service in making comparisons of this sort. He is like a man who
would go before Parliament, when it was discussing some big project
like the nationalisation of the railways and deny its right to
legislate on such a matter till it had passed a measure forbidding the
sticky sort of fly-papers. One might sympathise heartily with his
desire to abolish the slow torture of flies, and I for one detest with
my whole soul those filthy fly-traps in which the insects go dragging
their legs out till they die. But it is obvious that the question of
cruelty to flies is one which must be dealt with on its merits. To
weigh it in the balance against such a thing as nationalisation of the
railways is merely to invite a humorous rather than a serious
treatment of the question. It is not a comic question in itself: it
may easily become comic as a result of some ridiculous comparison.
That is, more or less, what one feels in regard to Mr Galsworthy's
implied comparison between the importance of Free Trade and the
importance of putting an end to the "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." In
so far as the export of horses leads to cruelty and wretchedness I
agree with Mr Galsworthy that it ought to be stopped. Not because the
horses are "worn out in work for Englishmen," not because they are
"old and faithful servants"--that is mere sentimentalising and
rhetoric--but because they are living creatures which ought not to be
subjected to any pain that is not necessary. On the other hand, is not
Mr Galsworthy rather unimaginative in failing to see that Tariff
Reform might conceivably lead in present circumstances to intense pain
and distress in every town and county in England? The imposition or
non-imposition of a tariff may seem, at a superficial glance, to
belong to the mere pedantry of politics. But consider the human
consequences of such a thing. Every penny taken out of the pockets of
the poor owing to an increase in the price of goods means the
disappearance of a potential pennyworth of food from the poor man's
home. Obviously, in a country where hundreds of thousands of people
are living on the edge of starvation--and over it--even a slight rise
in the cost of things might produce the most calamitous results.
Starvation and disease and the anguish of those who have to watch
their children suffer, an increase in crime and insanity and
wretchedness--these are all quite conceivable results of a sudden
change in the poor man's capacity to buy the necessaries of life. That
is the humane Free Trader's case for Free Trade. The humane Tariff
Reformer's case for Tariff Reform, on the other hand, is that a change
in the fiscal system would increase wages and employment and quickly
put an end to the present abominations of starvation, sweating, and
unemployment. I am not concerned for the moment with the comparative
merits of Free Trade and Tariff Reform. I am concerned merely with
pointing out that Mr Galsworthy's theory that such a thing as the
export of worn-out horses causes "more suffering to innocent and
helpless creatures" than would be caused by an error in fiscal policy,
affecting millions of men and women and children, does not bear a
moment's examination.
Take, again, Mr Galsworthy's comparison of the case of the Home Rule
Bill with the case of the caging of wild song-birds. Is not Mr
Galsworthy in this instance also lacking in imagination? Had he read
Irish history he would have learned a little about the "suffering to
innocent and helpless creatures" that logically flows from the denial
of a country's right to self-government. I will give the classic
example. In the late forties of the nineteenth century, the Irish
potato crop failed. The crops of corn were abundant, cattle were
abundant, but the potatoes everywhere rotted in the fields under a
mysterious blight. As the potato was the staple food of the people,
this would have been sufficiently disastrous, even in a self-governed
country. But, if Ireland had had self-government in 1847, does any one
believe that her Ministers would have allowed corn and cattle to go on
being exported from the country while the people were starving? Right
through the Famine Ireland went on exporting grain and cattle to the
value of seventeen million pounds a year so that rents might be paid.
Many leading Irishmen urged the Government to pass a temporary measure
prohibiting the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while the Famine
lasted. This step had been taken by the Governments of Belgium and
Portugal in similar circumstances. Had it been taken in Ireland--as it
is incredible that it would not if the Union had not been in
existence--between half a million and a million men, women, and
children would have been saved from the torture of death by starvation
and typhus fever. Not only this, but does not Mr Galsworthy also
overlook those multiplied agonies of exile, eviction, and agrarian
crime, which living creatures in Ireland would have been spared--in
great measure, at least--if the country had possessed self-government?
It may be doubted, whether all the wild song-birds that have ever
existed since the Garden of Eden have endured among them such an
excess of misery as fell to the lot of the Irish people in the half
century following the Famine--much of it preventable by a simple
change in the machinery of the constitution. Nor can one easily
measure the amount of suffering in England indirectly due to the fact
that the political intellect of the country was so occupied with the
Irish question that it had not the time or the energy left to tackle
scores of pressing English questions. Housing, poor law reform,
half-time--these and a host of other matters have been thrust out of
the way till statesmen, released from the woes of Ireland, might have
time to consider them. Many Socialists have a way of forgetting the
social meaning of constitutional changes. They regard constitutional
reform as something that delays social reform, whereas it may be
something that enables the public, if it so desires, to speed up
social reform. That is why Home Rule, the abolition of the veto of the
House of Lords, and a dozen comparable matters, must be as eagerly
ensued by Socialists as by Radicals. The underfed child, the sweated
woman--even the maltreated animal, I imagine--will benefit as a result
of changes which, to say the least, take some of the impediments out
of the way of the social reformer. Meanwhile, let Mr Galsworthy and
those who think with him redouble their efforts on behalf of humanity,
whether towards man or beast. But let them not seek to destroy a good
thing that is being done in order to call attention to a good thing
that is not being done. Let them not try to persuade us that it is
more important for the Russian people to abolish mouse traps than to
get a constitutional monarch and sound Parliamentary institutions. I
have the sincerest respect for Mr Galsworthy's heart--for the generous
passion with which he stands up for all the lame dogs in the world. I
agree heartily with every separate cause he advocates in his letter to
the _Times_. It is only his table of values with which I quarrel, and
the destructive use he makes of it. I believe that an overwhelming
case could be made out against Parliament on the score of its
heartlessness, but Mr Galsworthy has not made it.
XVI
SPRING FASHIONS
In spite of the progress of civilisation, there are still women to
whom the returning Spring is mainly a festival of dresses. It is
pleasant to know that there is, after all, a remnant of primitive
humanity surviving. Women will before long be the only savages. Long
after the last anthropologist has departed from the last South Sea
Island in despair, when the people have all become Christians and have
no manners and customs left, the race of fashionable women will still
march its feathered regiments up and down under the sun, a puzzle and
an exasperation to the scientific inquirer. Like all really primitive
people, women will go on refusing to believe in or bow down to the
laws of Nature. Nature may tell them, for instance, of the correct
position of the human waist; but they will not listen to her; they
will insist that the human waist may be anywhere you like between the
neck and the knees, according to the fashion of the moment, and Nature
may as well put her fingers in her ears and go home. Savages, we are
told, do not even believe in the manifest generalisation of death:
they regard each new death as an entirely surprising event, due not to
natural, but to accidental causes. Similarly, the fashionable woman
regards the body each Spring as an entirely new body, subject to none
of the generalisations which seemed appropriate to the body of even a
year before. This is the grand proof she offers us of her superiority
to the animals. She will have no commerce with the monotony of their
ways. She will not submit herself to the regular gait of the sheep,
the horse, or the cow, which is the same this year as it was in the
year of Waterloo, or, for that matter, in the year of Salamis. She
claims for her body the liberty to move one year with the long stride
of a running fowl, and the next at a hobble like a spancelled goat. It
might be said of her that she is not one animal, but all the animals.
She will borrow from all Nature, dead and alive, indeed, as greedily
as a poet. She will colour her hair to look like a gorse-bush and her
lips to look like a sunset. She will capture the green from the grass,
the purple from the hills, the blue from Eastern seas, the silver from
the mists, as it suits her fancy. One year she will demand of life
that it shall be gorgeous in hue as a baboon's courtships; the next,
that it shall be as colourless as a rook's funeral. She enters upon
the labour of life as though it were a long series of disguises.
Probably it was her success in passing from form to form that led the
ancient Greeks to suspect the presence of nymphs now in trees, now in
running water, and now even in the hills. Everywhere in Nature man
sees evasive woman. There is nothing anywhere, from a mountain valley
in flower to a chestnut tree glistening into bud, which does not
remind him of something about her--her hats, her cloaks, or her
ribbons. Such a plunderer of beauties would, one cannot but feel,
become a great artist if only she possessed some standards. But she
dresses without standards, without philosophy: there is nothing but
appetite in it all, and a capricious appetite at that. She has no
settled principle but the principle of change. She flies from grace to
ugliness lightheartedly, indiscriminately. She is like the kind of
butterfly which you could get only in a fairy tale--a butterfly that
could change itself into a mouse, and from a mouse into a dandelion,
and from a dandelion into a camel, and from a camel into a
grasshopper, and from a grasshopper into a cat, and so on through a
thousand transformations. Her world leaves us giddy like the
transformation scene in a pantomime. In her artistic ideals she is a
follower, not of Orpheus, but of Proteus.
Yet who can disparage her April ritual? She is in league with the
whole singing earth, which once a year sets out on its long procession
of praise. Her new fashions are but an item in the general rejoicing
over the infinite resurrections of Nature. Every thorn-bush gowns
itself in green, a ghost of beauty. Every laurel puts forth new leaves
like little green flames. There is a glow in the grass as though some
spirit lurked behind it deeper a million times than its roots.
Everywhere Nature has relit the sacred fire. She has given us back
warmth--the warmth in which food increases and birds sing; and we can
no more escape her gladness than if we had been rescued from the
perils and privations of a siege. This is the time when men wake up to
find they are alive, and their exultation makes them poets. One of the
first things of which man seems to have become conscious in the world
about him was the renewal of life each spring.
The earth does like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.
Once a year he beheld the coming of the golden age again. He
worshipped the serpent as the emblem of endless life long before he
learned to suspect it as the devil. He may have been an infidel as he
shivered in the winter rains, but the lark leaping into the sun
awakened the old splendid credulity again. He knows that Persephone
will rise. Hence the divine madness that possesses him year by year at
this season--a madness which nowadays expresses itself largely in
throwing hard balls at coconuts. Possibly this symbolises the
contemptuous smashing of the winter's fears, for is there anything
which looks more like a withered fear than one of those grisly brown
bearded fruits? And do not the showman's cries and his bell-ringings
at the coconut saloon make up a clamour like the clamour of the savage
beating forth the flock of his superannuated terrors? He is the
incarnation of the boastful faith that has returned to us. Perhaps,
too, the coconuts may be symbols of the hoarded food supply of the
winter--the supply which we were continually in dread might come to a
slow close, and which we can now rail at and insult in our revived
confidence in the green world.
Certainly this enthusiasm of ours for the spring is not all so
disinterested as it appears. We are hungry animals before we are
poetical animals, and we are often praising the promise of our food
when we seem to be most exalted in our raptures. It may be that even
the pleasure we take in the singing of birds is simply a relic of the
pleasure which primitive man felt as he heard the voice of many
dinners making its way back to him at the turn of the year. But the
appeal of music and colour need not be so detailedly stomachic as
that. Man may not have loved the lark's song because he wanted in
particular to eat the lark, or, indeed, any bird. He may have loved it
merely as a significant voice amid the chorus and banners of the
returning hosts of eatable things. If it were not so, many of our
tastes would be different. Among the smells and colours of spring
those we love most are not the smells and colours of eatable things,
but of inculinary things, like roses, and if we loved the music of
birds by some standard of the stomach, it is the crowing of the cock
and not the song of the lark that would inspire us to poetry. It is
the grunting of the pig and not the cuckoo's call which would startle
in us the thrill of romance.
There is, on the other hand, just a chance that natural man does
respond more sympathetically to the voice of the cock and the pig than
to the speech of the cuckoo and the skylark. The difference between
the farmer's and the artist's taste in landscape is proverbial. When
man looks at the world and sums it up in terms of food, he is
indifferent to masses of colour and runs of music. His favourite
colour is the colour of a good crop of corn or a field of grass that
will fatten the cattle. He cares less for silver streams than for the
drains in his turnip-fields. Whether the love of the more ornamental
things--the useless songs of the birds and the scent of flowers, which
is a prosaic thing only to the bees--is an advance on this passion for
utility may be questioned by the advocates of the simple life.
Ornament, they may contend, especially in woman's dress, is simply
mannikin's vainglory. Woman was first hung or robed with precious
things, not in order that she might be happy, but in order that man
might be able to boast of her among his neighbours. She was as sure a
sign of his power as a string of enemies' heads hanging from his
waist. She was the advertisement of his riches. Before long woman
became happy in her golden slavery. Wisely so, perhaps, for in the end
she was able to make use of the man's fatuous love of boasting to
exact high terms for aiding him in his conspiracy of magnificence. She
studied the science of surprise, and applied it to the labour of
dressing herself in such a way as to make him slavishly regard her as
the most wonderful being on earth. If we may trust the testimony of
Mrs Edith Wharton's novels, woman has so subjugated man with this
chameleon brilliance of hers in modern America that he thinks himself
quite happy if she makes use of him as the hodman of her charms. Thus
in the spring fashions we may see the triumph of a sex rather than a
hymn of colour to the revival of Nature. It is a lamentable declension
in theory, and therefore I do not entirely believe it. I still hold to
the conviction that the gaiety of women's Easter dress is in some
manner allied to the gaiety of the earth. It is but a decrepit gaiety
compared to what it might be. But that is because of its long
association with all sorts of alien things--the necessity of the
man--hunt, the pride of the church parade, and the rest of it. When
woman meets man on equal terms she will, one hopes in one's credulous
moments, cultivate beauty more and fashion less. She will no longer be
estranged from the morning stars that sing together and the little
hills that clap their hands. Her feet will be beautiful in Bond
Street, and Regent Street shall have cause to shout for joy.
XVII
ON BLACK CATS
It is easy to imagine the enthusiasm of the audience at Manchester
when a black cat walked on to the platform at a meeting of Sir Edward
Carson's. Lord Derby, who presided, hailed it as an omen of the
success of the Ulster cause. He went on to tell the audience that the
last Unionist victory in Manchester had been presaged by the
appearance of a black cat in some polling booth or other. That, you
may be sure, was the most convincing argument in the night's
speech-making. People who will stumble over the logic of politics for
a lifetime can appreciate the logic of the black cat in a fraction of
a second. Black cats, indeed, are one of the very few things in which
a good many unbelievers nowadays believe. These are the substitute for
the angels and devils of our grandfathers. We are sceptics in
everything but our superstitions. The most superstitious people of all
are often to be found among those who do not believe in God, and who
would not dream of entering a church-gate unless there was no other
way of avoiding walking under a ladder. These it is who pick up pins
with the greatest enthusiasm, and who become downcast if a dog howls,
and who had rather not sleep at all than sleep in a room numbered
thirteen. They will deride the cherubim and the seraphim, but they
will not risk offending the demon to whom they throw an oblation of
the salt they have just spilt on the table. It is as though each man
carried his own little firmament of immortals about with him, and
sacrificed to them on his own infinitesimal altars. This is not, I
suspect, because he loves them, but because he fears them. He regards
them as a species of blackmailers--the Scottish way of looking at
fairies. Nearly every portent is to him a portent of misfortune. The
number thirteen, the spilling of salt, the bay of a dog, the sight of
a red-haired man first thing on New Year's morning, dreams about
babies--these things cast a gloom over his world deeper than midnight;
and of this kind are nearly all the portents which wriggle like little
snakes in the superstitious imagination.
It is the distinction of the black cat that he is one of the few
cheerful superstitions left to us. Why he should be so no one can tell
us, and he has not been considered so in all times or in all places.
He has even been regarded on occasion as the false shape of a witch.
Perhaps, the origin of all our care of him was the tenderness of fear.
He may be like the black god worshipped by the ancient Slavs who were
indifferent to his white brother-god. They did this, we are told,
because they thought that the white god was so good that they had
nothing to fear from him in any case. But the black god one could not
trust, and so one had to buy his goodwill. It seems not improbable
that the veneration of the black cat may have begun in much the same
way. The smile with which our ancestors first greeted him was, I
fancy, a nervous, doubting smile, like the smile with which many of us
try to cajole snarling dogs. Then, gradually, as he did not leap upon
them and destroy them, they came to believe less and less in his will
to do evil, and in the end he was canonised, and now he has been
accepted as a sound English Tory, which is generally admitted to be
the highest type of animal that Nature has produced.
Two centuries or so ago Addison poured such finished contempt on all
superstitions of this kind that it would have been difficult to
believe that men and women of intellect would still be clinging to
them to-day. At the same time, their survival is the most natural
thing in the world. They are bound to survive in a world in which men
live not in faiths and enjoyments, but in hopes and fears. Faith is
the way of religion, and enjoyment is the way of philosophy; but hopes
and fears are the coloured lights that illuminate the exciting way of
superstition. If we are creatures of hopes and fears we have no sun,
and our lights have a trick of appearing and disappearing like
will-o'-the-wisps, leading us a pretty dance whither we know not.
Every step we take we expect to unfold the secret. We find omens in
the direction of straws, in the running of hares, in the flight of
birds. If the girl of hopes and fears wishes to know what colour of a
man she is going to marry, she waits till she hears the cuckoo in
summer, and then examines the sole of her shoe in the expectation of
finding a hair on it which will be the colour of her future husband's
head. I will make a confession of my own. I have never listened
slavishly for the cuckoo, but many years ago I had as foolish a
superstition about farthings. I believed that they were luck-bringers.
At the time I was lodging in the traditional garret in Pimlico, trying
more or less vainly to make a living by writing. Whenever I had sent
off a manuscript I used to go out the same evening to a little shop
where, when they sold a loaf, they always gave you a farthing change
out of your threepence. How cheerily I used to leave the shop with the
loaf under my arm and the farthing in my pocket! That farthing, I
felt, could be trusted to cast a spell on the editor towards whom the
manuscript was flying. It would be as effective as an introduction
from one of the crowned heads of Europe. And even if, a night or two
afterwards, the most loathsome of all visible objects--a returned
manuscript--made the lodging-house look still more sordid than before,
I abated no jot of my trust. My heart sank for the moment, but in the
end I settled down to acceptance of the fact that there was a fool
sitting in an editor's chair who could resist even the power of
farthings. On the next day, or the day after, I would set out with
revived hope for the baker's shop again. I remember the acute misery I
felt on one occasion when I went into a more pretentious shop, where
the girl put my loaf in the scales and asked me whether I would prefer
a small roll or a part of a loaf to make up the full threepenceworth
of weight. I would have given my boots, and even my old hat, to be
able to say, "Please, may I have my farthing?" But my courage failed.
There are things one cannot say to a pretty shop-girl. Years
afterwards I happened to be discussing superstitions with a friend,
and I instanced the well-known belief in the luckiness of farthings.
"But farthings aren't supposed to be lucky," said my friend, with a
smile of authority: "they're supposed to be extremely unlucky." It was
as though the world reeled. Here I had been steadily building up ruin
for myself all that time with my miser's hoard of farthings. I felt
like the man in _The Silver King_ who cries: "Turn back, O wheels of
the Universe, and give me back my yesterday!" If only I could get back
some of my yesterdays, I would assuredly buy my bread in that big,
bright shop where the girl gives you full weight for your threepence;
and never would I set foot in that little low shop where a half-blind
old man wraps your loaf in a page of newspaper, and lays in your hand
a dirty farthing that is only the price of your undoing.