Every one can see why the Lion should be a symbol for the British
nation. This noble animal loves dignified repose. He haunts by
preference solitary glades and pastoral landscapes. His movements are
slow, he yawns a good deal; he has small squinting eyes high up in
his head, a long displeased nose, and a prodigious maw. He apparently
has some difficulty in making things out at a distance, as if he had
forgotten his spectacles (for he is getting to be an elderly lion now),
but he snaps at the flies when they bother him too much. On the whole,
he is a tame lion; he has a cage called the Constitution, and a whole
parliament of keepers with high wages and a cockney accent; and he
submits to all the rules they make for him, growling only when he is
short of raw beef. The younger members of the nobility and gentry may
ride on his back, and he obligingly lets his tail hang out of the bars,
so that the little Americans and the little Irishmen and the little
Bolshevists, when they come to jeer at him, may twist it. Yet when the
old fellow goes for a walk, how all the domestic and foreign poultry
scamper! They know he can spring; his strength when aroused proves
altogether surprising and unaccountable, he never seems to mind a blow,
and his courage is terrible. The cattle, seeing there is no safety in
flight, herd together when he appears on the horizon, and try to look
unconscious; the hyenas go to snarl at a distance; the eagles and the
serpents aver afterwards that they were asleep. Even the insects that
buzz about his ears, and the very vermin in his skin, know him for the
king of beasts.
But why should the other supporter of the British arms be the Unicorn?
What are the mystic implications of having a single horn? This can
hardly be the monster spoken of in Scripture, into the reason for whose
existence, whether he be the rhinoceros of natural history or a slip
of an inspired pen, it would be blasphemy to inquire. This Unicorn
is a creature of mediaeval fancy, a horse rampant argent, only with
something queer about his head, as if a croquet-stake had been driven
into it, or he wore a very high and attenuated fool's cap. It would be
far-fetched to see in this ornament any allusion to deceived husbands,
as if in England the alleged injury never seemed worth two horns, or
divorce and damages soon removed one of them. More plausible is the
view that, as the Lion obviously expresses the British character, so
the Unicorn somewhat more subtly expresses the British intellect.
Whereas most truths have two faces, and at least half of any solid
fact escapes any single view of it, the English mind is monocular; the
odd and the singular have a special charm for it. This love of the
particular and the original leads the Englishman far afield in the
search for it; he collects curios, and taking all the nation together,
there is perhaps nothing that some Englishman has not seen, thought, or
known; but who sees things as a whole, or anything in its right place?
He inevitably rides some hobby. He travels through the wide world with
one eye shut, hops all over it on one leg, and plays all his scales
with one finger. There is fervour, there is accuracy, there is kindness
in his gaze, but there is no comprehension. He will defend the silliest
opinion with a mint of learning, and espouse the worst of causes on
the highest principles. It is notorious elsewhere that the world is
round, that nature has bulk, and three if not four dimensions; it is a
truism that things cannot be seen as a whole except in imagination. But
imagination, if he has it, the Englishman is too scrupulous to trust;
he observes the shapes and the colours of things intently, and behold,
they are quite flat, and he challenges you to show why, when every
visible part of everything is flat, anything should be supposed to be
round. He is a keen reformer, and certainly the world would be much
simpler, right opinion would be much lighter and wrong opinion much
wronger, if things had no third and no fourth dimension.
Ah, why did those early phrenologists, true and typical Englishmen
as they were, denounce the innocent midwife who by a little timely
pressure on the infant skull compressed, as they said, "the oval
of genius into the flatness of boobyism." Let us not be cowed by a
malicious epithet. What some people choose to call boobyism and
flatness may be the simplest, the most British, the most scientific
philosophy. Your true booby may be only he who, having perforce but
a flat view of a flat world, prates of genius and rotundity. Blessed
are they whose eye is single. Only when very drunk do we acknowledge
our double optics; when sober we endeavour to correct and ignore this
visual duplicity and to see as respectably as if we had only one
eye. The Unicorn might well say the same thing of two-horned beasts.
Such double and crooked weapons are wasteful and absurd. You can use
only one horn effectively even if you have two, but in a sidelong
and cross-eyed fashion; else your prey simply nestles between, where
eye cannot see it nor horn probe it. A single straight horn, on the
contrary, is like a lancet; it pierces to the heart of the enemy by a
sure frontal attack: nothing like it for pricking a bubble, or pointing
to a fact and scathingly asking the Government if they are aware of it.
In music likewise every pure melody passes from single note to note, as
do the sweet songs of nature. Away with your demoniac orchestras, and
your mad pianist, tossing his mane, and banging with his ten fingers
and his two feet at once I As to walking on two feet, that also is mere
wobbling and, as Schopenhauer observed, a fall perpetually arrested.
It is an unstable compromise between going on all fours, if you want
to be safe, and standing on one leg, like the exquisite flamingo, if
you aspire to be graceful and spiritually sensitive. There is really no
biped in nature except ridiculous man, as if the prancing Unicorn had
succeeded in always being rampant; your feathered creatures are bipeds
only on occasion and in their off moments; essentially they are winged
beings, and their legs serve only to prop them when at rest, like the
foot-piece of a motor-cycle which you let down when it stops.
The Lion is an actual beast, the Unicorn a chimera; and is not England
in fact always buoyed up on one side by some chimera, as on the other
by a sense for fact? Illusions are mighty, and must be reckoned with in
this world; but it is not necessary to share them or even to understand
them from within, because being illusions they do not prophesy the
probable consequences of their existence; they are irrelevant in
aspect to what they involve in effect. The dove of peace brings new
wars, the religion of love instigates crusades and lights faggots,
metaphysical idealism in practice is the worship of Mammon, government
by the people establishes the boss, free trade creates monopolies,
fondness smothers its pet, assurance precipitates disaster, fury ends
in smoke and in shaking hands. The shaggy Lion is dimly aware of all
this; he is ponderous and taciturn by an instinctive philosophy. Why
should he be troubled about the dreams of the Unicorn, more than
about those of the nightingale or the spider? He can roughly discount
these creatures' habits, in so far as they touch him at all, without
deciphering their fantastic minds. That makes the strength of England
in the world, the leonine fortitude that helps her, through a thousand
stupidities and blunders, always to pull through. But England is also,
more than any other country, the land of poetry and of the inner man.
Her sunlight and mists, her fields, cliffs, and moors are full of
aerial enchantment; it is a land of tenderness and dreams. The whole
nation hugs its hallowed shams; there is a real happiness, a sense
of safety, in agreeing not to acknowledge the obvious; there is a
universal conspiracy of respect for the non-existent. English religion,
English philosophy, English law, English domesticity could not get on
without this "tendency to feign." And see how admissible, how almost
natural this chimera is. A milk-white pony, elegantly Arabian, with a
mane like sea-foam, and a tail like a little silvery comet, sensitive
nostrils, eyes alight with recognition, a steed such as Phoebus might
well water at those springs that lie in the chalices of flowers, a
symbol at once of impetuosity and obedience, a heraldic image for the
daintiness of Ariel and the purity of Galahad. If somehow we suspect
that the poetical creature is light-witted, the stem Lion opposite
finds him nevertheless a sprightly and tender companion, as King Lear
did his exquisite Fool. Such a Pegasus cannot be a normal horse; he was
hatched in a cloud, and at his birth some inexorable ironic deity drove
a croquet-stake into his pate, and set an attenuated crown, very like a
fool's cap, between his startled ears.
13