people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most
horrible is the worship of the god within. Anyone who knows anybody
knows how it would work; anyone who knows anyone from the Higher
Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god
within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.
Let Jones worship the sun or moon--anything rather than the Inner
Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in
his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world,
firstly, in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to
look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and
enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being
a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but
definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the
moon, terrible as an army with banners.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
JULY 13th
The slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same grey mist
as draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. But to the man he
is supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference
between the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle-class man
between a late night at the office and a supper at Pagani's.
_'Heretics.'_
JULY 14th _THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE_
The destruction of the Bastille was not a reform: it was something more
important than a reform. It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a
stone image. The people saw the building like a giant looking at them
with a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved face. For
of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called Materialism
can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive is that of the big
building. Man feels like a fly, an accident in the thing he has himself
made. It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man
made this confounding thing and man could unmake it. Therefore the
mere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a
huge public building has a spiritual, and a ritual, meaning far beyond
its immediate political results. It is a religious service. If, for
instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous enough to capture
and smash up the Bank of England you might argue for ever about the
inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the root of the
economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would never forget
it. It would change the world.
_'Tremendous Trifles.'_
JULY 15th _ST. SWITHIN'S DAY_
Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called
weather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English
landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English)
have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere
of their pictures: it is the subject of their pictures. They paint
portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather
posed for Turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English
painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering
and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and
terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight, fills the
whole canvas and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look
more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a dark
background, and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against
a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange
about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in
the grim garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high
light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue
flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the
red daisies are really the lost-red eyes of day, and the sun-flower
is the vice-regent of the sun. Lastly, there is this value about the
colour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed
and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife
and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on
the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue,
or blanching into white or breaking into green or gold. So we may be
perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself;
and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads
perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.
_'Daily News.'_
JULY 16th
It is true that all sensible women think all studious men mad. It is
true, for the matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of
any kind mad. But they do not put it in telegrams any more than they
wire to you that grass is green or God all-merciful. These things are
truisms and often private ones at that.
_'The Club of Queer Trades.'_
JULY 17th
You may come to think a blow bad because it humiliates. You may come to
think murder wrong because it is violent, and not because it is unjust.
_'The Ball and the Cross.'_
JULY 18th _THACKERAY BORN_
In all things his great spirit had the grandeur and the weakness which
belonged to the England of his time--an England splendidly secure and
free, and yet (perhaps for that reason) provincial and innocent. He had
nothing of the doctrinal quality of the French and Germans. He was not
one who made up his mind, but one who let his mind make him up. He lay
naturally open to all noble influences flowing around him; but he never
bestirred himself to seek those that were not flowing or that flowed
in opposite directions. Thus, for instance, he really loved liberty,
as only a novelist can love it, a man mainly occupied with the variety
and vivacity of men. But he could not see the cause of liberty except
where the Victorian English saw it; he could not see it in the cause of
Irish liberty (which was exactly like the cause of Polish or Italian
liberty, except that it was led by much more religious and responsible
men), and he made the Irish characters the object of much innocent and
rather lumbering satire. But this was not his mistake, but the mistake
of the atmosphere, and he was a sublime emotional Englishman, who lived
by atmosphere. He was a great sensitive. The comparison between him
and Dickens is commonly as clumsy and unreasonable as a comparison
between Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade or Bulwer Lytton and Anthony
Trollope. But the comparison really has this element of actuality: that
Dickens was above all things creative; Thackeray was above all things
receptive. There is no sense in talking about truth in the matter:
both are modes of truth. If you like to put it so: the world imposed
on Thackeray, and Dickens imposed on the world. But it could be put
more truly by saying that Thackeray represents, in that gigantic parody
called genius, the spirit of the Englishman in repose. This spirit is
the idle embodiment of all of us; by his weaknesses we shall fail and
by his enormous sanities we shall endure.
_Introduction to 'Thackeray.'_
JULY 19th
The Marchioness really has all the characteristics, the entirely
heroic characteristics, which make a woman respected by a man. She is
female--that is, she is at once incurably candid and incurably loyal,
she is full of terrible common sense, she expects little pleasure
for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it; above all, she is
physically timid and yet she can face anything.
_Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_
JULY 20th
Democracy in its human sense is not arbitrament by the majority; it
is not even arbitrament by everybody. It can be more nearly defined
as arbitrament by anybody: I mean that it rests on that club-habit of
taking a total stranger for granted, of assuming certain things to be
inevitably common to yourself and him. Only the things that anybody may
be presumed to hold have the full authority of democracy. Look out of
the window and notice the first man who walks by. The Liberals may have
swept England with an overwhelming majority; but you would not stake a
button that the man is a Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools
and respected in all law courts; but you would not bet a straw that he
believes in the Bible. But you would bet your week's wages, let us say,
that he believes in wearing clothes. You would bet that he believes
that physical courage is a fine thing, or that parents have authority
over children. Of course, he might be the millioneth man who does not
believe these things; if it comes to that, he might be the Bearded Lady
dressed up as a man. But these prodigies are quite a different thing
from any mere calculation of numbers. People who hold these views are
not a minority, but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that
have full democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody:
what you would observe before any new-comer in a tavern--that is the
real English law. The first man you see from the window, he is the King
of England.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
JULY 21st
Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever
Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome.
Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of
civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
_'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_
JULY 22nd
It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic
state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If
we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with
us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, 'What laws
shall we make?' In a purely democratic state it would be always saying,
'What laws can we obey?'
_'Heretics.'_
JULY 23rd
No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic
cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition
exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is
that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian
saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint always has
a very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed
with sleep. The medieval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones,
but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community
of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that.
Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure
creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite
extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness
inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
JULY 24th
Novels and newspapers still talk of the English aristocracy that came
over with William the Conqueror. Little of our effective oligarchy is
as old as the Reformation; and none of it came over with William the
Conqueror. Some of the older English landlords came over with William
of Orange; the rest have come over by ordinary alien immigration.
_'George Bernard Shaw.'_
JULY 25th
It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should
have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of
marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
JULY 26th
Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and
all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church
seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church
seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with
kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was
because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The
Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond
the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last
summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.
_'The Ball and the Cross.'_
JULY 27th
The best men of the Revolution were simply common men at their best.
This is why our age can never understand Napoleon. Because he was
something great and triumphant, we suppose that he must have been
something extraordinary, something inhuman. Some say he was the Devil;
some say he was the Superman. Was he a very, very bad man? Was he a
good man with some greater moral code? We strive in vain to invent the
mysteries behind that immortal mask of brass. The modern world with all
its subtleness will never guess his strange secret; for his strange
secret was that he was very like other people.
'_Charles Dickens._'
JULY 28th
The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men
began to use the word 'spiritual' as the same as the word 'good.' They
thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in
virtue. When scientific evolution was announced, some feared that
it would encourage mere animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere
spirituality. It taught men to think that so long as they were passing
from the ape they were going. But you can pass from the ape and go to
the devil.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
JULY 29th
One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood
which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep
in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just
uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have
by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a
certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having
missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom,
but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
_'Robert Browning.'_
JULY 30th
The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define,
the authority even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark
defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more
supernatural than all the authority of a man to think. We know now
that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear
scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the
same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
JULY 31st
The party system in England is an enormous and most efficient machine
for preventing political conflicts.
_'George Bernard Shaw.'_
AUGUST
AUGUST 1st
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have
time to preach his own heresy.
_'George Bernard Shaw.'_
AUGUST 2nd
Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next
generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one
set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching
the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It
is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason
is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that
our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely
a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, 'Why
should anything go right; even observation or deduction? Why should not
good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in
the brain of a bewildered ape?' The young sceptic says, 'I have a right
to think for myself.' But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says,
'I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.'
_'Orthodoxy.'_
AUGUST 3rd
Even among liars there are two classes, one immeasurably better than
another. The honest liar is the man who tells the truth about his old
lies; who says on Wednesday, 'I told a magnificent lie on Monday.' He
keeps the truth in circulation; no one version of things stagnates in
him and becomes an evil secret. He does not have to live with old lies;
a horrible domesticity.
_Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_
AUGUST 4th
The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for
an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget
the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see, if we shut
our eyes, are not the scenes we have stared at under the direction
of guide-books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not
look at all--the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about
something else--about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow.
We can see the background now because we did not see it then.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
AUGUST 5th
THE keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer should
give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis or boiled
elephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his head
in his hands, plunged in arithmetical calculations about how much food
there can be on the premises.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
AUGUST 6th _TRANSFIGURATION_
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret
of the Christian. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels
towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the
thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural,
almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing
their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly
on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His
native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial
diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained
His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple and
asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Yet He
restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that
shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was
something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.
There was something that He covered by abrupt silence or impetuous
isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show
us when He walked upon our earth, and I have sometimes fancied that it
was His mirth.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
AUGUST 7th
Imperialism is foreign, Socialism is foreign, Militarism is foreign,
Education is foreign, strictly even Liberalism is foreign. But
Radicalism was our own; as English as the hedge-rows.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
AUGUST 8th
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a flower that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young!
They twisted even decent sins to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us.
Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as we,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley, all jangled and absurd,
When all church bells were silent, our cap and bells were heard.
_'The Man who was Thursday.'_
AUGUST 9th
In practice no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of
physical inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used
except for special modern purposes--such as the endowment of research
or the oppression of the poor.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
AUGUST 10th _THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY_
We, the modern English, cannot easily understand the French Revolution,
because we cannot easily understand the idea of a bloody battle
for pure common sense; we cannot understand common sense in arms
and conquering. The French feeling--the feeling at the back of the
Revolution--was that the more sensible a man was, the more you must
look out for slaughter.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
AUGUST 11th
Tom Jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is
walking about the streets; we meet him every day. We meet with him, we
drink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him.
The only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage
to write about him. We split up the supreme and central human being,
Tom Jones, into a number of separate aspects. We let Mr. J. M. Barrie
write about him in his good moments, and make him out better than he
is. We let Zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out
much worse than he is. We let Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of
spiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard
Kipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far
more cowardly. We let obscene writers write about the obscenities of
this ordinary man. We let puritan writers write about the purities of
this ordinary man. We look through one peephole that makes men out as
devils, and we call it the New Art. We look through another peephole
that makes men out as angels, and we call it the New Theology. But if
we pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over
some old mildewed leaves, and if in that obscurity and decay we find
some faint traces of a tale about a complete man--such a man as is
walking on the pavement outside--we suddenly pull a long face, and we
call it the coarse morals of a bygone age.
_'All Things Considered.'_
AUGUST 12th
Self is the Gorgon. Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and
lives. Pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone.
_'Heretics.'_
AUGUST 13th
You complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity;
it did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of
virginity; the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up
an ideal of virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism?
Your quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism
has achieved an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece
of floating poetry. But if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats,
running about in a street in London, choose to differ as to the ideal
itself, not only from the Church, but from the Parthenon whose name
means virginity, from the Roman Empire which went outwards from the
virgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of Europe, from the
lion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them,
and who make up together the bearers of your own national shield, from
the most living and lawless of your own poets, from Massinger, who
wrote the 'Virgin Martyr,' from Shakespeare, who wrote 'Measure for
Measure'--if you in Fleet Street differ from all this human experience,
does it never strike you that it may be Fleet Street that is wrong?
_'The Ball and the Cross.'_
AUGUST 14th
It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt
(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring shy people out. For every
practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of
a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party
it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if
possible without bodily violence.
_'Tremendous Trifles.'_
AUGUST 15th _THE ASSUMPTION_
One instant in a still light
He saw Our Lady, then
Her dress was soft as western sky,
And she was a queen most womanly,
But she was a queen of men.
And over the iron forest
He saw Our Lady stand,
Her eyes were sad withouten art
And seven swords were in her heart,
But one was in her hand.
_'Ballad of Alfred.'_
AUGUST 16th
I am not prepared to admit that there is, or can be, properly speaking,
in the world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual
beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable and that
they should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root
of every conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and
not in a cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea
as the ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet
or any similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all
men partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine
nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so.
_'Robert Browning.'_
AUGUST 17th
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings
alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific
civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will
laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
_'Heretics.'_
AUGUST 18th
All I have to urge is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and that I
dislike Socialism because it will (according to Socialists) be so like
that shop. It is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not object to
Socialism, because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it
will leave it so horribly the same.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
AUGUST 19th