unfriendly to superstitions. I cannot believe that the universe, or
even a single planet of it, is ruled by imps of chance which express
themselves in the doings of crows, and in floating tea-leaves and in
the dropping of umbrellas. Better join the church of the Sea-Dyaks of
Borneo, if one can find nothing better to believe in than that. It is
in order to protest against the heathen religion of crows and numbers
and tea-leaves that I sometimes deliberately leap on to a 'bus
numbered thirteen, or walk under a ladder rather than go round it.
Occasionally, I say, for my mood varies. There are days when I feel
like turning a blind eye to 'bus number 13, and when a crow, sitting
and cawing on the roof of the church opposite, gives me the shivers.
It is in vain that I tell myself that the last superstition is the
most irrational of all, because in some places the sight of one crow
is supposed to be lucky, the sight of two unlucky, while in other
places the reverse is the case, and apart from this, the superstition
does not refer to crows at all, but to magpies. Then, again, when I am
arguing against the dislike of setting out on a Friday, I find myself
compelled to admit that the holiday in which I was not able to get
away till Saturday was, on the whole, the best I ever had. But the
salt--I refuse to throw salt over my shoulder, no matter what happens.
I prefer to exorcise the demon with some formula from trigonometry, as
I once heard a man doing when he passed under a ladder. And if I
retain a hankering faith in black cats, it is, as I have said, the
most cheerful superstition in the world. About two months ago I was
sitting one night in the depths of gloom expecting news of a tragedy.
Suddenly, I heard a cat mewing as if in difficulties. It seemed some
way up the road, and I thought that it must be caught in a hedge, or
that somebody was tormenting it. I went downstairs and put my hat on
to go out and look for it, and had hardly opened the door, when in
walked a little black kitten with bright eyes and its tail in the air.
I defy anyone to have disbelieved in black kittens at that moment. It
seemed more like an omen than anything I have ever known. I had never
seen the kitten before, and its owner has reclaimed it since. But I
cannot help being grateful to it for anticipating with its gleaming
eyes the happy news that reached me a day or two later. Of course, I
do not believe the black cat superstition any more than I believe that
it is unlucky to see the new moon for the first time through glass.
But still, if you happen to be requiring a black cat at any time, I
advise you to make quite sure that there are no white hairs in its
coat. One white hair spoils all, and puts it on a level with any
common squaller in the back garden.
XVIII
ON BEING SHOCKED
Being shocked is evidently still one of the favourite pastimes of the
British people. There has been something of a festival of it since the
production of Mr Shaw's new play. Even the open Bible, it appears, is
not a greater danger to souls than _Androcles and the Lion_. Of
course, the open Bible has become generally accepted in England now,
but one remembers how the Church used to censor it, and one looks back
to the first men who protested against its being banned as to bright
heroes of adventure. Everybody knows, however, that if the Bible were
not already an accepted book--if we could read it with a fresh eye as
a book written by real people like ourselves and only just published
for the first time--it would leave most of us as profoundly shocked as
Canon Hensley Henson, who, though he does not want to limit its
circulation, is eager at least to expurgate it for the reading of
simple persons. I do not, I may say, quarrel with Canon Henson. Every
man has a right to be shocked so long as it is his own shock and not a
mere imitation of somebody else's. What one has no patience with is
the case of those people who are always shocked in herds. They are
intellectually too lazy to be shocked, so to say, off their own bat.
So they join a mob of the shocked as they might join a demonstration
in the streets or a political party. They are so lacking in initiative
that, instead of boldly being shocked themselves, they frequently even
are content to be shocked by proxy. In the world of the theatre they
hire the Censor to be shocked for them by all the immoral plays that
are written. The Censor having been duly shocked, the public feels
that it has done all that can be expected of it in that direction and
it refuses to turn a hair afterwards no matter what it sees in the
theatre. It takes schoolgirls to musical comedies which are as often
as not mere tinkling farces of lust. But it does not care. It has
handed over its capacity for being shocked to the Censor, and nothing
can stir it out of the happy sleep of its faculties any more--nothing,
I should add, except a Shaw play. For even the chalk of a dozen
censors could not remove the offence of Mr Shaw. He is like an
evangelist who would suddenly rise up at a garden party and talk
about God. He is as bad form as one of those enthusiastic converts who
corner us in railway trains or buttonhole us in the streets to ask us
if we are saved. He is a Salvationist who has broken into the
playhouse, and, as he unfolds the knockabout comedy of redemption, we
are aware that we no longer feel knowing and superior, as we expect
the winking laughter of the theatre to make us feel, but ignorant and
simple, like a child singing its first hymns. That is the mood, at any
rate, of _Androcles and the Lion_. That is the offence and the stone
of stumbling. Mr Shaw has stripped some of our most sacred feelings as
bare as babies, and we do not know what to do to express our sense of
the indecency.
It is clear, then, that being shocked is simply a way of recovering
our balance. It is also a way of recovering our sense of superiority.
There is more pleasure in being shocked by the sin of one's neighbour
or one's neighbour's wife than in eating cream buns. Not, indeed, that
it is always the sins that shock us most. Much as we enjoy the whisper
of how a great man beats his wife, or a poet drinks, or some merry
Greek has flirted her virtue away, we would shake our heads over them
with equal gravity if they had the virtues of Buddhist monks and
sisters. It is the virtues that shock us no less than the vices.
Perhaps it was because Swinburne gave utterance to the horror a great
many quite normal people feel for virtue that, in spite of an
intellect of far from splendid quality, he ended his life as something
of a prophet. Tolstoi never shocked Europe more than a hair's weight
so long as he blundered through the seven sins like nearly any other
man of his class. He only scandalised us when he began to try to live
in literal obedience to the Sermon on the Mount. When we are in
church, no doubt, we say fie to the young man who had great
possessions and would not sell all that he had and give to the poor,
as Jesus commanded him. But in real life we should be troubled only if
the young man took such a command seriously. Obviously, then, the
psychology of being shocked cannot be explained in terms of triumphant
virtue. We must look for an explanation rather in the widespread
instinct which forbids a man to be different either in virtues or in
vices from other people. It arises out of a loyalty to ordinary
standards, which the average man has made for his comfort--perhaps, we
should say, for his self-respect. To deny these standards in one's
life is like denying a foot-rule--which would be an outrage on the
common-sense of the whole trade union of carpenters. Or one might put
it this way. To live publicly like a saint is as disturbing as if you
were to ask a tailor to measure your soul instead of your legs. It is
to whisk your neighbour into a world of new dimensions--to leave him
dangling where he can scarcely breathe. This does not, it may be
thought, explain the attitude of the shocked man towards sinners. But,
after all, we are very tolerant of sinners until they break some code
of our class. John Bright defended adulteration because he was a
manufacturer. Grocers object to the forgery of cheques, which is a
danger to their business, in a manner in which they do not object to
the forgery of jam, which puts money in their purses. We are more
shocked by the man who gets drunk furiously once in six months than by
the man who tipples all the time, not because the former is more
surely destroying himself, but because he is more likely to do
something that will inconvenience business or society. We can forgive
almost all sins except those that inconvenience us. There are others,
it may be argued, that we hate for their own sake. But is not a part
of our hatred even of these due to the fact that they inconvenience
our minds, having about them something novel or immeasurable? It is in
the last analysis that breaches of codes and conventions shock us
most. If your uncle danced down Piccadilly dressed like a Chinaman,
your sense of propriety would be more outraged than if he appeared in
the Divorce Court, since, bad as the latter is, it is less
bewilderingly abnormal. Mr Wells, in _The Passionate Friends_, offers
a defence of the conventions by which Society attempts to reduce us
all to a common pattern. He sees in them, as it were, angels with
flaming swords against the remorseless individualism that flesh is
heir to. They are a sort of compulsion to brotherhood. They are signs
to us that we must not live merely to ourselves, but that we must in
some way identify ourselves with the larger self of human society. It
is a tempting paradox, and, in so far as it is true, it is a defence
of all the orthodoxies that have ever existed. Every orthodoxy is a
little brotherhood of men. At least, it is so until it becomes a
little brotherhood of parrots. It only breaks down when some horribly
original person discovers the old truth that it is a shocking thing
for men to be turned into parrots, and gives up his life to the work
of rescuing us from our unnatural cages. Perhaps a brotherhood of
parrots is better than no brotherhood at all. But the worst of it is,
the conventions do not gather us into one brood even of this kind.
They sort us into a thousand different painted and chattering groups,
each screaming against the other like, in the vulgar phrase, the
Devil. No: brotherhood does not lie that way. Perched vainly in his
cage of malice and uncharitableness, man feels more like a boss than a
brother. There is nothing so like an average superman as a parrot.
The passion for being shocked, then, must be redeemed from its present
cheapness if it is to help us on the way to being fit for the double
life of the individual and society. We must learn to be shocked by the
normal things--by the conventions themselves rather than by breaches
of the conventions. Those who lift their hands in pious horror over
conventional Christianity should also lift their hands in pious horror
over conventional un-Christianity. The conventions are often merely
truths that have got the sleeping-sickness; but by this very fact they
are disabled as regards any useful purpose. Every great leader,
whether in religion or in the reform of society, comes to us with
living truths to take the place of conventions. He gives the lie to
our bread-and-butter existence, and teaches us to be shocked by most
things to which we are accustomed and many things which we have
treasured. Society progresses only in so far as it learns to be
shocked, not by other people, but by itself. What did England ever
gain except a purr or a glow from being shocked by French morals or
German manners? The English taste for being shocked is only worth its
weight in old iron when it is directed on some thing such as the
procession of the poor and the ill-clad that circulates from morning
till night in the streets of English slums. Being shocked is a maker
of revolutions and literatures when men are shocked by the right
things--or, rather, by the wrong things. Out of a mood of shock came
Blake's fiery rout of proverbs in that poem which begins:
A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
It is, unfortunately, not the Robin Redbreast in a cage that shocks us
most now. It is rather the Robin Redbreast which revolts against being
expected to sit behind bars and sing like a mechanical toy. Our
resurrection as men and women will begin when we learn to be shocked
by our mechanical servitudes, as Ruskin and Morris used to be in their
fantastic way, instead of being shocked, as we are at present--the
conventionally good, the conventionally bad, and the conventionally
artistic who are too pallid to be either--by what are really only our
immortal souls. At our present stage of evolution, Heaven would shock
us far more than earth has succeeded in doing. That is at once our
condemnation and our comedy.
XIX
CONFESSIONS
Father Hugh Benson has been praised for his courage in confessing that
he could not read Sir Walter Scott. Surely this must be a world of
lies if it is remarkable to find a man honest in so simple a matter as
his tastes in literature. All but one--or it may even be a few
hundred--we are under the empire of shame, which withers truth upon
our lips and threatens us with the rack if we do not confess things
that are lies. That is the reason why in any given year we all appear
to have the same tastes. This year it is Croce; last year it was
Bergson; the year before that it was William James; the year before
that it was Nietzsche. In advanced circles you can already say what
you like about Bergson. You will hardly dare to be frank about Croce
till after midsummer. It is the same in literature as in philosophy.
Twenty years ago we were all swearing that Stevenson and Kipling were
two such artists as England had never seen before. We did not say
they were greater than Dickens and Shakespeare. We simply accepted
them as incomparable. To-day, no one who is not middle-aged speaks of
Mr Kipling as an artist, and one is humoured as a fogey by boys and
girls if one mentions Stevenson seriously in a discussion on
literature. Nor can we blame this popular changeableness as entirely
dishonest. We may love an author for his novelty for a time, as we
loved Swinburne for his novel metres and Mr Kipling for his novel
brutalities; and after a while, when the novelty has faded, we may see
that there is little enough left--too little, at any rate, to justify
our primrose praises. It is an ignominious confession to make that we
have been taken in by a new kind of powder and paint, but, as
everybody else has been taken in and afterwards disillusioned in the
same way and in the same hour, that does not trouble us. We do not
mind being ignominious in regiments. It is the refusal to
right-about-face and to march at the public word of command that would
be the difficult thing. We had rather go wrong with the crowd than be
solitary and conspicuous in our rectitude. In the Sunday-school we
used to sing "Dare to be a Daniel," but we sang it with a thousand
voices. The lion's den was an acclaimed resort for the childish
imagination at the moment. In one's surroundings, as a matter of
fact, one could have achieved resemblance to Daniel only by some such
extreme step as casting doubt upon his historical existence. Had one
done so, the commiteee of the school would quickly have made it clear
that Daniel in short breeches and a white Sunday tie was a most
undesirable person. It has always been as great a crime to behave like
Daniel as it has been an act of piety to praise him.
It is because there are so few who are willing to face the terrors of
isolation that any one who will do so gains an easy notoriety. A man
has only to confess quite honestly that he has individual tastes and
failings in order to take a place among men of genius. His confession,
however, must be as honest as if vanity and pretence had never been
known. It is not enough that he should confess his vices. It may be
more fashionable at the time to confess one's vices than one's
virtues. When a confession is merely a form of boasting it becomes as
frivolous as Dr Cook's story of his discovery of the Pole. There is a
natural humility in the great books of confessions: the writers of
sham-confessions are no more capable of the act of bending than a
balloon. It is possible to give the life-story of every sin one has
ever committed and yet to remain dishonest. One may be attitudinising
even while one tells the truth. It is, it may be granted,
extraordinarily difficult to see oneself truly and without bias, and
to refrain from discovering excuses for oneself faster almost than one
discovers one's faults. It is this humbug sense of excuses in the
background that makes most of us the merest pretenders when we confess
that we are blackguards, and call ourselves by other insulting names.
Our confessions are as often as not mean attempts to forestall the
accusations of those we have injured. We make them in the hope of
turning anger into pity, and when the trick has succeeded we laugh in
secret triumph over the simplicity of human nature. Anatole France has
maintained that all the good writers of confessions, from Augustine
onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins. It is
a paradox with the usual grain of truth. The self-analyst, probably
enough, will fall in love with the material on which he works just as
the surgeon does. One has heard surgeons wax enthusiastic over some
unique case of disease which they have cured. They will even speak of
such things as "lovely." It is thus a fighter shakes hands with his
opponent. Similarly, the saint with his sins. For him they will always
be illuminated, as it were, by grace. Saints have even been known to
thank God for their sins as the means of their salvation. On the
other hand, no good book of confessions is mere
play-acting--lip-service to heaven, secret gratitude to the devil.
When confession becomes a luxury of this dramatic sort, one may begin
to suspect oneself as but a refined sort of sensualist. There are
moods of false exaltation in which the confession that one has broken
a commandment seems to add an inch to one's stature. The true
confessor, on the other hand, will as soon confess a mouse as a
mountain. He will not begin, like Baudelaire in the cafe: "On the
night I killed my father...." He will more likely tell us, like Pepys,
how he beat the servant-girl with a broom, or how, like Horace, he
threw away his shield and ran from the battle. Pepys lives in
literature because he was unblushingly, unboastingly, frank about his
littleness--his jealousy of his wife, his petty conquests of other
women, his eternal sensualities mixed with his eternal prayers. How
vitally he portrays himself in a thousand sentences like: "I took
occasion to be angry with my wife before I rose about her putting up
half-a-crown of mine in a paper box, which she had forgotten where she
had lain it. But we were friends again, as we are always!" Between
that and the artistic attitude of naughtiness in a book like Mr
George Moore's _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, what a gulf there is! The
one is as fresh a piece of nature as a thorn-tree on a hill-side; the
other is as near life as the cloak-and-dagger plays of the theatre.
English prose literature has suffered immensely during the last
century because it has shrunk from the honesty of Mr Pepys and
attitudinised, now in the manner of Prince Albert, now in the manner
of Mr Moore. It has worn the white flower of a blameless life--or the
opposite--instead of the white sheet of repentance. It has suffered
from the obsession at one time of sex, at another time of sexlessness.
It has seldom, like modern Russian literature, been the confession of
a man's or a people's soul.
It is not only in literature, however, that the supreme genius is the
genius of confession. One demands the same kind of honest and personal
speech from one's friends. One cannot be friends with a man who is not
a man but an echo. The poets have sung of echo as a beautiful thing.
It may be well enough among the mountains, but who would live in a
world of echoes? One demands of one's friend that he shall be himself,
even though it involves a liking for the poems of Mr G. R. Sims,
rather than that he should be a boneless imitation who can talk the
current jargon about Picasso and the cubists. To confess that one has
no taste for the latest fad in the arts and philosophy is becoming a
rarer and rarer form of originality. We utter our pallid judgments in
terror at once of the clique of the moment and of posterity. We are
afraid that our contemporaries may tell us that we no longer can keep
abreast of _les jeunes_, but are become ossified. We are afraid that
our grandchildren will look back on us with the smiling superiority
with which we look back on those who raved against Wagner and flung
epithets at Ibsen. Be in no trouble about that. Your grandchildren
will smile at you in any case. Has not the reputation of Matthew
Arnold already sunk lower than that of the reviewers in the daily
papers? Is not even Pater being thrust into a second grave as an
indolent driveller without judgment? There is no phylactery against
the poor opinion of one's grandchildren. Nor need we be greatly in
fear of damning bad art because an occasional Wagner has been
condemned. After all, there were other people condemned besides
Wagner. They were so bad, however, that we have forgotten what the
critics said about them. Pope wrote his _Dunciad_ not against the
Wagners and Ibsens of his day, but against all those fashionable
fellows whose names survive only in his satire. No one would have the
courage to write a _Dunciad_ to-day. We have discovered that there
are no dunces except the people who were the vogue yesterday. Thus we
chorus the season's reputations. We are ready to stab last week's gods
in the back if it happens to be the fashion. We can all say what we
please about Shakespeare now that it no longer requires courage to do
so, but we dare not confess with equal frankness our feelings about
some little wren of a minor poet who came out of the shell a month
ago. The world has become a maze of echoes in which no honest
conversation can be heard for the dull reverberant speech of the
walls.
XX
THE TERRORS OF POLITICS
There is a good deal to be said for Mr Lloyd George's complaint
against the world for its treatment of politicians. In one sense, it
may be better to throw a brick at a politician than to trust him. It
encourages the others. Unhappily, it is a habit that, once acquired,
is by no means easy to discontinue. One throws one's first brick as a
public duty; before one has got through one's first cart-load,
however, one is throwing for the sheer exhilaration of the thing. It
is difficult, for instance, to believe that if Mr Leo Maxse went to
Paradise itself, he would be able to forget his cunning with the words
"swindlers," "rogues," and "cabals"; one feels sure that he would
discover some angels requiring to be denounced for singing "cocoa"
hymns, and some committee of the saints which it was necessary to
arraign as Foozle & Co. The popularity of Mr Maxse's redundant abuse
in _The National Review_ seems to me to be one of the most significant
phenomena of the day. It is a symptom of the reviving taste for
looking on one's political opponent not only as a public, but as a
private, villain. There was probably never a time when it was a more
popular amusement, both in print and at the dinner table, to give a
twist of criminality to the portraiture of political enemies. When
Daniel O'Connell denounced Disraeli as "the heir-at-law of the
blasphemous thief who died on the cross," he was abusing him, not for
his home life, but as a public figure. Similarly, when Sir William
Harcourt described Mr Chamberlain as "a serpent gnawing a file," he
said nothing which would make even the most proper lady shrink from
bowing to Mr Chamberlain in the street. The modern sort of
nomenclature, however, has gone beyond this. It is a constant
suggestion that Cabinets are recruited from Pentonville and Wormwood
Scrubs. One would hardly be surprised, on meeting a Prime Minister
nowadays, to find that he had the bristly chin and the club of Bill
Sikes. As for the rank and file of Ministers, one does not insult Bill
Sikes by comparing them to him. One thinks of them rather as on the
level with racecourse sneak-thieves and the bullies of disorderly
houses. Decidedly, they are not persons to take tea with.