be counted, I
think, as the only positive bias. I was brought up a Liberal, and have
always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a
self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or
threadbare, I can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle
of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions. The first
is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the
things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than
extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something
more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of
humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of
power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as
such, should be felt as something more heart-breaking than any music
and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than
death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a
Norman nose.
This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in
men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold
separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political
instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common.
Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The
democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is
a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry.
It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on
vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the
loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish
a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a
thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own
nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them
badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I
know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by
scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their
noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these
universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among
them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly
important things must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of
the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is
democracy; and in this I have always believed.
But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to
understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the
idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious
that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting
to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or
arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the
tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to
aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against
the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is
treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of
history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the
village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in
the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the
past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with
the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for
us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in
great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no
reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or
fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our
ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit
to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be
walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the
accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the
accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's
opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a
good man's opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot
separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to
me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils.
The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It
is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot
papers, are marked with a cross.
I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had a bias, it was always
a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition. Before we
come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content to allow for
that personal equation; I have always been more inclined to believe the
ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome
literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and
prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest
demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. I would
always trust the old wives' fables against the old maids' facts. As long
as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases.
Now, I have to put together a general position, and I pretend to no
training in such things. I propose to do it, therefore, by writing down
one after another the three or four fundamental ideas which I have found
for myself, pretty much in the way that I found them. Then I shall
roughly synthesise them, summing up my personal philosophy or natural
religion; then I shall describe my startling discovery that the whole
thing had been discovered before. It had been discovered by
Christianity. But of these profound persuasions which I have to recount
in order, the earliest was concerned with this element of popular
tradition. And without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and
democracy I could hardly make my mental experience clear. As it is, I do
not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose to try.
My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken
certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse;
that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of
democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I
believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to
be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with
them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and
rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and
rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country
of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that
judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised
elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic
beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon
before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular
tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush
or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were
supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is
what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not
"appreciate Nature," because they said that Nature was divine. Old
nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that
dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the
dryads.
But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on
fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble
and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous
lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants should be killed because
they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such. For the
rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more tradition
than the Jacobite. There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the
same as that of the Magnificat--_exaltavit humiles._ There is the great
lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved _before_
it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty,"
which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts,
yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a
sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of
elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I
could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a
certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy
tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.
It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments
(cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of
the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word,
necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in
fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that
reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older
than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) _necessary_ that
Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of
it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases: it
really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father
of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne: and we in
fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six
animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and
fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over the hedge of the
elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an
extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were
talking of the actual things that happened--dawn and death and so on--as
if _they_ were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that
trees bear fruit were just as _necessary_ as the fact that two and one
trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the
test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot
_imagine_ two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees
not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or
tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a
man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But
they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law
of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit
Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity:
because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we
can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy
it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it
had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this
sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which
there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there
are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles,
but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed
up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the
philosophical question of how many beans make five.
Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery tales.
The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall"; but
he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The
witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will
fall"; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the
effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the
advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does
not lose either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head
until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a
falling tower. But the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they
imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree
and an apple reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had
found not only a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those
facts. They do talk as if the connection of two strange things
physically connected them philosophically. They feel that because one
incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing
the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black
riddles make a white answer.
In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they
are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting
conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's
Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales.
The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law.
A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and
enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there
is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is
an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea
of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take
liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can
turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into
a fairy prince. As _ideas_, the egg and the chicken are further off each
other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a
chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears. Granted, then, that
certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard
them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic
manner of science and the "Laws of Nature." When we are asked why eggs
turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the
fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to
horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer
that it is _magic_. It is not a "law," for we do not understand its
general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it
happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always
happen. It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that
we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet
on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a
poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of
account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility,
but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms
used in the science books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and
so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis
which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as
describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm,"
"spell," "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and
its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a _magic_ tree. Water runs
downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is
bewitched.
I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have
some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is
simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words
my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from
another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying
eggs. It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who
is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a
sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he
is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen
birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy,
tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A
forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so
the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both
cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A
sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because,
by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the
materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a
sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own,
apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from
fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not
grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.
This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the
fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived
from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct
of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of
the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that
when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need
tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by
being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of
three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like
romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales--because they find them
romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to
whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This
proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of
interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to
refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They
make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment,
that they run with water. I have said that this is wholly reasonable and
even agnostic. And, indeed, on this point I am all for the higher
agnosticism; its better name is Ignorance. We have all read in
scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who
has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and
appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every
man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may
understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than
any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know
thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all
forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that
we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism
only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we
have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means
that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
But though (like the man without memory in the novel) we walk the
streets with a sort of half-witted admiration, still it is admiration.
It is admiration in English and not only admiration in Latin. The wonder
has a positive element of praise. This is the next milestone to be
definitely marked on our road through fairyland. I shall speak in the
next chapter about optimists and pessimists in their intellectual
aspect, so far as they have one. Here I am only trying to describe the
enormous emotions which cannot be described. And the strongest emotion
was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstacy
because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an
opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact
that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a
fairy tale. The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful,
though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus
puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful
to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous
legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can
I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?
There were, then, these two first feelings, indefensible and
indisputable. The world was a shock, but it was not merely shocking;
existence was a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise. In fact, all
my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain
from boyhood. The question was, "What did the first frog say?" And the
answer was, "Lord, how you made me jump!" That says succinctly all that
I am saying. God made the frog jump; but the frog prefers jumping. But
when these things are settled there enters the second great principle
of the fairy philosophy.
Any one can see it who will simply read "Grimm's Fairy Tales" or the
fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang. For the pleasure of pedantry I will
call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. Touchstone talked of much
virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an "if."
The note of the fairy utterance always is, "You may live in a palace of
gold and sapphire, _if_ you do not say the word 'cow'"; or "You may live
happily with the King's daughter, _if_ you do not show her an onion."
The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things
conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling
things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden. Mr.
W.B. Yeats, in his exquisite and piercing elfin poetry, describes the
elves as lawless; they plunge in innocent anarchy on the unbridled
horses of the air--
"Ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame."
It is a dreadful thing to say that Mr. W.B. Yeats does not understand
fairyland. But I do say it. He is an ironical Irishman, full of
intellectual reactions. He is not stupid enough to understand
fairyland. Fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people
who gape and grin and do as they are told. Mr. Yeats reads into elfland
all the righteous insurrection of his own race. But the lawlessness of
Ireland is a Christian lawlessness, founded on reason and justice. The
Fenian is rebelling against something he understands only too well; but
the true citizen of fairyland is obeying something that he does not
understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests
upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly
out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love
flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple
is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.
This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is certainly not lawlessness or
even liberty, though men under a mean modern tyranny may think it
liberty by comparison. People out of Portland Gaol might think Fleet
Street free; but closer study will prove that both fairies and
journalists are the slaves of duty. Fairy godmothers seem at least as
strict as other godmothers. Cinderella received a coach out of
Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a
command--which might have come out of Brixton--that she should be back
by twelve. Also, she had a glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence
that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in
a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things
in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw
stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of
the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance
most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat. And this fairy-tale
sentiment also sank into me and became my sentiment towards the whole
world. I felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond, but
as brittle as the window-pane; and when the heavens were compared to the
terrible crystal I can remember a shudder. I was afraid that God would
drop the cosmos with a crash.
Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be
perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do
not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was
the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on
_not doing something_ which you could at any moment do and which, very
often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is
that to _me_ this did not seem unjust. If the miller's third son said to
the fairy, "Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy
palace," the other might fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that,
explain the fairy palace." If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must
leave the ball at twelve?" her godmother might answer, "How is it that
you are going there till twelve?" If I leave a man in my will ten
talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the
conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not
look a winged horse in the mouth. And it seemed to me that existence was
itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not
understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand
the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The
veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as
the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the
towering trees.
For this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy) I never
could join the young men of my time in feeling what they called the
general sentiment of _revolt_. I should have resisted, let us hope, any
rules that were evil, and with these and their definition I shall deal
in another chapter. But I did not feel disposed to resist any rule
merely because it was mysterious. Estates are sometimes held by foolish
forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn: I was
willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal
fantasy. It could not well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to
hold it at all. At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show
my meaning. I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising
generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd
and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love
to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a
harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar
anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing
one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like
complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with
the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an
exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man
is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at
once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man
plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The æsthetes touched the
last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The
thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their
knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this
reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any
sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the
sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a
cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the
blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of
recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in
ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because
we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for
sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.
Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I
have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of
tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely
radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment
was here, that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the
modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on
two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long
time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right.
The really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this
basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have
explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first,
that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been
quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this
wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest
limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world
running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of
that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I
have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened
into convictions.
First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism;
saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded
without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because
it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher
is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been
scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked
at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable
ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold
quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but
dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been
_done_. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were
strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an
instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had
happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened
since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were
not very sure.
The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the
necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I
found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things
except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition
made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as
if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it
as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing
shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local
secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all
elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an
emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the
repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like
that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again.
The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the
crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me
see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe
rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an
idea.
All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests
ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that
if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of
clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary;
if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation
to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought
into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off
of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some
slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he
is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still.
But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to
Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to
Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the
stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every
morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my
inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true
that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His
routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The
thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some
game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs
rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have
abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free,
therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do
it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly
dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible
that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every
evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity
that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy
separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He
has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old,
and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a
mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical _encore_. Heaven may _encore_
the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth
a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin,
the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life
or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that
they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every
human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition
may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it
may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and
yet each birth be his positively last appearance.
This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions
meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts
to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to
think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were _wilful_. I
mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In
short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I
thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound
emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has
some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always
felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a
story-teller.
But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against
the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it
loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would
have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and
therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an
imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion
that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma
of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any
more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of
God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image;
what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to
argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small
compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong
imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and
annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their
ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and
their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his evil
influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later
scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H.G. Wells.
Many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as
wicked. But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should
lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.
But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I
have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in
the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly
inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of
this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went
on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be
anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness
or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added
nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he
would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The
warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long
corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human.
So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more
and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of
all that is divine.
In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for
the definition of a law is something that can be broken. But the
machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken;
for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either
unable to do things or we were destined to do them. The idea of the
mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither have the firmness
of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them. The largeness of this
universe had nothing of that freshness and airy outbreak which we have
praised in the universe of the poet. This modern universe is literally
an empire; that is, it is vast, but it is not free. One went into larger
and larger windowless rooms, rooms big with Babylonian perspective; but
one never found the smallest window or a whisper of outer air.
Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance; but for me all
good things come to a point, swords for instance. So finding the boast
of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my emotions I began to argue
about it a little; and I soon found that the whole attitude was even
shallower than could have been expected. According to these people the
cosmos was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only (they would
say) while it is one thing it is also the only thing there is. Why,
then, should one worry particularly to call it large? There is nothing
to compare it with. It would be just as sensible to call it small. A man
may say, "I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its
crowd of varied creatures." But if it comes to that why should not a man
say, "I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars
and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see"? One is as good
as the other; they are both mere sentiments. It is mere sentiment to
rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth; it is quite as sane a
sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger than it is. A man chooses
to have an emotion about the largeness of the world; why should he not
choose to have an emotion about its smallness?
It happened that I had that emotion. When one is fond of anything one
addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a
lifeguardsman. The reason is, that anything, however huge, that can be
conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small. If military
moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object
would be vast because it would be immeasurable. But the moment you can
imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman. The moment you
really see an elephant you can call it "Tiny." If you can make a statue
of a thing you can make a statuette of it. These people professed that
the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the
universe. But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to
address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.
Actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were
better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large.
For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the
reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the
pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste;
but I felt a sort of sacred thrift. For economy is far more romantic
than extravagance. To them stars were an unending income of halfpence;
but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels
if he has one sovereign and one shilling.
These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and tone
of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can
express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of
eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness
by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "Robinson Crusoe,"
which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the
fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance
of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just
snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of
things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory.
Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it
in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to
look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy
one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the
solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all
things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from
a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely
birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke
much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was
common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a
more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great
Might-Not-Have-Been.
But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and
number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship. That there
are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns
and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but
somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the
planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the
Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion.
I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are
called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills. For the universe is a
single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as
peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos
is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another
one.
Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the
unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the
soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before
I could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more
easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my
bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a
miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick,
with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick,
if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural
explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I
came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some
one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work
of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as
dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of
humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not
drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made
us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and
vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and
held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as
Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt
and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had
not even thought of Christian theology.