springless, in which I have deposited my cranks. I always choose a hard,
uncomfortable seat opposite, from which I conduct my defence against the
insidious appeal of the visitors. Their faces do not fade from my
memory. They haunt me with a gentle refrain of the world-as-it-might-be.
The world as they would like it to be is certainly not always habitable,
but it is generally one of exuberant imaginative verdure.
Here is the man who wants to abolish sex. He believes in spirit. He is
timid and womanly, his mind is pure and inexpressibly shocked at the
carnal desires which disfigure the otherwise fair picture of humanity.
Love, marriage, procreation, cannot these be purged from the base and
degrading obsessions of sex? By abstinence, by concentration, we may
eliminate them. Surely the story of the Fall makes it quite clear that
we were never meant to perpetuate such gross mistakes.... Here is the
woman who believes sex to be the source of all good, all life, all joy.
She holds a medical degree and is passionately opposed to the
emancipation of womanhood. She is unmarried, and dresses with
old-fashioned emphasis of the eternal feminine. With a soft and languid
smile she deprecates the fate which sent her to the medical school
instead of the nursery. "Why," she tells me, with radiant eyes,
"everything is sex; poetry, painting, sculpture, religion are sex. Women
who suppress their sexual nature by pursuing the chimerical advantages
of votes and professions are guilty of race-suicide. Race-suicide must
be stopped." There is the believer in the immediate return of Jesus
Christ and the approaching end of the world. He comes as a convert with
a message, and laden with books of prophecy. A year ago he was still a
successful man of business, and a gay soul with no inclination towards
the holy life. The merry twinkle in his eye has disappeared, and in its
place I see the dull glow of an obsessing idea. "What is the good of all
your struggle and your agitation?" he says; "everything will come right
and the wicked will be punished. Join me in proclaiming the coming of
the Lord. Let people be warned and repent in time." There is the lively,
mercurial lady in green who deals in statesmanship and high politics,
who knows everybody of importance, and who controls the fate of nations
through her magic influence behind the scenes. To-day she has been to
the War Office, yesterday the Home Office trembled at her approach,
to-morrow certain officials in high diplomatic circles will know to
their cost what she thinks of them. There is the pompous lady of a
hundred committees. She has a passion for committees, and no sooner has
she formed one or sat on one than she discovers the general unworthiness
of the assembly. She comes to expose people, to prove how utterly
incapable they are of managing affairs.
The priestess of some system of New Thought arrives. She is pleasant and
unruffled. "Can you deny," she asks, "that nothing exists for you but
that which you allow to enter your mind?" No, I cannot. "Very well,
then, you can control the universe by thought. You can gain happiness,
health, peace of mind, and long life. By thought and meditation you can
make for yourself a world of harmony, a consciousness which excludes
everything that is ugly and painful and jarring." I murmur that this is
no doubt possible, but it seems a trifle selfish whilst so many human
souls are struggling in the sea of trouble. I am sharply pulled up. "I
thought you would be too immersed in the wretched folly of agitation to
understand," she says; "I came to show you the better way." She is
followed by the clothes enthusiast. He wears sandals and has discarded
the abomination of starched linen. "We are forming a Society for the
Revival of Greek Clothing," he announces. "From the aesthetic and the
hygienic points of view, nothing is more important than the clothes we
wear." I venture on a feeble Teufelsdroeckh joke. He does not condescend
to listen. "We must get rid of hideous trousers and feet-strangling
skirts [I am lost in admiration over the indictment of the skirt, for I
remember a certain reception in Washington in the days of the
snake-skirt when I stumbled and fell at a moment when a little dignity
would have been my most precious possession]; we must wear loose white
draperies amenable to the air and the washtub." I quite agree, but raise
some practical obstacles and a few conventional pegs of delay. They
prove intolerable, and my visitor departs convinced that I am not one of
the elect.
Missionaries of dietetics come in a motley procession. There is the man
who believes we can eat anything provided we masticate everything with
bovine thoroughness; there is the man who believes that we ought to eat
nothing during long bouts of purgative fasting, and who lives cheerfully
and inexpensively on hot water during two yearly periods of twenty days.
There is the woman who has found the nearest approach to nectar and
ambrosia in the uncooked fruits and vegetables of the earth, which,
properly pounded, are digested, and make of our sluggish bodies fit
receptacles for Olympian wisdom. There are the people who have
discovered the one cause of all disease. It may be uric acid or cell
proliferation or hard water--there is always a complementary cure. I
listened one day with much interest to an exposition of the evils of
salt. Salted food, I was told, is the cause of our troubles. We are
salted and dried until all power of recuperation is driven out of our
nerves and muscles. I was asked to study the subject. The theory was
well supported by scientific reasoning and evidence, and on the
following evening I had thoroughly entered into the saltless ideal. A
vision of the dispirited haddock had materially assisted my conclusion
when a visitor was announced. He was preceded by a card showing
impressively that he was a man of learning in theories of disease. "I
have come," he said, "in the hope that you will take an interest in my
experiments and conclusions with regard to disease in general. I have
discovered that the one cure for rheumatism, consumption, and cancer is
salt, plenty of common salt."
The trouble with all these people is not that they are all wrong. They
are probably all right. It is a question of angles and quality of the
grey matter of the brain. The trouble is the limitation of experience
and outlook imposed by fate upon each individual.
A league or society is theoretically the one human institution which is
akin to heaven. You have an object and a programme. You know you are
occupied with the most important task in the world. But you feel
powerless alone. You send out your appeal for support and kindred souls
flock to your banner. Can anything be more soul-satisfying than a
community of those who think alike, who feel alike, and who work for the
same end? Anarchy is impossible, and you decide on a constitution and
rules for the management of your spiritual brotherhood. A committee is
appointed to control the affairs of the union, and officials to carry
out its wishes. Now you have the ideal of which you dreamt, the pure
collective force which should prove irresistible. Friends within and
enemies without.
But you have not excluded the canker of human differences. Your kindred
souls discover that, though they think alike on the one point which drew
you together, they differ strongly on others. There are other opinions,
religious and political, than those which come within the purview of
your little organization. You surprise some of your friends in the act
of discussing your denseness in matters of which they have a firm and
clear grasp. You begin to wonder how it is possible for people who have
such a perfect vision of certain necessary lines of reform to manifest
such unmitigated stupidity in regard to others. If you are wise, you
resign yourself to the inevitable divergence of mind; if they are wise,
they agree to pardon your shortcomings.
Fanatics flower in a society like poppies in a wheat-field. They have
lost sight of everything but the urgency of the cause. They are
intolerant because they have no knowledge of human nature and no
self-criticism wherewith to check the wild ideas that sprout beneath
their immense self-confidence. They turn withering scorn on committees
and officials who refuse to give effect to their suggestions to burn the
House of Commons, or stop the traffic of London, or commit combined
suicide in Hyde Park as a protest against the continuance of the
iniquity which they denounce. They would do things in a different
manner. They intend to show the world and politicians that their views
cannot be ignored with impunity. For you and your lukewarm followers
they have nothing but contempt--the contempt which is earned by the
coward. The fanatic is troublesome, but comparatively easy to deal with.
There is another product of organized reform on which you cannot so
easily shut the door. It is the ideologue who rides the scheme to death.
It is the doctrinaire who must form systems within systems and policies
within policies. It is not enough that you have set out to suppress
something or to encourage something. You must follow his particular
way. He is in terror of compromise and sees profligacy in sweet
reasonableness. He knows the tragic failure of other movements with
vacillating policies. This one must be saved at all costs. 'Twere better
to smash the whole movement than proceed along undesirable lines. He
would scorn victory that came through avenues not recognized by him.
Certain words and phrases have completely captivated his imagination.
With them he fences heroically and causes a sufficiency of clatter and
noise. He is in deadly earnest and will brook no rivals. Parties within
parties are formed, and the energies which should be directed towards
fighting opponents are absorbed in combat within the society.
There is another element of disaster which now and then gains ascendancy
in the community of reformers. It is the professional agitator, the
parasite who will speak for or against a principle according to the
economic advantage which one side or the other may offer. You may
hold that such a man is not altogether undesirable, provided he can
"organize" and persuade people that the society is worthy of support.
You may think that he is no more blameworthy than the lawyer who pleads
your views so eloquently and who handles the jury with such consummate
skill, though his sole incentive is your fee and not your case. If you
act on such a belief and allow your professional agitator to manage your
society, you will certainly one day find your ideals turned to ashes and
your organization for moral action turned into money-making machinery.
Whilst life teaches you that societies are frail human institutions and
that conferences and congresses do not bring about the millennium, you
are saved from despair if you keep ever fresh your sense of humour.
There are problems in the life of the reformer which the mountains never
fail to put before me. I have so often come to them from the heat and
turmoil of controversy. I have come like a soldier from battle, covered
with mud and slightly wounded, yet exultant in the spirit of the fray.
The mountains speak to me, and lo! another self appears. They speak to
me of beauty, of peace, of the infinite mystery of life; they give me
broad effects of light and shade, and obliterate the small pictures
which pursue me on the plains. Yesterday, in the stillness of Alpine
midwinter, the moon shone clear and full on the glacier. I sat gazing
at the outlines of the peaks trembling in the pale light of a perfect
evening. The noisy mountain torrents were held captive in prisons of
ice, but here and there the sound of an irrepressible rivulet threading
its underground way through stones and earth brought to my ears a song
of spring. I love the trees, the sky, the snow--all my senses respond to
the call of the solitude of Nature. I felt free and happy; I sank into
the state of bliss in which the soul is conscious of no desire. Surely
this is better than the strife and the sordid cares of the camp;
surely one may walk apart and enjoy the fruits of tranquillity? Our
consciousness can admit but an infinitesimal part of that which is: let
us then fill it to the brim with the joy of beauty, with the harmony of
being at rest. Then I remembered the things which lay beyond my peaks
and my moonlight: a vision of prisons and shambles, of battlefields and
slums, passed before my eyes. How can one forget! How can one enjoy
peace and beauty! Duty bids us to descend, love bids us to share the
suffering.
And yet are there not two ways of seeking perfection, two paths clearly
defined and well trodden throughout the ages--reform of self and reform
of others? What may at first sight appear as aesthetic or mystic egoism
is perhaps the better way. The hermit who forsakes the world and
renounces the social ties and burdens which most men count of value is
bent on the purification of his own soul. Monasticism--with all its
faults--recognized the essential need of self-examination and
self-discipline. It bade us cleanse our souls, conquer our own
temptations, by a rigid system of religious exercise. Our modern
reformer is not always conscious of any need for self-reform. He lustily
attacks the misdoings of others and remains happily ignorant of the
Socratic rule, _Know thyself_. "Every unordered spirit is its own
punishment," says St. Augustine, and the disorder is not removed by
assaulting the faults of others. We have, first and last, to be
captains of our own souls. There is an element of absurdity in the
thought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to hunt
for the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment of
self-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantial
rule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from the
passions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limit
experience and give a false simplicity to the problems of life. Early
Christian monasticism held that as this world is the domain of the
devil, the only safety lies in flight from it. Such a view precludes the
possibility of social reform on a general and lasting basis. It has a
radical consistency and a scientific precision which are only disturbed
by the course of actual events. Supposing all humanity could be
withdrawn, every precious brand snatched from the burning and the whole
made into a vast monastery? The devil would be sure to slip in and cause
a disturbance.
The social reformer assumes that the world is worthy of his care, and
that we are here to make it as habitable as we can. He lives in the
midst of sinful humanity and accepts the inheritance of earthly
conventions. He may choose to live in the slums whilst his spirit
clamours for a hermitage amongst the blue hills. His ways may be
crotchety and his temper irritable--what does it matter so long as he is
carrying out his appointed task in the cosmic order?
To the true nature-lover there is no renunciation in forsaking the
things prized by most men. His virtue may be vice concealed; he gathers
bliss where others find boredom. Give me a tree, a perfect tree, and you
may keep your palaces. Give me the green fields with a hundred thousand
flowers, and you may keep your streets and your piles of gold. Give me
the wild wind and the breath of the torrent, and I have no wish to hear
your hymns. There is a brazen self-sufficiency about the nature-lover
which baffles and offends the mind of the crowd. The most amazing thing
about him is that he turns hardship and deprivation into pleasure. Take
away his house and he shelters in a cave. Deprive him of your company
and he laughs to himself. Take away his possessions and he tells you he
is rich because he wants so little, whilst you are poor, for you have
surrounded yourself with a hundred unnecessary wants. Like Antaeus, the
mythical giant, he derives his strength and his power to overcome
enemies from contact with the earth. He discovers a mode of being,
behind and beyond ordinary existence. He says to the busy crowds of
industry and commerce, to the men and women who wear out their lives in
the joyless chase of success: "You will die before you know satisfaction
and rest. Come and be human, come and grow in the sunshine and the
rain." He finds that two-thirds of the reforms for which men labour
would not be needed if the artificialities of society were abandoned. He
is, of course, unpractical and self-centred. Listen to Thoreau, the
arch-enemy of the social treadmill, and to his scorn of reformers:
Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If
anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions,
if he have a pain in his bowels even--for that is the seat of
sympathy--he forthwith sets about reforming--the world. Being a
microcosm himself, he discovers--and it is a true discovery, and
he is the man to make it--that the world has been eating green
apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green
apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children
of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic
philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Patagonian, and
embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus by a
few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile
using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his
dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its
cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its
crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live.
And whilst thus branding those who set out to reform others, he shows
his adherence to the great order of self-reformers by the following
conclusion:
I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I
never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
Thoreau cultivates simplicity with an intense regard for the effect on
himself. He is--in spite of his seclusion--above all a prophet amongst
men. He made great discoveries in the realm of the mind--the mind
attending closely to Nature, but he is too much the naturalist and the
land-surveyor to lose himself in the raptures of nature love. He is a
stranger to the ethereal touch with which Fiona Macleod opens the magic
door of that which is felt but not seen in earth and sky. He misses the
mystic hour when ghosts of the green life are about. That hour has been
seized by Algernon Blackwood, who makes us feel the fascination, the
vague dread of the elemental powers. There is a dream-wood in which the
souls of all things intermingle, and once imprisoned there, the
nature-lover may not escape until he has paid toll to the pixies.
There is, after all, nothing incompatible in the life of self-enrichment
and the life of self-expenditure. They are interdependent, and rule the
ancient order of gnosis and praxis. Whether we go to nature or religion
or science for replenishment, we must be filled. And the ironic power
which presides over our feasts compels the most inveterate egoist
amongst us to share his treasures. Mind is for ever craving to give to
mind. If we want nothing better than to boast of our superiority, the
boasting imparts a lesson to others and is therefore a gift. But the
reforming spirit spares few who think. It is generally believed that the
purely literary mind scorns the idea of reforming: that art is above
moral purpose. I have yet to discover the purely literary mind. Homer
and Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante are clearly not of it. Shakespeare, so
say the wiseacres, is the strictly impartial dramatist. He depicts the
good and the bad, the great and the small, with complete detachment.
Naturally, the art is the detachment and the lesson is in the perfect
representation. The literary man may indignantly repudiate the idea of
"preaching." "To go preach to the first passer by," wrote Montaigne, "to
become tutor to the ignorance of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor."
He may have abhorred the idea, but through his essays he made himself
tutor to innocence and the model of subjective moralizing.
However widely we roam the Republic of Letters, we meet no citizen
without a badge of consecrated service. Pretenders, perhaps, usurpers of
the titles of others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise.
These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann,
Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged with
revolt. The transcendentalism of Emerson, the naturalism of Zola, the
cynicism of La Rochefoucauld are all convergent streams in the torrent
of reforming words which make the soul fertile.
No; the tame and vapid acquiescents are not to be found in literature.
Sometimes they furnish material for literature. Their principal use in
life is to kindle the souls of reformers with the resentment of which
great deeds are born.
NATIONALITY
I can remember no time in my life when I was not addicted to the study
of humanity. The marvels of faces, types, and characteristics were, I
feel sure, with me in my cradle. At the age of ten I had evolved a kind
of astrological chart of my own, according to which all human beings,
including uncles and aunts, grandmothers and children, could be placed
in twelve categories. There were the long-nosed, thin-lipped,
sandy-haired, over-principled people, who always knew right from wrong
and who grudged me an extra chocolate because it was not the hour to
have one. There were the snub-nosed, full-lipped, dark-eyed people,
whose manners were jolly and who positively encouraged illicit
consumption of fruit in the thin-lipped aunt's garden. There were the
shortsighted, solemn people with bulging foreheads and studious habits
who saw print and nothing else. They bored me and belonged to my
eleventh category. As far as I can see now, my categories were a florid
elaboration of the four temperaments of Hippocrates, though I have no
idea of the cause of my childish absorption in the subject. It was
certainly altogether spontaneous and not encouraged, for I have a vivid
recollection of how an eager and eloquent description of my categories
(profusely illustrated by mimicry) brought me a sharp reprimand and a
very nasty tonic. The tonic was taken under compulsion, but the cure is
still unaccomplished.
And now for many years I have sat at my chalet window and seen the world
go by. The path from the village below to the peaks and pastures above
runs past my nest. On it, in the summer months, there was a straggling
procession of tourists and climbers, peasants and townsfolk. They were
of all nationalities, and their loud voices proclaimed the immutability
of the curse of Babel. I used to be annoyed at the close proximity of
the path, until, one day, I discovered its marvellous opportunities for
anthropological research. Then I settled down, content to limit my
wooing of the solitude to the early morning and the late evening, or the
time when the wild autumnal gales brush the mountains clear of trippers
and paint the surrounding foliage in glorious tints of red and gold.
For I assure you the proper study of man is man, and the proper study of
woman is both man and woman.