literally of this type. I have chosen the names from a nonsense story
merely for algebraic lucidity and universality; what has really happened
in our own shops and streets is every bit as nonsensical. But quite
recent events have confirmed this analysis with an accuracy which even
the unconverted can hardly regard as a coincidence. I have already
traced the truth in the case of the liquor traffic; but many
public-spirited persons of the Prohibitionist school have found it very
difficult to believe. All “temperance legislation” is a compromise
between a liquor merchant who wants to get rid of his liquor and a
teetotaller who does not want his neighbours to get it. But as the
capitalist is much stronger than the crank, the compromise is lop-sided
as such; the neighbours do get it, but always in the wrong way. But
again, since the crank has not a true creed, but only an intellectual
itch, he cares much more to be up and doing than to understand what he
has done. As I said above, he only wants to do something; and he has
done something; he has increased drunkenness. Anyhow, all such reforms
are upon the plan of my parable. Sometimes it is decreed that drink
shall only be sold in large quantities suitable to large incomes; that
is exactly like allowing one nobleman to wear twenty hats. Sometimes it
is proposed that the State should take over the liquor traffic; we
hardly need to be told what that means, when it is the Plutocratic
State. It means quite simply this: the policeman goes to the hatter and
buys his whole stock of hats at a hundred pounds a piece, and then
parades the street handing out hats to those who may take his fancy, and
by blows of the truncheon forcing every man Jack of the rest of them to
pay a hundred pounds for a hat he does not get. Merely to divert the
rivers of ale or gin from private power to public power or from poor men
to rich men, or from good taverns to bad taverns, is the sort of effort
with which the faddists are satisfied and the liquor lords much more
than satisfied.
There was a curious case of the same thing in the attempt to economize
food during the Great War. The reformers did not wish _really_ to
economize food; the great food profiteers would not let them. The fussy
person wants to force or forbid something, under the conditions defining
all such effort; it must be something that will interfere with the
citizen and will not interfere with the profiteer. Given such a problem,
we might almost predict, for instance, that he will propose the
limitation of the number of courses at a restaurant. It will not save
the beef; it is not meant to save the beef; but to save the
beef-merchant. There will actually be more food bought, if the cook is
not allowed to turn the scraps into kickshaws. But why should a
plutocracy including food profiteers object to more food being bought?
Why, for that matter, should the pure-minded social idealist object to
more food being bought, as long as it is the wrong food that is sold?
His quite disinterested aim is not that food should be restricted, but
merely that freedom should be restricted. When once he is assured that
a sufficient number of thoughtless persons are really getting what they
don’t want, he says he is building Jerusalem in England’s green and
pleasant land. And so he is; if the expression signifies handing over
England to the wealthier Jews.
Now the only way in which this conclusive explanation can be countered
is by ridiculing, as impossible, the notion that so fantastic a compact
can be clearly and coolly made. And of course it is not so made. The two
attitudes are not logically interlocked, like the antlers of stags; they
simply squeeze each other out of shape, as in a wrestle of two rival
jelly-fish. We should be far safer if they had the intellectual honesty
of a bargain or a bribe. As it is, they have an almost creepy quality
which justifies the comparison to shapeless beasts of the sea. I defy
any rational man to deny that he has noticed something moonstruck and
mis-shapen, as apart from anything unjust or uncomfortable, about the
little laws which have lately been tripping him up; laws which may tell
him at any minute that he must not purchase turpentine before a certain
tick of the clock, or that if he buys a pound of tea he must also buy a
pennyworth of tin-tacks. The strictly correct word for such things is
half-witted; and they are half-witted because each of the two
incongruous partners has only half his will. They have not, for
instance, the sweeping simplicity of the old sumptuary laws or even the
old Puritan persecutions. But they are also half-witted because even the
one mind is not the whole mind; it is largely the subconscious mind,
which dares not trust itself in speech. The Drink Capitalist dares not
actually say to the teetotaller, “Let me sell a quart bottle of whisky
to be drunk in a day, and then I will let you pester a poor fellow who
makes a pot of beer last half an hour.” That is exactly what happens in
essence; but it is easy to guess what happens in external form. The
teetotaller has twenty schemes for cutting off free citizens from the
beverage of their fathers; and out of these twenty the liquor lord,
without whose permission nothing can be done, selects the one scheme
which will not interfere with him and his money. It is even more
probable that the temperance reformer himself selects, by an instinct
for what he would call practical politics, the one scheme which the
liquor lord is likely to look at. And it matters nothing that it is a
scheme too witless for Wonderland; a scheme for abolishing hats while
preserving hatters.
It might be a good thing to give the control of drink to the State--if
there were a State to give it to. But there is not. There is nothing but
a congested compromise made by the pressure of powerful interests on
each other. The liquor lords may bargain with the other lords to take
their abnormal tribute in a lump instead of a lifetime; but not one of
them will live the poorer. The main point is that, in passing through
that plutocratic machinery, even a mad opinion will always emerge in a
shape more maniacal than its own; and even the silliest fool can only do
what the stupidest fool will let him.
The Pagoda of Progress
There is one fashionable fallacy that crops up everywhere like a weed,
until a man feels inclined to devote the rest of his life to the
hopeless task of weeding it out. I take one example of it from a
newspaper correspondence headed “Have Women Gone Far Enough?” It is
immediately concerned with alleged impropriety in dress; but I am not
directly interested in that. I quote one paragraph from a lady
correspondent, not because it is any worse than the same thing as stated
by countless scholars and thinkers, but rather because it is more
clearly stated--
“‘Women have gone far enough.’ That has always been the cry of the
individual with the unprogressive mind. It seems to me that until
Doomsday there will always be the type of man who will cry ‘Women have
gone far enough'; but no one can stop the tide of evolution, and women
will still go on.”
Which raises the interesting question of where they will go to. Now, as
a matter of fact, every thinking person wants to stop the tide of
evolution at some particular mark in his own mind. If I were to propose
that people should wear no clothes at all, the lady might be shocked.
But I should have as much right as anyone else to say that she was
obviously an individual with an unprogressive mind. If I were to propose
that this reform should be imposed on people by force, she would be
justly indignant. But I could answer her with her own argument--that
there had always been unprogressive people, and would be till Doomsday.
If I then proposed that people should not only be stripped but skinned
alive, she might, perhaps, see several moral objections. But her own
argument would still hold good, or as good as it held in her own case;
and I could say that evolution would not stop and the skinning would go
on. The argument is quite as good on my side as on hers; and it is
worthless on both.
Of course, it would be just as easy to urge people to progress or evolve
in exactly the opposite direction. It would be as easy to maintain that
they ought to go on wearing more and more clothes. It might be argued
that savages wear fewer clothes, that clothes are a mark of
civilization, and that the evolution of them will go on. I am highly
civilized if I wear ten hats, and more highly civilized if I wear twelve
hats. When I have already evolved so far as to put on six pairs of
trousers, I must still hail the appearance of the seventh pair of
trousers with the joy due to the waving banner of a great reform. When
we balance these two lunacies against each other, the central point of
sanity is surely apparent. The man who headed his inquiry “Have Women
Gone Far Enough?” was at least in a real sense stating the point
rightly. The point is that there _is_ a “far enough.” There is a point
at which something that was once neglected becomes exaggerated;
something that is valuable up to that stage becomes undesirable after
that stage. It is possible for the human intellect to consider clearly
at what stage, or in what condition, it would have enough complication
of clothes, or enough simplification of clothes, or enough of any other
social element or tendency. It is possible to set a limit to the pagoda
of human hats, rising for ever into infinity. It is possible to count
the human legs, and, after a brief calculation, allot to them the
appropriate number of trousers. There is such a thing as the
miscalculation of making hats for a hydra or boots for a centipede, just
as there are such things as bare-footed friars or the Hatless Brigade.
There are exceptions and exaggerations, good and bad; but the point is
that they are not only both good and bad, but they are good and bad in
opposite directions. Let a man have what ideal of human costume or
custom he likes. That ideal must still consist of elements in a certain
proportion; and if that proportion is disturbed that ideal is destroyed.
Let him once be clear in his own mind about what he wants, and then,
whatever it is that he wants, he will not want the tide of evolution to
wash it away. His ideal may be as revolutionary as he likes or as
reactionary as he likes, but it must remain as he likes it. To make it
more revolutionary or more reactionary is distortion; to suggest its
growing more and more reactionary or revolutionary for ever is demented
nonsense. How can a man know what he wants, how can he even want what he
wants, if it will not even remain the same while he wants it?
The particular argument about women is not primarily the point; but as a
matter of fact it is a very good illustration of the point. If a man
thinks the Victorian conventions kept women out of things they would be
the happier for having, his natural course is to consider what things
they are; not to think that any things will do, so long as there are
more of them. This is only the sort of living logic everybody acts upon
in life. Suppose somebody says, “Don’t you think all this wood could be
used for something else besides palings?” we shall very probably answer,
“Well, I dare say it could,” and perhaps begin to think of wooden boxes
or wooden stools. But we shall not see, as in a sort of vision, a vista
of wooden razors, wooden carving-knives, wooden coats and hats, wooden
pillows and pocket-handkerchiefs. If people had made a false and
insufficient list of the uses of wood, we shall try to make a true and
sufficient list of them; but not imagine that the list can go on for
ever, or include more and more of everything in the world. I am not
establishing a scientific parallel between wood and womanhood. But there
would be nothing disrespectful in the symbol, considered as a symbol;
for wood is the most sacred of all substances: it typifies the divine
trade of the carpenter, and men count themselves fortunate to touch it.
Here it is only a working simile, but the point of it is this--that all
this nonsense about progressive and unprogressive minds, and the tide of
evolution, divides people into those who stick ignorantly to wood for
one thing and those who attempt insanely to use wood for everything.
Both seem to think it a highly eccentric suggestion that we should find
out what wood is really useful for, and use it for that. They either
profess to worship a wooden womanhood inside the wooden fences of
certain trivial and temporary Victorian conventions; or else they
profess to see the future as a forest of dryads growing more and more
feminine for ever.
But it does not matter to the main question whether anybody else draws
the line exactly where I do. The point is that I am not doing an
illogical thing, but the only logical thing, in drawing the line. I
think tennis for women normal and football for women quite abnormal; and
I am no more inconsistent than I am in having a wooden walking-stick and
not a wooden hat. I do not particularly object to a female despot; but I
do object to a female demagogue. And my distinction is as much founded
on the substance of things as my eccentric conduct in having a wooden
chair and table but not a wooden knife and fork. You may think my
division wrong; the point is that it is not wrong in being a division.
All this fallacy of false progress tends to obscure the old common sense
of all mankind, which is still the common sense of every man in his own
daily dealings: that everything has its place and proportion and proper
use, and that it is rational to trust its use and distrust its abuse.
Progress, in the good sense, does not consist in looking for a direction
in which one can go on indefinitely. For there is no such direction,
unless it be in quite transcendental things, like the love of God. It
would be far truer to say that true progress consists in looking for the
place where we can stop.
The Myth of the “Mayflower”
Agnosticism, the ancient confession of ignorance, was a singularly sane
and healthy thing so far as it went. Unfortunately it has not gone as
far as the twentieth century. It has declared in all ages, as a heathen
chief declared in the dark ages, that the life of a man is like the
flight of a bird across a firelit room, because we know nothing of
whence it comes or whither it goes. It would seem natural to apply it
not only to man but to mankind. But the moderns do not apply the same
principle but the very opposite principle. They specialize in the
unknown origins and in the unknown future. They dwell on the prehistoric
and on the post-historic or prophetic; and neglect only the historic.
They will give a most detailed description of the habits of the bird
when he was a sort of pterodactyl only faintly to be traced in a fossil.
They will give an equally detailed description of the habits of the bird
a hundred years hence, when he shall have turned into a super-bird, or
the dove of universal peace. But the bird in the hand is worth far less
to them than the two mysterious birds in these two impenetrable bushes.
Thus they will publish a portrait with life, letters, and tabletalk of
the Missing Link, although he is missing; they will publish a plan and
documented history of how the Social Revolution happened, though it has
not happened yet. It is the men who are not missing and the revolutions
that have happened that they have rather a habit of overlooking. Anyone
who has argued, for instance, with the young Jewish intellectuals who
are the brain of Bolshevism knows that their whole system turns on the
two pivots of the prehistoric and the prophetic. They talk of the
Communism of prehistoric ages as if it were a thing like the Crusades in
the Middle Ages; not even a probable conjecture but a proved and
familiar fact. They will tell you exactly how private property arose in
primitive times, just as if they had been there. And then they will take
one gigantic leap over all human history, and tell you about the
inevitable Communism of the future. Nothing seems to matter unless it is
either new enough to be foretold or old enough to be forgotten.
Mr. H. G. Wells has hit off his human habit in the account of a very
human character, the American girl who glorifies Stonehenge in his last
novel. I do not make Mr. Wells responsible for her opinions, though she
is an attractive person and much too good for her Lothario. But she
interests me here because she typifies very truly another variation upon
this same tendency. To the prehistoric and the post-historic must be
added a third thing, which may be called the unhistoric. I mean the bad
teaching of real history that such intelligent people so often suffer.
She sums up exactly what I mean when she says humorously that Stonehenge
has been “kept from her,” that Notre Dame is far less important, and
that this is the real starting-point of the “Mayflower.”
Now the “Mayflower” is a myth. It is an intensely interesting example
of a real modern myth. I do not mean of course that the “Mayflower”
never sailed, any more than I admit that King Arthur never lived or that
Roland never died. I do not mean that the incident had no historic
interest, or that the men who figured in it had no heroic qualities; any
more than I deny that Charlemagne was a great man because the legend
says he was two hundred years old; any more than I deny that the
resistance of Roman Britain to the heathen invasion was valiant and
valuable, because the legend says that Arthur at Mount Badon killed nine
hundred men with his own hand. I mean that there exists in millions of
modern minds a traditional image or vision called the “Mayflower,” which
has far less relation to the real facts than Charlemagne’s two hundred
years or Arthur’s nine hundred corpses. Multitudes of people in England
and America, as intelligent and sympathetic as the young lady in Mr.
Wells’ novel, think of the “Mayflower” as an origin or archetype like
the Ark or at least the Argo. Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say
that they think the “Mayflower” discovered America. They do really talk
as if the “Mayflower” populated America. Above all, they talk as if the
establishment of New England had been the first and formative example of
the expansion of England. They believe that English expansion was a
Puritan experiment; and that an expansion of Puritan ideas was also the
expansion of what have been claimed as English ideas, especially ideas
of liberty. The Puritans of New England were champions of religious
freedom, seeking to found a newer and freer state beyond the sea, and
thus becoming the origin and model of modern democracy. All this
betrays a lack of exactitude. It is certainly nearer to exact truth to
say that Merlin built the castle at Camelot by magic, or that Roland
broke the mountains in pieces with his unbroken sword.
For at least the old fables are faults on the right side. They are
symbols of the truth and not of the opposite of the truth. They
described Roland as brandishing his unbroken sword against the Moslems,
but not in favour of the Moslems. And the New England Puritans would
have regarded the establishment of real religious liberty exactly as
Roland would have regarded the establishment of the religion of Mahound.
The fables described Merlin as building a palace for a king and not a
public hall for the London School of Economics. And it would be quite as
sensible to read the Fabian politics of Mr. Sidney Webb into the local
kingships of the Dark Ages, as to read anything remotely resembling
modern liberality into the most savage of all the savage theological
frenzies of the seventeenth century. Thus the “Mayflower” is not merely
a fable, but is much more false than fables generally are. The revolt of
the Puritans against the Stuarts was really a revolt _against_ religious
toleration. I do not say the Puritans were never persecuted by their
opponents; but I do say, to their great honour and glory, that the
Puritans never descended to the hypocrisy of pretending for a moment
that they did not mean to persecute their opponents. And in the main
their quarrel with the Stuarts was that the Stuarts would not persecute
those opponents enough. Not only was it then the Catholics who were
proposing toleration, but it was they who had already actually
established toleration in the State of Maryland, before the Puritans
began to establish the most intolerant sort of intolerance in the State
of New England. And if the fable is fabulous touching the emancipation
of religion, it is yet more fabulous touching the expansion of empire.
That had been started long before either New England or Maryland, by
Raleigh who started it in Virginia. Virginia is still perhaps the most
English of the states, certainly more English than New England. And it
was also the most typical and important of the states, almost up to
Lee’s last battle in the Wilderness. But I have only taken the
“Mayflower” as an example of the general truth; and in a way the truth
has its consoling side. Modern men are not allowed to have any history;
but at least nothing can prevent men from having legends.
We have thus before us, in a very true and typical modern picture, the
two essential parts of modern culture. It consists first of false
history and second of fancy history. What the American tourist believed
about Plymouth Rock was untrue; what she believed about Stonehenge was
only unfounded. The popular story of Primitive Man cannot be proved. The
popular story of Puritanism can be disproved. I can fully sympathize
with Mr. Wells and his heroine in feeling the imaginative stimulus of
mysteries like Stonehenge; but the imagination springs from the mystery;
that is, the imagination springs from the ignorance. It is the very
greatness of Stonehenge that there is very little of it left. It is its
chief feature to be featureless. We are very naturally and rightly moved
to mystical emotions about signals from so far away along the path of
the past; but part of the poetry lies in our inability really to read
the signals. And this is what gives an interest, and even an irony, to
the comparison half consciously invoked by the American lady herself
when she asked “What’s Notre Dame to this?” And the answer that should
be given to her is: “Notre Dame, compared to this, is _true_. It is
history. It is humanity. It is what has really happened, what we know
has really happened, what we know is really happening still. It is the
central fact of your own civilization. And it is the thing that has
really been kept from you.”
Notre Dame is not a myth. Notre Dame is not a theory. Its interest does
not spring from ignorance but from knowledge; from a culture complicated
with a hundred controversies and revolutions. It is not featureless, but
carved into an incredible forest and labyrinth of fascinating features,
any one of which we could talk about for days. It is not great because
there is little of it, but great because there is a great deal of it. It
is true that though there is a great deal of it, Puritans may not be
allowed to see a great deal in it; whether they were those brought over
in the “Mayflower” or only those brought up on the “Mayflower.” But that
is not the fault of Notre Dame; but of the extraordinary evasion by
which such people can dodge to right and left of it, taking refuge in
things more recent or things more remote. Notre Dame, on its merely
human side, is mediæval civilization, and therefore not a fable or a
guess but a great solid determining part of modern civilization. It is
the whole modern debate about the guilds; for such cathedrals were built
by the guilds. It is the whole modern question of religion and
irreligion; for we know what religion it stands for, while we really
have not a notion what religion Stonehenge stands for. A Druid temple is
a ruin, and a Puritan ship by this time may well be called a wreck. But
a church is a challenge; and that is why it is not answered.
Much Too Modern History
All wise men will agree that history ought to be taught more fully in
the form of world history. In that respect at least Mr. Wells gave us an
excellent working model. England is meaningless without Europe, more
meaningless than England without Empire. But those who would broaden
history with human brotherhood too often suffer from a limitation not
absent even from Mr. Wells. They exchange the narrowness of a nation for
the narrowness of a theory, or even a fad. They think they have a
world-wide philosophy because they extend their own narrowness to the
whole world. A distinguished professor, who is a member of the League of
Nations Union, has been telling an interviewer what he thinks
history-books should teach. And it seems to me that, according to his
view if correctly reported, the new histories would be rather more
prejudiced and limited than the old.
He begins with a small but singular error, which itself shows some lack
of the imagination that can see two sides of a question. He says,
“Textbooks of history should aim at truth. It should not be possible for
one version of the American War of Independence to be taught in American
schools, and another in English schools.”