most artistic age have done to save the monument?” I reply, “There are
hundreds of things that Greeks or Mediævals might have done; and I have
no notion what they would have chosen; but I say that by an instinct in
their whole society they would have done something that was decent and
serious and suitable to the place. Perhaps some family of knights or
warriors would have the hereditary duty of guarding such a place. If so
their armour would be appropriate; their tents would be appropriate;
not deliberately--they would grow like that. Perhaps some religious
order such as normally employ nocturnal watches and the relieving of
guard would protect such a place. Perhaps it would be protected by all
sorts of rituals, consecrations, or curses, which would seem to you
mere raving superstition and silliness. But they do not seem to me one
twentieth part so silly, from a purely rationalist point of view, as
calmly making a spot hideous in order to keep it beautiful.”
The thing that is really vulgar, the thing that is really vile, is to
live in a good place Without living by its life. Any one who settles
down in a place without becoming part of it is (barring peculiar
personal cases, of course) a tripper or wandering cad. For instance,
the Jew is a genuine peculiar case. The Wandering Jew is not a wandering
cad. He is a highly civilised man in a highly difficult position; the
world being divided, and his own nation being divided, about whether he
can do anything else except wander.
The best example of the cultured, but common, tripper is the educated
Englishman on the Continent. We can no longer explain the quarrel by
calling Englishmen rude and foreigners polite. Hundreds of Englishmen
are extremely polite, and thousands of foreigners are extremely rude.
The truth of the matter is that foreigners do not resent the rude
Englishman. What they do resent, what they do most justly resent, is
the polite Englishman. He visits Italy for Botticellis or Flanders
for Rembrandts, and he treats the great nations that made these things
courteously--as he would treat the custodians of any museum. It
does not seem to strike him that the Italian is not the custodian of the
pictures, but the creator of them. He can afford to look down on such
nations--when he can paint such pictures.
That is, in matters of art and travel, the psychology of the cad.
If, living in Italy, you admire Italian art while distrusting Italian
character, you are a tourist, or cad. If, living in Italy, you admire
Italian art while despising Italian religion, you are a tourist, or cad.
It does not matter how many years you have lived there. Tourists will
often live a long time in hotels without discovering the nationality
of the waiters. Englishmen will often live a long time in Italy without
discovering the nationality of the Italians. But the test is simple. If
you admire what Italians did without admiring Italians--you are a
cheap tripper.
The same, of course, applies much nearer home. I have remarked elsewhere
that country shopkeepers are justly offended by London people, who,
coming among them, continue to order all their goods from London. It is
caddish to wink and squint at the colour of a man's wine, like a wine
taster; and then refuse to drink it. It is equally caddish to wink and
squint at the colour of a man's orchard, like a landscape painter; and
then refuse to buy the apples. It is always an insult to admire a thing
and not use it. But the main point is that one has no right to see
Stonehenge without Salisbury Plain and Salisbury. One has no right to
respect the dead Italians without respecting the live ones. One has no
right to visit a Christian society like a diver visiting the deep-sea
fishes--fed along a lengthy tube by another atmosphere, and seeing
the sights without breathing the air. It is very real bad manners.
THE NEW THEOLOGIAN
It is an old story that names do not fit things; it is an old story
that the oldest forest is called the New Forest, and that Irish stew is
almost peculiar to England. But these are traditional titles that tend,
of their nature, to stiffen; it is the tragedy of to-day that even
phrases invented for to-day do not fit it. The forest has remained new
while it is nearly a thousand years old; but our fashions have grown old
while they were still new.
The extreme example of this is that when modern wrongs are attacked,
they are almost always attacked wrongly. People seem to have a positive
inspiration for finding the inappropriate phrase to apply to an
offender; they are always accusing a man of theft when he has been
convicted of murder. They must accuse Sir Edward Carson of outrageous
rebellion, when his offence has really been a sleek submission to
the powers that be. They must describe Mr. Lloyd George as using his
eloquence to rouse the mob, whereas he has really shown considerable
cleverness in damping it down. It was probably under the same impulse
towards a mysterious misfit of names that people denounced Dr. Inge as
“the Gloomy Dean.”
Now there is nothing whatever wrong about being a Dean; nor is there
anything wrong about being gloomy. The only question is what dark but
sincere motives have made you gloomy. What dark but sincere motives
have made you a Dean. Now the address of Dr. Inge which gained him
this erroneous title was mostly concerned with a defence of the modern
capitalists against the modern strikers, from whose protest he appeared
to anticipate appalling results. Now if we look at the facts about that
gentleman's depression and also about his Deanery, we shall find a very
curious state of things.
When Dr. Inge was called “the Gloomy Dean” a great injustice was done
him. He had appeared as the champion of our capitalist community against
the forces of revolt; and any one who does that exceeds in optimism
rather than pessimism. A man who really thinks that strikers have
suffered no wrong, or that employers have done no wrong--such a man
is not a Gloomy Dean, but a quite wildly and dangerously happy Dean. A
man who can feel satisfied with modern industrialism must be a man with
a mysterious fountain of high spirits. And the actual occasion is not
less curious; because, as far as I can make out, his title to gloom
reposes on his having said that our worker's demand high wages, while
the placid people of the Far East will quite cheerfully work for less.
This is true enough, of course, and there does not seem to be much
difficulty about the matter. Men of the Far East will submit to very low
wages for the same reason that they will submit to “the punishment known
as Li, or Slicing”; for the same reason that they will praise polygamy
and suicide; for the same reason that they subject the wife utterly to
the husband or his parents; for the same reason that they serve their
temples with prostitutes for priests; for the same reason that they
sometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexual
perversion. They do it, that is, because they are Heathens; men with
traditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and the
gestures of self-respect. They may be very much better than we are in
hundreds of other ways; and I can quite understand a man (though
hardly a Dean) really preferring their historic virtues to those of
Christendom. A man may perhaps feel more comfortable among his Asiatic
coolies than among his European comrades: and as we are to allow the
Broadest Thought in the Church, Dr. Inge has as much right to his heresy
as anybody else. It is true that, as Dr. Inge says, there are numberless
Orientals who will do a great deal of work for very little money; and
it is most undoubtedly true that there are several high-placed and
prosperous Europeans who like to get work done and pay as little as
possible for it.
But I cannot make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and
traditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which
he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands of
years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge
admires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced
the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious
deduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathen
Chinese. Instead of supporting Christian missions to Korea or Japan, he
ought to be at the head of a great mission in London for converting the
English to Taoism or Buddhism. There his passion for the moral beauties
of paganism would have free and natural play; his style would improve;
his mind would begin slowly to clear; and he would be free from all
sorts of little irritating scrupulosities which must hamper even the
most Conservative Christian in his full praise of sweating and the sack.
In Christendom he will never find rest. The perpetual public criticism
and public change which is the note of all our history springs from a
certain spirit far too deep to be defined. It is deeper than democracy;
nay, it may often appear to be non-democratic; for it may often be the
special defence of a minority or an individual. It will often leave the
ninety-and-nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost. It
will often risk the State itself to right a single wrong; and do justice
though the heavens fall. Its highest expression is not even in the
formula of the great gentlemen of the French Revolution who said that
all men were free and equal. Its highest expression is rather in the
formula of the peasant who said that a man's a man for a' that. If there
were but one slave in England, and he did all the work while the rest
of us made merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud to
God night and day. Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearly
works with, a creed which postulates a humanised God and a vividly
personal immortality. Men must not be busy merely like a swarm, or even
happy merely like a herd; for it is not a question of men, but of a
man. A man's meals may be poor, but they must not be bestial; there must
always be that about the meal which permits of its comparison to
the sacrament. A man's bed may be hard, but it must not be abject or
unclean: there must always be about the bed something of the decency of
the death-bed.
This is the spirit which makes the Christian poor begin their terrible
murmur whenever there is a turn of prices or a deadlock of toil
that threatens them with vagabondage or pauperisation; and we cannot
encourage the Dean with any hope that this spirit can be cast out.
Christendom will continue to suffer all the disadvantages of being
Christian: it is the Dean who must be gently but firmly altered. He had
absent-mindedly strayed into the wrong continent and the wrong creed. I
advise him to chuck it.
But the case is more curious still. To connect the Dean with Confucian
temples or traditions may have appeared fantastic; but it is not. Dr.
Inge is not a stupid old Tory Rector, strict both on Church and State.
Such a man might talk nonsense about the Christian Socialists being
“court chaplains of King Demos” or about his own superb valour in
defying the democracy that rages in the front pews of Anglican churches.
We should not expect a mere old-fashioned country clergyman to know that
Demos has never been king in England and precious seldom anywhere else;
we should not expect him to realise that if King Demos had any chaplains
they would be uncommonly poorly paid. But Dr. Inge is not old-fashioned;
he considers himself highly progressive and advanced. He is a New
Theologian; that is, he is liberal in theology--and nothing else.
He is apparently in sober fact, and not as in any fantasy, in sympathy
with those who would soften the superior claim of our creed by urging
the rival creeds of the East; with those who would absorb the virtues of
Buddhism or of Islam. He holds a high seat in that modern Parliament of
Religions where all believers respect each other's unbelief.
Now this has a very sharp moral for modern religious reformers. When
next you hear the “liberal” Christian say that we should take what is
best in Oriental faiths, make quite sure what are the things that people
like Dr. Inge call best; what are the things that people like Dr. Inge
propose to take. You will not find them imitating the military valour of
the Moslem. You will not find them imitating the miraculous ecstasy of
the Hindoo. The more you study the “broad” movement of today, the more
you will find that these people want something much less like Chinese
metaphysics, and something much more like Chinese Labour. You will find
the levelling of creeds quite unexpectedly close to the lowering of
wages. Dr. Inge is the typical latitudinarian of to-day; and was never
more so than when he appeared not as the apostle of the blacks, but as
the apostle of the blacklegs. Preached, as it is, almost entirely
among the prosperous and polite, our brotherhood with Buddhism or
Mohammedanism practically means this--that the poor must be as meek
as Buddhists, while the rich may be as ruthless as Mohammedans. That is
what they call the reunion of all religions.
THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN
The middle classes of modern England are quite fanatically fond of
washing; and are often enthusiastic for teetotalism. I cannot therefore
comprehend why it is that they exhibit a mysterious dislike of rain.
Rain, that inspiring and delightful thing, surely combines the qualities
of these two ideals with quite a curious perfection. Our philanthropists
are eager to establish public baths everywhere. Rain surely is a public
bath; it might almost be called mixed bathing. The appearance of persons
coming fresh from this great natural lustration is not perhaps polished
or dignified; but for the matter of that, few people are dignified when
coming out of a bath. But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an
enormous purification. It realises the dream of some insane hygienist:
it scrubs the sky. Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry
rafters and Starless corners of the cosmos; it is a cosmic spring
cleaning.
If the Englishman is really fond of cold baths, he ought not to grumble
at the English climate for being a cold bath. In these days we are
constantly told that we should leave our little special possessions and
join in the enjoyment of common social institutions and a common social
machinery. I offer the rain as a thoroughly Socialistic institution. It
disregards that degraded delicacy which has hitherto led each gentleman
to take his shower-bath in private. It is a better shower-bath, because
it is public and communal; and, best of all, because somebody else pulls
the string.
As for the fascination of rain for the water drinker, it is a fact the
neglect of which I simply cannot comprehend. The enthusiastic water
drinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet and
debauch of his own favourite beverage. Think of the imaginative
intoxication of the wine drinker if the crimson clouds sent down claret
or the golden clouds hock. Paint upon primitive darkness some such
scenes of apocalypse, towering and gorgeous skyscapes in which champagne
falls like fire from heaven or the dark skies grow purple and tawny with
the terrible colours of port. All this must the wild abstainer feel, as
he rolls in the long soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven,
and listens to the roaring rain. It is he, the water drinker, who
ought to be the true bacchanal of the forests; for all the forests are
drinking water. Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it: the
trees rave and reel to and fro like drunken giants; they clash boughs
as revellers clash cups; they roar undying thirst and howl the health of
the world.
All around me as I write is a noise of Nature drinking: and Nature makes
a noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined. If I count
it Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall I
complain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to all
living things; a cup of water for every shrub; a cup of water for every
weed? I would be ashamed to grumble at it. As Sir Philip Sidney said,
their need is greater than mine--especially for water.
There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wild
Highland clan: a elan come from those hills where rain is not so much an
incident as an atmosphere. Surely every man of imagination must feel
a tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever he
puts on a mackintosh. I could never reconcile myself to carrying an
umbrella; it is a pompous Eastern business, carried over the heads of
despots in the dry, hot lands. Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageable
walking stick; open, it is an inadequate tent. For my part, I have no
taste for pretending to be a walking pavilion; I think nothing of my
hat, and precious little of my head. If I am to be protected against
wet, it must be by some closer and more careless protection, something
that I can forget altogether. It might be a Highland plaid. It might be
that yet more Highland thing, a mackintosh.
And there is really something in the mackintosh of the military
qualities of the Highlander. The proper cheap mackintosh has a blue and
white sheen as of steel or iron; it gleams like armour. I like to think
of it as the uniform of that ancient clan in some of its old and misty
raids. I like to think of all the Macintoshes, in their mackintoshes,
descending on some doomed Lowland village, their wet waterproofs
flashing in the sun or moon. For indeed this is one of the real beauties
of rainy weather, that while the amount of original and direct light
is commonly lessened, the number of things that reflect light is
unquestionably increased. There is less sunshine; but there are more
shiny things; such beautifully shiny things as pools and puddles and
mackintoshes. It is like moving in a world of mirrors.
And indeed this is the last and not the least gracious of the casual
works of magic wrought by rain: that while it decreases light, yet it
doubles it. If it dims the sky, it brightens the earth. It gives the
roads (to the sympathetic eye) something of the beauty of Venice.
Shallow lakes of water reiterate every detail of earth and sky; we
dwell in a double universe. Sometimes walking upon bare and lustrous
pavements, wet under numerous lamps, a man seems a black blot on all
that golden looking-glass, and could fancy he was flying in a yellow
sky. But wherever trees and towns hang head downwards in a pigmy puddle,
the sense of Celestial topsy-turvydom is the same. This bright, wet,
dazzling confusion of shape and shadow, of reality and reflection, will
appeal strongly to any one with the transcendental instinct about this
dreamy and dual life of ours. It will always give a man the strange
sense of looking down at the skies.
THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER
When, as lately, events have happened that seem (to the fancy, at least)
to test if not stagger the force of official government, it is
amusing to ask oneself what is the real weakness of civilisation, ours
especially, when it contends with the one lawless man. I was reminded of
one weakness this morning in turning over an old drawerful of pictures.
This weakness in civilisation is best expressed by saying that it cares
more for science than for truth. It prides itself on its “methods”
more than its results; it is satisfied with precision, discipline, good
communications, rather than with the sense of reality. But there are
precise falsehoods as well as precise facts. Discipline may only mean
a hundred men making the same mistake at the same minute. And good
communications may in practice be very like those evil communications
which are said to corrupt good manners. Broadly, we have reached a
“scientific age,” which wants to know whether the train is in the
timetable, but not whether the train is in the station. I take one
instance in our police inquiries that I happen to have come across: the
case of photography.
Some years ago a poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared,
and the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him, so
that he might be identified. The photograph, as I remember it, depicted
or suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his head
thrown back, with long distinguished features, colourless thin hair and
slight moustache, and though conveyed merely by the head and shoulders,
a definite impression of height. If I had gone by that photograph I
should have gone about looking for a long soldierly but listless man,
with a profile rather like the Duke of Connaught's.
Only, as it happened, I knew the poet personally; I had seen him a great
many times, and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget,
if seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland
Scotch, who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes and
dark emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelic
or whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity; and he looked
like some swarthy elf. He was small, with a big head and a crescent of
coal-black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediately
under his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have
been painted scarlet; three black tufts, two on the upper lip and one
under the lower, seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustaches
of Mephistopheles. His eyes had that “dancing madness” in them which
Stevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck; but he sometimes
distorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one of
them. A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find. You could
have picked him out in any crowd--so long as you had not seen his
photograph.
But in this scientific picture of him twenty causes, accidental and
conventional, had combined to obliterate him altogether. The limits
of photography forbade the strong and almost melodramatic colouring
of cheek and eyebrow. The accident of the lighting took nearly all the
darkness out of the hair and made him look almost like a fair man. The
framing and limitation of the shoulders made him look like a big man;
and the devastating bore of being photographed when you want to write
poetry made him look like a lazy man. Holding his head back, as people
do when they are being photographed (or shot), but as he certainly never
held it normally, accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominated
his slight figure. Here we have a clockwork picture, begun and finished
by a button and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting feature
has been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they could
have been by the most namby-pamby flatterer, painting in the weakest
water-colours, on the smoothest ivory.
I happen to possess a book of Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricatures, one of
which depicts the unfortunate poet in question. To say it represents
an utterly incredible hobgoblin is to express in faint and inadequate
language the license of its sprawling lines. The authorities thought it
strictly safe and scientific to circulate the poet's photograph. They
would have clapped me in an asylum if I had asked them to circulate
Max's caricature. But the caricature would have been far more likely to
find the man.