wastefulness. There is nothing the average servant scorns more than
the house in which she is expected to make use of the torsos of
loaves, and in which she is forbidden to sacrifice odds and ends of
meat to the little gods of the dust-bin. She loves the house where
there is milk for the sink as well as for the children and the cat.
Years ago, when some people were advocating a tax on salt, they did so
on the ground that no one need suffer since at present everybody puts
on his plate several times as much salt as he ever uses. Hence, if we
were more careful with the salt, such a tax would be a tax not on salt
but on wastefulness. It is the same with mustard. I remember a
Scotsman once asking me in a hushed voice if I knew how Colman had
made his fortune. I thought from my friend's solemn air that it must
have been in some sensational way--by buying a deserted gold-mine or
running a South American revolution. But my friend merely pointed to
the plate from which I was eating. "He made it," he declared solemnly,
"out of mustard you leave on the edge of your plate."
Perhaps the Scotsman was right in shaking his head so gravely over our
extravagance in mustard. But somehow I, too, have the kitchen's taste
for superfluities, and enough never seems half so good as a little
more. Horace described the happy man as the man who had enough and
something over for servants and thieves. "Oh, the little more, and how
much it is!" Even if we grudge it to the thieves, we love it because
of the sense it gives us that we are no longer struggling in the water
but sitting in triumph on the dry land. The average Englishman
dislikes Tariff Reform, not entirely because he has grasped the
economics of the subject, but because it would bring in a system which
would compel him to be as thrifty as a Frenchman and as careful as a
German. One must admit to a certain degree of sympathy with him. When
one hears of French peasants (as I once did) calling round after the
meals of the rich to carry off the scrapings of the plates to make
soup for their families, and of their doing this not because they were
very poor, but because they were very thrifty, one's heart suddenly
rejoices at the sight of the tattered old flag of prodigality again.
One does not want to see thrift given the extreme character of an
orgy.
On the other hand, a good many of us get an easy sense of the heroic
by living in lordly wastefulness. It appeals to us as a kind of
enlargement of our personality. That is why so many of us shrink with
horror from such social economies as a kitchen or a heating apparatus
that would serve a street. We like our own fires and our own bad
cookery. It is as childish as if we wanted our own footpath and our
own moon, and no doubt we would insist on these if we could. We
pretend that romance would leave the world if the sausages were turned
by a citizen in a municipal cap of liberty instead of by a wage-slave,
and that freedom would be dead if we warmed our toes at a civic fire.
I wonder that no one takes exception to the communal warmth of the
sun.
The present wastefulness would be little worse than an insane joke if
all this multiplying of cooks and parlourmaids did not absorb such an
amount of reluctant youth and deftness and energy. But, alas! our
ideals of private citizenship seldom mean that we do our work
privately ourselves. They only mean that we privately hire somebody
else to do it. In other words, they are usually a violation of the
private citizenship of somebody else. Consequently, though we enjoy
helping in the wastefulness of it all as a puppy enjoys tearing a
book, we do not feel justified in elevating our tastes into an ethical
system. We are simply grabbers of the corn supply. Probably, even in a
hundred years, people will look back on our present west-European
society and marvel at the common habit of prosperous men in sitting
down to a table where there are far more dishes and elegancies than
they can ever absorb, while men, women and children walk the streets
empty. I seldom sit down to dinner in a hotel without a sense that I
am being offered three people's food. No, a society that gives three
people's food to one man and one man's portion of food--or less--to
three people must be the laughing-stock of angels. The social waste
that results from railway monopolies and battleship programmes and the
warren of small shops in every city is as nothing to this. Except,
perhaps, in so far as it is the cause of this. On the whole, however,
the problem of waste goes deeper than battleships, which are but toys
and which will disappear as soon as the nations grow up and cease
making faces at each other. It is a problem on the same level with
lust, which, indeed, is a form of waste. It is one of the great
problems of egoism, which is more concerned with mastery than with
truth or common-sense or gentleness. Not mastery of oneself--just
gimcrack, made-in-Birmingham mastery. This is the Mammon of our
conceit upon whose altars we are willing to offer up the sacrifice of
the wasted earth.
XI
ON CHRISTMAS
There is a cant of Christmas, and there is a cant of anti-Christmas.
There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply
because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle
you simply because it is Christmas. Thus, between those who appreciate
and those who depreciate Christmas, it is difficult for an ordinary
man to escape bruises. As I grow older, I confess, I accept Christmas
more philosophically than I used to do. There was a time when it
seemed a dangerous institution, like home life or going to church. One
felt that in undermining its joys one was making a breach in the
defences of an ancient hypocrisy. Still more, one resented the steady
boredom of the day--the boredom of a day from which one had been led
to expect larger ecstasies than a surfeit of dishes and the explosion
of crackers can give. One might have enjoyed it well enough, perhaps,
if one had not had the feeling that it was one's duty to be happy. But
to be deliberately happy for a whole day was a task as exhausting as
deliberately hopping with one's feet tied. It was not that one wanted
to be unhappy. It was merely that one desired one's liberty to be
either as happy or as miserable as one pleased.
Remembering these early hostilities, I will not bid anyone be happy or
merry or jolly on Christmas Day, except as the turkey and plum-pudding
move them. At the same time, I cannot let the festival pass without
recanting my childish insolence towards the holly and the mistletoe. I
have been converted to Christmas as thoroughly almost as that prince
of individualists, Scrooge. I can now pull a cracker with any man; I
can accept gifts without actual discourtesy; and if the flame goes out
before the plum-pudding reaches me, I am as mortified as can be. The
Christmas tree shines with the host of the stars, and I can even
forgive my neighbour who plays "While shepherds watched" all day long
on the gramophone. The Salvation Army, which plays the same tune and
one or two others all through the small hours on the trombone and the
cornet-a-piston, is a severer test of endurance. But even that one can
grin and bear when one remembers that the Salvationist bandsmen are
but a sort of melancholy herald angels. The solitary figure in the
Christmas procession, indeed, whom one hates with a boiling and
bubbling hatred, is the postman who does not call. In Utopia the
postman does not miss a letter-box on Christmas Day. Or on any other
day.
It would be affectation to pretend, however, that one has suddenly
developed a craving for plum-pudding and cracker-mottoes in one's
middle age. One's reconcilement with Christmas is due neither to one's
stomach nor to a taste for the wit and wisdom of cracker
manufacturers. It is simply that one has come to enjoy a season of
lordly inutility, when for the space of a day or two the cash-nexus
hangs upon the world as light as air. It is no small thing to have
this upsetting of the tyrannies, if it is only for a few hours. The
heathen, as we call them, realised this even before the birth of
Christ, and had the Saturnalia and other festivals of the kind in
which a communism of licence ruled, if not a communism of gentleness.
It is still an instinct in many Christian places to turn Christmas
into a general orgy--to make it a day on which one bows down and
worships the human maw. (And there are worse things in the world than
brandy-sauce.) On the other hand, there is also the instinct to make
of the day a door into a new world of neighbourliness. It is the only
day in the year on which many men speak humanly to their servants and
open their eyes to the cheerful lives of children and simple people.
Hypercritical youth will deny that man has a right to confine his
neighbourliness to a single day in the year any more than he has a
right to confine his sanctity to the Sabbath. But we who have ceased
to exact miracles from human nature are glad to have even a single day
as a beginning. Socialism, we may admit, depends upon the extension of
the Christmas festival into the rest of the year. It demands that the
relations between man and man shall be, as far as possible, not
shopkeeping relations, but Christmas relations. In other words, it
aims at a society in which the little conquests of gain will cease to
be the chief end of time, and men will no more think of cheating each
other than Romeo would think of cheating Juliet. Nor is there any
other side of the new civilisation which will be more difficult to
build than this. This is the very spirit of the new city. Without it
the rest would be but a chaos of stones and mortar--a Gehenna of
purposeless machinery.
It is an extraordinary fact that the rediscovery of Christmas in the
nineteenth century was not followed sooner by the rediscovery of the
limitations of individualism. Dickens himself, the incarnation of
Christmas, did not realise till quite late in life what a denial
modern civilisation is of the Christmas spirit. Even in _Hard Times_,
where, as Mr Shaw pointed out, he expresses the insurrection of the
human conscience against a Manchesterised society, he offers us no
hope except from the spread of a sort of Tory benevolence. Perhaps,
however, it does not matter how you label benevolence so long as it is
the real thing and is not merely another name for that most insidious
form of egotism--patronage. That Dickens was pugnaciously benevolent
in all his work--except when he was writing about Dissenters and
Americans--was one of the most fortunate accidents in the popular
literature of the nineteenth century. He did not, perhaps, dramatise
the secret mystery of human brotherhood--the brotherhood of saint and
fool and criminal and ordinary man--as Tolstoi and Dostoevsky have
done in some of their work. But he dramatised goodwill with a
thoroughness never attempted before in England.
On the whole, it may be doubted whether the Christmas spirit has not
grown stronger and deeper since the time of Dickens. Only a few years
ago it seemed as though it were dying. People began to detest even
Christmas cards as something more Victorian than _The Idylls of the
King_. But here the old enthusiasm is back again, and we can no more
kill Christmas than the lion could kill Androcles. Perhaps the
popularisation of Italian art, as well as Dickens, has something to do
with it. Our imaginations cannot escape from the Virgin and the Child,
and we are like children ourselves in the inquisitiveness with which
we peer into that magic stable where the ass and the cow worship and
the shepherds and the kings and the little angels in their nightgowns
are on their knees. There has come back a gaiety, a playfulness, into
the picture, such as our grandfathers might have thought irreverent,
but their grandfathers' grandfathers, on the other hand, would have
seen to be perfectly natural. The cult of the child has, perhaps, been
overdone in recent years, and we have brought our mawkishness and our
morbid analysis even to the side of the cradle. At the same time, no
one has yet been able to point out a way by which we can escape from
the obsession of rates and taxes, of profit and loss, except by the
recovery of the child's vision. Without that vision religion itself
becomes a matter of profit and loss. With that vision the dullest
world blossoms with flowers; even truisms cease to be meaningless; and
Christmas is itself again. Out of the drowning of the world we have
made a toy for the nursery, and the birth of the King of Glory has
become the theme of a song for infants.
One of the most exquisite pictures in literature is that of the three
ships that come sailing into Bethlehem "on Christmas Day, in the
morning"; and not less childishly beautiful is that other short carol:
There comes a ship far sailing then,
Saint Michael was the steersman,
Saint John sat in the horn;
Our Lord harped, our Lady sang,
And all the bells of Heaven they rang,
On Christ's Sunday at morn.
One sees the same childish imagination at work in the old English
carol, "Hail, comely and clean," in which the three shepherds come to
the inn stable with their gifts, the first with "a bob of cherries"
for the new-born baby, the second with a bird, and the third with a
tennis-ball. "Hail," cries the third shepherd--
Hail, darling dear, full of godheed!
I pray Thee be near, when that I have need.
Hail! sweet Thy cheer! My heart would bleed
To see Thee sit here in so poor weed,
With no pennies.
Hail! put forth Thy dall!
I bring Thee but a ball,
Have and play Thee withal.
And go to the tennis.
These songs, it may be, are more popular to-day than they were fifty
years ago--partly owing to the decline of the old-fashioned suspicious
sort of Protestantism, which saw the Pope behind every bush--including
the holly-bush. One remembers how Protestants of the old school used
to denounce even Raphael's grave Madonnas as trash of Popery. "I'll
have no Popish pictures in my house," declared a man I know to his
son, who had brought home the Sistine Madonna to hang on his walls;
and the picture had to be given away to a friend. Similarly, the
observance of Christmas Day was regarded in some places as a Popish
superstition. One old Protestant clergyman many years ago used to make
the rounds of his friends and parishioners on Christmas morning to
wish them the compliments of the day. It was his custom, however, to
pray with each of them, and in the course of his prayers to explain
that he must not be regarded as taking Christmas Day seriously.
"Lord," he would pray, "we are not gathered here in any superstitious
spirit, as the Roman Catholics are, under the delusion that Thy Son
was born in Bethlehem on the twenty-fifth of December. Hast not Thou
told us in Thy Holy Book that on the night on which Thy Son was born
the shepherds watched their flocks by night in the open air? And Thou
knowest, O Lord, that in the fierce and inclement weather of
December, with its biting frosts and its whirling snows, this would
not have been possible, and can be but a Popish invention." But,
having set himself right with God, he was human enough to proceed on
his journey of good wishes. Noble intolerance like his is now, I
believe, dead. To-day even a Plymouth Brother may wreathe his brow
with mistletoe, and a Presbyterian may wish you a merry Christmas
without the sky or the Shorter Catechism falling.
XII
ON DEMAGOGUES
It is still the custom in civilised countries for the politicians to
call each other names. The word "serpent" has, one regrets to say,
fallen out of use. But we are compensated for this in some measure by
the invention of new terms of insult almost every day. It is not very
long since Mr Lloyd George called Mr Steel Maitland "the
cat's-meat-man of the Tory party," and Mr Steel Maitland retorted by
calling Mr Lloyd George "Gehazi, the leper." And, side by side with
original fancies of this kind, the old-fashioned dictionary of abuse
still stands as open as the English Bible, where statesmen may arm
themselves with nouns and adjectives that everybody can understand,
such as "duke," "turncoat," "Jack Cade," "paid agitator," "Irish,"
"attorney," "despot," "nefarious" (which was almost as dead as
"serpent" till Sir Edward Carson revived it), and, last but not least,
"demagogue." It is only a day or two since Mr Bonar Law called Mr
Lloyd George a demagogue, and one was disappointed to find that Mr
Lloyd George, instead of calling Mr Bonar Law Nebuchadnezzar or Judas
Iscariot in return, merely insisted that he could not be a demagogue,
because a demagogue was a man who kicked away the ladder by which he
had risen. This is very much as if you were to call a man "Bill
Sikes," and he retorted that he could not be Bill Sikes because Bill
Sikes had a wooden leg. Of course, Bill Sikes had not a wooden leg,
and a demagogue is not necessarily a man who kicks away the ladder by
which he has risen. A demagogue is simply a mob-leader--a man who
appeals to popular passions rather than principles. He is what half
the statesmen of all parties aspire to be in every democratic
community. Despots obtain their mastery over the crowd by the sword:
demagogues by the catchword. That is the difference between a tyranny
and a democracy. It may not seem to be a change for the better to
those who have a taste for the costumes and lights of the theatre. But
the demagogue at least consults the mob as though it had a mind and
will of its own. The very way in which he flatters it and instigates
it to passion is an assertion of its freedom of choice, and,
therefore, a concession to the dignity of human nature. It is like
wooing as compared with marriage by capture.
Even when we have put the demagogue securely above the despot,
however, we are left in considerable doubt about him. Somehow or other
we do not like him. We do not trust him further than we can see him.
We distrust him as Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Dickens did. We feel
that the difference between a demagogue and a statesman is that the
former converts human beings into a mob, while the latter exalts a mob
into a company of human beings. It is the difference between a pander
and a prophet. It is true that men of a conservative temper hate the
pander and the prophet almost equally. Shakespeare, for instance, who
was a bad politician as well as a good poet, mocks at Utopias no less
than at bombast in that unhistorical picture he suggests of Jack
Cade:--
CADE: There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold
for a penny: the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I
will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall
be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass;
and when I am king, as king I will be,----
ALL: God save your majesty!
CADE: I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all
shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all
in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and
worship me, their lord.
DICK: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE: Nay, that I mean to do.
To many of us, if you omit Cade's occasional lapses into
individualism--as in his desire to be worshipped as a king--this will
seem an admirable programme. It will more than hold its own in
comparison with any programme that ever originated in Newcastle or
Birmingham. William Morris himself might have had that vision of
restoring Cheapside to green fields, and even the extremest
Marconoclast could hardly go further than Cade in suggestions for a
summary way with lawyers. Who is there who is not whole-heartedly with
Cade for the abolition of poverty? In fact, there seems little to
criticise in the man as Shakespeare drew him, except that he made his
proposals for personal, not for social ends. That, I believe, is the
real essence of demagogy.
To be a demagogue is not to advocate one thing rather than another. It
depends on the manner, not on the matter, of one's proposals. One may
reap one's own glory out of praise of the New Jerusalem no less than
out of the most vulgar incitements to war and hatred. It is a
temptation to which every man is subject who has ever stood on a cart
above a crowd of his fellows. One feels tempted to play on them, like
a child who finds itself left alone with a piano. It is worse than
that. A crowd is like a sea of liquor, the fumes of which go to an
orator's head and make him boast and lie and leer as he would be
ashamed to see himself doing in his sober senses. He becomes, to
parody Novalis on Spinoza, a mob-intoxicated man. But there is one
notable difference between a decent drunkard and a demagogue. The
drunkard is satisfied with getting drunk himself. The demagogue is not
content till he has made the crowd drunk too. He and the mob are, as
it were, mutual intoxicants, and in the result many a public meeting
turns into so disgraceful an orgy that, if anything comparable to it
occurred in a music-hall, the licence would be withdrawn. This is a
kind of vice of which the moralists have not yet taken sufficient
note. And yet there is no more execrable passion on earth than
demagogue-passion on the one hand, and mob-passion on the other. Cleon
will always be remembered as one of the basest Athenians who ever
lived, and this is because he was the first demagogue of
Imperialism--a violent animal on his hind-legs who bellowed till he
woke up the blood-lust of his fellow-citizens. He was powerful only
so long as he could keep that and other popular lusts active. Men, it
has been said by a notable philosopher, seek after power rather than
beauty; but this, I believe, is only true of demagogues and egoists of
kindred sorts. The demagogue is the man who, instead of aiming at
bringing the mob to his mood, feels after the mood of the mob, and,
having discovered it, whips it into froth and fury. If you keep your
eyes open at a public meeting--not always an easy thing to do in days
when men discuss Welsh Disestablishment--you will see how the
demagogue often becomes the master of a meeting that has listened
coldly to intelligent and honest speeches. Like pot-boiling in art, it
is perfectly easy if you know the way. The Sausage Seller who aspired
to be Cleon's rival, in _The Knights_ of Aristophanes, expounds the
whole art of demagogy in his prayer:
Ye influential impudential powers
Of sauciness and jabber, slang and jaw!
Ye spirits of the market-place and street,
Where I was reared and bred--befriend me now!
Grant me a voluble utterance, and a vast
Unbounded voice, and steadfast impudence!
And, in another passage, Demosthenes initiates him into the means of
obtaining power over the people:
Interlard your rhetoric with lumps
Of mawkish sweet, and greasy flattery.
Be fulsome, coarse, and bloody!
This, indeed, is what oratory is bound to degenerate into in a
democracy unless it is the weapon of a conviction. It is like any
other form of art which is practised, not from any burning and
generous motive, but for mere love of that sense of power which gain
and popularity give. Dickens, owing to a curious gap in his knowledge,
made his typical Trade-Union leader, Slackbridge, in _Hard Times_, a
demagogue of the ranting type, who began a speech:
Oh, my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh,
my friends and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an
iron-handed and a grinding despotism! Oh, my friends and
fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen and fellow-men!
Slackbridge, we are also told, was "an ill-made, high-shouldered man
with lowering brows, and his features crushed into an habitually sour
expression." That represents the attitude of many people to popular
leaders. They believe that no one can advocate a reasonable future for
the poor without being venomous and of an ugly appearance. They do not
realise that the demagogues and agitators of to-day are chiefly men of
the propertied classes and their allies, like Sir Edward Carson and
Mr F.E. Smith. Sir Edward Carson's speeches in Ulster, indeed, are the
most extreme instances of demagogy we have had in recent years. They
are all noise and passion, roaring echoes of the mob-soul, rhetoric
and not reason, thunder-storms instead of light. They are appeals to
the war-spirit--the same spirit that Cleon and all the demagogues have
sought to awaken. Incidentally I admit that a class-war or a sex-war
may as readily produce its Carsons as a war of sectarianism. Sir
Edward Carson is the awful example to all creeds and classes of how
not to do it.
XIII
ON COINCIDENCES