It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace.
Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering
and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to
everybody, can stop one’s heart with the very thought of them. But while
this is granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely true
that these universal things are strange; it is moreover true that they
are subtle. In the last analysis most common things will be found to
be highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the
difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they will
call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct
of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of
describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That
there is a strong physical element in both romance and the Memento
Mori makes them if possible more baffling than if they had been wholly
intellectual. No man could say exactly how much his sexuality was
colored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere boyish itch for
irrevocable adventures, like running away to sea. No man could say how
far his animal dread of the end was mixed up with mystical traditions
touching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things are
animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties
begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part and
go home to their tea.
It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore
it is not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-room
song of my youth which began “In the gloaming, O, my darling,” was
vulgar enough as a song; but the connection between human passion and
the twilight is none the less an exquisite and even inscrutable thing.
Or to take another obvious instance: the jokes about a mother-in-law
are scarcely delicate, but the problem of a mother-in-law is extremely
delicate. A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the
twilight. She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things--law and a
mother. The caricatures misrepresent her; but they arise out of a real
human enigma. “Comic Cuts” deals with the difficulty wrongly, but it
would need George Meredith at his best to deal with the difficulty
rightly. The nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this: it is not
that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.
But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have
all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument,
the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it “the very
nadir and scoff of good conversationalists.” Now there are very deep
reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well
as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. First of
all it is a gesture of primeval worship. The sky must be invoked; and
to begin everything with the weather is a sort of pagan way of beginning
everything with prayer. Jones and Brown talk about the weather: but so
do Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary idea
in politeness--equality. For the very word politeness is only the Greek
for citizenship. The word politeness is akin to the word policeman: a
charming thought. Properly understood, the citizen should be more polite
than the gentleman; perhaps the policeman should be the most courtly and
elegant of the three. But all good manners must obviously begin with
the sharing of something in a simple style. Two men should share an
umbrella; if they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share
the rain, with all its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy.
“For He maketh His sun to shine....” This is the second element in the
weather; its recognition of human equality in that we all have our hats
under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the universe. Arising out of
this is the third wholesome strain in the custom; I mean that it begins
with the body and with our inevitable bodily brotherhood. All true
friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of
rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are
already prigs and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each human soul has
in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation.
Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.
Briefly, in the mere observation “a fine day” there is the whole great
human idea of comradeship. Now, pure comradeship is another of those
broad and yet bewildering things. We all enjoy it; yet when we come to
talk about it we almost always talk nonsense, chiefly because we suppose
it to be a simpler affair than it is. It is simple to conduct; but it is
by no means simple to analyze. Comradeship is at the most only one half
of human life; the other half is Love, a thing so different that one
might fancy it had been made for another universe. And I do not mean
mere sex love; any kind of concentrated passion, maternal love, or
even the fiercer kinds of friendship are in their nature alien to pure
comradeship. Both sides are essential to life; and both are known in
differing degrees to everybody of every age or sex. But very broadly
speaking it may still be said that women stand for the dignity of love
and men for the dignity of comradeship. I mean that the institution
would hardly be expected if the males of the tribe did not mount guard
over it. The affections in which women excel have so much more authority
and intensity that pure comradeship would be washed away if it were not
rallied and guarded in clubs, corps, colleges, banquets and regiments.
Most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband
not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love,
seeking to destroy Comradeship.
All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have
remarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has
a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we are
all under the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the
“winged rock” of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bond
as the essential one; for comradeship is simply humanity seen in that
one aspect in which men are really equal. The old writers were entirely
wise when they talked of the equality of men; but they were also very
wise in not mentioning women. Women are always authoritarian; they
are always above or below; that is why marriage is a sort of poetical
see-saw. There are only three things in the world that women do not
understand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But men
(a class little understood in the modern world) find these things the
breath of their nostrils; and our most learned ladies will not even
begin to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of cool
camaraderie. Lastly, it contains the third quality of the weather, the
insistence upon the body and its indispensable satisfaction. No one
has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a
certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious
materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the
thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at
root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its
very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness
there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into
the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of
the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that
are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and
comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.
The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word
“affinity.” There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members,
men and women, call each other “Comrade.” I have no serious emotions,
hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit: at the worst it is
conventionality, and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only
to point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers
together, lilies and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and call
them all daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word
daisy. If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if
you include under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable
prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman who baffles him,
the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl who is impudent and
innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most
mountainous love; if you are going to call all these comradeship, you
will gain nothing, you will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and
universal and open; but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is
obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection;
it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who
has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is
impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is
strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it “speaking to the
question.” Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are
speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five
best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he
explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are
all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men
are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one remembers after
a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a
visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called the club.
It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential to
the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers.
It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these
things so long as it is honorable; comradeship must be in some degree
ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils
are stopped with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must be
physically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt
sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left
entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure; and that is the
strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young
idealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash and
living on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the
wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live without
women, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of
artificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an army
also has to be in many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy without
chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These
have a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the
savage common-sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sort
of man that is not afraid of women.
*****