Mr. Forbes Robertson, let us say, would experience no surprise or
discomfort at seeing him enter the room in the bodily form of Mr.
Chaplin, there is a confusion constantly made between being attracted by
exterior, which is natural and universal, and being attracted by what is
called physical beauty, which is not entirely natural and not in the
least universal. Or rather, to speak more strictly, the conception of
physical beauty has been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physical
beauty which no more exhausts the possibilities of external
attractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhausts
the possibilities of moral attractiveness.
The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the
Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have
wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against
the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have
long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a
stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the
Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism--an
asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish
severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men
lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees
of blood certain consequences might follow. But they did not starve
their instinct for contrasts and combinations; their prophets gave two
wings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim with all the
riotous ingenuity of Lewis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their police
regulation into elfland; they vetoed not the actual adulteries of the
earth but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the banns of thought.
It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters
of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The
chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have
been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie
a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever feels
that the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big--big as some
folk-lore giants have been? In some Scandinavian story a hero walks for
miles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be the
bridge of the giant's nose. That is what we should call, with a calm
conscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified the
Greeks, and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their natural
love of size, vitality, variety, energy, ugliness. Nature intended every
human face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, to
be regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from an
oak, and an apple-tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners did
for trees the Greeks did for the human form; they lopped away its living
and sprawling features to give it a certain academic shape; they hacked
off noses and pared down chins with a ghastly horticultural calm. And
they have really succeeded so far as to make us call some of the most
powerful and endearing faces ugly, and some of the most silly and
repulsive faces beautiful. This disgraceful _via media_, this pitiful
sense of dignity, has bitten far deeper into the soul of modern
civilization than the external and practical Puritanism of Israel. The
Jew at the worst told a man to dance in fetters; the Greek put an
exquisite vase upon his head and told him not to move.
Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the
same conception applies to noses. To insist that one type of face is
ugly because it differs from that of the Venus of Milo is to look at it
entirely in a misleading light. It is strange that we should resent
people differing from ourselves; we should resent much more violently
their resembling ourselves. This principle has made a sufficient hash of
literary criticism, in which it is always the custom to complain of the
lack of sound logic in a fairy tale, and the entire absence of true
oratorical power in a three-act farce. But to call another man's face
ugly because it powerfully expresses another man's soul is like
complaining that a cabbage has not two legs. If we did so, the only
course for the cabbage would be to point out with severity, but with
some show of truth, that we were not a beautiful green all over.
But this frigid theory of the beautiful has not succeeded in conquering
the art of the world, except in name. In some quarters, indeed, it has
never held sway. A glance at Chinese dragons or Japanese gods will show
how independent are Orientals of the conventional idea of facial and
bodily regularity, and how keen and fiery is their enjoyment of real
beauty, of goggle eyes, of sprawling claws, of gaping mouths and
writhing coils. In the Middle Ages men broke away from the Greek
standard of beauty, and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers,
which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils. In the full summer of
technical artistic perfection the revolt was carried to its real
consummation in the study of the faces of men. Rembrandt declared the
sane and manly gospel that a man was dignified, not when he was like a
Greek god, but when he had a strong, square nose like a cudgel, a
boldly-blocked head like a helmet, and a jaw like a steel trap.
This branch of art is commonly dismissed as the grotesque. We have never
been able to understand why it should be humiliating to be laughable,
since it is giving an elevated artistic pleasure to others. If a
gentleman who saw us in the street were suddenly to burst into tears at
the mere thought of our existence, it might be considered disquieting
and uncomplimentary; but laughter is not uncomplimentary. In truth,
however, the phrase 'grotesque' is a misleading description of ugliness
in art. It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothic
gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least
intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of
satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole
key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut
out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pines
stand up hardily upon a high cliff, we like to see a chasm cloven from
end to end of a mountain. With equally noble enthusiasm we like to see a
nose jut out decisively, we like to see the red hair of a friend stand
up hardily in bristles upon his head, we like to see his mouth broad and
clean cut like the mountain crevasse. At least some of us like all this;
it is not a question of humour. We do not burst with amusement at the
first sight of the pines or the chasm; but we like them because they are
expressive of the dramatic stillness of Nature, her bold experiments,
her definite departures, her fearlessness and savage pride in her
children. The moment we have snapped the spell of conventional beauty,
there are a million beautiful faces waiting for us everywhere, just as
there are a million beautiful spirits.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF FARCE
I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be
marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as
'degenerating into farce'; it would be fair criticism to speak of it
'changing into farce'; but as for degenerating into farce, we might
equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a
story is spoken of as 'melodramatic,' and the phrase, queerly enough, is
not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as 'pantomimic' or
'sensational' is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for
all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime (now extinct) is
one of the pleasantest sensations of all. 'This stuff is fit for a
detective story,' is often said, as who should say, 'This stuff is fit
for an epic.'
Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification,
there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of
it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for
them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually
tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of
the great mother, they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and
when they are right they are right almost by accident, because of the
blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder
seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of
a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their
own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime
seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or
effect, a mass of 'jarring atoms,' a prolonged mental torture of
irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous
vulgarity, where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his
wife comes home, and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. All this
is, in a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing in heaven or earth
except the attitude and the phrases quoted at the beginning of this
article. We have no doubt in the world that, if the other forms of art
had been equally despised, they would have been equally despicable. If
people had spoken of 'sonnets' with the same accent with which they
speak of 'music-hall songs,' a sonnet would have been a thing so
fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen; a
rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. If people had said that epics
were only fit for children and nursemaids, 'Paradise Lost' might have
been an average pantomime: it might have been called 'Harlequin Satan,
or How Adam 'Ad 'em.' For who would trouble to bring to perfection a
work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write
'Othello' if even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, 'Mr. Shakespeare
is fit for something better than writing tragedies'?
The case of farce, and its wilder embodiment in harlequinade, is
especially important. That these high and legitimate forms of art,
glorified by Aristophanes and Molière, have sunk into such contempt may
be due to many causes: I myself have little doubt that it is due to the
astonishing and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and hilarity which
marks modern aesthetics, to such an extent that it has spread even to
the revolutionists (once the hopeful section of men), so that even those
who ask us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they
will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary
art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the
phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it
must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its
lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have
all the comedy emotions of 'Much Ado about Nothing' or 'Northanger
Abbey,' but if their actual conversation were reported, it would
possibly not be a worthy addition to literature. An old man sitting by
his fire may have all the desolate grandeur of Lear or Père Goriot, but
if he comes into literature he must do something besides sit by the
fire. The artistic justification, then, of farce and pantomime must
consist in the emotions of life which correspond to them. And these
emotions are to an incredible extent crushed out by the modern
insistence on the painful side of life only. Pain, it is said, is the
dominant element of life; but this is true only in a very special sense.
If pain were for one single instant literally the dominant element in
life, every man would be found hanging dead from his own bed-post by the
morning. Pain, as the black and catastrophic thing, attracts the
youthful artist, just as the schoolboy draws devils and skeletons and
men hanging. But joy is a far more elusive and elvish matter, since it
is our reason for existing, and a very feminine reason; it mingles with
every breath we draw and every cup of tea we drink. The literature of
joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare and more triumphant than the
black and white literature of pain. And of all the varied forms of the
literature of joy, the form most truly worthy of moral reverence and
artistic ambition is the form called 'farce'--or its wilder shape in
pantomime. To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house,
there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the
possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder
whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or
sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the
candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a
potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this
nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of
pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said
(with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may
be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly
symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and
architecture which characterizes pantomime and farce. If the whole
affair happened in some alien atmosphere, if a pear-tree began to grow
apples or a river to run with wine in some strange fairyland, the effect
would be quite different. The streets and shops and door-knockers of the
harlequinade, which to the vulgar aesthete make it seem commonplace, are
in truth the very essence of the aesthetic departure. It must be an
actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing
different interiors; it must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into
the air without his touching them, or else the whole internal excitement
of this elvish invasion of civilization, this abrupt entrance of Puck
into Pimlico, is lost. Some day, perhaps, when the present narrow phase
of aesthetics has ceased to monopolize the name, the glory of a farcical
art may become fashionable. Long after men have ceased to drape their
houses in green and gray and to adorn them with Japanese vases, an
aesthete may build a house on pantomime principles, in which all the
doors shall have their bells and knockers on the inside, all the
staircases be constructed to vanish on the pressing of a button, and all
the dinners (humorous dinners in themselves) come up cooked through a
trapdoor. We are very sure, at least, that it is as reasonable to
regulate one's life and lodgings by this kind of art as by any other.
The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us; but
we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of
transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men
of the day when they set about the writing of comic literature do it
under one destructive fallacy and disadvantage: the notion that comic
literature is in some sort of way superficial. They give us little
knick-knacks of the brittleness of which they positively boast, although
two thousand years have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the 'Frogs'
as on the wisdom of the 'Republic.' It is all a mean shame of joy. When
we come out from a performance of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' we feel
as near to the stars as when we come out from 'King Lear.' For the joy
of these works is older than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than
wisdom, their love is stronger than death.
The old masters of a healthy madness, Aristophanes or Rabelais or
Shakespeare, doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics
of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and
consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But what
abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved
for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not
even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to
exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the
bells!
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF HUMILITY
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the
exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that
they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. And
especially (in this age of egoistic idealism) there is about one who
defends humility something inexpressibly rakish.
It is no part of my intention to defend humility on practical grounds.
Practical grounds are uninteresting, and, moreover, on practical grounds
the case for humility is overwhelming. We all know that the 'divine
glory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value
our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever
may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility--in other people.
But the matter must go deeper than this. If the grounds of humility are
found only in social convenience, they may be quite trivial and
temporary. The egoists may be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation,
agonizing for a more arduous ideal. To judge from the comparative lack
of ease in their social manner, this seems a reasonable suggestion.
There is one thing that must be seen at the outset of the study of
humility from an intrinsic and eternal point of view. The new philosophy
of self-esteem and self-assertion declares that humility is a vice. If
it be so, it is quite clear that it is one of those vices which are an
integral part of original sin. It follows with the precision of
clockwork every one of the great joys of life. No one, for example, was
ever in love without indulging in a positive debauch of humility. All
full-blooded and natural people, such as schoolboys, enjoy humility the
moment they attain hero-worship. Humility, again, is said both by its
upholders and opponents to be the peculiar growth of Christianity. The
real and obvious reason of this is often missed. The pagans insisted
upon self-assertion because it was the essence of their creed that the
gods, though strong and just, were mystic, capricious, and even
indifferent. But the essence of Christianity was in a literal sense the
New Testament--a covenant with God which opened to men a clear
deliverance. They thought themselves secure; they claimed palaces of
pearl and silver under the oath and seal of the Omnipotent; they
believed themselves rich with an irrevocable benediction which set them
above the stars; and immediately they discovered humility. It was only
another example of the same immutable paradox. It is always the secure
who are humble.
This particular instance survives in the evangelical revivalists of the
street. They are irritating enough, but no one who has really studied
them can deny that the irritation is occasioned by these two things, an
irritating hilarity and an irritating humility. This combination of joy
and self-prostration is a great deal too universal to be ignored. If
humility has been discredited as a virtue at the present day, it is not
wholly irrelevant to remark that this discredit has arisen at the same
time as a great collapse of joy in current literature and philosophy.
Men have revived the splendour of Greek self-assertion at the same time
that they have revived the bitterness of Greek pessimism. A literature
has arisen which commands us all to arrogate to ourselves the liberty of
self-sufficing deities at the same time that it exhibits us to ourselves
as dingy maniacs who ought to be chained up like dogs. It is certainly a
curious state of things altogether. When we are genuinely happy, we
think we are unworthy of happiness. But when we are demanding a divine
emancipation we seem to be perfectly certain that we are unworthy of
anything.
The only explanation of the matter must be found in the conviction that
humility has infinitely deeper roots than any modern men suppose; that
it is a metaphysical and, one might almost say, a mathematical virtue.
Probably this can best be tested by a study of those who frankly
disregard humility and assert the supreme duty of perfecting and
expressing one's self. These people tend, by a perfectly natural
process, to bring their own great human gifts of culture, intellect, or
moral power to a great perfection, successively shutting out everything
that they feel to be lower than themselves. Now shutting out things is
all very well, but it has one simple corollary--that from everything
that we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the
wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on
us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can
reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the
door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the
beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically
the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain
knowledge. A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man--the matter
awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms,
the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which
a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view,
he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he
is not a beetle. The most brilliant exponent of the egoistic school,
Nietszche, with deadly and honourable logic, admitted that the
philosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down upon the weak, the
cowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightful
experience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is
really _seen_ when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego
sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he sees
everything foreshortened or deformed.
Now if we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to see
everything as it was, he would certainly proceed on a different
principle. He would seek to divest himself for a time of those personal
peculiarities which tend to divide him from the thing he studies. It is
as difficult, for example, for a man to examine a fish without
developing a certain vanity in possessing a pair of legs, as if they
were the latest article of personal adornment. But if a fish is to be
approximately understood, this physiological dandyism must be overcome.
The earnest student of fish morality will, spiritually speaking, chop
off his legs. And similarly the student of birds will eliminate his
arms; the frog-lover will with one stroke of the imagination remove all
his teeth, and the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes and fears
of jelly-fish will simplify his personal appearance to a really alarming
extent. It would appear, therefore, that this great body of ours and all
its natural instincts, of which we are proud, and justly proud, is
rather an encumbrance at the moment when we attempt to appreciate things
as they should be appreciated. We do actually go through a process of
mental asceticism, a castration of the entire being, when we wish to
feel the abounding good in all things. It is good for us at certain
times that ourselves should be like a mere window--as clear, as
luminous, and as invisible.