THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOPSY-TURVEYDOM
My friends, topsy-turveydom is not so easy as it looks. The trouble is
not in inverting, but in finding _what to invert_. Our language is full
of ancient saws, but it takes wit to discover which to turn upside down.
Anybody can stand anything on its head, but it is only the real humourist
who knows which thing can stand on its head without falling or looking
foolish. 'T is the same in stage dialogue. Many a man of moderate wit can
find a repartee when the joke is unconsciously led up to by another
speaker. It is the preparation for the joke that is the dramatist's
difficulty. To borrow a term from the Greek grammars, the protasis of the
repartee is more troublesome than the apodosis. The puzzle is, therefore,
find the protasis. When Barry Pain says that sometimes the glowing fire
in the grate stares at you from behind its bars, as if it could read
pictures in you, you cannot help laughing. If he had given you the
protasis, "You gaze into the fire as if you could read pictures in it,"
even you could have invented the inversion. Topsy-turveydom is, I repeat,
no laughing matter. It is an art--and must be studied. When Besant's
School of Literature is founded, there will be
EXERCISES IN TOPSY-TURVEYDOM
1. Invert the following commonplaces humorously:
Honesty is the best policy.
The cup that cheers but not inebriates.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Like a child in its mother's arms.
(_Not so easy, you see!_)
2. Invert the following _motifs_ humorously:
(_a_) A parted husband and wife reconciled by their little child.
(Stock Poetry.)
(_b_) A patient marrying his nurse on recovery. (Stock Story.)
(_c_) A mother-in-law who comes to stay six months. (The Old Humour.)
Inversion may be applied, you see, both to ideas and to phrases. Let me
contribute a specimen of either sort to the literary primer of the
future:
THE ECONOMY OF SMOKING
I must really give up not smoking, at least till the American Copyright
Act works smoothly, and I am in a position to afford luxuries. At present
this habit of not smoking is a drain upon my resources which I can ill
support. Whenever a man comes to my house, I have to give him cigars, or
else gain the reputation of a churly and ill-mannered host. In the olden
days, when I was economical and smoked all day long, I could go to that
man's house and get those cigars back. Very often, too, I used to get the
best of the bargain, and thus effect considerable economies in the
purchase of good tobacco. Nowadays, not only have I got to give away
cigars for nothing, but they must be good ones. Formerly if I gave my
friends bad cigars, it was from a box I was obviously smoking myself, and
therefore they had at least the consolation of knowing I was a companion
in misfortune. But to give others "evils from which you are yourself
exempt" (to quote Lucretius) would be a terrible blend of bad taste and
inhospitality. Under such circumstances a man looks on a bad cigar as an
insult, and the greater insult because it is a gratuitous one. But my
losses from these sources are trivial compared with the item for
theatres. In the pure, innocent days, when I could not bear to let my
pipe out of my mouth even for a moment, I was unable to go to theatres;
but now that I have taken to not smoking, I have fallen a victim to my
other craving--the passion for the play. Three stalls a week tot up
frightfully in a year. No, decidedly I must check this extravagant habit
of not smoking before I am irretrievably ruined.
This is forced, but Truth often dwells the bottom of a paradox.
THE DANGER OF LEARNING TO SWIM
The danger of drowning arises mainly from being able to swim. The ability
to swim is of little use as a safeguard against drowning, for it is only
in a minority of cases that the accident thoughtfully allows you every
facility for displaying your powers of natation; you are not conceded
calm stream, a calm mind, and a bathing-costume; usually you are
disorganised, _ab initio_, by the unexpectedness of the thing, you are
weighed down by your clothes and your purse, you are entangled with
sails, or clutched at by fellow-passengers, or sucked into vortices. In a
big steamer accident, what chance is there for those who can swim? Only
an occasional Hercules can keep afloat in a heavy sea, and he not for
long. The most that swimming can do for you is to enable you to save
yourself in circumstances where you would very probably be saved by
somebody else. On the other hand, the ability to swim exposes you to many
risks you w|uld never have run had you been helpless in the water. You
swim in perilous places, you go out too far and cannot get back, you
expose yourself to the possibilities of cramp, you try to save other
people's lives and lose your own. There is also the temptation to go to
the Bath Club in Piccadilly and die of a too luxurious lunch. On the
whole, I believe as many swimmers are drowned as non-swimmers when a
general accident occurs, while the swimmers invite special accidents of
their own. Do you deduce from this that I advise you not to learn to
swim? Quite the contrary: it is a delightful and invigorating exercise.
Only you must not imagine you are thereby armed against fate. Swimming
for amusement is as different from swimming for life as yachting on the
Thames is from crossing the Atlantic.
For my example of phrase-inversion I cannot do better than reprint the
open letter addressed by me--in the height of his success, and in parody
of his manner--to the great _phraseur_ and _farunix_ of his little day;
especially as some have thought to see in it proof that prophecy has not
yet died out of Israel.
MY DEAR SIR: I have never for one moment doubted that you are a thinker,
a poet, an art critic, a dramatist, a novelist, a wit, an Athenian, and
whatever else you say you are. You are all these things--I confess it to
your shame. I have always looked down upon you with admiration. As an
epigrammatist I consider you only second to myself, though I admit that
in the sentiment, "to be intelligible is to be found out," I had the
disadvantage of prior publication. When you point out that Art is
infinitely superior to Nature, I feel that you are cribbing from my
unpublished poems, and I am quite at one with you in regarding the sunset
as a plagiarism. Nature is undoubtedly a trespasser, and should be warned
off without the option of a fine. I say these things to make it quite
clear that I speak to you more in anger than in sorrow. You are much too
important to be discussed seriously, and if I take the trouble to give
you advice, it is only because I am so much younger than you. I am
certain you are ruining yourself by cigarette cynicism; far better the
rough, clay-pipe cynicism of a Swift. There is no smoke without fire, but
it requires very little fire to keep a cigarette going. The art of
advertising oneself by playful puffs is not superior to Nature. But you
are not really playful and innocent; it would be ungracious to deny that
you have all the corruption which the Stage has so truly connected with
the cigarette. Still, isn't it about time you got divorced and settled
down? At present there are only two good plays in the world--"The Second
Book of Samuel" and "Lady Windermere's Fan"; surely you have power to add
to their number. Try a quiet life of artistic production, and don't talk
so much about Art. We are tired of missionaries, whether they wear the
white tie of the Church or of Society, and it is a great pity we have not
the simple remedy of the savages, who eat theirs. These few words of
admonition would be incomplete if I did not impress upon you that policy
is the only honesty. Art is short and life is long, and a stitch in time
debars one from having a new coat. You can take a drink to the horse, but
you can't make him well; and nothing succeeds like failure. Vice is the
only perfect form of virtue, and virtue---- Easy there! Steady! Avast!
Belay! Which!
The Boeotians are dull folk, no doubt, but life would be dull without
them. Imagine a wilderness of Wildes! It would be like a sky all
rainbows. Then what beautiful whetstones the Boeotians are! Abuse them,
by all means, so long as they will pay for it. But what a blessing that
the minds capable of taking the artistic view of life are rare enough to
keep the race sane! The coarser forms of egotism seem less baneful to the
brain-tissue. You claim to be an Athenian, but the Athenians did not
smoke cigarettes. It is true that tobacco had not been invented, but this
is a sordid detail If Athens stands for anything in the history of
culture, it is for sanity, balance, strength. Aristotle, at least as much
an Athenian as any native of Ireland, meditated about aesthetics, but he
meditated also about politics, logic, philosophy, political economy,
ethics--everything. Socrates was a _causeur_, but he was also a martyr.
No, after all the Beautiful is _not_ so important as you imagine you are.
No doubt for a few billion years painters and musicians and
epigrammatists will remain the centre cf creation; but when the sun grows
cold it is conceivable that invaluable canvases may be used up as fuel,
and that humanity may sacrifice even your printed paradoxes to keep
warmth a little longer in its decrepit bones. The fact is, you are too
_borné_, too one-sided, to be accepted as as a "king of men." You take
such broad views that you grow narrow. What you want is a little
knowledge of life, and twelve months' hard labour.
But though topsy-turveydom may be attained with comparative ease, it
performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use. Our
moral ideals grow mouldy if preached too much; our stories stale if told
too often. Conventionality is but a living death. The other side of
everything must be shown, the reverse of the medal, the silver side of
the shield as well as the golden. Convex things are equally concave, and
concave things convex. The world was made round so that one man's "up"
should be another man's "down." The world is the Earthly Paradox, with
four cardinal points of mutual contradiction, all equally N., S., E., and
W. 'T is thus a symbol of all paradoxes, of all propositions in which
mutually contradictory things are true. Nay, paradox is the only truth,
for it cannot be denied; including, like the world, its own
contradiction. Topsy-turveydom unfolds our musty ideas to the sun and
spreads them out the other way. The man who reverses the Fifth
Commandment and says that parents should honour their children is not a
flippant jester, but a philosophic thinker. This is the true inwardness
of the topsy-turvey humourist.
Topsy-turveydom has played a prodigious part in the progress of thought.
The history of philosophy and science is merely a tale of development by
topsy-turveydom, every new thinker simply contradicting his predecessor.
Thales said water was the primitive principle of all things; so
Anaximander said it was air, whereupon Anaximenes said it was matter.
This made Pythagoras maintain it was not concrete matter but abstract
number; whereupon Xenophanes would have it that it was not number but
pure monistic being, and his disciple Zeno invented some delightful and
immortal paradoxes to prove that time and motion and number and change
have no existence, and only existence exists. Up comes Heraclitus,
proving that existence doesn't exist, and there is nothing in the world
but becoming: that so far from change not existing, nothing exists but
change. It was now about time to return to earth, and so Empedocles and
Democritus came along with their Atoms; thereby provoking Anaxagoras into
bringing in Soul to explain things. Things were going on thus
satisfactorily when the Sophists appeared on the scene to say that we
didn't really know anything, because all our knowledge was subjective, so
Socrates insisted that it didn't matter, because conduct was
three-fourths of life. Plato retorted that it did matter, and he invented
an archetypal universe of which this was a faint and distorted copy.
Naturally Aristotle must contradict him by founding empirical science,
which concerns itself only with this world. On his heels came the Stoics,
who would have nothing to do with science except in so far as it made men
virtuous, and who wanted to live soberly and severely. This provoked the
neo-Platonists into craving for ecstatic union with the supernatural. The
transition period from ancient philosophy to modern was one long fight
between Nominalists and Realises, the one school teaching the exact
opposite of the other.
But it is in the history of Modern Philosophy and Modern Science that one
finds the strongest examples of this progress by paradox. The triumph of
topsy-turveydom was when Galileo, the Oscar Wilde of Astronomy, declared
that the earth went round the sun--a sheer piece of inversion. Darwin,
the Barry Pain of Biology, asserted that man rose from the brutes, and
that, instead of creatures being adapted to conditions, conditions
adapted creatures. Berkeley, the Lewis Carroll of Metaphysics,
demonstrated that our bodies are in our minds, and Kant, the W. S.
Gilbert of Philosophy, showed that space and time live in us. In
Literature it is the same story. To credit the scholars, Homer is no
longer a man, nor the Bible a book. As for Zechariah, it was written
before Genesis. This topsy-turveydom is a valuable organon of scientific
discovery. Take any accepted proposition, invert it, and you get a New
Truth. Any historian who wishes to make a name has but to state that Ahab
was a saint and Elijah a Philistine--that Ananias was a realist and
George Washington a liar--that Charles I. was a Republican hampered by
his official position, and that the Armada defeated Drake--that Socrates
died of drinking, and that hemlock was what he gave Xantippe. In fact,
there is no domain of intellect in which a judicious cultivation of
topsy-turveydom may not be recommended. Ask why R. A.'s are invariably
colour-blind, and you become a great art critic, while a random regret
that Mendelssohn had no ear for music will bring you to the very front in
musical circles. For the tail shall always wag the dog in the end, and
Aristides will never be able to remain in Athens if men will call him
"the Just." _Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse._ We are bored--and then
comes the topsy-turveyist's opportunity. "To every action there is an
equal and contrary reaction" is a sure law of motion, and in the seesaw
of speculation the "down" of to-day is the "up" of to-morrow. Next
century we shall be sick of science; and indeed the spooks are already
returning for the funeral of this. I shall end with
AN APOLOGY TO A CELEBRATED CHARACTER
As a synonym for sin,
Jezebel,
I 'll no longer drag you in,
Jezebel.
Now I know your glorious mission was to spread
the truths Phoenician,
Metaphoric life anew you shall begin,
Jezebel;
Metaphoric life anew you shall begin,
Cultured Baalite, loyal wife,
Jezebel,
Martyr in a noble strife,
Jezebel;
Protestant for light and sweetness 'gainst the
narrow incompleteness
Of Elijah and Elisha's view of life,
Jezebel;
Of Elijah and Elisha's view of life.
XVI
GHOST-STORIES
Why do ghosts walk at Christmas? What seduction hath Yule Tide for these
phantastic fellows, that it lures them from their warm fireplaces? Is it
that the cool snow is grateful after the fervours of their torrid zone,
where even the pyrometer would fail to record the temperature? Is it that
Dickens is responsible for the season, and that Marley's ghost has set
the fashion among the younger spooks? The ghost of Hamlet's father was
not so timed: he walked in all weathers. Perhaps it is the supernatural
associations of Christmas that create the atmosphere in which ghosts live
and move and have their being. Or perchance it is at the season of family
reunion that the thoughts turn most naturally to vacant chairs and the
presences that once filled them. Or is it that the ghosts walk for me
alone, by reason that Christmas always brings me haunting thoughts of
them? For my youth was nursed upon the "penny dreadfuls" of an age that
knew not "Chums," nor the "Boys' Own Paper." They were not so very
dreadful, those "penny dreadfuls," though dreadfully disrespectful to
schoolmasters, who were wont to rend them in pieces in revenge. The
heroes of the stories began to urge on their wild career in the
school-room, where they executed practical jokes that would have
gladdened the heart of Mr. Gilbert's merry Governor; the jokers were
never found out unless they confessed to spare another boy's feelings,
and then the schoolmaster was so touched that he spared theirs. After
passing through five forms and upsetting them all, they arrived at the
sixth form, which demanded a new volume to itself, called, let us say,
"Tom Tiddler's School-days Continued," and mainly devoted to cigars and
flirtation. "Tom Tiddler at College" followed--all "wines" and
proctor-baiting, with Tom Tiddler as stroke in the victorious 'Varsity
eight. "Tom Tiddler Abroad" was the next title, for the chronicle of a
popular hero would run on for years and years; and in this section red
Indians and wild beasts were rampant. 'T were long to trace the fortunes
of Tom Tiddler in all their thrilling involutions; but when he had
painted the globe red he married and settled down. And then began "Young
Tom Tiddler's School-days," "Young Tom Tiddler's Schooldays Continued,"
"Young Tom Tiddler Abroad," and all the weekly round of breathlessness;
and never was proverb truer than that the young cock cackles as the old
cock crows. By the time interest palled in the son a new generation of
readers had arisen, and the unblushing paper commenced to run "Tom
Tiddler's School-days" again. So went the whirligig. But at Christmas,
when the blue-nosed waifs carol in the cold and boys have extra pennies,
Tom Tiddler himself slunk into the background, lost in the ample folds of
a "Double Number," the same blazoned impudently, as though it did not
demand double money. But the extra pennyworth was all ghosts: ghosts,
ghosts, ghosts; full measure, pressed down and running over; not your
Ibsenian shadows of heredity, but real live ghosts, handsomely appointed,
with chains and groans and wavy wardrobes. They lived in moated granges
and ivy-wreathed castles, and paced snowy terraces or dark, desolate
corridors. There was no talk then of psychic manifestations, or auras, or
telepathy, or spiritual aether. Ghosts were solid realities in those days
of the double number.
"To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late," as Macaulay
sings, and it is no less impossible to escape spirit-rapping and all the
fascinating _menu_ of the Psychical Society. The epidemic, which is
contagious to the last degree, seizes its victims when they are off
guard, under pretense of amusing an idle hour, and ends by robbing them
of sleep and health; some it drives into lunatic asylums and some into
newspaper correspondence. That thought-reading is not necessarily
delusion or collusion is now generally recognised; a _protégée_ of Mr. F.
W. Myers convinced me of the possibility of simple feats, though not of
her explanation of them. She credited them to spirits, and wicked spirits
to boot. In vain, I pointed out that spirits who occupied themselves so
docilely about matters so trivial must be harmless creatures with no more
guile than the village idiot: she would concede no grain of goodness in
their composition. Table-turning I had never seen. Ghosts I had never
met, though I had met plenty of persons who had their acquaintance. Like
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--or is it Madame de Stäel[*]?--I did not
believe in them, but I was afraid of them. Premonitions I had often had,
but they had scarcely ever come true. But now I am prepared to believe
anything and everything, and to come up to the Penitent Form--if there be
one--of the Psychical Society and to declare myself saved. I am already
preparing a waxen image of a notorious critic, to stick pins thereinto.
Not that I did not always believe the Spook Society was doing necessary
work in supplementing the crude treatises of our psychologists, who are
the most fatuous and self-complacent scientists going.
[* Transcriber's note: So in original. One would rather expect the accent
tréma on the 'e', not on the 'a'.]
My conversion to a deeper interest in the obscurer psychic phenomena
befell through encountering a theatrical touring company in a dull
provincial town. The barber told me about it--a dapper young Englishman
of twenty-five, with an unimpeachable necktie.
BARBER. "They're playing 'Macbeth' to-night, sir."
AUTHOR. (growling). "Indeed?"
B. "Yes, sir; I'm told it's pretty thick."
A. "What's pretty thick?"
B. "'Macbeth.'"
A. "What do you mean by 'thick'?"
B. "Full of gore, sir. I don't like those sort o' pieces. I like
opera--'Utopia' and that sort o' thing. You can see plenty o' thick
things in real life. I don't want to go to the theatre to get the creeps
and horrors. But I've seen 'Othello' and 'Virginius.'"
A. "Ha! Do you know who wrote 'Othello'?"
B. "No, that I don't."
A. "Do you know who wrote 'Macbeth'?"
B. "Now you ask me something!"
A. (speculating sadly on the vanity of fame and the absurdity of being a
national bard, but determined to vindicate a brother author) "'Othello'
and 'Macbeth' were written by Shakespeare."
B. (unmoved) "Ah! that's the man that wrote 'Taming of the Shrew,' isn't
it?"
A. (astonished) "Yes."
So the Author went to see the thick play, and found he knew Lady Macbeth,
nay, had--by an odd episode--first seen her in dressing-gown and
curl-papers; so, presuming upon this intimate acquaintanceship, he got
himself bidden to the Banquet--in less Shakespearian language, he went to
supper. The Banquet was uninterrupted by Banquos or other bogies. Lady
Macbeth--in a Parisian art-gown--sipped milk after her bloody exertions,
and listened graciously, her fair young head haloed in smoke, to her
guest's comparison of herself with Mrs. Siddons. But Lady Macbeth's
Chaperon was a Medium, self-made, and when the compliments and the supper
had been cleared away, the Medium kindly proposed to exhibit her
newly-discovered prowess with the Planchette. The Planchette, as
everybody knows, and as I didn't know myself till I saw it, is a wooden
heart that runs on two hind wheels, and has a pencil stuck through the
centre of its apex. The Medium gracefully places her hand upon the heart,
which after an interval of Quaker-like meditation begins to write, as
abruptly as a Quaker is moved by the Spirit, and as abruptly finishes.
AUTHOR. "What do I want to do early to-morrow morning?"
What was in his mind was: "Send a wire to Manchester." The Planchette
almost instantly scribbled: "Send a telegram to your brother." Now, his
brother _was_ connected with the matter; and although at the time he
considered the Planchette half wrong, yet in the morning, after
reconsidering the question, the Author actually did send the wire to his
brother instead. Sundry other things did the Planchette write, mostly
wise, but sometimes foolish. It did not hesitate, for example, over the
publisher of a certain anonymous book, but failed to give the title,
though it wrote glibly, "Children of Night." These results were
sufficiently startling to invite further investigation, so the trio next
proceeded to "call spirits from the vasty deep" by making a circle of
their thirty fingers upon a wooden table. Very soon the table gave signs
of upheaval, while some cobbling sprite fell to tapping merrily at his
trade within its ligneous recesses. Lady Macbeth said that these taps
denoted its readiness to hold communion with the grosser earth, and
constituted its sole vocabulary. As in the game of Animal, Vegetable, and
Mineral, its information was to be extracted by a series of queries
admitting of "yes" or "no" in answer. One tap denoted "no," three "yes,"
and two "doubtful." It could also give numerical replies. The table or
the sprite, having indicated its acquiescence in this code, proceeded to
give a most satisfactory account of itself. It told the Author his age,
the time of day, the date of the month, carefully allowing for its being
past midnight (which none of the human trio had thought of); it was
excellently posted on his private concerns, knowing the date of his
projected visit to America, and the name of his past work and his future
wife. Its orthography was impeccable, though its method was somewhat
todious, for the Author had to run through the alphabet to provoke the
sprite into tapping at any particular letter. But one soon grew
reconciled to its cumbrous methods, as though holding converse with a
foreigner; and its remarks made up in emphasis what they lacked in
brevity, and were given with exemplary promptitude. Interrogated as to
its own personality, it declared it was an unborn spirit, destined to be
born in ten years. "Do you know what makes you be born?" inquired the
Author. "Yes," it replied. "Will you tell us?" "Yes." "Tell us, then."
"F-O-R-C-E." "Is it God's force?" "No." "Is He not omnipotent, then?"
"No." "What is the true religion?" "Buddhism." "Do you mean Madame
Blavatsky was right?" "Yes." "Is there a heaven?" "Yes." "A Hell?" "No."
To hear a small still voice rapping, rapping in the silence of the small
hours, rapping out the secrets of the universe, was weird enough. It was
as though Milton's words were indeed inspired, and--
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen.
"What!" thought the Author, "shall the Great Secret which has puzzled so
many heads--heads in caps and heads in turbans, heads in bonnets and
heads in berettas, as Heine hath it--shall the explanation of the
Universe, which baffled Aristotle, and puzzled Hegel, and still more his
readers, be the property of this wretched little unborn babe, this infant
rapping in the night, and with no language but a rap? Was, then,
Wordsworth right, and is our birth 'but a sleep and a forgetting'?" And,
mingled with these questionings, a sort of compassion for the poor orphan
spirit, inarticulate and misunderstood, beating humbly at the gates of
speech. Natheless was the Author quite incredulous, and even while he was
listening reverently to these voices from Steadland, his cold cynic brain
was revolving a scientific theory to account for the striking
manifestations.
In the course of two or three _séances_, with lights turned low, but
honesty burning high--for Lady Macbeth was guileless, and her Chaperon
above suspicion,--various other "spirits" hastened to be interviewed.
There was "Ma," who afterwards turned out to be the Chaperon's "Pa,"
whose name--a queer French name--it gave in full. The Chaperon's "Pa,"
who was dead, announced he was no longer a widower, for his relief had
just rejoined him on Wednesday--the 10th. This news of her mother's death
was unknown to the Chaperon. In truth, "Pa" is still a widower.
Another "spirit"--a woman (who refused to give her age)--predicted that
the amount of money taken at the theatre the next night would be £44. The
actual returns on the morrow were £44 0_s_. 6_d_. But when, elated by its
success, it prophesied £43, the returns were only £34. But this same
creature, that gave only an inverted truth--perhaps it was momentarily
controlled by the spirit of Oscar Wilde--displayed remarkable knowledge
in other directions. Asked if it knew what piece had been played the week
before in the theatre--a question that none of the three could have
answered--it replied, "'The Road to ----'" "Do you mean 'The Road to
Ruin'?" the Author interrupted eagerly, tired of its tedious
letter-by-letter methods. "No," it responded vehemently; and finished,
"'F-o-r-t-u-n-e.'" Lady Macbeth consulted the "Era," and sure enough "The
Road to Fortune" had preceded her own company. "Can you tell us the piece
to follow?" the author asked; and the "spirit" responded readily "'The
Pro----'" "Do you mean 'The Professor's Love Story'?" the Author again
interrupted. "No; 'The Prodigal,'" answered the table. "Ah! 'The
Prodigal,'" echoed the Author, confounding it temporarily with "The
Profligate"; but the spirit dissented, and added, "'Daughter.'" There
being no means of verifying this for the moment, the Author proceeded to
inquire for the piece to follow that, and was unhesitatingly informed
that it was "The Bauble Shop." "Where is 'The Bauble Shop' now?" he
inquired. The spirit amiably rapped out "Eastbourne." This was correct
according to the "Era." Consulting the hoardings after leaving the house,
the Author discovered that the other replies were quite exact, save for
the fact that "The Bauble Shop" was to come first and "The Prodigal
Daughter" second. Here was the paradoxical humour of this Oscar Wilde-ish
"spirit" again.
Endless was the information vouchsafed by these disembodied
intelligences, in any language one pleased; and, although they at times
displayed remarkable obstinacy, refusing to answer, or breaking off
abruptly in the middle of a most interesting communication, as though
they had been betrayed into indiscretion: yet, to speak generally, there
was scarcely any topic on which they were not ready to discourse--past,
present, or to come--and their remarks, whether accurate or not, were
invariably logical, bearing an intelligible relation to the question.
Even sporting tips were obtainable without a fee, and Avington was given
as the winner of the Liverpool Cup, though the Author had never heard of
him, and the other two were not aware he was booked for the race, still
less that he was the favourite. In the sequel he only came second. Real
tips did the "spirits" give, tipping the table vehemently. They were also
very obedient to commands, moving or lifting the table in whatsoever
direction the Author ordered, much as though they were men from Maple's;
and when he willed them to raise it, the united forces of Lady Macbeth
and Lady Macbeth's Chaperon could not easily depress its spirits. Nor did
they contradict one another. There was a cheerful unanimity about the
Author's dying at fifty-seven. But this did not perturb the Author, whose
questions were all cunningly contrived to test his theory of the
"spiritual world." For instance, he set them naming cards, placed on the
table with faces downwards and _unknown to anybody_; arguing that with
their bloated omniscience they could scarcely fail to name a card shoved
under their very noses. Nor did they--altogether. Most began well, but
were spoiled by success. However, here is the record performance--eight
consecutive attempts of the table to give the "correct card" under the
imposition of the hands of the Chaperon and the Author only, neither
knowing the card till it was turned up to verify the table's assertion:
TABLE'S CARD. ACTUAL CARD.
1. Jack of Diamonds . . . Queen of Spades.
2. Jack of Diamonds . . . Jack of Diamonds.
3. Three of Clubs . . . Jack of Spades.
4. Jack of Diamonds . . . Jack of Diamonds.
5. Seven of Clubs . . . Five of Diamonds.
6. Three of Spades . . . Three of Spades.
7. Ten of Hearts . . . Ten of Hearts.
8. Nine of Clubs . . . Nine of Clubs.
Here are five bull's-eyes out of eight shots! The name of the performer
deserves record. It was the spirit of a German woman, named Gretehen, who
died three years ago, but refused to say at what age. She was wrong
sometimes, but then it may have been her feminine instinct for fibbing.
"The spirits play tricks," say the spiritualists. "Sometimes they are
wicked spirits, who tell lies." The Planchette also wrote out the names
of unseen cards placed upon it face downwards. The artistic spirit of the
Author now bids him pause: the narrative has now reached a point of
interest at which recollections of "Tom Tiddler's Schooldays" urge him to
pen the breathless motto: "To be continued in our next."
XVII
A THEORY OF TABLE-TURNING
The yearning of humanity for the supernatural, even for the
pseudo-supernatural, is as pathetic as it is profound. Wherefore I regret
that I can make no concessions to it. The following theory of
table-turning came to me as I experimented, from my general knowledge of
psychology. I have not compared it with the theories of the Psychical
Society, which I have never read, preferring to jot down the impressions
of an independent observer, which, if they should at all coincide with
the explanations of the spook-hunters, will irrefutably demonstrate that
their Society was founded in vain. If, moreover, as Mr. Andrew Lang has
since pointed out, it coincides largely with the theory of Dr. Carpenter,
so much the better.
What are the facts? If two or more people (according to the size of the
table) place their hands in circular contact around a table, and possess
their souls in patience for a delightfully uncertain period, sundry
strange manifestations will occur. Even after the first few moments the
more imaginative will feel the table throbbing, unsuspicious of the fact
that it is the blood at their finger-tips. Presently, too, an uncanny
wave of cold air will pass underneath the arch of their palms. This is,
according to the professional witches of Endor, the frigid flitting of
the spirits, but the most superficial meteorologist will expound it you
learnedly. Your hand, passive and in a fixed position, heats the air
under it, which, becoming lighter, is constantly displaced by the colder
circumambient air. Finally, when everybody is wrought up to an exalted
expectation of the supernatural, the table begins to oscillate, to move
slowly to and fro, to waltz, and even to raise itself partially or wholly
off the ground. Sometimes it taps instead of moving. Nor are these
motions and these taps merely the intoxicated irregularities of an
exuberant energy. They are coherent responses (according to a code agreed
upon with the "spirit" in possession) to questions asked by one of the
sitters. They are the expression of infinite and ungrudging information
on almost every subject. Through this wooden language, through this music
of the tables and this dancing movement of their legs, tabular
information respecting your past or other people's past and future lives,
together with full details of the doings of the departed in those other
spheres of heaven or hell which they adorn or illumine respectively, may
be obtained at the lowest rates, and with only that reasonable delay
which results from the exigencies of a letter-code. For the "spirits" of
the table, be it understood, are unable to communicate with earth except
by taps and movements for "yes" or "no," or by rapping out numbers; so
that they have to signify their meaning, snailwise, letter by letter. The
"spirit" of the Planchette will indeed write you out sentences; but to
that, like the actor in melodrama, I will return anon. In the stock
_séances_, I know, spirits materialise themselves and glide white-sheeted
through darkened rooms. But as my own _séances_ and "spirits" were
personally conducted by myself, the optical illusions of Messrs.
Maskelyne & Cook, the Pepper's Ghost of the dear old Polytechnic, had no
opportunity of putting in an appearance. My spooks did nothing but answer
questions, so that the very suggestion that they were spirits came
entirely from me. In fact, they do but dance to the "medium's" piping;
and should he suggest that they are methylated, the chances are that not
a few would cheerfully acquiesce in this description of themselves. In
short, it is only the prepossession, the pathetic prejudice, in favour of
visitors from other worlds that leads at all to the thought of "spirits,"
drawing such a red herring across the track that the average observer,
who is nothing if not unobservant, has all his partisan faculties of
mis-observation brought into full play on behalf of the spirit-world.
Doubtless the actual presence of "spirits" is the cheapest way of
accounting for the phenomena. But one might as well call in "spirits" to
explain the dancing of a kettle-lid. Not till every natural hypothesis
has been exhausted is the scientific observer entitled to call in the
supernatural. And in reality all that has to be explained is the
mechanical movements of tables under certain specified conditions, the
said movements having an apparent relation to will and intelligence.
First of all, what moves the table?
Well, the slightest exercise of the finger or wrist muscles is sufficient
to move the small, light round table which is usually the subject of
experiment; and when once the slightest movement is established--by the
involuntary contraction of a single muscle--all the other persons'
muscles, in accommodating themselves to the movement of the table, cannot
help helping it, either by pulling or pushing in the direction in which
it is going. It is, in fact, almost impossible to follow the movement of
a moving table and yet keep your superimposed hands perfectly passive;
and with ninety-nine persons out of a hundred the startled interest in
the movement even begets an unconscious desire to help it, which at times
almost rises to a curious semi-conscious self-deception, a voluntary
exaggeration of the marvellous. Yet nothing makes the ordinary sitter
angrier than to be told he has helped to move the table. It is as though
he were accused of cheating at whist, or worse, of playing a foolish
card. Take half a dozen persons at random, and there are sure to be one
or two so impressionable and emotional that they cannot help contributing
the slight initial impulse which gathers force as it goes. These nervous
subjects cannot sit a quarter of an hour perfectly still without a
twitching of the muscles, while the tense state of expectation which
subtly transforms itself into a wish to see the table move and not have
the experiment in vain, finally compels them, despite themselves, to
start the "manifestations." Indeed, to think of a thing is half to do it.
Every idea has a tendency to project itself in action. If you think
strongly, for instance, of lifting your hand, it is difficult not to do
it, for the idea of motion is motion in embryo. The wish is father to the
thought, and the thought to the deed. The wish to see the table move is
the grandfather of its motion. Even with the most sceptical, when the
table is requested to go in a particular direction the muscles
involuntarily tend thither. All the deepest analyses of scientific
psychology are involved in this wretched little episode of table-turning,
and it is not marvellous that the ordinary observer should perceive only
the marvellous.
So much for the movements. But how about the raps? How about those
mysterious tappings which come from the very heart of the table, as
eloquent of the preternatural as those immortal taps heard by Poe ere the
raven stepped into his chamber? I should be more impressed by these taps
if I were not capable of manufacturing them myself _ad lib._ without
detection, by secretly manipulating the ball of my thumb. One is
therefore justified in assuming that, where these raps are not produced
by conscious fraud, they are the involuntary result of the same motions
that produced them voluntarily. Even wood has a certain elasticity, and
an imperceptible increase followed by an imperceptible relaxation of
pressure on the surface of the table will alter the tension of the wood,
the molecules of which in springing back to their prior position will
emit a creak or a tap, just as a piece of extended elastic will when let
go again. Both the raps and the movements, then, are in essence phenomena
of the same order: simple results of muscular pressure, conscious,
sub-conscious, or unconscious.
It now only remains to explain the answers themselves, to account not
only for their almost invariably logical form, but also for their
occasionally astonishing content. For the table is not infrequently wiser
than anybody in the room; also it knows the past and is ready to predict
the future.
The whole thing is really an excellent object-lesson in Psychology. For
the solution is obvious. The table being unconscious, _you answer
yourself_--you not only produce the raps and movements, but you regulate
them.
The connection between mind and body is, it seems to me, admirably
illustrated by table-turning. According to the latest philosophic view,
the connection itself defies human comprehension. It is simply a case of
_non possumus intelligere_. But the connection itself may be expressed
thus: No idea or feeling without physical disturbance, no physical
disturbance without feeling or idea. Mind and body are as related as the
tune to the violin-string. Every state of mind tends to set up nervous
vibration, and every nervous vibration tends to set up a state of mind.
In either case the tendency may be, and usually is, counteracted. The
average member of a spiritualistic circle cannot prevent the thought in
his brain taking on bodily expression to the extent of a muscular
contraction stimulating the very sensitive tips of the fingers. You
cannot think of a joke or see the humour of anything without wanting to
smile, though you may suppress your smile in obedience to other
considerations. Nor can you put your features into smiling position,
without experiencing a latent sense of amusement, though you would not
know what you were smiling at. But if six cool scientific intellects,
acquainted with the tricks of their own organisms and determined to
dissever thought from motion, were to sit round a table, they might sit
till doomsday without the "spirit" turning up. This is what the
spiritualists mean by unsympathetic persons, persons obnoxious to the
spirits, persons with antipathetic auras, and all the rest of the jargon.
But six intellects taken at random, being anything but cool and
scientific, are not able to prevent their ideas passing over into action
in the shape of muscular twitches; though if even the unscientific were
to look up at the ceiling and forget all about the table, the table would
probably forget to move. Now the majority of the replies of the table
deal with matters actively present to the consciousness of at least one
of the six owners of the superimposed hands. When the table raps out
something known only to this one person, and the startled person admits
that the table is right, an uncanny feeling is produced; the table seems
at least to be a thought-reader, and on this wave of astonishment the
hypothesis of "spirits" rides up triumphantly. When the topic is one of
which nobody knows anything--_e.g._, whether the supposed spirit is a man
or woman--chance, or a vague idea floating up in the mind of one of the
party, determines the reply.
But what of those replies in which some striking truth is told of which
none of the party was conscious, as for instance in the examples I gave
in my last, when the table informed us that Mr. Jones's "Bauble Shop" was
then playing at Eastbourne, or that "The Road to Fortune" had been
playing in the town in which we were the week before we arrived? To clear
up this most remarkable aspect of the whole matter we must go still
deeper into Psychology.
What we are pleased to call our Mind is made up of two parts--our
Consciousness and--what I shall call loosely yet sufficingly and without
prejudice to Metaphysics--our Sub-Consciousness. The latter is
immeasurably the vaster portion. It is a tossing ocean of thoughts which
feeds the narrow little fountain of Consciousness. It holds all our
memories. We cannot be conscious of all ourselves and all our past at
once--that way madness lies, or divinity. We may know ten languages, but
we can only think in the mould of one at a time. Our thoughts and
memories can only come up into clear Consciousness by ones or twos--to be
dealt with and then dismissed. They spirit from the great deep of
Sub-Consciousness into the thin fountain-stream of Consciousness, and
fall back again into the great deep. And this great deep is never still,
though we know nothing of its churning save by its tossing up through the
fountain some new mental combination of which it had received only the
elements--as when the mathematician has the solution of a problem flashed
upon him at the moment of waking, or as the author has the development of
his plot thrust upon him when he is playing billiards, or as the wit
finds repartees invented for him by his brilliant but unknown
collaborator. This is what the crowd calls "inspiration," the late Mr.
Stevenson "Brownies," and the scientist "unconscious cerebration." A man
of talent has a good Working Consciousness, a man of genius a good
Working Sub-Consciousness. Hence the frequent mental instability of
genius. The Infant Prodigy's feats are done by his Sub-Consciousness.
Instinct is Racial Genius, Genius is Individual Instinct. The highest
Genius is sane. A Shakespeare or a Goethe has both a good Working
Consciousness and a good Working Sub-Consciousness, with the former so
self-balanced that it regulates the products of the latter. The
cultivation of the Working Consciousness may either improve or impair the
products of its bigger brother. Education, the cultivation of the
critical faculty, would be fatal to some writers, actors, painters, and
musicians; it would but spoil the Working Sub-Consciousness. Others--more
sanely balanced--would gain in art more than they lost in nature.
Now, what are the elements with which our Sub-Consciousness works?--what
does this ocean contain? It would be easier to discover what it does not
contain. Wrecks and argosies and dead faces, mermaidens and subterranean
palaces, and the traces of vanished generations; these are but a
millionth part of its treasures: the Sub-Consciousness were perhaps
better likened to the property-room and scene-dock of the Great Cosmic
Theatre, holding infinite wardrobes and scenes ready-painted, parks and
seas and libraries, and ruined cottages and whitewashed attics, to say
naught of an army of supers ready to put on all the faces we have ever
seen. In our Sub-Consciousness, moreover, are stored up all the voices
and sounds and scents we have ever perceived, and to all these
reminiscences of our own sensations are perhaps added the shadows of our
ancestors' sensations--episodes that perchance we re-experience only in
dreamland--so that part of the vivid vision of genius, of the poet's eye
bodying forth the shapes of things unknown, may be inherited Memory. And
thus Imagination, when it is not a mere fresh combination of elements
experienced, may be only a peculiar variety of atavism.
From this boundless reservoir, then, which holds our heredity and our
experience, go forth the battalions of dreams--the infinitely possible
permutations and combinations of its elements, wrought by the Working
Sub-Consciousness when the poor Working Consciousness cannot get sound
asleep, but must watch perforce with half an eye the procession of
thoughts and images over which it has lost control. For it is the duty of
Consciousness to control the stream sent up by Sub-Consciousness. When it
is awake but unable to do this, we have Insanity; when asleep, Dreams. In
Somnambulism the Working Sub-Consciousness is seen in an accentuated
phase. It does all the work of its little brother, even to exercising its
owner's muscles. To be "possessed" by a popular song is a species of
insanity--Consciousness ridden by a singing Sub-Consciousness.
Between our Consciousness and our Sub-Consciousness there is more or less
easy communication. It is not perfect. You cannot draw up what you will
from the ocean: you cannot always directly remember a name or a date that
you know--you can only set an indirect train of thought at work. _Per
contra_, it is not easy to transfer certain conscious states to the
storehouse of Sub-Consciousness--to learn a page of prose, or deposit the
memory of a piece of music, which you are forced to play slowly and
thoughtfully before the digital dexterity is added to the treasures of
your Sub-Consciousness. Under exceptional conditions, exceptional flotsam
and jetsam is tossed up into Consciousness, as in the case of that
servant girl who spoke Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in her delirium, having
unconsciously absorbed the same from overhearing the studies of her
learned master many years before.
Now, just as a conscious thought has an accompaniment of physical motion,
so has a sub-conscious thought. Thus, then, a thought which does not pass
through the thin fountain-stream of Consciousness may yet produce the
same muscular twitches as if it were clearly present to the presiding
Ego. In the case of the "Road to Fortune," the name must have really sunk
into my brain, although I was unaware of it, and probably could not have
consciously recalled it to save my life. The stage-manager subsequently
reminded me that he had in my presence regretted that the "Road to
Fortune" had done such good business, since there would probably be a
reaction. _I_ have only a recollection of his telling me that the success
of the preceding piece would hurt his--my Consciousness had grasped at
the intellectual side of his remark, my Sub-Consciousness had absorbed
the irrelevant fact of the name of the piece. In examining the "Era," to
verify this item, Lady Macbeth's eye must have unconsciously noted that
"The Bauble Shop" was at Eastbourne; but the information was not
registered in her Consciousness, for there is a struggle of thoughts to
catch the thinker's I--that is to say the Central Consciousness--and only
the fittest can survive. We are indeed wiser than we know. Our
Sub-Consciousness knows all we know, and all we have forgotten, and all
that our mental sponge sucked in without spirting it through
Consciousness. In fact, attention or inattention often determines whether
a thought or a feeling shall come up into clear Consciousness or not. You
can feel a pain in your big toe if you want to. Conversely, in the
excitement of battle soldiers do not always feel their wounds.
When the table prophesies or delivers "a message from the other world,"
the result is a compound of fluke with expectation or with apprehension.
Fears or hopes dimly in the mind get accentuated, or transmuted, or
distorted as in dreams; and when the "spirits" are proved wrong, as in
the matter of the Chaperon's mother, the spiritualists tell you that you
have got hold of a "lying spirit." Verily a cheap explanation! "They play
tricks sometimes," say their apologists. The true explanation is that
your Sub-Consciousness was ignorant of the reply your Consciousness asked
for. Endless as its contents seem, there are limits; and when it does not
know, your Sub-Consciousness will rarely confess it. It makes a brazen
guess, keeping the logical form of the answer, because your
Sub-Consciousness knows that, but blundering deplorably in the matter.
Sometimes it will not speak at all, but when it does it is cocksure to
the last degree. Its humour is the humour of the stock joke, the Old
Humour--as when it will not tell a woman's age. Its sulkiness and
eccentricity and occasional indecency are just what one would expect from
a Sub-Consciousness, whose thoughts have no central I to keep them in
order. (Compare Goethe's explanation of the obscenities of Ophelia.)
Sometimes, too, there are Obstructive Associations, which account for its
inability to make up its want of mind; and as there are usually several
persons at table, the result is complicated by their separate
Sub-Consciousnesses. In brief, table-turning is a method of interrogating
your Sub-Consciousness. It is, so to speak, objective introspection. The
table enables you to peep at your Sub-Consciousness, to know your larger
self. It is an external medium on which you may see registered visibly
and audibly (through the vibrations you sub-consciously communicate to
it) that Sub-Consciousness which _ex hypothesi_ you cannot peep at
directly. The moving table may be considered the objectification of
Sub-Consciousness, or a mirror in which Sub-Consciousness is reflected to
the gaze of Consciousness (to the great benefit of the science of
Psychology, which may be revolutionised by table-turning). By humouring
your Sub-Consciousness, by addressing it as though it were a separate
identity utterly unconnected with you, by asking a "spirit" to answer
you, you help to break your Mind in two, to detach the Sub-Consciousness
from the Consciousness, and so to get results which astonish yourself. So
divided is mind against itself that (as when I thought "The Pro--" was to
be "The Professor's Love Story") even a conscious expectation of
something different does not turn the Sub-Consciousness from its first
dogged determination; or it may be that somebody else's Sub-Consciousness
was in the ascendant. The "mediums" who excuse the "spirits" on the
ground of their mendacity are not necessarily frauds: they are themselves
deceived; they do not know that if the "spirits" lie, it is because a
true reply was not latent in any one of the _human_ Consciousnesses or
Sub-Consciousnesses present. But the conclusion of the whole matter seems
to be this: there is a germ of scientific truth which the professional
spiritualists doctor and wrap round with complex trickery in order to
extract backsheesh from poor old women of both sexes anxious for
information about deceased relatives. Circles are formed with pretentious
mysticism, and no self-respecting "spirit" will appear without being
received in state with extinguished lights and creepy accompaniments. The
unconscious revelations made by the sitters are the sole genuine
foundation of the spiritualists' influence. Consciousness holds converse
with deceased relatives, and Sub-Consciousness, which knows all about
them, answers for them. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep" myself,
and they will come when I call them, but the "vasty deep" is the deep of
my own Sub-Consciousness. We seem to hear voices from spirit-land; but as
when we hold a sea-shell to our ear and seem to hear the ocean it is only
the blood in our own veins, so--to continue Eugene Lee-Hamilton's fine
sonnet--
Lo! in my heart I hear, as in a shell,
The murmur of a world beyond the grave,
Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be.
Thou fool! this echo is a cheat as well,--
The hum of earthly instincts,--and we crave
A world unreal as the shell-heard sea.
Tables might be "turned" to various purposes. Criminals might be
compelled to yield up their secrets to them in uncontrollable muscular
vibrations, their Sub-Consciousness being tapped. For students under
examination table-turning would be very useful for recalling forgotten
knowledge. The Planchette would be the most convenient form. For
obviously the _modus operandi_ of the Planchette is exactly the same as
the table's. The medium's Sub-Consciousness arrives at an answer by
guesswork, reminiscence, etc., and produces the muscular movements of
writing without first passing the message through the writer's
Consciousness. Mr. Stead has, I believe, a familiar spirit called Julia.
This is merely a projection of his own Sub-Consciousness, the Planchette
being the artificial instrument for enabling him to give
pseudo-objectivity to his thought, to detach a shred of his mind. Even
so, many a dramatist marshals toy figures on a mimic stage. The external
image is a help to weak imaginations. The process of novel-writing
involves breaking up your mind into bits--one for each character. And
when the characters are said to take the reins into their own hands, it
means that the bits are developing an independent existence. If Mr. Stead
is not careful, Julia will get the upper hand of him, his
Sub-Consciousness will dominate his Consciousness, and then he will be
mad. This detachment of bits of mind is dangerous; the monster may
overpower Frankenstein. Julia is literally a child of Mr. Stead's brain,
a psychical daughter embodied in a Planchette. Double Consciousness,
Double Identity, are well-known forms of insanity. In a mild degree they
consist with sanity. Landseer could paint different heads simultaneously
with both hands.
Hypnotism, on this theory, would be the lulling of the patient's
Consciousness, the closing of his central I, and the setting of his
Sub-Consciousness to work in accordance with suggestions.
Thought-transference seems a superfluous hypothesis here. Death is the
cessation of both Consciousness and Sub-Consciousness; and when a drowned
man is resuscitated his Sub-Consciousness can never have ceased. Do you
fail to understand Sub-Consciousness? So do I--as much as that our
digestion operates and our blood circulates without asking our
permission. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Sub-Consciousness is
simply the psychical side of the molecular changes that are going on in
our nervous system. There is more than "metaphysical conceit" in that
elegy of Donne's:
Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.
Sub-Consciousness is a greater marvel in itself than any that it
explains, and beats the spooks hollower than they are. Just consider the
phenomena of dreams, what things we do, what sights we see. It is only
the commonness of dreams that blinds us to the fact that they are more
marvellous than ghost-stories. Mr. Lang thinks the theory of the
sub-conscious self that uses our muscles for its own ends is "the most
startling thing ever offered to the public; and that it should be
regarded as true by a sceptic is staggering to our judicial faculties."
But why? Our noble selves--are they not already exposed to the indignity
of dreams? What matters another insult? We need not be greatly put out if
Sub-Consciousness is busy in the day-time too. And what about
Somnambulism? What about musical or literary creation? Are not our ideas
made for us in the kitchen of our Sub-Consciousness? Our Consciousness is
only a small part of ourselves. What produced De Quincey's opium dreams
was certainly not Consciousness. I can see visions, myself, without
opium. In certain excited states of the brain I can travel in my chair,
or bed, perfectly awake, through an endless and variegated series of
scenes--domestic interiors with people talking or eating or playing
cards, battle-fields with glittering phalanxes, beautiful tossing seas,
gorgeous forests, melancholy hospitals, busy newspaper offices, etc.,
etc. These are almost entirely detached from my will, and the chief
interest of the spectacle is the unexpectedness of its episodes. The
scenes and the people have all the concreteness and detail of actuality,
although I never forget that I am observing my own hallucinations. Just
fancy what ghosts I could see in the dark if I lost my central control
and let my Sub-Consciousness get the upper hand! Sociologists say, the
seeing of dead people in dreams gave rise to the idea of ghosts. I would
suggest that the same process as that of dreaming gives rise to the
ghosts themselves. Great is the Sub-Consciousness! Who shall say what it
does not contain, either _in esse_ or _in posse!_ Till we have exhausted
the Sub-Consciousness let us not talk of spooks.
Two things alone remain to be considered. One is how the Planchette or
the table is able to read cards placed face downwards upon it; the second
is, is telepathy or thought-transference a possibility? As to the first
point I have never yet been able to satisfy myself whether the results
are more than Chance would account for; for Chance has strange
vagaries--themselves part of the doctrine of Chances--and in order to
decide, one would have to make a far more extended induction than I have
had time for. But if the mathematical probabilities are really exceeded,
one would be driven to the suspicion that there resides in the
Sub-Consciousness a sense of which we are unaware, perhaps an extra way
of perceiving by the tips of the fingers, which may be either a new
embryonic sense, not yet developed by the struggle for existence, or the
rudimentary survival of an old sense eliminated in the struggle, perhaps
a relic from those primeval homogeneous organisms in which every part of
the body did every kind of work. After all, the senses are all
developments of the sense of touch. This suspicion is strengthened by the
fact that the correct card is often given at the first trial, and not
after, as if this unused sense were soon exhausted. By the way, though
the "spirits" mostly failed to tell a card placed face down, and unknown
to any one in the room, they were invariably successful when it was
placed face up: a sufficient proof--is it not?--that there could be
nothing in the replies which was not already in some one's mind.
With regard to the question of telepathy, though I am tempted to believe
in it, I have not yet met with any convincing instance of it.
Thought-reading _à la_ Stuart Cumberland almost any one could do who
practised it. The thought-reader merely takes the place of the table as a
receiver of muscular vibrations. What tempts me to believe in the
transfer of thought without physical connection is that, given telepathy,
all the mysterious phenomena that have persisted in popular belief
through the centuries could be swept away at one fell swoop. By
telepathy, working mainly through the Sub-Consciousness, I will explain
you Clairvoyance (that is, not the mere seeing of pictures, which is a
phenomenon akin to dreaming, but the vision of other people's
Sub-Consciousnesses), ghosts, witchcraft, possession, wraiths, Mahatmas,
astral bodies, etc., etc. But it is rather absurd to call in a new
mystery to explain what may not even be facts. And so, till I am
convinced either of ghosts or of telepathy, I must accord an impartial
incredulousness to both. _Credat Christianus_, F. W. Myers or W. T.
Stead! For I gather that the Psychical Society assert that they _must_
exist. But as yet--_je n'en vois pas la nécessité_. If it is indeed
possible to telegraph without fees and to put a psychical girdle round
the earth in twenty seconds, by all means let the noses of those
extortionate cable companies be put out of joint. To me it is just as
wonderful that mind can communicate with mind by letter or even by
speech. One more puzzle adds no light to our darkness. And as for ghosts,
I have more than a lurking sympathy with the farrier in "Silas Marner."
"'If ghos'es want me to believe in 'em, let 'em leave off skulking i' the
dark and i' lone places--let 'em come where there's company and candles!'
"'As if ghos'es 'u'd want to be believed in by anybody so ignorant!' said
Mr. Macey, in deep disgust at the farrier's crass incompetence to
apprehend the conditions of ghostly phenomena."
And supposing "ghos'es" do exist--the moment the Supernatural is attested
and classified it becomes as natural as anything else. Such spooks would
add nothing to the dignity and sanctity of the scheme of creation, and
are no friends to religion. The world would only be made to look more
ridiculous if our deceased friends really rapped tables and pulled off
bedclothes, as Miss Florence Marryat's do. Mrs. Besant (who up to the
moment of going to press is still a Theosophist), in her latest reading
of the riddle of this painful earth, does but explain _obscurum per
obscurius_. Where is the point of a progression through stages, if there
is no continuous consciousness? What does it matter if I am not myself,
but somebody else in his fifth plane or her nineteenth incarnation?
Decidedly it is better to bear the religions we have, than fly to others
that we know not of. If Mr. F. W. Myers hears that some ill-trained
observers have seen ghosts, he becomes Dantesque and dithyrambic about
"the love that rules the world and all the stars." For my part, I fail to
draw the moral. I am content to look nearer home--at coal-heavers and
costermongers, poets and engineers--and to found my theory of life on
less deniable data. A fig for your ghosts! What! Here have I been living
and working and thinking nigh half a lifetime, and only now these gentry
should deign to give me cognisance of their existence. Dame Nature would
have indeed treated me scurvily had she reduced me to such absurd
oracles. The phenomena seem so rare and so irregular, the vast majority
of mankind having to go through life only afraid of ghosts, but never
seeing them, that no general law of posthumous existence could be based
on these obscure and erratic accidents. There may be only a survival of
the fittest. It is not in the aberrations, but in the constant factors of
human life that we must seek for light, and the attitude of these
smellers after immortality is precisely that of the mediaevals who sought
for the workings of divinity in eccentric variations from its own habits,
till miracles became so commonplace that, as Charles Reade deliciously
sums it up, a man in "The Cloister and the Hearth" could reply to his
fellow, who was anxious to know why the market-place was black with
groups, "Ye born fool! it is only a miracle." If I am to seek for
"intimations of immortality," let me find them not in the haphazard
freaks of disembodied intelligence, but where Wordsworth found them, and
where Mr. Myers was once content to find them, in
Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings!
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
If Moses came to London he would be very disgusted with Mr. Stead and the
correspondents of "Borderland" who collect "facts" for him. For that
supremely sane and sage legislator made one clean sweep of all the
festering superstitions that fascinate the silly and the sentimental
to-day as much as they did three thousand years ago. Mr. Stead is a
Puritan, and the Old Testament should be his impregnable rock. Yet
Deuteronomy is most definite about "Julia." "There shall not be found
with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit. For whosoever doeth
these things is an abomination unto the Lord." His organisation of
research is a delusion; science is not to be thus syndicated. The
ordinary observer has no idea of scientific sifting, and in ten minutes I
exposed a gentleman who impressed a large London club as "the most
wonderful thought-reader in Europe."
"Nature has many methods of producing the same effect," says Henry
James's greater brother. "She may make our ears ring by the sound of a
bell, or by a dose of quinine; make us see yellow by spreading a field of
buttercups before our eyes, or by mixing a little Santonine powder with
our food." Probably not ten per cent. of the correspondents of
"orderland" are aware of the existence of such "subjective sensations,"
or realize, despite their nightly experience of dreams, that it does not
take an actual external object to give you the sensation of something
outside yourself. And passing optical illusions may have all the
substantiality of ghosts. When Benvenuto Cellini went to consult a
wizard, as he relates in his "Memoirs," countless spirits were raised for
his behoof, dancing amid the voluminous smoke of a kindled fire. He
actually _saw_ them: it was a splendid case for "Borderland." Yet the
probabilities are that the cunning magician merely projected
magic-lantern pictures on the background of the vapour. My brother woke
up one morning, and accidentally directing his eyes to the ceiling,
beheld there a couple of monsters--uncouth, amorphous creatures with
ramifying conformations and deep purple veins. After a few moments they
passed away; but the next morning, lo! they were there again, and the
next, and the next, till at last, in alarm, off he goes to a specialist
in eyes and unfolds his tale of woe. Is he, perhaps, going blind? "So
you've discovered them at last!" laughs the eminent oculist. "These
things are Purkinje's Figures--the shadows of the network of
blood-vessels of the retina microscopically magnified on the ceiling:
everybody ought to see them--it's a sign the eye is a good working lens.
But they don't notice them except by accident, when the light slants
sideways, and when there's a specially good background for them to be
projected and magnified upon." And, taking him into his mystic chamber,
and reconstituting the conditions, "Look!" says he, "there are your old
friends again!" And there they were, sure enough, in all their amorphous
horror. It is, in fact, not so much the actual external object that
determines our perception, as attention or inattention; and with wise
unconsciousness we ignore all that it is not necessary for us to see at
the moment. If our organism were always in perfect health, if our senses
were not deceivers ever, if we did not dream as solid a world as that
which we inhabit by day, then, indeed, a single appearance of a ghost
would settle the question; but as things are, our own eyes are just what
we mustn't believe.
As Helmholtz pointed out, we ought to see everything double, except the
few objects in the centre of vision; and as a matter of fact we do get
double images, but the prejudiced intelligence perceives them as one. The
drunken man is thus your only true seer. Genius, which has always been
suspected of affinity with drunkenness, is really a faculty for seeing
abnormally--that is to say, veraciously. Andrew Lang, who thinks that all
children have genius, is thus partially justified; for till they have
been taught to see conventionally, they see with fresh insight. Hence the
awkwardness of their questions. Mr. Bernard Shaw recently wrote an
article on "How to Become a Genius," but he omitted to supply the recipe.
It is simply this: see what you do see, and not what everybody tells you
you see. To think what everybody says is to be a Philistine, and to say
what everybody thinks is to be a genius. Every healthy eye sees
Purkinje's Figures when the conditions are present; but only a rare eye
perceives them consciously. That is the eye of genius, but the
Philistines cry, "Disease! Degeneration!"
XVIII
SOCIETIES TO FOUND
I have noted in my Sancho Panza moments a number of deficiencies in the
commonweal which can only be remedied--in our modern manner--by
societies. Let me start with a few of the most needed.
1. SOCIETY FOR PROVIDING NEW OATHS
The present currency is badly worn and was always nasty. Swear-words are
a necessity. They are the safety-valves of the soul. Why not have them
nice and innocent--the kind of oath a girl can use to her mother? It is
unfair men should monopolise the bad language. I wonder the Women's
Rights women have not sworn about it. I have already suggested that
Wellington's "twopenny damn" be replaced by "I don't care a double-blank
domino." This gives a compound or twopenny sensation of the unspeakable,
combined with absolute innocuity, like a vegetarian chop or a temperance
champagne. A milder form (the penny plain) would be "a blank cheque." The
society ought to offer prizes for the best suggestions.
2. SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING READINGS AMONG REVIEWERS
It is a notorious fact that critics are the most ill-read class in the
community. There are few occupations so laborious, exhaustive, and
inadequately remunerated, as reviewing; and who can wonder if the
wretched reviewer never finds time to read a book from one week's end to
the other. It is a cruel anomaly that men, some of whom may have souls as
much as we have, should be shut out from all the pleasures of literature,
and all the possibilities of self-culture that books contain. The poor
critic goes to his grave, picking up a smattering of cant phrases that
are in the air--"Zolaism,"--"Ibsenites," "Décadents," "Symbolism," "the
new humour," "the strong-man poetry," and what not--but to become
acquainted at first hand with the meaning or meaninglessness of these
phrases is denied him by the hard conditions of his life. Publishers
would greatly help the proposed society by sending out books cut.
3. SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF CELEBRITIES
"Mankind's available stock of admiration is not large enough for all the
demands made upon it," wrote Professor Bain, with the one flash of humour
I have noticed in his big treatises. If, as Wordsworth contends,
We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love,
a certain number of objects of admiration is indispensable. But the
surplusage of celebrities in this age is simply overwhelming. Celebrity
is cheap to-day. You may arrive at it by a million avenues. It is almost
impossible to keep your name out of the papers. Culture is so catholic
that celebrities who in the old days would have been monopolised by
esoteric cliques are common property. The paleographer and the
coleopterist claim a share of our admiration equally with the serpentine
dancer and the record-breaking cyclist, and the judicious editor prints
their "interviews" at equal length. We have an impartial acquaintance
with the tastes and views of cardinals and comic singers; and the future
of the papacy is given almost as much space as Little Tich's talent for
water-colour, and his fondness for the 'cello and his baby. Moreover,
that coil of cable which makes the whole world kin has burdened us with
the celebrities of the universe. When to these are added the celebrities
of the past, of every period, country, and variety, the brain reels. Too
many cooks spoil the broth, and too many celebrities numb our faculty of
wonder. The vivid feeling that is possible when heroes are few fades into
a faint reflection of emotion. The celebrity's name calls up not
admiration, but only a shadowy consciousness that admiration is due. We
never pause to get the emotion. I am afraid the first proceeding of the
society will have to be the suppression of the illustrated weeklies,
which manufacture celebrities artificially to fill up their pages, and,
in order to have pretty pictures, give every actress that makes a little
hit a prominence which Shakespeare did not deserve. If there is no
celebrity of the week it is necessary to create one, is the editorial
motto. If a man is a celebrity you interview him, and if you interview
him he is a celebrity.
You will not believe me (though I don't care a double-blank domino if you
don't, for it is true) when I tell you that an opposition society already
exists--a society for the manufacture of celebrities. Self-puffery has
always gone on in a sporadic fashion, most people sending their own puffs
to the papers, and rolling their own logs, on the principle that if you
want a thing done well you must do it yourself. But the idea of the
society is the organisation of self-puffery. It is done through an
association which undertakes (for a fee) to insert anything you choose to
send it about yourself in a hundred native papers, and a hundred
Colonial, Indian, and American papers, as well as to get special articles
written thereon, and to organise press receptions, luncheons, journeys,
dinners, etc., etc. _O tempora! O mores!_ What an exposure of the lower
journalism! Oh the crush of celebrities there will be when the society
has been at work a few years!
4. THE CHARITY OF CHARITIES
The begging-letters and circulars are enough to light your fires the
whole year, and it is a pity they are not sent to the poor, to whom they
would be of more value. Still, not to have the worry of receiving and
discriminating among these appeals is another of the many compensations
of poverty. There are a thousand varieties of Charity (some beginning at
a Home and others going abroad), and the most munificent can support only
a few, and perhaps will select the wrong few. And most of these Charities
are struggling along painfully, their resources taxed to the utmost by
the severe winter and the coal strike; many can scarcely make both ends
meet. There is nothing to prevent the weaker dying of want, and our
Charities suffering from a heavy mortality. And of course it will be the
best and most retiring Charities that will starve to death rather than
beg of the first comer, while the brazen Charities will perambulate the
streets with strident clamour, rattling full money-boxes.
Do we not therefore need another Charity? Nay, blaspheme not, nor clench
thy purse-strings. One other Charity--just one more--is a social
necessity. I would call it "The Charity of Charities." 'T is a central
bureau of beneficence, to which each doubting philanthropist should send
such sums as he knows not how to dispense. The bureau should inquire into
the circumstances of each Charity, and grant or refuse relief strictly in
accordance with its needs or merits. The Charity Organisation Society is
another affair altogether. Perhaps people are afraid of pauperising the
Charities assisted, but there is no reason why these should not continue
to be self-supporting as far as possible. Such as could not manage to
exist in this country could be assisted to emigrate, while every help
would be given to exiled or persecuted Charities to gain a sphere of
activity in this country. Fortunately, there are always large-minded men
among us who will receive any Charity, however despised, with open arms!
There would be visitation committees to call at the offices of the
Charities, to see that they were not pleading poverty when the officials
were drawing big salaries; a loan society to help them over bad times, so
as not to destroy their self-respect by doles in aid; while a cookery
school for accounts and a sanatorium for those that failed to keep their
balance might also be annexes of this grand institution.
XIX
INDECENCY ON THE ENGLISH STAGE
[_This protest was dated Jan. 1, 1891. Things are rather better now._]
I am not a young person. Nothing ever brings a blush to my cheek except
the rouge-pencil or the exposure of my stealthy deeds of good I can read
the Elizabethan dramatists or Rabelais with equanimity, and the only
thing that mars my enjoyment of Juvenal is the occasional obscurity of
the Latin. I like the immoral passages in "Mademoiselle de Maupin," even
if I do not go so far as Swinburne and call it "the holy book of beauty."
Ibsen refreshes me like a tonic, and I even believe in Zola. And yet, if
I were State censor of the English stage--which fortunately I am not--I
should suppress half of our plays for their indecency. The other half I
should suppress for their fatuity. But that is another story.
That vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness, is a maxim for
which the world cannot be too thankful to Burke; for though the point of
view be not true, an important aspect of the truth is undoubtedly
exhibited. Now, what we get on the English stage is the grossness without
the vice--or, to put it more accurately, the vulgarity without the open
presentation of the vice. You may mean anything, so long as you say
something else. Almost every farcical comedy or comic opera--to leave the
music-hall alone--is vitiated by a vein of vulgar indecency which is
simply despicable. The aim of the artist is not to conceal art--there is
none to conceal--but to conceal his indecencies decently, and yet in the
most readily discoverable manner. The successful stage-piece is too often
but a symphony in blue. What the English, with their fashion of spoiling
French importations, incorrectly term _doubles entendres_, are almost
indispensable items in the fare of some London theatres of good repute.
And the references to things sexual are usually as stupid as they are
superfluous to the development of the plot or the characters. There is
not the shadow of an excuse for their introduction. They are simply silly
accretions on the play, quite unimplicated with the spirit of the scene,
and losing all meaning in their effort to have two. One can enjoy the
sparkle of wit and the rich halo of comedy playing around situations
unaffectedly "improper"; even the farces of the Palais Royal amuse with
the broad foolery of their _esprit gaulois_; but the English endeavour to
make the best of both worlds, the English author who combines the prude
and the pimp--for these one can have nothing but contempt. And the
measure of one's longing for a sane and virile view and presentation of
life will be the measure of one's abhorrence of immorality which has not
even the decency to be indecent.
The French dramatist gives us characters living in "a state of sin" (one
of the United States not recognised at the Court of St. James's). The
English dramatist conveys the plot, conveys the situations which spring
out of the "state of sin," but leaves out the basis on which the whole
rests. Thus, instead of situations intelligibly indecent, we get
situations unintelligibly indecent. Eros, like an Indian conjuror, is
left suspended from nothing. As the English playgoer does not ask for
intelligible situations, he is satisfied with the residuum. The
dramatist's uneasy striving to account for the behaviour of his
personages only renders the latent character of the residuum more
glaring.
The truth is, that everything depends on treatment and atmosphere. Lord
Houghton has treated the difficult theme of a mother's and daughter's
love for the same man with tenderness and grace; a foreign writer would
lay bare and anatomise with more of scalpel and less of sentiment. The
former satisfies our aesthetic instincts; the latter would, in addition,
appeal to our intellectual curiosity. To the English dramatist the whole
story would be _tabu_; but if the Continental man had got some striking
situations out of it, the Briton's soul would hanker after those
situations. So he would make the mother a maiden aunt, and give us the
familiar spectacle of the aged spinster languishing for matrimony, as
incarnated for the nonce in the person of her niece's lover. Miss Sophie
Larkin would play the part, and it would be intended to be a comic one.
There is more suggestiveness in the conventional stage figure of the
amorous old maid than in all Congreve's comedies. And yet what figure is
more certain to please, in the whole gallery of puppets? Scenes and
characters of this sort you may have by the dozen; but to build a moral
play upon an "immoral" basis is to court damnation. To construct a noble
piece of work on the basis of "improper" relations between your chief
characters is to show the cloven hoof. Once the initial scheme granted,
the rest may be as bracing as an Alpine breeze; but the critics will
scent brimstone. But to build an immoral play upon a "moral" basis--that
way gladness lies. Critics, who would rage at the delineation of a
character remotely resembling a human being's, will pat you on the back
with a good-humoured smile, and at most a laughing word of reprobation
for your azure audacities. Ladies, who, whether they are married or
unmarried, are in England presumed to be agnostics in sexual matters,
will roar themselves hoarse over farces whose stories could only be told
to the ultramarines. Ibsen may not untie a shoe-latchet in the interest
of truth, while English burlesque managers may put an army of girls into
tights. One dramatist may steal a horse-laugh by a tawdry vulgarity,
while another may not look over an ankle. It is the same with literature.
We look askance at "The Kreutzer Sonata," but tolerate the vulgar
anecdotal indecencies of the sporting journal. The artist's eye may not
see life steadily, and see it whole; but it is licensed to wink and ogle
at will from behind its blinker. If the artist's "immorality" is the
artistic embodiment of a frank Paganism, or is inspired by an ethical or
a scientific purpose, he is a filthy-minded fellow. Seriousness is the
unpardonable sin. Coarseness can be condoned, if it is only flippant and
frivolous enough. In short, the only excuse for indecency is to have
none.
Unfortunately, practical considerations are so involved with artistic
that it may be imprudent to accord the artist as wide a charter as he
would wish. The ideals of sincerity and honesty may in the present social
environment be so potential for harm that it is for the common interest
that they should not be gratified. This may be so, though I do not
believe it. But whether it be so or not, of one thing I am certain,--and
that is that the half-hearted dallying with things sexual is wholly an
evil; that the prurient sniffing and sniggering round the subject is more
fraught with peril to a community, more debasing to the emotional
currency, more blighting to the higher sexual feelings of the race, than
the most shameless public repudiation of all moral restraints. Evil cures
itself in the sunlight; it grows and flourishes in the darkness. Vice
looks fascinating in the gloaming; the morning shows up the tawdriness
and the paint.
XX
LOVE IN LIFE AND LITERATURE
Love! Love! Love! The air is full of it as I write, though the autumn
leaves are falling. Shakespeare's immortal love-poem is playing amid the
cynicism of modern London, like that famous fountain of Dickens's in the
Temple gardens. The "largest circulation" has barely ceased to flutter
the middle-class breakfast-table with discussions on "the Age of Love"
and Little Billee and Trilby--America's "Romeo and Juliet"--loom large at
the Haymarket. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, forgetting even Napoleon, his King
Charles's head, is ruling high at the libraries with _réchauffés_ of
"Some Old Love Stories," and the "way of a man with a maid" is still the
unfailing topic of books and plays. One would almost think that Coleridge
was to be taken "at the foot of the letter"--
All thoughts, all passions, all delights
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
But alas! suffer me to be as sceptical as Stevenson in "Virginibus
Puerisque." In how many lives does Love really play a dominant part? The
average taxpayer is no more capable of a "grand passion" than of a grand
opera. "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart." Ay, my Lord Byron,
but 'tis not "woman's whole existence," neither. Focussed in books or
plays to a factitious unity, the rays are sadly scattered in life.
Natheless Love remains an interest, an ideal, to all but the hopeless
Gradgrinds. Many a sedate citizen's pulse will leap with Romeo's when
Forbes-Robertson's eye first lights upon the Southern child "whose beauty
hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear." Many
a fashionable maid, with an eye for an establishment, will shed tears
when Mrs. Patrick Campbell, martyr to unchaffering love, makes her
quietus with a bare dagger.
For the traces left by Love in life are so numerous and diverse that even
the cynic--which is often bad language for the unprejudiced
observer--cannot quite doubt it away. There seems to be no other way of
accounting for the facts. When you start learning a new language you
always find yourself confronted with the verb "to love"--invariably the
normal type of the first conjugation. In every language on earth the
student may be heard declaring, with more zeal than discretion, that he
and you and they and every other person, singular or plural, have loved,
and do love, and will love. "To love" is the model verb, expressing the
archetype of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world
of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, "to love,"
which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and
violent, is always "regular" in grammar. Ancient and modern tongues tell
the same tale--from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the
elephantine language that was "made in Germany." Not only is "to love"
deficient in no language (as _home_ is deficient in French, and _Geist_
in English), but it is never even "defective." No mood or tense is ever
wanting--a proof of how it has been conjugated in every mood and tense of
life, in association with every variety of proper and improper noun, and
every pronoun at all personal. Not merely have people loved
unconditionally in every language, but there is none in which they would
not have loved, or might not have loved, had circumstances permitted;
none in which they have not been loved, or (for hope springs eternal in
the human breast) have been about to be loved. Even woman has an Active
Voice in the matter; indeed, "to love" is so perfect that, compared with
it, "to marry" is quite irregular. For, while "to love" is sufficient for
both sexes, directly you get to marriage you find in some languages that
division has crept in, and that there is one word for the use of ladies
and another for gentlemen only. Turning from the evidence enshrined in
language to the records of history, the same truth meets us at any date
we appoint. Everywhere "'T is love that makes the world go round." It is
dizzying to think what would have happened if Eve had not accepted Adam.
What could have attracted her if it was not love? Surely not his money,
nor his family. For these she couldn't have cared a fig-leaf.
Unfortunately, the daughters of Eve have not always taken after their
mother. The statistics of crime and insanity testify eloquently to the
reality of love, arithmetic teaching the same lesson as history and
grammar. Consider, too, the piles of love at Mudie's! A million
story-tellers in all periods and at all places cannot have all told
stories, though they have all, alas! told the same story. They must have
had mole-hills for their mountains, if not straw for their bricks. There
are those who, with Bacon, consider love a variety of insanity; but it is
more often merely a form of misunderstanding. When the misunderstanding
is mutual, it may even lead to marriage. As a rule Beauty begets man's
love, Power woman's. At least, so women tell me. But then, I am not
beautiful. It must be said for the man that every lover is a species of
Platonist--he identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True. The
woman's admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and
too often feels, "If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be."
"The Stage is more beholding to Love than the life of man," says Bacon.
The "Daily Telegraph" is perhaps even more "beholding" to it. The
ingenuity with which this great organ raises the cloyless topic every
silly season under another name, is beyond all praise. No conclusion will
ever be arrived at, of course, because "Love" means a different thing
with each correspondent, and it is difficult to lay down general truths
about a relation that varies with each of the countless couples that have
ever experienced it, or have fancied they experienced it. The set theme
of a newspaper correspondence always reminds me of a nervous old lady
crossing the roadway: she runs this way and that way, gets splashed by
every passing wheel, jumps back, jumps forward again, finds temporary
harbour on a crossing-stage under a lamp, darts sideways, and ends by
arriving in another street altogether. So that the heading of a
correspondence is scant guide as to what is being discussed under it; and
no one would be surprised to find a recipe against baldness under the
title of "The Age of Love." But then "The Age of Love" is an absurd and
answerless question. Experience shows that all ages fall in love--and out
again; so that, to quote the pithy Bacon again, "a man may have a quarrel
to marry when he will." Octogenarians elope, and Mr. Gilbert's elderly
baby died a _blasé_ old _roué_ of five.
Romeo's passion was a second, not a first, love: he had already loved
Rosaline. Juliet's first--and only--love came to her only eleven years
after she had been weaned, "come Lammas." Save that the "Age of Love" may
be said to be "Youth"--for Love aye rejuvenates--there is nothing to be
said. Wherefore the German gentleman who protested against the _clichés_
of novel-writers in the matter of the eternity of passion was well within
the wilderness of the subject. The _cliché_ metaphor, by the way, is
itself becoming a _cliché_, so stereotyped do we grow in protesting
against the stereotyped. Germans are, perhaps, not the best authorities
on passion: they are too sentimental for love and too domestic for
romance. Still, our German is justified in his complaint: the love-scenes
in our novels and dramas correspond very little to human nature. In works
of pure romance this is no drawback to artistic beauty; but in much
modern work purporting to mirror contemporary life, the love-making has
neither the beauty that springs from idealisation, nor that which springs
from reality. Property-speeches and stock-sentiments still do duty for
what really takes place in modern love-making. We have played with the
traditional puppets so long that we have come to believe they are alive.
They may have been alive once--when life was more elemental; they still
exist, perchance, in those primitive conditions which are really the past
surviving into the present. But in no field of human life is there
greater need of fresh observation than in this of love. The
ever-increasing subtlety and complexity of modern love have not yet found
adequate registration and interpretation in art. Art always seems to me a
magic mirror in which the shapes of the past are held long after they
have passed away. The author of to-day looks not into his heart--but into
the mirror--and writes. Primitive Love found its poet in Longus the
Greek, with his "Daphnis and Chloe"; but who has given us Modern Love?
Not Meredith himself, despite his sonnets; though "The Egoist" is a
terrible analysis of a modern lover, as saddening as the "Modern Lover"
of George Moore. The poets are ill guides to love. Their passions are
half-fantastic, if not of imagination all compact. Shelley's
"Epipsychidion" was the expression of a passing mood; Tennyson's "Come
into the Garden, Maud," a lyric exaltation that must have died down when
Maud appeared, and could in any case scarce have survived its fiftieth
rewriting; Rossetti's interpretation of "The House of Life" is as purely
individual as Patmore's "Angel in the House"; Swinburne sings of
phantasms; we can no more take our poets for types of modern lovers than
we can accept Dante or Petrarch as representatives of the mediaeval
lover. These poets used their goddesses as mystic inspirers. Dante was
not in love with Beatrice, the daughter of Portinari, but with his own
imagination: she married Simone as he Gemma, and thus he was still able
to worship her. The devotion of Petrarch to Laura did not prevent his
having children by another lady. If we turn to modern prose-writers, we
fail to find any really subtle treatment of Modern Love. Henry James
himself shrinks from analysing it, even allusively and insinuatingly.
Zola's handling of the love-theme is as primary as Pierre Loti's, for
Zola has the eye for masses, not for individual subtleties. Tolstoï,
informed by something of the rage of the old ascetics, is too iconoclast;
Maupassant's stories sometimes suggest a cynicism as profound as
Chamfort's or that old French poet's who wrote:
Femme, plaisir de demye heure,
Et ennuy qui sans fin demeure.
Ibsen is as idealistic as Strindberg is materialist. Shall we seek light
in the modern lady-novelist, with her demand for phases of passion suited
to every stage of existence? Shall we fall in with the agnosticism of
John Davidson, and admit that no man has ever understood a woman, a man,
or himself, and _vice versa_? 'T is seemingly the opinion of Nordau that,
after the first flush of youth, we do but play "The Comedy of Sentiment,"
feigning and making believe to recapture
That first lyric rapture.
And his friend Auguste Dietrich writes:
Se faire vivement désirer et paraître refuser alors ce qu'elle brûle
d'accorder ... voilà la comédie que de tout temps ont jouée les
femmes.
Not quite a fair analysis, this: like all cynicism, it is crude. Juliet
for one did not play this comedy, though she was aware of the rôle.
Or, if thou think'st I am too quickly won,
I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo.
Nor is it always comedy, even when played. Darwin, in his "Descent of
Man," recognizes a real innate coyness, and that not merely of the female
sex, which has been a great factor in improving the race. And, since we
are come to the scientific standpoint, let it be admitted that marriage
is a racial safeguard which does not exhaust the possibilities of
romantic passion. Nature, as Schopenhauer would say, has over-baited the
hook. Our capacities for romance are far in excess of the needs of the
race: we have a surplus of emotion, and Satan finds mischievous vent for
it. We are confronted with a curious dualism of soul and body, with two
streams of tendency that will not always run parallel: _hinc illae
lachrymae_. This it is that makes M. Bourget's "Cruel Enigme." Perhaps
the ancients were wiser, with whom the woman had no right of choice,
passing without will from father to husband. When the Romans evolved
their concept of the marriage-contract between man and woman instead of
between father and son-in-law, the trouble began. Emancipated woman
developed soul and sentiment, and when Roman Law conquered the world, it
spread everywhere the seeds of romance. Romance--the very etymology
carries its history, for 't is only natural that the first love-stories
should have been written in the language of Rome. Nor is it inapt that
the typical lover should recall Rome by his name:
O, Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou. Romeo?
Romantic Love is the rose Evolution has grown on earthly soil. _Floreat!_
Strange that Nordau, in his "Conventional Lies of Civilisation," should
echo this aspiration and gush over the Goethean _Wahlverwandtschaft_--the
elective affinity of souls--almost with the rapture of a Platonist,
conceiving love as the soul finding its pre-natal half. Surely, to his
way of thinking, scientific selection were better for the race than such
natural selection, especially as natural selection cannot operate in our
complicated civilisation, where at every turn the poetry of life dashes
itself against the dead wall of prose. The miracle has happened. Edwin
loves Angelina, and by a strange coincidence Angelina also loves Edwin.
But then come the countless questions of income, position, family. Adam
and Eve were the only couple that started free from relatives. Else,
perhaps, had their garden not been "Paradise." All later lovers have had
to consult other people's tastes as well as their own, and there has
probably never been a marriage that has pleased all parties unconcerned.
And even when the course of true love runs smooth, do the lovers marry
whom they were in love with? Alas! marriage is a parlous business: one
loves one's ideal, but the beloved is always real. The wiser sort take a
leaf out of Dante's book or Petrarch's, and retain their illusions. "The
poets call it love--we doctors give it another name," says a kindly old
character in one of Echegaray's comedies: "How is it cured? This very day
with the aid of the priest; and so excellent a specific is this, that
after a month's appliance, neither of the wedded pair retains a vestige
of remembrance of the fatal sickness."
There is a kind of scientific selection in the intermarriage of persons
of quality, which is at the bottom of their supposed superciliousness and
disdain of trade, though blood does not infallibly produce breeding.
There is the same tribal instinct in the aversion of Jews from exogamy,
and it is this sort of scientific selection which is subconsciously going
on when parents and guardians, sisters, cousins, and aunts, interfere
with the "elective affinities." Money, too, is really a security for the
due rearing of offspring. It is to be hoped there is a tear beneath the
sneers of Sudermann's comedy, "Die Schmetterlingschlacht," for the
sorrows of moneyless mothers with unmarriageable girls.
Doän't thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is,
said Tennyson's Northern Farmer--a sentiment which was anticipated or
plagiarised by Wendell Holmes as "Don't marry for money, but take care
the girl you love has money." Few people may marry directly for money, or
even for position, but few marriages are uncomplicated by considerations
of money and position. Little wonder if
Love, light as air, at sight of human ties
Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.
Lovers may thrust such thoughts into the background, but is not this
wilful blindness as much "The Comedy of Sentiment" as that which supplies
the theme of Nordau's novel? It weighed upon Walter Bagehot that
"immortal souls" should have to think of tare and tret and the price of
butter; but "sich is life"--prose and poetry intertangled. The cloud may
have a silver lining, but clouds are not all silver. Wherefore Nordau's
glorification of the love-match is curiously unscientific; it belongs to
silver-cloudland; it might work among the birds of [Greek:
Nephelo-kokkugia]. Loveless marriages may beget happiness, if not
ecstacy; and love-matches may be neither for the interest of the
individuals nor of the race. They serve, however, to feed Art, and one
real love-match will justify a hundred novels and plays, just as one good
ghost will supply a hundred ghost-stories. Considering how many dead
people there are, the percentage of those permitted to play ghost is so
infinitesimal as to be incredible _a priori_; nevertheless, how we snatch
at the possibility of ghosts! Even so we like to connect love and
marriage, two things naturally divorced, and to fancy that wedding bells
are rung by Cupid. But, after all, what is love? In lawn-tennis it counts
for nothing. In the dictionary it figures, _inter alia_, as "a kind of
light silken stuff." And, as Dumas _fils_ sagely sums it up in "Le
Demi-Monde": "Dans le mariage, quand l'amour existe, l'habitude le tue,
et quand il n'existe pas elle le fait naître."
XXI
DEATH AND MARRIAGE
It was with melancholy amusement that I read in the scientific journals
that sewer-gas was comparatively innocuous. After the hundreds of
sanitary tracts in which the deadliness of sewer-gas has been an axiom of
faith, after the thousand-and-one deaths from it in the contemporary
novel, it is grimly diverting to learn that sewer-gas may be welcomed
without fear to our hearths and homes. The same process appears to be
overtaking science with which we are familiar in the sphere of
history--all the bad gases are getting purified and the good spirits
vilified. The invincible solids are being liquefied, and the aëry
nothings are being given solid habitations. The Professor tells me that
liquid oxygen is obtainable only under great pressure, and at a colossal
cost. I beg respectfully to suggest to the millionaires the advisability
of laying in quarts of it for their dinner-parties. This sparkling
beverage--essence of oxygen, mark you--would not need to be iced, for the
North Pole is as a red-hot poker compared with it. Such a beverage would
make a sensation and provide paragraphs for the society journals and the
"Times" obituary. It is true the guests would not like it, but they would
be anxious to quaff it. Have you never noticed the innocent joy which the
pop and froth of cheap champagne gives to suburban souls? There is a
magic halo about champagne--an aroma of aristocracy--which sanctifies it
for people who would be happier with lemonade. Wherefore I doubt not
there would be a public to adventure on liquid oxygen, though it were
congealed in the attempt. The imbibition thereof might indeed replace
suicide and cremation--it would both kill and cure, and our frozen bodies
might be preserved in family ice-safes for the edification of scientific
posterity. I should not marvel if liquid air or oxygen became an article
of the euthanasian creed. As for sewer-gas, we may yet live to see it
manufactured artificially for the improvement of the public health, and
conveyed to our overcrowded drawing-rooms with all the paraphernalia of
pipes and the mendacious meter. Science has turned so many somersaults
even in my short lifetime that I am prepared for anything. I have even
serious doubts as to the stability of Darwinism, I have seen so many
immortal truths die young. I verily believe that the cocksureness of our
century is destined to be the amusement of the next, which may not
impossibly believe that the ape is descended from man by retrogression.
Our little systems have their day,
They have their day--and come again.
The science of medicine in particular seems to be always in a critical
condition, and the bacillus bobs up and down in a manner that is "painful
and free." Like Hamlet's father's ghost, it eludes our question: we know
not if it is "a spirit of health or goblin damned," angel or demon or
delusion. The microbe of to-day is the myth of to-morrow. Surgery is the
only department of medicine which has made real advances in our century.
The rest is guesswork and experiment on vile bodies. I do not know why
the Peculiar People should be persecuted for refusing vivi-injection.
Tolstoï, a friend of his told me, breathes fire and fury against the
doctors, and will have none of their drugs or their doctrines, and he is
not alone in believing that every tombstone is a monument to some
doctor's skill. "When doctors disagree," says the proverb. But do they
ever agree--unless they consult? I went to an eminent oculist once, who
anointed my eyes with cocaine in order to make the pupils dilate. But my
pupils refused to obey. He was dumfoundered, and said that such a refusal
was unheard of: it contradicted all experience and all the books. I felt
quite conscience-stricken. He tried again and again, but my pupils
remained obdurately small. I apologised for my originality, and he peered
at my eyes minutely, evidently expecting to find the new humour. So I
suggested he might try Horror, which I understood from the novelists made
the pupils dilate; but he replied that that would not be professional. He
told me, however, a fact which I thought well worth his fee. An erudite
scientist had devoted a monograph to cocaine, but failed to discover the
one fact about it which was worth knowing, and which had raised cocaine
to the first rank--to wit, that applied externally it was an anaesthetic,
so that if you put a drop on your tongue you might bite your tongue
without hurting yourself. Doubtless the poor man was ready enough to bite
his tongue when his book was spoilt by the discovery. But I cannot help
thinking that his case was typical of science--which is appallingly
exhaustive and self-satisfied, but seems just to miss the one essential
thing.
Have you heard the legend of the Marriage of the Angel of Death with a
mortal woman? He was aweary of his cheerless professional round, and
longed for domestic joys to brighten his scanty leisure. It did not
strike him to "domesticate the Recording Angel"; but one day, being sent
to despatch a beautiful woman, he fell in love with her instead, and
married her. But dire was the punishment of his disobedience. The
beautiful woman turned out a shrew, who made Death's life not worth
living, and as he had refused to kill her when her hour sounded, she was
now immortal. In despair he deserted her and her child, and would never
go near her, so that her neighbourhood was always healthy, and she
unconsciously made the fortune of several insanitary watering-places. In
course of time Death's son grew up, and with that curious filial
perversity (which has been especially remarked in the children of
clergymen) he became a physician. And his fame as a physician spread far
and wide, inasmuch as he knew the secret of Death, that uxorious and
henpecked Angel having revealed it to his wife in a weak moment. If the
Angel stood at the foot of the bed, he was only terrifying the patient;
if, however, he took up his position at the head of the bed, he was in
deadly earnest, and hope was vain. Inheriting sufficient of his father's
nature to see him when he was invisible to others, the physician was
naturally able to prophesy with undeviating accuracy, though the cunning
rascal made great play with stethoscopes and syringes and what not, and
felt pulses and thumped chests before he gave judgment, and was
solicitous in administering drugs when he foresaw the patient was
destined to recover. Now, it befell one day that the Princess of
Paphlagonia (of whom I have told elsewhere) fell grievously sick, and
none of the physicians could do aught to relieve her. So the king issued
a proclamation that whosoever could cure her could have her to wife. Now,
the fame of the beauty of the princess had travelled as far as the renown
of the mighty physician, so that desire was kindled in his heart to try
for the grand prize. And so Death's son set out and travelled over land
and sea, comforting the sick everywhere as he passed by, and curing all
those that were fated not to die. And at last he arrived in the capital
of Paphlagonia, and was received with great joy by the king and all his
court, and ushered into the sick-chamber. A great warmth gathered at his
heart as his eyes fell upon the marvellous fairness of the princess; but
the next moment his heart was turned to ice, for lo! he perceived the
Angel of Death standing at the head of the bed. After a moment of agony
the physician commanded all present to leave the chamber; then for the
first time he broke the silence his mother had imposed upon him.
"Father," he said, "have you no pity upon me--you who once loved a woman
yourself?" Then Death answered, in a hollow voice: "I must do my duty. I
disobeyed once, and my punishment was greater than I could bear."
"Father," pleaded the physician again, "will you not move to the foot of
the bed?" "Nay, I cannot," answered Death harshly: "I was commanded to
stay here, and here I must stay." "And thou wilt stay there whatever I
say or do?" asked the physician plaintively. "Yea," answered Death
stoutly. Then, wrought up to desperation, the physician called the
attendants in again and bade them turn the bed round, so that Death was
left standing at the foot. But the Angel, seeing himself outwitted,
rushed back to the head. The physician thereupon dismissed the attendants
and upbraided him with his broken promise, but Death stood firm. At last
the physician lost his temper and all his good bedside manner, and cried
furiously: "If you're not gone instantly, I'll send for mother!" And the
Angel of Death vanished in the twinkling of the bedpost.
Till we can marry off Azrael to a termagant, I do not believe we shall
ever really turn the tables upon him. Nothing is more surprising to a
reader of advertisement columns than that people still continue to die.
An army of alchemists has discovered the Elixir of Life, and retails it
at one-and-three-halfpence a phial. Paracelsus has turned pill-maker, and
prospers exceedingly, and sells out to a joint-stock company. But the
great procession gravewards goes on, the "thin black lines" creeping
along all day long, and there is no falling off in the consumption of
sherry and biscuits. The scythe of the Black Angel shines--_opus
fervet_--and it is always the mowing season. Sometimes he stands at the
foot of the bed, and then there is triumph for the pharmacopoeia;
sometimes he stands at the head, and then the bed becomes a grave and he
a tombstone. Alas! his marriage is but a pleasant myth, and his
infallible son a dream. Azrael is still a bachelor, and science is not
shrew enough to drive him away. Perhaps 't is as well the leeches cannot
avert him; perhaps 't is a blessing that they blunder, and the kindly
grass grows over their mistakes. As it is, too many people are an
unconscionable long time in dying. Their habit of procrastination is with
them to the last. They linger on--a misery to themselves, and a thorn to
those anxious to mourn their loss. They do not know how to retire
gracefully. The art of leaving a world should be taught as a branch of
deportment.
An American philanthropist who died recently was in the habit of girding
at the arrangements of the universe, which did not seem to him organised
after the fashion of a bureau of beneficence. He was wont to regret that
he had not been present at the creation, so as to give a few hints.
"Well, what would you have advised?" a friend once challenged him to say.
"I would have advised," he retorted, "that health be made catching
instead of disease." At first hearing, this sounds taking, but its
plausibility diminishes under investigation. Health is the normal state
of an organism, the perfect working of its parts,--it is not something
superadded, as disease is. You might as well expect one watch to catch
the right time from another. The philanthropist would have been more
within the bounds of the reasonable if he had demanded that disease
should be more egotistic and less epidemic. Every organism ought to
consume its own smoke, and not communicate its misfortunes to its
neighbours. And this it does satisfactorily enough in organic disease; it
is only when those impish germs, microbes and bacilli, mix themselves up
with the matter that we get pathological socialism. I confess that the
whole germ business seems to me an illogical element in the scheme of
destruction, though 't is of a piece with the structure of things. And
yet there is a sense in which health _is_ catching. There is a contagion
of confidence as well as of panic, and the surest way to escape epidemics
is to disbelieve them. Radiant people radiate health. The mind is a big
factor in things hygienic. 'T is a poor medicine that takes no account of
the soul. We are not earthen receptacles for drugs, but breathing clay
vivified by thoughts and passions. And in the universe of morals, at any
rate, health is catching just as much as disease. We are ennobled by
noble souls, and uplifted by righteousness. We pattern ourselves
unconsciously upon our friends. Character is contagious, and emotion
epidemic, and good-humour has its germs; copy-book maxims are null and
void: packets of propositions leave us cold. Morality can only be taught
by object-lessons; they err egregiously who would teach it by the card. A
fine character in a play or a novel outweighs a sermon; and in real life
the preacher pales before the practiser. It is a great day when a man
discovers for himself that honesty is the best policy. Morality is a
matter of feeling and will, not of intellect. Handbooks of ethics may
edify the intellect, and "Cicero de Officiis" be the favourite reading of
rogues. I knew a university student who at his examination cribbed Kant's
panegyric of the moral law from a concealed text-book.
The legend of Death's marriage recalls to me that of John L. Sullivan's.
It is said that the famous bruiser was in like grievous plight. His wife
beat him, and he had to sue for a divorce on the ground of cruelty! There
is something deliciously pathetic about the insignificance of a great man
to his wife--his valet feels small at least on pay-day. "The Schoolmaster
Abroad" is a rampant divinity with a ferocious ferule; at home he is a
meek person in slippers. The policeman who stands majestically at the
cross-roads, waving the white glove of authority, nods in the
chimney-corner without a helmet. Bishop Proudie was not much of a hero to
Mrs. Proudie, and even a beadle is, I fear, but moderately imposing in
the domestic sanctum. That a prophet is not without honour save in his
own country, we know; but even if he travel abroad, he must leave his
wife behind him,--else will he never continuously contemplate his own
greatness. This is why so many great men remain bachelors. It perhaps
also explains why the others are so unhappy in their marriages. Perhaps
there ought to be a training-school for the supply of great men's wives.
XXII
THE CHOICE OF PARENTS
"Yes," said Marindin quietly, "they may say they write for Posterity, but
what living author besides myself does write for Posterity?"
This sounded so unlike Marindin's modesty that I wondered if the port and
the paradoxes of our Christmas dinner had got into his head at last. The
veteran man of letters had talked brilliantly _more suo_ of many things,
most of all perhaps of his dead friend, Charles Dickens. Who seemed more
surely to have been writing Christmas stories for Posterity? we had asked
ourselves musingly, as we discussed the change of temper since the days
when Dickens or Father Christmas might have stood for the Time-Spirit.
Many good things had Marindin said of Ibsen and Nietzsche and the modern
apostles of self-development who sneered at the Gospel of self-sacrifice,
and at all the amiable virtues our infancy had drawn from "The Fairchild
Family" with its engaging references to Jeremiah xvii. 9. But now he was
breaking out in a new way, and I missed the reassuring twinkle in his
eye.
"I think I may without arrogance claim to be the one author who really
has considerable influence with Posterity," he went on, drawing serenely
at his cigar and adjusting his right leg more comfortably across the arm
of his easy-chair. "Is there any one else whom Posterity listens to?"