of a small French town and found its cathedral. It was one of those gray
and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden,
like the solid blue-gray lead of the spires and the jewelled windows;
the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping
with damp; and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were
scoured with old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch with
many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain.
I also found a notice of services, etc., and among these I found the
announcement that at 11.30 (that is about half an hour later) there
would be a special service for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draft
of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town
and sent to serve in the French Army; sent (as it happened) at an awful
moment, when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways.
There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only of
all kinds, but in all attitudes, kneeling, sitting, or standing
about. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a
Protestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or
likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was “going on all the
time”; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if it
were a sort of mystical inn.
Several tricolours were hung quite near to the altar, and the young men,
when they came in, filed up the church and sat right at the front.
They were, of course, of every imaginable social grade; for the French
conscription is really strict and universal. Some looked like young
criminals, some like young priests, some like both. Some were so
obviously prosperous and polished that a barrack-room must seem to
them like hell; others (by the look of them) had hardly ever been in so
decent a place. But it was not so much the mere class variety that most
sharply caught an Englishman's eye. It was the presence of just those
one or two kinds of men who would never have become soldiers in any
other way.
There are many reasons for becoming a soldier. It may be a matter of
hereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice; it
may be an interest in the work or a lack of interest in any other work.
But there would always be two or three kinds of people who would never
tend to soldiering; all those kinds of people were there. A lad with red
hair, large ears, and very careful clothing, somehow conveyed across
the church that he had always taken care of his health, not even from
thinking about it, but simply because he was told, and that he was one
of those who pass from childhood to manhood without any shock of being a
man. In the row in front of him there was a very slight and vivid little
Jew, of the sort that is a tailor and a Socialist. By one of those
accidents that make real life so unlike anything else, he was the one
of the company who seemed especially devout. Behind these stiff or
sensitive boys were ranged the ranks of their mothers and fathers, with
knots and bunches of their little brothers and sisters.
The children kicked their little legs, wriggled about the seats, and
gaped at the arched roof while their mothers were on their knees praying
their own prayers, and here and there crying. The gray clouds of
rain outside gathered, I suppose, more and more; for the deep church
continuously darkened. The lads in front began to sing a military hymn
in odd, rather strained voices; I could not disentangle the words, but
only one perpetual refrain; so that it sounded like
Sacrarterumbrrar pour la patrie,
Valdarkararump pour la patrie.
Then this ceased; and silence continued, the coloured windows growing
gloomier and gloomier with the clouds. In the dead stillness a child
started crying suddenly and incoherently. In a city far to the north a
French diplomatist and a German aristocrat were talking.
I will not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outline
of its almost cruel actuality. I will not talk nor allow any one else to
talk about “clericalism” and “militarism.” Those who talk like that are
made of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate
“Socialism.” The women who were calling in the gloom around me on God
and the Mother of God were not “clericalists”; or, if they were,
they had forgotten it. And I will bet my boots the young men were not
“militarists”--quite the other way just then. The priest made a
short speech; he did not utter any priestly dogmas (whatever they are),
he uttered platitudes. In such circumstances platitudes are the only
possible things to say; because they are true. He began by saying that
he supposed a large number of them would be uncommonly glad not to go.
They seemed to assent to this particular priestly dogma with even
more than their alleged superstitious credulity. He said that war was
hateful, and that we all hated it; but that “in all things reasonable”
the law of one's own commonwealth was the voice of God. He spoke about
Joan of Arc; and how she had managed to be a bold and successful soldier
while still preserving her virtue and practising her religion; then he
gave them each a little paper book. To which they replied (after a brief
interval for reflection):
Pongprongperesklang pour la patrie,
Tambraugtararronc pour la patrie.
which I feel sure was the best and most pointed reply.
While all this was happening feelings quite indescribable crowded
about my own darkening brain, as the clouds crowded above the darkening
church. They were so entirely of the elements and the passions that I
cannot utter them in an idea, but only in an image. It seemed to me
that we were barricaded in this church, but we could not tell what was
happening outside the church. The monstrous and terrible jewels of the
windows darkened or glistened under moving shadow or light, but the
nature of that light and the shapes of those shadows we did not know and
hardly dared to guess. The dream began, I think, with a dim fancy that
enemies were already in the town, and that the enormous oaken doors were
groaning under their hammers. Then I seemed to suppose that the town
itself had been destroyed by fire, and effaced, as it may be thousands
of years hence, and that if I opened the door I should come out on a
wilderness as flat and sterile as the sea. Then the vision behind the
veil of stone and slate grew wilder with earthquakes. I seemed to
see chasms cloven to the foundations of all things, and letting up an
infernal dawn. Huge things happily hidden from us had climbed out of
the abyss, and were striding about taller than the clouds. And when the
darkness crept from the sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments of
St. John I fancied that some hideous giant was walking round the church
and looking in at each window in turn.
Sometimes, again, I thought of that church with coloured windows as a
ship carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night. Sometimes
I thought of it as a great coloured lantern itself, hung on an iron
chain out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings, the
wings of the princes of the air. But I never thought of it or the young
men inside it save as something precious and in peril, or of the things
outside but as something barbaric and enormous.
I know there are some who cannot sympathise with such sentiments of
limitation; I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroic
tenderness if some day a young man, with red hair, large ears, and
his mother's lozenges in his pocket, were found dead in uniform in the
passes of the Vosges. But on this subject I have heard many philosophies
and thought a good deal for myself; and the conclusion I have come to is
Sacrarterumbrrar pour la Pattie, and it is not likely that I shall alter
it now.
But when I came out of the church there were none of these things,
but only a lot of Shops, including a paper-shop, on which the posters
announced that the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily.
THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS
It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by
some special sort of lunatic. A mild touch of madness may even keep a
man sane; for it may keep him modest. So some exaggerations in the State
may remind it of its own normal. But it is bad when the head is cracked;
when the roof of the commonwealth has a tile loose.
The two or three cases of this that occur in history have always been
gibbeted gigantically. Thus Nero has become a black proverb, not
merely because he was an oppressor, but because he was also an
aesthete--that is, an erotomaniac. He not only tortured other
people's bodies; he tortured his own soul into the same red revolting
shapes. Though he came quite early in Roman Imperial history and was
followed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the Roman
Empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman. The
populace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour when
they came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal of
the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and saw
a statue without a head.
It is the same with that ugly entanglement before the Renaissance, from
which, alas, most memories of the Middle Ages are derived. Louis XI
was a very patient and practical man of the world; but (like many
good business men) he was mad. The morbidity of the intriguer and the
torturer clung about everything he did, even when it was right. And just
as the great Empire of Antoninus and Aurelius never wiped out Nero, so
even the silver splendour of the latter saints, such as Vincent de Paul,
has never painted out for the British public the crooked shadow of Louis
XI. Whenever the unhealthy man has been on top, he has left a horrible
savour that humanity finds still in its nostrils. Now in our time the
unhealthy man is on top; but he is not the man mad on sex, like Nero; or
mad on statecraft, like Louis XI; he is simply the man mad on money. Our
tyrant is not the satyr or the torturer; but the miser.
The modern miser has changed much from the miser of legend and anecdote;
but only because he has grown yet more insane. The old miser had
some touch of the human artist about him in so far that he collected
gold--a substance that can really be admired for itself, like ivory
or old oak. An old man who picked up yellow pieces had something of the
simple ardour, something of the mystical materialism, of a child who
picks out yellow flowers. Gold is but one kind of coloured clay, but
coloured clay can be very beautiful. The modern idolater of riches is
content with far less genuine things. The glitter of guineas is like
the glitter of buttercups, the chink of pelf is like the chime of bells,
compared with the dreary papers and dead calculations which make the
hobby of the modern miser.
The modern millionaire loves nothing so lovable as a coin. He is content
sometimes with the dead crackle of notes; but far more often with the
mere repetition of noughts in a ledger, all as like each other as eggs
to eggs. And as for comfort, the old miser could be comfortable, as many
tramps and savages are, when he was once used to being unclean. A man
could find some comfort in an unswept attic or an unwashed shirt. But
the Yankee millionaire can find no comfort with five telephones at his
bed-head and ten minutes for his lunch. The round coins in the miser's
stocking were safe in some sense. The round noughts in the millionaire's
ledger are safe in no sense; the same fluctuation which excites him with
their increase depresses him with their diminution. The miser at least
collects coins; his hobby is numismatics. The man who collects noughts
collects nothings.
It may be admitted that the man amassing millions is a bit of an idiot;
but it may be asked in what sense does he rule the modern world. The
answer to this is very important and rather curious. The evil enigma
for us here is not the rich, but the Very Rich. The distinction is
important; because this special problem is separate from the old general
quarrel about rich and poor that runs through the Bible and all strong
books, old and new. The special problem to-day is that certain powers
and privileges have grown so world-wide and unwieldy that they are out
of the power of the moderately rich as well as of the moderately
poor. They are out of the power of everybody except a few
millionaires--that is, misers. In the old normal friction of normal
wealth and poverty I am myself on the Radical side. I think that a
Berkshire squire has too much power over his tenants; that a Brompton
builder has too much power over his workmen; that a West London doctor
has too much power over the poor patients in the West London Hospital.
But a Berkshire squire has no power over cosmopolitan finance, for
instance. A Brompton builder has not money enough to run a Newspaper
Trust. A West End doctor could not make a corner in quinine and freeze
everybody out. The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern
market. The things that change modern history, the big national and
international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations,
the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages,
the big expenses often incurred in elections--these are getting too
big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly
fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims.
There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about
them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the
chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser
aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even
good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are
sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their
patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to
sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous
man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will
never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old
bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough
to want it.
Lastly, the most serious point about them is this: that the new miser
is flattered for his meanness and the old one never was. It was never
called self-denial in the old miser that he lived on bones. It is called
self-denial in the new millionaire if he lives on beans. A man like
Dancer was never praised as a Christian saint for going in rags. A
man like Rockefeller is praised as a sort of pagan stoic for his
early rising or his unassuming dress. His “simple” meals, his “simple”
clothes, his “simple” funeral, are all extolled as if they were
creditable to him. They are disgraceful to him: exactly as disgraceful
as the tatters and vermin of the old miser were disgraceful to him. To
be in rags for charity would be the condition of a saint; to be in rags
for money was that of a filthy old fool. Precisely in the same way,
to be “simple” for charity is the state of a saint; to be “simple” for
money is that of a filthy old fool. Of the two I have more respect for
the old miser, gnawing bones in an attic: if he was not nearer to God,
he was at least a little nearer to men. His simple life was a little
more like the life of the real poor.
THE MYSTAGOGUE
Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and
impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your
aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is
perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond
all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all
good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment;
and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is
always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are
that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.
Thus Giotto or Fra Angelico would have at once admitted theologically
that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint
Him. And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a rather
quaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard, like a king of the
elves, was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Him
in some way. That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy
pictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, more
blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of good
is always towards Incarnation. But, on the other hand, those refined
thinkers who worship the Devil, whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the
salons of Paris, always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness,
the unutterable character of the abomination. They call him “horror
of emptiness,” as did the black witch in Stevenson's Dynamiter; they
worship him as the unspeakable name; as the unbearable silence. They
think of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind; the cloud on
the brain of the maniac; the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endless
corridors of nightmare. It was the Christians who gave the Devil a
grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. It
was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanists
never drew him at all.
And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity
and mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we may
separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt
from mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he
has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has
no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too
subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outree or
specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary
people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable
that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is
always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable;
but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to
come out of it.
Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the
thing called Art, and the people called Art Critics. It is obvious that
an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy
cunning that has made them what they are. It is equally obvious that
a landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape; a portrait
painter only half of the person; they are lucky if they express so much.
And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of the
pictures can only express half of them, and that the less important
half. Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken that
connects God With Nature, or Nature with men, or men with critics. The
“Mona Lisa” was in some respects (not all, I fancy) what God meant her
to be. Leonardo's picture was, in some respects, like the lady. And
Walter Pater's rich description was, in some respects, like the picture.
Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature, in the
last resort, can express something other than its own unhappy self.
Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely
inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being
speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. But if there is any good in
Botticelli (there is much good, and much evil too) it is emphatically
the critic's business to explain it: to translate it from terms of
painting into terms of diction. Of course, the rendering will be
inadequate--but so is Botticelli. It is a fact he would be the
first to admit. But anything which has been intelligently received can
at least be intelligently suggested. Pater does suggest an intelligent
cause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli's “Venus Rising from the
Sea.” Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for Turner destroying
forests and falsifying landscapes. These two great critics were far too
fastidious for my taste; they urged to excess the idea that a sense
of art was a sort of secret; to be patiently taught and slowly learnt.
Still, they thought it could be taught: they thought it could be learnt.
They constrained themselves, with considerable creative fatigue, to find
the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been
clone in Italian painting. The same is true of Whistler and R. A. M.
Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez. They had
something to say about the pictures; they knew it was unworthy of the
pictures, but they said it.
Now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post
Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They
are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt
to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is
untranslatable--that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable,
impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their
banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper
on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried
to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good
old anti-democratic muddlements: that “the public” does not understand
these things; that “the likes of us” cannot dare to question the dark
decisions of our lords.
I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simple
test mentioned above. If there were anything intelligent in such art,
something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature. Man
is made with one head, not with two or three. No criticism of Rembrandt
is as good as Rembrandt; but it can be so written as to make a man go
back and look at his pictures. If there is a curious and fantastic art,
it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantastic
literary expression for it; inferior to it, doubtless, but still akin to
it. If they cannot do this, as they cannot; if there is nothing in their
eulogies, as there is nothing except eulogy--then they are quacks
or the high-priests of the unutterable. If the art critics can say
nothing about the artists except that they are good it is because
the artists are bad. They can explain nothing because they have found
nothing; and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be
found.
THE RED REACTIONARY
The one case for Revolution is that it is the only quite clean and
complete road to anything--even to restoration. Revolution alone
can be not merely a revolt of the living, but also a resurrection of the
dead.
A friend of mine (one, in fact, who writes prominently on this paper)
was once walking down the street in a town of Western France, situated
in that area that used to be called La Vendee; which in that great
creative crisis about 1790 formed a separate and mystical soul of its
own, and made a revolution against a revolution. As my friend went down
this street he whistled an old French air which he had found, like Mr.
Gandish, “in his researches into 'istry,” and which had somehow taken
his fancy; the song to which those last sincere loyalists went into
battle. I think the words ran:
Monsieur de Charette.
Dit au gens d'ici.
Le roi va remettre.
Le fleur de lys.
My friend was (and is) a Radical, but he was (and is) an Englishman, and
it never occurred to him that there could be any harm in singing archaic
lyrics out of remote centuries; that one had to be a Catholic to enjoy
the “Dies Irae,” or a Protestant to remember “Lillibullero.” Yet he was
stopped and gravely warned that things so politically provocative might
get him at least into temporary trouble.
A little time after I was helping King George V to get crowned, by
walking round a local bonfire and listening to a local band. Just as a
bonfire cannot be too big, so (by my theory of music) a band cannot
be too loud, and this band was so loud, emphatic, and obvious, that I
actually recognised one or two of the tunes. And I noticed that quite a
formidable proportion of them were Jacobite tunes; that is, tunes that
had been primarily meant to keep George V out of his throne for ever.
Some of the real airs of the old Scottish rebellion were played, such
as “Charlie is My Darling,” or “What's a' the steer, kimmer?” songs that
men had sung while marching to destroy and drive out the monarchy under
which we live. They were songs in which the very kinsmen of the present
King were swept aside as usurpers. They were songs in which the actual
words “King George” occurred as a curse and a derision. Yet they
were played to celebrate his very Coronation; played as promptly and
innocently as if they had been “Grandfather's Clock” or “Rule Britannia”
or “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.”