outside all history. It belongs to Biology or the Science of Life; that
is, it concerns things like cows, that are not so very much alive. Men
are far too much alive to get into the science of anything; for them we
have made the art of history. To say that human actions have depended
on economic support is like saying that they have depended on having two
legs. It accounts for action, but not for such varied action; it is a
condition, but not a motive; it is too universal to be useful. Certainly
a soldier wins the Victoria Cross on two legs; he also runs away on two
legs. But if our object is to discover whether he will become a V.C. or
a coward the most careful inspection of his legs will yield us little or
no information. In the same way a man will want food if he is a dreamy
romantic tramp, and will want food if he is a toiling and sweating
millionaire. A man must be supported on food as he must be supported
on legs. But cows (who have no history) are not only furnished more
generously in the matter of legs, but can see their food on a much
grander and more imaginative scale. A cow can lift up her eyes to the
hills and see uplands and peaks of pure food. Yet we never see the
horizon broken by crags of cake or happy hills of cheese.
So far the cow (who has no history) seems to have every other advantage.
But history--the whole point of history--precisely is that
some two legged soldiers ran away while others, of similar anatomical
structure, did not. The whole point of history precisely is: some people
(like poets and tramps) chance getting money by disregarding it, while
others (such as millionaires) will absolutely lose money for the fun
of bothering about it. There would be no history if there were only
economic history. All the historical events have been due to the
twists and turns given to the economic instinct by forces that were not
economic. For instance, this theory traces the French war of Edward
III to a quarrel about the French wines. Any one who has even smelt the
Middle Ages must feel fifty answers spring to his lips; but in this case
one will suffice. There would have been no such war, then, if we all
drank water like cows. But when one is a man one enters the world
of historic choice. The act of drinking wine is one that requires
explanation. So is the act of not drinking wine.
But the capitalist can get much more fun out of the doctrine.
When strikes were splitting England right and left a little while ago,
an ingenious writer, humorously describing himself as a Liberal, said
that they were entirely due to the hot weather. The suggestion was
eagerly taken up by other creatures of the same kind, and I really do
not see why it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentable
uprisings in history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather is
generally rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on
the sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from
captivity. The English strikers used some barren republican formula
(arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic
shibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except for
a wage accepted by them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt
employed some dry scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of
making bricks with nothing to make them of. But whatever fantastic
intellectual excuses they may have put forward for their strange and
unnatural conduct in walking out when the prison door was open, there
can be no doubt that the real cause was the warm weather. Such a climate
notoriously also produces delusions and horrible fancies, such as Mr.
Kipling describes. And it was while their brains were disordered by the
heat that the Jews fancied that they were founding a nation, that they
were led by a prophet, and, in short, that they were going to be of some
importance in the affairs of the world.
Nor can the historical student fail to note that the French monarchy was
pulled down in August; and that August is a month in summer.
In spite of all this, however, I have some little difficulty myself
in accepting so simple a form of the Materialist Theory of History (at
these words all Marxian Socialists will please bow their heads three
times), and I rather think that exceptions might be found to the
principle. Yet it is not chiefly such exceptions that embarrass my
belief in it.
No; my difficulty is rather in accounting for the strange coincidence by
which the shafts of Apollo split us exclusively along certain lines of
class and of economics. I cannot understand why all solicitors did not
leave off soliciting, all doctors leave off doctoring, all judges leave
off judging, all benevolent bankers leave off lending money at high
interest, and all rising politicians leave off having nothing to add to
what their right honourable friend told the House about eight years
ago. The quaint theoretic plea of the workers, that they were striking
because they were ill paid, seems to receive a sort of wild and hazy
confirmation from the fact that, throughout the hottest weather, judges
and other persons who are particularly well paid showed no disposition
to strike. I have to fall back therefore on metaphysical fancies of my
own; and I continue to believe that the anger of the English poor (to
steal a phrase from Sir Thomas Browne) came from something in man that
is other than the elements and that owes no homage unto the sun.
When comfortable people come to talking stuff of that sort, it is really
time that the comfortable classes made a short summary and confession
of what they have really done with the very poor Englishman. The dawn of
the mediæval civilisation found him a serf; which is a different thing
from a slave. He had security; although the man belonged to the land
rather than the land to the man. He could not be evicted; his rent could
not be raised. In practice, it came to something like this: that if the
lord rode down his cabbages he had not much chance of redress; but he
had the chance of growing more cabbages. He had direct access to the
means of production.
Since then the centuries in England have achieved something different;
and something which, fortunately, is perfectly easy to state. There is
no doubt about what we have done. We have kept the inequality, but we
have destroyed the security. The man is not tied to the land, as in
serfdom; nor is the land tied to the man, as in a peasantry. The rich
man has entered into an absolute ownership of farms and fields; and (in
the modern industrial phrase) he has locked out the English people. They
can only find an acre to dig or a house to sleep in by accepting such
competitive and cruel terms as he chooses to impose.
Well, what would happen then, over the larger parts of the planet, parts
inhabited by savages? Savages, of course, would hunt and fish. That
retreat for the English poor was perceived; and that retreat was cut
off. Game laws were made to extend over districts like the Arctic snows
or the Sahara. The rich man had property over animals he had no more
dreamed of than a governor of Roman Africa had dreamed of a giraffe.
He owned all the birds that passed over his land: he might as well have
owned all the clouds that passed over it. If a rabbit ran from Smith's
land to Brown's land, it belonged to Brown, as if it were his pet dog.
The logical answer to this would be simple: Any one stung on Brown's
land ought to be able to prosecute Brown for keeping a dangerous wasp
without a muzzle.
Thus the poor man was forced to be a tramp along the roads and to sleep
in the open. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off.
A landless man in England can be punished for behaving in the only way
that a landless man can behave: for sleeping under a hedge in Surrey or
on a seat on the Embankment. His sin is described (with a hideous sense
of fun) as that of having no visible means of subsistence.
The last possibility, of course, is that upon which all human beings
would fall back if they were sinking in a swamp or impaled on a spike
or deserted on an island. It is that of calling out for pity to the
passerby. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off. A
man in England can be sent to prison for asking another man for help in
the name of God.
You have done all these things, and by so doing you have forced the poor
to serve the rich, and to serve them on the terms of the rich. They have
still one weapon left against the extremes of insult and unfairness:
that weapon is their numbers and the necessity of those numbers to the
working of that vast and slavish machine. And because they still had
this last retreat (which we call the Strike), because this retreat
was also perceived, there was talk of this retreat being also cut off.
Whereupon the workmen became suddenly and violently angry; and struck at
your Boards and Committees here, there, and wherever they could. And you
opened on them the eyes of owls, and said, “It must be the sunshine.”
You could only go on saying, “The sun, the sun.” That was what the man
in Ibsen said, when he had lost his wits.
THE WRONG INCENDIARY
I stood looking at the Coronation Procession--I mean the one
in Beaconsfield; not the rather elephantine imitation of it which, I
believe, had some success in London--and I was seriously impressed.
Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deathly surprise that
I was quite right. Never before have I realised how right I was in
maintaining that the small area expresses the real patriotism: the
smaller the field the taller the tower. There were things in our local
procession that did not (one might even reverently say, could not) occur
in the London procession. One of the most prominent citizens in our
procession (for instance) had his face blacked. Another rode on a pony
which wore pink and blue trousers. I was not present at the Metropolitan
affair, and therefore my assertion is subject to such correction as the
eyewitness may always offer to the absentee. But I believe with some
firmness that no such features occurred in the London pageant.
But it is not of the local celebration that I would speak, but of
something that occurred before it. In the field beyond the end of my
garden the materials for a bonfire had been heaped; a hill of every kind
of rubbish and refuse and things that nobody wants; broken chairs, dead
trees, rags, shavings, newspapers, new religions, in pamphlet form,
reports of the Eugenic Congress, and so on. All this refuse, material
and mental, it was our purpose to purify and change to holy flame on the
day when the King was crowned. The following is an account of the rather
strange thing that really happened. I do not know whether it was any
sort of symbol; but I narrate it just as it befell.
In the middle of the night I woke up slowly and listened to what I
supposed to be the heavy crunching of a cart-wheel along a road of loose
stones. Then it grew louder, and I thought somebody was shooting out
cartloads of stones; then it seemed as if the shock was breaking big
stones into pieces. Then I realised that under this sound there was also
a strange, sleepy, almost inaudible roar; and that on top of it every
now and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols. Then I knew
what it was. I went to the window; and a great firelight flung across
two meadows smote me where I stood. “Oh, my holy aunt,” I thought,
“they've mistaken the Coronation Day.”
And yet when I eyed the transfigured scene it did not seem exactly like
a bonfire or any ritual illumination. It was too chaotic, and too close
to the houses of the town. All one side of a cottage was painted pink
with the giant brush of flame; the next side, by contrast, was painted
as black as tar. Along the front of this ran a blackening rim or rampart
edged with a restless red ribbon that danced and doubled and devoured
like a scarlet snake; and beyond it was nothing but a deathly fulness of
light.
I put on some clothes and went down the road; all the dull or startling
noises in that din of burning growing louder and louder as I walked. The
heaviest sound was that of an incessant cracking and crunching, as if
some giant with teeth of stone was breaking up the bones of the world. I
had not yet come within sight of the real heart and habitat of the fire;
but the strong red light, like an unnatural midnight sunset, powdered
the grayest grass with gold and flushed the few tall trees up to the
last fingers of their foliage. Behind them the night was black and
cavernous; and one could only trace faintly the ashen horizon beyond the
dark and magic Wilton Woods. As I went, a workman on a bicycle shot a
rood past me; then staggered from his machine and shouted to me to tell
him where the fire was. I answered that I was going to see, but thought
it was the cottages by the wood-yard. He said, “My God!” and vanished.
A little farther on I found grass and pavement soaking and flooded, and
the red and yellow flames repainted in pools and puddles. Beyond were
dim huddles of people and a small distant voice shouting out orders. The
fire-engines were at work. I went on among the red reflections, which
seemed like subterranean fires; I had a singular sensation of being in a
very important dream. Oddly enough, this was increased when I found that
most of my friends and neighbours were entangled in the crowd. Only in
dreams do we see familiar faces so vividly against a black background of
midnight. I was glad to find (for the workman cyclist's sake) that
the fire was not in the houses by the wood-yard, but in the wood-yard
itself. There was no fear for human life, and the thing was seemingly
accidental; though there were the usual ugly whispers about rivalry and
revenge. But for all that I could not shake off my dream-drugged soul a
swollen, tragic, portentous sort of sensation, that it all had something
to do with the crowning of the English King, and the glory or the end
of England. It was not till I saw the puddles and the ashes in broad
daylight next morning that I was fundamentally certain that my midnight
adventure had not happened outside this world.
But I was more arrogant than the ancient Emperors Pharaoh or
Nebuchadnezzar; for I attempted to interpret my own dream. The fire was
feeding upon solid stacks of unused beech or pine, gray and white piles
of virgin wood. It was an orgy of mere waste; thousands of good
things were being killed before they had ever existed. Doors, tables,
walking-sticks, wheelbarrows, wooden swords for boys, Dutch dolls for
girls I could hear the cry of each uncreated thing as it expired in the
flames. And then I thought of that other noble tower of needless things
that stood in the field beyond my garden; the bonfire, the mountain of
vanities, that is meant for burning; and how it stood dark and lonely in
the meadow, and the birds hopped on its corners and the dew touched and
spangled its twigs. And I remembered that there are two kinds of fires,
the Bad Fire and the Good Fire the last must surely be the meaning of
Bonfire. And the paradox is that the Good Fire is made of bad things, of
things that we do not want; but the Bad Fire is made of good things,
of things that we do want; like all that wealth of wood that might have
made dolls and chairs and tables, but was only making a hueless ash.
And then I saw, in my vision, that just as there are two fires, so there
are two revolutions. And I saw that the whole mad modern world is a race
between them. Which will happen first--the revolution in which
bad things shall perish, or that other revolution, in which good things
shall perish also? One is the riot that all good men, even the most
conservative, really dream of, when the sneer shall be struck from the
face of the well-fed; when the wine of honour shall be poured down the
throat of despair; when we shall, so far as to the sons of flesh is
possible, take tyranny and usury and public treason and bind them into
bundles and burn them. And the other is the disruption that may come
prematurely, negatively, and suddenly in the night; like the fire in my
little town.
It may come because the mere strain of modern life is unbearable; and in
it even the things that men do desire may break down; marriage and
fair ownership and worship and the mysterious worth of man. The two
revolutions, white and black, are racing each other like two railway
trains; I cannot guess the issue...but even as I thought of it, the
tallest turret of the timber stooped and faltered and came down in a
cataract of noises. And the fire, finding passage, went up with a spout
like a fountain. It stood far up among the stars for an instant, a
blazing pillar of brass fit for a pagan conqueror, so high that one
could fancy it visible away among the goblin trees of Burnham or along
the terraces of the Chiltern Hills.
THE FREE MAN
The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men
find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally
to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save
their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice. Ruskin rebuked
Coleridge for praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sun
to be free. It seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be the
sun. Speaking as a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea of
Joshua stopping the sun in heaven than with the idea of Ruskin trotting
his daily round in imitation of its regularity. Joshua was a Radical,
and his astronomical act was distinctly revolutionary. For all
revolution is the mastering of matter by the spirit of man, the
emergence of that human authority within us which, in the noble words of
Sir Thomas Browne, “owes no homage unto the sun.”
Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant
merely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like a
tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in
selecting and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaning
of the trade of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the real
idea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use the
word “make” about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as
a country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man “makes his
way” through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the
Romans. When a man “makes a friend,” he makes a man. And in the third
case we talk of a man “making love,” as if he were (as, indeed, he is)
creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful form
of manufacture. In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in
man, or, if you like the word, the artist.
In its secondary political sense liberty is the living influence of the
citizen on the State in the direction of moulding or deflecting it. Men
are the only creatures that evidently possess it. On the one hand, the
eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness. On the other hand, ants,
bees, and beavers exhibit the highest miracle of the State influencing
the citizen; but no perceptible trace of the citizen influencing the
State. You may, if you like, call the ants a democracy as you may
call the bees a despotism. But I fancy that the architectural ant who
attempted to introduce an art nouveau style of ant-hill would have a
career as curt and fruitless as the celebrated bee who wanted to swarm
alone. The isolation of this idea in humanity is akin to its religious
character; but it is not even in humanity by any means equally
distributed. The idea that the State should not only be supported by
its children, like the ant-hill, but should be constantly criticised and
reconstructed by them, is an idea stronger in Christendom than any
other part of the planet; stronger in Western than Eastern Europe. And
touching the pure idea of the individual being free to speak and act
within limits, the assertion of this idea, we may fairly say, has been
the peculiar honour of our own country. For my part I greatly prefer the
Jingoism of Rule Britannia to the Imperialism of The Recessional. I have
no objection to Britannia ruling the waves. I draw the line when
she begins to rule the dry land--and such damnably dry land
too--as in Africa. And there was a real old English sincerity
in the vulgar chorus that “Britons never shall be slaves.” We had no
equality and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of.
And I think just now it is worth while to draw attention to the old
optimistic prophecy that “Britons never shall be slaves.”
The mere love of liberty has never been at a lower ebb in England than
it has been for the last twenty years. Never before has it been so easy
to slip small Bills through Parliament for the purpose of locking people
up. Never was it so easy to silence awkward questions, or to protect
high-placed officials. Two hundred years ago we turned out the Stuarts
rather than endanger the Habeas Corpus Act. Two years ago we abolished
the Habeas Corpus Act rather than turn out the Home Secretary. We passed
a law (which is now in force) that an Englishman's punishment shall not
depend upon judge and jury, but upon the governors and jailers who have
got hold of him. But this is not the only case. The scorn of liberty
is in the air. A newspaper is seized by the police in Trafalgar Square
without a word of accusation or explanation. The Home Secretary says
that in his opinion the police are very nice people, and there is an end
of the matter. A Member of Parliament attempts to criticise a peerage.
The Speaker says he must not criticise a peerage, and there the matter
drops.
Political liberty, let us repeat, consists in the power of
criticising those flexible parts of the State which constantly require
reconsideration, not the basis, but the machinery. In plainer words,
it means the power of saying the sort of things that a decent but
discontented citizen wants to say. He does not want to spit on the
Bible, or to run about without clothes, or to read the worst page in
Zola from the pulpit of St. Paul's. Therefore the forbidding of these
things (whether just or not) is only tyranny in a secondary and special
sense. It restrains the abnormal, not the normal man. But the normal
man, the decent discontented citizen, does want to protest against
unfair law courts. He does want to expose brutalities of the police.
He does want to make game of a vulgar pawnbroker who is made a Peer. He
does want publicly to warn people against unscrupulous capitalists and
suspicious finance. If he is run in for doing this (as he will be)
he does want to proclaim the character or known prejudices of the
magistrate who tries him. If he is sent to prison (as he will be) he
does want to have a clear and civilised sentence, telling him when he
will come out. And these are literally and exactly the things that
he now cannot get. That is the almost cloying humour of the present
situation. I can say abnormal things in modern magazines. It is the
normal things that I am not allowed to say. I can write in some solemn
quarterly an elaborate article explaining that God is the devil; I can
write in some cultured weekly an aesthetic fancy describing how I
should like to eat boiled baby. The thing I must not write is rational
criticism of the men and institutions of my country.
The present condition of England is briefly this: That no Englishman can
say in public a twentieth part of what he says in private. One cannot
say, for instance, that--But I am afraid I must leave out
that instance, because one cannot say it. I cannot prove my
case--because it is so true.
THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER
We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-minded
that he paid a call at his own house. My own absent-mindedness is
extreme, and my philosophy, of course, is the marvel of men and angels.
But I never quite managed to be so absent-minded as that. Some yards at
least from my own door, something vaguely familiar has always caught
my eye; and thus the joke has been spoiled. Of course I have quite
constantly walked into another man's house, thinking it was my own
house; my visits became almost monotonous. But walking into my own house
and thinking it was another man's house is a flight of poetic detachment
still beyond me. Something of the sensations that such an absent-minded
man must feel I really felt the other day; and very pleasant sensations
they were. The best parts of every proper romance are the first chapter
and the last chapter; and to knock at a strange door and find a nice
wife would be to concentrate the beginning and end of all romance.