in the way that I feel inclined to regard Japs and cats. They are not
specially spoken of as evil; they are enjoyed as witching and wonderful;
but they are not trusted as good. You do not say the wrong words or give
the wrong gifts to them; and there is a curious silence about what would
happen to you if you did. Now to me, Japan, the Japan of Art, was always
a fairyland. What trees as gay as flowers and peaks as white as
wedding cakes; what lanterns as large as houses and houses as frail as
lanterns!... but... but... the missionary explained (I read in the
paper) that the assertion and denial about the Japanese use of torture
was a mere matter of verbal translation. “The Japanese would not call
twisting the thumbs back 'torture.'”
THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE
I find myself in agreement with Mr. Robert Lynd for his most just remark
in connection with the Malatesta case, that the police are becoming
a peril to society. I have no attraction to that sort of atheist
asceticism to which the purer types of Anarchism tend; but both an
atheist and an ascetic are better men than a spy; and it is ignominious
to see one's country thus losing her special point of honour about
asylum and liberty. It will be quite a new departure if we begin to
protect and whitewash foreign policemen. I always understood it was
only English policemen who were absolutely spotless. A good many of us,
however, have begun to feel with Mr. Lynd, and on all sides authorities
and officials are being questioned. But there is one most graphic and
extraordinary fact, which it did not lie in Mr. Lynd's way to touch
upon, but which somebody really must seize and emphasise. It is
this: that at the very time when we are all beginning to doubt these
authorities, we are letting laws pass to increase their most capricious
powers. All our commissions, petitions, and letters to the papers
are asking whether these authorities can give an account of their
stewardship. And at the same moment all our laws are decreeing that they
shall not give any account of their stewardship, but shall become yet
more irresponsible stewards. Bills like the Feeble-Minded Bill and
the Inebriate Bill (very appropriate names for them) actually arm with
scorpions the hand that has chastised the Malatestas and Maleckas with
whips. The inspector, the doctor, the police sergeant, the well-paid
person who writes certificates and “passes” this, that, or the other;
this sort of man is being trusted with more authority, apparently
because he is being doubted with more reason. In one room we are asking
why the Government and the great experts between them cannot sail a
ship. In another room we are deciding that the Government and experts
shall be allowed, without trial or discussion, to immure any one's body,
damn any one's soul, and dispose of unborn generations with the levity
of a pagan god. We are putting the official on the throne while he is
still in the dock.
The mere meaning of words is now strangely forgotten and falsified; as
when people talk of an author's “message,” without thinking whom it
is from; and I have noted in these connections the strange misuse of
another word. It is the excellent mediæval word “charter.” I remember
the Act that sought to save gutter-boys from cigarettes was called
“The Children's Charter.” Similarly the Act which seeks to lock up as
lunatics people who are not lunatics was actually called a “charter” of
the feeble-minded. Now this terminology is insanely wrong, even if the
Bills are right. Even were they right in theory they would be applied
only to the poor, like many better rules about education and cruelty.
A woman was lately punished for cruelty because her children were not
washed when it was proved that she had no water. From that it will be an
easy step in Advanced Thought to punishing a man for wine-bibbing when
it is proved that he had no wine. Rifts in right reason widen down the
ages. And when we have begun by shutting up a confessedly kind
person for cruelty, we may yet come to shutting up Mr. Tom Mann for
feeblemindedness.
But even if such laws do good to children or idiots, it is wrong to use
the word “charter.” A charter does not mean a thing that does good to
people. It means a thing that grants people more rights and liberties.
It may be a good thing for gutter-boys to be deprived of their
cigarettes: it might be a good thing for aldermen to be deprived of
their cigars. But I think the Goldsmiths' Company would be very much
surprised if the King granted them a new charter (in place of their
mediæval charter), and it only meant that policemen might pull the
cigars out of their mouths. It may be a good thing that all drunkards
should be locked up: and many acute statesmen (King John, for instance)
would certainly have thought it a good thing if all aristocrats could
be locked up. But even that somewhat cynical prince would scarcely have
granted to the barons a thing called “the Great Charter” and then locked
them all up on the strength of it. If he had, this interpretation of the
word “charter” would have struck the barons with considerable surprise.
I doubt if their narrow mediæval minds could have taken it in.
The roots of the real England are in the early Middle Ages, and no
Englishman will ever understand his own language (or even his own
conscience) till he understands them. And he will never understand them
till he understands this word “charter.” I will attempt in a moment
to state in older, more suitable terms, what a charter was. In modern,
practical, and political terms, it is quite easy to state what a charter
was. A charter was the thing that the railway workers wanted last
Christmas and did not get; and apparently will never get. It is called
in the current jargon “recognition”; the acknowledgment in so many words
by society of the immunities or freedoms of a certain set of men. If
there had been railways in the Middle Ages there would probably have
been a railwaymen's guild; and it would have had a charter from the
King, defining their rights. A charter is the expression of an idea
still true and then almost universal: that authority is necessary
for nothing so much as for the granting of liberties. Like everything
mediæval, it ramified back to a root in religion; and was a sort of
small copy of the Christian idea of man's creation. Man was free, not
because there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free.
By authority he was free. By authority the craftsmen of the guilds were
free. Many other great philosophers took and take the other view:
the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and
determinists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gave
man a law. The mediæval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter.
Modern feeling may not sympathise with its list of liberties, which
included the liberty to be damned; but that has nothing to do with the
fact that it was a gift of liberties and not of laws. This was mirrored,
however dimly, in the whole system. There was a great deal of gross
inequality; and in other aspects absolute equality was taken
for granted. But the point is that equality and inequality were
ranks--or rights. There were not only things one was forbidden
to do; but things one was forbidden to forbid. A man was not only
definitely responsible, but definitely irresponsible. The holidays of
his soul were immovable feasts. All a charter really meant lingers alive
in that poetic phrase that calls the wind a “chartered” libertine.
Lie awake at night and hear the wind blowing; hear it knock at every
man's door and shout down every man's chimney. Feel how it takes
liberties with everything, having taken primary liberty for itself; feel
that the wind is always a vagabond and sometimes almost a housebreaker.
But remember that in the days when free men had charters, they held that
the wind itself was wild by authority; and was only free because it had
a father.
THE CONTENTED MAN
The word content is not inspiring nowadays; rather it is irritating
because it is dull. It prepares the mind for a little sermon in the
style of the Vicar of Wakefield about how you and I should be satisfied
with our countrified innocence and our simple village sports. The word,
however, has two meanings, somewhat singularly connected; the “sweet
content” of the poet and the “cubic content” of the mathematician. Some
distinguish these by stressing the different syllables. Thus, it might
happen to any of us, at some social juncture, to remark gaily, “Of the
content of the King of the Cannibal Islands' Stewpot I am content to be
ignorant”; or “Not content with measuring the cubic content of my safe,
you are stealing the spoons.” And there really is an analogy between the
mathematical and the moral use of the term, for lack of the observation
of which the latter has been much weakened and misused.
The preaching of contentment is in disrepute, well deserved in so far
that the moral is really quite inapplicable to the anarchy and insane
peril of our tall and toppling cities. Content suggests some kind of
security; and it is not strange that our workers should often think
about rising above their position, since they have so continually to
think about sinking below it. The philanthropist who urges the poor to
saving and simple pleasures deserves all the derision that he gets. To
advise people to be content with what they have got may or may not be
sound moral philosophy.
But to urge people to be content with what they haven't got is a piece
of impudence hard for even the English poor to pardon. But though the
creed of content is unsuited to certain special riddles and wrongs,
it remains true for the normal of mortal life. We speak of divine
discontent; discontent may sometimes be a divine thing, but content must
always be the human thing. It may be true that a particular man, in his
relation to his master or his neighbour, to his country or his enemies,
will do well to be fiercely unsatisfied or thirsting for an angry
justice. But it is not true, no sane person can call it true, that man
as a whole in his general attitude towards the world, in his posture
towards death or green fields, towards the weather or the baby, will be
wise to cultivate dissatisfaction. In a broad estimate of our earthly
experience, the great truism on the tablet remains: he must not covet
his neighbour's ox nor his ass nor anything that is his. In highly
complex and scientific civilisations he may sometimes find himself
forced into an exceptional vigilance. But, then, in highly complex and
scientific civilisations, nine times out of ten, he only wants his own
ass back.
But I wish to urge the case for cubic content; in which (even more than
in moral content) I take a personal interest. Now, moral content has
been undervalued and neglected because of its separation from the other
meaning. It has become a negative rather than a positive thing. In some
accounts of contentment it seems to be little more than a meek despair.
But this is not the true meaning of the term; it should stand for the
idea of a positive and thorough appreciation of the content of anything;
for feeling the substance and not merely the surface of experience.
“Content” ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased;
placidly, perhaps, but still positively pleased. Being contented with
bread and cheese ought not to mean not caring what you eat. It ought
to mean caring for bread and cheese; handling and enjoying the cubic
content of the bread and cheese and adding it to your own. Being
content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and
resigned to living in it. It ought to mean appreciating what there is
to appreciate in such a position; such as the quaint and elvish slope of
the ceiling or the sublime aerial view of the opposite chimney-pots. And
in this sense contentment is a real and even an active virtue; it is not
only affirmative, but creative. The poet in the attic does not forget
the attic in poetic musings; he remembers whatever the attic has of
poetry; he realises how high, how starry, how cool, how unadorned and
simple--in short, how Attic is the attic.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of
getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and
it is rare. The absence of this digestive talent is what makes so
cold and incredible the tales of so many people who say they have been
“through” things; when it is evident that they have come out on the
other side quite unchanged. A man might have gone “through” a plum
pudding as a bullet might go through a plum pudding; it depends on the
size of the pudding--and the man. But the awful and sacred question
is “Has the pudding been through him?” Has he tasted, appreciated, and
absorbed the solid pudding, with its three dimensions and its three
thousand tastes and smells? Can he offer himself to the eyes of men as
one who has cubically conquered and contained a pudding?
In the same way we may ask of those who profess to have passed through
trivial or tragic experiences whether they have absorbed the content
of them; whether they licked up such living water as there was. It is a
pertinent question in connection with many modern problems.
Thus the young genius says, “I have lived in my dreary and squalid
village before I found success in Paris or Vienna.” The sound
philosopher will answer, “You have never lived in your village, or you
would not call it dreary and squalid.”
Thus the Imperialist, the Colonial idealist (who commonly speaks and
always thinks with a Yankee accent) will say, “I've been right away from
these little muddy islands, and seen God's great seas and prairies.” The
sound philosopher will reply, “You have never been in these islands; you
have never seen the weald of Sussex or the plain of Salisbury; otherwise
you could never have called them either muddy or little.”
Thus the Suffragette will say, “I have passed through the paltry duties
of pots and pans, the drudgery of the vulgar kitchen; but I have come
out to intellectual liberty.” The sound philosopher will answer, “You
have never passed through the kitchen, or you never would call it
vulgar. Wiser and stronger women than you have really seen a poetry
in pots and pans; naturally, because there is a poetry in them.” It is
right for the village violinist to climb into fame in Paris or Vienna;
it is right for the stray Englishman to climb across the high shoulder
of the world; it is right for the woman to climb into whatever cathedrae
or high places she can allow to her sexual dignity. But it is wrong that
any of these climbers should kick the ladder by which they have climbed.
But indeed these bitter people who record their experiences really
record their lack of experiences. It is the countryman who has not
succeeded in being a countryman who comes up to London. It is the
clerk who has not succeeded in being a clerk who tries (on vegetarian
principles) to be a countryman. And the woman with a past is generally a
woman angry about the past she never had.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and
love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really
been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them
back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because
we have drunk them dry.
THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL
I have republished all these old articles of mine because they cover
a very controversial period, in which I was in nearly all the
controversies, whether I was visible there or no. And I wish to gather
up into this last article a valedictory violence about all such things;
and then pass to where, beyond these voices, there is peace--or in
other words, to the writing of Penny Dreadfuls; a noble and much-needed
work. But before I finally desert the illusions of rationalism for
the actualities of romance, I should very much like to write one last
roaring, raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterly
irrational. The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, like
the Ten Commandments. I would call it “Don'ts for Dogmatists; or Things
I am Tired Of.”
This book of intellectual etiquette, like most books of etiquette, would
begin with superficial things; but there would be, I fancy, a wailing
imprecation in the words that could not be called artificial; it might
begin thus:--
(1) Don't use a noun and then an adjective that crosses out the noun.
An adjective qualifies, it cannot contradict. Don't say, “Give me a
patriotism that is free from all boundaries.” It is like saying, “Give
me a pork pie with no pork in it.” Don't say, “I look forward to that
larger religion that shall have no special dogmas.” It is like saying,
“I look forward to that larger quadruped who shall have no feet.” A
quadruped means something with four feet; and a religion means something
that commits a man to some doctrine about the universe. Don't let
the meek substantive be absolutely murdered by the joyful, exuberant
adjective.
(2) Don't say you are not going to say a thing, and then say it. This
practice is very flourishing and successful with public speakers. The
trick consists of first repudiating a certain view in unfavourable
terms, and then repeating the same view in favourable terms. Perhaps the
simplest form of it may be found in a landlord of my neighbourhood, who
said to his tenants in an election speech, “Of course I'm not going to
threaten you, but if this Budget passes the rents will go up.” The thing
can be done in many forms besides this. “I am the last man to
mention party politics; but when I see the Empire rent in pieces by
irresponsible Radicals,” etc. “In this hall we welcome all creeds. We
have no hostility against any honest belief; but only against that black
priestcraft and superstition which can accept such a doctrine as,” etc.
“I would not say one word that could ruffle our relations with Germany.
But this I will say; that when I see ceaseless and unscrupulous
armament,” etc. Please don't do it. Decide to make a remark or not to
make a remark. But don't fancy that you have somehow softened the saying
of a thing by having just promised not to say it.
(3) Don't use secondary words as primary words. “Happiness” (let us say)
is a primary word. You know when you have the thing, and you jolly well
know when you haven't. “Progress” is a secondary word; it means the
degree of one's approach to happiness, or to some such solid ideal. But
modern controversies constantly turn on asking, “Does Happiness help
Progress?” Thus, I see in the New Age this week a letter from Mr.
Egerton Swann, in which he warns the world against me and my friend Mr.
Belloc, on the ground that our democracy is “spasmodic” (whatever that
means); while our “reactionism is settled and permanent.” It never
strikes Mr. Swann that democracy means something in itself; while
“reactionism” means nothing--except in connection with democracy.
You cannot react except from something. If Mr. Swann thinks I have ever
reacted from the doctrine that the people should rule, I wish he would
give me the reference.
(4) Don't say, “There is no true creed; for each creed believes itself
right and the others wrong.” Probably one of the creeds is right and
the others are wrong. Diversity does show that most of the views must
be wrong. It does not by the faintest logic show that they all must be
wrong. I suppose there is no subject on which opinions differ with more
desperate sincerity than about which horse will win the Derby. These are
certainly solemn convictions; men risk ruin for them. The man who puts
his shirt on Potosi must believe in that animal, and each of the other
men putting their last garments upon other quadrupeds must believe in
them quite as sincerely. They are all serious, and most of them are
wrong. But one of them is right. One of the faiths is justified; one of
the horses does win; not always even the dark horse which might stand
for Agnosticism, but often the obvious and popular horse of Orthodoxy.
Democracy has its occasional victories; and even the Favourite has been
known to come in first. But the point here is that something comes in
first. That there were many beliefs does not destroy the fact that there
was one well-founded belief. I believe (merely upon authority) that the
world is round. That there may be tribes who believe it to be triangular
or oblong does not alter the fact that it is certainly some shape, and
therefore not any other shape. Therefore I repeat, with the wail of
imprecation, don't say that the variety of creeds prevents you from
accepting any creed. It is an unintelligent remark.
(5) Don't (if any one calls your doctrine mad, which is likely enough),
don't answer that madmen are only the minority and the sane only the
majority. The sane are sane because they are the corporate substance of
mankind; the insane are not a minority because they are not a mob. The
man who thinks himself a man thinks the next man a man; he reckons his
neighbour as himself. But the man who thinks he is a chicken does not
try to look through the man who thinks he is glass. The man who thinks
himself Jesus Christ does not quarrel with the man who thinks himself
Rockefeller; as would certainly happen if the two had ever met. But
madmen never meet. It is the only thing they cannot do. They can talk,
they can inspire, they can fight, they can found religions; but they
cannot meet. Maniacs can never be the majority; for the simple reason
that they can never be even a minority. If two madmen had ever agreed
they might have conquered the world.
(6) Don't say that the idea of human equality is absurd, because some
men are tall and some short, some clever and some stupid. At the height
of the French Revolution it was noticed that Danton was tall and Murat
short. In the wildest popular excitement of America it is known that
Rockefeller is stupid and that Bryan is clever. The doctrine of human
equality reposes upon this: That there is no man really clever who has
not found that he is stupid. That there is no big man who has not felt
small. Some men never feel small; but these are the few men who are.
(7) Don't say (O don't say) that Primitive Man knocked down a woman
with a club and carried her away. Why on earth should he? Does the male
sparrow knock down the female sparrow with a twig? Does the male giraffe
knock down the female giraffe with a palm tree? Why should the male
have had to use any violence at any time in order to make the female a
female? Why should the woman roll herself in the mire lower than the
sow or the she-bear; and profess to have been a slave where all these
creatures were creators; where all these beasts were gods? Do not
talk such bosh. I implore you, I supplicate you not to talk such bosh.
Utterly and absolutely abolish all such bosh--and we may yet
begin to discuss these public questions properly. But I fear my list of
protests grows too long; and I know it could grow longer for ever. The
reader must forgive my elongations and elaborations. I fancied for the
moment that I was writing a book.