the case either of Cain or of Orestes, and there are many other
examples of guilty murderers in the heroic age. This, however, only
means that there was some limitation put upon the right to kill from
the beginning. The right to kill did not exist as against the members
of one's own family. It would have been impossible to explain the
humour of _The Playboy of the Western World_ to men of the heroic age.
The women who flocked with their farmhouse gifts to show their
appreciation of the boy who had killed his father would have seemed
long-nailed monsters of depravity to the Greeks of the time of
Oedipus. Professor Freud, in his book on dreams, maintains that men
in all ages desire to kill their fathers out of jealousy; he contends
even that Hamlet's reluctance to kill his father's murderer was due
to the fact that he had often wished to murder his father himself.
This, however, is an abnormal interpretation of the jealousies and
hatreds of human beings. The philosopher, perhaps, may see the
principle of murder in every feeling of anger in the same way as the
Christian Apostle saw that, if you hate a man, you are already a
murderer in your own heart. The hatred of parents and children,
however, is not universal any more than the hatred of husbands and
wives. Still, family quarrels are sufficiently natural to enable us to
see that the first step towards good citizenship must have been the
prohibition of the right to kill the members of one's own family.
Gradually, the family widened into the clan, the clan into the city,
the city into the nation, the nation into the larger unit embracing
men of the same colour, and it will ultimately widen, one hopes, into
the human race. But we are far from having reached that stage yet. It
is said to be almost impossible to get a death sentence passed on an
Englishman who has murdered an Indian native. This merely means that
it is regarded as a lesser crime for a European to murder an Asiatic
than for a European to murder a European. In other words the family
sanctities have been extended in some respects so as to cover Europe,
but they have not yet overflowed so far as Asia and Africa. The
objection of the war-at-any-price party to-day to civil war is purely
on the ground that it is fratricidal--that it is an outrage on
recognised family sanctities. The militarists do not see that every
war is fratricidal--that every war is a civil war. As a rule, indeed,
they deny the existence of family rights outside the borders of their
own nation in the narrowest sense. They do not realise that it is as
horrible a thing to shoot fellow-Europeans--not to say, fellow-men--as
it is to shoot fellow-countrymen. As private citizens they not only
admit but insist upon the foreigner's right to live. As public-minded
men and patriots, they will admit nothing beyond his right to be
carried off on a stretcher if they fail to kill him on the field of
battle.
This, however, is to discuss Cain as a statesman rather than Cain as a
human being--to consider the social right to kill rather than the
individual right to kill. Public morals being so far in the rear of
private morals, it raises an entirely different question from that
suggested by Mr Justice Darling's remark. Mr Justice Darling laid it
down that the private citizen has not--except, it may be presumed, in
the last necessities of self-defence--the right to kill even the most
worthless and treacherous of human beings. The spy, the sweater, the
rack-renter, the ravisher--each has the right to trial by his peers.
This, I believe, is good morals as well as good law. Even where it is
a case of a blackguard's commission of some unspeakable crime for
which there is no legal redress, though we may sympathise with his
murderer, we cannot praise the murder. There are, it may be admitted,
cases of murder with a high moral purpose. These are especially
abundant in the annals of political assassination, which may be
described as private murder for public reasons. Very few of us would
claim to be the moral equals of Charlotte Corday, and we have abased
ourselves for centuries before the at-last-suspected figures of
Harmodius and Aristogeiton. There are crimes which are the crimes of
saints. Our reverence for the saintliness leads us almost into a
reverence for the crime. The hero of Finland a few years ago was a
young man who slew a Russian tyrant at the expense of his own life.
Deeds like this have the moral glow of self-sacrifice beyond one's own
most daring attempts at virtue. How, then, is one to condemn them? But
we condemn them by implication if we do not believe in imitating them;
and few of us would believe in imitating them to the point of
bringing up our children to be even the most honourable of assassins.
One unconsciously analyses these crimes into their elements, some of
them noble, some of them the reverse. One has heard, again, of what
may be called private murders for family reasons--crimes of revenge
for some wrong done to a mother, a sister, or a child. Even here,
however, one knows that it is against the interests of the State and
of the race that we should admit the right to kill. Once allow crimes
of indignation, and every indignant man will claim to be a law to
himself. It may be that the prohibition of murder--even murder with
the best intentions--is in the interests of society rather than of any
absolute code of morality. But even so society must set up its own
code of morality in self-defence. In practice, of course, it has also
the right to distinguish between crimes that are the outcome of a
criminal nature, and crimes that are isolated accidents in the lives
of otherwise good men and women. Lombroso was opposed to the severe
punishment of crimes of passion--crimes which are not likely to be
repeated by those who perpetrate them. This, however, is a plea for
the consideration of mitigating circumstances, not an assertion that
the crime of murder is in any circumstances justifiable.
XXIII
THE HUMOUR OF HOAXES
It was only the other day that Mr G. A. Birmingham gave us a play
about a hoax at the expense of an Irish village, in course of which a
statue was erected to an imaginary Irish-American General, the
aide-de-camp of the Lord-Lieutenant coming down from Dublin to perform
the unveiling ceremony. Lady Gregory, it may be remembered, had
previously used a similar theme in _The Image_. And now comes the
story of yet another statue hoax from Paris. On the whole the Paris
joke is the best of the three. It was a stroke of genius to invent a
great educationist called Hegesippe Simon. One can hardly blame the
members of the Chamber of Deputies for falling to the lure of a name
like that. Perhaps they should have been warned by the motto which M.
Paul Berault, of _L'Eclair_, the perpetrator of the hoax, quoted from
among the sayings of the "precursor" to whom he wished to erect a
centenary statue. "The darkness vanishes when the sun rises" is an
aphorism which is almost too good to be true. M. Berault, however,
relying upon the innocence of human nature, sent a circular to a
number of senators and deputies opposed to him in politics, announcing
that, "thanks to the liberality of a generous donor, the disciples of
Hegesippe Simon have at length been able to collect the funds
necessary for the erection of a monument which will rescue the
precursor's memory from oblivion," and inviting them to become
honorary members of a committee to celebrate the event. Despite the
fact that he quoted the sentence about the darkness and the sunrise,
thirty of the politicians replied that they would be delighted to help
in the centenary rejoicings. M. Berault thereupon published their
names with the story of the hoax he had practised on them, and as a
result, according to the newspaper correspondents, all Paris has been
laughing at the joke, "the good taste of which," adds one of them,
"would hardly be relished in England, where other political manners
obtain."
With all respect to this patriotic journalist, I am afraid the love of
hoaxing and practical joking cannot be limited to the Latin, or even
to the Continental races. It is a passion that is as universal as
lying, and a good deal older than drinking. It is merely the instinct
for lying, indeed, turned to comic account. Christianity, unable to
suppress it entirely, had to come to terms with it, and as a result we
have one day of the year, the first of April, devoted to the humours
of this popular sin. There are many explanations of the origin of All
Fools' Day, one of which is that it is a fragmentary memorial of the
mock trial of Jesus, and another of which refers it to the belief that
it was on the first of April that Noah sent out the dove from the Ark.
But the Christian or Hebrew origin of the festival appears to be
unlikely in view of the fact that the Hindus have an All Fools' Day of
their own, the Huli Festival, on almost exactly the same date. One may
take it that it was in origin simply a great natural holiday, on which
men enjoyed the license of lying as they enjoy the license of drinking
on a Bank Holiday. There is no other sport for which humanity would be
more likely to desire the occasional sanction of Church and State than
the sport of making fools of our neighbours. We must have fools if we
cannot have heroes. Some people, who are enthusiasts for destruction,
indeed, would give us fools and knaves in the place of our heroes, and
have even an idea that they would be serving some moral end in doing
so. It is on an iconoclastic eagerness of one kind or another that
nearly all hoaxing and practical joking is based. It consists chiefly
in taking somebody down a peg. The boy who used to shout "Wolf!",
however, may have been merely an excessively artistic youth who
enjoyed watching the varied expressions on the faces of the sweating
and disillusioned passersby who ran to his assistance. Obviously, a
man's face is a dozen times more interesting to look at when it is
crimson with frustrate virtue than when it is placid with thoughts of
the price of pigs.
This is not to justify the morality of hoaxing. It is to explain it as
an art for art's sake. Murder can, and has, been defended on the same
grounds. It is to be feared, however, that few hoaxers or murderers
can be named who pursued their hobby in the disinterested spirit of
artists. In most cases there is some motive of cruelty or dislike. One
would not go to the trouble of murdering and hoaxing people if it did
not hurt or vex somebody or other. Those who invent hoaxes are first
cousins of the boy who ties kettles or lighted torches to cats' tails.
It is the terror of the cat that amuses him. If the cat purred as the
instruments of torture were fitted on to it the boy would feel that he
had serious cause for complaint. There is, no doubt, a great deal of
the cruelty of boys which is experimental rather than malicious--the
practice of blowing up frogs, for instance. But, for the most part,
it must be admitted, a spice of cruelty is counted a gain in human
amusements. This is called thoughtlessness in boys, but it is a
deliberate enthusiasm in primitive man, out of which we have to be
slowly civilised. There is probably no more popular game with the
infancy of the streets than covering a brick with an old hat in the
hope that some glorious fool will come along who will kick hat and
brick together, and go limping and swearing on his way. One might
easily produce a host of similar instances of the humour of the small
boy who looks so like an angel and behaves so like a devil. There are,
it may be, thousands of small boys who never perpetrated an act of
such cheerful malice in their lives. But even they have usually some
other outlet for their comic cruelty. The half of comic literature
depends upon someone's getting cudgelled or ducked in a well, or
subjected to some pain. It is one of the paradoxes of comedy, indeed,
that, even when we like the hero of it, we also like to see him hurt
and humiliated. We are glad when Don Quixote is beaten to a jelly, and
when his teeth are knocked down his throat. We rejoice at every
discomfort that befalls poor Parson Adams. Humour, even when it
reaches the pitch of genius, has still about it much of the elemental
cruelty of the boy who arranges a pin upon the point of which his
friend may sit down, or who pulls away a chair and sends someone
sprawling.
Hoaxes, at the best, spring from a desire to harry one's neighbour. As
a rule, refined men and women have by this time given up the ambition
to cause others physical pain, but one still hears of milder
annoyances being practised with considerable spirit. It was Theodore
Hook, I believe, who originated the practice of hoaxing tradesmen into
delivering long caravans of goods at some house or other, to the fury
of the householder and the disturbance of traffic. Every now and then
the jest is still revived, whereupon everybody condemns it and--laughs
at it. That is one of the oddest facts about the hoax as a form of
humour. No one has a good word to say for it, and yet everyone who
tells you the story of a hoax tells it with a chuckle. Some years ago
a young gentleman from one of the Universities palmed himself off on
an admiral--was it not?--as the Sultan of Zanzibar, and was
entertained as such by the officers on board one of King George's
ships. Everybody frowned at the young gentleman's taste, but nobody
outside the Navy failed to enjoy the hoax as the best item of the
day's news. Similarly, the Koepenick affair set not only all Germany
but all Europe laughing. Skill and audacity always delight us for
their own sakes; when it is rogueries that are skilful and audacious,
they shock us into malicious appreciation. They are adventures
standing on their heads. It is difficult not to forgive a clever
impostor so long as it is not we on whom he has imposed.
As for the Hegesippe hoax, it may be that there is even an ethical
element in our pleasure. Such a hoax as this is a pin stuck in
pretentiousness. If it is an imposture, it is an imposture on
impostors. One feels that it is good that members of Parliament should
be exposed from time to time. Otherwise they might become puffed up.
Still, there remains a very good reason why we should oppose a
disapproving front to hoaxes of all sorts. We ourselves may be the
next victims. Most of us have a Hegesippe Simon in our cupboards.
Whether in literature, history, or politics, the human animal is much
given to pretending to knowledge that he does not possess. There are
some men whom one could inveigle quite easily into a discussion on
plays of Shakespeare and Euripides which were never written. I
remember how one evening two students concocted a poem beginning with
the drivelling line, "I stood upon the rolling of the years," and
foisted it on a noisy admirer of Keats as a work of the master.
Similarly, in political arguments, one has known a man to invent
sayings of Gladstone and Chamberlain without being challenged. This
is, of course, not amusing in itself. It becomes amusing only when the
other disputants, instead of confessing their ignorance, make a
pretence of being acquainted with the invented quotations. It is our
dread of appearing ignorant that leads us into the enactment of this
kind of lies. We will go to any extreme rather than confess that we
have never even heard of Hegesippe Simon. Luckily, Hegesippe Simon
happens to be a person who can trip our pretentiousness up. But the
senators and deputies who were willing to celebrate the precursor's
centenary were probably not humbugs to any greater degree than if they
had consented to celebrate the anniversary of Diderot or Rousseau or
Alfred de Musset. It is utter imposture, this practice of doing honour
to great names which mean less to one than a lump of sugar; and if an
end could be put to centenary celebrations in all countries, no great
harm would be done to public honesty. On the other hand, most public
rejoicings over men of genius would be exceedingly small if all the
speeches and applause had to come from the heart without any addition
from those who merely like to be in the latest movement. Perhaps the
adherents of Hegesippe Simon are necessary in order to make it
profitable to be a man of genius at all. They are not only a useful
claque, but they pay. That is why even if William Shakespeare, Anatole
France, and Bergson are only other and better known names for
Hegesippe, it would be madness to destroy such enthusiasm as has
gathered round them. M. Berault, by his light-hearted hoax on his
political opponents, has struck at the very roots of popular homage to
men of genius.
XXIV
ANATOLE FRANCE
There does not at first glance seem to be any great similarity between
Mr Thomas Hardy and M. Anatole France, the latter of whom has come to
London to see how enthusiastically Englishmen can dine when they wish
to express their feelings about literature. Yet both writers are
extraordinarily alike. Each of them is an incarnation of the spirit of
pity, of the spirit of irony. Mr Hardy may have more pity than irony
and Anatole France may have more irony than pity. I might put it
another way and say that Mr Hardy has the tragic spirit of pity while
Anatole France has the comic spirit of pity. But each of them is, in
his own way, the last word of the nineteenth century on the
universe--the century that extinguished the noon of faith and gave us
the little star of pity to light up the darkness instead. Each of them
is, therefore, a pessimist--Mr Hardy typically British, Anatole France
typically French, in his distress. It is as though Mr Hardy spoke out
of a rain-cloud; Anatole France out of a cloud of irresponsible
lightnings. There, perhaps, you have an eternal symbol of the
difference between the Englishman, who takes his irreligion as
seriously as his religion, and the Frenchman, who takes his irreligion
as smilingly as his _aperitif_.
It is just because he sums up the end of the nineteenth century so
well that Anatole France is already in some quarters a declining
fashion. He is the victim of a reaction against his century, not of a
reaction against his style. He is the last of the true mockers: the
twentieth century demands that even its mockers shall be partisans of
the coming race. Anatole France does not believe in the coming race.
He is willing to join a society for bringing it into existence--he is
even a Socialist--but his vision of the world shows him no prospect of
Utopias. He is as sure as the writer of _Ecclesiastes_ that every
blessed--or, rather, cursed--thing is going to happen over and over
again. Life is mainly a procession of absurdities in which lovers and
theologians and philosophers and collectors of bric-a-brac are the
most amusing figures. It is one of the happy paradoxes of human
conduct that, in spite of this vision of futilities, Anatole France
came forward at the Dreyfus crisis as a man of action, a man who
believed that the procession of absurdities could be diverted into a
juster road. "Suddenly," as Brandes has said, "he stripped himself of
all his scepticism and stood forth, with Voltaire's old blade gleaming
in his hand--like Voltaire irresistible by reason of his wit, like him
the terrible enemy of the Church, like him the champion of innocence.
But, taking a step in advance of Voltaire, France proclaimed himself
the friend of the poor in the great political struggle." He even did
his best to become a mob-orator for his faith. Since that time he has
given his name willingly to the cause of every oppressed class and
nation. It is as though he had no hope and only an intermittent spark
of faith; but his heart is full of charity.
That somewhere or other a preacher lay hidden in Anatole France might
have all along been suspected by observant readers of his works. He is
a born fabulist. He drifts readily into fable in everything he writes.
And, if his fables do not always walk straight to their moral in their
Sunday clothes, that is not because he is not a very earnest moralist
at heart, but because his wit and humour continually entice him down
by-paths. It is sometimes as though he set out to serve morality and
ended by telling an indecent story--as though he knelt down to pray
and found himself addressing God in a series of blasphemies. This is
the contradiction in his nature which makes him so ineffectual as a
propagandist, so effectual as an artist. Ineffectual, one ought to
say, perhaps, not as a propagandist so much as a partisan. For he does
propagate with the most infectious charm his view of the animal called
man, and the need for being tender and not too serious in dealing with
him. If he has not preached the brotherhood of man with the missionary
fervour of the idealists, he has at least, in accordance with an
idealism of his own, preached a brotherhood of the beasts. He never
lets himself savagely loose upon his brother-beasts as Swift does.
Even in _Penguin Island_, with all its bitterness, he shakes his head
rather than his stick at the vicious kennels of men. The truth is,
Epicureanism is in his blood. If he could, he would watch the stream
of circumstance, as it went by, with the appreciative indifference of
the gods. It is only the preacher in his heart that prevents this.
Like his own Abbe Coignard, he shares his loyalty between Epicurus and
Christ. Henley once described Stevenson as something of the
sensualist, and something of the Shorter Catechist. Translated into
French, that might serve as a character-sketch of Anatole France.
Originality has been denied to him in some quarters, but, it seems to
me, unjustly. One may find something very like this or that aspect of
him in Sterne, or Voltaire, or Heine. But in none of them does one
find the complete Anatole France, ironist, fabulist, critic,
theologian, artist, connoisseur, politician, philosopher, and creator
of character. As artist, he is at many points comparable to Sterne. He
has the same sentimental background to his wit, the same tenderness in
his ridicule, the same incapacity for keeping his jests from
scrambling about the very altar, the same almost Christian sensuality.
Sterne, of course, is the more innocent writer, because his intellect
was not nearly so covetous of experience. Sterne, though in his
humanitarianism he occasionally stood in a pulpit above his time, was
content for the most part to work as an artist. He could do all the
preaching he wanted on Sundays. On week-days my Uncle Toby and
Corporal Trim were the only minor prophets he troubled about. Anatole
France, on the other hand, is not a preacher by trade. He has no
safety-valve of that kind for his moralisings. The consequence is that
he has again and again felt himself compelled to ease his mind by
adopting the part of the lay preacher we call the journalist. He is in
much of his work a Sterne turned journalist--a Sterne flashingly
interested in leaving the world better than he found it and other
things that grieve the artistic. He might even be described as the
greatest living journalist. The Bergeret series of novels are, apart
from their artistic excellence, the most supremely delightful examples
of modern European journalism. Similarly, when he turned for a too
brief space to literary criticism, he proved himself the master of all
living men in the art of the literary causerie. The four volumes of
_La Vie Litteraire_ will, I imagine, survive all but a few of the
literary essays of the nineteenth century. They are in a sense only
trifles, but what irresistible trifles!
But no criticism would be just which stopped short at the assertion
that Anatole France is to some extent a journalist. So was Dickens for
that matter, and so, no doubt, was Shakespeare. It is much more
important to emphasise the fact that Anatole France is an artist--that
he stands at the head of the artists of Europe, indeed, since Tolstoi
died. His novels are not the issue of an impartial love of form, like
Flaubert's. They are as freakish as the author's personality; they
tell only the most interrupted of stories. They might be said in many
cases to introduce the Montaigne method into fiction. They are essays
portraying a personality rather than novels on a conventional model.
They may have a setting amid early Christianity or early Mediaevalism;
they may disguise themselves as realism or as fairy tales; but the
secret passion of them all is the self-revelation of the author--the
portraiture of the last of the mockers as he surveys this mouldy world
of churches and courtesans. This portrait peeps round the corner at us
in nearly every sentence. "Milesian romancers!" cried M. Bergeret. "O
shrewd Petronius! O Noel du Fail! O forerunners of Jean de la
Fontaine! What apostle was wiser or better than you, who are commonly
called good-for-nothing rascals? O benefactors of humanity! You have
taught us the true science of life, the kindly scorn of the human
race!" There, by implication, you have the ideal portrait of Anatole
France himself--the summary of his temper. The kindly scorn of the
human race is the basis upon which the Francian Decalogue will be
founded. In _Penguin Island_ the scorn at times ceases to be entirely
kindly. It ceases even to be scorn. It becomes utter despair. But in
_Thais_, in _Sur la Pierre Blanche_, in _Le Mannequin d'Osier_, with
what a comprehending sympathy he despises the human race! How amiably
he impales the little creatures, too, and lectures us on the humours
of amorousness and quarrelsomeness and heroism in the insect world!
Even the French Revolution he sees in _Les Dieux Ont Soif_ as a
scuffle of insects to be regarded with amusement rather than amazement
by the philosopher among his cardboard toys. Not really amusement, of
course, but pity disguised as amusement--the pity, too, not of a
philosopher in a garden, but of a philosopher always curiously
hesitating between the garden and the street.
XXV
THE SEA