IN THE COMET’S TAIL
That next (Sunday) night, the night before the comet crossed our orbit,
Her Majesty and His Royal Highness argued long together, wrestling
together, alone in that Newmarket Parlour, on whose Last Supper table
lay a document drawn up by him, she at one moment almost going on her
knees, entreating, holding him, with “Don’t do it, my son—don’t do it.”
But he, pacing short about, his hands behind him, said again and again:
“It is no use, Mother....”
“You depose your poor father, you see,” she said with water in her eyes
that hung on him.
“Mother, you talk.... ‘Depose.’... What does it matter? Only for some
weeks.”
“Oh, I’m afraid! afraid!... It will profoundly offend the British
people, I know!”
“Mother, as if that mattered. I am the light of the world, Mother—for
the moment. In fifty years’ time men will smile—I hope—at my little say
as obvious baby-talk; but, for the moment, it is what _I_ say that is
wit, if they have the wit and grace to recognise my face and my voice,
and the oil that anoints my appointed pate. And they will, I think—some
time. My anticipation is that most of them will jump for joy. Anyway,
it doesn’t matter. I have the whim and the power to do them good, and I
will.”
The Queen, seated at the table, made of her hand a bed for her heavy
head, saying wearily: “Isn’t it a Morrison Pill? I begin to doubt if
the sorrows of men can be cured by any Morrison Pill.”
“But why do you, Mother? Oh, now, that seems rather unscientific of
you. The question is: Who is Morrison? Can he see facts? If so, his
pill is Divine, and nothing in the universe is the slightest use except
just his pill. Do, do, let’s shun catchwords like death, shall we?
Everything that’s done is done by a pill, Mother: to every effect its
special effecter: that light there was not lit by vague exhortations to
be good, but by a pill, by special measures; the sun shifts its mass
600 miles a minute, not more, not less, by a pill. And in the case of a
man who catches cold, then from the skin the kidneys sicken, then from
the kidneys the heart has it, the artery-walls, the circulation, the
stomach, the nerve-centres, and the man pants a complex discordance—in
such a case Morrison has to be rather a shrewd man to adapt his pill
to the original root of all that; but, as to the root of the complex
discordance of society, no such acumen is required: for it is known,
it must be obvious to blockheads, that if a nation has no country—if
Israel live in Egypt—if Englishmen live on a foreign England, making
bricks and paying toll to foreign Pharaohs from Normandy, who own
England—then in England you must have national discordance; and if Man
has no planet, then you must have international discordance. What is
amusing is, that war is regarded as the greater evil of the two! But
war is not a great evil, or not a deep, because it is God’s penalty
for a small wrong—for the wrong of the seizure by peoples of land that
belongs to all; the monstrous wrong, bringing the monstrous penalty,
is the seizure by only one individual of what belongs to all—and this
is that simple catching cold, pitching into complex discordances, that
needs no seer to heal it with a pill. And it is not because it was not
_seen_ that it has not been healed, but because our England has been
governed by lubbers and, blunted pundits.”
“Yes, I agree,” breathed the Queen—“I know, I agree”—reading the
document—“but still—oh, listen to me. Some of these things—Tell me
frankly, Teddy, does this clause here mean that you intend doctors to
murder infants?”
“What else, Mother?”
“Ah!”
“Mother—really—that sigh does not touch me. Mother, is it wrong to kill
a man? We kill a German, or a man who kills a man; but, of course, one
filthy infant kills many. Only last night Li Ku Yu was proving to me
that it is not wrong to kill two hundred million men.”
“Oh, the bloodthirsty—— And, Teddy, you believed him?”
“Mother, I said ‘proved’: perhaps you did not catch.... Oh, Mother,
how we distrust truth!—our only friend—our Blessed Saviour from all
our sorrows and wrongs—how we dread Her Heavenly face in our barbarian
brainlessness and irreligion——”
“Yes—I see that, too—that’s all right—but just think, Teddy—think of
the shock to the moral sense of England——”
“Yes, but, Mother, the moral sense of England is not a fixed thing! It
mayn’t be very high at present, but in six months I’ll have it raised——”
“Oh, Heaven, what shall I say to him?”—the Queen shook her bowed
brow—“This about doctors is an interference with evolution—Oh, I’m
afraid!—We mayn’t have the right——”
“‘Interference’”—the Prince stopped in his pacing—“Really, Mother, you
bring out things now that I’m sure would never have passed your lips
when I was ten! I suppose the brain ‘tires’ like steel-temper——”
“Meaning that I am getting old?”—with a dwelling underlook.
“Scott, Mother, no, of course—old, no—God forbid. But ‘interfering’
with evolution, Mother. How supremely——! They reckon ill, Mother, who
leave God out: when we fly from Him. He is the wings; when we interfere
with evolution, that, of course, is evolution interfering with
itself—as you know.”
The Queen did not answer; but presently was muttering: “Well, it is all
over now—no more little Teddy—the fledgling flown—the Spring-time over
and gone—Oh, my God, I must be satisfied——”
As she broke into tears, with tears the Prince threw himself at her
mother’s knees.
All that night and the next forenoon he spent in interviews; and in
the afternoon, as Mr Mackay, the Prime Minister, was making an oration
in the Commons, intended to be impressive, in praise of the Prince
of Wales’s services to the world, the Prince with fifty blue-jackets
stepped into the House, and, standing by the Speaker’s Chair, said:
“Gentlemen, this Parliament is dissolved; force at hand; my regrets for
breaking in upon your grave deliberations.”
When they were gone, he locked up the House.
His Edict was in the evening papers:
“Men of Great Britain and Ireland.
“You know me, as I think I know you.
“I undertake (without prejudice to the Majesty of my Royal
Father and Mother) the direction of our country, until the
following sociological experiments be in the way of being made:—
“1. That Great Britain and Ireland be considered my private
property by right of conquest.
“2. That navies be now abolished.
“3. That rates and taxes (except ‘death-duties’) be abolished;
and ‘customs.’
“4. That citizens be liable to daily drill, including running
and breathing, between the ages of five and fifty-five.
“5. That it be made a privilege to be British, citizens to
receive a citizen-salary of 8s. a week from the age of
seventeen in the case of males, of 15s. in the case of
females, and of 35s. in the case of married couples
between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. Old Age
Pensions to be abolished.
“6. That such nervous diseases as insanity, epilepsy,
drunkenness, paralysis and idleness be considered
incorrigible.
“7. That the sale of love be made a felony.
“8. That our nation devote itself (_A_) to getting knowledge
of God, and (_B_) to teaching it: these two activities,
Research and Education, to be its two main activities, and
to cost it dear, each one, in millions per annum.
“9. That each boy and girl learn at least five handicrafts, or
‘trades,’ three of them to be (_A_) Working in wood, (_B_)
Working in iron, (_C_) Working in land.
“10. That the following be Government monopolies: (_A_)
Education, (_B_) Milk-supply, (_C_) Electric-power supply,
(_D_) Doctoring, (_E_) Publishing, (_F_) Amalgamation and
Distribution of Businesses.
“11. That Members of Parliament be paid three thousand pounds
per annum; and be Doctors of Science; and be workmen,
having educated hands and eyes, personally acquainted with
God; and be not bald nor toothless.
“12. That Doctors be twice consecrated (_A_) by a Bishop, (_B_)
by an Archbishop; and be Bachelors of Science; and be
State-servants; and be taught in Consecration that ‘to the
pure all things are pure.’
“13. That every species of clergyman now leave off uttering in
public for money whatever has come to seem childish or
savage to ordinary centric people, and begin to behave
themselves like grown white men and good patriots.
“14. That the idea of ‘punishment’ be abolished. Animals are
(apparently) electro-chemical, or V-chemical, machines,
and the idea of ‘punishing’ a machine is senseless.
Therefore let the mood of penalties be more impersonal,
purposeful and sociological, imprisonments to be lifelong,
in general, and prisons pleasant places; and other
penalties to be by fine, pain, shame, and death.
“Writs to be issued for a new Parliament within six weeks....
“Edward....”
Silence followed all that afternoon.
That a tempest was mustering its thunders to empty itself everyone
felt: but whether of anger or gladness was the question.
As for the foreign population of Britain, they little cared: for to
them, already thinking of packing their trunk for the Continent once
more, whatever the Prince might do was wondrously done: but it is
certain that some nerve in every Englishman winced at his action,
dazzling angel as he might be in the nation’s eye.
There was silence and musing behind closed doors....
Then wire-messages commenced to fly, men to collect in eddies working
into whirlpools, and, near five, feet to steer toward the palace; then,
as at the turn and uncertain time of tides boats on the surface lie any
way, but suddenly determine to stem all one way, and men say, “_that’s_
the way things are,” so before six the national answer to the Edict was
known—by a tendency—by a current’s rush—by an ocean’s roaring. At seven
South-west London was one welter and howl of heads.
A vociferation of “Teddy!” entered the palace, pervading it from bottom
to top like a hot and restless presence unrelentingly, the King, Queen,
Princesses, everyone, praying the Prince to present himself; but he
would not.
It turned out that, just as when a lad outgrows his Eton-jacket,
or a larva takes to wings, or a tadpole to the solid land, so the
people now were perfectly sick and tired of the garrulous old gang,
child-playing and play-acting with the lives of generations, quoting
from one another’s “_speeches_,” scoring points (loud cheers), “voting
censures”; and now, suddenly, it was done, the Age of Sham, and let’s
pretend, and baby babble; suddenly, in a day, the Age of Business was
born; and now was the hour for joy-bells to jargon and jangle together,
and hearts to join in being glad.
But the Prince said: “I am not obliged to go when someone says
‘Teddy’”; and was glad to get out of it when, at eight-twenty, a letter
from Li Ku Yu was placed in his hand:
“Prince, I write by the hand of a woman who received me
Friday night into her house at Forest Hill—13 Bread Street—I
blind-struck before being well in air, left leg broken, suicide
to be at nine. It pleases me to think that you, Prince, will
trouble yourself to cremate my body.
“I enclose scheme of the Europe by me conceived. What is good
adopt, as God inspires. Blessed be His name.
“Li Hsi Hung and Yoshio Kanin have instructions that you,
Prince, are next the guide of China. These will write you.
“If Chinese show reluctance to evacuate, strike one blind,
here, there. Deal leniently.
“I, in your place, should keep at least one million in Europe,
and mix. Meditate this. Great at the wood-lathe, land-culture.
Or give Russia to Japan, China itself will respond to
scientific institutions. Behead opponents.
“I have loved you well. Farewell.
“Your Younger Brother,
“+Li Ku Yu+.”
It was then eight-twenty, and the Prince had a will to get to that
address in Forest Hill before nine. But since the Princess could not
now part from him, nor the Queen part from the Princess, they set out
together.
It soon appeared, however, that it was hopeless to make way through the
Strand.
The fact that that was the night of the comet’s crossing—a thing long
regarded with an exaggerated interest—packed the throng thicker; not
a vehicle but the royal one was anywhere visible; advance was step by
step; the Prince fretted and vexed; but still the car crawled, the
crowd growled.
The night being very mistily dim, for some time they were not
recognised, but in Kingsway it came, and then the situation became
dreadfully distressing. Backward now nor forward they could not budge,
and would soon have been exhausted, if they had not been rescued by
a posse of police into the so-called Opera-house, where they were
accommodated with seats at the stage-back, and there sat salved but
wretched, hearing the speech of a Socialist on the Edict to a hall
packed chiefly with working men—a meeting convened by the S.D.F.—the
stage almost as thronged as the hall.
And there on prickles sat the Prince, resentment on his lips, very
vexed with Her Majesty and the Princess, who had influenced him against
going through the air.
It was only after some minutes that it dawned upon the consciousness
of the hall that _he_ was sitting there within it, and all at once
the oratory stopped short at a call of “_Teddy!_”—then call upon
call—negligible to begin, but growing great, and then big, august, like
gales, and the guns of nature.
“Speech!” someone uttered, and then it was “_Teddy! Speech!_” shrieked
with the ceaselessness of some machine urgently at work which shrieks:
“_Speech! Speech!_”
The Prince’s teeth siffled his “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” his lids
disdainfully lowered.
“Just to humour them, then, a little,” shouted the Queen, leaning
near his ear which a clamour now filled thick as masses of javelins
flashed in battle; “Yes, Teddy,” the Princess said with her head and
eyes; “_Speech!_” shrieked the machine; and presently he, impelled,
compelled, went stepping in a dove-coloured dust-coat with that quick
little sway of his shoulders to the front, siffling, spinning a little
stick pretty trickily quickly round his fingers.
Clamour! Hush! Silence!
“I confess, men, you rather astonish me clamouring _Speech_ at me
like this. Suppose I have nothing new to say? will you still want ‘_a
speech_’? (“_Teddy! Yes!_”) That’s odd! That what you’re accustomed to?
(“_That’s it, Ted!_”) I see! The right honourable gentleman sat down
amid loud cheers after having been on his poor old feet two hours—that
the style? (“_You’ve got it, Teddy!_”) And if he had been on his poor
old headpiece, no person on earth would have been one penny——” (_Uproar
of joy._)
“But from _me_ you look for solider stuff, do you? (“_We do! Teddy!_”)
Hunks of bread and beef, do you? and honeycomb? (“_Right you are!_”)
Well, I’ll see, you, on your side, trying to sympathise with me,
remembering that if I live a little generation or so ahead of you, a
leader _should_, and that if in anything you ‘differ from’ me, you are
‘differing from’ your sons, and your own future selves.
“Which I say so confidently, for the reason that I foresee that ‘_the
speech_’ won’t have any of my opinions in. No opinions. You have heard
that it has been said by them of old time ‘Every Briton has a right to
his opinion,’ but I say to you that no Briton has, least of all I, I
think, since it has been proved that opinions are wrong—two opposite
opinions both wrong—and we can’t have a right to a wrong. And again it
has been said by them of old time, ‘Don’t believe everything that you
hear,’ but I say to you, ‘Don’t believe anything that you hear,’ if it
is the least bit abstruse: distrust, if you desire to foster strong
minds; until truth is proved: and then believe vitally deep.
“Do you feel like me, I wonder, when I find that I have been believing
something that’s not true? as if some thing or other a little behind
and above me had been smiling all along at me, not unkindly, but
very disdainfully—rather offensive. Hence ‘_the speech_’ will be
pretty brief. I think—no opinions, only ascertained facts; and then
all practical politics, I think, touching the spot of your private
lives and minds and happiness closer home than the fantastic politics
you’re accustomed to; and then plain, I think—no foreign long words.
Possibly I may want to use the foreign word ‘phenomena’—is there some
workman who does not know what ‘_phenomena_’ are? (A voice: “_Want
of sleep, Teddy!_”) Nonsense! that’s insomnia! No! ‘phenomena’ are
whatever you experience, as when you sneeze; yes, or feel sleepless;
or are conscious of the bliss of eating when hungry, of drinking after
ripping long wood with the saw; or are conscious of being conscious,
and of the oddity of such a thing; or conscious of loveliness—for this
globe is only a bit of drift-log gadding down the river of being with
meteor-stones and other streaming drift-log, and yet, see, she teams
with gleams of beauty, tones of music, in blue eyes, in Geissler tubes,
in the salmon satin of copper flushing in flame, in shavings, in that
song of strong winds in forests which no tongue can sing, in the moon
on wild white nights winging away among Switzerlands of cloud, like
some white wildfowl with a tail all colours, and your heart’s enticed
in you, and suddenly you find that your mouth has kissed your hand—aye,
and afresh the next night when it is calm she’ll ravish you afresh,
since age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety; or
are conscious of sexes among animals—some sorts have more than two—and
of their tumid moods and enthusiasms; or of the twenty million suns
which you see over you at night—another twenty millions over you by
day, which you see without feeling that you see; or of your own sun
when clouds seem clustering round him, he looking some illustrious
sultan-priest of the sultry countries, strutting in such stuffs as
you cannot peer at without tears: dark then with excessive bright his
skirts appear.
“Such are ‘phenomena’: all our impressions of the manners and customs
of this panorama of lamps and Arab tabernacle of the Most High God,
which we with our dog’s-eyes blink at a little, which twenty million
years hence the sons of men will see better, and love more, but will
never see well, nor love enough.
“Or possibly in ‘_the speech_’ I may use the word ‘philosopher’—is
there one man who doesn’t know what a _philosopher_ is? (A voice: “_Man
who bears pain, Sir!_”) That again is nonsense. No! a philosopher is a
man who habitually sees things a little (a _very_ little) as they are,
and other people as they seem. Here we are in Kingsway, for instance,
and someone may imagine that a minute hence we shall still be here:
well, a philosopher is a man who laughs at such a fancy, seeing and
feeling that a minute hence we’ll be away out where the North Sea is—if
the North Sea itself, meantime, had not vaulted a thousand miles. (A
voice: “_What about a scientist, Sir?_”) Well, a scientist laughs,
too, when he thinks of it, but not so heartily as a philosopher, who
has not merely swallowed truth, like the scientist, but truth is
become the substance of his blood. A philosopher must, of course, be a
scientist, but some quite distinguished scientists that I could name
have been laughably far from being philosophers, just as a national
economist must be a business-man, but not every excellent business-man
is an economist. Every living thing, in fact, is a scientist—that is,
_knows_ something—but here below only men are philosophers; so that the
‘scientist,’ the ‘expert,’ is the mere raw material of a man, and any
studious goose can be a ‘scientist’: it is the philosopher who is the
man, not a Bachelor of truth, but a married man to truth, a Master and
Doctor of truth. And the inventor is a philosopher: for he not only
acquires two truths, like the scientist, but uses them intimately like
his tools, sees a relation between them, _i.e._, a new truth: becomes a
wielder and foreman of truth.
“Is this, then, to be henceforth our national aim—to be philosophers,
inventors, real men? And shall not this be the subject of ‘_the
speech_’—of all future ‘_speeches_’? In which case, shall not my
text be those words so associated now with my respected ancestor,
His Majesty King George V.—‘Wake up, England!’ It is to be assumed,
of course, that His Majesty understood what it is _to wake up_—well,
everyone knows: it is to become conscious that there’s a picture on the
wall, a basin on the washstand, a sun, clouds—conscious of facts; and
the more facts we become actively conscious of—the laws of tension in
the picture’s string, the chemistry of the basin, the sun’s mass, age,
speed—the more awake we are; the more we are philosophers.
“To wake up, then, is to become philosophers? cognisant of God? (A
voice: “_But, Teddy, we don’t much believe in no God, most of us!_”)
No? Well, I didn’t know that workmen still spoke in that way; though
I know that one day when I was fourteen a ship’s-captain smuggled
me—_stole_ me—behind a shed at Hayling Island, and begged me with
intense agitations never to believe if my teachers told me that there’s
‘a God,’ since, as a matter of fact, there isn’t one—a most amusing
man—his furtive earnestness! his leering secrecies!—and for three
minutes I wouldn’t let him rush away from me, until I had made him
admit what rubbish he had hissed. Not that I had any quarrel with his
belief—I knew that his _belief_ was true—but I did think little of his
English. He simply did not know what the word ‘_God_’ means, or it
never would have entered his head to say that there’s ‘_no God_’—_i.e._
no beyond of sense-impressions, no cause of phenomena, no maker at
every instant of heaven and earth. What he _believed_ was that that
cause is nothing at all like what horses, or Mrs Jones next door, or
Mrs Bobmbobm on Mars, imagines it to be; but he did not say what he
believed, and he said what he did _not_ believe, that there’s no cause
at all, which was hardly very glittering English. In fact, strictly
speaking, these are the only three things of which every living being
is perfectly certain, that there are phenomena, and a cause for
them—‘I,’ a world, and God. (A voice: “_What sort of being can God
be, Teddy? And whatever caused Him?_”) Well! But why stop me with
impossible questions? Is it possible that you bother to ask yourself
and me a thing like that? Cats ask that, when you see them looking
at the moon; cats ask, bishops and witch-doctors answer; ancient
(so-called) ‘philosophers’ asked (they were not really philosophers);
but modern philosophers don’t bother, knowing that what Life is for is
more and more to enjoy and love God, not to guess at and comprehend
Him, as priests and negroes pretend to do, since God is _infinite_,
_i.e._ infinitely inconceivable, _x_ for ever—not, of course, meaning
inconceivable to _men_, to whom everything is inconceivable, but I am
speaking of creatures on spheres older than this, with their cocoanuts
roomy as cathedrals, through which unceasingly streams of adoring music
roll their roarings. And if someone wonders how I can know that to
them, too, God is _x_ for ever, I answer that this is known; but to
explain how might make ‘_the speech_’ tedious.
“You won’t bother, then, any more about what God is: you know that
He is amiable, producing wheat to make man brisk and European, and
fruit to make man amorous and romantic, and milk within the weasel’s
teat for her weans. How fresh is the ocean of March-wind! Oh, how
well after all is it then with men, and with the birds of the air
that laugh aloft with the blasts that whirl them! And suppose your
tongue was a hint too big for your mouth? or was fitted in with the
littlest list and lee-way, as when novices saw box-wood? How irritating
to frenzy the friction of the teeth on one side! But it is a nice,
true fit, like a rotor spinning in its stator-tunnel with scarce a
millimetre clearance-space: He is good, He has compasses, and calipers
with verniers, and decimal micrometers, to build with His bricks the
multiple eye of the fly. And you know that He is worshipful: that
Expanse is His knapsack, and Eternity is His journey; and you know many
things that He is _not_—nothing like what He has been conceived—not
a steed with wings of wind, nor a plant with stars for apples; not
short, not long, not middle-sized; neither masculine, nor feminine,
nor neuter; not living, not dead; no saint, though He has no failings;
does not know anything, though He more-than-knows everything; cannot
see, though in each billionth bit of a minute in each billionth bit
of a millimetre He busies a billion billion fingers. (A voice: “_But
how do you know He’s not a horse or a tree, Sir?_”) Because _you_ are
a horse and a tree (very like), and hardly look the kind of agent
that can nudge an atom with your elbow to do its duty, or sprint
foot-and-foot with electricity in a foot-race. (A voice: “_Yes, but
how do you know He’s not dead?_”) Who? I haven’t the faintest idea
what you mean. Have you yourself? How can anything ‘be dead’ unless it
die? Only syntheses—_i.e._ souls—can ‘be dead’; a tree can ‘be dead,’
_i.e._ its soul, but wood and stone can’t ‘be dead.’ Or you may stretch
and say a clock or a chisel can ‘be dead,’ but not brass and steel.
Really, it is time for workmen to begin to use words with a little more
’cuteness and gumption. (A voice: “_But it was you yourself, Sir, who
first said ‘He’s not dead.’_”) _I_ did? When?... Oh, well, yes, that’s
true: I was saying He’s not this and not that, and, happening to say
‘He’s not living,’ I added, ‘He’s not dead.’ But it was absurd to add
that, for if He never lived, He can’t be dead. ‘God’ ‘dead’? Queer
meeting of words!—make a cat laugh! Some say _the devil’s_ dead; some
say he’s not dead; and that’s a quite legitimate controversy, since
all things that we know with hoofs do sooner or later die. (“Kick the
bucket,” the Queen whispered quick to the Princess.) But God’s above
the devil, don’t you know. Stay: I’ll tell you something I know about
God, something new to you, and pretty wondrous: listen: God everywhere
at this instant is acting as He never anywhere acted before. Got that?
I say _never_—a long time. He ‘acts by law,’ you think, He’s ‘the same
yesterday, to-day and for ever’: well, no, those statements squint:
we should say ‘He acts like Himself,’ and in two like cases would,
_no doubt_, act in a like way, but has never had, will never have,
the chance to. For you know, do you, that if nine of you light pipes
to-night, you will do nine things that never were done before? That if
you braze brass on Monday and brass on Tuesday, if you make chloral
on Wednesday and chloral on Thursday, between all the four will be a
million million differences? A few days ago I was filing a piece of tin
for a tenon template, and it must have cut my finger, for on looking
at it through a glass, I saw some blood corpuscles; now, I guessed
that, besides blood, there were very likely on it traces of several
things—naphtha, tetrachlorinated ether, bichromate of potash—and I felt
sure then that never in time and space had there been that particular
meeting, or any precedent for that particular myriad of actions there
taking place. And so in every case. Why, the right eye of the fly Y is
a curio unique in the universe, dealing with light in a style quite new
and unique. If you draw two circles with a compass, or rule two lines,
do you suppose they are alike? Eye them through a microscope, and one
will be a drawing of the Andes, the other of the Balkans; glare at them
through God’s goggles close-gloating, and the pair of pencil-lines
will be spacious like planets, with collapsing palaces, Persepolis and
Serapis, precipices, Saharas, and sand-storms oversweeping teeming
peoples—alike in nothing save in their uniqueness. Even in so confirmed
a thing as an earth’s journey each year has its own course and story,
and on high-roads of ice between England and France the gorilla has
strangled the sabre-toothed tigress. If I step up Piccadilly, at
my every step trillions upon trillions of events occur in eternity,
each medley of events unique in eternity—electrical events between
my body and clothes, my boots and the pavement, electro-magnetic
events as each boot-nail moves, magneto-luminous events, events of
capillarity, of osmosis, of friction, of pressure, of surface-tension,
of moment-of-inertia, of molecular vibration, of chemistry, of heat,
of sound in Australia (for I shake the globe), events of a thousand
forces, no doubt, whose name men will never name. How comes God to
‘know’ how to juggle with the emergency of this eternal diversity?
What twisting Proteus is His foreman, swift-whispering wisdom at his
tympanum? He is never at a loss, look, nor stops to con His law-book,
but pat as pat He acts with spinning spontaneity. ‘Spontaneity’:—as
living things _seem_ to act: for you know—unless some one of you
is awfully thoughtless—that living things only _seem_ to act
spontaneously, one going on four legs, one on two, one behaving as a
baby, a Bavarian, a curate, a eunuch, a lunatic, a woman, a man, a
martin, a Mozart, a Martian, strictly in the strain of his make and
nature at any instant. What shall we say, then? That God actually is
what living beings seem to be—spontaneous? that God is _living_? We
may say so, if we like; and then we will divide things into three
kinds—God living; things like us lifelike, doll-like, dream-living, or
dream-life-positive; and things like iron dream-life-negative. But that
would be rather a queer way of putting it, since ‘living’ already has
a definite meaning, meaning things like us; so you had better divide
things into—iron life-negative; we life-positive, or ‘living’; and
God more-than-living, or _x_-being. God, anyway, you see, is not very
‘dead.’
“I hope I so express myself that you see what I mean, though it is
a little difficult in English of two syllables. By ‘life-positive’
and ‘life-negative’ I mean to suggest that _every_thing is living—as
I have long thought, and _said_—just as (we know) everything is
electrified, things that contain more electricity than a certain
stock or neutral amount being called ‘electro-positive,’ things that
contain less ‘electro-negative.’ So I call men, trees, life-positive,
iron life-negative, crystals life-neutral—in which case, of course,
a moon is much more living than a man, the difference being that
between heat and temperature, between momentum and speed, an ounce of
boiling oil having much less heat than a ton of ice, though a higher
temperature, and a bullet much less motion than the Severn, though
more velocity; so a man less life than a mountain, though at higher
‘potential’ or pressure; and _death_ is doubtless an ‘earthing’ (as
electricians say), that is, a flowing back to the common earth-stock of
the excess of life-fluid in life-positive bodies, through some break
or short-circuiting of the vital dynamo. But now I am saying more than
I know, so am certain to be wrong somewhere: though this, or something
like it, you are likely to hear frequently repeated during the next
fifty years.
“Well, but though God is _x_ for ever, we must have some conception of
God, though wrong: and civilisation consists in nothing but this—the
getting of an ever higher conception of God through a broadening
consciousness of His ways—through science—through being philosophers
and inventors—through ‘waking up.’
“And isn’t this desirable? Yes, for waking up, or becoming conscious,
means happiness. Or is it necessary for me to prove that? It is easily
proved. For happiness is a property of life, isn’t it? ‘_Life is
sweet._’ You know that every insect or plant that has not had some
mishap is happy, and, with one apparent exception, does not want
to die. Well, but the trait of life is consciousness; so the more
conscious, the more living: but happiness is a property of living;
therefore the more conscious, the happier; and he was the most foolish
of the foolish ancients who said, ‘he that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow’: for knowledge, if it be _real_ knowledge, and not
the Chinese ‘knowledge’ of ‘scholars,’ is knowledge of God; and the
more we know of God, the more we adore Him, and are happy.
“Yes, but mark this: that life with very little consciousness is
still happy, if without mishap, if healthy. Does some one of you by
chance know what health is? a singing hiccup of religion in your
inwards? One March morning when I was a boy I saw from behind a hedge
in the Highlands a girl come running, her hair and plaid fluttering
on the winds; and when she chanced to pull up, half breathless, half
laughing, not far from me, I think I never saw man so affected and
sick with bliss. Up to God she threw her eye, gasping with a sort of
fond reproach: ‘My health! Oh, I accuse You of love’; and when the
mixed wind and water whistled and swamped the willow-whips sweetly
by the water-brook, I saw her lover’s-glance go languishing and gush
toward tears, she groaning ‘beloved,’ and then ‘beloved.’ Another day a
Scotch meenister put into my hand a tract: and it was about a cobbler
who sat singing in the sunlight; so someone asked, ‘Why are you always
singing, Jamie?’ and what did the cobbler say? ‘It is Jesus singing,
singing in my heart.’ There, again, was a happy life, though, of
course, the ancient Asiatic whom he, a modern Scotchman, so familiarly
mentioned had nothing to do with the matter, as is proved by—But, by
the way, talking of proof, are we going henceforth to be sensitive
to proofs? For it is suasibleness that distinguishes high types from
low, it being difficult to persuade a negro, for if you din into him
a series of known truths, the deduction from which is an axiom, he’ll
say, ‘That may be all true enough, but I think I’ll still stick to
my own way of thinking.’ Apes are worse! Whereas scientists stand
ever ready to cast for ever behind them at the breath of a proof the
convictions of their lifetime. We must be attentive, then, to proofs,
if we desire to be high types. Of course, if one’s brain is degenerate
with age, that mayn’t be easy ... but I, personally, address myself
to the young: I am pretty nimble myself, and have, I confess, little
interest in stiff knees and intellects. In some lands a son will say to
his father: ‘Climb me this tree,’ and if the father is too decrepit,
the son will hang him on that tree. (“Old Age Suspensions,” the Queen
whispered quick.) The Chinese, on the other hand, worship their aged
and ancients; but we here are hardly just now in a mood to adore the
Chinese, and their oddities (“_Wipe them out, Teddy!_”); nor must we
hang our aged; but support them with gentleness and patience.
“But I was saying that one of many proofs that that ever-charming adept
whom the cobbler mentioned was never the cause of his singing is that
blackbirds, singing-apes, Hindoos, sing in that same happy manner: so
the cobbler was not happy because he was pious, but was pious because
he was happy, knowing Who made him happy, and made life without mishap
to be happy.
“Of course, he would have been happier if he had had _more_ life,
_i.e._ more consciousness—if, by a consciousness of anatomy, he had
understood what an adorable miracle it was that he sat there without
one ache in any one of his myriad bits; if, by a consciousness of
geology, he had got into his nerves a sense of Eternity, and of the
exquisite preciousness and romance of those days of his happy lifetime,
to last not one millionth part of one click of the clock of God,
while Saturn gads with whinings for life to arise on her, nightly to
eye those fires that light her flying sky; if he had understood that
his sky had not always been blue, nor his brook bright, but were the
triumph of æons for him to sit and sing a little at, and still were
becoming bluer, lovelier, for his sons’ sons to tumble dumb and blub
their bliss at; if he had felt himself, not the peasant of a village,
but a civilian of that Infinite down whose bowels he was bounding with
a thousand wings a thousand miles a minute that blessed day; then, you
will say, the tone of his singing would have deepened, and from the
pewit of penny-whistles and wren-twitterings would have grown to the
roaring of oratorios and the vaunt of organs.
“Then, too, he would have been richer in pocket: for if, while he
was making such music in his soul, some crude Jew of a duke had come
saying, ‘Please pay me some rent—give me half the boots you cobble, and
you’ll go to heaven,’ the cobbler would have answered, ‘What, old Rip,
you about in this region of space? Sit down and let’s discuss it with
some singing between.’ (“_Teddy! Hurrah! Teddy!_”)
“And suppose the cobbler had been freed of all fear? fear of to-morrow,
of death, and hell?
“Suppose he had known that, so far from being an everlasting being,
he was a being who could not last two seconds? that, beside those
flights of spheres sweeping him on a heyday through the heaven of
heavens, there was _another_ scamper—of atoms—equally sweeping,
inconceivably fleet, wheeling within him; that he was like a sand-form
of the sand-storm, a rain of the gayest grains gyrating into such
fugitive unions and dissolutions, that in four months he would be a
totally different man—his ribs brand-new, his brain, his hair—and
in four seconds by no means the same man: so that whatever calamity
might befall him to-morrow would not be befalling _him_, but somebody
else—which only sounds fantastic since truth is in that strain, fairily
romantic, Divinely wild.
“For the cobbler’s feeling that he was always the same being from the
time when he was a quadruped, ‘crawling’ as a baby, then was a triped
holding on to things, then was a biped, then in bent old age again
became a triped with a stick, again tending to be a quadruped—this
feeling was a pure illusion, due to the steady fleetness with which
millions of cobblers succeeded each other like the flitting films of
the cinematograph, each very like the last, yet different, whose steady
swiftness causes us to suppose that we are watching one photograph of a
horse jumping, when we are watching a hundred photographs; or like that
steady swiftness of the globe which gave the cobbler the illusion of
staying in the same place, when he was millions of leagues removed from
where he had been a week before, and still with the swift’s wing was
flitting through infinity: for the child is not the man; nor the father
of the man; but the man’s ape-like ancestor.
“Suppose he had known this: that every stitch which he commenced some
other cobbler finished, by an exquisite ‘division of labour’; that when
he went to bed it was never to wake; and that what was true of him was
true of his awl also, since at all instants all things are altering
in a dreamland where all reels, and the dreamer is a dream, where
everything is just freshly created, and there is no such thing as an
old oak-tree, where an atom in this palm of mine may be from farther
than the Pleiades, and ancienter than the suns whose colliding belched
this earth (for we are made of eternity, and have been at the ends of
infinity), where the vast fallacy is to be flat and dull, and dull are
you, and oh, dull am I, if we see this thing that we see, and are dull.
“But the man knew none of these truths: his nut was one vat of fatuous
fancies: he was all in the revel and fairyland of Heaven, and thought
himself in common cobblerland.
“If he had been conscious of some of this—as I once said to a Scotch
girl when I was a boy: she came up to London to see an aunt, and in
church on the Sunday her aunt whispered her in a confidential way:
‘_That’s_ the clergyman who married your uncle and me.’ The next
year she came up again, and again in church her aunt whispered her:
‘_That’s_ the clergyman who married your uncle and me’—causing the
girl to wonder! for it was quite a different type of clergyman. And
again the next summer she came, and again was whispered in confidence:
‘_That’s_ the clergyman who married your uncle and me’—another
clergyman! ‘Hallo,’ thought the girl, ‘the wish must be father to the
thought here, and the thought illegitimate’; and I remember saying
to her, ‘What did it matter? whichever of the three had married her,
she would still have been unmarried the day after, since he, the
husband, would have been a different he, she a different she’ (“And the
clergyman a different it,” whispered the Queen quick): for plasm, the
stuff that palpitates and suffers, _rages_ into alteration.
“This consciousness, then, you will say, would have lessened the
cobbler’s laughable vast egoism, giving him that humility and Nirvana
which goes with adoring and true religion, would have freed him from
fears, and enlarged his happiness.
“Yes, but don’t forget the main fact here: that _the cobbler was
still happy_—without all this consciousness; and, _with_ all this
consciousness, the philosopher, Herbert Spencer, was _not_ happy. Why?
Because he had indigestion. (“_Teddy! Right there!_”)
“Shall we not say, then, that this healthy cobbler with Sankey and
Moody singing in his heart was a better man than ten Spencers? more
‘_right with God_’ somehow? since happier? and a dog barking for
gladness of heart a better being than ten Spencers? more right with
God? Let us say this! as Spencer would have said: and then you will
better sympathise with some bits of my Edict. (“_Teddy! You are our
man!_”)
“Are we not at present made of trumpery stuff? grumpy ugly stuff?—so
many druggist-shops! hospitals! Nor is it difficult, I think, so
to change it, that every lid shall lower with love in resting on
every face, and that a pain shall be a strangeness. Let us try
this, then: for it has already been successfully tried by barbarian
tribes—Spartans—tribes of quite tiny brain-power compared with yours,
but brains undrenched with quixotic dreads and crotchets of Laputa,
seeing things level-headedly in daylight, not through mists and comic
convex-mirrors.” (“_Teddy! Don’t stop!_”)
The Prince was glancing at his watch; and he said: “This minute the
earth has entered the comet, men, and, you see, we are not poisoned, or
anything. Oh, we are still infested with many dreads, like children and
savages shrinking from things in the dark—let’s cast them off to-night,
to confront with bright eyes this new era whose sunrise-beams stream on
us.
“What must be the aims of that new age we have discovered by analysing
our cobbler:—first, health high to heaven; and next, waking up into
philosophers and inventors: for, surely, the respected sayer of my text
never meant: ‘Wake up _a little_, England! but for goodness’ sake keep
one eye still shut awhile’?
“To be philosophers and inventors, then: for which you must have
leisure, and you should have wealth. To have leisure I see that you
need only one thing—a country of your own: to have wealth you need, I
think, two things—a country of your own, and some new tools, by which
you will make in an hour what you now make in two. A country of your
own I will give you (“_Teddy! Hurrah! Teddy!_”); the tools you must
invent for yourselves: I undertaking that whoever of you produces a
really good new tool I will make of him a strutting duke.
“A little quickening of our wits’ activity will do it all; and we
have it in us, I think. When they were digging the Simplon tunnel,
they could make no headway, the rock was so tough, until some genius
engineer suggested ‘Try English labour’; and then the tunnel was soon
digged. Well, that’s your Englishman all over. Say to him, ‘Work like
a serf with your hands, and I’ll give you three pounds,’ and he’ll
answer: ‘Right you are, mister’; but tell him, ‘Work a little with
your head, and you’ll see heaven coming down out of heaven,’ and he’ll
answer, ‘Go on, what do you take me for?’ Yet I think that that grit
and grimness which digged the tunnel will bring us out top-boy when
it is forced into the direction of the discovery of truth. (“_Right!
Teddy!_”)
“Wake up, then! Why is there already dissent at my suggestion that
every child shall acquire five trades? There’s no difficulty. I myself
know ten or twelve. I wonder if you men and women understand that
those of you who can’t work in iron are uncivilised? this being the
stock definition of civilised man—‘man of the iron age.’ Or do you
suppose that rolling in a motor-car has any tendency to civilise a
countess, any more than to civilise the poodle rolling on her knee?
The question is, Can she make a motor-car? if she can’t, she is ‘out
of it’ as regards motor-cars, though she roll till she’s a rolly-poly.
For surely, if a man or woman can’t make castings, can’t even soften,
harden or temper steel, can’t anneal, case-harden, upset, weld or
braze iron, doesn’t even know how to make a chisel, a reamer, or a
countersinker, has no kind of truck with iron but when he cuts his
crust, how can he be said to belong to the iron age? he belongs to the
stone age, and is essentially hairy, as he would admit with horror
on a desert island, seeing there his face in the glass of God, and
himself rapidly lapsing to frank savagery. And there are many thousands
of men and women who consider themselves cultured—like a young man
whom I knew, who in a beautiful poignant voice would repeat from some
old Greek or Negro minstrel named Homer the Farewell of one Hickson
to his wife Anne (“He has forgotten her maiden-name of ‘Dromache,’”
the Queen whispered quick to the Princess), of which young man I
discovered that, to the delight of the solar system, he did not know
how to cut a screw, or tap a drill-hole—not even a suspicion of what
education _means_ having ever entered the heads of these essentially
Chinese—Korean—Laputan—and profoundly uneducated Simple-Simons. Nor can
I myself boast of culture, for, never having learned to work in land,
I am in that respect nothing more than a nomad of the days of Abraham.
However, mankind from Japan round to America and back is now about to
ponder the sense of this word ‘educate,’ and to relearn its ABC in a
new mood.
“Be quick, then! Wake! Why already is not every man, woman and youth
among you an electrical engineer, say? (A voice: “_Tall order,
Teddy!_”) Apparently, you know little of the matter! There’s no
difficulty—a little semi-voluntary quickening of yourselves. Anyone who
will give up novels for three years can be that. As to novels, that,
I think you will admit, is all nonsense, and I undertake that novels
go under in England, if I do not. Anyway, you get not one out of me
for ten years, by which time, I expect, your tastes will have changed:
for, if I delight to spend my time in making an experiment, and you in
mooning over George Meredith or Jules Verne, that’s not because I am
the nobler born, but because I have been subjected to noble influences,
and you to low. Subject you to the same, and you, too, will soon choose
the infinitely romantic truth rather than the more or less ninny,
sham-romantic myth. And just imagine that instead of every English man,
woman, and schoolgirl writing a “novel,” as at present, each began to
regard it as disgraceful to pass through life and die like a sheep
without having, for his part, invented something, seen something really
_novel_ and peculiar to his existence—what a giddy gay England _then_!
“For consciousness of truth, I say, since it is consciousness of God,
is joy: and to make a joyful noise in our hearts to Him, not because
of any hotch-potch of Hindoo, Hebrew, Chinese and African fancies in
us, but because of facts ascertained by white toilers—to make a joyful
noise to Him—we can’t perhaps chant yet for a century or two, but
already can kick up a sort of joyful shindy in us—and that’s life,
mind, that’s delight, that’s civilisation, that’s cultivation, _that’s_
waking up—blessed be His Name, faithful is He in all His ways. To this,
then, men, I call you, and come tapping at your doors. The midnight
time is past, or passing, for man, some spray and prickles of the
dayspring already surprise the night: be up to witness the thing that
the sunrise will be.
“I’m afraid the midnight and sunrise metaphor doesn’t quite run on
all fours. Never mind, you understand. Good-night. ‘_The speech_’ is
speechified.”
For some moments after this all the hall sat mute; but soon after he
had moved, in one corner of the stalls a chanting, low and slow and
moody, started in which the words were discerned:
“He has saved us from harm”;
and it ran like alcohol on fire, rose and rose, from droning to
roaring, and suddenly screamed, every creature present leaping to his
feet, as a tempest like Pentecost seemed to seize and possess the
place, inflaming every breast, blazing in every brain, wrapping the
platform, too, in its rapture, catching in its passion Her Majesty,
too, who sprang and sang, catching in its rhapsody the Princess, who,
spitting fire from her eyes, sprang and sang.
And once more, when it was over, it rose low, to be luxuriously rolled
in the throat with rocking bodies, solemnly like a nocturne droned, and
rose, and rose, and roared, and suddenly screamed:
“He has saved us from harm
With his dreadful flails,
With his stretched-out arm...”
The Prince alone was sitting, his lids lowered, thinking of Li Ku Yu.
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PRINTED BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH
Footnotes:
[1] Meaning “first and last” son of his mother.
Transcriber’s Notes:
• Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
• Text enclosed by pluses is in small caps (+small caps+).
• Text enclosed by equals is in bold (=bold=).
• Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.