And it visits the gaol as readily as the music-hall, and attends us in
our hearse no less than in our perambulator. Self-murder is not in
itself a funny subject, but who can remain solemn over the case of the
man who put an end to his life because he got tired of all the
buttoning and unbuttoning. Similarly, detestable a crime as we may
think cannibalism, we cannot help smiling when a traveller notes, as a
recent traveller in West Africa did, that human flesh never gives the
eater indigestion as the flesh of beasts does. It is--at least, I
suppose it is--merely a statement of fact, but it amuses us because
it introduces an inappropriate and unexpected element into our
consideration of cannibalism.
Perhaps Sir James Barrie would prefer to defend the humour of _The
Adored One_ on the ground, not that it is the humour of unreality, but
that, like the examples I have quoted, it is the humour of
incongruity. And, indeed, we only laugh at Leonora's murder in the
train because the reason for it was so disproportionate to the crime.
It is not funny for a woman to kill a man because he has beaten her
black and blue. It is not funny for her to kill him for his money, or
for any other reasonable motive. On the other hand, it would be funny
if she killed him for smoking a pipe while wearing a tall hat, or
because he said "lay" instead of "lie." It is the unreason of the
thing that appeals to us, and no amount of theorising about the
immorality of murder can deprive us of our joke. At the same time one
is willing to admit the excellence of those people who are so
overwhelmed by the exceeding sinfulness of sin that they cannot raise
a smile over even the most ridiculous scenes of murder and marital
infidelity. I know a great many people who can see nothing comic in
the upside-down antics of the drunken; they feel as if in laughing at
the absurdities of vice they would be acquiescing in vice. Perhaps
they would. Perhaps laughter is given to sinners as a compensation
for sins. It makes us tolerant by making us cheerful, and if we could
really laugh at murders and all indecencies, we should possibly end in
thinking that they are far less black than they are painted. So, I
imagine, the unlaughing saints reason. They always visualise sin in
its horror in a way that is beyond most of us, and we can respect
their gloom. But we who are more complex than the saints--we know well
enough that so paradoxical an affair is the human soul that a man may
laugh and laugh and keep the Ten Commandments; and we claim the right,
on the plea that "my mind to me a kingdom is," of maintaining a court
fool in our hearts to parody our royal existence, and so keep it from
going stale. In any case, we can no more help laughing than we can
help the colour of our hair. That is why we shall go on laughing at
the humours of the seven deadly sins, and why old scoundrels like Nero
and Gilles de Retz and Henry VIII are likely to remain favourite
characters in the comic chapters of human life till the book is burnt
and a new volume opens.
VI
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF HELL
It is significant of the change that has come over the religious
imagination that a number of representative clergymen have issued a
manifesto of disbelief in Hell and no heresy-hunt has begun. Disbelief
in Hell, it must in fairness be added, not as a symbol of something
sufficiently real, but as a definite place on the map of the Universe,
a gulf of wild flame and red-hot torments without end. There was a
time when to doubt any jot or tittle in the scenery and rhetoric of
Hell would have been thought a kind of atheism, and a world without
Hell would have seemed to many religious minds almost as lonely as a
world without God. Life was conceived chiefly in terms of Hell. It was
a kind of tight-rope walk across a bottomless pit of shooting fires
and the intolerable wailing of the damned. Heaven was sought less
almost for its proper delights than as an escape from the malignance
of the demons in this vast torture-chamber. Hell, indeed, was the most
desperately real of countries. For centuries men studied its
geography with greater zeal of research than we devote to-day to the
geography of Africa. They described its rule and estimated its
population, one author, with how much belief I know not, detailing the
names of seventy-two of its princes with 7,405,926 devils serving
them. In _The Apocalypse of St Peter_, which is as old at least as the
second century, the occupations of the damned are set forth with a
horrid carefulness. Hell is depicted as a continent of lakes of fire
and burning mud, over which adulterers hang by the hair and
blasphemers of the way of righteousness by the tongue. False witnesses
chew tongues of fire in their mouths. Misers roll on red-hot stones
sharper than spikes. Men who have committed unnatural crimes are
endlessly hurled from the top of dreadful crags. And this is but one
of the first of a long line of visions of the hereafter which
appeared, like the season's fruits, all through the early Christian
centuries and the Middle Ages, and achieved their perfect statement in
Dante. Every new writer sought out the most exquisite torments a
sensational imagination could invent, and added them to the picture of
the daily life of Hell and Purgatory. The Monk of Evesham saw in his
dream of Purgatory men being fried in a pan and others "pierced with
fiery nails even to their bones and to the loosening of their joints."
Others were gnawed by worms or dragged with hooks, or hung on gallows,
or "soaked in baths of pitch and brimstone with a horrible stench,"
and, if they tried to escape, "the devils that met with them beat them
sorely with scourges and forks and other kinds of torments." But we
need not go back beyond our own days for instances of these torturing
imaginations. Many who are now living have had the night-fears of
their childhood made monstrous with stories of devils with red-hot
pincers to tear one's flesh and with red-hot nails to lacerate one's
back. I have a friend who loves to tell of the regular Sunday summons
of an ancient clergyman to his congregation to flee from the doom of
the condemned sinner whom he invariably pictured as "seated upon a
projecting crag over a lurid, hissing, moaning, raging sea of an
undone Eternity, calling out, 'The harvest is past and I am not
saved.'"
Why the human imagination did not revolt against such a painful orgy
of sensationalism long before it did, it is difficult to understand.
Lecky tells us that the only prominent theologian to dispute the
material fire of Hell throughout the Middle Ages was the Irishman
Johannes Scotus Erigena. All the others accepted it either in terror
or with delight. For who can question that men can obtain as fiercely
sensual a pleasure from inflicting the pains of Hell on their enemies
as from flogging children and slaves? One of the best known instances
of this--shall I say, hellish?--sensualism, is the appeal of
Tertullian to his fellow Christians not to attend public spectacles on
the ground that they would one day behold the far more glorious
spectacle of the heathen rolling in the flames of the Pit.
"What," he wrote, "shall be the magnitude of that scene? How
shall I wonder? How shall I laugh? How shall I rejoice? How
shall I triumph when I behold so many and such illustrious
kings, who were said to be mounted into heaven groaning with
Jupiter their god in the lowest darkness of Hell! Then shall
the soldiers who persecuted the name of Christ burn in more
cruel fire than any they had kindled for the saints....
Compared with such spectacles, with such subjects of triumph
as these, what can praetor or consul, quaestor or pontiff,
afford? And even now faith can bring them near, imagination
can depict them as present."
Thus, Hell became the poor man's consolation, the oppressed and baited
man's revenge. Sleep itself hardly brought greater balm that the
thought of this large engulfing doom for opprobrious neighbours. It
would be unfair, on the other hand, to suggest that the ordinary
Christian ever believed in Hell save in honest misery of heart. "O,
Lord," an old lay evangelist used to pray in the homes he visited,
"shake these Thy children over Hell-fire, but shake them in marcy!"
There you have the voice of one who regarded Hell, not with glee as
the end of his enemies, but with desperate earnestness as a necessary
moral agency--who believed that men must be terrorised into virtue or
never know virtue at all. And, it is interesting to note, a clerical
correspondent has been writing to the _Daily News_ expressing the same
gloomy view. This writer declares, as the fruit of long experience,
that he has never known a case of a man's being converted except
through fear. It is common enough, too--or used to be--to hear
church-going young men profess that if they did not believe in Hell,
they would amaze the earth with their lusts and exploits. Viewed in
this light, the Devil becomes the world's super-policeman, and those
who seek to abolish him will naturally be looked on as dangerous
anarchists who would destroy the foundations of the law. As for that,
it would be foolish to deny the great part played by fear in the lives
both of sinners and saints, but whether morality is ultimately served
by our being afraid of the wrong things is a question that calls for
consideration. Certainly, Hell has produced its crop of devils as well
as of saints upon earth. It was men who believed in Hell who invented
the thumb-screw and the rack, and many of the most fiendish
instruments of torture the world has known.
Whether it is the case that man made Hell because he believed in
torture, or took to torture because he believed in Hell, there is no
denying that the worst period of torture our European civilisation has
known coincided with the time when men believed that God Himself
doomed to savage and eternal torments men, women, and even infants in
the cradle, on the most paltry excuses. And as man's conscience has
more and more decisively forbidden him to use torture as a punishment,
it has also forbidden him to believe that a beneficent Deity could do
such a thing. It may be thought that a beneficent Deity who could
permit cancer and the Putumayo and the factory system at its worst,
might easily enough sanction the fires of the mediaeval Hell. But even
cancer and the Putumayo are not a denial of what Stevenson called "the
ultimate decency of things." They are temporary, not eternal.
Thoughtful Christians can no longer accept the old Hell, because it
would mean, not the final triumph of righteousness, but the final
defeat of God. Many of those who dutifully cling to the dogma of their
Church on the point would agree with the French cure who said that he
believed in Hell, but he did not think there was anybody in it except
Voltaire. And even Voltaire will nowadays seem to most people to be
hardly a sufficiently scandalous person to deserve infinite millions
of years of anguish. The truth is, Hell shocks our moral sense.
Tennyson put the modern disbelief in it with a theatrical forcibleness
when he said that, if after death he woke up, even though it should be
in Heaven, and found there was a Hell, he would turn round and shake
his fist in the face of God Almighty. Since Tennyson's time Hell's
foundations have subsided: the ancient flames have died down; and man
has now for the background of his days no fierce and devouring
universe, but a cricket score-board and a page of "thinklet"
competitions in a penny paper. Perhaps the antithesis is an unfair
one, but some cosmic sense has certainly been lost to the general
imagination. No doubt it will return as moral ideas take the place of
materialistic terrors; for out of the wreck of the fiery Hell a moral
Hell is already rising. A moral Purgatory, one ought to say--a place
of discipline made in the image of this disciplining earth. For the
terrors of death and evil and pain all survive, and, even if we
abolish utterly the Devil with the pitchfork, and put in his place the
Button-moulder, is that a figure a pennyworth less dreadful? No, the
escape from Hell is not so much a holiday as we thought. There is
still an interval of adventure between us and Paradise, and all the
perils and fears to be overcome as of old. We have chased an allegory
from our doors, but its ghostly reality returns and stands outside the
window. And salvation and damnation remain the two chief facts under
the sun. And the saints and the parsons--and everybody, indeed, except
gloating old Tertullian--were right after all.
VII
ON CHEERFUL READERS
There has been an increasing demand lately for cheerful books. Mr
Balfour began it--at least, he gave it a voice by quoting approvingly
a phrase from one of Mr Bennett's novels about the books that cheer us
all up. It was a most unfortunate phrase to quote in public. It
confirmed every bald old scaramouch in all his hostilities to realism,
tragedy, and every other form of literature that does not go about
with its hat over its eye. It also confirmed a popular prejudice to
the effect that it is the duty of men of letters to be cheerful in a
way in which it is not the duty, say, of mathematicians to be
cheerful. Now, one need not be an enemy of cheerfulness to detest this
theory. One merely needs to be sufficiently awake to recognise that
cheerfulness may easily become a tyranny which will bind the hands and
feet of literature as it has already bound the hands and feet of
drama. Cheerfulness, cheerfulness, and yet again cheerfulness, is the
all too golden rule in the theatre. One result of this is that Ibsen
has been expelled from the stage for the only naughtiness of which the
English theatre takes notice--the naughtiness of being serious. Even
Mr Shaw, who possesses the comic spirit in greater abundance than any
other writer of his time, is flayed alive by the critics on the
production of each new play he writes, because, besides being
cheerful, he is a man of ideas. It is not enough that you should be
cheerful: you must be cheerful to the exclusion of everything
else--everything, at least, that might bring unrest to the intellect
or the spirit or to any other part of a man except the muscles that
work the oil-wells of sentiment and the creaking jaws of laughter. The
consequences might have been foreseen. No one unaided, could be quite
so inhumanly vacuous as the audiences in the theatres expected him to
be. And so the dramatic author had to call in to his aid the
musicians, the poets, the limelight-men, the mask-sellers, the dancing
girls, the dressmakers, and a host of other people, each of whom
separately could only be a little inane, but all of whom together
could be overwhelmingly inane; and among them they produced that
overwhelming inanity, musical comedy. There you have the ultimate
logic of cheerfulness in the theatre. It is like the obtrusive
cheerfulness of the performing animals in music-halls. It is a tedious
and beastly thing. It is cheerfulness without mind or meaning. It is
like a laugh painted on a clown's face. Compulsory cheerfulness must
always end like that, because, if one has to laugh all the time, it is
far easier to put the laugh on with a brush than to keep one's face
distorted by strength of will.
With the warning of the cheerful theatre before us, then, it would be
the stupidest folly to pay any heed to the new plea for cheerful
books. It is an extraordinary fact that thousands of people can be
serious to the point of bad temper over a political argument or a game
of cards or tennis; but if you asked them to take a book seriously,
they would regard the prospect as worse than a dry pharyngitis. They
put literature on a level not with their games, but with the
chocolates and drinks they consume when they are resting from their
games. It is of the chocolate kind of literature that ninety-nine out
of a hundred persons are thinking when they applaud phrases about the
books that cheer us all up. Or it might be nearer the mark to liken
the sort of literature they have in mind to one of those brands of
medicated port which innocent old ladies find grateful and comforting.
We live in an age of advertised brain-fag, and we demand of
literature that it shall be the literature of brain-fag. We ask of it
not friendship, but a drug. That is the heresy which must be killed if
letters are to live. Till it is killed they will not even be enjoyed.
I grant at once that it would be an impudence to expect an average
sensual man to regard books with the same profound interest as his
business affairs or his wife. On the other hand, persuade him that it
is pleasant to put as much of his heart into the enjoyment of a book
as he puts into the enjoyment of a football match, and you will
produce a revolution among the book-reading public. No man who is not
eccentric dreams of asking that a football match shall be amusing or a
game of chess cheerful. He goes to the one for its furious energy, for
the thrill of the rivalry of real people; he turns to the other for an
experience of intensity, of prescient skill. It is for energetic
experiences of a comparable kind, as Mr R. A. Scott-James suggestively
pointed out in a recent volume, that we go to literature. Literature
is not primarily meant to cheer us up when we are too tired to read
the paper, though incidentally it often does so, and to despise this
kind of literature would be as sinful as to despise Christmas pudding
and brandy sauce. But the purpose of literature is not to be an
epilogue to energy. It involves not a slackening, but a change, of
effort. That is why even the difficult authors like the Browning of
_Sordello_ attract us. They have the appeal of pathless mountains. It
is a curious fact, at the same time, that some of those who delight
most boldly in physical experiences turn from intellectual and
imaginative experiences with a kind of contempt. They despise from
their hearts the mollycoddle who will not risk a wound or a cold for
the pleasures of the sun and air. But, so far as the imagination is
concerned, they themselves are mollycoddles who will not venture
beyond a game of halma or a sugarstick by the hearth. What the world
of literature needs most is not cheerful writers, but adventurous
readers. The reading of poetry will become as popular as swimming when
once it is recognised that it is as natural and as exhilarating.
Literature thus justifies itself not so much by cheering us all up
when we are limp as by its appeal to the spirit of adventure, or, if
you like the phrase better, the spirit of experience. That is the
explanation of the pleasure we take in tragic literature. Tragedy
reminds certain spiritual energies in us that they are alive. It
enables them to expand, to exert themselves, to breathe freely. That
is why, in literature, it makes us happy to be miserable. To put
forth our strength, whether of limb or of imagination, makes for our
happiness far more than the passive cheerfulness of the fireside; or
if not more, at least as much. It would be ungrateful to speak
slightingly of the easy-chair and its pleasures. But the chief danger
in literature at present is not that the easy-chair will be neglected,
but that it will be given a place of far too great importance. Hence
it is necessary to emphasise the pleasures of the strenuous life in
contrast. This may seem to some readers a tolerable excuse for liking
tragedy and poetry, but a poor defence of the taste for realism,
naturalism, or whatever you like to call it. Even those who respond
immediately to the appeal of the mountains and the sea will often
resist the invitation of Zola and Huysmans and their followers to seek
adventures in the slums. They will not see that it is as natural to go
on one's travels in the slums as in the most beautiful lakeland on
earth. As a matter of fact, the discovery of the slums was one of the
most tremendous discoveries of the nineteenth century. It was one of
those revolutionary discoveries that have changed our whole view of
society. Whether it was the men of letters or the sociologists who
first discovered them I do not know. I contend, however, that the men
of letters had as much right to go to them as the sociologists. They
found life expressed there in horror and beauty, in sordidness and
nobility, and to reveal this in literature was to some extent to
create a new world for the imagination. It was to do more than this.
Society could not become fully self-conscious or articulate until the
pauper aspect of it was expressed in literature. Hence the novelist of
mean streets extended the boundaries of social self-consciousness. The
realists indeed have brought the remedial imagination to us as the
sociologist has brought the remedial facts and figures. This
remedialism, no doubt, is an extra-literary interest. But nothing is
quite alien to literature which touches the imagination. The
imagination may find its treasures in Tyre and Sidon or in an alley
off a back street, or even in a semi-detached villa. One must not
limit it in its wanderings to safe and clean and comfortable places.
This seems to me to be the great justification of the demand, not for
cheerful books, but for cheerful and courageous readers. The cheerful
reader will be able to go to hell with Dante and to hospital with
Esther Waters; and though this may be but a poor and secondhand
courage, it is at least preferable to the intellectual and imaginative
cowardice which will admit danger into literature only when it has
been stripped of every semblance of reality. The courage of the study,
it may be, is not so fine a thing as the courage of the workshop and
the field. But it is finer than is generally admitted. And it is much
rarer. There is no place in which men and women are so shamelessly
lazy and timid as among their books. If happiness lay in that
direction, the laziness might be justified. But it does not. Happiness
can never come from the atrophy of nine-tenths of our nature. It is
the result of the vigorous delight of heart and mind and spirit as
well as of body. The cheerful reader feels as ready for AEschylus and
his furies as the yachtsman for his sail on a choppy sea. He fears the
tragic satire of _Madame Bovary_ no more than a good pedestrian fears
the east wind. This is not to say that he does not enjoy cheerful
books when he finds them. He may even prefer _Tristram Shandy_ and
_The Pickwick Papers_ to Tolstoi. But he realises that cheerfulness in
a book is a delightful accident, not a necessity of literature. He
knows that to be cheerful is his own business, whether he goes with
his author into the dark and solitary places or into the sheltered and
smiling gardens of the sun.
VIII
ST G. B. S. AND THE BISHOP
There has been a delightful correspondence going on in the _Times_
about Mdlle Gaby Deslys. It owed not a little of its charm, I suspect,
to the fact that none of the correspondents had seen Gaby. The Bishop
of Kensington had not seen her; Mr H. B. Irving had not seen her; Mr
Bernard Shaw had not seen her. So they quarrelled furiously over her
as men have always quarrelled over the unseen, and if AEsop had been
alive, he might have got a fable out of the affair. The Bishop made
the mistake at the beginning of calling upon the Censor to suppress
Gaby. Mr Shaw, at mention of the Censor, immediately saw red, and Gaby
of the Lilies presented herself to his inflamed vision as a beautiful
damsel who was about to be made a meal of by an ecclesiastical
monster. He at once challenged the Bishop to battle--a battle of
theories. The Bishop unfortunately had no theory with him. He took his
stand upon the law. After the manner of Shylock, he insisted upon his
pound of flesh. Mr Shaw, of course, who bristled with theories could
not stand this. So he gave the Bishop his choice of theories and even
put several into his mouth, and forced a conflict upon him. And it was
a famous victory.
But what they fought each other for
I could not well make out.
Perhaps Mr Shaw himself did not quite know. But he made during the
fight some weird statements which are well worth examination.