and civilization held otherwise undisputed sway, the ideal of the
perfect and healthy peasant did undoubtedly represent in some shape or
form the conception that there was a dignity in simplicity and a dignity
in labour. It was good for the ancient aristocrat, even if he could not
attain to innocence and the wisdom of the earth, to believe that these
things were the secrets of the priesthood of the poor. It was good for
him to believe that even if heaven was not above him, heaven was below
him. It was well that he should have amid all his flamboyant triumphs
the never-extinguished sentiment that there was something better than
his triumphs, the conception that 'there remaineth a rest.'
The conception of the Ideal Shepherd seems absurd to our modern ideas.
But, after all, it was perhaps the only trade of the democracy which was
equalized with the trades of the aristocracy even by the aristocracy
itself. The shepherd of pastoral poetry was, without doubt, very
different from the shepherd of actual fact. Where one innocently piped
to his lambs, the other innocently swore at them; and their divergence
in intellect and personal cleanliness was immense. But the difference
between the ideal shepherd who danced with Amaryllis and the real
shepherd who thrashed her is not a scrap greater than the difference
between the ideal soldier who dies to capture the colours and the real
soldier who lives to clean his accoutrements, between the ideal priest
who is everlastingly by someone's bed and the real priest who is as glad
as anyone else to get to his own. There are ideal conceptions and real
men in every calling; yet there are few who object to the ideal
conceptions, and not many, after all, who object to the real men.
The fact, then, is this: So far from resenting the existence in art and
literature of an ideal shepherd, I genuinely regret that the shepherd is
the only democratic calling that has ever been raised to the level of
the heroic callings conceived by an aristocratic age. So far from
objecting to the Ideal Shepherd, I wish there were an Ideal Postman, an
Ideal Grocer, and an Ideal Plumber. It is undoubtedly true that we
should laugh at the idea of an Ideal Postman; it is true, and it proves
that we are not genuine democrats.
Undoubtedly the modern grocer, if called upon to act in an Arcadian
manner, if desired to oblige with a symbolic dance expressive of the
delights of grocery, or to perform on some simple instrument while his
assistants skipped around him, would be embarrassed, and perhaps even
reluctant. But it may be questioned whether this temporary reluctance of
the grocer is a good thing, or evidence of a good condition of poetic
feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an
ideal image of health and happiness in any trade, and its remoteness
from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes
that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always
operative, for example, in the mind of a soldier or a doctor; that the
Battle of Waterloo actually makes a private enjoy pipeclaying his
trousers, or that the 'health of humanity' softens the momentary
phraseology of a physician called out of bed at two o'clock in the
morning. But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and detail
of any calling, that ideal does, in the case of the soldier or the
doctor, exist definitely in the background and makes that drudgery worth
while as a whole. It is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in
the case of the vast number of honourable trades and crafts on which the
existence of a modern city depends. It is a pity that current thought
and sentiment offer nothing corresponding to the old conception of
patron saints. If they did there would be a Patron Saint of Plumbers,
and this would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual
craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did
actually plumb.
When all is said and done, then, we think it much open to question
whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance
of the ideal of the happy peasant. It is foolish enough to suppose that
the rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing
that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The
modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student
further astray than the old idyllic notion. For we cannot get the
chiaroscuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as
its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows. Probably at the very
moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking
heavily with his friend in a pot-house, the man himself is on his soul's
holiday, crowned with the flowers of a passionate idleness, and far more
like the Happy Peasant than the world will ever know.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION
It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition
stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff
shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the
ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us,
ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and
love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling
fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with
the most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so
interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of
different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it
would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous
mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated
papers, such as _Tit-Bits, Science Siftings_, and many of the
illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds
of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost
incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more
popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious
debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous
passages in Bradshaw's Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. It
is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother
Seigel's Syrup because he wished to know what eventually happened to the
young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap
detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever
our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we
gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at
the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy
bull-baiting or getting drunk. But the literature of information is
absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves
with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To
read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be
a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which
constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this
particular branch of popular literature.
Primarily, at least, there is one rather peculiar thing which must in
justice be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be
allowed to be, upon the whole, as disinterested as a prophet seeing
visions or a child reading fairy-tales. Here, again, we find, as we so
often do, that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can
trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among
the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this
popularity for information, which would be given by a person of greater
cultivation, would be that common men are chiefly interested in those
sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of
examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the
popularity of these insane encyclopaedias, it cannot be the ground of
utility. The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very
moonstruck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain
facts relevant to daily life than compilations on the subject of the
number of cows' tails that would reach the North Pole. There are many
more people who are in love than there are people who have any
intention of counting or collecting cows' tails. It is evident to me
that the grounds of this widespread madness of information for
information's sake must be sought in other and deeper parts of human
nature than those daily needs which lie so near the surface that even
social philosophers have discovered them somewhere in that profound and
eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding other people's business
which made great popular movements like the Crusades or the Gordon
Riots.
I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private
life after the manner of these papers. His conversation consisted of
fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth and time and
population, and his conversation was a nightmare of dulness. During the
shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how
many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge, and how
many rival shops Mr. Whiteley had bought up since he opened his
business. The attitude of his acquaintances towards this inexhaustible
entertainer varied according to his presence or absence between
indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man's brain
being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like
visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and
glass cases filled with specimens of London mud, of common mortar, of
broken walking-sticks and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered
that this intolerable prosaic bore had been, in fact, a poet. I learnt
that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and
unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went
along; that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that
the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet's brain.
Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so
circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him
it must have been a case of art for art's sake. The joke sustained so
gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is
shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon
reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had
struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true,
immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they
were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid
my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which
prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it from seeing with the
eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be
brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When
they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested,
but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the
street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be
interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art,
though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life
for interest with the same kind of cheerful and uneradicable assurance
with which we look for interest at a comedy for which we have paid money
at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary
fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured
picture, the scrawlings in circles of a baby upon the slate of night;
its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a
wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a cockney brilliancy, like the
holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level,
they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man--the
taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in
hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of 110 in South
Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large
masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the
miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of
something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip.
When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only
because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any
of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we
have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of
Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always
supposed to be, for his benefit; but in the fact that an unusually large
whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading
millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a
year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralized with the mere
indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and
splendid disinterestedness of the reader of _Pearson's Weekly_. He still
keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of
men--the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have
just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and, with a truly
sportsmanlike instinct, the average man takes most pleasure in the
details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult
and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the
giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern
representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the
werewolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not
interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought
that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it
had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature,
a refuge indicating the dulness of the world: it was an incident
pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.
That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of
information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial,
it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along
with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it
may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly
by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the objections which
we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering
where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers. The
natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is
far less often a subject of speculation; yet the healthy hungers which
lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of
the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics
long dethroned and the intrigues of commonwealths long obliterated from
the earth. And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer:
that perhaps the taste for shreds and patches of journalistic science
and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile
curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and
indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young and entering history
for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each
other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and
conventional eccentricities which, in any case, they would tell each
other in taverns. Science itself is only the exaggeration and
specialization of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the
youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere
news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a
pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as
monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between
science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We
have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can
be contented with a planet of miracles.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY
The modern view of heraldry is pretty accurately represented by the
words of the famous barrister who, after cross-examining for some time a
venerable dignitary of Heralds' College, summed up his results in the
remark that 'the silly old man didn't even understand his own silly old
trade.'
Heraldry properly so called was, of course, a wholly limited and
aristocratic thing, but the remark needs a kind of qualification not
commonly realized. In a sense there was a plebeian heraldry, since every
shop was, like every castle, distinguished not by a name, but a sign.
The whole system dates from a time when picture-writing still really
ruled the world. In those days few could read or write; they signed
their names with a pictorial symbol, a cross--and a cross is a great
improvement on most men's names.
Now, there is something to be said for the peculiar influence of
pictorial symbols on men's minds. All letters, we learn, were originally
pictorial and heraldic: thus the letter A is the portrait of an ox, but
the portrait is now reproduced in so impressionist a manner that but
little of the rural atmosphere can be absorbed by contemplating it. But
as long as some pictorial and poetic quality remains in the symbol, the
constant use of it must do something for the aesthetic education of
those employing it. Public-houses are now almost the only shops that use
the ancient signs, and the mysterious attraction which they exercise may
be (by the optimistic) explained in this manner. There are taverns with
names so dreamlike and exquisite that even Sir Wilfrid Lawson might
waver on the threshold for a moment, suffering the poet to struggle with
the moralist. So it was with the heraldic images. It is impossible to
believe that the red lion of Scotland acted upon those employing it
merely as a naked convenience like a number or a letter; it is
impossible to believe that the Kings of Scotland would have cheerfully
accepted the substitute of a pig or a frog. There are, as we say,
certain real advantages in pictorial symbols, and one of them is that
everything that is pictorial suggests, without naming or defining. There
is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the
intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never
dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the
spring.
Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial
symbolism of all the colours and degrees of aristocracy. When the great
trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made
one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this
pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours,
should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a
crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as
butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the
Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling
mistake--a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady--of decreasing
the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did
not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, 'You are as
good as the Duke of Norfolk,' but used that meaner democratic formula,
'The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.'
For it cannot be denied that the world lost something finally and most
unfortunately about the beginning of the nineteenth century. In former
times the mass of the people was conceived as mean and commonplace, but
only as comparatively mean and commonplace; they were dwarfed and
eclipsed by certain high stations and splendid callings. But with the
Victorian era came a principle which conceived men not as comparatively,
but as positively, mean and commonplace. A man of any station was
represented as being by nature a dingy and trivial person--a person
born, as it were, in a black hat. It began to be thought that it was
ridiculous for a man to wear beautiful garments, instead of it
being--as, of course, it is--ridiculous for him to deliberately wear
ugly ones. It was considered affected for a man to speak bold and heroic
words, whereas, of course, it is emotional speech which is natural, and
ordinary civil speech which is affected. The whole relations of beauty
and ugliness, of dignity and ignominy were turned upside down. Beauty
became an extravagance, as if top-hats and umbrellas were not the real
extravagance--a landscape from the land of the goblins. Dignity became a
form of foolery and shamelessness, as if the very essence of a fool were
not a lack of dignity. And the consequence is that it is practically
most difficult to propose any decoration or public dignity for modern
men without making them laugh. They laugh at the idea of carrying
crests and coats-of-arms instead of laughing at their own boots and
neckties. We are forbidden to say that tradesmen should have a poetry of
their own, although there is nothing so poetical as trade. A grocer
should have a coat-of-arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered
from distant and fantastic lands; a postman should have a coat-of-arms
capable of expressing the strange honour and responsibility of the man
who carries men's souls in a bag; the chemist should have a coat-of-arms
symbolizing something of the mysteries of the house of healing, the
cavern of a merciful witchcraft.
There were in the French Revolution a class of people at whom everybody
laughed, and at whom it was probably difficult, as a practical matter,
to refrain from laughing. They attempted to erect, by means of huge
wooden statues and brand-new festivals, the most extraordinary new
religions. They adored the Goddess of Reason, who would appear, even
when the fullest allowance has been made for their many virtues, to be
the deity who had least smiled upon them. But these capering maniacs,
disowned alike by the old world and the new, were men who had seen a
great truth unknown alike to the new world and the old. They had seen
the thing that was hidden from the wise and understanding, from the
whole modern democratic civilization down to the present time. They
realized that democracy must have a heraldry, that it must have a proud
and high-coloured pageantry, if it is to keep always before its own mind
its own sublime mission. Unfortunately for this ideal, the world has in
this matter followed English democracy rather than French; and those who
look back to the nineteenth century will assuredly look back to it as we
look back to the reign of the Puritans, as the time of black coats and
black tempers. From the strange life the men of that time led, they
might be assisting at the funeral of liberty instead of at its
christening. The moment we really believe in democracy, it will begin to
blossom, as aristocracy blossomed, into symbolic colours and shapes. We
shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves.
For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite
certain that the effort is superfluous.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGS
There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of
another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the
communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There
are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often
they are made.