admire his talent, but I am at this moment acting in strict obedience to
his theories. I am--I say it proudly--acting as a disciple of Freud, who
apparently forbids me to conceal any impulse, presumably including the
impulse to laugh. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Beresford; but my first
duty, of course, is to my own psychological inside. And goodness knows
what damage might not be done to the most delicate workings of my own
mental apparatus (as Mr. Arnold Bennett called it) if I were to subject
it to the sudden and violent strain of not smiling at the scientific
theory which is attractive because it is sexual, or of forcing my
features into a frightful composure when I hear of the spiritual
necessity for the liberation of impulse. I am not quite sure how far the
liberation of impulse is to be carried out in practice by its exponents
in theory; I do not know whether it is better to liberate the impulse to
throw somebody else out of an express train in order to have the
carriage to oneself all the way; or what may be the penalties for
repressing the native instinct to shoot Mr. Lloyd George. But obviously
the greater includes the less; and it would be very illogical if we were
allowed to chuck out our fellow-traveller but not to chaff him; or if I
were permitted to shoot at Mr. George but not to smile at Mr. Beresford.
And though I am not so serious as he is, I assure him that in this I am
quite as sincere as he is. In that sense I do seriously regret his
seriousness; I do seriously think such seriousness a very serious evil.
For some healthy human impulses are really the better for the relief by
words and gestures, and one of them is the universal human sense that
there is something comic about the relations of the sexes. The impulse
to laugh at the mention of morality as “free” or of sex science as
“attractive” is one of the impulses which is already gratified by most
people who have never heard of psycho-analysis and is only mortified by
people like the psycho-analysts.
Mr. Beresford must therefore excuse me if, with a sincere desire to
follow his serious argument seriously, I note at the beginning a certain
normal element of comedy of which critics of his school seem to be
rather unconscious. When he asks whether this theory of the nemesis of
suppression can serve the purposes of great literary work, it would seem
natural at first to test it by the example of the greatest literary
works. And, judged by this scientific test, it must be admitted that our
literary classics would appear to fail. Lady Macbeth does not suffer as
a sleep-walker because she has resisted the impulse to murder Duncan,
but rather (by some curious trick of thought) because she has yielded to
it. Hamlet’s uncle is in a morbid frame of mind, not, as one would
naturally expect, because he had thwarted his own development by leaving
his own brother alive and in possession; but actually because he has
triumphantly liberated himself from the morbid impulse to pour poison in
his brother’s ear. On the theory of psycho-analysis, as expounded, a man
ought to be haunted by the ghosts of all the men he has not murdered.
Even if they were limited to those he has felt a vague fancy for
murdering, they might make a respectable crowd to follow at his heels.
Yet Shakespeare certainly seems to represent Macbeth as haunted by
Banquo, whom he removed at one blow from the light of the sun and from
his own subconsciousness. Hell ought to mean the regret for lost
opportunities for crime; the insupportable thought of houses still
standing unburned or unburgled, or of wealthy uncles still walking about
alive with their projecting watch-chains. Yet Dante certainly seemed to
represent it as concerned exclusively with things done and done with,
and not as merely the morbidly congested imagination of a thief who had
not thieved and a murderer who had not murdered. In short, it is only
too apparent that the poets and sages of the past knew very little of
psycho-analysis, and whether or no Mr. Beresford can achieve great
literary effects with it, they managed to achieve their literary effects
without it. This is but a preliminary point, and I shall touch the more
serious problem in a few minutes, if the fashion has not changed before
then. For the moment I only take the test of literary experience, and of
how independent of such theories have been the real masterpieces of man.
Men are still excited over the poetic parts of poets like Shakespeare
and Dante; if they go to sleep it is over the scientific parts. It is
over some system of the spheres which Dante thought the very latest
astronomy, or some argument about the humours of the body which
Shakespeare thought the very latest physiology. I appeal to Mr.
Beresford’s indestructible sense of humanity and his still undestroyed
sense of humour. What would have become of the work of Dickens if it had
been rewritten to illustrate the thesis of Darwin? What even of the work
of Mr. Kipling if modified to meet the theories of Mr. Kidd? Believe me,
the proportions are as I have said. Art is long, but science is
fleeting; and Mr. Beresford’s subconsciousness, though stout and brave,
is in danger of being not so much a muffled drum as a drum which
somebody silences for ever; by knocking a hole in it, only to find
nothing inside. But there is one incidental moral in the matter that
seems to me topical and rather arresting. It concerns the idea of
punishment. The psycho-analysts continue to buzz in a mysterious manner
round the problem of Hamlet. They are especially interested in the
things of which Hamlet was unconscious, not to mention the things of
which Shakespeare was unconscious. It is in vain for old-fashioned
rationalists like myself to point out that this is like dissecting the
brain of Puck or revealing the real private life of Punch and Judy. The
discussion no longer revolves round whether Hamlet is mad, but whether
everybody is mad, especially the experts investigating the madness. And
the curious thing about this process is that even when the critics are
really subtle enough to see subtle things, they are never simple enough
to see self-evident things. A really fine critic is reported as arguing
that in Hamlet the consciousness willed one thing and the
subconsciousness another. Apparently the conscious Hamlet had
unreservedly embraced and even welcomed the obligation of vengeance, but
the shock (we are told) had rendered the whole subject painful, and
started a strange and secret aversion to the scheme. It did not seem to
occur to the writers that there might possibly be something slightly
painful, at the best, in cutting the throat of your own uncle and the
husband of your own mother. There might certainly be an aversion from
the act; but I do not quite see why it should be an unconscious
aversion. It seems just possible that a man might be quite conscious of
not liking such a job. Where he differed from the modern morality was
that he believed in the possibility of disliking it and yet doing it.
But to follow the argument of these critics, one would think that
murdering the head of one’s family was a sort of family festivity or
family joke; a gay and innocent indulgence into which the young prince
would naturally have thrown himself with thoughtless exuberance, were it
not for the dark and secretive thoughts that had given him an
unaccountable distaste for it. Suppose it were borne in upon one of
these modern middle-class critics, of my own rank and routine of life
(possibly through his confidence in the messages at a Spiritualist
séance) that it was his business to go home to Brompton or Surbiton and
stick the carving-knife into Uncle William, who had poisoned somebody
and was beyond the reach of the law. It is possible that the critic’s
first thought would be that it was a happy way of spending a
half-holiday; and that only in the critic’s subconsciousness the
suspicion would stir that there was something unhappy about the whole
business. But it seems also possible that the regret might not be
confined to his subconsciousness, but might swim almost to the surface
of his consciousness. In plain words, this sort of criticism has lost
the last rags of common sense. Hamlet requires no such subconscious
explanation, for he explains himself, and was perhaps rather too fond of
doing so. He was a man to whom duty had come in a very dreadful and
repulsive form, and to a man not fitted for that form of duty. There was
a conflict, but he was conscious of it from beginning to end. He was not
an unconscious person; but a far too conscious one.
Strangely enough, this theory of subconscious repulsion in the dramatic
character is itself an example of subconscious repulsion in the modern
critic. It is the critic who has a sort of subliminal prejudice which
makes him avoid something, that seems very simple to others. The thing
which he secretly and obscurely avoids, from the start, is the very
simple fact of the morality in which Shakespeare did believe, as
distinct from all the crude psychology in which he almost certainly did
not believe. Shakespeare certainly did believe in the struggle between
duty and inclination. The critic instinctively avoids the admission that
Hamlet’s was a struggle between duty and inclination; and tries to
substitute a struggle between consciousness and subconsciousness. He
gives Hamlet a complex to avoid giving him a conscience. But he is
actually forced to talk as if it was a man’s natural inclination to kill
an uncle, because he does not want to admit that it might be his duty to
kill him. He is really driven to talking as if some dark and secretive
monomania alone prevented us all from killing our uncles. He is driven
to this because he will not even take seriously the simple and, if you
will, primitive morality upon which the tragedy is built. For that
morality involves three moral propositions, from which the whole of the
morbid modern subconsciousness does really recoil as from an ugly jar of
pain. These principles are: first, that it may be our main business to
do the right thing, even when we detest doing it; second, that the right
thing may involve punishing some person, especially some powerful
person; third, that the just process of punishment may take the form of
fighting and killing. The modern critic is prejudiced against the first
principle and calls it asceticism; he is prejudiced against the second
principle and calls it vindictiveness; he is prejudiced against the
third and generally calls it militarism. That it actually might be the
duty of a young man to risk his own life, much against his own
inclination, by drawing a sword and killing a tyrant, that is an idea
instinctively avoided by this particular mood of modern times. That is
why tyrants have such a good time in modern times. And in order to avoid
this plain and obvious meaning, of war as a duty and peace as a
temptation, the critic has to turn the whole play upside down, and seek
its meaning in modern notions so remote as to be in this connexion
meaningless. He has to make William Shakespeare of Stratford one of the
pupils of Professor Freud. He has to make him a champion of
psycho-analysis, which is like making him a champion of vaccination. He
has to fit Hamlet’s soul somehow into the classifications of Freud and
Jung; which is just as if he had to fit Hamlet’s father into the
classifications of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He has
to interpret the whole thing by a new morality that Shakespeare had
never heard of, because he has an intense internal dislike of the old
morality that Shakespeare could not help hearing of. And that morality,
which some of us believe to be based on a much more realistic
psychology, is that punishment as punishment is a perfectly healthy
process, not merely because it is reform, but also because it is
expiation. What the modern world means by proposing to substitute pity
for punishment is really very simple. It is that the modern world dare
not punish those who are punishable, but only those who are pitiable. It
would never touch anyone so important as King Claudius--or Kaiser
William.
Now this truth is highly topical just now. The point about Hamlet was
that he wavered, very excusably, in something that had to be done; and
this is the point quite apart from whether we ourselves would have done
it. That was pointed out long ago by Browning in “The Statue and the
Bust.” He argued that even if the motive for acting was bad, the motive
for not acting was worse. And an action or inaction is judged by its
real motive, not by whether somebody else might have done the same thing
from a better motive. Whether or no the tyrannicide of Hamlet was a
duty, it was accepted as a duty and it was shirked as a duty. And that
is precisely true of a tyrannicide like that for which everybody
clamoured at the conclusion of the Great War. It may have been right or
wrong to punish the Kaiser; it was certainly even more right to punish
the German generals and admirals for their atrocities. But even if it
was wrong, it was not abandoned because it was wrong. It was abandoned
because it was troublesome. It was abandoned for all those motives of
weakness and mutability of mood which we associate with the name of
Hamlet. It might be glory or ignominy to shed the blood of imperial
enemies, but it is certainly ignominy to shout for what you dare not
shed; “to fall a-cursing like a common drab, a scullion.” Granted that
we had no better motives than we had then or have now, it would
certainly have been more dignified if we had fatted all the region-kites
with this slave’s offal. The motive is the only moral test. A saint
might provide us with a higher motive for forgiving the War-Lords who
butchered Fryatt and Edith Cavell. But we have not forgiven the
War-Lords. We have simply forgotten the War. We have not pardoned like
Christ; we have only procrastinated like Hamlet. Our highest motive has
been laziness; our commonest motive has been money. In this respect
indeed I must apologize to the charming and chivalrous Prince of Denmark
for comparing him, even on a single point, with the princes of finance
and the professional politicians of our time. At least Hamlet did not
spare Claudius solely because he hoped to get money out of him for the
salaries of the Players, or meant to do a deal with him about wine
supplied to Elsinore or debts contracted at Wittenburg. Still less was
Hamlet acting entirely in the interests of Shylock, an inhabitant of the
distant city of Venice. Doubtless Hamlet was sent to England in order
that he might develop further these higher motives for peace and pardon.
“’Twill not be noticed in him there; there the men are as mad as he.”
It is therefore very natural that men should be trying to dissolve the
moral problem of Hamlet into the unmoral elements of consciousness and
unconsciousness. The sort of duty that Hamlet shirked is exactly the
sort of duty that we are all shirking; that of dethroning injustice and
vindicating truth. Many are now in a mood to deny that it is a duty
because it is a danger. This applies, of course, not only to
international but internal and especially industrial matters. Capitalism
was allowed to grow into a towering tyranny in England because the
English were always putting off their popular revolution, just as the
Prince of Denmark put off his palace revolution. They lectured the
French about their love of bloody revolutions, exactly as they are now
lecturing the French about their love of bloody wars. But the patience
which suffered England to be turned into a plutocracy was not the
patience of the saints; it was that patience which paralysed the noble
prince of the tragedy; _accidia_ and the great refusal. In any case,
the vital point is that by refusing to punish the powerful we soon lost
the very idea of punishment; and turned our police into a mere
persecution of the poor.
The Meaning of Mock Turkey
Having lately taken part in a pageant of Nursery Rhymes, in the
character of Old King Cole, I meditated not so much on the glorious past
of the great kingdom of Colchester, as on the more doubtful future of
Nursery Rhymes. The Modern Movements cannot produce a nursery rhyme; it
is one of the many such things they cannot even be conceived as doing.
But if they cannot create the nursery rhyme, will they destroy it? The
new poets have already abolished rhyme; and presumably the new
educationalists will soon abolish nurseries. Or if they do not destroy,
will they reform; which is worse? Nursery rhymes are a positive network
of notions and allusions of which the enlightened disapprove. To take
only my own allotted rhyme as an example, some might think the very
mention of a king a piece of reactionary royalism, inconsistent with
that democratic self-determination we all enjoy under some five
Controllers and a committee of the Cabinet. Perhaps in the amended
version he will be called President Cole. Probably he will be confused
with Mr. G. D. H. Cole, the first President of the Guild Socialistic
Republic. With the greatest admiration for Mr. Cole, I cannot quite
picture him as so festive a figure; and I incline to think that the
same influences will probably eliminate the festivity. It is said that
America, having already abolished the bowl, is now attempting to abolish
the pipe. After that it might very reasonably go on to abolish the
fiddlers; for music can be far more maddening than wine. Tolstoy, the
only consistent prophet of the Simple Life, did really go on to denounce
music as a mere drug. Anyhow, it is quite intolerable that the innocent
minds of children should be poisoned with the idea of anybody calling
for his pipe and his bowl. There will have to be some other version,
such as: “He called for his milk and he called for his lozenge,” or
whatever form of bodily pleasure is still permitted to mankind. This
particular verse will evidently have to be altered a great deal; it is
founded on so antiquated a philosophy, that I fear even the alteration
will not be easy or complete. I am not sure, for instance, that there is
not a memory of animism and spiritism in the very word “soul,” used in
calling the monarch a merry old soul. It would seem that some other
simple phrase, such as “a merry old organism,” might be used with
advantage. Indeed it would have more advantages than one; for if the
reader will say the amended line in a flowing and lyrical manner, he
cannot but observe that the experiment has burst the fetters of formal
metre, and achieved one of these larger and lovelier melodies that we
associate with _vers libre_.
It is needless to note the numberless other examples of nursery rhymes
to which the same criticism applies. Some of the other cases are even
more shocking to the true scientific spirit. For instance, in the
typically old-world rhyme of “Girls and boys come out to play,” there
appear the truly appalling words: “Leave your supper and leave your
sleep.” As the great medical reformer of our day observed, in a striking
and immortal phrase, “All Eugenists are agreed upon the importance of
sleep.” The case of supper may be more complex and controversial. If the
supper were a really hygienic and wholesome supper, it might not be so
difficult to leave it. But it is obvious that the whole vision which the
rhyme calls up is utterly imcompatible with a wise educational
supervision. It is a wild vision of children playing in the streets by
moonlight, for all the world as if they were fairies. Moonlight, like
music, is credited with a power of upsetting the reason; and it is at
least obvious that the indulgence is both unseasonable and unreasonable.
No scientific reformer desires hasty and destructive action; for his
reform is founded on that evolution which has produced the anthropoid
from the amoeba, a process which none have ever stigmatized as hasty.
But when the eugenist recalls the reckless and romantic love affairs
encouraged by such moonlight, he will have to consider seriously the
problem of abolishing the moon.
But indeed I have much more sympathy with the simplicity of the baby who
cries for the moon than with the sort of simplicity that dismisses the
moon as all moonshine. And in truth I think that these two antagonistic
types of simplicity are perhaps the pivotal terms of the present
transition. It is a new thing called the Simple Life against an older
thing which may be called the Simple Soul; possibly exemplified, so far
as nursery rhymes are concerned, by the incident of Simple Simon. I
prefer the old Simple Simon, who, though ignorant of the economic
theory of exchange, had at least a positive and poetic enthusiasm for
pies. I think him far wiser than the new Simple Simon, who simplifies
his existence by means of a perverse and pedantic antipathy to pies. It
is unnecessary to add that this philosophy of pies is applicable with
peculiar force to mince-pies; and thus to the whole of the Christmas
tradition which descended from the first carols to the imaginative world
of Dickens. The morality of that tradition is much too simple and
obvious to be understood to-day. Awful as it may seem to many modern
people, it means no less than that Simple Simon should have his pies,
even in the absence of his pennies.
But the philosophy of the two Simple Simons is plain enough. The former
is an expansion of simplicity towards complexity; Simon, conscious that
he cannot himself make pies, approaches them with an ardour not unmixed
with awe. But the latter is a reaction of complexity towards simplicity;
in other words, the other Simon refuses pies for various reasons, often
including the fact that he has eaten too many of them. Most of the
Simple Life as we see it to-day is, of course, a thing having this
character of the surfeit or satiety of Simon, when he has become less
simple and certainly less greedy. This reaction may take two diverse
forms; it may send Simon searching for more and more expensive and
extravagant confectionery, or it may reduce him to nibbling at some new
kind of nut biscuit. For it may be noted, in passing, that it probably
will not reduce him to eating dry bread. The Simple Life never accepts
anything that is simple in the sense of self-evident and familiar. The
thing must be uncommonly simple; it must not be simply common. Its
philosophy must be something higher than the ordinary breakfast table,
and something drier than dry bread. The usual process, as I have
observed it in vegetarian and other summaries, seems in one sense indeed
to be simple enough. The pie-man produces what looks like the same sort
of pie, or is supposed to look like it; only it has thinner crust
outside and nothing at all inside. Then instead of asking Simple Simon
for a penny he asks him for a pound, or possibly a guinea or a
five-pound note. And what is strangest of all, the customer is often so
singularly Simple a Simon that he pays for it. For that is perhaps the
final and most marked difference between Simon of the Simple Spirit and
Simon of the Simple Life. It is the fact that the ardent and
appreciative Simon was not in possession of a penny. The more refined
and exalted Simon is generally in possession of far too many pennies. He
is often very rich and needs to be; for the drier and thinner and
emptier are the pies, the more he is charged for them. But this alone
will reveal another side of the same paradox; and if it be possible to
spend a lot of money on the Simple Life, it is also possible to make a
great deal of money out of it. There are several self-advertisers doing
very well out of the new self-denial. But wealth is always at one end of
it or the other; and that is the great difference between the two
Simons. Perhaps it is the difference between Simon Peter and Simon
Magus.
I have before me a little pamphlet in which the most precise directions
are given for a Mock Turkey, for a vegetarian mince-pie, and for a
cautious and hygienic Christmas pudding. I have never quite understood
why it should be a part of the Simple Life to have anything so deceptive
and almost conspiratorial as an imitation turkey. The coarse and comic
alderman may be expected, in his festive ribaldry, to mock a turtle; but
surely a lean and earnest humanitarian ought not to mock a turkey. Nor
do I understand the theory of the imitation in its relation to the
ideal. Surely one who thinks meat-eating mere cannibalism ought not to
arrange vegetables so as to look like an animal. It is as if a converted
cannibal in the Sandwich Islands were to arrange joints of meat in the
shape of a missionary. The missionaries would surely regard the
proceedings of their convert with something less than approval, and
perhaps with something akin to alarm. But the consistency of these
concessions I will leave on one side, because I am not here concerned
with the concessions but with the creed itself. And I am concerned with
the creed not merely as affecting its practice in diet or cookery but
its general theory. For the compilers of the little book before me are
great on philosophy and ethics. There are whole pages about brotherhood
and fellowship and happiness and healing. In short, as the writer
observes, we have “also some Mental Helps, as set forth in the flood of
Psychology Literature to-day--but raised to a higher plane.” It may be a
little risky to set a thing forth in a flood, or a little difficult to
raise a flood to a higher plane; but there is behind these rather vague
expressions a very real modern intelligence and point of view, common to
considerable numbers of cultivated people, and well worthy of some
further study.