Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The
first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the
most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on,
the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come
to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second
class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance
to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind.
The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes
described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a
desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the
classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good
people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But
the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not
offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of
earnest reflection and research.
The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride,
attach ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions, which
are called “commonplaces,” as that children are charming, or that
twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting three is a
fine sight. Now, these feelings are not crude; they are not even simple.
The charm of children is very subtle; it is even complex, to the extent
of being almost contradictory. It is, at its very plainest, mingled of
a regard for hilarity and a regard for helplessness. The sentiment of
twilight, in the vulgarest drawing-room song or the coarsest pair of
sweethearts, is, so far as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It is strangely
balanced between pain and pleasure; it might also be called pleasure
tempting pain. The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a
man fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it means
many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight in
experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really very
subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly. In fact, it does
not express them at all, except on those occasions (now only too rare)
when it indulges in insurrection and massacre.
Now, this accounts for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existence
of Poets. Poets are those who share these popular sentiments, but can so
express them that they prove themselves the strange and delicate things
that they really are. Poets draw out the shy refinement of the rabble.
Where the common man covers the queerest emotions by saying, “Rum
little kid,” Victor Hugo will write “L'art d'etre grand-pere”; where the
stockbroker will only say abruptly, “Evenings closing in now,” Mr.
Yeats will write “Into the twilight”; where the navvy can only mutter
something about pluck and being “precious game,” Homer will show you the
hero in rags in his own hall defying the princes at their banquet. The
Poets carry the popular sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch;
but let it always be remembered that it is the popular sentiments
that they are carrying. No man ever wrote any good poetry to show that
childhood was shocking, or that twilight was gay and farcical, or that a
man was contemptible because he had crossed his single sword with three.
The people who maintain this are the Professors, or Prigs.
The Poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them. Of
course, most of the Poets wrote in prose--Rabelais, for instance, and
Dickens. The Prigs rise above the people by refusing to understand them:
by saying that all their dim, strange preferences are prejudices and
superstitions. The Prigs make the people feel stupid; the Poets make the
people feel wiser than they could have imagined that they were. There
are many weird elements in this situation. The oddest of all perhaps is
the fate of the two factors in practical politics. The Poets who embrace
and admire the people are often pelted with stones and crucified. The
Prigs who despise the people are often loaded with lands and crowned. In
the House of Commons, for instance, there are quite a number of prigs,
but comparatively few poets. There are no People there at all.
By poets, as I have said, I do not mean people who write poetry, or
indeed people who write anything. I mean such people as, having culture
and imagination, use them to understand and share the feelings of their
fellows; as against those who use them to rise to what they call a
higher plane. Crudely, the poet differs from the mob by his sensibility;
the professor differs from the mob by his insensibility. He has not
sufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob.
His only notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut across it, in
accordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell himself that,
whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong. He forgets that
ignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of innocence.
Let me take one example which may mark out the outline of the
contention. Open the nearest comic paper and let your eye rest lovingly
upon a joke about a mother-in-law. Now, the joke, as presented for the
populace, will probably be a simple joke; the old lady will be tall and
stout, the hen-pecked husband will be small and cowering. But for all
that, a mother-in-law is not a simple idea. She is a very subtle idea.
The problem is not that she is big and arrogant; she is frequently
little and quite extraordinarily nice. The problem of the mother-in-law
is that she is like the twilight: half one thing and half another. Now,
this twilight truth, this fine and even tender embarrassment, might be
rendered, as it really is, by a poet, only here the poet would have to
be some very penetrating and sincere novelist, like George Meredith,
or Mr. H. G. Wells, whose “Ann Veronica” I have just been reading with
delight. I would trust the fine poets and novelists because they follow
the fairy clue given them in Comic Cuts. But suppose the Professor
appears, and suppose he says (as he almost certainly will), “A
mother-in-law is merely a fellow-citizen. Considerations of sex should
not interfere with comradeship. Regard for age should not influence
the intellect. A mother-in-law is merely Another Mind. We should free
ourselves from these tribal hierarchies and degrees.” Now, when the
Professor says this (as he always does), I say to him, “Sir, you are
coarser than Comic Cuts. You are more vulgar and blundering than the
most elephantine music-hall artiste. You are blinder and grosser than
the mob. These vulgar knockabouts have, at least, got hold of a social
shade and real mental distinction, though they can only express it
clumsily. You are so clumsy that you cannot get hold of it at all. If
you really cannot see that the bridegroom's mother and the bride have
any reason for constraint or diffidence, then you are neither polite nor
humane: you have no sympathy in you for the deep and doubtful hearts of
human folk.” It is better even to put the difficulty as the vulgar put
it than to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty altogether.
The same question might be considered well enough in the old proverb
that two is company and three is none. This proverb is the truth put
popularly: that is, it is the truth put wrong. Certainly it is untrue
that three is no company. Three is splendid company: three is the ideal
number for pure comradeship: as in the Three Musketeers. But if you
reject the proverb altogether; if you say that two and three are the
same sort of company; if you cannot see that there is a wider abyss
between two and three than between three and three million--then I
regret to inform you that you belong to the Third Class of human beings;
that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall be
alone in a howling desert till you die.