FANCIES VERSUS FADS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
CHARLES DICKENS
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
TREMENDOUS TRIFLES
ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS
A MISCELLANY OF MEN
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE
WINE, WATER, AND SONG
THE FLYING INN
A SHILLING FOR MY THOUGHTS
THE USES OF DIVERSITY
FANCIES VERSUS
FADS
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1923_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
INTRODUCTION
I have strung these things together on a slight enough thread; but as
the things themselves are slight, it is possible that the thread (and
the metaphor) may manage to hang together. These notes range over very
variegated topics and in many cases were made at very different times.
They concern all sorts of things from lady barristers to cave-men, and
from psycho-analysis to free verse. Yet they have this amount of unity
in their wandering, that they all imply that it is only a more
traditional spirit that is truly able to wander. The wild theorists of
our time are quite unable to wander. When they talk of making new roads,
they are only making new ruts. Each of them is necessarily imprisoned in
his own curious cosmos; in other words, he is limited by the very
largeness of his own generalization. The explanations of the Marxian
must not go outside economics; and the student of Freud is forbidden to
forget sex. To see only the fanciful side of these serious sects may
seem a very frivolous pleasure; and I will not dispute that these are
very frivolous criticisms. I only submit that this frivolity is the last
lingering form of freedom.
In short, the note of these notes, so to speak, is that it is only from
a normal standpoint that all the nonsense of the world takes on
something of the wild interest of wonderland. I mean it is only in the
mirror of a very moderate sense and sanity, which is all I have ever
claimed to possess, that even insanities can appear as images clear
enough to appeal to the imagination. After all, the ordinary orthodox
person is he to whom the heresies can appear as fantasies. After all, it
is we ordinary human and humdrum people who can enjoy eccentricity as a
sort of elfland; while the eccentrics are too serious even to know that
they are elves. When a man tells us that he disapproves of children
being told fairy-tales, it is we who can perceive that he is himself a
fairy. He himself has not the least idea of it. When he says he would
discourage children from playing with tin soldiers, because it is
militarism, it is we and not he who can enjoy in fancy the fantastic
possibilities of his idea. It is we who suddenly think of children
playing with little tin figures of philanthropists, rather round and
with tin top-hats; the little tin gods of our commercial religion. It is
we who develop his imaginative idea for him, by suggesting little leaden
dolls of Conscientious Objectors in fixed attitudes of refined
repugnance; or a whole regiment of tiny Quakers with little grey coats
and white flags. He would never have thought of any of these substitutes
for himself; his negation is purely negative. Or when an educational
philosopher tells us that the child should have complete equality with
the adult, he cannot really carry his idea any farther without our
assistance. It will be from us and not from him that the natural
suggestion will come; that the baby should take its turn and carry the
mother, the moment the mother is tired of carrying the baby. He will
not, when left to himself, call up the poetical picture of the child
wheeling a double perambulator with the father and mother at each end.
He has no motive to look for lively logical developments; for him the
assimilation of parent and child is simply a platitude; and an
inevitable part of his own rather platitudinous philosophy. It is we and
not he who can behold the whole vista and vanishing perspective of his
own opinions; and work out what he really means. It is only those who
have ordinary views who have extraordinary visions.
There is indeed nothing very extraordinary about these visions, except
the extraordinary people who have provoked some of them. They are only a
very sketchy sort of sketches of some of the strange things that may be
found in the modern world. But however inadequate be the example, it is
none the less true that this is the sound principle behind much better
examples; and that, in those great things as in these small ones, sanity
was the condition of satire. It is because Gulliver is a man of moderate
stature that he can stray into the land of the giants and the land of
the pygmies. It is Swift and not the professors of Laputa who sees the
real romance of getting sunbeams out of cucumbers. It would be less than
exact to call Swift a sunbeam in the house; but if he did not himself
get much sunshine out of cucumbers, at least he let daylight into
professors. It was not the mad Swift but the sane Swift who made that
story so wild. The truth is more self-evident in men who were more sane.
It is the good sense of Rabelais that makes him seem to grin like a
gargoyle; and it is in a sense because Dickens was a Philistine that he
saw the land so full of strange gods. These idle journalistic jottings
have nothing in common with such standards of real literature, except
the principle involved; but the principle is the right one.
But while these are frivolous essays, pretending only to touch on topics
and theories they cannot exhaustively examine, I have added some that
may not seem to fit so easily even into so slight a scheme.
Nevertheless, they are in some sense connected with it. I have opened
with an essay on rhyme, because it is a type of the sort of tradition
which the anti-traditionalists now attack; and I have ended with one
called “Milton and Merry England,” because I feel that many may
misunderstand my case against the new Puritans, if they have no notion
of how I should attempt to meet the more accepted case in favour of the
old Puritans. Both these articles appeared originally in the “London
Mercury,” and I desire to express my thanks to Mr. J. C. Squire for his
kind permission to reprint them. But, in the latter case, I had the
further feeling that I wished to express somewhere the historical
sentiment that underlies the whole; the conviction that there did and
does exist a more normal and national England, which we once inhabited
and to which we may yet return; and which is not a Utopia but a home. I
have therefore thought it worth while to write this line of introduction
to show that such a scrap-book is not entirely scrappy; and that even to
touch such things lightly we need something like a test. It is necessary
to have in hand a truth to judge modern philosophies rapidly; and it is
necessary to judge them very rapidly to judge them before they
disappear.
G. K. C.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
THE ROMANCE OF RHYME 1
HAMLET AND THE PSYCHO-ANALYST 20
THE MEANING OF MOCK TURKEY 35
SHAKESPEARE AND THE LEGAL LADY 46
ON BEING AN OLD BEAN 55
THE FEAR OF THE FILM 61
WINGS AND THE HOUSEMAID 68
THE SLAVERY OF FREE VERSE 74
PROHIBITION AND THE PRESS 80
THE MERCY OF MR. ARNOLD BENNETT 86
A DEFENCE OF DRAMATIC UNITIES 93
THE BOREDOM OF BUTTERFLIES 99
THE TERROR OF A TOY 105
FALSE THEORY AND THE THEATRE 111
THE SECRET SOCIETY OF MANKIND 117
THE SENTIMENTALISM OF DIVORCE 124
STREET CRIES AND STRETCHING THE LAW 130
THE REVOLT OF THE SPOILT CHILD 136
THE INNOCENCE OF THE CRIMINAL 142
THE PRUDERY OF THE FEMINISTS 149
HOW MAD LAWS ARE MADE 155
THE PAGODA OF PROGRESS 161
THE MYTH OF THE “MAYFLOWER” 166
MUCH TOO MODERN HISTORY 173
THE EVOLUTION OF SLAVES 179
IS DARWIN DEAD? 186
TURNING INSIDE OUT 193
STRIKES AND THE SPIRIT OF WONDER 205
A NOTE ON OLD NONSENSE 212
MILTON AND MERRY ENGLAND 219
FANCIES VERSUS FADS
The Romance of Rhyme
The poet in the comic opera, it will be remembered (I hope), claimed for
his æsthetic authority that “Hey diddle diddle will rank as an idyll, if
I pronounce it chaste.” In face of a satire which still survives the
fashion it satirized, it may require some moral courage seriously to
pronounce it chaste, or to suggest that the nursery rhyme in question
has really some of the qualities of an idyll. Of its chastity, in the
vulgar sense, there need be little dispute, despite the scandal of the
elopement of the dish with the spoon, which would seem as free from
grossness as the loves of the triangles. And though the incident of the
cow may have something of the moonstruck ecstasy of Endymion, that also
has a silvery coldness about it worthy of the wilder aspects of Diana.
The truth more seriously tenable is that this nursery rhyme is a
complete and compact model of the nursery short story. The cow jumping
over the moon fulfils to perfection the two essentials of such a story
for children. It makes an effect that is fantastic out of objects that
are familiar; and it makes a picture that is at once incredible and
unmistakable. But it is yet more tenable, and here more to the point,
that this nursery rhyme is emphatically a rhyme. Both the lilt and the
jingle are just right for their purpose, and are worth whole libraries
of elaborate literary verse for children. And the best proof of its
vitality is that the satirist himself has unconsciously echoed the
jingle even in making the joke. The metre of that nineteenth-century
satire is the metre of the nursery rhyme. “Hey diddle diddle, the cat
and the fiddle” and “Hey diddle diddle will rank as an idyll” are
obviously both dancing to the same ancient tune; and that by no means
the tune the old cow died of, but the more exhilarating air to which she
jumped over the moon.
The whole history of the thing called rhyme can be found between those
two things: the simple pleasure of rhyming “diddle” to “fiddle,” and the
more sophisticated pleasure of rhyming “diddle” to “idyll.” Now the
fatal mistake about poetry, and more than half of the fatal mistake
about humanity, consists in forgetting that we should have the first
kind of pleasure as well as the second. It might be said that we should
have the first pleasure as the basis of the second; or yet more truly,
the first pleasure inside the second. The fatal metaphor of progress,
which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea
of growth, which means leaving things inside us. The heart of the tree
remains the same, however many rings are added to it; and a man cannot
leave his heart behind by running hard with his legs. In the core of all
culture are the things that may be said, in every sense, to be learned
by heart. In the innermost part of all poetry is the nursery rhyme, the
nonsense that is too happy even to care about being nonsensical. It may
lead on to the more elaborate nonsense of the Gilbertian line, or even
the far less poetic nonsense of some of the Browningesque rhymes. But
the true enjoyment of poetry is always in having the simple pleasure as
well as the subtle pleasure. Indeed it is on this primary point that so
many of our artistic and other reforms seem to go wrong. What is the
matter with the modern world is that it is trying to get simplicity in
everything except the soul. Where the soul really has simplicity it can
be grateful for anything--even complexity. Many peasants have to be
vegetarians, and their ordinary life is really a simple life. But the
peasants do not despise a good dinner when they can get it; they wolf it
down with enthusiasm, because they have not only the simple life but the
simple spirit. And it is so with the modern modes of art which revert,
very rightly, to what is “primitive.” But their moral mistake is that
they try to combine the ruggedness that should belong to simplicity with
a superciliousness that should only belong to satiety. The last Futurist
draughtsmanship, for instance, evidently has the aim of drawing a tree
as it might be drawn by a child of ten. I think the new artists would
admit it; nor do I merely sneer at it. I am willing to admit, especially
for the sake of argument, that there is a truth of philosophy and
psychology in this attempt to attain the clarity even through the
crudity of childhood. In this sense I can see what a man is driving at
when he draws a tree merely as a stick with smaller sticks standing out
of it. He may be trying to trace in black and white or grey a primeval
and almost prenatal illumination; that it is very remarkable that a
stick should exist, and still more remarkable that a stick should stick
up or stick out. He may be similarly enchanted with his own stick of
charcoal or grey chalk; he may be enraptured, as a child is, with the
mere fact that it makes a mark on the paper--a highly poetic fact in
itself. But the child does not despise the real tree for being different
from his drawing of the tree. He does not despise Uncle Humphrey because
that talented amateur can really draw a tree. He does not think less of
the real sticks because they are live sticks, and can grow and branch
and curve in a way uncommon in walking-sticks. Because he has a single
eye he can enjoy a double pleasure. This distinction, which seems
strangely neglected, may be traced again in the drama and most other
domains of art. Reformers insist that the audiences of simpler ages were
content with bare boards or rudimentary scenery if they could hear
Sophocles or Shakespeare talking a language of the gods. They were very
properly contented with plain boards. But they were not discontented
with pageants. The people who appreciated Antony’s oration as such would
have appreciated Aladdin’s palace as such. They did not think gilding
and spangles substitutes for poetry and philosophy, because they are
not. But they did think gilding and spangles great and admirable gifts
of God, because they are.
But the application of this distinction here is to the case of rhyme in
poetry. And the application of it is that we should never be ashamed of
enjoying a thing as a rhyme as well as enjoying it as a poem. And I
think the modern poets who try to escape from the rhyming pleasure, in
pursuit of a freer poetical pleasure, are making the same fundamentally
fallacious attempt to combine simplicity with superiority. Such a poet
is like a child who could take no pleasure in a tree because it looked
like a tree, or a playgoer who could take no pleasure in the Forest of
Arden because it looked like a forest. It is not impossible to find a
sort of prig who professes that he could listen to literature in any
scenery, but strongly objects to good scenery. And in poetical criticism
and creation there has also appeared the prig who insists that any new
poem must avoid the sort of melody that makes the beauty of any old
song. Poets must put away childish things, including the child’s
pleasure in the mere sing-song of irrational rhyme. It may be hinted
that when poets put away childish things they will put away poetry. But
it may be well to say a word in further justification of rhyme as well
as poetry, in the child as well as the poet. Now, the neglect of this
nursery instinct would be a blunder, even if it were merely an animal
instinct or an automatic instinct. If a rhyme were to a man merely what
a bark is to a dog, or a crow to a cock, it would be clear that such
natural things cannot be merely neglected. It is clear that a canine
epic, about Argus instead of Ulysses, would have a beat ultimately
consisting of barks. It is clear that a long poem like “Chantecler,”
written by a real cock, would be to the tune of Cock-a-doodle-doo. But
in truth the nursery rhyme has a nobler origin; if it be ancestral it is
not animal; its principle is a primary one, not only in the body but in
the soul.
Milton prefaced “Paradise Lost” with a ponderous condemnation of rhyme.
And perhaps the finest and even the most familiar line in the whole of
“Paradise Lost” is really a glorification of rhyme. “Seasons return, but
not to me return,” is not only an echo that has all the ring of rhyme in
its form, but it happens to contain nearly all the philosophy of rhyme
in its spirit. The wonderful word “return” has, not only in its sound
but in its sense, a hint of the whole secret of song. It is not merely
that its very form is a fine example of a certain quality in English,
somewhat similar to that which Mrs. Meynell admirably analysed in one of
her last beautiful essays, in the case of words like “unforgiven.” It is
that it describes poetry itself, not only in a mechanical but a moral
sense. Song is not only a recurrence, it is a return. It does not
merely, like the child in the nursery, take pleasure in seeing the
wheels go round. It also wishes to go back as well as round; to go back
to the nursery where such pleasures are found. Or to vary the metaphor
slightly, it does not merely rejoice in the rotation of a wheel on the
road, as if it were a fixed wheel in the air. It is not only the wheel
but the wagon that is returning. That labouring caravan is always
travelling towards some camping-ground that it has lost and cannot find
again. No lover of poetry needs to be told that all poems are full of
that noise of returning wheels; and none more than the poems of Milton
himself. The whole truth is obvious, not merely in the poem, but even in
the two words of the title. All poems might be bound in one book under
the title of “Paradise Lost.” And the only object of writing “Paradise
Lost” is to turn it, if only by a magic and momentary illusion, into
“Paradise Regained.”
It is in this deeper significance of return that we must seek for the
peculiar power in the recurrence we call rhyme. It would be easy enough
to reply to Milton’s strictures on rhyme in the spirit of a sensible if
superficial liberality by saying that it takes all sorts to make a
world, and especially the world of the poets. It is evident enough that
Milton might have been right to dispense with rhyme without being right
to despise it. It is obvious that the peculiar dignity of his religious
epic would have been weakened if it had been a rhymed epic, beginning:--
Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal root.
But it is equally obvious that Milton himself would not have tripped on
the light fantastic toe with quite so much charm and cheerfulness in the
lines:--
But come thou Goddess fair and free
In heaven yclept Euphrosyne
if the goddess had been yclept something else, as, for the sake of
argument, Syrinx. Milton in his more reasonable moods would have allowed
rhyme in theory a place in all poetry, as he allowed it in practice in
his own poetry. But he would certainly have said at this time, and
possibly at all times, that he allowed it an inferior place, or at least
a secondary place. But is its place secondary; and is it in any sense
inferior?
The romance of rhyme does not consist merely in the pleasure of a
jingle, though this is a pleasure of which no man should be ashamed.
Certainly most men take pleasure in it, whether or not they are ashamed
of it. We see it in the older fashion of prolonging the chorus of a song
with syllables like “rumty tumty” or “tooral looral.” We see it in the
similar but later fashion of discussing whether a truth is objective or
subjective, or whether a reform is constructive or destructive, or
whether an argument is deductive or inductive: all bearing witness to a
very natural love for those nursery rhyme recurrences which make a sort
of song without words, or at least without any kind of intellectual
significance. But something much deeper is involved in the love of rhyme
as distinct from other poetic forms, something which is perhaps too deep
and subtle to be described. The nearest approximation to the truth I can
think of is something like this: that while all forms of genuine verse
recur, there is in rhyme a sense of return to exactly the same place.
All modes of song go forward and backward like the tides of the sea; but
in the great sea of Homeric or Virgilian hexameters, the sea that
carried the labouring ships of Ulysses and Æneas, the thunder of the
breakers is rhythmic, but the margin of the foam is necessarily
irregular and vague. In rhyme there is rather a sense of water poured
safely into one familiar well, or (to use a nobler metaphor) of ale
poured safely into one familiar flagon. The armies of Homer and Virgil
advance and retreat over a vast country, and suggest vast and very
profound sentiments about it, about whether it is their own country or
only a strange country. But when the old nameless ballad boldly rhymes
“the bonny ivy tree” to “my ain countree” the vision at once dwindles
and sharpens to a very vivid image of a single soldier passing under the
ivy that darkens his own door. Rhythm deals with similarity, but rhyme
with identity. Now in the one word identity are involved perhaps the
deepest and certainly the dearest human things. He who is home-sick does
not desire houses or even homes. He who is love-sick does not want to
see all the women with whom he might have fallen in love. Only he who is
sea-sick, perhaps, may be said to have a cosmopolitan craving for all
lands or any kind of land. And this is probably why sea-sickness, like
cosmopolitanism, has never yet been a high inspiration to song.
Songs, especially the most poignant of them, generally refer to some
absolute, to some positive place or person for whom no similarity is a
substitute. In such a case all approximation is merely asymptotic. The
prodigal returns to his father’s house and not the house next door,
unless he is still an imperfectly sober prodigal. The lover desires his
lady and not her twin sister, except in old complications of romance.
And even the spiritualist is generally looking for a ghost and not
merely for ghosts. I think the intolerable torture of spiritualism must
be a doubt about identity. Anyhow, it will generally be found that where
this call for the identical has been uttered most ringingly and
unmistakably in literature, it has been uttered in rhyme. Another
purpose for which this pointed and definite form is very much fitted is
the expression of dogma, as distinct from doubt or even opinion. This is
why, with all allowance for a decline in the most classical effects of
the classical tongue, the rhymed Latin of the mediæval hymns does
express what it had to express in a very poignant poetical manner, as
compared with the reverent agnosticism so nobly uttered in the rolling
unrhymed metres of the ancients. For even if we regard the matter of the
mediæval verses as a dream, it was at least a vivid dream, a dream full
of faces, a dream of love and of lost things. And something of the same
spirit runs in a vaguer way through proverbs and phrases that are not
exactly religious, but rather in a rude sense philosophical, but which
all move with the burden of returning; things to be felt only in
familiar fragments ... _on revient toujours_ ... it’s the old story ...
it’s love that makes the world go round; and all roads lead to Rome: we
might almost say that all roads lead to Rhyme.
Milton’s revolt against rhyme must be read in the light of history.
Milton is the Renascence frozen into a Puritan form; the beginning of a
period which was in a sense classic, but was in a still more definite
sense aristocratic. There the Classicist was the artistic aristocrat
because the Calvinist was the spiritual aristocrat. The seventeenth
century was intensely individualistic; it had both in the noble and the
ignoble sense a respect for persons. It had no respect whatever for
popular traditions; and it was in the midst of its purely logical and
legal excitement that most of the popular traditions died. The
Parliament appeared and the people disappeared. The arts were put under
patrons, where they had once been under patron saints. The English
schools and colleges at once strengthened and narrowed the New Learning,
making it something rather peculiar to one country and one class. A few
men talked a great deal of good Latin, where all men had once talked a
little bad Latin. But they talked even the good Latin so that no
Latinist in the world could understand them. They confined all study of
the classics to that of the most classical period, and grossly
exaggerated the barbarity and barrenness of patristic Greek or mediæval
Latin. It is as if a man said that because the English translation of
the Bible is perhaps the best English in the world, therefore Addison
and Pater and Newman are not worth reading. We can imagine what men in
such a mood would have said of the rude rhymed hexameters of the monks;
and it is not unnatural that they should have felt a reaction against
rhyme itself. For the history of rhyme is the history of something
else, very vast and sometimes invisible, certainly somewhat indefinable,
against which they were in aristocratic rebellion.
That thing is difficult to define in impartial modern terms. It might
well be called Romance, and that even in a more technical sense, since
it corresponds to the rise of the Romance languages as distinct from the
Roman language. It might more truly be called Religion, for historically
it was the gradual re-emergence of Europe through the Dark Ages, because
it still had one religion, though no longer one rule. It was, in short,
the creation of Christendom. It may be called Legend, for it is true
that the most overpowering presence in it is that of omni-present and
powerful popular Legend; so that things that may never have happened,
or, as some say, could never have happened, are nevertheless rooted in
our racial memory like things that have happened to ourselves. The whole
Arthurian Cycle, for instance, seems something more real than reality.
If the faces in that darkness of the Dark Ages, Lancelot and Arthur and
Merlin and Modred, are indeed faces in a dream, they are like faces in a
real dream: a dream in a bed and not a dream in a book. Subconsciously
at least, I should be much less surprised if Arthur was to come again
than I should be if the Superman were to come at all. Again, the thing
might be called Gossip: a noble name, having in it the name of God and
one of the most generous and genial of the relations of men. For I
suppose there has seldom been a time when such a mass of culture and
good traditions of craft and song have been handed down orally, by one
universal buzz of conversation, through centuries of ignorance down to
centuries of greater knowledge. Education must have been an eternal
_viva voce_ examination; but the men passed their examination. At least
they went out in such rude sense masters of art as to create the Song of
Roland and the round Roman arches that carry the weight of so many
Gothic towers. Finally, of course, it can be called ignorance,
barbarism, black superstition, a reaction towards obscurantism and old
night; and such a view is eminently complete and satisfactory, only that
it leaves behind it a sort of weak wonder as to why the very youngest
poets do still go on writing poems about the sword of Arthur and the
horn of Roland.
All this was but the beginning of a process which has two great points
of interest. The first is the way in which the mediæval movement did
rebuild the old Roman civilization; the other was the way in which it
did not. A strange interest attaches to the things which had never
existed in the pagan culture and did appear in the Christian culture. I
think it is true of most of them that they had a quality that can very
approximately be described as popular, or perhaps as vulgar, as indeed
we still talk of the languages which at that time liberated themselves
from Latin as the vulgar tongues. And to many Classicists these things
would appear to be vulgar in a more vulgar sense. They were vulgar in
the sense of being vivid almost to excess, of making a very direct and
unsophisticated appeal to the emotions. The first law of heraldry was to
wear the heart upon the sleeve. Such mediævalism was the reverse of mere
mysticism, in the sense of mere mystery; it might more truly be
described as sensationalism. One of these things, for instance, was a
hot and even an impatient love of colour. It learned to paint before it
could draw, and could afford the twopence coloured long before it could
manage the penny plain. It culminated at last, of course, in the energy
and gaiety of the Gothic; but even the richness of Gothic rested on a
certain psychological simplicity. We can contrast it with the classic by
noting its popular passion for telling a story in stone. We may admit
that a Doric portico is a poem, but no one would describe it as an
anecdote. The time was to come when much of the imagery of the
cathedrals was to be lost; but it would have mattered the less that it
was defaced by its enemies if it had not been already neglected by its
friends. It would have mattered less if the whole tide of taste among
the rich had not turned against the old popular masterpieces. The
Puritans defaced them, but the Cavaliers did not truly defend them. The
Cavaliers were also aristocrats of the new classical culture, and used
the word Gothic in the sense of barbaric. For the benefit of the
Teutonists we may note in parenthesis that, if this phrase meant that
Gothic was despised, it also meant that the Goths were despised. But
when the Cavaliers came back, after the Puritan interregnum, they
restored not in the style of Pugin but in the style of Wren. The very
thing we call the Restoration, which was the restoration of King
Charles, was also the restoration of St. Paul’s. And it was a very
modern restoration.
So far we might say that simple people do not like simple things. This
is certainly true if we compare the classic with these highly coloured
things of mediævalism, or all the vivid visions which first began to
glow in the night of the Dark Ages. Now one of these things was the
romantic expedient called rhyme. And even in this, if we compare the
two, we shall see something of the same paradox by which the simple like
complexities and the complex like simplicities. The ignorant liked rich
carvings and melodious and often ingenious rhymes. The learned liked
bare walls and blank verse. But in the case of rhyme it is peculiarly
difficult to define the double and yet very definite truth. It is
difficult to define the sense in which rhyme is artificial and the sense
in which it is simple. In truth it is simple because it is artificial.
It is an artifice of the kind enjoyed by children and other poetic
people; it is a toy. As a technical accomplishment it stands at the same
distance from the popular experience as the old popular sports. Like
swimming, like dancing, like drawing the bow, anybody can do it, but
nobody can do it without taking the trouble to do it; and only a few can
do it very well. In a hundred ways it was akin to that simple and even
humble energy that made all the lost glory of the guilds. Thus their
rhyme was useful as well as ornamental. It was not merely a melody but
also a mnemonic; just as their towers were not merely trophies but
beacons and belfries. In another aspect rhyme is akin to rhetoric, but
of a very positive and emphatic sort: the coincidence of sound giving
the effect of saying, “It is certainly so.” Shakespeare realized this
when he rounded off a fierce or romantic scene with a rhymed couplet. I
know that some critics do not like this, but I think there is a moment
when a drama ought to become a melodrama. Then there is a much older
effect of rhyme that can only be called mystical, which may seem the
very opposite of the utilitarian, and almost equally remote from the
rhetorical. Yet it shares with the former the tough texture of something
not easily forgotten, and with the latter the touch of authority which
is the aim of all oratory. The thing I mean may be found in the fact
that so many of the old proverbial prophecies, from Merlin to Mother
Shipton, were handed down in rhyme. It can be found in the very name of
Thomas the Rhymer.
But the simplest way of putting this popular quality is in a single
word: it is a song. Rhyme corresponds to a melody so simple that it goes
straight like an arrow to the heart. It corresponds to a chorus so
familiar and obvious that all men can join in it. I am not disturbed by
the suggestion that such an arrow of song, when it hits the heart, may
entirely miss the head. I am not concerned to deny that the chorus may
sometimes be a drunken chorus, in which men have lost their heads to
find their tongues. I am not defending but defining; I am trying to find
words for a large but elusive distinction between certain things that
are certainly poetry and certain other things which are also song. Of
course it is only an accident that Horace opens his greatest series of
odes by saying that he detests the profane populace and wishes to drive
them from his temple of poetry. But it is the sort of accident that is
almost an allegory. There is even a sense in which it has a practical
side. When all is said, _could_ a whole crowd of men sing the “Descende
Cœlo,” that noble ode, as a crowd can certainly sing the “Dies Irae,” or
for that matter “Down among the Dead Men”? Did Horace himself sing the
Horatian odes in the sense in which Shakespeare could sing, or could
hardly help singing, the Shakespearean songs? I do not know, having no
kind of scholarship on these points. But I do not feel that it could
have been at all the same thing; and my only purpose is to attempt a
rude description of that thing. Rhyme is consonant to the particular
kind of song that can be a popular song, whether pathetic or passionate
or comic; and Milton is entitled to his true distinction; nobody is
likely to sing “Paradise Lost” as if it were a song of that kind. I have
tried to suggest my sympathy with rhyme, in terms true enough to be
accepted by the other side as expressing their antipathy for it. I have
admitted that rhyme is a toy and even a trick, of the sort that delights
children. I have admitted that every rhyme is a nursery rhyme. What I
will never admit is that anyone who is too big for the nursery is big
enough for the Kingdom of God, though the God were only Apollo.
A good critic should be like God in the great saying of a Scottish
mystic. George Macdonald said that God was easy to please and hard to
satisfy. That paradox is the poise of all good artistic appreciation.
Without the first part of the paradox appreciation perishes, because it
loses the power to appreciate. Good criticism, I repeat, combines the
subtle pleasure in a thing being done well with the simple pleasure in
it being done at all. It combines the pleasure of the scientific
engineer in seeing how the wheels work together to a logical end with
the pleasure of the baby in seeing the wheels go round. It combines the
pleasure of the artistic draughtsman in the fact that his lines of
charcoal, light and apparently loose, fall exactly right and in a
perfect relation with the pleasure of the child in the fact that the
charcoal makes marks of any kind on the paper. And in the same fashion
it combines the critic’s pleasure in a poem with the child’s pleasure in
a rhyme. The historical point about this kind of poetry, the rhymed
romantic kind, is that it rose out of the Dark Ages with the whole of
this huge popular power behind it, the human love of a song, a riddle, a
proverb, a pun or a nursery rhyme; the sing-song of innumerable
children’s games, the chorus of a thousand campfires and a thousand
taverns. When poetry loses its link with all these people who are easily
pleased it loses all its power of giving pleasure. When a poet looks
down on a rhyme it is, I will not say as if he looked down on a daisy
(which might seem possible to the more literal-minded), but rather as if
he looked down on a lark because he had been up in a balloon. It is
cutting away the very roots of poetry; it is revolting against nature
because it is natural, against sunshine because it is bright, or
mountains because they are high, or moonrise because it is mysterious.
The freezing process began after the Reformation with a fastidious
search for finer yet freer forms; to-day it has ended in formlessness.
But the joke of it is that even when it is formless it is still
fastidious. The new anarchic artists are not ready to accept everything.
They are not ready to accept anything except anarchy. Unless it observes
the very latest conventions of unconventionality, they would rule out
anything classic as coldly as any classic ever ruled out anything
romantic. But the classic was a form; and there was even a time when it
was a new form. The men who invented Sapphics did invent a new metre;
the introduction of Elizabethan blank verse was a real revolution in
literary form. But _vers libre_, or nine-tenths of it, is not a new
metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
It is no more a revolution in literary form than eating meat raw is an
innovation in cookery. It is not even original, because it is not
creative; the artist does not invent anything, but only abolishes
something. But the only point about it that is to my present purpose is
expressed in the word “pride.” It is not merely proud in the sense of
being exultant, but proud in the sense of being disdainful. Such outlaws
are more exclusive than aristocrats; and their anarchical arrogance goes
far beyond the pride of Milton and the aristocrats of the New Learning.
And this final refinement has completed the work which the saner
aristocrats began, the work now most evident in the world: the
separation of art from the people. I need not insist on the sensational
and self-evident character of that separation. I need not recommend the
modern poet to attempt to sing his _vers libres_ in a public house. I
need not even urge the young Imagist to read out a number of his
disconnected Images to a public meeting. The thing is not only admitted
but admired. The old artist remained proud in spite of his unpopularity;
the new artist is proud because of his unpopularity; perhaps it is his
chief ground for pride.
Dwelling as I do in the Dark Ages, or at latest among the mediæval
fairy-tales, I am yet moved to remember something I once read in a
modern fairy-tale. As it happens, I have already used the name of George
Macdonald; and in the best of his books there is a description of how a
young miner in the mountains could always drive away the subterranean
goblins if he could remember and repeat any kind of rhyme. The impromptu
rhymes were often doggerel, as was the dog-Latin of many monkish
hexameters or the burden of many rude Border ballads. But I have a
notion that they drove away the devils, blue devils of pessimism and
black devils of pride. Anyhow Madame Montessori, who has apparently
been deploring the educational effects of fairy-tales, would probably
see in me a pitiable example of such early perversion, for that image
which was one of my first impressions seems likely enough to be one of
my last; and when the noise of many new and original musical
instruments, with strange shapes and still stranger noises, has passed
away like a procession, I shall hear in the succeeding silence only a
rustle and scramble among the rocks and a boy singing on the mountain.
Hamlet and the Psycho-Analyst
This morning, for a long stretch of hours before breakfast, and even as
it were merging into breakfast, and almost overlapping breakfast, I was
engaged in scientific researches in the great new department of
psycho-analysis. Every journalist knows by this time that
psycho-analysis largely depends on the study of dreams. But in order to
study our dreams it is necessary to dream; and in order to dream it is
necessary to sleep. So, while others threw away the golden hours in
lighter and less learned occupations, while ignorant and superstitious
peasants were already digging in their ignorant and superstitious
kitchen-gardens, to produce their ignorant and superstitious beans and
potatoes, while priests were performing their pious mummeries and poets
composing lyrics on listening to the skylark--I myself was pioneering
hundreds of years ahead of this benighted century; ruthlessly and
progressively probing into all the various horrible nightmares, from
which a happier future will take its oracles and its commandments. I
will not describe my dreams in detail; I am not quite so ruthless a
psychologist as all that. And indeed it strikes me as possible that the
new psychologist will be rather a bore at breakfast. My dream was
something about wandering in some sort of catacombs under the Albert
Hall, and it involved eating jumbles (a brown flexible cake now almost
gone from us, like so many glories of England) and also arguing with a
Theosophist. I cannot fit this in very well with Freud and his theory of
suppressed impulses. For I swear I never in my life suppressed the
impulse to eat a jumble or to argue with a Theosophist. And as for
wandering about in the Albert Hall, nobody could ever have had an
impulse to do that.
When I came down to breakfast I looked at the morning paper; not (as you
humorously suggest) at the evening paper. I had not pursued my
scientific studies quite so earnestly as that. I looked at the morning
paper, as I say, and found it contained a good deal about
Psycho-Analysis, indeed it explained almost everything about
Psycho-Analysis except what it was. This was naturally a thing which
newspapers would present in a rather fragmentary fashion; and I fitted
the fragments together as best I could. Apparently the dreams were
merely symbols; and apparently symbols of something very savage and
horrible which remained a secret. This seems to me a highly unscientific
use of the word symbol. A symbol is not a disguise but rather a display;
the best expression of something that cannot otherwise be expressed.
Eating a jumble may mean that I wished to bite off my father’s nose (the
mother-complex being strong on me); but it does not seem to show much
symbolic talent. The Albert Hall may imply the murder of an uncle; but
it hardly makes itself very clear. And we do not seem to be getting much
nearer the truth by dreaming, if we hide things by night more completely
than we repress them by day. Anyhow, the murdered uncle reminds me of
Hamlet, of whom more anon; at the moment I am merely remarking that my
newspaper was a little vague; and I was all the more relieved to open my
“London Mercury” and find an article on the subject by so able and
suggestive a writer as Mr. J. D. Beresford.
Mr. J. D. Beresford practically asked himself whether he should become a
psycho-analyst or continue to be a novelist. It will readily be
understood that he did not put it precisely in these words; he would
probably put psycho-analysis higher, and very possibly his own fiction
lower; for men of genius are often innocent enough of their own genuine
originality. That is a form of the unconscious mind with which none of
us will quarrel. But I have no desire to watch a man of genius tying
himself in knots, and perhaps dying in agony, in the attempt to be
conscious of his own unconsciousness. I have seen too many unfortunate
sceptics thus committing suicide by self-contradiction. Haeckel and his
Determinists, in my youth, bullied us all about the urgent necessity of
choosing a philosophy which would prove the impossibility of choosing
anything. No doubt the new psychology will somehow enable us to know
what we are doing, about all that we do without knowing it. These things
come and go, and pass through their phases in order, from the time when
they are as experimental as Freudism to the time when they are as
exploded as Darwinism. But I never can understand men allowing things so
visibly fugitive to hide things that are visibly permanent, like morals
and religion and (what is in question here) the art of letters. _Ars
longa, scientia brevis._
Anyhow, as has been said, psycho-analysis depends in practice upon the
interpretation of dreams. I do not know whether making masses of people,
chiefly children, confess their dreams, would lead to a great output of
literature; though it would certainly lead, if I know anything of human
nature, to a glorious output of lies. There is something touching in the
inhuman innocence of the psychologist, who is already talking of the
scientific exactitude of results reached by the one particular sort of
evidence that cannot conceivably be checked or tested in any way
whatever. But, as Mr. Beresford truly says, the general notion of
finding signs in dreams is as old as the world; but even the special
theory of it is older than many seem to suppose. Indeed, it is not only
old, but obvious; and was never discovered, because it was always
noticed. Long before the present fashion I myself (who, heaven knows, am
no psychologist) remember saying that as there is truth in all popular
traditions, there is truth in the popular saying that dreams go by the
rule of contraries. That is, that a man does often think at night about
the very things he does not think by day. But the popular saying had in
it a certain virtue never found in the anti-popular sciences of our day.
Popular superstition has one enormous element of sanity; it is never
serious. We talk of ages like the mediæval as the ages of faith; but it
would be quite as true a tribute to call them the ages of doubt; of a
healthy doubt, and even a healthy derision. There was always something
more or less consciously grotesque about an old ghost story. There was
fun mixed with the fear; and the yokels knew too much about turnips not
occasionally to think of turnip-ghosts. There is no fun about
psycho-analysis. One yokel would say, “Ar, they do say dreams go by
contraries.” And then the others would say “Ar,” and they would all
laugh in a deep internal fashion. But when Mr. J. D. Beresford says that
Freud’s theory is among scientific theories the most attractive for
novelists, “it was a theory of sex, the all but universal theme of the
novel,” it is clear that our audience is slower and more solemn than the
yokels. For nobody laughs at all. People seem to have lost the power of
reacting to the humorous stimulus. When one milkmaid dreamed of a
funeral, the other milkmaid said, “That means a wedding,” and then they
would both giggle. But when Mr. J. D. Beresford says that the theory
“adumbrated the suggestion of a freer morality, by dwelling upon the
physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse,” the
point seems somehow to be missed. Not a single giggle is heard in the
deep and disappointing silence. It seems truly strange that when a
modern and brilliant artist actually provides jokes far more truly
humorous than the rude jests of the yokels and the milkmaids, the finer
effort should meet with the feebler response. It is but an example of
the unnatural solemnity, like an artificial vacuum, in which all these
modern experiments are conducted. But no doubt if Freud had enjoyed the
opportunity of explaining his ideas in an ancient ale-house, they would
have met with more spontaneous applause.