the first few are: “Empty Your Mind,” “Think of the Best Things,”
“Appreciate,” “Analyse,” “Prepare Physically,” “Prepare Mentally,” and
so on. I have met some earnest students of this school, who had
apparently entered on this course, but at the time of our meeting had
only graduated so far as the fulfilment of the first rule. It was more
obvious, on the whole, that they had succeeded in the preliminary
process of emptying the mind than that they had as yet thought of the
best things, or analysed or appreciated anything in particular. But
there were others, I willingly admit, who had really thought of certain
things in a genuinely thoughtful fashion, though whether they were
really the best things might involve a difference of opinion between us.
Still, so far as they are concerned, it is a school of thought, and
therefore worth thinking about. Having been able to this extent to
appreciate, I will now attempt to analyse. I have attempted to discover
in my own mind where the difference between us really lies, apart from
all these superficial jests and journalistic points; to ask myself why
it is exactly that their ideal vegetarian differs so much from my ideal
Christian. And the result of the concentrated contemplation of their
ideal is, I confess, a somewhat impatient forward plunge in the progress
of my initiation. I am strongly disposed to “Prepare Physically” for a
conflict with the ideal vegetarian, with the holy hope of hitting him on
the nose. In one of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the vegetarian rebukes
his enemy for threatening to skin him, by reminding him that man should
only think beautiful thoughts; to which the enemy gives the unanswerable
answer: “Skinning you is a beautiful thought.” In the same way I am
quite prepared to think of the best things; but I think hitting the
ideal vegetarian on the nose would be one of the best things in the
world. This may be an extreme example; but it involves a much more
serious principle. What such philosophers often forget is that among the
best things in the world are the very things which their placid
universalism forbids; and that there is nothing better or more beautiful
than a noble hatred. I do not profess to feel it for them; but they
themselves do not seem to feel it for anything.
But as my new idealistic instructor tells me to analyse, I will attempt
to analyse. In the ordinary way it would perhaps be enough to say that I
do not like his ideals, and that I prefer my own, as I should say I did
not like the taste of nut cutlet so much as the taste of veal cutlet.
But just as it is possible to resolve the food into formulæ about
proteids, so it is partly possible to resolve the religious preference
into formulæ about principles. The most we can hope to do is to find out
which of these principles are the first principles. And in this
connexion I should like to speak a little more seriously, and even a
little more respectfully, of the formula about emptying the mind. I do
not deny that it is sometimes a good thing to empty the mind of the mere
accumulation of secondary and tertiary impressions. If what is meant is
something which a friend of mine once called “a mental spring clean,”
then I can see what it means. But the most drastic spring clean in a
house does not generally wash away the house. It does not tear down the
roof like a cobweb, or pluck up the walls like weeds. And the true
formula is not so much to empty the mind as to discover that we cannot
empty the mind, by emptying it as much as we can. In other words, we
always come back to certain fundamentals which are convictions, because
we can hardly even conceive their contraries. But it is the paradox of
human language that though these truths are, in a manner past all
parallel, hard and clear, yet any attempt to talk about them always has
the appearance of being hazy and elusive.
Now this antagonism, when thus analysed, seems to me to arise from one
ultimate thing at the back of the minds of these men; that they believe
in taking the body seriously. The body is a sort of pagan god, though
the pagans are more often stoics than epicureans. To begin with, it is
itself a beginning. The body, if not the creator of the soul in heaven,
is regarded as the practical producer of it on earth. In this their
materialism is the very foundation of their asceticism. They wish us to
consume clean fruit and clear water that our minds may be clear or our
lives clean. The body is a sort of magical factory where these things go
in as vegetables and come out as virtues. Thus digestion has the first
sign of a deity; that of being an origin. It has the next sign of a
deity; that if it is satisfied other things do not matter, or at any
rate other things follow in their place. And so, they would say, the
services of the body should be serious and not grotesque; and its
smallest hints should be taken as terrible warnings. Art has a place in
it because the body must be draped like an altar; and science is
paraded in it because the service must be in Latin or Greek or something
hieratic tongue. I quite understand these things surrounding a god or an
altar; but I do not happen to worship at that altar or to believe in
that god. I do not think the body ought to be taken seriously; I think
it is far safer and saner when it is taken comically and even coarsely.
And I think that when the body is given a holiday, as it is in a great
feast, I think it should be set free not merely for wisdom but for
folly, not merely to dance but to turn head over heels. In short, when
it is really allowed to exaggerate its own pleasures, it ought also to
exaggerate its own absurdity. The body has its own rank, and its own
rights, and its own place under government; but the body is not the King
but rather the Court Jester. And the human and historical importance of
the old jests and buffooneries of Christmas, however vulgar or stale or
trivial they appear, is that in them the popular instinct always
resisted this pagan solemnity about sensual things. A man was meant to
feel rather a goose when he was eating goose; and to realize that he is
such stuff as stuffing is made of. That is why anyone who has in these
things the touch of the comic will also have the taste for the
conservative; he will be unwilling to alter what that popular instinct
has made in its own absurd image. He will be doubtful about a Christmas
pudding moulded in the shape of the Pyramid or the Parthenon, or
anything that is not as round and ridiculous as the world. And when Mr.
Pickwick, as round and ridiculous as any Christmas pudding or any world
worth living in, stood straddling and smiling under the mistletoe, he
disinfected that vegetable of its ancient and almost vegetarian sadness
and heathenism, of the blood of Baldur and the human sacrifice of the
Druids.
Shakespeare and the Legal Lady
I wonder how long liberated woman will endure the invidious ban which
excludes her from being a hangman. Or rather, to speak with more
exactitude, a hangwoman. The very fact that there seems something
vaguely unfamiliar and awkward about the word, is but a proof of the
ages of sex oppression that have accustomed us to this sex privilege.
The ambition would not perhaps have been understood by the prudish and
sentimental heroines of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. But it is now
agreed that the farther we go beyond these faded proprieties the better;
and I really do not see how we could go farther. There are always
torturers of course; who will probably return under some scientific
name. Obscurantists may use the old argument, that woman has never risen
to the first rank in this or other arts; that Jack Ketch was not Jemima
Ketch, and that the headsman was called Samson and not Delilah. And they
will be overwhelmed with the old retort: that until we have hundreds of
healthy women happily engaged in this healthful occupation, it will be
impossible to judge whether they can rise above the average or no.
Tearful sentimentalists may feel something unpleasing, something faintly
repugnant, about the new feminine trade. But, as the indignant
policewoman said the other day, when a magistrate excluded some of her
sex and service from revolting revelations, “crime is a disease,” and
must be studied scientifically, however hideous it may be. Death also is
a disease; and frequently a fatal one. Experiments must be made in it;
and it must be inflicted in any form, however hideous, in a cool and
scientific manner.
It is not true, of course, that crime is a disease. It is criminology
that is a disease. But the suggestion about the painful duties of a
policewoman leads naturally to my deduction about the painful duties of
a hangwoman. And I make it in the faint hope of waking up some of the
feminists, that they may at least be moved to wonder what they are
doing, and to attempt to find out. What they are not doing is obvious
enough. They are not asking themselves two perfectly plain questions;
first, whether they want anybody to be a hangman; and second, whether
they want everybody to be a hangman. They simply assume, with panting
impetuosity, that we want everybody to be everything, criminologists,
constables, barristers, executioners, torturers. It never seems to occur
to them that some of us doubt the beauty and blessedness of these
things, and are rather glad to limit them like other necessary evils.
And this applies especially to the doubtful though defensible case of
the advocate.
There is one phrase perpetually repeated and now practically
stereotyped, which to my mind concentrates and sums up all the very
worst qualities in the very worst journalism; all its paralysis of
thought, all its monotony of chatter, all its sham culture and shoddy
picturesqueness, all its perpetual readiness to cover any vulgarity of
the present with any sentimentalism about the past. There is one phrase
that does measure to how low an ebb the mind of my unfortunate
profession can sink. It is the habit of perpetually calling any of the
new lady barristers “Portia.”
First of all, of course, it is quite clear that the journalist does not
know who Portia was. If he has ever heard of the story of the “Merchant
of Venice,” he has managed to miss the only point of the story. Suppose
a man had been so instructed in the story of “As You Like It” that he
remained under the impression that Rosalind really was a boy, and was
the brother of Celia. We should say that the plot of the comedy had
reached his mind in a rather confused form. Suppose a man had seen a
whole performance of the play of “Twelfth Night” without discovering the
fact that the page called Cesario was really a girl called Viola. We
should say that he had succeeded in seeing the play without exactly
seeing the point. But there is exactly the same blind stupidity in
calling a barrister Portia; or even in calling Portia a barrister. It
misses in exactly the same sense the whole meaning of the scene. Portia
is no more a barrister than Rosalind is a boy. She is no more the
learned jurist whom Shylock congratulates than Viola is the adventurous
page whom Olivia loves. The whole point of her position is that she is a
heroic and magnanimous fraud. She has not taken up the legal profession,
or any profession; she has not sought that public duty, or any public
duty. Her action, from first to last, is wholly and entirely private.
Her motives are not professional but private. Her ideal is not public
but private. She acts as much on personal grounds in the Trial Scene as
she does in the Casket Scene. She acts in order to save a friend, and
especially a friend of the husband whom she loves. Anything less like
the attitude of an advocate, for good or evil, could not be conceived.
She seeks individually to save an individual; and in order to do so is
ready to _break_ all the existing laws of the profession and the public
tribunal; to assume lawlessly powers she has not got, to intrude where
she would never be legally admitted, to pretend to be somebody else, to
dress up as a man; to do what is actually a crime against the law. This
is not what is now called the attitude of a public woman; it is
certainly not the attitude of a lady lawyer, any more than of any other
kind of lawyer. But it is emphatically the attitude of a private woman;
that much more ancient and much more powerful thing.
Suppose that Portia had really become an advocate, merely by advocating
the cause of Antonio against Shylock. The first thing that follows is
that, as like as not, she would be briefed in the next case to advocate
the cause of Shylock against Antonio. She would, in the ordinary way of
business, have to help Shylock to punish with ruin the private
extravagances of Gratiano. She would have to assist Shylock to distrain
on poor Launcelot Gobbo and sell up all his miserable sticks. She might
well be employed by him to ruin the happiness of Lorenzo and Jessica, by
urging some obsolete parental power or some technical flaw in the
marriage service. Shylock evidently had a great admiration for her
forensic talents; and indeed that sort of lucid and detached admission
of the talents of a successful opponent is a very Jewish
characteristic. There seems no reason why he should not have employed
her regularly, whenever he wanted some one to recover ruthless interest,
to ruin needy households, to drive towards theft or suicide the souls of
desperate men. But there seems every reason to doubt whether the Portia
whom Shakespeare describes for us is likely to have taken on the job.
Anyhow, that is the job; and I am not here arguing that it is not a
necessary job; or that it is always an indefensible job. Many honourable
men have made an arguable case for the advocate who has to support
Shylock, and men much worse than Shylock. But that is the job; and to
cover up its ugly realities with a loose literary quotation that really
refers to the exact opposite, is one of those crawling and cowardly
evasions and verbal fictions which make all this sort of servile
journalism so useless for every worthy or working purpose. If we wish to
consider whether a lady should be a barrister, we should consider sanely
and clearly what a barrister is and what a lady is; and then come to our
conclusion according to what we consider worthy or worthless in the
traditions of the two things. But the spirit of advertisement, which
tries to associate soap with sunlight or grapenuts with grapes, calls to
its rescue an old romance of Venice and tries to cover up a practical
problem in the robes of a romantic heroine of the stage. This is the
sort of confusion that really leads to corruption. In one sense it would
matter very little that the legal profession was formally open to women,
for it is only a very exceptional sort of woman who would see herself as
a vision of beauty in the character of Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz. And most
girls are more likely to be stage-struck, and want to be the real Portia
on the stage, rather than law-struck and want to be the very reverse of
Portia in a law court. For that matter, it would make relatively little
difference if formal permission were given to a woman to be a hangman or
a torturer. Very few women would have a taste for it; and very few men
would have a taste for the women who had a taste for it. But
advertisement, by its use of the vulgar picturesque, can hide the
realities of this professional problem, as it can hide the realities of
tinned meats and patent medicines. It can conceal the fact that the
hangman exists to hang, and that the torturer exists to torture.
Similarly it can conceal the fact that the Buzfuz barrister exists to
bully. It can hide from the innocent female aspirants outside even the
perils and potential abuses that would be admitted by the honest male
advocate inside. And that is part of a very much larger problem, which
extends beyond this particular profession to a great many other
professions; and not least to the lowest and most lucrative of all
modern professions; that of professional politics.
I wonder how many people are still duped by the story of the extension
of the franchise. I wonder how many Radicals have been a little
mystified, in remarking how many Tories and reactionaries have helped in
the extension of the franchise. The truth is that calling in crowds of
new voters will very often be to the interest, not only of Tories, but
of really tyrannical Tories. It will often be in the interest of the
guilty to appeal to the innocent; if they are innocent in the matter of
other people’s conduct as well as of their own. The tyrant calls in
those he has not wronged, to defend him against those he has wronged. He
is not afraid of the new and ignorant masses who know too little; he is
afraid of the older and nearer nucleus of those who know too much. And
there is nothing that would please the professional politician more than
to flood the constituencies with innocent negroes or remote Chinamen,
who might possibly admire him more, because they knew him less. I should
not wonder if the Party System had been saved three or four times at the
point of extinction, by the introduction of new voters who had never had
time to discover why it deserved to be extinguished. The last of these
rescues by an inrush of dupes was the enfranchisement of women.
What is true of the political is equally true of the professional
ambition. Much of the mere imitation of masculine tricks and trades is
indeed trivial enough; it is a mere masquerade. The greatest of Roman
satirists noted that in his day the more fast of the fashionable ladies
liked to fight as gladiators in the amphitheatre. In that one statement
he pinned and killed, like moths on a cork, a host of women prophets and
women pioneers and large-minded liberators of their sex in modern
England and America. But besides these more showy she-gladiators there
are also multitudes of worthy and sincere women who take the new (or
rather old) professions seriously. The only disadvantage is that in many
of those professions they can only continue to be serious by ceasing to
be sincere. But the simplicity with which they first set out is an
enormous support to old and complex and corrupt institutions. No modest
person setting out to learn an elaborate science can be expected to
start with the assumption that it is not worth learning. The young lady
will naturally begin to learn Law as gravely as she begins to learn
Greek. It is not in that mood that she will conceive independent doubts
about the ultimate relations of Law and Justice. Just as the
Suffragettes are already complaining that the realism of industrial
revolution interferes with their new hobby of voting, so the lady
lawyers are quite likely to complain that the realism of legal reformers
interferes with their new hobby of legalism. We are suffering in every
department from the same cross-purposes that can be seen in the case of
any vulgar patent medicine. In Law and Medicine, we have the thing
advertised in the public press instead of analysed by the public
authority. What we want is not the journalistic Portia but the
theatrical Portia; who is also the real Portia. We do not want the woman
who will enter the law court with the solemn sense of a lasting
vocation. We want a Portia; a woman who will enter it as lightly, and
leave it as gladly as she did.
The same thing is true of a fact nobler than any fiction; the story, so
often quoted, of the woman who won back mediæval France. Joan of Arc was
a soldier; but she was not a normal soldier. If she had been, she would
have been vowed, not to the war for France, but to any war with
Flanders, Spain or the Italian cities to which her feudal lord might
lead her. If she were a modern conscript, she would be bound to obey
orders not always coming from St. Michael. But the point is here that
merely making all women soldiers, under either system, could do nothing
at all except whitewash and ratify feudalism or conscription. And both
feudalism and conscription are much more magnanimous things than our
modern system of police and prisons.
In fact there are few sillier implications than that in the phrase that
what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. A cook who really
rules a kitchen on that principle would wait patiently for milk from the
bull, because he got it from the cow. It is neither a perceptible fact
nor a first principle that the sexes must not specialize; and if one sex
must specialize in adopting dubious occupations, we ought to be very
glad that the other sex specializes in abstaining from them. That is how
the balance of criticism in the commonwealth is maintained; as by a sort
of government and opposition. In this, as in other things, the new
regime is that everybody shall join the government. The government of
the moment will be monstrously strengthened; for everybody will be a
tyrant and everybody will be a slave. The detached criticism of official
fashions will disappear; and none was ever so detached as the deadly
criticism that came from women. When all women wear uniforms, all women
will wear gags; for a gag is part of every uniform in the world.
On Being an Old Bean
I was looking at some press cuttings that had pursued me down to a
remote cottage beside a river of Norfolk; and as it happened, those that
caught my eye were mostly not from the vulgar monopolist press, but from
all sorts of quieter and even more studious publications. But what
struck me as curious about the collection as a whole was the selection,
among half a hundred things that were hardly worth saying, of the things
that were considered worth repeating. There seemed to be a most
disproportionate importance attached to a trivial phrase I had used
about the alleged indecorum of a gentleman calling his father an old
bean. I had been asked to join in a discussion in the “Morning Post,”
touching the alleged disrespect of youth towards age, and I had done so;
chiefly because I have a respect for the “Morning Post” for its courage
about political corruption and cosmopolitan conspiracies, in spite of
deep disagreement on other very vital things. And I said what I should
have thought was so true as to be trite. I said that it makes life
narrower and not broader to lose the special note of piety or respect
for the past still living; and that to call an old man an old bean is
merely to lose all intelligent sense of the significance of an old man.
Since then, to my great entertainment, I seem to have figured in
various papers as a sort of ferocious heavy father, come out on my own
account to curse the numerous young sprigs who have called me an old
bean. But this is an error. I should be the last to deny that I am
heavy, but I am not fatherly; nor am I ferocious, at any rate I am not
ferocious about this. Individually I regard the question with a
detachment verging on indifference. I cannot imagine anybody except an
aged and very lean vegetarian positively dancing with joy at being
called an old bean; and I am not a very lean vegetarian. But still less
can I imagine anyone regarding the accusation with horror or resentment;
the sins and crimes blackening the career of a bean must be
comparatively few; its character must be simple and free from
complexity, and its manner of life innocent. A philosophic rationalist
wrote to me the other day to say that my grubbing in the grossest
superstitions of the past reminded him of “an old sow pig rooting in the
refuse of the kitchen heap,” and expressed a hope that I should be
dragged from this occupation and made to resume “the cap and bells of
yore.” That is something like a vigorous and vivid comparison; though my
Feminist friends may be distressed at my being compared to a sow as well
as a pig; and though I am not quite clear myself about how the animal
would get on when he had resumed the cap and bells of yore. But it would
certainly be a pity, when it was possible to find this image in the
kitchen heap, to be content with one from the kitchen garden. It would
indeed be a lost opportunity to work yourself up to the furious pitch of
calling your enemy a beast, and then only call him a bean.