is very difficult to say what is good and what is evil, and more
difficult still to suppress the one without suppressing the other. So
much is this so according to Mr Shaw that "one man seeing a beautiful
actress will feel that she has made all common debaucheries impossible
to him; another seeing the same actress in the same part will plunge
straight into those debaucheries because he has seen her body without
seeing her soul." But why choose a beautiful actress for the argument?
This matter can only be debated fairly if we take the case of an
actress whose lure is not beauty but some indecency of attitude,
gesture or phrase, which is meant to awaken the debauchee keeping
house in the breast of each of us with the ineffectual angel, and
which either does this or bores us into the bar. (I do not, I may say,
refer to Gaby Deslys, whom I, too, have not seen. I made more than one
attempt, but the crush of beauty-lovers was too great.) It is quite
easy to imagine an actress such as I have described: most of us have,
in the course of many hours misspent in music-halls, seen her. To say
that she may do good as well as harm is the same as saying that an
indecent photograph may do good as well as harm. If this is to be the
last word on the subject, then there is no logical reason why we
should not decorate the walls of elementary schools with indecent
photographs instead of maps, and teach the children limericks instead
of _Lady Clara Vere de Vere_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. Mr Shaw
may retort that he would allow any man who did not find indecent
photographs and limericks "objectionable" to have his fill of them,
but that he would not allow him to thrust them upon children. But this
is to pass a moral judgment. If it is not certain whether the dangers
of the sensual parodies of the arts are greater than the dangers of
religion--or say, of geography--there is surely no more reason for
preserving the children from one than from the other.
Even if we waive this point for the sake of argument, is Mr Shaw's
other position tenable--that, if we consider any form of entertainment
objectionable, we should show our disapproval, not by trying to have
it stopped, but simply by staying away from it? Surely even in
music-hall performances, there is a line to be drawn somewhere. We can
no more be sure where good ends and evil begins than we can be sure
where light ends and darkness begins. But we all have a good enough
notion of when it is dark, and it is not so very difficult to tell
when a music-hall turn is out of bounds. Some people, it may be
granted, run to excess in their sense of propriety. They are as
delicate as the lady who, when carving a chicken at table, used to
inquire: "Will you have a wing or a limb?" On the other hand, there is
an equally large number of people who have no delicacy at all but who
are always ready to greet the obscene with a cheer. Their favourite
meal of entertainment is brutality for an entree and sensuality for a
sweet. They can even mix their dishes at times, as, many years ago in
Paris, when a woman stripped to the waist and with her hands tied
behind her back used to get down on her knees and wait for rats to be
loosed out of a cage and kill them one by one with her mouth. Is there
no reason for suppressing a show of this kind except that it is rough
on rats? I think there is. It deserves suppression because it is what
we call, in a vague word, degrading. It is easy enough for a lively
imagination to picture as beastly a scene in which there would be no
rats present, and which, even if a thousand youths and maidens were
willing to pay night after night to see it, would still be a case for
the police.
One cannot help feeling that, in attacking the Bishop in regard to the
liberty of music-halls, Mr Shaw has allowed himself to be made angry
by the way in which the Church nearly always concentrates on sex when
it wishes to make war on sin. Probably he does well to be angry. It is
always worth while to denounce the Church for making morality so much
an affair of abstinences. On the other hand, the Church and the
prophets have realised by a wise instinct that this planet on which we
live tends perpetually to become a huge disorderly house, and that the
history of the world is largely the history of a struggle for decency.
At times, no doubt, the world has also been in danger of being
converted into a tyrannous Sabbath-school. But that was usually an
aftermath of disorder. There is no denying that the average human
being finds it far easier to learn to leer than to learn to sing
psalms. The fight against the leer is one of the first necessities of
civilisation. It may be argued that a policeman cannot be sent in
pursuit of a leer as he can in search of a pickpocket, and that, if he
were, he would more probably than not run it to earth in some
masterpiece of art or literature. But what about the leer when it has
been isolated--when it has no more connection with art or literature
than with Esperanto?
Mr Shaw seems to think that even in that case the attempt to suppress
it would be a form of persecution. But is it persecution to take
action against pickpockets or against employers who dodge the Factory
Acts or against the corrupters of children? Surely there are offences
that are capable of being dealt with by magistrates. Only the most
innocent optimist can believe that sweating, for instance, can be put
an end to by public opinion in the abstract as effectively as it can
be stopped by public opinion acting through the police. It is no
argument to say that, if we suppress certain music-hall turns because
we dislike them, those who object to the theory of the Atonement have
an equal right to try to suppress the teaching and preaching of that
doctrine. Might not the same argument be used against interference
with thieves and forgers or still more extreme criminals in the
pursuit of their livelihood? After all, supposing the Methodists added
to the Calvinist and Wesleyan varieties already in existence a new
sect of, say, Aphrodisiac Methodists, it is quite easy to conceive not
only public opinion, but the police interfering with it with the
approval of the mass of moral and immoral citizens. Similarly, if a
sect of Particular Baptist Thugs made its appearance, its religious
complexion would hardly save it from suppression. There might still be
half-a-dozen apostles of religious freedom who would tell you that you
could not logically take action against the Thugs and the Aphrodisiacs
without preparing the way for the prohibition of Bible-reading and for
burning psalm-singers at the stake. But common-sense knows better. It
knows that there are certain things which must be put down, either by
public opinion or by the police, if the world is to remain a place
into which it is worth a child's while to be born. It knows, too, that
the liberty to seek after truth and beauty in one's own way does not
necessarily involve the liberty to say or to do whatever beastly thing
one pleases, even if thousands of people enjoy it. If it did, then
the Censor's interference with _Mrs Warren's Profession_ would be an
act of the same kind as Scotland Yard's interference with the worst
kind of night clubs.
At the same time, one need not deny that the difficulty of deciding
what should be suppressed and what should not is immense. I see that
in some part of the world or other Isidora Duncan's dancing has been
prohibited. I myself have met a lady, who, when she was taken to see
Madame Duncan, was in an agony of blushes till she got out into the
street. But she sat through _The Merry Widow_ without turning a hair.
What, then, is to be the test in these matters? On the whole I think
it is a good rule to fight against the suppression of anything that
can by any stretch of the imagination be considered honestly intended
or beautiful. In the arts, one can believe without casuistry, beauty
ultimately transforms the beast. But there are forms of art,
literature and drama which are nothing else than a kind of indecent
exposure. Let us give them the benefit of the doubt, so long as there
is a doubt. But when there is no doubt, let them be given the benefit
of the policeman.
I wonder whether Mr Shaw would have argued so fiercely on the other
side if the Bishop had not dragged in the Censor. If the controversy
had not got mixed up with the Censorship, indeed, it would have
greatly simplified matters. Mr Shaw seems to have begun to belabour
the Bishop from a feeling that a blow to the Bishop was a blow to the
Censor, but having once begun, he seems to have gone on simply because
he enjoyed beating a Bishop. And of the remains there were gathered up
twelve basketsful. But, all the same, I cannot help feeling that the
Bishop perished in a good cause.
IX
STUPIDITY
"Surely honest men may thank God they belong to 'the Stupid
Party'!"--_The Spectator_, March 28, 1914.
It is a terrible thing to boast of stupidity, even in irony. It is a
still more terrible thing to associate stupidity with honesty. There
is a good deal to be said in favour of honesty, but stupidity in the
garb of honesty is the merest masquerader. There was once a member of
a local body whom I heard praised in the words: "He's the only honest
man in the Corporation, and that is because he is too stupid to be
anything else." I doubt if predestined honesty of this sort is
entitled to a statue. It has its public uses, no doubt, as an
occasional stumbling-block to those who traffic both in their own and
other people's virtue. Here, at least, is virtue that cannot be bought
at a crisis. On the other hand, it does not withstand the temptations
of gold a bit more sturdily than it withstands the appeals of reason.
It will not move either for a thousand pounds or for the Archangel
Gabriel. It bars the way to Heaven and the road to Hell impartially.
It has the unbudgeableness of the ass rather than the adaptability
which enables human beings to survive on this wrinkled planet. Even
so, one may admit a sneaking respect and affection for honest stupid
people in private life. It is when they feel called upon to devote
their combined honesty and stupidity to public affairs that one begins
to tremble and to wonder whether, after all, an honest fool or a
clever rogue is likely to do better service to the State. Oscar Wilde
once said it was well that good people did not live to see the evil
results of their goodness and that wicked people did not live to see
the good results of their wickedness. This is true, perhaps, no matter
how cunning one may be in one's virtue or how provident in one's
vices. But it is especially true of that blind and bigoted honesty
which cannot see farther than its nose. I know a town where the
lamplighter twenty years ago was an honest old man of the blind and
bigoted type. It was his duty to go out and light the lamps of the
little town on every night when there was no moon. One month, however,
it was noticed that all the lamps were alight while the moon was
blazing, and that when the moon was dark the lamps were dark too. The
old man was called before the town committee to account for his
disobedience to orders. Instead of apologising, however, he firmly
insisted that he had done his duty, and produced a calendar to prove
that there was no moon on the nights on which everybody had seen it
shining, and that it might have reasonably been expected to shine on
the nights on which it was obscured. He was asked why he did not trust
his eyes, but he said that he always went by the calendar, and he
would not yield an inch of his position till someone took the calendar
from him and noticed that it was not even a current one, but a
calendar of the previous year. There, I think, is a dramatisation of a
very common form of honesty. It is as common among Cabinet Ministers
and Churchmen as among aged lamplighters. It expresses itself in
adherence not only to antiquated Mother Seigel calendars but to
constitutions and confessions of faith that have lost their meaning.
Whether this can justly be called honesty at all is a question with
something to be said on both sides. It is certainly stupidity of the
very best quality.
One of the reasons why one rather disbelieves in reverencing stupidity
is that it is not always as honest as it looks. It is often an armour
instinctively, if not deliberately, put on by comfortable people.
This kind of stupidity has sometimes been attributed to excessive
eating and drinking, as when Holinshed wrote of the sixteenth-century
Scots that "they far exceed us in overmuch and distemperate
gormandise, and so engross their bodies that diverse of them do oft
become unapt to any other purpose than to spend their times in large
tabling and belly cheer." But I have known gluttons who have yet had
all their wits about them and ladies who could hardly get through the
wing of a chicken and were nevertheless as stupid as a prize cat
blinking beside the fire. There is more in it than the stomach.
Stupidity of the kind I mean is really an ingeniously built castle
with moat and drawbridge to guard against the entrance of the facts of
life--at least, of the disagreeable facts of life. It is by a perfect
network of castles of this kind that so many feudal privileges have
been kept alive generations after anyone defends the idea of
feudalism. Against stupidity, it has been said, the gods themselves
fight in vain, and it is hardly to be wondered at that democracy also
falls back from the impassive walls of those old castles like a broken
tide. It is only fair to say, however, that again and again different
noble inmates--how suggestive a word--of the castles have refused to
shelter themselves behind the drawbridge of stupidity and have even
offered to lead the people in an assault on castles in general. It is
then usually discovered that the people, too, have their dear retreat
of stupidity to which they fly on the first hint of a raid upon
Utopia. The stupidity of the underfed is an even more desperate thing
than the stupidity of the overfed, and, when a castellan offers his
sword to their cause, they merely look at each other and ask darkly:
"What's he going to get out of it?" It is the popular stupidity which
led Mr Shaw the other day to observe that he had more hope of
converting a millionaire than a millionaire's chauffeur to Socialism.
Certainly it is the stupid in the back streets who make the stupid in
the castles secure. The latter see in the former, indeed, not only
their first line of defence, but their justification. They see their
justification, however, in everything and everybody. They wrap
themselves up in little comforting thoughts that the poor do not feel
things as the respectable do. I have heard a comfortable artist, for
instance, in winter, arguing that there was no need to pity a blind
beggar shivering at a street-corner. "Each of us is kept warm," he
declared, "by a little stove in his stomach, and you would be
surprised to know how little it takes to keep a man like that's stove
alight. You see, he's been training himself all his life to do with
very little food and very little clothing and to sit out in all kinds
of weather. A fall in the temperature that would paralyse you or me
would affect him hardly more than a fall in the price of champagne.
You see, he's learned to do without things." There was almost a note
of envy in his voice for the man who had learned to do without
things--without soap, and meat, and blankets, and clothes-brushes, and
servants, and fires, and sunshine. That seems to be one of the
favourite hypocrisies of the stupid, the pretence of envying the poor.
I have seen a merchant grow suddenly eloquent as he described the
happy lot of the working-man, who had nothing to do but draw his
wages, and compared it with the anxious life of the employer, who had
all the cares and responsibilities of the business on his shoulders.
The rich never feel so good as when they are speaking of their
possessions as responsibilities. Hear a mistress set forth the
advantages of the life of a servant-girl--how she not only gets higher
wages than servants ever got before, but think of the food, and no
rent to pay! She even becomes mawkish over the fortune of a girl who
is too poor to be called upon to pay rates and taxes. Alas, these
idylls of the kitchen are all written in the drawing-room. If a
servant's life were all a matter of freedom from rent and rates and
taxes and the worries of making both ends meet on a thousand a year,
the idylls would be apt enough; but it is just possible that even to
make both ends meet on twenty-five pounds a year may have its own
difficulties. Certainly one has a right to suspect these ladies who
glorify the life of the cook and the parlour-maid. I will refuse to
believe in them till I hear that one of them has run away from her
husband to take one of those sinecures advertised in the domestic
service columns of the _Morning Post_. But, perhaps, their sense of
duty is too strong to allow them to fly from their responsibilities in
that way.
Stupidity might be defined as resignation to other people's
misfortunes. Alternatively, it is a way of regarding comforts as
responsibilities and of getting out of one's uncomfortable
responsibilities altogether. There is no greater enemy of change. For,
granted enough stupidity, it is easy to believe that Hell itself is
Heaven. It is the stupidity of the rich, rather than deliberate
heartlessness, that permits so many of them to live cheerfully on
ill-paid labour and slum rents. Fortunately the cheerful dullness of
rich people is rarer than it was a century ago. Then it was reinforced
by political economy which regarded transactions in human beings in
much the same light as transactions in pounds of tea. Our first
awakening to the right of other people to live happened just before we
gave up cannibalism. The second happened just before we gave up
slavery. The third will happen just before we give up capitalism.
Obviously, it is only our stupidity which enables us to go on putting
the rights of Tom, Dick, and Harry before the rights of the race. It
is only our stupidity which makes us believe that, while it is right
that superfluous wealth should be taxed a shilling in the pound for
the good of all, it would be robbery to tax it ten shillings in the
pound for the good of all. The first statesman who levied the first
tax thereby announced the dual ownership of property between the
citizen and the State. He vindicated the right of the State,
representing the common good, as against the individual, representing
only his private good, to a first share in property. The income-tax
stands for exactly the same principle in regard to State rights as
would the nationalisation of the land or the railways. As we grow less
stupid, we shall gradually awake to the fact that there is no right to
food and shelter and State benevolence that we possess which our
neighbours ought not also in justice to possess. We shall gradually
understand, for instance, that it is not worth while that a thousand
children should be brought up in the gutters of misery in order that a
few dozen young gentlemen may sup on plovers' eggs. It has already
dawned upon us that, if pensions are good for field-marshals, they
cannot be so very bad for linen-lappers. Perhaps we shall yet come to
see that a pension is a very good thing to begin life with as well as
to end life with. In the meantime, most of us are either too
comfortable or too miserable to think about such things. Our
stupidity, at least, keeps conscience or revolution from destroying
the peace of our meals.
X
WASTE
When Mr Churchill referred in Manchester to the piling up of armaments
as so much misdirected human energy, he said something with which men
of all parties will agree, except those few romantic souls who believe
that it is a bracing thing to shed the blood of a foreigner every now
and then. Obviously, if two men live beside one another, and if each
of them is so afraid of the other's climbing secretly into his back
garden that he hires a watchman to walk up and down the garden path
all day and night with a six-shooter in his hand, he is wasting on his
fears a great deal of energy that might be expended on cabbages.
Again, if there is a stream running between the gardens, and if each
of the householders is always preparing for the day when the other may
question his right to use the water, he will have to hire other strong
men, and many a man who might have made a good blacksmith or barman
may be turned into a sailor. The situation is so absurd that it does
not bear thinking about except as a game: the military aristocracies
who treat preparation for war as a form of sport are in this entirely
logical. On the other hand, when the burgess fulminates against war as
though it were the only example of wasted human energy that does not
bear thinking of, he is shutting his eyes to the fact that the whole
of modern civilisation is built upon a foundation of waste where it is
not built upon a foundation of want.
Our estimates of men and nations rise and fall with their capacity for
waste. The great nation, in the eyes of the Imperialist, is the nation
that can waste the world. It is the nation that can mow down harvests
of savages without even the comparatively decent excuse that it wants
to eat them. It is the nation that can make the genius of other
nations as though it were not--that can ruin harbours and send ships
worth a million pounds to the bottom of the sea. I do not say that
there are not other elements that have a part in the greatness of
nations. But the power of destruction alone is enough to make any
nation supreme for a day--and the supremacy of no nation lasts much
longer--and remembered in history. Similarly, with individual men and
women. "Everybody," said Emerson, "loves a lover." It would be almost
truer to say that everybody loves a wastrel. In our boyhood we love
those who waste themselves. In our discreeter years we envy those who
can waste the lives of others. It has often been noticed that youths
and maidens have a tenderness for drunkards and rakes. They reverence
the genius of life wasted almost more than the genius of life
fulfilled. Byron, whose vices killed him in his thirties; Sydney
Carton, who was seldom sober; Mr Kipling's gentleman-rankers, "damned
from here to eternity"--these awake a passionate devotion in the
breasts of the young such as is never lavished on successful grocers.
It is the prodigal son, and not his respectable brother, at whom
affectionate eyes look round as he passes along the street. Perhaps it
is because he is so much more obviously trying a fall with destiny
than the grocer. The mark of doom makes a more picturesque effect on
the brow than a silk-lined bowler hat. According to this view, the
wastrel owes his appeal largely to the fact that he is a fighter in a
lost cause--the cause of those who have lifted hands against the
universe.
The reverence of middle age for the wealthier geniuses of waste,
however, cannot be explained on grounds like these. One does not think
of Lord Tomnoddy or Sir Alexander Soapsuds as a warrior against
destiny. The prodigality of the rich appeals to us for quite other
reasons than does the prodigality of the prodigal. We endure it
chiefly because we envy it. The dream of being a rich man who can
thrust out men and women from their homes to make room for pheasants,
who by sheer economic pressure can force us to make bonbons for his
guests when we ought to be making boots for ourselves, who can take a
man who might be a duke and turn him into a flunkey, lulls us into a
kind of satisfaction with the world. The man who has the power to
waste fields and men and women and money and labour is the king who
rules in every vulgar heart among us. His royal wastefulness in food
and servants and ornaments brings him, it may be granted, not a
teaspoonful of added health or an eggcupful more of happiness. Even
the poets, who have so often sung for rich masters, have always had
the grace to warn them that over-eating and over-drinking and
over-confidence in this world's goods were merely three death's-heads
dressed up in seductive bonnets. But the truth is we never believe the
poets when once we have laid down the book. Our ideal of wastefulness
is firmly rooted in us beyond the attacks of any aesthete with his
harmless little quiver of phrases.