During the Boer War four men met by chance for the first time on the
eve of some big action, and the meeting was so agreeable that one of
the men who had a bad two-shilling piece in his pocket divided it, and
gave each of the others a quarter as a memento of the evening.
Immediately afterwards they separated, and never saw or heard of each
other again till a few evenings ago, when a dinner was given in honour
of somebody or other in Birmingham. The four men were friends of the
guest of the evening, and all of them turned up at the dinner, where
they recognised each other easily, we are told, because each of them
was wearing his quarter-florin on his watch-chain.
Life is, of course, a series of coincidences, but we never cease to be
surprised as each new one happens, and nothing can destroy their
recurring freshness. We may make mathematical calculations showing
that there is a chance in a million that such and such a thing will
happen, but, when it happens once in a million times, it seems to us
as marvellous as a comet. We cannot get accustomed to the pattern of
Nature, which repeats itself as daringly as the pattern in a
wall-paper. Our fathers recognised this pattern, and saw in it the
weird craftsmanship of destiny. We who believe in iron law, which
surely implies a rigid pattern, are by a curious want of logic
sceptics, and we treat each new emergence of the pattern as a strange
exception to scientific rule. We cannot believe that Nature arranged
howlings of dogs and disasters in the stars to accompany the death of
a Caesar or a Napoleon. Everything that we can call dramatic in Nature
we put down to chance and coincidence. Superstitious people confront
us with instance upon instance of the succession of omen and event,
but we label these exception No. 1, exception No. 2, and so forth, and
go cheerfully on our way.
Believers in omens tell us that, some time before Laud's trial and
execution, he found his portrait fallen on to the floor, and predicted
disaster; and they ask us to admit that this was more than a
coincidence, especially as there are a hundred similar stories. They
relate how the stumble of a horse proved as fatal an omen for Mungo
Park as did the fall of a picture for Laud. One day before he
departed on his last expedition to Africa his horse stumbled, and Sir
Walter Scott, who was with him, said: "I am afraid this is a bad
omen." "Omens follow those who look to them," replied the explorer,
and set forth on the expedition from which he never returned. Luckily
we have examples which suggest that Park and not Scott was right.
Everyone knows the story of William the Conqueror's fall as he landed
on the shores of England, and how, in order to calm the superstitious
alarm of his followers, he called on them to observe how he had taken
possession of the country with both hands. In the very fact of doing
so, of course, he merely substituted one interpretation of an omen for
another. But if omens are capable in this way of opposite
interpretations, we are on the direct road to scepticism about their
significance, and so to a view that most events that appear to have
been heralded by omens are simple coincidences.
One remarkable coincidence of this kind came to my ears the other day.
A man I know was suddenly dismissed from his post with three months'
salary in his pocket. I happened to be talking about superstitions
with him the same afternoon, when he said: "It's all very well, but
only last week, when I was in the country, some one was telling
fortunes by tea-leaves in the house where I was stopping; and he
turned to me and said: 'Old man, there's a big surprise in store for
you, and I see some money in the bottom of the cup.' I shan't let them
know this has happened," he added, "as it might encourage them to be
superstitious." Certainly, when such a coincidence happens in our own
lives, it is difficult to believe that it is not a deliberate act on
the part of Nature. Nature, we can see, does concern herself with the
minutest cell or atom of our being; why not with these premonitory
shadows of our deeds and sufferings? Many coincidences, on the other
hand, admit of a less fatalistic explanation. Everybody has noticed
how one no sooner meets a new name in a book that one comes on the
same name in real life also for the first time. I had not read Mr
Forrest Reid's novel, _The Bracknels_, a week, when, on walking down a
London avenue, the same name--"The Bracknels"--stared at me from a
gate. It is not easy, however, to conceive that destiny deliberately
leads one into a suburban avenue to enjoy the humour of one's surprise
at so trivial a coincidence. It is a more natural conclusion that
these names one begins to notice so livelily would still have remained
unobserved, were it not that they had acquired a new significance for
one's eyes owing to something one had read or heard. After all, one
can ride down the Strand on the top of a 'bus for a month without
consciously seeing a single name over a shop-window. But let any of
these names become real to us as the result of some accident, and it
leaps to one's eyes like a scene in a play. It is merely that one now
selects this particular name for observation, and ignores the others.
It is all due to the artistic craving for patterns. I am inclined at
times to explain the evidence in favour of the Baconian theory of
Shakespeare as pattern-mongering. Those cyphers, those coincidences of
phrase and suggestion at such-and-such a line from the beginning or
end of so many of the plays, those recurrences of hoggish pictures,
are enough to shake the balance of anyone who cannot himself go
forward with a study of the whole evidence. But, as we proceed with an
examination of the coincidences, we find that many of them are
coincidences only for the credulous. It seems a strange coincidence
that Shakespeare and Bacon should so often make use of the same
metaphors and words. But it seems strange only till we discover that
plenty of other pre-Shakespearean and Elizabethan writers made use of
them as well. Much of the Baconian theory, indeed, is built, not upon
coincidence, but upon pseudo-coincidence. The fact that Shakespeare
died on the same day of the month--or almost on the same day--as that
on which he was born is really a more interesting coincidence than any
that occurs within the field of Baconianism.
Much the same may be said of the coincidences discovered by those who
have, at one time or another, counted up the numerical values of the
letters in the names of Napoleon and Gladstone and other leaders of
men, and found that they were equal to 666, the fatal number of the
Antichrist. In nearly every case the name has been distorted in its
transliteration into Greek in such a way as to make the coincidence no
coincidence at all. On the other hand, there are some genuinely
interesting coincidences in figures, which have been recorded by
various writers on credulity and superstition. French history since
the middle of the eighteenth century can almost be written as a series
of figure-mongers' coincidences. It began with Louis XVI, who came to
the throne in 1774. By adding the sum of the ciphers in this figure to
the figure itself--1774 + 1 + 7 + 7 + 4--the arithmetical diviners
point out that you get 1793, the year of the King's death. Similarly,
the beginning of the French Revolution foretold the end of the
Revolutionary period with Napoleon's fall, for if you add up 1789 + 1
+ 7 + 8 + 9 you get 1814, the year of Elba. Louis Philippe's
accession-date, 1830, gives scarcely less remarkable results. If you
add to it the figures in 1773, the date of his birth--1830 + 1 + 7 + 7
+ 3--you get 1848, the date of his fall and flight. It is the same if
you add to his accession-date the figures in 1809, the date of his
marriage. Here again 1830 + 1 + 8 + 0 + 9 results in 1848. And, if you
turn to his Queen, you find that the figures in her birth-date, 1782,
lead up to the same fatal message: 1830 + 1 + 7 + 8 + 2 once more
mount to the ominous figure. The arithmeticians, whose ingenuities are
recorded in Mr Sharper Knowlson's _Origins of Popular Superstitions_,
have unearthed similar significances in the dates of Napoleon III.
They add the figure 1852--the date of his inauguration as Emperor--to
the ciphers of 1808, his birth-date--1852 + 1 + 8 + 0 + 8--and arrive
at the fatal date, 1869, when the Empire came to an end. The Empress
Eugenie was born in 1826 and married in 1853. Add the ciphers in these
dates to 1852--1852 + 1 + 8 + 5 + 3 or + 1 + 8 + 2 + 6--and 1869
appears once more. But there is no need to go on with these quaint
sums. I have quoted enough to suggest the intricate and subtle
patterns which the ingenious can discover everywhere in Nature.
Nature, assuredly, has provided us with coincidences so lavishly that
we may well go about in amazement. Even the fiction of Mr William Le
Queux is not quite so abundant in strange coincidences as the life of
the most ordinary man you could see reading a halfpenny newspaper. It
is only in literature, indeed, that coincidences seem unnatural.
Sophocles has been blamed for making a tragedy out of a man who
unwittingly slew his father and afterwards unwittingly married his
mother. It is incredible as fiction; but I imagine real life could
give us as startling a coincidence even as that. Each of us is, to use
Sir Thomas Browne's phrase, Africa and its prodigies. We tread a
miraculous earth which is all mirrors and echoes, hints and symbols
and correspondences. Each deed we do may, for all we know, be echoed
and mirrored in Nature in a thousand places, even before we do it, and
I can imagine it possible that the shape of a man's fate may be
scattered over the palm of his hand. I am a sceptic on the subject,
and I see what a door is opened to charlatanry if we admit the
presence of too many meanings in the world about us. But I am not
ready to deride the notion that there may be some undiscovered law
underlying many of the coincidences which puzzle us. True, if someone
contended that a mysterious sort of gravitation was working steadily
through the years to bring those four soldiers together again at the
Birmingham dinner, I should be anxious to hear his proofs. But I am
willing to listen patiently to almost any theory on the subject. No
theory could be more sensational than the facts.
XIV
ON INDIGNATION
There is nothing in which the newspapers deal more generously than
indignation. There is enough indignation going to waste in the columns
of the London Press to overturn the Pyramids in ruins and to alter the
course of the Danube. We have had a characteristic flow of popular
indignation over the execution of Mr Benton, a British citizen, in
Mexico. Probably not one Englishman in a million had ever heard of Mr
Benton before, but no sooner was he executed and in his grave than he
rose, as it were, the very impersonation of British citizenship
outraged by foreigners. On the whole, there is nothing healthier than
group-indignation of the kind that sees in an injury to one an injury
to all--that demands just dealing for even the poorest and least
distinguished member of the group. It is the sort of passion it would
be pleasant to see trained and developed. My only complaint against it
is that in the present state of the world it is too often reserved
for foreigners and for those semi-foreigners, the people who belong to
a different political party or social class from your own. One would
have thought, for instance, that the group-indignation which denounced
the execution of Mr Benton without a fair trial might also have
denounced the expulsion of the labour leaders from South Africa with
no trial at all. The fact that it did not and that several of the
London capitalist papers treated the whole South African episode as a
good joke at the expense of Labour is evidence that to a good many
Englishmen the maltreatment of British citizens is not in itself an
objectionable thing, provided it happens within the British Empire. It
seems to me that this is an entirely topsy-turvy kind of patriotism.
For every British citizen who is likely to be badly treated abroad,
there must be thousands who are in danger of being badly treated in
the British Empire itself. Is not the killing of an Englishman by an
English railway company, for instance, as outrageous a crime as the
killing of an Englishman by a foreign general? There is also this to
be remembered: your indignation against the criminal in your own
country is more likely to bear fruit than your indignation against the
criminal in a foreign country. You can catch your English
railway-director with a single policeman; you may not be able to
catch your foreigner without an international war. Thus, though I do
not question the occasional value of indignation against wicked
foreigners, I contend that a true economy of indignation would lead to
most of its being directed against wicked fellow-countrymen.
It may be retorted that Englishmen certainly do not limit their
indignation to foreigners, and that the Marconi campaign is a proof
that a good Englishman can always become righteously indignant against
a bad Englishman--at least when the latter happens to be a Welshman or
a Jew. But the Marconi campaign was only another example of
group-indignation against persons who were outside the group. It was
not, in this instance, a national or Imperial group: it was a party
group. What I am arguing for is the direction of group-indignation,
not against outsiders, but when necessary against the members of the
group. I should like to see Conservatives becoming really indignant
about Conservative scandals, Liberals becoming really indignant about
Liberal scandals, Socialists becoming really indignant about Socialist
scandals. As it is, indignation is usually merely a form of sectarian
excitement It is always easy to find something about which to become
indignant in your political opponent, if it is only his good temper.
His crime of crimes is that he is your political opponent--you use his
minor crimes merely as rods to punish him for that. Our indignation
against our opponents, to say truth, is usually ready long before the
happy excuse comes which looses it like a wild beast into the arena.
One sees a good example of this leashed indignation in the Ulster
Unionist attitude to Nationalist Ireland. There is a silly scuffle
about flags at Castledawson between a Sunday-school excursion party
and a Hibernian procession, both of which ought to have known better.
Not a woman or child is injured, according to the verdict of a judge
on the bench, but the Ulster Unionists, armed to the teeth with
indignation in advance, denounce the affair as though it were on the
same level of villainy with the September Massacres. Not long
afterwards real outrages break out in Belfast, and Catholics and
Socialists are kicked and beaten within an inch of their lives. Here
was a test of the reality of the indignation against outrages on human
beings. Did the Ulstermen then come forward in a righteous fury
against the wrongdoers on their own side? Not a bit of it. Sir Edward
Carson did disown them in the House of Commons. But the Ulster
Unionists, as a whole, raised not a breath of indignation. Being
average human beings, indeed, they invariably retort to any charges
made against them with an angry _tu quoque_ to the South. It is not
long, for instance, since a Special Commission sat to investigate the
facts about sweated women workers in Belfast, and issued a report in
which the prevalence of sweating was demonstrated beyond the doubt of
any but a blind man. Instead, however, of directing their indignation
against the evils of a system in their own midst, the Ulster
Unionists--at least, one of their organs in the Press--straightway
sent one of their representatives down into the South of Ireland to
prove how bad wages and conditions of life were there. What a waste of
indignation all this was! Munster was full of indignation against the
disease of sweating in Belfast, which it could not cure. Ulster, on
the other hand, was full of indignation against the disease of bad
housing in Dublin, which it could not cure. There is a flavour of
hypocrisy in much of this anger against sins that are outside the
circle of one's own responsibility. I do not mind how many sins a man
is angry with provided they include the sins he is addicted to himself
and that are at his own door. There is little credit in a rich
manufacturer's indignation against the evils of the land system if he
is indifferent to the evils of the factory system, and landlords who
denounce industrial evils but see nothing that needs redressing in the
lot of the agricultural labourer are in the same boat. Perhaps, in the
end, the world is served even by this outside virtue. The landlords,
in order to distract attention from their own case, have more than
once brought a useful indignation to bear on the case of the
manufacturers, and _vice versa_, and ultimately the bewildered,
ox-like public has begun to drink in a little of the truth. On the
other hand, this is an unhealthy atmosphere for public virtue. It
gives rise to cynical views such as are expressed in the proverb,
"When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own," and in the
lines concerning those who
Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to.
We all do it, unfortunately. The Presbyterian speaks with horror of
the way in which the Catholic breaks the Sabbath, and the Catholic
thinks it a terrible thing that the Presbyterian should go to a
theatre on Good Friday. Montaigne, who was by inclination a
sensualist, looked with disgust on the man who drank too much, and the
drunkard retorts that every vice except his own is selfish and
anti-social. Even when we admit our own sins we are half in love with
them. It seems a less intolerable crime in oneself to rob the poor-box
than in one's neighbour to have an unwashed neck. Englishmen never
began to sing the praises of cleanliness as the virtue that makes a
nation great until they had themselves taken to the bath. True, they
often wash, as they govern themselves, not directly but by proxy; but,
even so, cleanliness has been exalted into a national virtue till the
very people of the slums, where the bath is used only for the storage
of coal, have learned to shout "Dirty foreigner!" as the most
indignant thing that can be said at a crisis.
There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that some one
else is an evildoer. Our scandal about our neighbours is nearly all a
muttered tribute to our own virtue. It fills us with a new pride in
ourselves that it was not we who gambled with trust money or made love
to our neighbour's wife or ran away in battle. By kicking our
neighbours down for their sins we secure for ourselves, it seems, a
better place on the ladder. The object of all religion is to destroy
this self-satisfied indignation with our neighbours--to make us feel
that we ourselves are no better than the prostitute or the foreigner.
Similarly philosophy bids us know ourselves instead of following the
line of least resistance and damning others. That is why one would
like to see Englishmen concerned about injuries done to Englishmen by
Englishmen, even more than about injuries done to Englishmen by
foreigners. Indignation against the latter, necessary though it may
be, is apt to become a mere melodramatic substitute for native virtue.
There are crimes enough at home for any Englishman to practise his
indignation upon without ever letting his eye wander further than
Dover--crimes of underpayment, crimes of overwork, crimes of rotten
houses, crimes that are murder in everything but swiftness and theft
in everything except illegality. It is fine, no doubt, that Englishmen
should become hot with anger at the news of a Benton murdered in
Mexico as it is fine that the democracies of Europe should be inflamed
with indignation at the murder of a Ferrer in Spain. These things are
evidence of large brotherhoods, of an extension of those family
charities which are at the back of all advance in civilisation. On the
other hand, can none of this passionate fraternity be spared for John
Smith, aged fourteen, done to death by the half-time system, or for
his father killed on the line as the result of the need of making
dividends for railway shareholders, or for his mother working for a
halfpenny an hour in a narrow room the filth of which is transmuted
into gold for some rich man? These, too, are your brothers and
sisters, and deserve the angry eloquence of an epitaph. Here is
subject enough for indignation--not a weak and ineffectual indignation
against foreigners, but indignation knocking terribly at your own
doors.
XV
THE HEART OF MR GALSWORTHY
Mr Galsworthy has been writing to the _Times_ on "the heartlessness of
Parliament." The _Times_, always noted for its passion for humane
causes, ranges itself behind him and asserts that Englishmen have now
learned to speak of the politician "with intellectual contempt, as of
one who is making a game of realities, who fiddles a dull tune while
Rome is burning." Both Mr Galsworthy and the _Times_ are apparently
agreed that the measures which Parliament has for some time past been
discussing are matters of trivial significance and, in so far as they
take up time which might be devoted to better things, are an outrage
upon the conscience of (to use the odd phrase of the newspaper) "those
who are most interested in the spectacle of life and the future of
mankind." Mr Galsworthy, wearing his heart in his ink-pot not only
denounces the indifference of politicians to vital things, but goes on
to lay down an alternative programme--a programme of the heart, as he
might call it, in contrast to the programme of the hustings. He begins
his list of things which ought to be legislated about with the
sweating of women workers and insufficient feeding of children, and he
ends it with live instances of--in an even odder phrase than that
quoted from the _Times_--"abhorrent things done daily, daily left
undone."
Export of horses worn-out in work for Englishmen--save the
mark! Export that for a few pieces of blood-money delivers up
old and faithful servants to wretchedness.
Mutilation of horses by docking, so that they suffer, offend
the eye, and are defenceless against the attacks of flies
that would drive men, so treated, crazy.
Caging of wild things, especially wild song-birds, by those
who themselves think liberty the breath of life, the jewel
above price.
Slaughter for food of millions of creatures every year by
obsolete methods that none but the interested defend.
Importation of the plumes of ruthlessly slain wild birds,
mothers with young in the nest, to decorate our gentlewomen.
Probably ninety-nine readers out of a hundred will sympathise with Mr
Galsworthy's bitter cry against a Parliament that has so long left
these and other wrongs unrighted. Let Mr Galsworthy take any one of
his cases of inhumanity by itself, and he is sure of the support of
nearly all decent people in demanding that an end shall be put to it.
The human conscience has developed considerably in recent years in
regard to the treatment both of human beings and of animals, and,
though conscience is frequently dumb in the impressive presence of
economic interests, it has still the power to get things done, as
witness, for example, the establishment of minimum-wage boards in
certain sweated trades. Mr Galsworthy, however, does not ask you to
consider each of his desired reforms on its merits. He asks you, in
effect, to put them in place of the reforms which politicians are at
present discussing. "Almost any one of them," he declares of his brood
of evils, "is productive of more suffering to innocent and helpless
creatures, human or not, and probably of more secret harm to our
spiritual life, more damage to human nature, than, for example, the
admission or rejection of Tariff Reform, the Disestablishment or
preservation of the Welsh Church, I would almost say than the granting
or non-granting of Home Rule."