like the human soul surviving death. It survives a complete breach in
continuity. The way in which the language was pronounced may be lost;
the shades of meaning may be lost; sometimes even the plain meaning
of a word or two in a passage of true Poetry may be lost. And yet the
poetic essence survives. It survives in full strength--again like the
human soul--and if there were a resurrection for languages, as there
is for human beings, then the poetic soul meeting the poetic body would
be quite at its ease, not enfeebled by so long a separation.
Thus when I hear it argued (with every probability behind it) that
French poetry, on account of its extreme subtlety, will not--some
centuries hence--survive that most lasting of our languages, I
traverse. For men sometimes say that English poetry and Spanish poetry
will survive the end of our civilisation, because they are dependent on
lilt or stress. But how shall the glory of French verse remain which
wholly reposes upon such tiny modulations of the tongue? The answer is
that Greek undoubtedly reposed upon these same necessities; yet I take
it that Greek poetry has survived.
Moreover, if you look at it, the English effects are a great deal more
than lilt or stress, though lilt or stress is never absent from them.
Some of the most desperately successful efforts in the English lyric
are as slight in their nuance as the French. It is rare, no doubt; but
you can find cases. For instance:
"_Ah me, whilst thee the shores and sounding seas wash far away._"
Here is in English what a French line is: a line with hardly any
primary emphasis, a level line wholly dependent for its enormous
effect upon the vowel sounds and the slightest modulations. And now for
the miracle.
Imagine a time, a few generations hence, when the British _th_ shall
be blunted into _d_ by Colonials of every blood and colour, when the
short _o_ of "wash" has turned to the popular "worsh" and when the long
_o_ in "shore" had come to be pronounced like our _oo_, when the _s_
of the plural has in every position come to be pronounced like _z_,
when the final _d_ in "and" has become silent, and also the final _g_
in "ing," and the characteristic _a_ of the cultivated has become the
popular "oi." "Whoilst dee de zhoores an zoundin zeas worsh far awoi."
How could the line survive such changes? But it will survive; though I
am damned if I understand how!
There is something very consoling for poor mortals in all this. We
are here, in this world, all out of scale. We are hurried, we are
grotesquely subject to change, though by our every appetite we protest
against change, and hunger and thirst for victory over change. We are
fast-rooted things, mocked by ceaseless fading; we are immemorial
lovers carried on by a river of progressive forgetfulness; we are
deathless within, and yet a death goes on about us (ah! and _within_
us) all the time.
And there is in the midst of such a trial no temporal symbol of our
real, our ultimate, security except Poetry. The intellect may convince
us (if it is strong enough) of our immortality. Faith will always
accept the sensible doctrine of our not time-bound fate, and of the
concurrent doctrine of Resurrection. But you do not find any stuff
around you to confirm you--except Poetry. Religion assures: but nothing
man-made supports the vision of heaven, save the completed line. That
endures. That is outside time.
It is no answer to say that a poet may be lost, his writings forgotten.
Of course they may--or they may be found again. The point is that the
great poetic line is not subject to decay. So long as it is there at
all, it is there in its fulness. And this is true of nothing else among
the works of men.
On this account I envy those Eleven Poets from the lorry whom I met so
long ago, and the Head Poet, or Mystagogue, their leader. I often wish
I could meet them again.
These men were secure of something which no great soldier, no great
painter, nor sculptor, nor architect--not even any great Secretary
of State for Home Affairs or Master of the Buckhounds or Chief
Whip--can boast. They had achieved the unique thing, the only deathless
thing--that is, supposing they were Poets.
I suppose they must have been Poets, because they came labelled as
Poets and were received as Poets; and, in fine, were by all external
and social criteria, Poets. Just as a Lord is a Lord, or as a Judge is
a Judge, so were they Poets. I really do not know what the definition
is, but they were Poets. They were the possessors, the authors, the
creators of that which no one could take from them and which will
endure for ever--something that will never grow old. What a consolation
for the memory of death! What a foretaste of immortality!
It is a fine thing to be able to say, and I can imagine one of these
Eleven British Poets saying it:
"I have awkward manners and a foolish smile. I cannot earn more than
a few hundreds a year, and my father left me nothing. I cut a poor
figure among you all. But I have myself _made_: I am, therefore, a
complete possessor. I am father and _master_ of something entirely
different from anything which you command: whether you command wealth,
or lineage, or beauty, or any one of the talents which delight mankind
in song or in instrument of music, or with the pencil, or even in
building. I surpass you all, for I wrote this, that, or the other
thing, and it will stand for ever."
Certainly of all boasts short of virtue it is the proudest boast a man
can make.
ON CONVINCING PEOPLE
I have just been working at the "Provincials" of Pascal. They are full
of lies, and full of errors. They would not convince the stupidest of
readers who should seriously compare them with the original documents
which Pascal attacked. But no reader has ever done so. My object in
reading Pascal's book was to expose it, and therefore my object on
a small stage was to do what Pascal did on a large one, that is, to
convince people: with this only difference. Pascal had only to convince
those who agreed with him in believing something that was not true,
to wit, that Casuistry was immoral. But I set out to convince, of
something that _was_ true (to wit, that Casuistry was both moral and
necessary) those who heartily, save Maynard and Derome, disagreed with
me.
This amiable exercise has set me thinking about the art of convincing
people; and I say "of convincing" and not "of persuading," for I think
that the two arts stand for two different processes. You can persuade a
man to do a thing though he still disapproves of it in conscience and
intellect. But conviction is something higher.
It is an appeal to the intelligence and the love of truth. It relies
upon the production of proof. Very interested am I in ferreting out
the process whereby the thing is done, and in discovering why it will
succeed when it is done in one way, and fail when it is done in another.
I must make clearer my distinction between the mere production of a
mood, persuading, and _conviction_.
The mere production of a mood is effected (according to the weakness
of your subject) by some form of suggestion. The modern popular press
works that way. Its weapon is mere iteration, and its victim is the
many-headed beast. For the persuasion of the higher sort the thing must
be done by some seductive art, rhetoric, or flattery, or even music.
But in either case the end of the process is not a certitude of the
intelligence, and therefore your result is not final. Your intended
victim may be jerked out of his mood by any shock--especially by a
shock of reality.
There is between the mere persuasion and conviction an intermediate
thing, very common. It is advocacy: the advancing of selected arguments
towards a certain selected end. The victim knows he is being played
upon, yet he often succumbs. A man does not want to visit a particular
place. The method of suggestion would be merely to repeat the name of
the place over and over again, and the command to go there. Such are
those advertisements which you see upon the walls of great cities in
flaming letters commanding you to enter a dull playhouse. Advocacy
would put before the man all the real advantages of the place it
wanted him to visit and hide all the real disadvantages. It would act
through the intelligence, but also by cheating the intelligence.
Now, conviction is in a different world. When you convince a person
you make him really certain. It does not follow that you make him
certain of a truth, but you make him certain through the intelligence
and not through a mere mood. Nor do you put him, as advocacy does,
between two issues, one of which he chooses. You make him wholly at one
with the doctrine you give. You implant certitude to the exclusion of
every alternative. When you have done that you have created something
much more solid and permanent than a mood or even an action; you have
achieved a much greater thing than any advocacy or suggestion can. You
have established a mind.
I know that in saying this I am going flat against the opinion of my
time, for in these days we revere much more the man who can get a mob
to think the moon is made of green cheese and then, to-morrow, that
it is made of Sapolio, than we do the man who can convince. And the
reason we revere the baser method is that for the moment there is more
money in it. For the amount of money that a man may get out of his
fellows by a trick is our measure of his excellence. Nevertheless, I
will maintain that to convince is, even in practical affairs, much the
bigger business. For though you convince but a few in a certain time,
yet what you do is to plant something durable, and something filled
with the power of propagating itself. Conviction breeds.
When it comes to the methods of conviction, however, I hesitate. The
great rules are fairly well known: to present an argument fed with
concrete example, and in doing so to interest--not to fatigue. If
you combine those two things, interest and illustration, you should,
according to the rules, succeed. The point about not fatiguing is that
however perfect your reasoning, however strong your illustration, both
are useless if the mind to which they are addressed cannot receive
them. Fatigue interrupts reception. The points about concrete example
are, first, that a concrete example alone is vivid (even in mathematics
you must have visible symbols); the next, that in the application
of any idea, concrete example is the only test of value to man. You
will never convince a man, for instance, that protection necessarily
impoverishes a nation if he has before his eyes the example of nations
becoming suddenly very rich after adopting high tariffs.
It is quite clear that the citation of admirable examples, and even
their citation without boredom, is not sufficient. There is something
else, some trick of presentation, which lies, I fancy, in the sense of
proportion, and which achieves success. In this, by the way, Pascal had
genius. A wag rewrote one or two of the "Provincials," substituting
Jansenists for Jesuits, and thereby showed that they made just as good
reading and were just as convincing in attacking friends as enemies.
Pascal had the art--which is most important in this matter--of leaving
his readers under the impression that they had heard the whole case.
It can be done honestly by actually stating the opposite case before
giving the counter arguments. But it is more often done dishonestly
(as Pascal did it) by making your reader think that he has heard all
there is to hear, although he has, as a fact, heard hardly anything,
or nothing, of the other side. Pascal was, of course, working on very
favourable ground. He attacked what was at once powerful and unpopular,
and what was not only powerful and unpopular, but sincere and therefore
incapable of using poisoned weapons against himself. There is nothing
more interesting in literature than to see how the honest men he
attacked blundered in trying to refute him. They blundered because they
were _too_ honest for controversy. They saw that he was lying, and they
took it for granted he was telling simple lies of a childish sort. They
accused him of mechanical inaccuracy and misquotation, which was not
the way to set to work at all.
Pascal's method was in part what may be called the suppressed
alternative. It is a method which you often see used by demagogues
also, and by any one of those who ridicule a superior to an inferior.
Thus, on one occasion Pascal finds an author saying: "The obligation of
a Christian to give alms out of his superfluity rarely arises." The man
who wrote this used the technical theological word "obligation," but
Pascal quotes him as though he used it in the loosest conversational
sense. The man who wrote it decided (with obvious common-sense) that
those cases were rare in which you could say that a Christian had done
grievous wrong by _not_ giving alms on a particular occasion. Pascal
presented the matter so that his reader thought that the writer he was
attacking discountenanced giving alms at all.
You very often see the same sort of thing done by people who ridicule
the definitions of law. There is nothing easier. The law says, for
instance, that a minor, a young giant of twenty years, can avoid
payment by pleading "infancy."
It is quite easy to make that appear nonsense. It is not nonsense,
but it is made to appear nonsense by using the word "infancy" in two
senses. In the same way one could say by strict definition that the
law does not forbid you to murder your grandmother. What the law does
is to hang you if you murder your grandmother, which is, in strict
definition, quite another proposition. Great play one could make before
some one who had never heard of courts of justice, by saying: "Just
think! The law in this country actually allows one to murder one's
grandmother!" leaving discreetly aside the legal consequences of
the act, and using the word "allow" positively and negatively in the
same breath. The "Provincial letters" are crammed with this trick of
presenting a word in two senses: as who should play on the word "take"
and denounce the injunction "take your neighbour's money quietly" as
meaning "steal it on the sly," when all the author meant was "don't
play the fussy and generous refuser over small payments due to you."
There are those who tell you that not only Pascal and a hundred others,
but _every one_ who has _ever_ convinced has used dishonest methods,
and that no one ever convinced by solid proof alone. There are those
who will tell you that the admission of opposing arguments and their
honest analysis would be either so dull or so damaging, or both, that
those who adopt this, the only sincere method, will necessarily fail.
I do not agree. Thus only is it achieved once and for all. People who
are too weak to follow out a close chain of reasoning are at first
not affected by strict deduction and probity of evidence. But there
is always a minority with brains enough and energy enough to follow
an argument, and then at last lead the rest. The quality of such
achievement is that it is final: it is never reversed. It is done once
and for all. The few who have mastered the proof are fixed and have,
henceforward, authority. To produce such final conviction is a very
great action indeed. It is the making of the public mind. It is the
ultimate direction of the State.
But its first victory is exceedingly restricted. In matters where men
have interest against truth, conviction is so rare as to work at first
almost imperceptibly. An insignificant body receive a truth. Often they
are dispersed. In a century there is a multitude. Soon, the world.
ON CONTROVERSY
It is astonishing what a great part of energy goes in our civilised and
lettered society to controversy.
This country is certainly as civilised as any in Europe and it is much
more lettered than any other. That is, there are more people bothering
about print than you will find anywhere else. It has something to do, I
think, with living in great towns and depending upon newspapers, but,
anyhow, there it is, and one of its effects is a continued occupation
in controversy. It always astonishes the foreign visitor, and I
think it usually irritates the foreign resident. It is a habit often
attacked, but all this opposition to it is a foreign opposition at
bottom. To the native controversy is food and drink, and no one would
be without it.
Now there is much more in this habit of controversy than meets the eye.
If you were to call it a passion for wrangling you would be exactly
contradicting its nature. It is dearest to those who hate wrangling.
It is carefully preserved from reality. It is a sort of game, and
has in it much the same instinct as makes men play other games in a
game-loving country. Its object is not conviction, but scoring under
set conditions, and it is most interesting to watch how the rules grow
up of themselves and how strict they become.
It would be the death of controversy to demand a real conquest. When
people begin to get into that mood controversy ends and fighting
begins. Nations which are intent on real results fall into civil wars.
Nothing is more opposed to the spirit of controversy than this spirit
of arms and a creed. Controversy is to the search after ultimate truth,
or the desire for conviction, what fencing with foils is to slashing
with cavalry swords, or what shooting for a challenge shield is to
sniping from a tree at the other person in the mud.
Its weapon is advocacy. In pure, serene, absolute controversy the
advocate will cheerfully take either side, but even in that less
perfect controversy to which (alas!) our fallen nature condemns us, and
in which there is some suspicion of real feeling, advocacy easily takes
precedence over the statement of truth. And that is one of the delights
of controversy, as no one knows better than they who have wasted and
enjoyed their lives in this delicious pastime.
I always think that there is an ill done to controversy when the lists
are unequally chosen. It demands for its proper exercise fairly equal
chances for either side. For instance, one man gets up and says that
England would be much better off if no foreign goods came into it,
whereupon the other man, scenting a controversy from afar, says: "What
about tea?" There at once--at the very issue of the bout--you have a
knockout, and that spoils sport. Or again, a man says: "If you want
to improve the communications of London you must have wider streets,
and you cannot have wider streets without interfering with privileged
pieces of property." The moment you begin to talk like that controversy
is abominably offended. You might as well play chess with a loaded
revolver, or come to the football field with a posse of bravoes.
No, the essence of this admirable exercise is a sort of "picking up
sides" which balances the argument. You must give reasonable chances
for advocacy to either party. Chalk the lists, face the champions
square, and then let go.
I notice a very proper contempt for, and sometimes interference with,
that party to a controversy who breaks even the less understood and
more subtle rules: for instance, dropping the "Mr." in Politics. You
may say of a parliamentarian, "Mr. Biggs was committing political
murder when he poured his hidden poison into the sleeping ear of Mr.
Higgs." That is all right. It means that old Biggs thought he could get
more money by abandoning his leader Higgs. The use of the two "Misters"
proves that in your heart you care not a dump which gets the salary,
contracts, and perks. But if you say "Biggs won't take office under
Higgs because he thinks there's no money in it," that is blackguardly:
for it spoils sport.
It is thus a breach of the rules to impute what are called "unworthy
motives"; that is, serious motives. Both parties must, like the
champions of the ring, shake hands; and there are a lot of little
phrases (they are kept set up in most newspaper offices, and in some
are stereotyped in ready-made bars) which come in most usefully
for this purpose. Such are "No-one-can-dispute (Mr. Noggins's)
scholarship-or-his-quite peculiar-knowledge-of (Samian ware)," after
which you go on to argue that in point of fact Noggins is as ignorant
as the beasts that perish, and you support your contention with special
pleading.
So deep-rooted is this love of controversy that one of its favourite
playing-fields is what one would imagine to be sacred ground, to wit,
the security and happiness of one's own country. Jones has only to
say that he wants his country to win in some war of life and death,
for Brown, tempted by so admirable an occasion, to come up on the
other side. But what does Brown do? Do you suppose he says, "I want my
country to perish?" Not a bit of it; that would not be controversy at
all, and, what is more, it would be an impossible position for Brown to
take up, considering that Brown, by the very fact that he is conducting
such a controversy, is stamping his chief national characteristic
all over himself. So what Brown does is to show how defeat would
ultimately enhance the glory and increase the strength of the country.
Both parties agree to this special limited area of operations, and
within it they spar round and round and round. Meanwhile, the real war
goes on, no harm is done at home, and the nation wins or loses without
a link between that awful reality of war and the spillikin-match at
home.
It is very difficult to define where victory in this game of
controversy lies. It depends to some extent, like victory in any other
game, upon fatigue, or lack of attention. I had a controversy in the
"Times Literary Supplement" many years ago about the Battle of Evesham
with another person who apparently knew less about it than I did. After
the special pleading and nonsense had gone on through five or six moves
I quoted Matthew Paris. My opponent (who wore a mask and a long cloak)
came in with a heavy blow, showing that Matthew Paris was dead when the
Battle of Evesham was fought. Now, the counter-blow to this was as easy
as falling off a log. Your spectator (for whose benefit these newspaper
duels are fought) would naturally say, "This is final!" What he did not
know was that there is a continuation of Matthew Paris, commonly called
under the same name, which _does_ deal with the Battle of Evesham. All
I had to do was to write another letter (which I am sure the courteous
Editor would have printed, seeing that he got all this for nothing),
pointing out with the utmost good feeling, tact, etc., that my
opponent was swindling, and, by using a false technical term, deceiving
the populace. "Matthew Paris" (I should have said) "is a conventional
term for the original chronicle _and its continuation_ as a whole, and
it is '_a poor trick of controversy_'" (I love that phrase; it is one
of the seasoned and rooted phrases) "to confuse the general reader
with false references." Did I make such a reply? Did I write that
letter to the "Times Literary Supplement"? Not I! I was smitten with an
intense desire to go to Belgium (it was before the war) and study the
battlefield of Ramillies, where is sold the worst liquor in the world;
and off I went, leaving my opponent the proud and sole victor on that
field. I wish to-day I knew who he was. To slay or to be slain by a
hooded antagonist is poor fun: it ought to be part of the rules of the
theatre for the man to pull off the hood at the end, either from his
own glazing eyes or from those of his prostrate victim, whereupon the
ladies would recognise to their amazement the features of Sir Guy de
Beaurivage or Mr. Hulp, or whoever it might be, and the tourney would
end with a feast to the hero after the sentimental burial of the dead.
Which reminds me of what a shame it is that so much controversy
_should_ be anonymous. It was never meant to be so. After all,
controversy is conducted for the amusement of the onlookers as well
as for, and more than for, the exercise and moral health of the
principals, and there is not much fun in an anonymous combat where,
for all you know, the opposing parties may really be one and the same
person.