two modes of historical construction and development. For there is not
really very much difference, as European history goes, in the time that
has elapsed between us and the Jacobite and between us and the Jacobin.
When George III was crowned the gauntlet of the King's Champion was
picked up by a partisan of the Stuarts. When George III was still on the
throne the Bourbons were driven out of France as the Stuarts had been
driven out of England. Yet the French are just sufficiently aware that
the Bourbons might possibly return that they will take a little trouble
to discourage it; whereas we are so certain that the Stuarts will never
return that we actually play their most passionate tunes as a compliment
to their rivals. And we do not even do it tauntingly. I examined the
faces of all the bandsmen; and I am sure they were devoid of irony:
indeed, it is difficult to blow a wind instrument ironically. We do it
quite unconsciously; because we have a huge fundamental dogma, which the
French have not. We really believe that the past is past. It is a very
doubtful point.
Now the great gift of a revolution (as in France) is that it makes men
free in the past as well as free in the future. Those who have cleared
away everything could, if they liked, put back everything. But we who
have preserved everything--we cannot restore anything. Take,
for the sake of argument, the complex and many coloured ritual of the
Coronation recently completed. That rite is stratified with the separate
centuries; from the first rude need of discipline to the last fine shade
of culture or corruption, there is nothing that cannot be detected or
even dated. The fierce and childish vow of the lords to serve their lord
“against all manner of folk” obviously comes from the real Dark Ages;
no longer confused, even by the ignorant, with the Middle Ages. It comes
from some chaos of Europe, when there was one old Roman road across four
of our counties; and when hostile “folk” might live in the next village.
The sacramental separation of one man to be the friend of the fatherless
and the nameless belongs to the true Middle Ages; with their great
attempt to make a moral and invisible Roman Empire; or (as the
Coronation Service says) to set the cross for ever above the ball.
Elaborate local tomfooleries, such as that by which the Lord of the
Manor of Work-sop is alone allowed to do something or other, these
probably belong to the decay of the Middle Ages, when that great
civilisation died out in grotesque literalism and entangled heraldry.
Things like the presentation of the Bible bear witness to the
intellectual outburst at the Reformation; things like the Declaration
against the Mass bear witness to the great wars of the Puritans; and
things like the allegiance of the Bishops bear witness to the wordy and
parenthetical political compromises which (to my deep regret) ended the
wars of religion.
But my purpose here is only to point out one particular thing. In all
that long list of variations there must be, and there are, things
which energetic modern minds would really wish, with the reasonable
modification, to restore. Dr. Clifford would probably be glad to see
again the great Puritan idealism that forced the Bible into an antique
and almost frozen formality. Dr. Horton probably really regrets the
old passion that excommunicated Rome. In the same way Mr. Belloc
would really prefer the Middle Ages; as Lord Rosebery would prefer
the Erastian oligarchy of the eighteenth century. The Dark Ages would
probably be disputed (from widely different motives) by Mr. Rudyard
Kipling and Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But Mr. Cunninghame Graham would
win.
But the black case against Conservative (or Evolutionary) politics is
that none of these sincere men can win. Dr. Clifford cannot get back
to the Puritans; Mr. Belloc cannot get back to the mediævals; because
(alas) there has been no Revolution to leave them a clear space for
building or rebuilding. Frenchmen have all the ages behind them, and can
wander back and pick and choose. But Englishmen have all the ages on top
of them, and can only lie groaning under that imposing tower, without
being able to take so much as a brick out of it. If the French decide
that their Republic is bad they can get rid of it; but if we decide that
a Republic was good, we should have much more difficulty. If the French
democracy actually desired every detail of the mediæval monarchy, they
could have it. I do not think they will or should, but they could. If
another Dauphin were actually crowned at Rheims; if another Joan of Arc
actually bore a miraculous banner before him; if mediæval swords shook
and blazed in every gauntlet; if the golden lilies glowed from every
tapestry; if this were really proved to be the will of France and the
purpose of Providence--such a scene would still be the lasting and
final justification of the French Revolution.
For no such scene could conceivably have happened under Louis XVI.
THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS
In the very laudable and fascinating extensions of our interest in
Asiatic arts or faiths, there are two incidental injustices which we
tend nowadays to do to our own records and our own religion. The first
is a tendency to talk as if certain things were not only present in the
higher Orientals, but were peculiar to them. Thus our magazines will
fall into a habit of wondering praise of Bushido, the Japanese chivalry,
as if no Western knights had ever vowed noble vows, or as if no Eastern
knights had ever broken them. Or again, our drawing-rooms will be full
of the praises of Indian renunciation and Indian unworldliness, as if no
Christians had been saints, or as if all Buddhists had been. But if the
first injustice is to think of human virtues as peculiarly Eastern, the
other injustice is a failure to appreciate what really is peculiarly
Eastern. It is too much taken for granted that the Eastern sort of
idealism is certainly superior and convincing; whereas in truth it is
only separate and peculiar. All that is richest, deepest, and subtlest
in the East is rooted in Pantheism; but all that is richest, deepest,
and subtlest in us is concerned with denying passionately that Pantheism
is either the highest or the purest religion.
Thus, in turning over some excellent books recently written on the
spirit of Indian or Chinese art and decoration, I found it quietly and
curiously assumed that the artist must be at his best if he flows with
the full stream of Nature; and identifies himself with all things; so
that the stars are his sleepless eyes and the forests his far-flung
arms. Now in this way of talking both the two injustices will be found.
In so far as what is claimed is a strong sense of the divine in all
things, the Eastern artists have no more monopoly of it than they have
of hunger and thirst.
I have no doubt that the painters and poets of the Far East do exhibit
this; but I rebel at being asked to admit that we must go to the Far
East to find it. Traces of such sentiments can be found, I fancy, even
in other painters and poets. I do not question that the poet Wo Wo (that
ornament of the eighth dynasty) may have written the words: “Even the
most undignified vegetable is for this person capable of producing
meditations not to be exhibited by much weeping.” But, I do not
therefore admit that a Western gentleman named Wordsworth (who made
a somewhat similar remark) had plagiarised from Wo Wo, or was a mere
Occidental fable and travesty of that celebrated figure. I do not deny
that Tinishona wrote that exquisite example of the short Japanese poem
entitled “Honourable Chrysanthemum in Honourable Hole in Wall.” But I do
not therefore admit that Tennyson's little verse about the flower in the
cranny was not original and even sincere.
It is recorded (for all I know) of the philanthropic Emperor Bo, that
when engaged in cutting his garden lawn with a mower made of alabaster
and chrysoberyl, he chanced to cut down a small flower; whereupon, being
much affected, he commanded his wise men immediately to take down upon
tablets of ivory the lines beginning: “Small and unobtrusive blossom
with ruby extremities.” But this incident, touching as it is, does not
shake my belief in the incident of Robert Burns and the daisy; and I am
left with an impression that poets are pretty much the same everywhere
in their poetry--and in their prose.
I have tried to convey my sympathy and admiration for Eastern art and
its admirers, and if I have not conveyed them I must give it up and go
on to more general considerations. I therefore proceed to say--with
the utmost respect, that it is Cheek, a rarefied and etherealised form
of Cheek, for this school to speak in this way about the mother that
bore them, the great civilisation of the West. The West also has its
magic landscapes, only through our incurable materialism they look
like landscapes as well as like magic. The West also has its symbolic
figures, only they look like men as well as symbols. It will be answered
(and most justly) that Oriental art ought to be free to follow its own
instinct and tradition; that its artists are concerned to suggest one
thing and our artists another; that both should be admired in their
difference. Profoundly true; but what is the difference? It is certainly
not as the Orientalisers assert, that we must go to the Far East for a
sympathetic and transcendental interpretation of Nature. We have paid
a long enough toll of mystics and even of madmen to be quit of that
disability.
Yet there is a difference, and it is just what I suggested. The Eastern
mysticism is an ecstasy of unity; the Christian mysticism is an ecstasy
of creation, that is of separation and mutual surprise. The latter says,
like St. Francis, “My brother fire and my sister water”; the former
says, “Myself fire and myself water.” Whether you call the Eastern
attitude an extension of oneself into everything or a contraction of
oneself into nothing is a matter of metaphysical definition. The
effect is the same, an effect which lives and throbs throughout all the
exquisite arts of the East. This effect is the Sing called rhythm, a
pulsation of pattern, or of ritual, or of colours, or of cosmic theory,
but always suggesting the unification of the individual with the world.
But there is quite another kind of sympathy the sympathy with a
thing because it is different. No one will say that Rembrandt did not
sympathise with an old woman; but no one will say that Rembrandt painted
like an old woman. No one will say that Reynolds did not appreciate
children; but no one will say he did it childishly. The supreme instance
of this divine division is sex, and that explains (what I could never
understand in my youth) why Christendom called the soul the bride of
God. For real love is an intense realisation of the “separateness” of
all our souls. The most heroic and human love-poetry of the world is
never mere passion; precisely because mere passion really is a melting
back into Nature, a meeting of the waters. And water is plunging
and powerful; but it is only powerful downhill. The high and human
love-poetry is all about division rather than identity; and in the great
love-poems even the man as he embraces the woman sees her, in the same
instant, afar off; a virgin and a stranger.
For the first injustice, of which we have spoken, still recurs; and if
we grant that the East has a right to its difference, it is not realised
in what we differ. That nursery tale from nowhere about St. George and
the Dragon really expresses best the relation between the West and the
East. There were many other differences, calculated to arrest even
the superficial eye, between a saint and a dragon. But the essential
difference was simply this: that the Dragon did want to eat St. George;
whereas St. George would have felt a strong distaste for eating the
Dragon. In most of the stories he killed the Dragon. In many of the
stories he not only spared, but baptised it. But in neither case did the
Christian have any appetite for cold dragon. The Dragon, however,
really has an appetite for cold Christian--and especially for cold
Christianity. This blind intention to absorb, to change the shape of
everything and digest it in the darkness of a dragon's stomach; this is
what is really meant by the Pantheism and Cosmic Unity of the East. The
Cosmos as such is cannibal; as old Time ate his children. The Eastern
saints were saints because they wanted to be swallowed up. The Western
saint, like St. George, was sainted by the Western Church precisely
because he refused to be swallowed. The same process of thought that has
prevented nationalities disappearing in Christendom has prevented the
complete appearance of Pantheism. All Christian men instinctively resist
the idea of being absorbed into an Empire; an Austrian, a Spanish, a
British, or a Turkish Empire. But there is one empire, much larger and
much more tyrannical, which free men will resist with even stronger
passion. The free man violently resists being absorbed into the empire
which is called the Universe. He demands Home Rule for his nationality,
but still more Home Rule for his home. Most of all he demands Home
Rule for himself. He claims the right to be saved, in spite of Moslem
fatalism. He claims the right to be damned in spite of theosophical
optimism. He refuses to be the Cosmos; because he refuses to forget it.
THE MUMMER
The night before Christmas Eve I heard a burst of musical voices so
close that they might as well have been inside the house instead of
just outside; so I asked them inside, hoping that they might then seem
farther away. Then I realised that they were the Christmas Mummers, who
come every year in country parts to enact the rather rigid fragments of
the old Christmas play of St. George, the Turkish Knight, and the Very
Venal Doctor. I will not describe it; it is indescribable; but I will
describe my parallel sentiments as it passed.
One could see something of that half-failure that haunts our artistic
revivals of mediæval dances, carols, or Bethlehem Plays. There are
elements in all that has come to us from the more morally simple
society of the Middle Ages: elements which moderns, even when they are
mediævalists, find it hard to understand and harder to imitate. The
first is the primary idea of Mummery itself. If you will observe a child
just able to walk, you will see that his first idea is not to dress up
as anybody--but to dress up. Afterwards, of course, the idea
of being the King or Uncle William will leap to his lips. But it is
generally suggested by the hat he has already let fall over his nose,
from far deeper motives. Tommy does not assume the hat primarily because
it is Uncle William's hat, but because it is not Tommy's hat. It is a
ritual investiture; and is akin to those Gorgon masks that stiffened the
dances of Greece or those towering mitres that came from the mysteries
of Persia. For the essence of such ritual is a profound paradox: the
concealment of the personality combined with the exaggeration of the
person. The man performing a rite seeks to be at once invisible and
conspicuous. It is part of that divine madness which all other creatures
wonder at in Man, that he alone parades this pomp of obliteration and
anonymity. Man is not, perhaps, the only creature who dresses himself,
but he is the only creature who disguises himself. Beasts and birds do
indeed take the colours of their environment; but that is not in order
to be watched, but in order not to be watched; it is not the formalism
of rejoicing, but the formlessness of fear. It is not so with men, whose
nature is the unnatural. Ancient Britons did not stain themselves blue
because they lived in blue forests; nor did Georgian beaux and belles
powder their hair to match an Arctic landscape; the Britons were not
dressing up as kingfishers nor the beaux pretending to be polar bears.
Nay, even when modern ladies paint their faces a bright mauve, it is
doubted by some naturalists whether they do it with the idea of escaping
notice. So merry-makers (or Mummers) adopt their costume to heighten
and exaggerate their own bodily presence and identity; not to sink it,
primarily speaking, in another identity. It is not Acting--that
comparatively low profession—comparatively I mean. It is Mummery;
and, as Mr. Kensit would truly say, all elaborate religious ritual is
Mummery. That is, it is the noble conception of making Man something
other and more than himself when he stands at the limit of human things.
It is only careful faddists and feeble German philosophers who want to
wear no clothes; and be “natural” in their Dionysian revels. Natural
men, really vigorous and exultant men, want to wear more and more
clothes when they are revelling. They want worlds of waistcoats and
forests of trousers and pagodas of tall hats toppling up to the stars.
Thus it is with the lingering Mummers at Christmas in the country. If
our more refined revivers of Miracle Plays or Morrice Dances tried to
reconstruct the old Mummers' Play of St. George and the Turkish Knight
(I do not know why they do not) they would think at once of picturesque
and appropriate dresses. St. George's panoply would be pictured from
the best books of armour and blazonry: the Turkish Knight's arms and
ornaments would be traced from the finest Saracenic arabesques. When my
garden door opened on Christmas Eve and St. George of England entered,
the appearance of that champion was slightly different. His face was
energetically blacked all over with soot, above which he wore an
aged and very tall top hat; he wore his shirt outside his coat like a
surplice, and he flourished a thick umbrella. Now do not, I beg you,
talk about “ignorance”; or suppose that the Mummer in question (he is a
very pleasant Ratcatcher, with a tenor voice) did this because he knew
no better. Try to realise that even a Ratcatcher knows St. George of
England was not black, and did not kill the Dragon with an umbrella.
The Rat-catcher is not under this delusion; any more than Paul Veronese
thought that very good men have luminous rings round their heads; any
more than the Pope thinks that Christ washed the feet of the twelve in
a Cathedral; any more than the Duke of Norfolk thinks the lions on a
tabard are like the lions at the Zoo. These things are denaturalised
because they are symbols; because the extraordinary occasion must hide
or even disfigure the ordinary people. Black faces were to mediæval
mummeries what carved masks were to Greek plays: it was called being
“vizarded.” My Rat-catcher is not sufficiently arrogant to suppose for
a moment that he looks like St. George. But he is sufficiently humble to
be convinced that if he looks as little like himself as he can, he will
be on the right road.
This is the soul of Mumming; the ostentatious secrecy of men in
disguise. There are, of course, other mediæval elements in it which
are also difficult to explain to the fastidious mediævalists of to-day.
There is, for instance, a certain output of violence into the void. It
can best be defined as a raging thirst to knock men down without the
faintest desire to hurt them. All the rhymes with the old ring have the
trick of turning on everything in which the rhymsters most sincerely
believed, merely for the pleasure of blowing off steam in startling
yet careless phrases. When Tennyson says that King Arthur “drew all the
petty princedoms under him,” and “made a realm and ruled,” his grave
Royalism is quite modern. Many mediævals, outside the mediæval
republics, believed in monarchy as solemnly as Tennyson. But that older
verse
When good King Arthur ruled this land
He was a goodly King--
He stole three pecks of barley-meal
To make a bag-pudding.
is far more Arthurian than anything in The Idylls of the King. There are
other elements; especially that sacred thing that can perhaps be called
Anachronism. All that to us is Anachronism was to mediævals merely
Eternity. But the main excellence of the Mumming Play lies still,
I think, in its uproarious secrecy. If we cannot hide our hearts in
healthy darkness, at least we can hide our faces in healthy blacking.
If you cannot escape like a philosopher into a forest, at least you can
carry the forest with you, like a Jack-in-the-Green. It is well to walk
under universal ensigns; and there is an old tale of a tyrant to whom
a walking forest was the witness of doom. That, indeed, is the very
intensity of the notion: a masked man is ominous; but who shall face a
mob of masks?
THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY
The Cheap Tripper, pursued by the curses of the aesthetes and the
antiquaries, really is, I suppose, a symptom of the strange and almost
unearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customs
of a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does
not necessarily follow from mere poverty, or mere democracy, or mere
unlettered simplicity of mind.
But though the tripper, artistically considered, is a sign of our
decadence, he is not one of its worst signs, but relatively one of its
best; one of its most innocent and most sincere. Compared with many
of the philosophers and artists who denounce him; he looks like a God
fearing fisher or a noble mountaineer. His antics with donkeys and
concertinas, crowded charabancs, and exchanged hats, though clumsy, are
not so vicious or even so fundamentally vulgar as many of the amusements
of the overeducated. People are not more crowded on a char-a-banc than
they are at a political “At Home,” or even an artistic soiree; and if
the female trippers are overdressed, at least they are not overdressed
and underdressed at the same time. It is better to ride a donkey than to
be a donkey. It is better to deal with the Cockney festival which asks
men and women to change hats, rather than with the modern Utopia that
wants them to change heads.
But the truth is that such small, but real, element of vulgarity as
there is indeed in the tripper, is part of a certain folly and falsity
which is characteristic of much modernity, and especially of the very
people who persecute the poor tripper most. There is something in the
whole society, and even especially in the cultured part of it, that does
things in a clumsy and unbeautiful way.
A case occurs to me in the matter of Stonehenge, which I happened to
visit yesterday. Now to a person really capable of feeling the poetry of
Stonehenge it is almost a secondary matter whether he sees Stonehenge
at all. The vast void roll of the empty land towards Salisbury, the gray
tablelands like primeval altars, the trailing rain-clouds, the vapour
of primeval sacrifices, would all tell him of a very ancient and
very lonely Britain. It would not spoil his Druidic mood if he
missed Stonehenge. But it does spoil his mood to find
Stonehenge--surrounded by a brand-new fence of barbed wire, with a
policeman and a little shop selling picture post-cards.
Now if you protest against this, educated people will instantly answer
you, “Oh, it was done to prevent the vulgar trippers who chip stones and
carve names and spoil the look of Stonehenge.” It does not seem to
occur to them that barbed wire and a policeman rather spoil the look of
Stonehenge. The scratching of a name, particularly when performed
with blunt penknife or pencil by a person of imperfect School Board
education, can be trusted in a little while to be indistinguishable from
the grayest hieroglyphic by the grandest Druid of old. But nobody could
get a modern policeman into the same picture with a Druid. This really
vital piece of vandalism was done by the educated, not the uneducated;
it was done by the influence of the artists or antiquaries who wanted
to preserve the antique beauty of Stonehenge. It seems to me curious to
preserve your lady's beauty from freckles by blacking her face all over;
or to protect the pure whiteness of your wedding garment by dyeing it
green.