When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were
called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words
myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea
of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was
that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal
explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could
be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be. Both these
statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for
other explanations. An optimist could not mean a man who thought
everything right and nothing wrong. For that is meaningless; it is like
calling everything right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the
conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the
pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except
himself. It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the
mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little
girl, "An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist
is a man who looks after your feet." I am not sure that this is not the
best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it.
For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that
more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from
moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our
primary power of vision and of choice of road.
But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist and the
pessimist. The assumption of it is that a man criticises this world as
if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of
apartments. If a man came to this world from some other world in full
possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of
midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man
looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against
the absence of a sea view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs
to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He
has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag
long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the
essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.
In the last chapter it has been said that the primary feeling that this
world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed in fairy tales.
The reader may, if he likes, put down the next stage to that bellicose
and even jingo literature which commonly comes next in the history of a
boy. We all owe much sound morality to the penny dreadfuls. Whatever the
reason, it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude towards life
can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in
terms of criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not
optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty.
The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave
because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag
flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should
leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too
glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its
gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving
it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic
thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly,
optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.
Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing--say Pimlico.
If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of
thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitary. It is not
enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely
cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a
man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would
be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love
Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly
reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise
into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as
a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide
horrible things; but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does
not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover
does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico
as mothers love children, arbitarily, because it is _theirs_ Pimlico in
a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that
this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of
mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the
darkest roots of civilisation and you will find them knotted round some
sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to
a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because
she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed
to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there
is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and
co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong
in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics
directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by
one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me";
there is no trace of such a transaction. There _is_ a trace of both men
having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place." They gained
their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate
courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become
courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves
for the altar, and found that they were clean. The history of the Jews
is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can
be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten Commandments which have been
found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a
code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a
certain desert. Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity. And
only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a
holiday for men.
If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing is a
source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact. Let
us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort of
universal patriotism. What is the matter with the pessimist? I think it
can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is
the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated, without
undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend. And what is
the matter with the candid friend? There we strike the rock of real life
and immutable human nature.
I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he
is not candid. He is keeping something back--his own gloomy pleasure in
saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to
help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of
anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course)
of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and
gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who
says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not
worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn
his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an
anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him
is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend;
the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at
all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is
using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army,
to discourage people from joining it. Because he is allowed to be
pessimistic as a military adviser he is being pessimistic as a
recruiting sergeant. Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the
cosmic anti-patriot) uses the freedom that life allows to her
counsellors to lure away the people from her flag. Granted that he
states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions,
what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are
down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some
great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common
clergyman who wants to help the men.
The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men,
but that he does not love what he chastises--he has not this primary and
supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil of the man commonly
called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt that the optimist, wishing to
defend the honour of this world, will defend the indefensible. He is the
jingo of the universe; he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong." He will
be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of
front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with
assurances. He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. All
this (which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really
interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained without
it.
We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only question is,
shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? If you like to put it
so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? Now, the
extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak
defence of everything) comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational
optimism leads to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to
reform. Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism.
The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man
who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the
man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves some feature of
Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself defending that
feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico itself,
he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem. I do not deny
that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the mystic patriot
who reforms. Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest among those who
have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The worst jingoes do not
love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an
empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But
if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it
would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. Thus also only those
will permit their patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends
on history. A man who loves England for being English will not mind how
she arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go
against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman)
by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end
in utter unreason--because he has a reason. A man who loves France for
being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves
France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly
what the French have done, and France is a good instance of the working
paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism more purely abstract and arbitrary;
and nowhere else is reform more drastic and sweeping. The more
transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics.
Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case of
women; and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid people started
the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through
everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can
hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend
their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with
the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the
thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is:
his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else.
Women who are utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their
criticism. Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother,
who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong as a
man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value. The
devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a
sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is
bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
This at least had come to be my position about all that was called
optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of reform we
must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. A man must be interested in life,
then he could be disinterested in his views of it. "My son give me thy
heart"; the heart must be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have a
fixed heart we have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious
criticism. It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as
mixed of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent
endurance. But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be
defective. It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put
in those quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly
blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer--
"Enough we live:--and if a life,
With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth."
I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch.
For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not
the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which
we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger
to neutralise each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a
fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe
at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage,
to which we can return at evening.
No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we
demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get
it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to
think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without
once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without
once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist
and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is
he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to
die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist
who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash
the whole universe for the sake of itself.
I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as they
came: and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident of the
time. Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether
it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told us
that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown his
brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out
because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even
suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot
machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I
found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and
humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and
absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the
refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man,
kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is
concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically
considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all
buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds;
but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by
the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the
things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults
everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by
refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the
cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a
tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury:
for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be
pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and
there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and
the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and
philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven
through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines.
There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is
different from other crimes--for it makes even crimes impossible.
About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he
said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of
this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite
of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside
him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares
so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of
everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to
end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he
renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this
ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that
something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link
with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the
universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the
queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the
suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of
carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic.
The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness.
They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave
afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very
poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the cross-roads to show
what Christianity thought of the pessimist.
This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity
entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I
shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions,
but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the
martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern
morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be
drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the
line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling
evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too
far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against
the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite
ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good
that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung
away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's. I
am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?
Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were in some
beaten track. Christianity had also felt this opposition of the martyr
to the suicide: had it perhaps felt it for the same reason? Had
Christianity felt what I felt, but could not (and cannot) express--this
need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous reform of
things? Then I remembered that it was actually the charge against
Christianity that it combined these two things which I was wildly trying
to combine. Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being
too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the
world. The coincidence made me suddenly stand still.
An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such
and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another.
Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not
credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain
philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on
Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was
suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a
man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the
century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe
in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he
can believe in any miracle in any age. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing. A
materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a
materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian Scientist of the
twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth
century. It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in
dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was
given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question.
And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the
world, the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this
question.
It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite
indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had
never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which
any mediæval would have been eager to correct them. They represent that
the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to
preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. They
will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the
remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach
Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity
and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind.
Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered
after a long talk. Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper
of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its
armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of
bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner
Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world
specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an
exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last
Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in
the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care
for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due
to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice
that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do,
upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love
enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just
as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the
morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of
the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus
Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish
egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of
passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what
these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most
horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body
knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher
Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god
within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.
Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light;
let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street,
but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in
order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards,
but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a
divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian
was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely
recognised an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible
as an army with banners.
All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun and
moon. If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them; to say,
that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn insects alive. He
thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke, he may give his
neighbour measles. He thinks that because the moon is said to drive men
mad, he may drive his wife mad. This ugly side of mere external optimism
had also shown itself in the ancient world. About the time when the
Stoic idealism had begun to show the weaknesses of pessimism, the old
nature worship of the ancients had begun to show the enormous weaknesses
of optimism. Nature worship is natural enough while the society is
young, or, in other words, Pantheism is all right as long as it is the
worship of Pan. But Nature has another side which experience and sin are
not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan
that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural
Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature
in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he
is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes
at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow
at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull's blood, as did
Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of health always leads to
something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object
of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped. Stars and mountains
must not be taken seriously. If they are, we end where the pagan nature
worship ended. Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her
cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.
Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination. The
theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything that
was bad.
On the other side our idealist pessimists were represented by the old
remnant of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius and his friends had really given
up the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the god
within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature, and hardly any hope of
any virtue in society. They had not enough interest in the outer world
really to wreck or revolutionise it. They did not love the city enough
to set fire to it. Thus the ancient world was exactly in our own
desolate dilemma. The only people who really enjoyed this world were
busy breaking it up; and the virtuous people did not care enough about
them to knock them down. In this dilemma (the same as ours) Christianity
suddenly stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world
eventually accepted as _the_ answer. It was the answer then, and I think
it is the answer now.
This answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered; it did not in
any sense sentimentally unite. Briefly, it divided God from the cosmos.
That transcendence and distinctness of the deity which some Christians
now want to remove from Christianity, was really the only reason why any
one wanted to be a Christian. It was the whole point of the Christian
answer to the unhappy pessimist and the still more unhappy optimist. As
I am here only concerned with their particular problem I shall indicate
only briefly this great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of
the creating or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical,
because they must be verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of
God _in_ all things as if he were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has,
in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet. All terms,
religious and irreligious, are open to this charge. The only question is
whether all terms are useless, or whether one can, with such a phrase,
cover a distinct _idea_ about the origin of things. I think one can, and
so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk about
evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian theism was this, that
God was a creator, as an artist is a creator. A poet is so separate from
his poem that he himself speaks of it as a little thing he has "thrown
off." Even in giving it forth he has flung it away. This principle that
all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at least as consistent
through the cosmos as the evolutionary principle that all growth is a
branching out. A woman loses a child even in having a child. All
creation is separation. Birth is as solemn a parting as death.
It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce
in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or
the mother from the new-born child) was the true description of the act
whereby the absolute energy made the world. According to most
philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to
Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much
a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which
had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had
since made a great mess of it. I will discuss the truth of this theorem
later. Here I have only to point out with what a startling smoothness it
passed the dilemma we have discussed in this chapter. In this way at
least one could be both happy and indignant without degrading one's self
to be either a pessimist or an optimist. On this system one could fight
all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence. One
could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with the world.
St. George could still fight the dragon, however big the monster bulked
in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the mighty cities or bigger
than the everlasting hills. If he were as big as the world he could yet
be killed in the name of the world. St. George had not to consider any
obvious odds or proportions in the scale of things, but only the
original secret of their design. He can shake his sword at the dragon,
even if it is everything; even if the empty heavens over his head are
only the huge arch of its open jaws.
And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I
had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable
machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection--the world
and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the
fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without
trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I
found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard
spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a
world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the
hole in the world--it had evidently been meant to go there--and then the
strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two
machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts
fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after
bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click
of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were
repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct
after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the
metaphor, I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take
one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country
surrendered and turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up, as it
were, back to the first fields of my childhood. All those blind fancies
of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain to trace on
the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane. I was right when I
felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it was the divine
choice. I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that
grass was the wrong colour than say that it must by necessity have been
that colour: it might verily have been any other. My sense that
happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something
when all was said: it meant the whole doctrine of the Fall. Even those
dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I have not been able to
describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like
colossal caryatides of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast
and void, but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for
anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist;
to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds. And my
haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used,
but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that
had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according
to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a
golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.
But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed the reason
for optimism. And the instant the reversal was made it felt like the
abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket. I had often called
myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism. But
all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this
reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the
world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do _not_ fit
in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is
an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I
really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had
been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse
and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it
dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was
poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of
the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again
that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in
acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the _wrong_ place, and my
soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and
illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now
why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a
giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.