biography. They are alike in certain respects, as, for example, in the
fact that neither of them resembles the original, and that both of them
commonly tone down not only all a man's vices, but all the more amusing
of his virtues. But they are treated in one respect differently. We
never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the
sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of
the most important part of a man's existence. The sculptor does not work
at this disadvantage. The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an
eminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the
public; he does not depict a statesman with a sack over his head because
his smile was too sweet to be endurable in the light of day. But in
biography the thesis is popularly and solidly maintained, so that it
requires some courage even to hint a doubt of it, that the better a man
was, the more truly human life he led, the less should be said about it.
For this idea, this modern idea that sanctity is identical with secrecy,
there is one thing at least to be said. It is for all practical purposes
an entirely new idea; it was unknown to all the ages in which the idea
of sanctity really flourished. The record of the great spiritual
movements of mankind is dead against the idea that spirituality is a
private matter. The most awful secret of every man's soul, its most
lonely and individual need, its most primal and psychological
relationship, the thing called worship, the communication between the
soul and the last reality--this most private matter is the most public
spectacle in the world. Anyone who chooses to walk into a large church
on Sunday morning may see a hundred men each alone with his Maker. He
stands, in truth, in the presence of one of the strangest spectacles in
the world--a mob of hermits. And in thus definitely espousing publicity
by making public the most internal mystery, Christianity acts in
accordance with its earliest origins and its terrible beginning. It was
surely by no accident that the spectacle which darkened the sun at
noonday was set upon a hill. The martyrdoms of the early Christians were
public not only by the caprice of the oppressor, but by the whole desire
and conception of the victims.
The mere grammatical meaning of the word 'martyr' breaks into pieces at
a blow the whole notion of the privacy of goodness. The Christian
martyrdoms were more than demonstrations: they were advertisements. In
our day the new theory of spiritual delicacy would desire to alter all
this. It would permit Christ to be crucified if it was necessary to His
Divine nature, but it would ask in the name of good taste why He could
not be crucified in a private room. It would declare that the act of a
martyr in being torn in pieces by lions was vulgar and sensational,
though, of course, it would have no objection to being torn in pieces by
a lion in one's own parlour before a circle of really intimate friends.
It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has
inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars
have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked
and numerous than advertisements of Pears' soap. It would be a strange
world indeed if Nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame,
if the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves
and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at
sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness, and the birds
flew, like bats, by night.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE
There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world
of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of
morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a
descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost
crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the
goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the
inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when
everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown
from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and
experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical
phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown
in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is 'the heir of all
the ages' is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally
important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is
not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good
for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling
doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.
The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding
childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and
inventive in any age; and if we were asked what was the best proof of
this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with all
respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was to be
found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of
nonsense. 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose,' at least, is original, as
the first ship and the first plough were original.
It is true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the
world has seen--Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne--have written
nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense.
The nonsense of these men was satiric--that is to say, symbolic; it was
a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered truth. There is all the
difference in the world between the instinct of satire, which, seeing in
the Kaiser's moustaches something typical of him, draws them continually
larger and larger; and the instinct of nonsense which, for no reason
whatever, imagines what those moustaches would look like on the present
Archbishop of Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of absence of mind. We
incline to think that no age except our own could have understood that
the Quangle-Wangle meant absolutely nothing, and the Lands of the
Jumblies were absolutely nowhere. We fancy that if the account of the
knave's trial in 'Alice in Wonderland' had been published in the
seventeenth century it would have been bracketed with Bunyan's 'Trial of
Faithful' as a parody on the State prosecutions of the time. We fancy
that if 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose' had appeared in the same
period everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.
It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear's
'Nonsense Rhymes.' To our mind he is both chronologically and
essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis
Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We
know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious
and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant
and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and
in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense--the
idea of _escape_, of escape into a world where things are not fixed
horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees,
and any odd man you meet may have three legs. Lewis Carroll, living one
life in which he would have thundered morally against any one who walked
on the wrong plot of grass, and another life in which he would
cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue, was, by his very
divided nature, his one foot on both worlds, a perfect type of the
position of modern nonsense. His Wonderland is a country populated by
insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of
masquerade; we feel that if we could pierce their disguises, we might
discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were Professors and
Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental holiday. This sense of escape is
certainly less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of the completeness of
his citizenship in the world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic
biography as we know Lewis Carroll's. We accept him as a purely fabulous
figure, on his own description of himself:
'His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.'
While Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear
introduces quite another element--the element of the poetical and even
emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a
contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason
as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his
amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic
prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.
'Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live,'
is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in
'Jabberwocky.' Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes his
whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear, with
more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps of his
own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational statements,
until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know what they mean.
There is a genial ring of commonsense about such lines as,
'For his aunt Jobiska said "Every one knows
That a Pobble is better without his toes,"'
which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poet seems so easy on the
matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning,
that we know the peculiar difficulties of a Pobble, that we are as old
travellers in the 'Gromboolian Plain' as he is.
Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new
sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a
mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of
mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen
out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any
great aesthetic growth. The principle of _art for art's sake_ is a very
good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction between the
earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad
principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its
roots in the air. Every great literature has always been
allegorical--allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad'
is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all
life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle. There
is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the
word 'ghosts'; another, and somewhat better one, in which we think it
is summed up in the words 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Even the
vulgarest melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses
something of the delight in sinister possibilities--the healthy lust for
darkness and terror which may come on us any night in walking down a
dark lane. If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the
future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world
must not only be the tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be
nonsensical also. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very
unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things.
Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the
'wonders' of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be
completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we
regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for
a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we
consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the
skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the
astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to
it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other
side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a
quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a
man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple
with only two.
This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder.
It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book
of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been
represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth
century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on
the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it.
'Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?' This simple
sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant
independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions,
is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense
and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme
symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things
with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.
The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of
things, has decided that 'faith is nonsense,' does not know how truly he
speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is
faith.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF PLANETS
A book has at one time come under my notice called 'Terra Firma: the
Earth not a Planet.' The author was a Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott, and he
quoted very seriously the opinions of a large number of other persons,
of whom we have never heard, but who are evidently very important. Mr.
Beach of Southsea, for example, thinks that the world is flat; and in
Southsea perhaps it is. It is no part of my present intention, however,
to follow Mr. Scott's arguments in detail. On the lines of such
arguments it may be shown that the earth is flat, and, for the matter of
that, that it is triangular. A few examples will suffice:
One of Mr. Scott's objections was that if a projectile is fired from a
moving body there is a difference in the distance to which it carries
according to the direction in which it is sent. But as in practice there
is not the slightest difference whichever way the thing is done, in the
case of the earth 'we have a forcible overthrow of all fancies relative
to the motion of the earth, and a striking proof that the earth is not
a globe.'
This is altogether one of the quaintest arguments we have ever seen. It
never seems to occur to the author, among other things, that when the
firing and falling of the shot all take place upon the moving body,
there is nothing whatever to compare them with. As a matter of fact, of
course, a shot fired at an elephant does actually often travel towards
the marksman, but much slower than the marksman travels. Mr. Scott
probably would not like to contemplate the fact that the elephant,
properly speaking, swings round and hits the bullet. To us it appears
full of a rich cosmic humour.
I will only give one other example of the astronomical proofs:
'If the earth were a globe, the distance round the surface, say, at 45
degrees south latitude, could not possibly be any greater than the same
latitude north; but since it is found by navigators to be twice the
distance--to say the least of it--or double the distance it ought to be
according to the globular theory, it is a proof that the earth is not a
globe.'
This sort of thing reduces my mind to a pulp. I can faintly resist when
a man says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have four
legs; but when he says that if the earth were a globe cats would not
have five legs I am crushed.
But, as I have indicated, it is not in the scientific aspect of this
remarkable theory that I am for the moment interested. It is rather with
the difference between the flat and the round worlds as conceptions in
art and imagination that I am concerned. It is a very remarkable thing
that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon
things. We are convinced intellectually that we inhabit a small
provincial planet, but we do not feel in the least suburban. Men of
science have quarrelled with the Bible because it is not based upon the
true astronomical system, but it is certainly open to the orthodox to
say that if it had been it would never have convinced anybody.
If a single poem or a single story were really transfused with the
Copernican idea, the thing would be a nightmare. Can we think of a
solemn scene of mountain stillness in which some prophet is standing in
a trance, and then realize that the whole scene is whizzing round like a
zoetrope at the rate of nineteen miles a second? Could we tolerate the
notion of a mighty King delivering a sublime fiat and then remember
that for all practical purposes he is hanging head downwards in space? A
strange fable might be written of a man who was blessed or cursed with
the Copernican eye, and saw all men on the earth like tintacks
clustering round a magnet. It would be singular to imagine how very
different the speech of an aggressive egoist, announcing the
independence and divinity of man, would sound if he were seen hanging on
to the planet by his boot soles.
For, despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott's horror at the Newtonian astronomy and
its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance
of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old
Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the
spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had
no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact
of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of
gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it--a sentiment of
combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which
all things hang upon one thread. 'Thou hast hanged the world upon
nothing,' said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence
wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy. The sense of the
preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the
hollow of a hand, is one which the round and rolling earth gives in its
most thrilling form. Mr. Wardlaw Scott's flat earth would be the true
territory for a comfortable atheist. Nor would the old Jews have any
objection to being as much upside down as right way up. They had no
foolish ideas about the dignity of man.
It would be an interesting speculation to imagine whether the world will
ever develop a Copernican poetry and a Copernican habit of fancy;
whether we shall ever speak of 'early earth-turn' instead of 'early
sunrise,' and speak indifferently of looking up at the daisies, or
looking down on the stars. But if we ever do, there are really a large
number of big and fantastic facts awaiting us, worthy to make a new
mythology. Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for example, with genuine, if unconscious,
imagination, says that according to astronomers, 'the sea is a vast
mountain of water miles high.' To have discovered that mountain of
moving crystal, in which the fishes build like birds, is like
discovering Atlantis: it is enough to make the old world young again.
In the new poetry which we contemplate, athletic young men will set out
sturdily to climb up the face of the sea. If we once realize all this
earth as it is, we should find ourselves in a land of miracles: we shall
discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own. Among all
the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and
catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that
they are living on a star.
In the early days of the world, the discovery of a fact of natural
history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of
poetry. When man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is
called the automatic animal state, and began to notice the queer facts
that the sky was blue and the grass green, he immediately began to use
those facts symbolically. Blue, the colour of the sky, became a symbol
of celestial holiness; green passed into the language as indicating a
freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to
live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the
symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this
habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased abruptly
with scientific progress, and all the confounding portents preached by
Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of
the universe compared with which the Apocalypse with its falling stars
was a mere idyll. They declared that we are all careering through space,
clinging to a cannon-ball, and the poets ignore the matter as if it were
a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in
our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang; and men
still go back to dusty records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us
that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a
solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a
fact, and men still go back to the fairy-tale. To what towering heights
of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of
natural history had continued and man's fancy had played with the
planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers! We might have
had a planetary patriotism, in which the green leaf should be like a
cockade, and the sea an everlasting dance of drums. We might have been
proud of what our star has wrought, and worn its heraldry haughtily in
the blind tournament of the spheres. All this, indeed, we may surely do
yet; for with all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing
happily that no man knows: whether the world is old or young.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF CHINA SHEPHERDESSES
There are some things of which the world does not like to be reminded,
for they are the dead loves of the world. One of these is that great
enthusiasm for the Arcadian life which, however much it may now lie open
to the sneers of realism, did, beyond all question, hold sway for an
enormous period of the world's history, from the times that we describe
as ancient down to times that may fairly be called recent. The
conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and
shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of
Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare,
and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and
brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of
the China Shepherdess. The Catholic Church and the Ideal Shepherd are
indeed almost the only things that have bridged the abyss between the
ancient world and the modern. Yet, as we say, the world does not like
to be reminded of this boyish enthusiasm.
But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an
element alone. By the cheap revolutionary it is commonly supposed that
imagination is a merely rebellious thing, that it has its chief function
in devising new and fantastic republics. But imagination has its highest
use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination, like the
trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves.
Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the
eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with
the eyes of a Euphuist. The prime function of imagination is to see our
whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions. In
spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of
imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make
settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make
facts wonders. To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since
they were paradoxes in the Stone Age; to them the ordinary copy-book
blazes with blasphemy.
Let us, then, consider in this light the old pastoral or Arcadian ideal.
But first certainly one thing must be definitely recognised. This
Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm. To study it is like
fumbling in the love-letters of a dead man. To us its flowers seem as
tawdry as cockades; the lambs that dance to the shepherd's pipe seem to
dance with all the artificiality of a ballet. Even our own prosaic toil
seems to us more joyous than that holiday. Where its ancient exuberance
passed the bounds of wisdom and even of virtue, its caperings seem
frozen into the stillness of an antique frieze. In those gray old
pictures a bacchanal seems as dull as an archdeacon. Their very sins
seem colder than our restraints.
All this may be frankly recognised: all the barren sentimentality of the
Arcadian ideal and all its insolent optimism. But when all is said and
done, something else remains.