whether coercive or persuasive, I do think they both had a basis of
common sense which is wanting in this third theory. The parent, whether
persuading or punishing the child, was at least aware of one simple
truth. He knew that, in the most serious sense, God alone knows what the
child is really like, or is meant to be really like. All we can do to
him is to fill him with those truths which we believe to be equally true
whatever he is like. We must have a code of morals which we believe to
be applicable to all children, and impose it on this child because it is
applicable to all children. If it seems to be a part of his personality
to be a swindler or a torturer, we must tell him that we do not want any
personalities to be swindlers and torturers. In other words, we must
believe in a religion or philosophy firmly enough to take the
responsibility of acting on it, however much the rising generations may
knock, or kick, at the door. I know all about the word education meaning
drawing things out, and mere instruction meaning putting things in. And
I respectfully reply that God alone knows what there is to draw out; but
we can be reasonably responsible for what we are ourselves putting in.
The Innocence of the Criminal
A phrase, which we have all heard, is sometimes uttered by some small
man sentenced to some small term of imprisonment, for either or both of
the two principal reasons for imprisoning a man in modern England: that
he is known to the police, and that he is not known to the magistrate.
When such a man receives a more or less temperate term of imprisonment,
he is often reported as having left the dock saying that he would “do it
on his head.” In his own self-consciousness, he is merely seeking to
maintain his equilibrium by that dazed and helpless hilarity which is
the only philosophy allowed to him. But the phrase itself, like a great
part of really popular slang, is highly symbolic. The English pauper
(who tends to become numerically the preponderant Englishman) does
really reconcile himself to existence by putting himself in an inverted
and grotesque posture towards it. He does really stand on his head,
because he is living in topsy-turvydom.
He finds himself in an Upsidonia fully as fantastic as Mr. Archibald
Marshall’s, and far less fair and logical; in a landscape as wild as if
the trees grew downwards or the moon hung below his feet. He lives in a
world in which the man who lends him money makes him a beggar; in
which, when he is a beggar, the man who gives him money makes him a
criminal; in which, when he is a criminal and “known to the police,” he
becomes permanently liable to be arrested for other people’s crimes. He
is punished if his home is neglected, though there is nobody to look
after it, and punished again if it is not neglected, and the children
are kept from school to look after it. He is arrested for sleeping on
private land, and arrested again for sleeping on public land, and
arrested, be it noted, for the positive and explicit reason that he has
no money to sleep anywhere else. In short, he is under laws of such
naked and admitted lunacy that they might quite as well tell him to
pluck all the feathers off the cows, or to amputate the left leg of a
whale. There is no possible way of behaving in such a pantomime city
except as a sort of comic acrobat, a knockabout comedian who does as
many things as possible on his head. He is, both by accident and design,
a tumbler. It is a proverb about his children that they tumble up; it is
the whole joke about his drunkenness that he tumbles down. But he is in
a world in which standing straight or standing still have become both
impossible and fatal. Meredith rightly conceived the only possible
philosophy of this modern outlaw as that of Juggling Jerry; and even
what is called his swindling is mostly this sort of almost automatic
juggling. His nearest approach to social status is mere kinetic
stability, like a top. There was, indeed, another tumbler called in
tradition Our Lady’s Tumbler, who performed happier antics before a
shrine in the days of superstition; and whose philosophy was perhaps
more positive than Juggling Jerry’s or Meredith’s. But a strenuous
reform has passed through our own cities, careful of the survival of the
fittest, and we have been able to preserve the antic while abolishing
the altar.
But though this form of reaction into ridicule, and even self-ridicule,
is very natural, it is also very national; it is not the only human
reaction against injustice, nor perhaps the most obvious. The Irishman
has shot his landlord, the Italian has joined a revolutionary secret
society, the Russian has either thrown a bomb or gone on a pilgrimage,
long before the Englishman has come finally to the conclusion that
existence is a joke. Even as he does so he is too fully conscious that
it would be too bad as a tragedy if it were not so good as a farce. It
is further to be noticed, for the fact is of ominous importance, that
this topsy-turvy English humour has, during the last six or seven
generations, been more and more abandoned to the poorer orders. Sir John
Falstaff is a knight; Tony Weller is a coachman; his son Sam is a
servant to the middle classes, and the recent developments of social
discipline seem calculated to force Sam Weller into the status of the
Artful Dodger. It is certain that a youth of that class who should do
to-day a tenth of the things that Sam Weller did would in one way or
another spend most of his life in jail. To-day, indeed, it is the main
object of social reform that he should spend the whole of his life in
jail; but in a jail that can be used as a factory. That is the real
meaning of all the talk about scientific criminology and remedial
penalties. For such outcasts, punishment is to be abolished by being
perpetuated. When men propose to eliminate retribution as “vindictive,”
they mean two very simple things: ceasing altogether to punish the few
who are rich, and enslaving all the rest for being poor.
Nevertheless this half-conscious buffoon who is the butt of our society
is also the satirist of it. He is even the judge of it, in the sense
that he is the normal test by which it will be judged. In a number of
quite practical matters it is he who represents historic humanity, and
speaks naturally and truthfully where his judges and critics are
crooked, crabbed and superstitious. This can be seen, for instance, if
we see him for a moment not in the dock but in the witness-box. In
several books and newspapers I happened to read lately, I have noticed a
certain tone touching the uneducated witness; phrases like “the
vagueness characteristic of their class,” or “easily confused, as such
witnesses are.” Now such vagueness is simple truthfulness. Nine times
out of ten, it is the confusion any man would show at any given instant
about the complications which crowd human life. Nine times out of ten,
it is avoided in the case of educated witnesses by the mere expedient of
a legal fiction. The witness has a brief, like the barrister: he has
consulted dates, he has made memoranda, he has frequently settled with
solicitors exactly what he can safely say. His evidence is artificial
even when it is not fictitious; we might almost say it is fictitious
even when it is not false. The model testimony, regarded as the most
regular of all in a law court, is constabulary testimony; if what the
soldier said is not evidence, what the policeman says is often the only
evidence. And what the policeman says is incredible, as he says it. It
is something like this: “I met the prisoner coming out of Clapham
Junction Station and he told me he went to see Mrs. Nehemiah Blagg, of
192, Paardeburg Terrace, West Ealing, about a cat which he had left
there last Tuesday week which she was going to keep if it was a good
mouser, and she told him it had killed a mouse in the back kitchen on
Sunday morning so he had better leave it. She gave him a shilling for
his trouble, and he went to West Ealing post-office where he bought two
halfpenny stamps and a ball of string, and then to the Imperial Stores
at Ealing Broadway, and bought a pennyworth of mixed sweets. Coming out
he met a friend, and they went to the Green Dolphin and made an
appointment for 5.30 next day at the third lamp-post in Eckstein
Street,” and so on. It is frankly impossible for anybody to say such a
sentence; still more for anybody to remember it. If the thing is not a
tissue of mere inventions, it can only be the arbitrary summary of a
very arbitrary cross-examination, conducted precisely as are the
examinations of a secret police in Russia. The story was not only
discovered bit by bit, but discovered backwards. Mountains were in
labour to bring forth that mouse in West Ealing. The police made a
thorough official search of the man’s mental boxes and baggage, before
that cat was let out of the bag. I am not here supposing the tale to be
untrue--I am pointing out that the telling of it is unreal. The right
way to tell a story is the way in which the prisoner told it to the
policeman, and not the way in which the policeman tells it to the court.
It is the way in which all true tales are told, the way in which all men
learn the news about their neighbours, the way in which we all learned
everything we know in childhood; it is the only real evidence for
anything on this earth, and it is not evidence in a court of law. The
man who tells it is vague about some things, less vague about others,
and so on in proportion; but at his very vaguest, among the stiff
unreason of modern conditions, he is a judgment on those conditions. His
very bewilderment is a criticism, and his very indecision is a decision
against us. It is an old story that we are judged by the innocence of a
child, and every child is, in the French phrase, a terrible child. There
is a true sense in which all our laws are judged by the innocence of a
criminal.
In politics, of course, the case is the same. I will defer the question
of whether the democracy knows how to answer questions until the
oligarchy knows how to ask them. Asking a man if he approves of Tariff
Reform is not only a silly but an insane question, for it covers the
wildest possibilities, just as asking him whether he approves of Trouser
Reform might mean anything from wearing no trousers to wearing a
particular pattern of yellow trousers decorated with scarlet snakes.
Talking about Temperance, when you mean pouring wine down the gutter, is
quite literally as senseless as talking about Thrift, when you mean
throwing money into the sea. The rambling speech of yokels and tramps is
as much wiser than this as a rambling walk in the woods is wiser than
the mathematical straightness of a fall from a precipice. The present
leaders of progress are, I think, very near to that precipice; about all
their schemes and ideals there is a savour of suicide. But the clown
will go on talking in a living and, therefore, a leisurely fashion, and
the great truth of pure gossip which sprang up in simpler ages and was
the fountain of all the literatures, will flow on when our intricate and
tortured society has died of its sins.
The Prudery of the Feminists
In the ultimate and universal sense I am astonished at the lack of
astonishment. Starting from scratch, so to speak, we are all in the
position of the first frog, whose pious and compact prayer was: “Lord,
how you made me jump!” Matthew Arnold told us to see life steadily and
see it whole. But the flaw in his whole philosophy is that when we do
see life whole we do not see it steadily, in Arnold’s sense, but as a
staggering prodigy of creation. There is a primeval light in which all
stones are precious stones; a primeval darkness against which all
flowers are as vivid as fireworks. Nevertheless, there is one kind of
surprise that does surprise me, the more, perhaps, because it is not
true surprise but a supercilious fuss. There is a kind of man who not
only claims that his stone is the only pebble on the beach, but declares
it must be the one and only philosopher’s stone, because he is the one
and only philosopher. He does not discover suddenly the sensational fact
that grass is green. He discovers it very slowly, and proves it still
more slowly, bringing us one blade of grass at a time. He is made
haughty instead of humble by hitting on the obvious. The flowers do not
make him open his eyes, but, rather, cover them with spectacles; and
this is even more true of the weeds and thorns. Even his bad news is
banal. A young man told me he had abandoned his Bible religion and
vicarage environment at the withering touch of the one line of
Fitzgerald: “The flower that once has blown, for ever dies.” I vainly
pointed out that the Bible or the English burial service could have told
him that man cometh up as a flower and is cut down. If that were
self-evidently final, there would never have been any Bibles or any
vicarages. I do not see how the flower can be any more dead, when a
mower can cut it down, merely because a botanist can cut it up. It
should further be remembered that the belief in the soul, right or
wrong, arose and flourished among men who knew all there is to know
about cutting down, not unfrequently cutting each other down, with
considerable vivacity. The physical fact of death, in a hundred horrid
shapes, was more naked and less veiled in times of faith or superstition
than in times of science or scepticism. Often it was not merely those
who had seen a man die, but those who had seen him rot, who were most
certain that he was everlastingly alive.
There is another case somewhat analogous to this discovery of the new
disease of death. I am puzzled in somewhat the same way when I hear, as
we often hear just now, somebody saying that he was formerly opposed to
Female Suffrage but was converted to it by the courage and patriotism
shown by women in nursing and similar war work. Really, I do not wish to
be superior in my turn, when I can only express my wonder in a question.
But from what benighted dens can these people have crawled, that they
did not know that women are brave? What horrible sort of women have they
known all their lives? Where do they come from? Or, what is a still
more apposite question, where do they think they come from? Do they
think they fell from the moon, or were really found under
cabbage-leaves, or brought over the sea by storks? Do they (as seems
more likely) believe they were produced chemically by Mr. Schafer on
principles of abiogenesis? Should we any of us be here at all if women
were not brave? Are we not all trophies of that war and triumph? Does
not every man stand on the earth like a graven statue as the monument of
the valour of a woman?
As a matter of fact, it is men much more than women who needed a war to
redeem their reputation, and who have redeemed it. There was much more
plausibility in the suspicion that the old torture of blood and iron
would prove too much for a somewhat drugged and materialistic male
population long estranged from it. I have always suspected that this
doubt about manhood was the real sting in the strange sex quarrel, and
the meaning of the new and nervous tattoo about the unhappiness of
women. Man, like the Master Builder, was suspected by the female
intelligence of having lost his nerve for climbing that dizzy
battle-tower he had built in times gone by. In this the war did
certainly straighten out the sex tangle; but it did also make clear on
how terrible a thread of tenure we hold our privileges--and even our
pleasures. For even bridge parties and champagne suppers take place on
the top of that toppling war-tower; an hour can come when even a man who
cared for nothing but bridge would have to defend it like Horatius; or
when the man who only lives for champagne would have to die for
champagne, as certainly as thousands of French soldiers have died for
that flat land of vines; when he would have to fight as hard for the
wine as Jeanne D’Arc for the oil of Rheims.
Just as civilization is guarded by potential war, so it is guarded by
potential revolution. We ought never to indulge in either without
extreme provocation; but we ought to be cured for ever of the fancy that
extreme provocation is impossible. Against the tyrant within, as against
the barbarian without, every voter should be a potential volunteer.
“Thou goest with women, forget not thy whip,” said the Prussian
philosopher; and some such echo probably infected those who wanted a war
to make them respect their wives and mothers. But there would really be
a symbolic sense in saying, “Thou goest with men, forget not thy sword.”
Men coming to the council of the tribe should sheathe their swords, but
not surrender them. Now I am not going to talk about Female Suffrage at
this time of day; but these were the elements upon which a fair and sane
opposition to it were founded. These are the risks of real politics; and
the woman was not called upon to run such a risk, for the very simple
reason that she was already running another risk. It was not laws that
fixed her in the family; it was the very nature of the family. If the
family was a fact in any very full sense, and if popular rule was also a
fact in any very full sense, it was simply physically impossible for the
woman to play the same part in such politics as the man. The difficulty
was only evaded because the democracy was not a free democracy or the
family not a free family. But whether this view was right or wrong, it
is at least clear that the only honourable basis for any limitations of
womanhood is the same as the basis of the respect for womanhood. It
consisted in certain realities, which it may be undesirable to discuss,
but is certainly even more undesirable to ignore. And my complaint
against the more fussy feminists (so called from their detestation of
everything feminine) is that they do ignore these realities. I do not
even propose the alternative of discussing them; on that point I am
myself content to be what some call conventional, and others, civilized.
I do not in the least demand that anyone should accept my own deduction
from them; and I do not care a brass farthing what deduction anybody
accepts about such a rag as a modern ballot-paper. But I do suggest that
the peril with which one half of humanity is perpetually at war should
be at least present in the minds of those who are perpetually bragging
about breaking conventions, rending veils, and violating antiquated
taboos. And, in nine cases out of ten, it seems to be quite absent from
their minds. The mere fact of using the argument before mentioned, of
woman’s strength vindicated by war work, shows that it is absent from
their minds.
If this oddity of the new obscurantism means, rather, that women have
shown the moral courage and mental capacity needed for important
concerns, I am equally unable to summon up any surprise at the
revelation. Nothing can well be more important than our own souls and
bodies; and they, at their most delicate and determining period, are
almost always and almost entirely confided to women. Those who have been
appointed as educational experts in every age are not surely a new order
of priestesses. If it means that in a historic crisis all kinds of
people must do all kinds of work, and that women are the more to be
admired for doing work to which they are unaccustomed, or even
unsuited, it is a point which I should quite as warmly concede. But if
it means that in planning the foundations of a future society we should
ignore the one eternal and incurable contrast in humanity; if it means
that we may now go ahead gaily as if there were really no difference at
all; if it means, as I read in a magazine to-day, and as almost anyone
may now read almost anywhere, that if such and such work is bad for
women it must be bad for men; if it means that patriotic women in
munition factories prove that any women can be happy in any factories;
if, in short, it means that the huge and primeval facts of the
family no longer block the way to a mere social assimilation and
regimentation--then I say that the prospect is not one of liberty but of
perpetuation of the dreariest sort of humbug. It is not emancipation, it
is not even anarchy; it is simply prudery in the thoughts. It means that
we have Bowdlerized our brains as well as our books. It is every bit as
senseless a surrender to a superstitious decorum as it would be to force
every woman to cut herself with a razor, because it is not etiquette to
admit that she cannot grow a beard.
How Mad Laws are Made
Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and
a vested interest. The fashionable way of effecting a social reform is
as follows. To make the story clearer, and worthier of its wild and
pointless process, I will call the two chief agents in it the March Hare
and the Hatter. The Hatter is mad, in a quiet way; but he is merely mad
on making hats, or rather on making money. He has a huge and prosperous
emporium which advertises all possible hats to fit all possible heads;
but he certainly nourishes an occult conviction that it is really the
duty of the heads to fit the hats. This is his mild madness; in other
respects he is a stodgy and rather stupid millionaire. Now, the man whom
we will call the March Hare is at first sight the flat contrary of this.
He is a wild intellectual and the leader of the Hatless Brigade. It does
not much matter why there is this quarrel between the Hare and the Hat;
it may be any progressive sophistry. Perhaps it is because he is a March
Hare; and finds it hard to keep his hat on in a March wind. Perhaps it
is because his ears are too long to allow him to wear a hat; or perhaps
he hopes that every emancipated member of the Hatless Brigade will
eventually evolve ears as long as a hare’s--or a donkey’s. The point is
that anyone would fancy that the Hare and the Hatter would collide. As
a matter of fact they co-operate. In other words, every “reform” to-day
is a treaty between the two most influential modern figures--the great
capitalist and the small faddist. They are the father and mother of a
new law; and therefore it is so much of a mongrel as to be a monster.
What happens is something like this. The line of least resistance is
found between the two by a more subtle analysis of their real respective
aims. The intuitive eye of friendship detects a fine shade in the
feelings of the Hatter. The desire of his heart, when delicately
apprehended, is not necessarily that people should wear his hats, but
rather that they should buy them. On the other hand, even his
fanatically consistent colleague has no particular objection to a human
being purchasing a hat, so long as he does not wreck his health, blast
his prospects and generally blow his brains out, by the one suicidal act
of putting it on. Between them they construct a law called the Habitual
Hat-Pegs Act, which lays it down that every householder shall have not
less than twenty-three hat-pegs and that, lest these should accumulate
unwholesome dust, each must be covered by a hat in uninterrupted
occupation. Or the thing might be managed some other way; as by
arranging that a great modern nobleman should wear an accumulation of
hats, one on top of the other, in pleasing memory of what has often been
the itinerant occupation of his youth. Broadly, it would be enacted that
hats might be used in various ways; to take rabbits out of, as in the
case of conjurers, or put pennies into, as in the case of beggars, or
smash on the heads of scarecrows, or stick on the tops of poles; if only
it were guaranteed that as many citizens as possible should be forced to
go bareheaded. Thus, the two most powerful elements in the governing
class are satisfied; of which the first is finance and the second
fidgets. The Capitalist has made money; and he only wanted to make
money. The Social Reformer has done something; and he only wanted
something to do.