is his open mind we wish to influence or his empty stomach we wish to
cure, and then consider seriously (if you can) the five men, including
two of his own alleged oppressors, who were summoned as a Royal
Commission to consider his claims when he or his sort went out on strike
upon the railways. I knew nothing against, indeed I knew nothing about,
any of the gentlemen then summoned, beyond a bare introduction to
Mr. Henderson, whom I liked, but whose identity I was in no danger of
confusing with that of a railway-porter. I do not think that any old
gentleman, however absent-minded, would be likely on arriving at Euston,
let us say, to hand his Gladstone-bag to Mr. Henderson or to attempt to
reward that politician with twopence. Of the others I can only judge
by the facts about their status as set forth in the public Press. The
Chairman, Sir David Harrell, appeared to be an ex-official distinguished
in (of all things in the world) the Irish Constabulary. I have no
earthly reason to doubt that the Chairman meant to be fair; but I am not
talking about what men mean to be, but about what they are. The police
in Ireland are practically an army of occupation; a man serving in them
or directing them is practically a soldier; and, of course, he must
do his duty as such. But it seems truly extraordinary to select as one
likely to sympathise with the democracy of England a man whose whole
business in life it has been to govern against its will the democracy
of Ireland. What should we say if Russian strikers were offered the
sympathetic arbitration of the head of the Russian Police in Finland
or Poland? And if we do not know that the whole civilised world sees
Ireland with Poland as a typical oppressed nation, it is time we did.
The Chairman, whatever his personal virtues, must be by instinct
and habit akin to the capitalists in the dispute. Two more of the
Commissioners actually were the capitalists in the dispute. Then
came Mr. Henderson (pushing his trolley and cheerily crying, “By your
leave.”), and then another less known gentleman who had “corresponded”
with the Board of Trade, and had thus gained some strange claim to
represent the very poor.
Now people like this might quite possibly produce a rational enough
report, and in this or that respect even improve things. Men of
that kind are tolerably kind, tolerably patriotic, and tolerably
business-like. But if any one supposes that men of that kind can
conceivably quiet any real quarrel with the Man of the Other Kind, the
man whom I first described, it is frantic. The common worker is angry
exactly because he has found out that all these boards consist of the
same well-dressed Kind of Man, whether they are called Governmental or
Capitalist. If any one hopes that he will reconcile the poor, I say, as
I said at the beginning, that such a one has not looked on the light of
day or dwelt in the land of the living.
But I do not criticise such a Commission except for one most practical
and urgent purpose. It will be answered to me that the first Kind of Man
of whom I spoke could not really be on boards and committees, as modern
England is managed. His dirt, though necessary and honourable, would
be offensive: his speech, though rich and figurative, would be almost
incomprehensible. Let us grant, for the moment, that this is so. This
Kind of Man, with his sooty hair or sanguinary adjectives, cannot be
represented at our committees of arbitration. Therefore, the other Kind
of Man, fairly prosperous, fairly plausible, at home at least with the
middle class, capable at least of reaching and touching the upper class,
he must remain the only Kind of Man for such councils.
Very well. If then, you give at any future time any kind of compulsory
powers to such councils to prevent strikes, you will be driving the
first Kind of Man to work for a particular master as much as if you
drove him with a whip.
THE MEDIÆVAL VILLAIN
I see that there have been more attempts at the whitewashing of King
John.
But the gentleman who wrote has a further interest in the matter; for he
believes that King John was innocent, not only on this point, but as a
whole. He thinks King John has been very badly treated; though I am not
sure whether he would attribute to that Plantagenet a saintly merit or
merely a humdrum respectability.
I sympathise with the whitewashing of King John, merely because it is
a protest against our waxwork style of history. Everybody is in a
particular attitude, with particular moral attributes; Rufus is always
hunting and Coeur-de-Lion always crusading; Henry VIII always marrying,
and Charles I always having his head cut off; Alfred rapidly and in
rotation making his people's clocks and spoiling their cakes; and
King John pulling out Jews' teeth with the celerity and industry of
an American dentist. Anything is good that shakes all this stiff
simplification, and makes us remember that these men were once alive;
that is, mixed, free, flippant, and inconsistent. It gives the mind
a healthy kick to know that Alfred had fits, that Charles I prevented
enclosures, that Rufus was really interested in architecture, that Henry
VIII was really interested in theology.
And as these scraps of reality can startle us into more solid
imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are
on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I a
Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that they
were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think
that John was a nice gentleman; but for all that the popular picture of
him is all wrong. Whether he had any generous qualities or not, he had
what commonly makes them possible, dare-devil courage, for instance, and
hotheaded decision. But, above all, he had a morality which he broke,
but which we misunderstand.
The mediæval mind turned centrally upon the pivot of Free Will. In
their social system the mediævals were too much PARTI-PER-PALE, as
their heralds would say, too rigidly cut up by fences and quarterings
of guild or degree. But in their moral philosophy they always thought of
man as standing free and doubtful at the cross-roads in a forest. While
they clad and bound the body and (to some extent) the mind too stiffly
and quaintly for our taste, they had a much stronger sense than we have
of the freedom of the soul. For them the soul always hung poised like an
eagle in the heavens of liberty. Many of the things that strike a modern
as most fantastic came from their keen sense of the power of choice.
For instance, the greatest of the Schoolmen devotes folios to the minute
description of what the world would have been like if Adam had refused
the apple; what kings, laws, babies, animals, planets would have been
in an unfallen world. So intensely does he feel that Adam might have
decided the other way that he sees a complete and complex vision of
another world, a world that now can never be.
This sense of the stream of life in a man that may turn either way
can be felt through all their popular ethics in legend, chronicle, and
ballad. It is a feeling which has been weakened among us by two heavy
intellectual forces. The Calvinism of the seventeenth century and the
physical science of the nineteenth, whatever other truths they may have
taught, have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom. We think of
bad men as something like black men, a separate and incurable kind of
people. The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism. It
brought the villain upon the stage; the lost soul; the modern version
of King John. But the contemporaries of King John did not feel like that
about him, even when they detested him. They instinctively felt him to
be a man of mixed passions like themselves, who was allowing his evil
passions to have much too good a time of it. They might have spoken of
him as a man in considerable danger of going to hell; but they would
have not talked of him as if he had come from there. In the ballads of
Percy or Robin Hood it frequently happens that the King comes upon the
scene, and his ultimate decision makes the climax of the tale. But we
do not feel, as we do in the Byronic or modern romance, that there is
a definite stage direction “Enter Tyrant.” Nor do we behold a deus ex
machina who is certain to do all that is mild and just. The King in the
ballad is in a state of virile indecision. Sometimes he will pass from
a towering passion to the most sweeping magnanimity and friendliness;
sometimes he will begin an act of vengeance and be turned from it by
a jest. Yet this august levity is not moral indifference; it is moral
freedom. It is the strong sense in the writer that the King, being
the type of man with power, will probably sometimes use it badly and
sometimes well. In this sense John is certainly misrepresented, for he
is pictured as something that none of his own friends or enemies saw. In
that sense he was certainly not so black as he is painted, for he lived
in a world where every one was piebald.
King John would be represented in a modern play or novel as a kind
of degenerate; a shifty-eyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul's
backbone and green blood in his veins. The mediævals were quite capable
of boiling him in melted lead, but they would have been quite incapable
of despairing of his soul in the modern fashion. A striking a fortiori
case is that of the strange mediæval legend of Robert the Devil.
Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to an embittered woman
actually in answer to prayers to Satan, and his earlier actions are
simply those of the infernal fire let loose upon earth. Yet though he
can be called almost literally a child of hell, yet the climax of the
story is his repentance at Rome and his great reparation. That is the
paradox of mediæval morals: as it must appear to the moderns. We must
try to conceive a race of men who hated John, and sought his blood, and
believed every abomination about him, who would have been quite capable
of assassinating or torturing him in the extremity of their anger. And
yet we must admit that they would not really have been fundamentally
surprised if he had shaved his head in humiliation, given all his goods
to the poor, embraced the lepers in a lazar-house, and been canonised
as a saint in heaven. So strongly did they hold that the pivot of Will
should turn freely, which now is rusted, and sticks.
For we, whatever our political opinions, certainly never think of our
public men like that. If we hold the opinion that Mr. Lloyd George is a
noble tribune of the populace and protector of the poor, we do not admit
that he can ever have paltered with the truth or bargained with the
powerful. If we hold the equally idiotic opinion that he is a red and
rabid Socialist, maddening mobs into mutiny and theft, then we expect
him to go on maddening them--and us. We do not expect him, let
us say, suddenly to go into a monastery. We have lost the idea of
repentance; especially in public things; that is why we cannot
really get rid of our great national abuses of economic tyranny and
aristocratic avarice. Progress in the modern sense is a very dismal
drudge; and mostly consists of being moved on by the police. We move on
because we are not allowed to move back. But the really ragged prophets,
the real revolutionists who held high language in the palaces of kings,
they did not confine themselves to saying, “Onward, Christian soldiers,”
still less, “Onward, Futurist soldiers”; what they said to high emperors
and to whole empires was, “Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?”
THE DIVINE DETECTIVE
Every person of sound education enjoys detective stories, and there
are even several points on which they have a hearty superiority to
most modern books. A detective story generally describes six living
men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story
generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be
alive. But those who have enjoyed the roman policier must have noted
one thing, that when the murderer is caught he is hardly ever hanged.
“That,” says Sherlock Holmes, “is the advantage of being a private
detective”; after he has caught he can set free. The Christian Church
can best be defined as an enormous private detective, correcting
that official detective--the State. This, indeed, is one of the
injustices done to historic Christianity; injustices which arise from
looking at complex exceptions and not at the large and simple fact. We
are constantly being told that theologians used racks and thumbscrews,
and so they did. Theologians used racks and thumbscrews just as they
used thimbles and three-legged stools, because everybody else used them.
Christianity no more created the mediæval tortures than it did the
Chinese tortures; it inherited them from any empire as heathen as the
Chinese.
The Church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth and
employ cruelty. But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture,
if we look at the general shape and colour of the thing, the real
difference between the Church and the State is huge and plain. The
State, in all lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment,
more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal
everywhere. The Church is the only institution that ever attempted to
create a machinery of pardon. The Church is the only thing that ever
attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to
avenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the
weaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the
world. Its speciality--or, if you like, its oddity--was this
merciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not
slay.
I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to two popular plays
on somewhat parallel topics, which have been successful here and in
America. The Passing of the Third Floor Back is a humane and reverent
experiment, dealing with the influence of one unknown but divine figure
as he passes through a group of Squalid characters. I have no desire to
make cheap fun of the extremely abrupt conversions of all these people;
that is a point of art, not of morals; and, after all, many conversions
have been abrupt. This saviour's method of making people good is to tell
them how good they are already; and in the case of suicidal outcasts,
whose moral backs are broken, and who are soaked with sincere
self-contempt, I can imagine that this might be quite the right way.
I should not deliver this message to authors or members of Parliament,
because they would so heartily agree with it.
Still, it is not altogether here that I differ from the moral of Mr.
Jerome's play. I differ vitally from his story because it is not a
detective story. There is in it none of this great Christian idea of
tearing their evil out of men; it lacks the realism of the saints.
Redemption should bring truth as well as peace; and truth is a fine
thing, though the materialists did go mad about it. Things must be
faced, even in order to be forgiven; the great objection to “letting
sleeping dogs lie” is that they lie in more senses than one. But in Mr.
Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back the redeemer is not a divine
detective, pitiless in his resolve to know and pardon. Rather he is a
sort of divine dupe, who does not pardon at all, because he does not
see anything that is going on. It may, or may not, be true to say, “Tout
comprendre est tout pardonner.” But it is much more evidently true to
say, “Rien comprendre est rien Pardonner,” and the “Third Floor Back”
does not seem to comprehend anything. He might, after all, be a quite
selfish sentimentalist, who found it comforting to think well of his
neighbours. There is nothing very heroic in loving after you have been
deceived. The heroic business is to love after you have been undeceived.
When I saw this play it was natural to compare it with another play
which I had not seen, but which I have read in its printed version.
I mean Mr. Rann Kennedy's Servant in the House, the success of which
sprawls over so many of the American newspapers. This also is concerned
with a dim, yet evidently divine, figure changing the destinies of a
whole group of persons. It is a better play structurally than the other;
in fact, it is a very fine play indeed; but there is nothing
aesthetic or fastidious about it. It is as much or more than the other
sensational, democratic, and (I use the word in a sound and good sense)
Salvationist.
But the difference lies precisely in this--that the Christ of Mr.
Kennedy's play insists on really knowing all the souls that he loves;
he declines to conquer by a kind of supernatural stupidity. He pardons
evil, but he will not ignore it. In other words, he is a Christian, and
not a Christian Scientist. The distinction doubtless is partly explained
by the problems severally selected. Mr. Jerome practically supposes
Christ to be trying to save disreputable people; and that, of course,
is naturally a simple business. Mr. Kennedy supposes Him to be trying
to save the reputable people, which is a much larger affair. The chief
characters in The Servant in the House are a popular and strenuous
vicar, universally respected, and his fashionable and forcible wife.
It would have been no good to tell these people they had some good in
them--for that was what they were telling themselves all day long.
They had to be reminded that they had some bad in them--instinctive
idolatries and silent treasons which they always tried to forget. It is
in connection with these crimes of wealth and culture that we face the
real problem of positive evil. The whole of Mr. Blatchford's controversy
about sin was vitiated throughout by one's consciousness that whenever
he wrote the word “sinner” he thought of a man in rags. But here, again,
we can find truth merely by referring to vulgar literature--its
unfailing fountain. Whoever read a detective story about poor people?
The poor have crimes; but the poor have no secrets. And it is because
the proud have secrets that they need to be detected before they are
forgiven.
THE ELF OF JAPAN
There are things in this world of which I can say seriously that I
love them but I do not like them. The point is not merely verbal, but
psychologically quite valid. Cats are the first things that occur to me
as examples of the principle. Cats are so beautiful that a creature from
another star might fall in love with them, and so incalculable that he
might kill them. Some of my friends take quite a high moral line about
cats. Some, like Mr. Titterton, I think, admire a cat for its moral
independence and readiness to scratch anybody “if he does not behave
himself.” Others, like Mr. Belloc, regard the cat as cruel and secret, a
fit friend for witches; one who will devour everything, except, indeed,
poisoned food, “so utterly lacking is it in Christian simplicity and
humility.” For my part, I have neither of these feelings. I admire cats
as I admire catkins; those little fluffy things that hang on trees. They
are both pretty and both furry, and both declare the glory of God. And
this abstract exultation in all living things is truly to be called
Love; for it is a higher feeling than mere affectional convenience; it
is a vision. It is heroic, and even saintly, in this: that it asks for
nothing in return. I love all the cats in the street as St. Francis of
Assisi loved all the birds in the wood or all the fishes in the sea; not
so much, of course, but then I am not a saint. But he did not wish to
bridle a bird and ride on its back, as one bridles and rides on a horse.
He did not wish to put a collar round a fish's neck, marked with the
name “Francis,” and the address “Assisi”--as one does with a dog.
He did not wish them to belong to him or himself to belong to them;
in fact, it would be a very awkward experience to belong to a lot of
fishes. But a man does belong to his dog, in another but an equally
real sense with that in which the dog belongs to him. The two bonds of
obedience and responsibility vary very much with the dogs and the men;
but they are both bonds. In other words, a man does not merely love a
dog; as he might (in a mystical moment) love any sparrow that perched
on his windowsill or any rabbit that ran across his path. A man likes a
dog; and that is a serious matter.
To me, unfortunately perhaps (for I speak merely of individual taste), a
cat is a wild animal. A cat is Nature personified. Like Nature, it is
so mysterious that one cannot quite repose even in its beauty. But like
Nature again, it is so beautiful that one cannot believe that it is
really cruel. Perhaps it isn't; and there again it is like Nature. Men
of old time worshipped cats as they worshipped crocodiles; and those
magnificent old mystics knew what they were about. The moment in which
one really loves cats is the same as that in which one (moderately and
within reason) loves crocodiles. It is that divine instant when a man
feels himself--no, not absorbed into the unity of all things (a
loathsome fancy)--but delighting in the difference of all things.
At the moment when a man really knows he is a man he will feel, however
faintly, a kind of fairy-tale pleasure in the fact that a crocodile is
a crocodile. All the more will he exult in the things that are more
evidently beautiful than crocodiles, such as flowers and birds and
cats--which are more beautiful than either. But it does not follow
that he will wish to pick all the flowers or to cage all the birds or to
own all the cats.
No one who still believes in democracy and the rights of man will admit
that any division between men and men can be anything but a fanciful
analogy to the division between men and animals. But in the sphere of
such fanciful analogy there are even human beings whom I feel to be like
cats in this respect: that I can love them without liking them. I
feel it about certain quaint and alien societies, especially about the
Japanese. The exquisite old Japanese draughtsmanship (of which we shall
see no more, now Japan has gone in for Progress and Imperialism) had a
quality that was infinitely attractive and intangible. Japanese pictures
were really rather like pictures made by cats. They were full of
feathery softness and of sudden and spirited scratches. If any one will
wander in some gallery fortunate enough to have a fine collection of
those slight water-colour sketches on rice paper which come from the
remote East, he will observe many elements in them which a fanciful
person might consider feline. There is, for instance, that odd enjoyment
of the tops of trees; those airy traceries of forks and fading twigs, up
to which certainly no artist, but only a cat could climb. There is that
elvish love of the full moon, as large and lucid as a Chinese lantern,
hung in these tenuous branches. That moon is so large and luminous
that one can imagine a hundred cats howling under it. Then there is the
exhaustive treatment of the anatomy of birds and fish; subjects in which
cats are said to be interested. Then there is the slanting cat-like eye
of all these Eastern gods and men--but this is getting altogether
too coincident. We shall have another racial theory in no time
(beginning “Are the Japs Cats?”), and though I shall not believe in
my theory, somebody else might. There are people among my esteemed
correspondents who might believe anything. It is enough for me to say
here that in this small respect Japs affect me like cats. I mean that I
love them. I love their quaint and native poetry, their instinct of easy
civilisation, their unique unreplaceable art, the testimony they bear
to the bustling, irrepressible activities of nature and man. If I were
a real mystic looking down on them from a real mountain, I am sure I
should love them more even than the strong winged and unwearied birds
or the fruitful, ever multiplying fish. But, as for liking them, as one
likes a dog--that is quite another matter. That would mean trusting
them.