in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge
behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more
heavy because it is trifling, colourless, and of small import to the
soul, then, as I say, I give it up: I do not know what the word means.
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area--deciding sales, banquets,
labours, and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area--providing
toys, boots, sheets, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain
area--teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene: I can understand
how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could
narrow it.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
MAY 3rd
Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the Kingdom, it is lawful
also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore the
Kingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the trees.
It is lawful to pray, 'Thine anger come on earth as it is in Heaven.'
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
MAY 4th
Happy is he and more than wise
Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
This world through all the grey disguise
Of sleep and custom in between.
Yes; we may pass the heavenly screen,
But shall we know when we are there?
Who know not what these dead stones mean,
The lovely city of Lierre.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
MAY 5th
Anomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract
illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm:
and this for a reason that anyone at all acquainted with human nature
can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind: and anomalies
accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had
by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea
to nod his head three times before he got out of bed: the practical
politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly, that it
was not a grievance. It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me
no good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit
to it; but the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for
all that. If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years, I could
cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater
ease; for there would have permanently sunk into every man's mind the
notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and
irrational power. They would have grown accustomed to insanity.
'_All Things Considered._'
MAY 6th
Ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least
genuine: they are about something. They are about patriotism, about
religion, or about money: the three great realities. In other words,
they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in, or with what
universe a man lives in, or how he is to manage to live in either. But
they are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins in the same
governing class shall be allowed to bring in the same Parish Councils
Bill.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
MAY 7th
Maeterlinck is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual
tremors as Messrs. Crosse & Blackwell are in filling a man with jam.
But it all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery,
being a modern sceptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I,
being an orthodox Christian, prefer the jam.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
MAY 8th
The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave
because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the
flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we
should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or
too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its
gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving
it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic
thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot.
Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic
patriot.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MAY 9th
It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an
institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not
natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which
you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or
obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half
a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so
much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it
is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it,
is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment,
but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It
is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but once
admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but
philosophy, ethics, and finally, poetry.
'_Browning._'
MAY 10th
Whatever makes men feel old is mean--an empire or a skin-flint shop.
Whatever makes men feel young is great--a great war or a love-story.
And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that
is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions
and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that
startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is
no sceptic who does not feel that men have doubted before. There is
no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are
ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his
neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do
the old things are fed by Nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who
is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. No woman who
has a child thinks there have been such things as children. No people
that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken
empires.
'_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'
MAY 11th
Most of us have suffered from a certain sort of lady who, by her
perverse unselfishness, gives more trouble than the selfish; who almost
clamours for the unpopular dish and scrambles for the worst seat. Most
of us have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of
self-effacement.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
MAY 12th
It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the
crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs
away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's
knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious
literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently
accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be
expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I
had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to
the influence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest
entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the
minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the
community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.
'_The Defendant._'
MAY 13th
Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit: they
are never worshippers of Force. Soldiers more than any other men are
taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact
is obvious: the might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or
what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They
learn to obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons
on a coat, a title, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may
be unreasonable things; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but
they are not weak things. They are not Force, and they do not look
like Force. They are parts of an idea, of the idea of discipline; if
you will, of the idea of tyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could
possibly say that his own bayonets were his authority. No soldier
could possibly say that he came in the name of his own bayonets. It
would be as absurd as if a postman said that he came inside his bag.
I do not, as I have said, underrate the evils that really do arise
from militarism and the military ethic. It tends to give people wooden
faces and sometimes wooden heads. It tends, moreover (both through its
specialization and through its constant obedience), to a certain loss
of real independence and strength of character. This has almost always
been found when people made the mistake of turning the soldier into a
statesman, under the mistaken impression that he was a strong man. The
Duke of Wellington, for instance, was a strong soldier and therefore
a weak statesman. But the soldier is always, by the nature of things,
loyal to something. And as long as one is loyal to something one can
never be a worshipper of mere force. For mere force, violence in the
abstract, is the enemy of anything we love. To love anything is to see
it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in
misfortune; and when a soldier has accepted any nation's uniform he has
already accepted its defeat.
'_All Things Considered._'
MAY 14th
Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals
is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike
faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about
the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the
General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere
mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision
is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much
as I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of
innocence when I believed in Liberals.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MAY 15th
Distribute the dignified people and the capable people and the highly
business-like people among all the situations which their ambition or
their innate corruption may demand, but keep close to your heart, keep
deep in your inner councils the absurd people; let the clever people
pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise
you, but let the fools alone influence you; let the laughable people
whose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really
inside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your
lonely march towards the last impossibility.
_Introduction to 'David Copperfield.'_
MAY 16th
Philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the
more awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable,
from 'A child is born' to 'A soul is damned.' If the ordinary man may
not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
MAY 17th
Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MAY 18th _GEORGE MEREDITH DIED_
The trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out into
deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening
was so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all
to itself. I went along that road according to directions that had
been given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling, beyond which
the wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious
courtesy and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from
him upon the valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of
that quality which the old English called 'faerie'; it is the quality
which those can never understand who think of the past as merely
brutal; it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees. I went
through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table, looking
smallish in his big chair. He was already an invalid, and his hair and
beard were both white; not like snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but
like something feathery, or even fierce; rather they were white like
white thistledown. I came up quite close to him; he looked at me as
he put out his frail hand, and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were
startlingly young. He was the one great man of the old world whom I
have met who was not a mere statue over his own grave.
He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about the
books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked
about the books he had not written. He unrolled a purple bundle of
romances which he had never had time to sell. He asked me to write
one of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he
had been talking to the milkman. It was a splendid and frantic story,
a sort of astronomical farce. It was all about a man who was rushing
up to the Royal Society with the only possible way of avoiding an
earth-destroying comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand,
the man was tripped up at every other minute by his own weaknesses
and vanities; how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for
brawling. That is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more.
Another, I dimly remember, was a version of the fall of Parnell; the
idea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love of
secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went out of that garden with a
blurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature.
The feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood is
a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere. I
really had the feeling that I had seen the creative quality; which is
supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls the Old Man of the Forest: I
had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind my path; I have never seen
him again; and now I shall not see him, because he died last Tuesday.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
MAY 19th _GLADSTONE DIED_
Lift up your heads: in life, in death,
God knoweth his head was high;
Quit we the coward's broken breath
Who watched a strong man die.
Oh, young ones of a darker day,
In Art's wan colours clad,
Whose very love and hate are grey--
Whose very sin is sad,
Pass on; one agony long drawn
Was merrier than your mirth,
When hand-in-hand came death and dawn
And spring was on the earth.
'_To Them that Mourn._'
MAY 20th
If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to
take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught
at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels
and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed.
Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their
idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of
the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively
criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the
high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room
tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in
Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or
suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are
our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost
unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter boys for their immorality
at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German
professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that
we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we
canvass the proposition that all property is theft.... At the very
instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life,
we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.
'_The Defendant._'
MAY 21st
The English nation will still be going the way of all European nations
when the Anglo-Saxon race has gone the way of all fads.
'_Heretics._'
MAY 22nd
The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain
kind of literature, and likes that kind even when it is bad better
than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this
unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as
real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who
can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as
irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak, warm coffee a
really superior sort of ice.
'_Charles Dickens._'
MAY 23rd
To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining
shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone.
This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and
futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect
creed of predestination, were turned to stone; the modern sociological
scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The
only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists
somewhat amusing, statues.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
MAY 24th _EMPIRE DAY_
I for one should be sincerely glad if we could have a national
celebration, remembering our real achievements and reminding ourselves
of our real work in the world. Only for any such national celebration
I should suggest two conditions: first, that our national celebration
should be invented by our nation and not by another nation. And
secondly, that it should be forced by the people on the newspaper
proprietors, and not by the newspaper proprietors on the people.
'_Illustrated London News._'
MAY 25th
There is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them.
'_Alarms and Discursions._'
MAY 26th _ST. AUGUSTINE OF ENGLAND'S DAY_
If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have
followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged
(and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new
barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old
society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who
were forgetting how to make an arch, and she taught them to invent the
Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the
Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that
the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was
the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MAY 27th
One Sun is splendid: six Suns would be only vulgar. One Tower of Giotto
is sublime: a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white
posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry
of nature, in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love, in following
the single woman; the poetry of religion, in worshipping the single
star.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
MAY 28th
Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales--because they
find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should
think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring
him.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MAY 29th _THE RESTORATION_
It is a commonplace that the Restoration Movement can only be
understood when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it
is insufficiently realized that the tyranny which half frustrated
all the good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was
not the fire of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy
of restraint, which passed away: that still burns in the heart of
England, only to be quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is
seldom remembered that the Puritans were in their day emphatically
intellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on the logical
necessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the
chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, through the damning fact that
they had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a
satisfactory explanation can never satisfy.
'_Twelve Types._'
MAY 30th _BLESSED JOAN OF ARC_
Joan of Arc was not stuck at the Cross Roads either by rejecting all
the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She
chose a path and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I come
to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or
Nietzsche--all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of
all that is noble in Tolstoy: the pleasure in plain things, especially
in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the
poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that, and
with this great addition: that she endured poverty while she admired
it, whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out
its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and
pathetic in poor Nietzsche and his mutiny against the emptiness and
timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium
of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms.
Well, Joan of Arc had all that; and, again, with this difference, that
she did not praise fighting, but fought. We _know_ that she was not
afraid of an army, while Nietzsche for all we know was afraid of a
cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche
only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at
their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more
violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who
did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MAY 31st
Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining
the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted
to trained men. If it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks
men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that
I felt in the jury-box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the
solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its
specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious,
it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing
was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
JUNE
JUNE 1st
The great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres and a
cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary
grounds. They will deny him the three acres on grounds of State
Ownership. They will forbid him the cow on grounds of humanitarianism.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
JUNE 2nd
Life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
JUNE 3rd
I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me, in her grand green
drawing-room, whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and
why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer:
'Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade, you
would turn me out of the house.'
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
JUNE 4th
Every man of us to-day is three men. There is in every modern European
three powers so distinct as to be almost personal--the trinity of
our earthly destiny. The three may be rudely summarized thus: First
and nearest to us is the Christian, the man of the historic Church,
of the creed that must have coloured our minds incurably whether we
regard it as the crown and combination of the other two, or whether
we regard it as an accidental superstition which has remained for two
thousand years. First, then, comes the Christian; behind him comes
the Roman--the citizen of that great cosmopolitan realm of reason and
order, in the level and equality of which Christianity arose. He is the
Stoic who is so much sterner than the Ancorites. He is the Republican
who is so much prouder than kings. It is he that makes straight roads
and clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. And the third
man: he has no name, and all true tales of him are blotted out; yet he
walks behind us in every forest path and wakes within us when the wind
wakes at night. He is the origins--he is the man in the forest.
'_William Blake._'
JUNE 5th
The right and proper thing, of course, is that every good patriot
should stop at home and curse his own country. So long as that is being
done everywhere, we may be sure that things are fairly happy, and being
kept up to a reasonably high standard. So long as we are discontented
separately we may be well content as a whole.
'_Illustrated London News._'
JUNE 6th