beginning is the right end at which to begin. The modern man has to read
everything backwards; as when he reads journalism first and history
afterwards--if at all. He is like a blind man exploring an elephant, and
condemned to begin at the very tip of its tail. But he is still more
unlucky; for when he has a first principle, it is generally the very
last principle that he ought to have. He starts, as it were, with one
infallible dogma about the elephant; that its tail is its trunk. He
works the wrong way round on principle; and tries to fit all the
practical facts to his principle. Because the elephant has no eyes in
its tail-end, he calls it a blind elephant; and expatiates on its
ignorance, superstition, and need of compulsory education. Because it
has no tusks at its tail-end, he says that tusks are a fantastic
flourish attributed to a fabulous creature, an ivory chimera that must
have come through the ivory gate. Because it does not as a rule pick up
things with its tail, he dismisses the magical story that it can pick up
things with its trunk. He probably says it is plainly a piece of
anthropomorphism to suppose that an elephant can pack its trunk. The
result is that he becomes as pallid and worried as a pessimist; the
world to him is not only an elephant, but a white elephant. He does not
know what to do with it, and cannot be persuaded of the perfectly simple
explanation; which is that he has not made the smallest real attempt to
make head or tail of the animal. He will not begin at the right end;
because he happens to have come first on the wrong end.
But in nothing do I feel this modern trick, of trusting to a fag-end
rather than a first principle, more than in the modern treatment of
poetry. With this or that particular metrical form, or unmetrical form,
or unmetrical formlessness, I might be content or not, as it achieved
some particular effect or not. But the whole general tendency, regarded
as an emancipation, seems to me more or less of an enslavement. It seems
founded on one subconscious idea; that talk is freer than verse; and
that verse, therefore, should claim the freedom of talk. But talk,
especially in our time, is not free at all. It is tripped up by
trivialities, tamed by conventions, loaded with dead words, thwarted by
a thousand meaningless things. It does not liberate the soul so much,
when a man can say, “You always look so nice,” as when he can say, “But
your eternal summer shall not fade.” The first is an awkward and
constrained sentence ending with the weakest word ever used, or rather
misused, by man. The second is like the gesture of a giant or the
sweeping flight of an archangel; it has the very rush of liberty. I do
not despise the man who says the first, because he _means_ the second;
and what he means is more important than what he says. I have always
done my best to emphasize the inner dignity of these daily things, in
spite of their dull externals; but I do not think it an improvement that
the inner spirit itself should grow more external and more dull. It is
thought right to discourage numbers of prosaic people trying to be
poetical; but I think it much more of a bore to watch numbers of
poetical people trying to be prosaic. In short, it is another case of
tail-foremost philosophy; instead of watering the laurel hedge of the
cockney villa, we bribe the cockney to brick in the plant of Apollo.
I have always had the fancy that if a man were really free, he would
talk in rhythm and even in rhyme. His most hurried post-card would be a
sonnet; and his most hasty wires like harp-strings. He would breathe a
song into the telephone; a song which would be a lyric or an epic,
according to the time involved in awaiting the call; or in his
inevitable altercation with the telephone girl, the duel would be also a
duet. He would express his preference among the dishes at dinner in
short impromptu poems, combining the more mystical gratitude of grace
with a certain epigrammatic terseness, more convenient for domestic good
feeling. If Mr. Yeats can say, in exquisite verse, the exact number of
bean-rows he would like on his plantation, why not the number of beans
he would like on his plate? If he can issue a rhymed request to procure
the honey-bee, why not to pass the honey? Misunderstandings might arise
at first with the richer and more fantastic poets; and Francis Thompson
might have asked several times for “the gold skins of undelirious wine”
before anybody understood that he wanted the grapes. Nevertheless, I
will maintain that his magnificent phrase would be a far more real
expression of God’s most glorious gift of the vine, than if he had
simply said in a peremptory manner “grapes”; especially if the culture
of compulsory education had carefully taught him to pronounce it as if
it were “gripes.” And if a man could ask for a potato in the form of a
poem, the poem would not be merely a more romantic but a much more
realistic rendering of a potato. For a potato is a poem; it is even an
ascending scale of poems; beginning at the root, in subterranean
grotesques in the Gothic manner, with humps like the deformities of a
goblin and eyes like a beast of Revelation, and rising up through the
green shades of the earth to a crown that has the shape of stars and the
hue of heaven.
But the truth behind all this is that expressed in that very ancient
mystical notion, the music of the spheres. It is the idea that, at the
back of everything, existence begins with a harmony and not a chaos;
and, therefore, when we really spread our wings and find a wider
freedom, we find it in something more continuous and recurrent, and not
in something more fragmentary and crude. Freedom is fullness, especially
fullness of life; and a full vessel is more rounded and complete than an
empty one, and not less so. To vary Browning’s phrase, we find in prose
the broken arcs, in poetry the perfect round. Prose is not the freedom
of poetry; rather prose is the fragments of poetry. Prose, at least in
the prosaic sense, is poetry interrupted, held up and cut off from its
course; the chariot of Phœbus stopped by a block in the Strand. But when
it begins to move again at all, I think we shall find certain
old-fashioned things move with it, such as repetition and even measure,
rhythm and even rhyme. We shall discover with horror that the wheels of
the chariot go round and round; and even that the horses of the chariot
have the usual number of feet.
Anyhow, the right way to encourage the cortège is not to put the cart
before the horse. It is not to make poetry more poetical by ignoring
what distinguishes it from prose. There may be many new ways of making
the chariot move again; but I confess that most of the modern theorists
seem to me to be lecturing on a new theory of its mechanics, while it is
standing still. If a wizard before my very eyes works a miracle with a
rope, a boy and a mango plant, I am only theoretically interested in the
question of a sceptic, who asks why it should not be done with a garden
hose, a maiden aunt and a monkey-tree. Why not, indeed, if he can do it?
If a saint performs a miracle to-morrow, by turning a stone into a fish,
I shall be the less concerned at being asked, in the abstract, why a man
should not also turn a camp-stool into a cockatoo; but let him do it,
and not merely explain how it can be done. It is certain that words such
as “birds” and “bare,” which are as plain as “fish” or “stone,” can be
combined in such a miracle as “Bare ruined quires where late the sweet
birds sang.” So far as I can follow my own feelings, the metre and fall
of the feet, even the rhyme and place in the sonnet, have a great deal
to do with producing such an effect. I do not say there is no other way
of producing such an effect. I only ask, not without longing, where else
in this wide and weary time is it produced? I know I cannot produce it;
and I do not in fact feel it when I hear _vers libres_. I know not where
is that Promethean heat; and, even to express my ignorance, I am glad to
find better words than my own.
Prohibition and the Press
An organ of the Nonconformist Conscience, while commenting very kindly
on my recent remarks about America, naturally went on to criticize,
though equally kind, my remarks about Prohibition. Now, so far as I am
concerned, the problem is not so much Prohibition with a large P as
prohibition with a small one. I mean, I am interested not so much in
liquor as in liberty. I want to know on what principle the
prohibitionists are proceeding in this case, and how they think it
applies to any other case. And I cannot for the life of me make out.
They might be expected to argue that there is something peculiar in
principle about the position of liquor, and make that the basis for
attacking liquor. But in point of fact they do not attack liquor; they
do quite simply attack liberty. I mean that they are satisfied with
saying about this liberty what can obviously be said about any
liberty--that it can be, and is, abominably abused. If that had been a
final objection to any form of freedom, there never would have been any
form of freedom. And there most notably would never have been the
particular forms of freedom which are most sacred to the Nonconformist
Conscience. The Nonconformists have demanded liberty to secede, though
they knew it led to an anarchy of sects and spiteful controversies.
They have demanded the licence to print, though they knew it involved
the licence to print twenty falsehoods to one truth. I suppose there is
nothing in history of which the modern Puritan would be more innocently
proud than the thing called the Liberty of the Press, which arose out of
the pamphleteering of the seventeenth century, and especially the great
pamphlet of Milton. Yet everything that Milton says, about allowing
controversy in spite of its dangers, could be applied word for word to
the case of allowing drinking in spite of its dangers. Is not the virtue
that shuts itself up in a temperance hotel a fugitive and cloistered
virtue? Is not the morality that dare not have wine on the table, or in
the town, emphatically one that dares not sally out to meet its enemy?
All Milton’s arguments for freedom are arguments for beer; and, of
course, Milton himself would certainly have applied them to beer. The
highly successful brewer to whom he was Latin secretary--a gentleman of
the name of Williams, otherwise Cromwell--would hardly have been pleased
with him if he had not applied them to beer.
For instance, the critic whom I am here venturing to criticize says that
people differ about Prohibition according to their knowledge or
ignorance of the dreadful state of the slums, the ravages of alcoholism
in our industrial cities, and all the rest of it. Whether or no this be
a good argument against the public-house, there is no doubt that I could
easily turn it against the public press. I could insist that I am a
common Cockney Fleet Street journalist who has done nightly work for
daily papers and fed off nocturnal potato-stalls; whereas he is probably
a cultivated Congregationalist minister writing in a library of
theological works. I might say that I know better than he does, or than
most people do, the cynicism and the vulgarity and the vices of
journalism. But, as a matter of fact, the vices of journalism have by
this time become as evident to the people who read journals as to the
people who write them. All responsible people are complaining of the
power and condition of the press, and no people more than these earnest
and ethical Nonconformists. It is they who complain most bitterly that a
Jingo press can manufacture war. It is they who declare most indignantly
that a sensational press is undermining morality. They often, to my
mind, unduly confuse matters of morality with matters of taste. They
often, to my mind, denounce as mere Jingoism what is simply the deeply
democratic and popular character of patriotism. But nobody will deny
that to a large extent they are legitimately and logically alarmed about
the abuses and absurdities of the newspapers. But they have not yet used
this as an argument for a veto upon all newspapers. Why in the world
should they use the parallel evils as an argument for a veto on all
public-houses?
For my part I do feel very strongly about the frivolity and
irresponsibility of the press. It seems impossible to exaggerate the
evil that can be done by a corrupt and unscrupulous press. If drink
directly ruins the family, it only indirectly ruins the nation. But bad
journalism does directly ruin the nation, considered as a nation; it
acts on the corporate national will and sways the common national
decision. It may force a decision in a few hours that will be an
incurable calamity for hundreds of years. It may drive a whole
civilization to defeat, to slavery, to bankruptcy, to universal famine.
Even at this moment there are prominent papers wildly urging us to
war--not with our foes but with our friends. There are some journalists
so wicked as to want war, almost for its own sake; there are more
journalists so weak-minded as to work for war without even wanting it.
Let me give one example out of fifty of the sort of phrases that flash
by us when we turn over the papers. A headline in enormous letters
announces that the French are “scuttling” out of the disputed areas in
the Near East. The phrase about scuttling, and the policy of scuttle,
has been familiar and firmly established in English journalism as
meaning a cowardly and servile surrender, admitting abject defeat. And
the suggestion is that the French, being notoriously a nation of
cowards, having that tendency to panic produced by a habit of dancing
and a diet of frogs, can vividly be pictured as scampering with screams
of terror from the sight of a Turk with a drawn sabre. This is the way
our newspapers improve our relations with our Allies. Only the newspaper
men seem to have got a little mixed in their eagerness to expatiate on
the wide field of French vileness and ignominy. Only a little while ago
the same papers were telling us that the French were furious
filibusters, forcing war in every corner of the world. We were told that
it was France which was militaristic and aggressive, and all her rivals
were made to scuttle. We were told that it was the Frenchman and not the
Turk who was the terrible person holding the drawn sabre. In plain
words, these journalists are resolved to show that whatever the French
do is wrong. If they advance, they are arrogant; if they retreat, they
are cowardly. If they keep an army beyond the Rhine, they are pursuing a
policy of militarism; if they withdraw an army from somewhere else,
they are pursuing a policy of scuttle. Where M. Poincaré is ready to
fight, he is a fire-eater who cares for nothing but fighting; where he
is not ready to fight, he is a poltroon who is always notoriously too
timid to fight. The careful selection of language of this sort, for a
given period, might quite possibly land us in a European war--a war in
which we should be certainly on the wrong side, and almost certainly on
the losing side.
Suppose I come forward with this great reform of the Prohibition of the
Press. Suppose I suggest that the police should forcibly shut up all the
newspaper-offices, as the other reformers wish to shut up all the
public-houses. What answer will the Puritan moralists make to me, or on
what principle do they distinguish between the one reform and the other?
There is no kind of doubt about the harm that journalism does; and their
own line of argument precludes them from appealing merely to the good
that it does. As a matter of fact, far better poems have been written in
taverns than are ever likely to appear in daily papers. And, from
Pantagruel to Pickwick, this form of festivity has a roll of literary
glory to its credit which is never likely to be found in the back files
of any newspaper that I know of. But the Puritans do not discuss the
healthier tradition of wine; they consider their argument sufficiently
supported by the unhealthy effects of gin and bad beer in the slums. And
if we adopt that principle of judging by the worst, then the worst
effects of the press are far wider than the worst effects of the
public-house. What exactly is the principle by which they distinguish
between lawful and unlawful liberty, or mixed and unmixed licence? I
have a rough-and-ready test, which may be right or wrong, but which I
can at least state; but where has their test been stated? I say that the
simplest form of freedom is that which distinguishes the free man from
the slave--the ownership of his own body and his own bodily activities.
That there is a risk in allowing him this ownership is obvious, and has
always been obvious. The risk is not confined to the question of drink,
but covers the whole question of health. But surely the other forms of
freedom, such as freedom to print, are very much more indirect and
disputable. A newspaper may be made the instrument of the vilest sort of
swindling or starving of a whole people. Why are we to grant the remote
right, and deny the intimate right? Moreover, a newspaper is a new
thing; if our fathers had the right to it, they never knew it. Fermented
liquor is as old as civilization, or older. But what I have asked for
again and again is simply the principle of the Prohibitionists: and I am
asking still.
The Mercy of Mr. Arnold Bennett
Mr. Arnold Bennett recently wrote one of his humorous and humane
_causeries_, pleading very properly for social imagination and the
better understanding of our fellows. He carried it however to the point
of affirming, as some fatalists do, that we should never judge anybody
in the sense of condemning anybody, in connexion with his moral conduct.
Some time ago the same distinguished writer showed that his mercy and
magnanimity were indeed on a heroic scale by reviewing a book of mine,
and even saying many kind things about it. But to these he added a doubt
about whether true intelligence could be consistent with the acceptance
of any dogma. In truth there are only two kinds of people; those who
accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know
it. My only advantage over the gifted novelist lies in my belonging to
the former class. I suspect that his unconsciousness of his dogmas
extends to an unconsciousness of what he means by a dogma. If it means
merely the popular idea of being dogmatic, it might be suggested that
saying that all dogmatism is unintelligent is itself somewhat dogmatic.
And something of what is true of his veto on dogma is also true on his
veto of condemnation; which is really a veto on vetoes.
Mr. Arnold Bennett does not darken the question with the dreary
metaphysics of determinism; he is far too bright and adroit a journalist
for that. But he does make a simple appeal to charity, and even
Christianity, basing on it the idea that we should not judge people at
all, or even blame them at all. Like everybody else who argues thus, he
imagines himself to be pleading for mercy and humanity. Like everybody
else who argues thus, he is doing the direct contrary. This particular
notion of not judging people really means hanging them without trial. It
would really substitute for judgment not mercy but something much more
like murder. For the logical process through which the discussion passes
is always the same; I have seen it in a hundred debates about fate and
free-will. First somebody says, like Mr. Bennett: “Let us be kinder to
our brethren, and not blame them for faults we cannot judge.” Then some
casual common-sense person says: “Do you really mean you would let
anybody pick your pocket or cut your throat without protest?” Then the
first man always answers as Mr. Bennett does: “Oh no; I would punish him
to protect myself and protect society; but I would not _blame_ him,
because I would not venture to judge him.” The philosopher seems to have
forgotten that he set out with the idea of being kinder to the
cut-throat and the pick-pocket. His sense of humour should suggest to
him that the pick-pocket might possibly prefer to be blamed, rather than
go to penal servitude for the protection of society.
Now of course Mr. Bennett is quite right in the most mystical and
therefore the most deeply moral sense. We do not know what God knows
about the merits of a man. Nor do we know what God knows about the
needs of a community. A man who poisons his little niece for money may
have mysterious motives and excuses we cannot understand. And so he may
serve mysterious social purposes we cannot follow. We are not infallible
when we think we are punishing criminals; but neither are we infallible
when we think we are protecting society. Our inevitable ignorance seems
to me to cut both ways. But even in our ignorance one thing is vividly
clear. Mr. Bennett’s solution is not the more merciful, but the less
merciful of the two. To say that we may punish people, but not blame
them, is to say that we have a right to be cruel to them, but not a
right to be kind to them.
For after all, blame is itself a compliment. It is a compliment because
it is an appeal; and an appeal to a man as a creative artist making his
soul. To say to a man, “rascal” or “villain” in ordinary society may
seem abrupt; but it is also elliptical. It is an abbreviation of a
sublime spiritual apostrophe for which there may be no time in our busy
social life. When you meet a millionaire, the cornerer of many markets,
out at dinner in Mayfair, and greet him (as is your custom) with the
exclamation “Scoundrel!” you are merely shortening for convenience some
such expression as: “How can you, having the divine spirit of man that
might be higher than the angels, drag it down so far as to be a
scoundrel?” When you are introduced at a garden party to a Cabinet
Minister who takes tips on Government contracts, and when you say to him
in the ordinary way “Scamp!” you are merely using the last word of a
long moral disquisition; which is in effect, “How pathetic is the
spiritual spectacle of this Cabinet Minister, who being from the first
made glorious by the image of God, condescends so far to lesser
ambitions as to allow them to turn him into a scamp.” It is a mere
taking of the tail of a sentence to stand for the rest; like
saying ’bus for omnibus. It is even more like the case of that
seventeenth century Puritan whose name was something like
“If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Higgins”;
but who was, for popular convenience, referred to as “Damned Higgins.”
But it is obvious, anyhow, that when we call a man a coward, we are in
so doing asking him how he can be a coward when he could be a hero. When
we rebuke a man for being a sinner, we imply that he has the powers of a
saint.
But punishing him for the protection of society involves no regard for
him at all. It involves no limit of proportion in the punishment at all.
There are some limits to what ordinary men are likely to say that an
ordinary man deserves. But there are no limits to what the danger of the
community may be supposed to demand. We would not, even if we could,
boil the millionaire in oil or skin the poor little politician alive;
for we do not think a man deserves to be skinned alive for taking
commissions on contracts. But it is by no means so certain that the
skinning him alive might not protect the community. Corruption can
destroy communities; and torture can deter men. At any rate the thing is
not so self-evidently useless as it is self-evidently unjust and
vindictive. We refrain from such fantastic punishments, largely because
we _do_ have some notion of making the punishment fit the crime, and not
merely fit the community. If the State were the sole consideration, it
may be inferred a priori that people might be much more cruel. And in
fact, where the State was the sole consideration, it was found in
experience that they were much more cruel. They were much more cruel
precisely because they were freed from all responsibilities about the
innocence or guilt of the individual. I believe that in heathen Rome,
the model of a merely civic and secular loyalty, it was a common
practice to torture the slaves of any household subjected to legal
enquiry. If you had remonstrated, because no crime had been proved
against the slaves, the State would had answered in the modern manner:
“We are not punishing the crime; we are protecting the community.”
Now that example is relevant just now in more ways than one. Of course I
do not mean that this was the motive of all historical cruelties, or
that some did not spring from quite an opposite motive. But it was the
motive of much tyranny in the heathen world; and in this, as in other
things, the modern world has largely become a heathen world. And modern
tyranny can find its prototype in the torturing of heathen slaves in two
fundamental respects. First, that the modern world has returned to the
test of the heathen world, that of considering service to the state and
not justice to the individual. And second, that the modern world, like
the heathen world, is here inflicting it chiefly on subordinate and
submerged classes of society; on slaves or those who are almost slaves.