repeated it in print, about an alleged and perhaps legendary lady
secretary of Madam Blavatsky or Mrs. Besant, who was so much delighted
with a new sofa or ottoman that she sat on it by preference when resting
or reading her correspondence. At last it moved slightly, and she found
it was a Mahatma covered with his Eastern robe and rigid in prayer, or
some more impersonal ecstasy. That a lady secretary should have a seat
any gentleman will approve; that a Mahatma should be sat on no Christian
will deny; nevertheless, there is another possible moral to the fable
which is a reproach rather to the sitter than the seat. It might be put,
as in a sort of vision or allegory, by imagining that all our furniture
really was made thus of living limbs instead of dead sticks. Suppose the
legs of the table were literally legs--the legs of slaves standing
still. Suppose the arms of an armchair really were arms--the arms of a
patient domestic permanently held out, like those of an old nurse
waiting for a baby. It would be calculated to make the luxurious
occupant of the easy-chair feel rather like a baby; which might do him
good. Suppose every sofa were like that of Mrs. Besant’s
secretary--simply made of a man. They need not be made merely of
Theosophists or Buddhists--God forbid. Many of us would greatly prefer
to trust ourselves to a Moslem or Turk. This might, with strict
accuracy, be called sitting on an Ottoman. I have even read, I think, of
some oriental potentate who rejoiced in a name sounding like “sofa.” It
might even be hinted that some of them might be Christians, but there is
no reason, of course, why all of them should not be praying. To sit on a
man while he was praying would doubtless require some confidence. It
would also give a more literal version of the possession of a Prie-Dieu
chair. It would be easy to expand the extravagance into a vision of a
whole house alive, an architecture of arms and legs, a temple of temples
of the spirit. The four walls might be made of men like the squares in
military formation. There is even, perhaps, a shadow of the fantasy in
the popular phrases that compare the roof to the human head, that name
the chimney-pot hat after the chimney, or lightly allude to all modern
masculine head-dresses as “tiles.” But the only value of the vision, as
of most visions--even the most topsy-turvy ones--is a moral value. It
figures forth, in emblem and enigma, the truth that we do treat merely
as furniture a number of people who are, at the very least, live stock.
And the proof of it is that when they move we are startled like the
secretary sitting on the praying man; but perhaps it is we who should
begin to pray.
In the current criticisms of the Strikes there is a particular tone,
which affects me not as a matter of politics, but rather of philosophy,
or even of poetry. It is, indeed, the servile spirit expressed, if not
in its poetry, at least in its rhetoric. But it is a spirit I can
honestly claim to have hated and done my best to hammer long before I
ever heard of the Servile State, long before I ever dreamed of applying
this test to Strikes, or indeed of applying it to any political
question. I felt it originally touching things at once elemental and
every day--things like grass or daylight, like stones or daisies. But in
the light of it, at least, I always rebelled against the trend or tone
of which I speak. It may roughly be described as the spirit of taking
things for granted. But, indeed, oddly enough, the very form of this
phrase rather misses its own meaning. The spirit I mean, strictly
speaking, does not take things for granted. It takes them as if they had
not been granted. It takes them as if it held them by something more
autocratic than a right; by a cold and unconscious occupation, as stiff
as a privilege and as baseless as a caprice. As a fact, things generally
are granted, ultimately by God, but often immediately by men. But this
type of man is so unconscious of what he has been given that he is
almost unconscious of what he has got; not realizing things as gifts, he
hardly realizes them as goods. About the natural things, with which I
began, this oblivion has only inward and spiritual, and not outward and
political, effects. If we forget the sun the sun will not forget us, or,
rather, he will not remember us to revenge himself by “striking” at us
with a sunstroke. The stars will not go on strike or extinguish the
illumination of the universe as the electricians would extinguish the
illumination of the city. And so, while we repeat that there is a
special providence in a falling star, we can ignore it in a fixed star.
But when we at once ignore and assume thousands of thinking, brooding,
free, lonely and capricious human creatures, they will remind us that we
can no more order souls than we can order stars. This primary duty of
doubt and wonder has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of special
industrial quarrels. The workmen might be quite wrong to go on strike,
and we should still be much more wrong in never expecting them to go on
strike. Ultimately, it is a mystical but most necessary mood of
astonishment at everything outside one’s own soul--even one’s own body.
It may even involve a wild vision in which one’s own boots on one’s own
feet seem to be things distant and unfamiliar. And if this sound a shade
fantastic, it is far less fantastic than the opposite extreme--the state
of the man who feels as if he owned not only his own feet, but hundreds
of other human feet like a huge centipede, or as if he were a universal
octopus, and all rails, tubes and tramlines were his own tentacles, the
nerves of his own body, or the circulation of his own blood. That is a
much worse nightmare, and at this moment a much commoner one.
Tennyson struck a true note of the nineteenth century when he talked
about “the fairy-tales of science and the long result of time.” The
Victorians had a very real and even childlike wonder at things like the
steam-engine or the telephone, considered as toys. Unfortunately the
long result of time, on the fairy-tales of science, has been to extend
the science and lessen the fairy-tale, that is, the sense of the
fairy-tale. Take for example the case of a strike on the Tubes. Suppose
that at an age of innocence you had met a strange man who had promised
to drive you by the force of the lightning through the bowels of the
earth. Suppose he had offered, in a friendly way, to throw you from one
end of London to the other, not only like a thunderbolt, but by the same
force as a thunderbolt. Or if we picture it a pneumatic and not an
electric railway; suppose he gaily promised to blow you through a
pea-shooter to the other side of London Bridge. Suppose he indicated all
these fascinating opportunities by pointing to a hole in the ground and
telling you he would take you there in a sort of flying or falling room.
I hope you would have agreed that there was a special providence in a
falling room. But whether or no you could call it providential, you
would agree to call it special. You would at least think that the
strange man was a very strange man. You would perhaps call him a very
strange and special liar, if he merely undertook to do it. You might
even call him a magician, if he did do it. But the point is this, that
you would not call him a Bolshevik merely because he did not do it. You
would think it a wonderful thing that it should be done at all; passing
in that swift car through those secret caverns, you would feel yourself
whirled away like Cinderella carried off in the coach that had once been
a pumpkin. But though such things happened in every fairy-tale, they
were not expected in any fairy-tale. Nobody turned on the fairies and
complained that they were not working, because they were not always
working wonders. The press in those parts did not break into big
headlines of “Pumpkins Held Up; No Transformation Scenes,” or “Wands
Won’t Work; Famine of Coaches.” They did not announce with horror a
“Strike of Fairy Godmothers.” They did not draw panic-stricken pictures
of mobs of fairy godmothers, meeting in parks and squares, merely
because the majority of pumpkins still continued to be pumpkins. Now I
do not argue that we ought to treat every tube-girl as our fairy
godmother; she might resent the familiarity, especially the suggestion
of anything so near to a grandmother. But I do suggest that we should,
by a return to earlier sentiments, realize that the tube servants are
doing something for us that we could not do for ourselves; something
that is no part of our natural capacities, or even of our natural
rights. It is not inevitable, or in the nature of things, that when we
have walked as we can or want to, somebody else should carry us further
in a cart, even for hire: or that when we have wandered up a road and
come to a river, a total stranger should take us over in a boat, even if
we bribe him to do so. If we would look at things in this plain white
daylight of wonder, that shines on all the roads of the fairy-tales, we
come to see at last the simplest truth about the Strikes, which is
utterly missed in all contemporary comments on them. It is merely the
fact that Strikers are not _doing_ something: they are doing nothing. If
you mean that they should be _made_ to do something, say so, and
establish slavery. But do not be muddled by the mere word “strike” into
mixing it up with breaking a window or hitting a policeman on the nose.
Do not be stunned by a metaphor; there are no metaphors in fairy-tales.
A Note on Old Nonsense
The Suffragettes have found out that they were wrong; I might even be so
egotistical as to say they have found out that we were right. At least
they have found out that the modern plutocratic parliamentary franchise
is what I for one always said it was. In other words, they are startled
and infuriated to find that the most vital modern matters are not
settled in Parliament at all, but mostly by a conflict or compromise
between Trusts and Trade Unions. Hence Mrs. Flora Drummond actually
cries aloud that she is being robbed of her precious vote; and says
dramatically “We women are being disenfranchized”--apparently by
“Soviets.” It is as if somebody who had just spent half a million on a
sham diamond, that ought never to have deceived anybody, should shriek
from the window that thieves had stolen the real diamond that never
existed at all.
Whether or no there are Soviets, there are undoubtedly Strikes; and I do
not underrate the difficulty or danger of the hour. There is at least a
case for blaming men for striking right and left, illogically and
without a system; there is a case for blaming them for striking steadily
and logically in accordance with a false system; there is a case for
saying that “direct action” implies such a false system. But there is
no case whatever for blaming them for having depreciated the waste paper
of the Westminster ballot-box; for that was depreciated long before the
war, and long before the word “Soviet” came to soothe and satisfy the
mind of Mrs. Drummond. It is absurd to blame the poor miners for
discrediting the members of Parliament, who could always be trusted to
discredit themselves. It was not the wild destructive Soviet which
decided that Parliament should not know who paid the bills of its own
political parties; it was Parliament itself. It was not a mad Bolshevist
addressing a mob who said that the men of the parliamentary group have
to treat charges of corruption among themselves differently from those
outside; it was the greatest living parliamentarian in a great
parliamentary debate. Miners had no more to be with it than missionaries
in the Cannibal Islands; it was not because men could not get coal that
they wanted to get coronets; and the empty coal-scuttle did not fill the
party chest. But in any case the policy of people like Mrs. Drummond
seems to require explanation. I can only fall back on the suggestion I
have already made; that she and her friends insisted on taking shares in
a rotten concern. They were quite sincere; so far as anybody can be
quite sincere who flatly refuses to listen to reason. They have no right
to complain if those who had to listen to their lawlessness will not
listen to their legalism.
As a fact such a lady is rather contemptuous than complaining. She says
the miners do not want Nationalization; which may or may not be true.
But she explains the demand by the old disdainful allusion to agitators;
or Labour leaders who “have to beat the big drum or lose their jobs.”
Nobody of course could possibly connect Mrs. Flora Drummond with the
idea of a big drum; any more than with a big horse or a uniform or a
self-created military rank. But this particular school of Feminists must
not be too fastidious in the present case. The miners are poor and
rudely instructed men; and cannot be expected to have that touch of
quiet persuasiveness and softening courtesy, by which the Militant
Suffragettes did so much to defend the historic dignity of their sex.
They have to fall back on something only too like a big drum, having no
skill in the silvery flutings of the W.S.P.U., or that tender lute which
Miss Pankhurst touched at twilight. But under all the disadvantages of
the coarser sex, the advocates of Nationalization have not yet used all
the methods that precedent might suggest to them. Mr. Smillie has not
cut up any Raphaels or Rembrandts at the National Gallery; nor even set
fire to any of the theatres he may happen to pass when he is out for a
walk. Mr. Bonar Law, on returning home at evening, does not find Mr.
Sidney Webb, a solitary figure chained to his railings. One of the
Suffragettes distinguished herself by getting inside a grand piano; but
it is seldom that we open our own private piano and find a large
coal-miner inside the instrument. The coal-miner may be better at the
big drum than the grand piano; but he remains on the outside of both;
and his drum is really smaller than some. The big drum, however, is
rather a convenient metaphor for something obvious and loud and hollow;
and the true moral in the matter is that recent English history was a
procession led far too much by the big drum; and the agitation about
mere Parliamentary votes was one of the most recent and most remarkable
examples of it.
What will be the future of the present industrial crisis I will not
prophesy; but I do know that every element in the past, which has led to
this impasse in the present, has been thus glorified as a mere novelty
by such a noisy minority. It was just because sanguine and shallow
people found it easier to act than to write, and easier to write than to
think, that every one of the changes came which now complicate our
position. The very industrialism which makes us dependent on coal, and
therefore on coal-miners and coal-owners, was forced on us by fussy
efficient fools, for whom anything fresh seemed to be free. Neither
miners nor mine-owners could have put out the fire by which Shakespeare
told his Winter’s Tale. The unequal ownership, which has justly
alienated the workers, was hurried happily through because the owners
were new, and it did not matter that they were few. The blind hypocrisy
with which our press and publicists hardened their hearts in the great
strikes before the war, was made possible by loud evasions about
political progress and especially by the big drum of Votes for Women. I
have begun this essay on a controversial note, with the echo of an old
controversy; and yet I do not mean to be merely provocative. The
Suffragettes are only doing what we all do; and I have only put them
first as an example of accumulated abuses for which we are all
responsible. I do not mean to blame the Suffragettes as they blame the
Socialists; but only to point to an impasse of impenitence for which we
are all to blame.
I am more and more convinced that what is wanted nowadays is not
optimism or pessimism, but a sort of reform that might more truly be
called repentance. The reform of a state ought to be a thing more like
the reform of a thief, which involves the admission that he has been a
thief. We ought not to be merely inventing consolations, or even merely
prophesying disasters; we ought, first and foremost, to be confessing
our own very bad mistakes. It is easy enough to say that the world is
getting better, by some mysterious thing called progress--which seems to
mean providence without purpose. But it is almost as easy to say the
world is getting worse, if we assume that it is only the younger
generation that has just begun to make it worse. It is easy enough to
say that the country is going to the dogs, if we are careful to identify
the dogs with the puppies. What we need is not the assertion that other
people are going to the dogs, but the confession that we ourselves have
only just come back from the swine. We also are the younger generation,
in the sense of being the Prodigal Son. As somebody said, there is such
a thing as the Prodigal Father. We could purchase hope at the dreadful
price of humility. But all thinkers and writers, of all political
parties and philosophical sects, seem to shrink from this notion of
admitting they are on the wrong road and getting back on to the right
one. They are always trying to pretend, by hook or crook, that they are
all on the same somewhat meandering road, and that they were right in
going east yesterday, though they are right in going west to-day. They
will try to make out that every school of thought was an advance on the
last school of thought, and that no apology is due to anybody. For
instance, we might really have a moderate, cautious, and even
conservative reform of the evils affecting Labour, if we would only
confess that Capitalism itself was a blunder which it is very difficult
to undo. As it is, men seem to be divided into those that think it an
achievement so admirable that it cannot be improved upon, and those who
think it an achievement so encouraging that it _can_ be improved upon.
The former will leave it in chaos, and the latter will probably improve
it into slavery. Neither will admit what is the truth--that we have got
to get _back_ to a better distribution of property, as it was before we
fell into the blunder of allowing property to be clotted into monstrous
monopolies. For that involves admitting that we have made a mistake; and
that we none of us have the moral courage to do.
I suggest very seriously that it will do good to our credit for courage
and right reason if we drop this way of doing things. The conversions
that have converted the world were not effected by this sort of
evolutionary curve. St. Paul did not pretend that he had changed slowly
and imperceptibly from a Pharisee to a Christian. Victor Hugo did not
maintain that he had been very right to be a Royalist, and only a little
more right to be a Republican. If we have come to the conclusion that we
have been wrong, let us say so, and congratulate ourselves on being now
right; not insinuate that in some relative fashion we were just as right
when we were wrong. For in this respect the progressive is the worst
sort of conservative. He insists on conserving, in the most obstinate
and obscurantist fashion, all the courses that have been marked out for
progress in the past. He does literally, in the rather unlucky metaphor
of Tennyson, “let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves
of change.” For anyone who changes in that fashion has only got into a
groove. There is no obligation on anybody to invent evolutionary excuses
for all these experiments. There is no need to be so much ashamed of our
blunders as all that. It is human to err; and the only final and deadly
error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.
Milton and Merry England
Mr. Freeman, in contributing to the “London Mercury” some of those
critical analyses which we all admire, remarked about myself (along with
compliments only too generous and strictures almost entirely just) that
there was very little autobiography in my writings. I hope the reader
will not have reason to curse him for this kindly provocation, watching
me assume the graceful poses of Marie Bashkirtseff. But I feel tempted
to plead it in extenuation or excuse for this article, which can hardly
avoid being egotistical. For though it concerns one of those problems of
literature, of philosophy and of history that certainly interest me more
than my own psychology, it is one on which I can hardly explain myself
without seeming to expose myself.
That valuable public servant, “The Gentleman with the Duster,” has
passed on from Downing Street, from polishing up the Mirrors and
polishing off the Ministers, to a larger world of reflections in “The
Glass of Fashion.” I call the glass a world of reflections rather than a
world of shadows; especially as I myself am one of those tenuous shades.
And the matter which interests me here is that the critic in question
complains that I have been very unjust to Puritans and Puritanism, and
especially to a certain ethical idealism in them, which he declares to
have been more essential than the Calvinism of which I “make so much.”
He puts the point in a genial but somewhat fantastic fashion by saying
that the world owes something to the jokes of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, but
more to the moral earnestness of John Milton. This involves rather a
dizzy elevation than a salutary depression; and the comparison is rather
too overwhelming to be crushing. For I suppose the graceful duster of
mirrors himself would hardly feel crushed, if I told him he did not hold
the mirror up to Nature quite so successfully as Shakespeare. Nor can I
be described as exactly reeling from the shock of being informed that I
am a less historic figure than Milton. I know not how to answer, unless
it be in the noble words of Sam Weller: “That’s what we call a
self-evident proposition, as the cats'-meat-man said to the housemaid
when she said he was no gentleman.” But for all that I have a
controversial issue with the critic about the moral earnestness of
Milton, and I have a confession to make which will seem to many only too
much in the personal manner referred to by Mr. Freeman.
My first impulse to write, and almost my first impulse to think, was a
revolt of disgust with the Decadents and the æsthetic pessimism of the
’nineties. It is now almost impossible to bring home to anybody, even to
myself, how final that _fin de siècle_ seemed to be; not the end of the
century but the end of the world. To a boy his first hatred is almost as
immortal as his first love. He does not realize that the objects of
either can alter; and I did not know that the twilight of the gods was
only a mood. I thought that all the wit and wisdom in the world was
banded together to slander and depress the world, and in becoming an
optimist I had the feelings of an outlaw. Like Prince Florizel of
Bohemia, I felt myself to be alone in a luxurious Suicide Club. But even
the death seemed to be a living or rather everlasting death. To-day the
whole thing is merely dead; it was not sufficiently immortal to be
damned. But then the image of Dorian Gray was really an idol, with
something of the endless youth of a god. To-day the picture of Dorian
Gray has really grown old. Dodo then was not merely an amusing female;
she was the eternal feminine. To-day the Dodo is extinct. Then, above
all, everyone claiming intelligence insisted on what was called “Art for
art’s sake.” To-day even the biographer of Oscar Wilde proposes to
abandon “art for art’s sake,” and to substitute “art for life’s sake.”
But at the time I was more inclined to substitute “no art, for God’s
sake.” I would rather have had no art at all than one which occupies
itself in matching shades of peacock and turquoise for a decorative
scheme of blue devils. I started to think it out, and the more I thought
of it the more certain I grew that the whole thing was a fallacy; that
art could not exist apart from, still less in opposition to, life;
especially the life of the soul, which is salvation; and that great art
never had been so much detached as that from conscience and common
sense, or from what my critic would call moral earnestness.
Unfortunately, by the time I had exposed it as a fallacy, it had
entirely evaporated as a fashion. Since then I have taken universal
annihilations more lightly. But I can still be stirred, as man always
can be by memories of their first excitements or ambitions, by anything
that shows the cloven hoof of that particular blue devil. I am still
ready to knock him about, though I no longer think he has a cloven hoof
or even a lame leg to stand on. But for all that there is one real
argument which I still recognize on his side; and that argument is in a
single word. There is still one word which the æsthete can whisper; and
the whisper will bring back all my childish fears that the æsthete may
be right after all. There is one name that does seem to me a strong
argument for the decadent doctrine that “art is unmoral.” When that name
is uttered, the world of Wilde and Whistler comes back with all its cold
levity and cynical connoisseurship. The butterfly becomes a burden and
the green carnation flourishes like the green bay-tree. For the moment I
do believe in “art for art’s sake.” And that name is John Milton.
It does really seem to me that Milton was an artist, and nothing but an
artist; and yet so great an artist as to sustain by his own strength the
idea that art can exist alone. He seems to me an almost solitary example
of a man of magnificent genius whose greatness does not depend at all
upon moral earnestness, or upon anything connected with morality. His
greatness is in a style, and a style which seems to me rather unusually
separate from its substance. What is the exact nature of the pleasure
which I, for one, take in reading and repeating some such lines, for
instance, as those familiar ones:
Dying put on the weeds of Dominic
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.