A friend of mine, to whom I owe so much of my gossip that I sometimes
think that he does the work and I only take the collection, told me the
other day of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me as
significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to-day. He observed
two people in ecstasies before a certain landscape. It was quite a
nice picture, but my friend thought their praises were extravagant.
Suddenly one of the two turned to the catalogue. "Why, this is not the
Leader picture at all," said she. "It is No. So-and-so." And
forthwith the two promptly turned away from the picture they had been
admiring so strenuously, found No. So-and-So, and fell into raptures
before that.
Now I am not going to make fun of these people. I am not going to make
fun of them because I am not sure that I don't suffer from their
infirmity. If I don't I am certainly an exceptional person, for the
people who really think for themselves are almost as scarce as virtuous
people were found to be in the Cities of the Plain. We are most of us
second-hand thinkers, and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all.
Those good people before the picture were not thinking their own
thoughts: they were thinking what they thought was the right thing to
think. They had the luck to find themselves out. Probably it did not
do them any good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs they
were, what empty echoes of an echo they had discovered themselves to
be. They had been taught--heaven help them!--to admire those vacant
prettinesses of Leader and they were so docile that they admired
anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't his.
It reminds me of the story of the two Italians who quarrelled so long
and so bitterly over the relative merits of Tasso and Ariosto that at
last they fought a duel. And as they lay dying on the ground one of
them said to the other, "And to think that I have never read a line of
them." "Nor I either," said the other. Then they expired. I do not
suppose that story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit. Men are
always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices they have
inherited from somebody else, ideas they have borrowed second-hand.
Many of us go through life without ever having had a genuine thought of
our own on any subject of the mind. We think in flocks and once in the
flock we go wherever the bellwether leads us.
It is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with this servility of
mind. Horace Walpole was enraptured with the Rowley Poems when he
thought they were the work of a mediaeval monk: when he found they were
the work of Chatterton himself his interest in them ceased and he
behaved to the poet like a cad. Yet the poems were far more wonderful
as the productions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they would
have been as the productions of a man of sixty. The literary world of
the eighteenth century thought Ossian hardly inferior to Homer; but
when Macpherson's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture
into the deepest pit of oblivion. Yet, as poetry, it was as good or
bad--I have never read it--in the one case as in the other.
There is a delicious story told by Anatole France which bears on this
subject. In some examination in Paris the Military Board gave the
candidates a piece of dictation consisting of an unsigned page. It was
printed in the papers as an example of bad French. "Wherever did these
military fellows," it was asked, "find such a farrago of uncouth and
ridiculous phrases?" In his own literary circles Anatole France
himself heard the passage held up to laughter and torn to tatters. The
critic who laughed loudest, he says, was an enthusiastic admirer of
Michelet. Yet the passage was from Michelet himself, from Michelet at
his best, from Michelet in his finest period. How the great sceptic
must have enjoyed that evening!
It is not that we cannot think. It is that we are afraid to think. It
is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with
the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it. Even
some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed
in thinking independently. We only succeed in getting into other
flocks. Think of that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us some
years ago, the Cubists and Dottists and Spottists and Futurists and
other cranks, who filled London with their shows, and set all the
"advanced" people singing their praises. They were not real praises
that expressed genuine feeling. They were the artificial enthusiasms
of people who wanted to join in the latest fashion. They would rave
over any imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion--rather
than not be thought clever enough to find a meaning in things that had
no meaning.
We are too timid to think alone, too humble to trust our own feeling or
our own judgment. We want some authority to lean up against, and when
we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little independent
thought as children reciting the "twice-times" table. I would rather a
man should think ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo. I
once heard an Evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, speaking of
Shakespeare, gravely remark that he "could never see anything in that
writer." I smiled at his naivete, but I respected his courage. He
couldn't see anything in Shakespeare and he was too honest to pretend
that he could. That is far better than the affectations with which men
conceal the poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility.
In other days the man that dared to think for himself ran the risk of
being burned. Giordano Bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a
description of the Oxford of his day which shows how tyrannical
established thought can be. Aristotle was almost as sacred as the
Bible, and the University statutes enacted that "Bachelors and Masters
who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five
shillings for every point of divergence and for every fault committed
against the Logic of the Organon." We have liberated thought from the
restraints of the policeman and the executioner since then, but in
liberating it we have lost our reverence for its independence and
integrity. We are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease
to think at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely as we
follow the fashions in hats.
The evil, I suppose, lies in our education. We standardise our
children. We aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching
them to be themselves--new incarnations of the human spirit, new
prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world.
We are more concerned about putting our thoughts into their heads than
in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in
knowledge but poor in wisdom. They are not in fear of the stake, but
they are in fear of the judgment of the world, which has no more title
to respect than those old statutes of Oxford which we laugh at to-day.
The truth, I fear, is that thought does not thrive on freedom. It only
thrives under suppression. We need to have our liberties taken away
from us in order to discover that they are worth dying for.